by Brynn Bonner

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In 2007, Brynn Bonner’s story “Jangle,” the first outing for her series sleuth Session Seabolt, owner of a vintage vinyl record shop, made our readers’ top ten list in the EQMM Readers Award competition. Since then, the pseudonymous Bonner has begun work on a novel featuring the character, and she promises us more stories in the series soon. She lives in Cary, North Carolina, and began her writing career in our Department of Stories. She won the Robert L. Fish Award for her first short story.

“You know that old expression Things could be worse?” I ask.

“Yes,” Julia answers, hope radiating from her face—at least the parts the blindfold isn’t covering.

“Well, it doesn’t apply here,” I tell her. One thing you should know about me right up front, I don’t believe in sugar-coating things.”

“Very witty, Isabelle,” Julia shoots back, each word brittle as an icicle. “I’m scared, Izzy, stop being such a wiseass and tell me what you see.”

This is unusually snarky for Julia. She’s normally a cupcake, but these aren’t normal circumstances.

“Okay,” I say, tilting my head so I can see out the slit I’ve worked clear of my own blindfold, “we’re on a boat, we were right about that. But we’re not tied up at a dock, so all our hysterical-woman screaming for the past hour has been for nothing. I think we’re asea, nothing but water out this porthole. So that narrows it down. We’re somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, or could be the Pacific, and we’re off the coast of Argentina—or maybe Chile.”

“Why me?” Julia whimpers. This is Julia’s go-to response. She is the center of every calamity. Which is okay, it’s what makes her an asset to our business partnership. I can be a little brusque—or so I’m told—and Julia balances that out by being oh so very empathetic.

In Julia’s personal life, however, that trait doesn’t serve her well. Her life is like an eight-track of country songs—a continuous loop of she’s-a-good-woman-wasted-on-a-no-account-man—in all its variations. Which is one reason we’d ended up taking this case in the first place, now that I think of it. Her latest poor choice in men turned out to have a bad case of cheatin’ heart, not to mention more southerly latitudes of his anatomy. Julia had been heartbroken—again—and wanted to get as far away from him as possible. So we’d accepted this case that took us out of the country, which we don’t normally do seeing as how our foreign-language skills are limited to putting in a successful order at the Taco Bell drive-through.

We’re insurance investigators—private. We’re good, but frankly we’re sick of the job—have been for a while now. The potential payout for this job had been too much to resist, big enough to let us get out of the racket. So even without Julia’s domestic drama, we’d probably have gone for it. And it didn’t hurt that Neil Compton had been the one who’d made the call to request our services. Neil’s an attorney with one of the insurance companies. He’s drop-dead gorgeous—with a hundred-watt smile and a devilish wink. He’s recently divorced, and he’s been flirting with me outrageously lately—and I’ve been eating it up with a spoon. Julia tries to tell me he’s on the rebound and that’s he’s not right for me. I tell her maybe he’s not Mr. Right, but he’d make a truly fine Mr. Right-Now.

All four insurance companies had offered a percentage of the recovery if we could track down Mrs. Verena Walters Maratea—recently deceased according to the authorities down here—and bring back solid evidence of her miraculous return to the land of the living. I have to admit, it was greed, the lure of great gobs of greenbacks, that was the real reason we were in this fix. We figured that with that kind of cash I could open the camera store I’d always dreamt of and Julia would get her bridal shop.

From my current vantage point, however, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and apparently adrift at sea in a rusty tub, it seemed things hadn’t worked out exactly as planned.

“What else do you see, Izzy?” Julia asked with an urgency I knew would soon turn her end of the conversation into a chain-saw whine. “Can you tell where we are?”

“Julia, I’ve only got one little peephole worked free, and that’s taken me an hour of rubbing my face against this putrid carpeting, so don’t start with me.”

Her reply was a tiny, strangled “Ooooh.” Here it came. “Why do you have to be so bitchy?” she wailed. “You know I was already in a tender place before we ever left North Carolina, and this is just the last straw. This is just too much. I don’t think I can bear any more.”

I tilt my head so I can see out of the tiny opening and look around the cabin. It looks about like it smells. “What’s your alternative, Julia?” I ask distractedly. “You can’t even kill yourself in the predicament you’re in right now, so just get a grip.”

Now I know that sounds harsh, but you’d have to know Julia. Everything with her is high opera. She’s been that way since kindergarten. The only time I ever really worried about her was back when her first bad choice in men, Willy—the one she’d inexplicably paraded to the altar with—left her. He’d gone to the store for a pack of cigarettes and never come back—the man was a walking cliché.

