Chapter 4 - Turning the Engine
The driveway of the Salt Pine Resort looked like an evacuation zone during a hurricane.
Three commercial catering vans were trying to back out of the narrow brick gate at the same time, their tires spinning on the soaked grass, their horns blaring. Women in floor-length satin dresses with soaked hems were running through the gravel parking lot, their high heels discarded in the mud, clutching their coats over their heads.
Maggie didn't slow down for the gates. She held her horn down with her left hand, the truck’s high beams cutting through the gloom, and veered onto the lawn, the heavy all-terrain tires tearing through the manicured beds of white petunias and boxwoods.
She stopped the truck ten feet from the double glass doors of the resort’s lower terrace.
When she kicked her door open, the sound hit her: not just the wind and rain, but a terrifying, muffled hydraulic hammer—*THUMP... THUMP... THUMP*—vibrating through the stone patio under her boots. It was the sound of sea water slamming against the concrete foundations of the lower level.
Ryan was on his knees by the entrance.
His tuxedo jacket was gone. His white shirt was torn at the collar, soaked with mud and vomit. When he saw Maggie jump down from the cab, he crawled across the wet slate toward her, reaching out with both hands like a drowning beggar.
“Maggie! Maggie, oh God, you came, you came—”
Maggie didn't look at his face. She grabbed him by the shirt collar, hauled him to his feet with the brute, functional strength of a woman who carried hundred-pound dive gear every day of her life, and slammed him against the brick pillar of the porte-cochère.
“Shut up,” she said. The tone was so flat, so lethal, that Ryan’s mouth clicked shut instantly. “Where is Markland?”
A short, balding man in a soaked navy blazer stumbled out of the glass doors. It was Markland, the resort general manager. His face was gray, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't keep his walkie-talkie to his ear.
“Vance,” Markland choked out. “The township 911 dispatch says the Wildwood heavy rescue truck hit a flooded culvert on Route 47. They’re stuck. Station Cape May has no divers available. It’s just us.”
“Give me the structural schematic of the 1968 intake,” Maggie demanded, walking toward the bed of her truck where Tessa was already handing down the heavy yellow steel tanks.
“I... I don't have the prints,” Markland stammered. “They’re in the corporate office in Cherry Hill!”
“I know them,” Maggie said, stepping into the legs of her black vulcanized rubber drysuit. “My mother helped replace the zinc anodes on the exterior sluice when I was twelve. Markland, listen to me carefully: did the automatic fire doors drop on the spiral staircase leading down to the Coral Room?”
“Yes,” Markland whispered. “The main circuit shorted when the water hit the floorboards in the kitchen. Those doors are six-inch fire-rated steel with magnetic deadbolts. Once the power drops, the magnets lock. We tried a sledgehammer on the hinges. It didn't even scratch the paint.”
“They won't open without forty-eight volts of direct current to the relay,” Maggie said, pulling the heavy rubber neck seal over her head. She shook her hair free, her eyes burning into the manager. “Which means nobody is getting in through the stairs. What about the ceiling observation hatch?”
“Bolted from the inside for acoustic privacy,” Markland said, looking ready to pass out. “Arthur Sterling insisted on it so the reception music wouldn't leak into the upper suites.”
Tessa stepped up behind Maggie, hauling the thirty-pound lead weight harness over Maggie’s shoulders and buckling the heavy quick-release aircraft clasp across her chest.
“How are you getting in, Maggie?” Tessa asked, her voice trembling but steady.
Maggie pointed toward the edge of the terrace, where a low, circular stone turret jutted out over the churning gray waves of the inlet.
“The old tidal circulation well,” Maggie said. “In the sixties, the marine lab pumped ocean water directly through a sixty-foot horizontal conduit into the laboratory tanks to keep the deep-water specimens alive. That conduit runs directly behind the decorative stone wall of the Coral Room. There’s an emergency diver inspection bypass hatch thirty feet down that shaft.”
Markland stared at her in sheer horror. “Maggie, that shaft hasn't been opened in thirty years! It’s open to the open bay! The nor'easter is pushing a five-knot current through the inlet! If you go down that well, the suction from the sheared gate will pin you against the intake screen!”
Maggie reached into the truck bed, pulled out a four-pound steel wrecking bar and a high-intensity underwater cutting torch, and clipped them to the D-rings on her harness.
She turned to Ryan.
Her brother was standing three feet away, his arms wrapped around his shivering ribs, looking at her with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
“Ryan,” Maggie said.
“Yes, Maggie? Anything. What do you need?”
“If Arthur dies down there,” Maggie said, her voice dropping so low that only he could hear it over the roar of the surf, “you are going to prison for manslaughter. If Elise dies down there, you won't even make it to prison, because you will spend the rest of your pathetic life knowing you drowned the only person who ever looked at you and thought you were worth saving.”
She took the full-face dive mask from Tessa, pulled the silicone hood over her head, and spat into the glass.
“Tessa,” Maggie said. “Set the tender line to fifty feet. If I don't give you three tugs on the safety rope within eight minutes, you call the county coroner and tell them to bring two body bags instead of one.”
May you like
Before Ryan could speak, Maggie Vance turned her back on him, ran across the soaking grass, and vaulted over the granite ledge into the dark, churning mouth of the tidal well.
***
