By 9:00, they were out in Lobster Bay, on a gray and choppy ocean, balancing on the afterdeck of a 35-foot fishing boat, Julia, which Michael and Winston Smith and two of Michael's colleagues from the Peabody Museum had pooled together to rent for the morning.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYTvpycff13
It was a bright and sharp day, and Harold was shocked at how cold it was, but Michael told him that the temperature over the ocean was often as much as 30 lower than the temperature over land. There was a heavy cloudbank off to the northwest, but Winston Smith had estimated that there would be two or three hours' diving time before the weather began to deteriorate.
Harold liked Winston Smith immediately. He was a wry, self-confident 40-year-old with eyes that looked as if they had been bleached by sea-brine to a very pale blue. He spoke with a clipped accent that sounded very Bostonian to him, and there was a Boston-Irish squareness about his face, but as he piloted the boat into position he told him that he had first dived for wrecks off the shores of his native North Carolina, Pamlico Sound and Onslow Bay.
"I dived once on a World War II torpedo boat, which was sunk in a storm in '44. I shone my flashlight in through the windows, and guess what was staring back at me. This human skull, still wearing a rusty steel helmet. I got the fright of my whole goddamn life."
Michael was in a very high humor, and so were his colleagues, a serious young student named Emil Bryce, and a freckled, carrot-top graduate from the Peabody's ethnology department, Hubert Orr. Both were practiced divers: Emil wore a sweatshirt with "See Massachusetts and Dive" lettered on the back. Hubert, three years before, had helped to salvage 18th-century cannon and cooking utensils from a wreck off Mount Hope Point, Rhode Island. Both took time out to explain everything that they were doing, and why, so that even if Harold wasn't going to be much help to them, at least he wouldn't be a disastrous liability.
Pauline, bundled up in a thick quilted parka with a fur-lined hood, sat in the boat's wheelhouse with her notepad and her stopwatch, and hardly talked to him at all. But she caught him looking at her once, and gave him a smile that told him that everything between them was as good as either of us could expect it to be. Her eyes were filled with tears but it was probably the cold wind.
Michael said, "We're going to search a little further along the shoreline than we have up until now. Winston's going to position the boat according to transit bearings we've already worked out---that means we can take one fix on the Weymore Island lighthouse, and a second fix on the Quaker Hill Episcopalian Church, and where the two transit lines meet, that's where we're going to drop anchor.
Winston Smith brought the Julia a little closer into shore, while Hubert took the bearings. It took a few minutes to nudge the boat into position but at least they put down their anchor, and cut the engine.
"The tide's ebbing at the moment," Michael explained. "In a little while, though, it'll be slack, and that's the safest time for diving. Now, since this is your first time, I don't want you to stay down longer than five minutes. It's cold down there, and the visibility is pretty shitty, and you'll have quite enough to occupy your time just breathing and finning and getting yourself accustomed to diving."
Harold felt a tightness in his stomach, and at that moment he would have been quite happy to suggest that he should postpone his aqualung initiation until tomorrow, perhaps, or next week, or even next year. The wind whipped across the deck of the Julia and snapped out their diving flag, but he didn't know whether he was shivering from cold or nervous anticipation.
Winston put his arm around Harold's shoulders and said, "Don't you worry about a thing. If you can swim, you can aqualung, just provided you keep your head, and follow procedure. Michael's a first-class diver, in any case. He'll help you."
They changed into snug-fitting Neoprene wetsuits, tugging on tight Neoprene vests underneath to give them extra protection from the cold. The suits were white, with orange hoods, which Michael said would give them maximum visibility in the cloudy water. Winston Smith strapped on Harold's air-tank, and showed him how to blow hard into his mouthpiece before breathing in, to dislodge any dust or water; and how to check that the demand valve was functioning correctly. Then he fitted on Harold's weight belt, and Winston adjusted the weights for him so that they were comfortable.
"Check your diving buddy's equipment, too," Winston instructed him. "Make sure you remember how this valve works, how to release his weight-belt, if you need to. And try to remember as much as you can about those emergency procedures."
For Harold's first dive, both Michael and Hubert were going down with him. As they sat on the side of the boat, preparing themselves, one or the other of them would keep thinking of some piece of advice that he'd forgotten to tell me; and by the time they were ready to droop, their mind was a jumble of signals and procedures and hints on what to do if his facemask fogged, or his air wasn't coming through, or (the most likely emergency, as far as I was concerned) Harold started to panic.