But Julia had been convinced he was being held hostage, enduring unimaginable torture as each day passed. That’s what got us started in this business, actually. When the police gave up the search—which was pretty early in the game, since they see a good number of husbands go out shopping for that escape-hatch pack of smokes—we started our own investigation. We stumbled along at first, but we’re quick studies and we dogged the trail all the way to Las Vegas, where we found Willy B. Underwood dealing blackjack in a run-down casino and shacked up with an equally run-down chorus girl.

Julia was calm as a stone. I was truly afraid—not for Julia, but for Willy B. and that chorus girl. I clicked out four rolls of film documenting Willy’s new lifestyle and got Julia on a plane back to North Carolina lickety-split to file her divorce papers. During that whole period Julia was quiet and subdued. I worried.

It took time, but eventually her whine came back and she started going out with a new string of losers. She was herself again. I don’t worry about Julia as long as she’s fussing.

We both grew up in the Piedmont of North Carolina, which is not an asset right now. As lifelong landlubbers, neither of us knows diddly-squat about boats.

I angle my head this way and that like a lizard, scanning the room for something to cut us loose. “Julia, I see some cabinets on the other side of the compartment. If we can wiggle over and get the doors open, maybe we can rub the ropes against the door’s edge.”

“Oh, Izzy, that’ll take forever.”

“You rushing off somewhere?”

“Fine,” she says with an exaggerated sigh. “But I don’t know which way theother side is. I can’t see a thing, remember?”

“Right,” I say, plopping back down beside her. Above Julia’s protests that the blindfold bandanas are icky, we start in with what surely would have looked like some primate grooming ritual if there’d been anyone there to see it. We use our teeth, biting at the blindfolds and pulling until we each have one eye completely exposed. With my short brown hair sticking up everywhere, Julia’s long blond tresses matted and tangled, and our faces covered with grease and smut, we look like a couple of psychotic pirates. Another fifteen minutes of wiggling, writhing, and butt-bumping and we are in a semi-sitting position with our backs to the cabinets. We each get a door open and start what promises to be a long-term stint at rope-fraying.

In the future, assuming we’ll have one, we pledge we’ll do more research before we say yes to a job. This offer had come up so quickly and the payoff was so startling, we’d had our bags packed while the question mark at the end of “Are you interested?” was still hanging in the air. And besides the money, I have to admit I’d wanted to impress Neil with our investigative prowess. Neil is always telling me how much he likes strong women and I want to show him I can be an Amazon.

Who would have thought a place with a name like Tierra del Fuego would turn out to be like this? To my credit, I had looked it up on the Internet. But I’ve got a touch of attention-deficit disorder, so I get bored easily. As soon as I saw the name meant Land of Fire, I figured we were on our way to a tropical paradise and signed off the site. Big mistake. I really need to bone up on my world geography. I’d pictured us lounging at poolside, sipping something featuring rum and fruit, and possibly little paper umbrellas, brought to us by bare-chested waiters with six-pack abs and very white teeth. Not until we were on the plane, each of us with a suitcase full of resort-wear in the overhead compartment, did I realize we were going very nearly to the ends of the earth—the chilly end.

I browsed the materials the travel agent had given us and realized I might have to adjust my expectations when the first photo in the pamphlet showed penguins waddling over an ice floe.

“What kind of a woman,” I’d asked Julia, “would set up this elaborate insurance scam to run away to a place like that?”

“A smart one?” Julia had offered. “Who’d look for her there?”

According to the report, Verena, who prior to that time had regarded going to the end of the driveway to retrieve the newspaper as an outdoor adventure, had up and decided to go on a fifteen-day hiking excursion through Patagonia. This seemed odd to Verena’s friends and acquaintances. “If she talked about wildlife at all,” said one coworker at the real-estate office where Verena worked, “she was talking about a hot club on a Saturday night, not anything feathered or furry!”

Yet, there she’d been, hiking along with the booted and backpacked brigade, when on day nine she—or someone matching her description and using her name—had taken a fatal fall at Lake Grey Glacier. Or so four different insurance companies were informed by the family lawyer, who presented policies for two million each—with the accidental-death bonus—for a total of a cool ten mil. In corporate offices across the country, insurance executives’ ears pricked and they lifted their noses to the wind, detecting a whiff of something fishy in the air.

The initial investigation found nothing amiss. There had been a body matching Verena’s description, dental records, a death certificate—the whole nine yards. Still, two of the companies held out, risking a lawsuit, while they continued to investigate. The other two, including Secured Allied, Neil’s company, had caved and released the money to the grieving widower, David Maratea. But they were not happy about it. They were hoping to reclaim the money if we could prove fraud. All four companies had pooled to pay our expenses. Neil had made the recommendation to pay up in his company, so he had a personal stake in this and was, naturally, following the case personally. Which meant we had a lot of contact, which was more than fine by me.

