“This place has great security as far as it goes, what with the gates and alarms, but that’s a big bay out there. What’s to stop someone from coming here by boat?”
“Nothing, I suppose,” Lara said. “But our whole purpose is to study and protect marine life. Have you ever heard of anyone trying to steal a dolphin? Honestly, Matt, I don’t think anyone is after Sea Life. I think it was pure accident that Miguel Gomez’s... body parts wound up here.”
“This whole case... I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Back inside, they discovered that Grady had woken up, and come down and met Meg, and the two of them had enjoyed extolling Adam Harrison’s virtues. Rick and Adrianna came down then as well, and despite the hour they had more coffee before finally determining that they all really needed to go to bed. Though Rick and Adrianna offered to give up their spot, Matt quickly said that he’d slept on the plane, so he was happy to catch a few z’s on the sofa, and Meg would bunk in with Lara.
It was morning before Lara had a chance to speak with Meg and Matt alone, taking them for a tour of the facility and introducing them to the other members of the staff. Finally, the three of them sat on the platform by Cocoa’s enclosure and fed her fish.
“This place is wonderful,” Meg said.
It was really good to have the two of them there, Lara thought. Meg was a lithe, fit five foot ten, with raven-dark hair and deep, penetrating blue eyes that somehow communicated both confidence and cordiality. Matt was a bruiser—smart, fit and built like a tank. More than that, she knew they’d both had enough training to tackle almost any situation.
“It was wonderful,” Lara said. “I mean, it still is, really. I love what I’m doing. I love Cocoa, and the other dolphins and the sea lions—and even the cats and birds, the lizards and the squirrels. But Cocoa just had to give me that finger. And then...the rest.”
“You can’t let what’s really good in life be ruined just because there are evil people in the world,” Meg said.
Lara looked at her friend and smiled. Meg had known her whole life what she wanted to do. As a child, she’d lost a member of her own family to a murderer, and even then, Meg had played a role in seeing that the man was caught.
Because she saw the dead.
“I saw him,” Lara told her in a rush. “The man whose body parts we found in the bay, I saw him—after he was dead. They haven’t released this yet, but his name was Miguel Gomez, and Brett Cody wasn’t surprised that I’d seen him—it was almost as if he expected it. Diego was talking about doppelgangers and twins, but Brett was staring straight at me and I knew—I just knew—that he believed me.”
“Maybe he sees the dead, too,” Matt said.
“All of a sudden?” Lara demanded. “You knew him before—did he see ghosts? Can you go your whole life delightfully oblivious and then suddenly start seeing ghosts of the dead?”
Meg smiled at that. “You’ve seen the dead before. You saw the Confederate officer who helped us save your life,” she said softly.
“You described him so clearly that I believed he was there.”
Meg shook her head. “No, you saw him. Maybe you’ve always had the ability. Maybe there just wasn’t a ghost out there who needed to reach you. Until now.”
Lara groaned inwardly. Once she’d been so passionate. So determined to create a world where good people wound up in power, where candidates were elected on merit, not because their campaign contributions were large enough to feed entire countries.
She still dreamed of seeing good men and women in power; she still meant to write the speeches and white papers that could help put them there. But she was also in love with dolphins and sea life in general, and she’d become passionate about ecology, and that was all part of the bigger picture. Politicians owed a decent world to those who would come after them.
“I’m going to suggest you open yourself up to this ghost and find out what he has to say,” Matt told her, then added softly, “I came into all this paranormal stuff kicking and screaming. Most of us do—unless we grow up with it and consider the dead as friends. After all, most of them are just as good in death as they were in life.”
“What about evil?” Lara asked, feeling a little silly. “There are evil people, too, so there must be evil ghosts, right?”
“I’ve heard about a few from some of our fellow Krewe members,” Meg said. “But the good is there to outweigh the evil.”
“If only,” Lara said.
“If only?” Matt asked her.
“If only good outweighed evil in life the way you say it does in death,” Lara said.