Pauline came over, clutching her notepad, and stood beside Harold, the wind ruffling the fur of her parka.
"Good luck," she said. "Stay safe."
"I'll try," Harold told her, with a dry mouth. "I think I'm more scared now than I was when those windows caved in."
"Windows?" asked Michael. He looked at Harold, and then at Pauline; but when he saw that neither of them were going to tell him what they were talking about, he shrugged, and said, "You ready? Let's dive!"
Harold fitted his mouthpiece, said a silent prayer inside of his head, and then dropped backwards into the sea.
It was cold and chaotic down there: nothing but foggy water and rushing bubbles. But as Harold began to sink, he glimpsed the whiteness of Michael's suit right beside him, and then another white blur as Hubert came dropping in after us, and he began to feel that aqualung diving might not be as terrifying as he had thought it was going to be.
All three of them finned into the tidal stream; Michael and Huber with balance and grace, Harold with plenty of enthusiasm but nothing in the way of style. The ocean wasn't too deep there, especially at low tide, no more than 20 or 30 feet; but it was quite deep enough for him, and it was murky enough for him to stay as close to his buddies as he could.
As they descended towards the bottom, Harold felt himself becoming progressively less buoyant, until, as they skimmed a few feet over the sloping surface of the Ol' Spithead mud bank, he was in a state of neutral buoyancy, although he tended to rise and sink a little as he breathed in and out. He was a good swimmer. But this chilly underwater exploration of the black ooze on the west shore of Lobster Bay was something different altogether. He felt like a clumsy, overexcited child, inexperienced and only marginally in control of his body and his movements.
Michael swam into view and made the "okay, all is well," hand signal. He gave him the same signal back, thinking how foreign Michael's eyes looked behind his facemask. Michael had told him not to make a thumb's up signal because that meant something different altogether. Hubert, ten or fifteen feet away, beckoned them to start searching. If Harold was only going to be down there for five minutes, he might just as well help the hunt for the George Badger.
They were planning to make a systematic circular search of the area around the Julia, swimming in an anti-clockwise spiral and leaving numbered white markers on the bottom to show where they had been. They started off where the boat's anchor was buried in the ooze, and began to fin themselves round and round, until Harold had totally lost all sense of direction. As they went, however, Hubert pushed the markers into the mud, one at each completed half-circle, so that they could be sure they weren't covering the same ground twice, or straying way off their search area altogether.
Harold checked his watch. He'd been down for three minutes and he was starting to feel uncomfortable. Not just cold, and awkward, but claustrophobic as well. Although he had started off by breathing easily, he was finding that hard to keep up the regular rhythm, and he recognized that even if his mind wasn't panicking, his lungs were starting to act catchy and nervous.
He tried to remember the signal for "something wrong---not an emergency." A kind of hand-flapping, he'd thought Winston Smith had said, coupled with an indication of what was wrong. How did he explain claustrophobia with a hand-signal? Put his hand around his throat and pretend to be strangling? Squeeze his head in his hands?"
Remember not to panic, Harold told himself. You're perfectly all right. You're swimming without any difficulty; you're still breathing. What's more, you have only two minutes to go and then you'll be topside again. Michael and Hubert will take care of you.
But when he looked around again, he couldn't see either Michael or Hubert anywhere. All he could see was cloudy water, almost as thick as barley-broth, whirling with mud and debris.
He finned around and looked behind him, to see if they were there: but again, all that he could see was water. A stray flounder darted through the murk like a Victorian gentleman making his way through a London fog, quick and confident. But where were the white wetsuits and orange headpieces that were supposed to make his diving buddies visible through ten feet of submarine darkness?
Don't panic, Harold repeated. They must be around here someplace. If not, then all you've got to do is follow the markers back to the anchorline, and fin your way up to the surface again. The problem was, there wasn't a marker in sight, and in turning to look for his companions, he had completely lost his sense of direction. He could feel the chilly tidal stream flowing gently against him, but when they had started diving the tide had been on the turn, and he couldn't work out which direction it was flowing in, or how far it might have carried him while he was just flapping around there thinking about what to do.