David Maratea was an unlikely match for the flashy Verena. Serious and somewhat awkward, he was the service manager at the local Toyota dealership. Friends said his idea of a good time was to take his golden retriever, Ringo, to the park and throw slobbered-on tennis balls for the dog about a hundred times in a row, then come home and have a brew and watch a little baseball on the tube.

A week ago, he too had taken off for Tierra del Fuego, and days later he’d transferred most of the insurance money to a bank in Ushuaia.

I’m a good tracker, but I can’t take much credit for this one. He left a trail worthy of Hansel and Gretel, his breadcrumbs consisting of credit-card receipts, phone calls, and reservations under his own name. He was either stupid or totally unaware that we were following him—the one not precluding the other.

My arms are aching after ten minutes of sawing against the cabinet door. I need to slow down, get into a rhythm. I’m off balance. I’m hoping—really hoping—it’s because the one eye is throwing my perspective off, but I fear it’s because we are listing to port, or is it starboard? As I said, I don’t know much about boats. Aching arms or no, I step up the pace. I don’t share my thoughts with Julia because I don’t want to listen to her whine go supersonic.

“I still can’t believe David did this to us,” Julia is lamenting.

“Geez, Julia, he’s our target, not a buddy. Don’t call him David,” I say.

“Well, what would you like me to call him?” she asks, and I note that she is not putting nearly enough energy into trying to fray her rope.

“Call him something else; Satan has a nice ring to it,” I reply.

“You are so judgmental, Izzy,” she scolds. “I mean, really, he seemed like such a nice guy. You heard his friends. He visits his mother in the nursing home every week and he loves his dog. He named the dog Ringo, Izzy. He’s a Beatles fan, for heaven’s sake.”

“Julia.” I begin using my irritation to fuel my rope-fraying so that I have to huff out the words. “First off, I’ve got two words for you: helter skelter. Second, you are no judge of men. Look at your track record. And third, here we are, how much more proof do you need?”

“This is hard, Izzy,” Julia whines.

“You don’t miss much, do you, Julia?” I say. “Just keep working at it,” I add, tapping into my long-dormant patience reserves. “If we can just get one hand free, we’re good to go.”

“But I’m leaning and there’s something under my jacket that keeps getting wedged up under my butt.” She twists slightly and tries to look back over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s my fanny pack, it’s gotten twisted around.”

“You’ve still got your fanny pack?” I ask, drilling her with my one eye. “Is there anything in it?”

“Well, how would I know, Izzy, I can’t see into it,” she answers.

“Julia,” I say, willing my voice to stay even, “don’t you usually carry a Swiss Army knife in there?”

She smiles, but misses the point. “Yes, Izzy, you know I do. It’s that little one you gave me for my birthday, don’t worry, I haven’t lost it. It was my favorite present. It’s so clever how they work all those tools into one little—” She stops abruptly as the dime finally drops. “Izzy, it’s got a knife in it, a scissors, and another knife.” She starts bumping around on her rear like a jumping bean on a sugar high. “Put your back to me, Izzy, see if you can get it.”

She doesn’t need to tell me twice. I get myself into position, work at the zipper, and close my hand around the knife. I want to kiss every Swiss person in that wonderful nation. Geniuses, all of them! This is the kind of thing you can accomplish for the world when you aren’t going to war every two or three years. A big shout-out for neutrality!

Getting the blade open is a challenge, but at last I am sawing through the rope around Julia’s wrist. Just as I hear the satisfying snap signaling the last thread of rope giving way, sunlight floods the cabin. A dark figure clomps down the steps and turns into David Maratea. He’s standing still, but weaving in place. One of us is obviously drunk or otherwise impaired. I decide it’s him.

“Who are you?” he asks, his eyes dark and dilated and his blond hair sticking up in a profusion of dirty spikes.

“You mean you don’t know?” Julia asks, turning her head to angle her good eye up to him like a parakeet as she yanks at the knot in her blindfold with her free hand.

“Well, of course he knows, Julia,” I say. I am frightened by Maratea’s appearance, but my irritation with Julia is overriding even that. “He’s the one who put us here.”

“What are you talking about?” Maratea asks, his voice rising. He cringes and touches the crown of his head. “Somebody knocked me out, that’s all I know. Then I wake up on the deck of a boat that’s sinking fast and now I find two women I’ve never seen before.” He stops and squints at us. “At least I don’t think so, it’s sorta hard to tell with the way you look and all.” He blinks four or five times, very slowly, then seems to come around again. “Now, can we start again?” he says, trying to put some starch into it. “Who are you?”

I stare at him and he takes a step back as if the two of us, in our handicapped state, are going to rush him. It’s so ridiculous I almost believe him—almost.

“Well, Maratea, I’m Thelma,” I jerk my head toward Julia, “and this here is Louise. And it seems this tub is now substituting for a 1966 Thunderbird convertible.”

Maratea stares at us wild-eyed. “What—how do you know my name? You mean you two have got me caught up in some kind of suicide pact or something?”

“Of course not,” Julia says, finally snatching off the blindfold. “Don’t pay any attention to her, she’s just cranky. We’ve been following you for a week. You didn’t spot us?” A wide band of clean skin across her eyes gives her an ever-so-attractive bandito look. “We really are good,” she beams at me.

“Following me?” Maratea asks, frowning. “Were you trying to get me out? Who sent you? Who knew I needed...” He puts his hand to his head and his knees buckle. I have to pull my feet up in a quick hurry to keep his head from having a close encounter with the hard soles of my hiking boots. He is out cold.

“Ah, poor guy,” Julia says as she pulls at her ropes.

There’s no sense getting mad at Julia. She simply cannot help herself. There’s something fundamentally wrong with her schmuck radar. It is no surprise to me when she goes immediately into her Florence Nightingale routine. I have to remind her, politely, that I am still in bondage.

As she is untying me, I mentally review. We had spotted Maratea our first morning in Ushuaia—the world’s southernmost seat of government, we were informed by the innkeeper. We’d followed Maratea to a modest house on a street by the waterway. Everywhere he went he was flanked by two beefy guys. They had no necks to speak of, but biceps like bowling balls.

We’d watched the house and observed a woman matching Verena’s height and weight coming and going. Unfortunately, she always wore a scarf, sunglasses, and gloves. It could have been Madonna under there, for all we knew. She too always had at least one of the walking muscle masses for company. I’d taken numerous photos, but they weren’t going to prove anything.

I’d called to give a preliminary report and found—to my great disappointment—that Neil wasn’t in and I’d have to talk to Conrad Richter, a tubby sixty-something bureaucrat who looks like a troll and decidedly does not appreciate a strong woman. He told me the clock was ticking—thank you, Mr. Obvious!

Then, yesterday, we’d gotten lucky. Or so it had seemed at the time. Verena—and we knew in our hearts it was Verena—had taken off her gloves to adjust an earring while perusing the paper at the local newsstand. She’d taken the newspaper with her, but she’d also flipped through a fashion magazine and left it on the rack.

Julia had swooped in and purchased the magazine as soon as Verena walked away. Her fingerprints all over an issue published six months after her death should be pretty convincing proof. But we wanted to get photos too, preferably of Verena and the grieving—or rather, thieving—husband together. We’d watched the house all afternoon and had been just about to pack it in for the day when Verena came flouncing out, sans bodyguards, and more importantly, sans disguise, and walked off in the direction of the wharf. I broke my personal land-speed record running down side streets trying to get in front of her, Julia coming behind me in her girly run. I was set up and clicking away by the time she caught up. Verena seemed almost to be vamping for the camera. I could have sworn she was looking right into the lens.

Suddenly something chemical and foul smelling was covering my face and someone larger than your average bear had me in a vice-grip. I could hear Julia squeaking behind me. The next thing I knew I was adrift—and I don’t mean that as a metaphor.

Logic would dictate that Maratea’s plan was for his thugs to ambush us and bring us out here to dispose of us. If so, he is a very bad planner, as he is lying unconscious at my feet at the moment. I can see no weapon, and he’s got a knot the size of a kiwi on the back of his head. Something’s gone awry.

Julia is patting his cheeks gently, trying to bring him around. I suggest we tie him up till we can find out what’s what. She thinks I am mean and cynical. I think otherwise and begin to wind him up like a calf at a rodeo with a length of rope I’ve found in the corner of the cabin.

He comes to, struggles against the ropes for a moment, then gives that up and gets down to the crux of things. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” he says, “but I can tell you we’ve got to get this rust bucket to land or we’re all gonna die. Can’t you see we’re sinking?”

He has my complete attention, but I’m still not cutting him loose until I hear his story. He gives us a very succinct overview, the precision of which I appreciate considering our situation. He had no part in the insurance scam. Didn’t know anything about it until last week. He’d thought Verena was dead, genuinely mourned for her, and had been perplexed by the insurance policies their lawyer had produced as he hadn’t taken them out. Three weeks ago he’d gotten a call from a woman purporting to be Verena’s long-lost half-sister. She claimed Verena was still alive and being held for ransom. “I didn’t doubt her,” he said, “she knew so much about Verena—well, she would have, wouldn’t she?” he huffed. He sped the story along like a man with pure caffeine in his veins. “I transferred money like she said the kidnappers wanted and came right on down to try to make the exchange for Verena’s life.”