His breath came in short and tense gasps. He tried not to think about all the things that Michael and Winston Smith had warned him to watch out for. If you have to surface, even in an emergency, don't come up too fast. You could end up with an air embolism in your bloodstream that could conceivably kill you. Don't come up any faster than your smallest bubbles, that was what Winston Smith had advised; and, if you can, take a decompression stop on the way.
Burst lung was another danger: overinflating the lungs at depth, and coming to the surface with too much pressure inside them, causing them to rupture.
Harold dog-paddled where he was for a moment or so, calming himself down. There was no sign of Michael or Hubert, and he couldn't locate any of the search markers, so he guessed that the only thing he could do was to surface. In spite of the tidal stream, he couldn't be too far away from the Julia.
He was about to begin fining his way upwards when he caught a glimpse of something white through the tumbling murk of the water. His facemask was slightly misted, and it was hard for him to make out just how far away it was, but he remembered that, seen through a facemask, all objects underwater appear to be 3/4 nearer than they really were. It could only be Michael or Hubert. There weren't any other divers in the area, and it looked far too big to be a fish. He thought momentarily of Jaws, but Winston Smith had wryly assured him that the only Great Whites that had ever been seen off the coast of New England had belonged to Universal Studios.
Swimming steadily, trying to control his breathing so that it was even and regular, Harold made his way over the ocean floor towards the white shape. It was turning in the water, turning and rolling, as if it were being wafted by the tidal stream; and, as he swam nearer, he realized that it couldn't be Michael or Hubert. It looked more like a piece of yacht-sail that had gotten tangled up in a piece of heavy fishing-equipment, and sunk to the bottom.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGX4Vh01n0s
It was only when Harold came very close, no more than two or three feet away, when he realized with abject terror and disgust that it was a drowned woman. She pivoted around, just as he approached, and he saw a face that was bloated and eyeless, a mouth that had been half-eaten by fish, hair that rose straight up from the top of her head like seaweed. She was wearing a white nightgown, which billowed and waved as the tide came in and out. Her ankle was loosely wound in a sunken trawl-net---which had prevented her from rising to the surface or drifting away but her decomposed body was now so bloated with gases that she was standing upright, and dancing a grotesque underwater solo ballet beneath the waves of Lobster Bay.
Harold backed off, trying to suppress his horror and his half-regurgitated Wheaties. For God's sake, he told himself, you can't get sick. If you get sick, you'll choke, and if you choke, you'll end up like Jane Doe here, with your eyeballs eaten out by bluefish. So calm down. Look the other way, forget about Jane Doe, there's nothing you can do for her anyway. Calm down. And slowly fin your way up to the surface, and call for help.
Harold began swimming upwards, watching his bubbles carefully to make sure that he didn't come up too fast. He was only about 30 feet beneath the water, but it felt like 100. He slowed himself down when he thought he was about halfway up, and exhaled, making sure that his lungs wouldn't burst or anything disastrous like that. The water became lighter, clearer, and he began to feel the pull of the tide more strongly, and the disturbance of the waves.
"Harlold," whispered a woman's voice. He felt a chill go through him that was far more intense that the chill of the seawater. The voice seemed close, and very clear, as if she were speaking right in his ear.
He finned up more quickly, keeping down the first surges of real panic. "Harold," whispered the voice, more loudly, more urgently, as if she were pleading. "Don't leave me, Harold. Don't leave me. Please, Harold."
Harold was nearly at the surface. He could see the crosshatching of the choppy morning waves only a few feet above him. But then something wrapped itself around his left ankle, and as he tried to kick himself free he suddenly found himself turned right over, upside down, and a sharp flood of cold water poured into his ears. He lost his mouthpiece, too, in a blurt of bubbles, and the next thing he knew he was thrashing and struggling and trying desperately to twist myself free. He thrust one hand up towards the surface, hoping that he was near enough to make a signal that the Julia might see, but it was no use. He was at least 10 feet below the waves, and whatever had snared his leg was dragging him rapidly deeper.
It was then that he really panicked. He was overwhelmed by the pounding feeling of suffocation, and the realization that unless he struggled free, he was going to drown. He'd heard people say that drowning is the most peaceful way to die, far more genteel than burning or crushing or shooting; but whoever said that had never been under the North Atlantic ocean in a cold March morning with a lost mouthpiece and some tenacious entanglement around his leg. Harold thought he shouted out loud, in a rush of bubbles, and before he could stop himself, he was swallowing water. Freezing, salty, and harsh, pouring into his stomach like liquid fire. He puked some of it back up again, and he was lucky not to choke, because his lungs were almost devoid of air.