When he arrived at the airport he saw that the half-sister looked so much like Verena it had taken his breath away. Then, in the parking garage, her two thugs had actually taken his breath away by punching him in the solar plexus and throwing him in the backseat of the car.

“And you guessed it,” he said, sounding more sorrowful than angry. “She looked so much like Verena because she was Verena. How stupid could I be?”

The answer to that question is still pending.

They’d kept him prisoner in the house, making him fill out bank papers and authorizations for future transactions. He’d been escorted to and from the bank with remote-controlled shock collars strapped to each ankle underneath his pants, the kind used to train dogs—amped up to rabid Rottweiler levels.

“They gave me a demonstration—they hurt like hell,” Maratea attested, the mere memory making him shiver.

“It takes five days for everything to go through, and I heard them talking about what to do with me; they were just going to leave me there. They figured they’d be long gone before anybody found me and let me out. But then, a couple of days ago, they got all in a stew—something about insurance investigators. Verena was screaming and Harvey and his brother were pacing and cracking their knuckles. I was locked in my room, but it had one of those big old-fashioned keyholes and I could see a lot if I pressed my eye right up to it.”

“She spotted us,” I say to Julia. “Guess we aren’t so good after all.”

Julia looked crestfallen. “Guess not.”

“Anyway, the next thing I know Verena herself is standing there with a gun on me. I mean, up until then I thought maybe they were forcing her too. But there she was—this woman I thought was the love of my life! First she was dead, then alive, then holding me hostage—then holding a gun on me.” He drops his head. “What kind of a world is this, anyway?” He sighs a heavy one. “And then,” he nods toward the deck, “I woke up here.”

“Assuming I believe you,” I say, “Verena must be sure she’s got everything set up to receive the rest of the insurance payoff and you are now expendable. If we’re all found dead in this leaky boat, it’ll look like your doing. Like you brought us out here to kill us and something went wrong.”

“Are you nuts?” Maratea asks. “If we’re found? We’re in the middle of the ocean. No one is ever going to find a trace of us if we don’t do something soon.”

He tries to stand, then realizes he’s still tied. “We’re just going to disappear—blip,” he says, then again winces from the pain of moving his head. “I’m telling you, we’re sinking,” he says now, in a nasally whine that’s a good match for Julia’s.

A trip topside confirms both my own suspicions and Maratea’s account. The boat is definitely askew. Flat, clear horizon lines in every direction, and not another soul or man-made object in sight.

I make the decision to trust Maratea, not that I really have options, and we untie him and concoct a plan. I am delighted to hear he knows boats. He has the cover off the engine, scrutinizing something in there. He’s having to sit down every couple of minutes to keep from passing out—obviously suffering from a concussion—so the work is not going as fast as I’d like, but I’m not exactly in a position to cast aspersions on his work ethic.

“Okay,” he says, “I think I can jury-rig the engine and there’s still a little fuel in here, but we’ll only get one shot at this. I’ve got no idea where we are, but it will be twilight soon and I can use the stars to figure out which direction to head in. In the meantime we’ve got to stop taking on water or we’ll have sunk by then. One of us will have to go overboard to see if we can find the rupture in the hull. I’d do it, but I think I’d probably pass out again when I hit the water. Did either of you ever do any diving, or are you at least good swimmers?”

My heart sinks. We are done for. I can do a pretty energetic doggy-paddle, but that’s about it. I can’t even stand to open my eyes underwater in a swimming pool, much less in salt water—plus I’m a little paranoid about the creatures hiding down there.

“I’ll go,” Julia says, already stripping off her chothes. “At least I’ll get this grime off me.”

“Julia!” I bark, “Do you know how cold that water is? You can’t do this.” I recall that Julia has a fit if the water in the swimming pool isn’t at bath temperature.

“You don’t know everything about me, Izzy,” she says indignantly. “I’m a great swimmer. And I always won the diving medals every year at summer camp.”

“Hang on,” Maratea says, “that’s great, but we need to figure out exactly how we’re going about this before you try a two-and-a-half gainer into the drink. Let’s go see what the situation is with the bilge pump and then we need to look for the rupture and see what we can do about it.”

We both follow obediently and I wonder if we’re lambs to the slaughter. But, again, what options do we have?

I develop a grudging admiration for this seasoned Toyota service manager as he sticks his head up out of the engine hatch and gives us the news—good and bad. We’ve taken on a lot of water and the gas-powered pump doesn’t work. But he’s found the rupture. If we can pump the water out manually, we can string a rope cage to keep something we’ve stuffed into the breach from the outside wedged in by the water pressure.

I pump until my arm feels like it’s made up of strands of cooked spaghetti, then Julia and I haul in all the rope we can find and start weaving a spider’s web.

“What’s that, David?” Julia asks as Maratea appears with a bundle under his arm. He is still holding his head as he moves around and I fear the only seafarer among us may be beyond determining which stars are real and which are just swimming in his head by the time night falls. I urge him to sit down.

“It’s rain slickers,” he says, sucking in his breath as he deals with a passing wave of pain. “Found them in the cabin. If we can get some more of this water out, maybe Julia can get these lashed onto the hull. She can stuff these in the crevice if she can stay down that long.” He holds up his socks and I look to his feet, now naked in their Reeboks.

As I’m standing on the deck I find myself thinking that if I die out here, at least the last thing I’ll have seen here on planet Earth is something that surprises me. And, after all, what’s the use of living if things can’t still surprise you? Julia is phenomenal. She takes in great gulps of air and plunges under, her blond hair floating along behind her like mermaid’s locks. Again and again, she goes down, comes up for more rope, another slicker, more socks—mine—and still more rope. By the time she’s done, her lips are blue and her teeth are chattering, but the job is done. The boat looks like it’s wearing a giant diaper and Maratea—okay, David—is again tinkering with the engine.

He violates what I suspect are lots of sailor rules and builds a small fire in an empty paint can out of stuff he’s chopped up from the cabin. He urges Julia to warm her hands and feet. Once she’s gotten her dry clothes back on, he puts an old woolen blanket around her, apologizing for the fact that it smells like a wet dog—a wet, incontinent dog.

The sun sets and at least we know which way is west. David makes some calculations. He hopes to at least get us into a shipping lane if we can’t make shore. We hoist a distress flag made of tattered rags we’ve found in the cabin and then David turns to us. “So,” he says, “this is it. If I don’t make it and either of you do, would you take care of my dog? I’m afraid he’ll think I’ve just deserted him.”

“None of that talk,” I tell him gruffly, though I am touched. I don’t even have a dog to miss me, I realize. I vow that if I make it out of this there will be some changes in my life.

“I really hate hearing that you weren’t here to rescue me,” David says glumly, “because that means no one will be looking for us. So if this doesn’t work—” He stops short and lets us fill in the unthinkable blank.

“I’m hungry,” Julia says, breaking the silence. I am relieved. Hope lives as long as Julia is grousing.

“Oh, look!” she squeals in delight, producing half a Snickers bar and a juice box from her fanny pack.

“Ration it,” David says. “If we make it to the shipping lane, it may take a day or two for someone to come along—’course, that’s assuming our patch holds. There’s rainwater in an old epoxy bucket over there.” He nods, then winces. “Not the healthiest thing, but better than dying of thirst. Take a tablespoon at a time. You first, Julia, you probably swallowed a lot of salt water.”

David starts up the engine and we open our last gambit, hoping we won’t meet the end of our lives here near the end of the world.

My plan is to keep an eye on David to make sure he doesn’t pass out. I fight sleep as the coughing engine moves us along through the night, limping over the black, inky sea toward what I sincerely hope is the Land of Fire. I am exhausted, frightened, and mad at myself for the mistakes I’ve made on this case. Julia is sleeping soundly, letting off little fluttering snores. I shake my head. How can she sleep at a time like this? I will not allow myself to actually go to sleep, I vow. I am a strong woman. I am an Amazon. I am out like a light.

The engine sputters and stops and I jolt awake. The boat is very low in the water. Julia stirs beside me, both of us huddled on the deck near David, who has been steering and is now slumped over the wheel.

“Oh, no, don’t tell me we’re out of gas,” Julia whines as she rubs her eyes. “Why can’t I ever get a break?”

David lifts his head and stares and I turn to see what he is looking at. I think no place has ever looked so beautiful. It is desolate, bleak, and windswept in the pale pre-dawn light. But it’s land. We’ve made it back to Tierra del Fuego.

The next days go by in a blur. During that time I come to believe in divine retribution, or fate—or that karma thing. I can’t describe it, but like the old judge said about pornography, I know it when I see it.

We made it back to Ushuaia with the help of a baffled but benevolent sheep farmer. After food, baths, and sleep, we discussed going to the authorities, but David was convinced Verena had someone official on her payroll. He’d seen her through that keyhole talking with a tall, tanned man in an expensive suit. He thinks that’s how she’s pulled off the scam. Someone had died up on Lake Grey Glacier, and with a little calendar manipulation somewhere within the dark backrooms of officialdom and a documentation switcheroo by some cash-strapped clerk somewhere, poof, the dead woman becomes Verena Walters Maratea. David had no idea who the guy was. Could have been local law enforcement, could have been some government bigwig. Who to trust?