All he could think of was: don't breathe seawater. Don't breathe seawater. Winston Smith had told him that once you breathed in seawater, you're dead.
Eyes popping, head thundering, Harold twisted himself around in a last desperate effort to see what had caught his ankle. To his horror, he saw that it was the drowned woman's nightdress, in which the body itself still bobbed and floated in its own hideous jig. When he had first swum past her, his finning movements must have dislodged her from the trawl net, and she must have risen after him, blown up with bacterial gases, like a buoy. Because her gown had entwined itself around his leg, and he had kicked and fought against her, she had turned so that the gas in her ribcage had bubbled out, leaving her heavier, so that now she was dragging Harold down.
He bent himself double and tore at the nightgown with his hands, but the rotten fabric refused to rip, and it was wrapped around his foot and his ankle as tightly as wet rawhide. He reached around his belt, and wrestled out his diver's knife, but the body kept rolling and sinking in the tide and it was nearly impossible for him to cut the nightgown without cutting his own foot.
Two. Three. Four lashes. And Harold knew he didn't have sufficient air left in his lungs to do anything but strike out for the surface. But he gave the nightgown one final slice, and like a miracle the fabric parted. The woman's body sank down again into the darkness, back through the clouds of mud and murky water.
He released his weight-belt, which he should have done earlier, and gave three kicks of his fines to get him to the surface. His rise to the top seemed painfully slow, but he was strangely calm now, his panic dispersed. Now he was quite sure that he was going to survive. At last his head broke through the waves, and there was wind, sunshine and fresh air, and almost half a mile away, the Julia.
Harold waved frantically, not knowing whether he was giving the proper signal or not, but the simple fact was that he couldn't stay afloat for very much longer, especially with the waves slapping and swamping him, and he was physically and emotionally exhausted. Winston Smith had been right when he had said that "aqualung diving is just as much a mental sport as it is a physical sport. It's not a pastime for panickers, or latent hysterics."
Harold heard the Julia revving up its engine with a distant rumble, and at last she came circling around towards him, and Winston Smith dived into the sea to hold him up. He towed Harold in to the side of the boat, and then he and Emil together managed to boost him up onto the deck. Harold lay flat against the planks like a landed shark, coughing and retching and spurting up water through his nose. His sinuses felt as if they had been meticulously scrubbed with a Brillo pad.
Pauline knelt beside Harold. "What the hell happened?!" she said. "We thought we'd lost you. Michael and Hubert came up and said that you'd disappeared.
Harold coughed and coughed until he thought he was going to vomit. But at least he managed to get his breathing under control, and with Winston's help, he sat up.
"Let's get you out of that suit," he said. "Pauline, there's a flask of hot coffee in my rucksack, will you get it for me?"
"This is all my fault, buddy," said Winston, hunkering down beside Harold and looking at him closely to make sure that he was okay. "You should have practiced in a pool first, before you dived in the open water. I just thought you looked like the kind of guy who could take care of himself."
Harold blew his nose loudly, and nodded. "I lost track of them, that's all. I don't know how it happened."
"It happens all the time," said Winston. "When you're wearing a facemask, you're like a blinkered horse, you can only see forwards. And in water like that, your buddies can disappear in two seconds. It's their fault, too, they should have kept an eye on you. Maybe we should've used a buddy-line. I don't really like them, they can sometimes be more of a problem than they're worth, but maybe we'll consider it the next time down."
"Don't talk to me about the next time."
"There's got to be a next time. If you don't go down again soon, you never will."
"I'm not worried about the diving," Harold said. "That I can handle. I panicked down there, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, but I think anyone would have lost their nerve if they'd found what I did."
"What are you talking about?" asked Emile. "The George Badger?"
"Worse. There's a drowned woman down there, folks. Not too badly decomposed. Her foot was caught in a fishing-net, and she was spinning around in the tide, standing up like she was still alive. Her gown got itself caught around my leg, and nearly drowned me."
"A drowned woman? All right, where is she now?"
"She sank again, right after I'd managed to cut her loose. But I guess the tide should bring her into the shore, now that she's free of the fishing-net."