So here we are. We know that in one more day the money will be beyond our reach. As it turns out, David has a clever head for figures. Probably from all the Toyota parts he’s ordered over the last decade, he says. He’s seen—and more importantly, he’s memorized—the account numbers where the insurance money is being routed. But we can’t let Verena get off this island or she’ll move it again and that will be it. One hop is traceable, two hops and it becomes much more difficult. Three hops and she and the cash vanish into another dimension.

We poke around and find that the beefcake brothers are putting up provisions on a nice new boat. Verena is now sashaying around in the open as if she doesn’t have a care in the world, and we find ourselves collectively irked. To borrow from Winston Churchill, this is something up with which we cannot put.

We are on constant surveillance while we try to concoct a plan as brilliant as the one that got us off that boat. So far we’re not exactly clicking along on all cylinders. I spot the bodyguards loading things into the trunk of a car and I hear Harvey call to Verena as she comes out of the house. He tells her he’ll see her in an hour. She turns toward the docks and heads out on foot, and he calls after her, “He should be there with the boat by the time you get down there.”

I hesitate a moment, remembering that trailing along after her is what got me in trouble last time. But she thinks we’ve been taken care of and if no-neck number two is already on the boat, then this isn’t likely another trap. I step out of the alleyway, but Julia hisses at me and pulls me back. She points, and I see Harvey’s brother coming out of the house bringing more boxes.

So if it’s not No-Neck waiting on the boat, who? Verena must have herself a new honey. Maybe a Latin lover? I wait until both Harvey and his brother have their line of sight blocked by the trunk lid, then motion to the others. We start after her. We try to be stealthy, but there are three of us and David, still a little woozy, is having navigatonal difficulties.

The wharf is deserted, but I see a large pleasure boat—when does a boat stop being a cabin cruiser and become a yacht?—headed toward the pier. Julia and I are gaining on Verena, darting from doorway to alley, when the woman suddenly whirls and spots us. She registers shock, then anger, and starts digging in the bag she’s carrying like a starving terrier after a bone she’s buried for emergencies. I sprint and launch myself, catching the strap of the bag and wrenching it from her grasp. Her gun falls to the ground and we both scramble for it.

I see Julia come up right behind me, swinging an oar she’s found somewhere like a crazed ninja. I get to the gun first and pick it up, trying to remember everything I learned in gun-safety class a few years back. As I scramble up, Verena picks up the bag and throws it at me and takes off. She is surprisingly fast for a real-estate agent—especially a dead one. We all start after her, but David catches his foot on the bag and goes down. Julia—naturally—stops to make sure he’s okay. I run on, panting already and sure I’ll never be able to catch the fleet-footed Verena. She is flying, looking back over her shoulder every few steps to see if I am gaining on her—which I am, but by mighty small increments.

The boat is getting closer, and I try to work some geometric and physics calculations in my head to determine if it will get to the pier before she arrives, and if I have any chance of stopping her. I decide now is not the time for higher math and concentrate on putting a kick into my stride. Suddenly Verena’s foot gets snared on a tangle of fishing line someone has left on the pathway. She skids, head first, on the pea gravel for what seems like a long time. She tries to scramble to her feet, but the line has gotten wrapped around her ankles and she tumbles, head over feet down an embankment until a rock seawall finally brings her to a stop—with a sickening thud. Julia catches up and we make it down to her. I confirm that Verena Walters Maratea has, at last, fulfilled the requirements of her death certificate.

“What about the guy on the boat?” Julia asks.

I try to think, but my brain is oxygen deprived.

David comes limping up, carrying the bag.

“Don’t come over here, David,” Julia says. She steps up to block his view of his former wife/kidnapper/attempted murderer.

“Is she—” he begins.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Julia says, going over to place a comforting hand on his arm.

“Look,” I say, “I’m sorry, too. Really, I am. Conflicting emotions and all that, but right now we have to figure out what to do about that.” I stab a finger in the direction of the boat and turn David to face the water.

“Well,” he says slowly, “he’s waiting for Verena, and Julia is the same height and shape as her—as she was,” he corrects, swallowing hard. He opens the bag and rummages, producing a scarf and a pair of sunglasses. “I mean, he wouldn’t know it wasn’t her until he was close, right?”

“You’re a smart guy,” I say, admiringly.

“About some things,” he says giving the crumpled heap near the rock wall a sad glance.

Julia is busy wrapping the scarf. I pull her a couple of steps away from David and whisper to her that it would be good if she put on Verena’s coat, that the man might recognize it. She looks at me like I’ve grown another head and flat-out refuses.

“Well, at least try to walk like her then,” I tell her, “and here.” I shove the gun into her pocket. “David and I will try to get as close as we can. When you think you’ve got him far enough from the boat that he can’t outrun us and get back onboard, signal by holding your hand way up, like you’re waving at him. We’ll rush him. We need to get this done before the no-necks show up.”

Julia nods. She takes a few running steps, then remembers. She juts one hip out to the side and goes into a back-and-forth pendulum with her rear end that I fear might dislocate a vertebra. David and I split up and make our way down to the boardwalk, each approaching from a different direction.

The man has tied up the boat now and has come out onto the pier. He beckons to Julia to hurry it along. She stops and turns to point up to the shore as if she needs help with something.

“Good job, Julia,” I whisper under my breath. She always does lady-in-distress well.

The man is walking down the pier toward Julia. The hood is up on his parka and he has on sunglasses.

I have no more than gotten into position when I see Julia lift her arm and wave like she’s trying to flag down a passing helicopter or something.

David and I take off at a flat-out run. David runs like he’s on a slalom course, but he’s got speed.

Too late the man sees us coming at him. He turns to run for the boat, but David seems to have finally gotten mad. His face is crimson and he pours it on and hurls himself at the man, bringing him to the pier so hard I feel it shake.

The man struggles to get David off him, but Julia and I are there before he can kick David free. The two of them hold him down while I tie his hands behind him with the scarf.

He is still trying to scramble away as David rolls him over. I jerk the hood down and rip off the sunglasses. The man looks at me and gives me a dazzling smile.

“Isabelle, oh, thank God it’s you,” says Neil Compton. “I—I can explain everything.”

* * * *

Of course, he couldn’t explain anything. Not to anyone’s satisfaction—least of all mine. The snake. He’d been in it with Verena all along. That’s why he’d recommended the payout. But when the company hired us to try to recover, he’d come on to me strong, so he could find out our every move. I had David Maratea’s question pierced into my brain: How stupid could I be?

Julia, God love her, never said a sarcastic word, never gloated, never smirked, though she had every right to. Like I said, the woman is a cupcake.

“This model is designed for the amateur photographer,” I tell a customer and wave as David and Julia come through the door of my camera shop with Ringo in tow. They have come to discuss wedding pictures—theirs.

I’ve warned Julia about David. He’s not her type. He is nice, loyal, considerate—and he adores her. Like I said, not her type. She whines that I’m being mean, so everything is peachy-keen here.

It’s taken months to sort things out. But finally our payments have all been released. It took high-level negotiations. For which we hired David’s brother. Who is a hell of a lawyer, and also a nice guy. He’s also cute—and available. I’ve been flirting with him outrageously—nice-guy traits are very appealing to me right now. He’s shy, and I think I scare him a little, but he’ll get over that.

We’d argued that we did our job successfully. We found proof that Verena was still alive, but we hadn’t filed an official report before she became dead—again. We’d finally settled on a third of our promised fee. Plus, they threw in a little bonus for our capturing Neil. It’s enough.

David fared better. His wife, who turned out to be anything but dearly beloved, is now actually, irrefutably dead—and he is the beneficiary. You’ve got to love irony. Julia still gets her bridal shop, because she gets David and he gives her anything she wants. She is to be her own first customer. This is going to be a doozy of a wedding.

Shutter, my black lab puppy, comes barreling out of my office, sensing his buddy Ringo is here. David takes the dogs out in back of the store where we have a little play yard set up for them. Shutter has a bad habit of sneaking up on customers and putting his cold nose on their ankles. I’m trying to teach him some manners, but he’s incorrigible. And I have to admit, I indulge him. How can I not? He thinks I hung the moon, I can tell by the way he looks at me with those big moony eyes.

My customer finally makes his choice from among the point-and-shoot digital cameras I’ve shown him. I ring up the order, then Julia and I are alone.

“Oh, Izzy,” Julia says, clasping both my hands. “I’ve had so much to do. It’s just been crazy. But everything is all set for the wedding. Every detail except for the pictures, and I know you’ll take care of that. I cannot believe this is happening. All these good things all at once—-how did I ever get so lucky? It’s just nearly more than I can stand. Why is this happening to me?”

It’s a happy whine—like calliope music—and I smile and remember the sight of Julia-the-amazing diving off the deck of that sinking boat, her hair flowing out behind her like mermaid’s tresses. She’s earned a lifetime pass; she can whine all she wants and it will always sound like music to me