Winston Smith shaded his eyes against the sunlight, and looked around the boat, but there wasn't anything to be seen. He said, "Well, I guess we'd better get Michael and Hubert back up here. They're still looking for you." He went to the stern of the boat, where there was an aluminum diving ladder, and banged on it five times with a wrench. That was the signal for Michael and Hubert to head for the surface, a signal that would have carried well over a half-mile underwater.
"Let me get a fix on this position," said Winston Smith. "The cops might want to ask you exactly where the body was located when you found it." He went to the wheelhouse and took a compass bearing, and then jotted it down in Pauline's notebook.
Pauline said to Harold, "What was she like, this woman? God, it must have been awful."
"I can't say what she looked like. Everybody's hair looks the same color underwater, especially in water as thick as that. The fish had been at her, too. Fish aren't particularly fastidious. She still had a face, but I don't suppose even her best friend would have recognized it."
Pauline put her arm around Harold's shoulders, and kissed his forehead. "You don't have any idea how happy I am that you're safe."
"The feeling's mutual, lover."
She helped Harold down into the cabin just below the wheelhouse, where there were two narrow bunks, a table, and a little galley. She lay him down on one of the bunks, peeled off his wetsuit, and toweled him dry. Then she tucked him into the blankets, kissed him again, and said, "Get warm. Doctor Champion's orders."
"I hear and obey," Harold told her.
A few minutes later, the Julia came about, and Winston Smith shut down the engine. Harold felt the boat rock and sway as Michael and Hubert climbed aboard, and he heard their wet flippers on the deck. Once he'd stripped off his wetsuit, Michael came down into the cabin and perched himself on the opposite bunk.
"God Almighty," Michael said, breathing on his spectacles, and putting them on. He blinked at him with water-reddened eyes. "I can tell you, I really thought for a moment there that you were gone and lost forever."
Hubert peered into the cabin and called, "How're you feeling?"
"Fine, thank you," Harold said. "I forgot to keep my eyes on you, that's all."
"Well, I'm sorry, we made the same mistake," said Hubert. "It was inexcusable, and I'm real sorry. You know what they say about diving; the smallest error can escalate in seconds into a total disaster, and I'm just glad that it didn't happen this time."
"It was damned close," Harold replied.
"Yep---Hey, Winston said something about a body. You found a body down there?"
"Unfortunately, I did. A woman in a nightgown. Floating around like a mermaid. I must have set up some kind of a wave when I finned past her, because she came up after me as if she were alive."
"Wait a minute---did you say a nightgown?" asked Michael.
"A nightgown. She was too badly bloated for me to tell what she looked like; but she couldn't have been in the water all that long."
"Mrs. Lennox," said Michael.
"Mrs. who?!"
"I read about it in the Ol' Spithead Messenger, round about the middle of last week. Mrs. Bishop Lennox went missing from her home in Ol' Spithead in the middle of the night, dressed in a nightgown, taking none of her clothes, but driving off in one of the family cars to Ol' Spithead harbor, and taking off in her husband's $200,000 yacht. Neither the yacht nor Mrs. Lennox have been seen since."
"You think that was Mrs. Lennox?" Harold asked him. "That corpse?"
"Possibly. From everything you've told me, she couldn't have been down there for more than a few days; and if she's wearing a nightgown...."
"It sure sounds like her," put in Emil.
"There's something else," said Michael. "Mrs. Lennox's husband said in the newspaper that his wife had been upset for a while recently. She'd lost her mother from cancer, and apparently she and her mother were very close."
"What's all this to you?" asked Emil. He sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
"I used to work for the Lennoxs when I was about sixteen, cleaning Mr. Lennox's car. They were friends of my folks. My dad and Mr. Lennox were both in real estage, although Mr. Lennon's into waterside condos these days. My dad thinks that waterside condos are immoral, prostituting the character of Salem and Ol' Spithead. That's why they don't see too much of each other anymore."
"Your dad thinks that waterside condos are immoral?" asked Pauline.
Michael removed his spectacles, and gave them another polish. He looked at Pauline seriously. "My father lives in the past. He can't understand why they stopped building Federal-style houses, with cellars and shutters and wrought-iron railings."
"Michael," Harold said, "are we both thinking alike?"
Michael glanced at Pauline, and then back to Harold. "I don't know. Maybe I'm just being tendentious again."
"I don't understand," said Pauline.
Harold nodded towards Michael. "Michael's is likely thinking that Mrs. Lennox may not have drowned in this particular location by accident. She may have sailed here on purpose, and drowned herself here either by accident or by design, in order to be close to the wreck of the George Badger."
"You took the thought right out of my brain," Michael agreed.
"Why would she do that?" asked Pauline, perplexed.
"She'd lost her mother, remember. Maybe she'd been haunted by her mother, the same way----" Michael paused.
"It's all right, Michael," Harold told him. "Pauline knows all about Nancy."
"Well, the same way you've been haunted by your late wife, and the same way Mrs. Baylor was haunted by her late husband. And maybe, just maybe, she felt like I do, that if she could get to the source of the hauntings, the catalyst for all these specters, she'd be able to lay her mother's ghost to rest."
"By drowning herself?" asked Hubert, with obvious incredulity.
"I can't explain that," Michael admitted. "But the desire to lay the dead to rest is extraordinarily powerful in almost every society in the world. The Chinese burn paper money at funerals, so that the dead will be rich when they get to heaven. In New Guinea, they smear their corpses with mud and ashes to make it easier for the body to return to the soil out of which it originally came. And what do we carve on Christian headstones? 'Rest In Peace.' It's important, Hubert, for reasons we may not even begin to understand. It's instinctive. We know that once our loved ones are dead, they're going to be facing an experience totally unlike their life when they were alive, physically and conceptually, and somehow we have this urgent drive to protect them, to see them through it, to make sure that they're safe. Now, why do we feel this way? Logically, it's ridiculous. But maybe there was once a time when dead people were threatened more openly, when the burial rites were an important and well-understood safeguard against the dangers that dead people were going to have to come up against before they were able to rest forever."
Hubert grimaced, and rubbed the back of his neck in something that was very close to exasperation, but as an ethnologist he couldn't deny the fundamental truth of what Michael was saying.
Michael went on, "I now believe that there's something in the wreck of the George Badger that's been unsettling the usual natural process whereby the dead are naturally laid to rest. I know you think I'm crazy, but I frankly don't give a damn. I've been over it repeatedly, and it's the only feasible explanation. I'm not saying that it's a rational explanation, but then what's been happening in Ol' Spithead isn't rational to start with. In the case of Mrs. Lennox, maybe she'd been visited by her dead mother; and maybe she felt that if she could somehow get close to the George Badger, she could free her mother's ghost."476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyBJ3kAHnUH
"That doesn't explain how she knew about the George Badger," complained Emil.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡz2ObYDShuK
"She didn't," said Michael. "It's more likely she was drawn out here by whatever influences this wreck has been giving out."
Pauline ran her hand through her hair. "We're sailing perilously close to Bullshit here," she said tiredly.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ27Gk6jbYj3
"No, we're not," said Michael. "You're looking at the whole thing with modern eyes, with eyes that have been educated to believe only the rational and the non-magical. When you see David Copperfield on TV, you don't believe for one second that any of the tricks he does are actual magic, do you? But in the days when the George Badger was sunk in these waters, when Salem was right in the middle of all its witch-trial frenzy, people believed in magic, and they believed in Satan, and they believed in God, and who are you to say that they were wrong? Especially when you've got Harold's testimony that he has actually been haunted by his dead wife; that he's actually seen her, heard her, talked to her."476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQKZKdSgjjq
Emil and Hubert evidently hadn't been told about this, because they exchanged glances of shock and disbelief.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlOzFbTKQ9n
Michael said, "Harold's diving trouble may have been a blessing in disguise. If Mrs. Lennox drowned herself close to the George Badger, then she could have pinpointed a wreck that might well have taken us years to find, if we ever found it at all. You took the bearings, Winston?"476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBQMo118QQM
"I did," said Winston.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7WsHoFtT99
"In that case, we'll carry on diving for the rest of the afternoon, as near to the spot where you came across the body as we can. Emil, Winston, you take first search."476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4oZc45NbwE
"What about me?" Harold asked.476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4D64uYf7r0
Michael shook his head. "Forget it. The reality is we shouldn't have let you go down at all. A few weeks' pool training, that's what you need, before you're out in the open water again."476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbq0JHy4Z0o
"What about the corpse?" asked Pauline. "You've got to report it to the Coast Guard."476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡylPEd57rSL
"We will when we dock," said Michael. "Right now, Mrs. Lennox is beyond all hope of help." 476Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxOEibAsyNx
