The Old Woman’s Eyes
They took the Earless Man at his word and decided not to report the encounter to the authorities. This made the next move simple: remove every trace of the corpse and the Earless Man from their world. Clean the floor of the house, destroy the bloody clothes and towels, and wash the dock. Seabrook also wanted to burn the clothes he was wearing. They were stained with blood and smelled like the dead man. After that, they would decide whether to leave, or stay in Bimini and finish their summer research. They didn’t want to wait until morning, and got straight to work. But as they cleaned, Seabrook and Aja grew angry and upset.
They felt paranoid and unsafe.
“He’d been told we were scientists and doctors,” Aja said about the Earless Man. They were both on their knees, cleaning the floor with soap, rags, and water where the man had bled. “He said he couldn’t find a doctor. Bimini’s medical clinic closes at five p.m. every day. Someone on the island sent him to us.”
“The guy seemed scared to death,” Seabrook said.
“He was. Someone killed his friend and nearly killed him too. He said he’d been set up. He couldn’t see who shot him.”
Seabrook shook his head.
“If he doesn’t get to a real doctor soon,” Aja said, “he may die. Those bullets are still in him.”
“Was it a bad drug deal?”
“He didn’t say. But someone is looking for him. He said he had to keep moving or he’d be killed.”
“He had bricks of cocaine below deck.”
“A lot?”
“A whole lot. A hundred and sixty kilos in bricks. Maybe more. It was dark. I couldn’t see well and I didn’t want him to shoot you, so I hurried back on deck.”
Aja nodded and touched his shoulder.
“Right before I came up on deck, a weird woman spoke to me,” Seabrook told her.
“What woman?” Aja said.
“There was a woman in the forward cabin.”
“Against her will?”
“No. She seemed to be hiding. In the dark she couldn’t tell who I was and asked me if I was Salvatore.”
“Salvatore? . . . I wonder if that’s the Earless Man’s name, or maybe his dead friend’s name?”
“Probably Earless Man. The dead man was on the floor right in front of me. I think she could see him. But I got a real bad feeling off her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like she enjoyed killing people. And wanted to kill me.”
“How could you tell?”
“She pointed a gun at me and smiled. I ran up the stairs before she could shoot. I think she is the woman Earless Man was talking about. Maybe she is some kind of boss.”
Aja shook her head sideways. “Jeez. What did she look like?”
“Weird, shaky eyes, kind of bloated face.” Seabrook shrugged. “I only saw her for a few seconds and it was dark, but I think she had a necklace with seashells on it. She was crazy in the worst way.”
Aja nodded. “I’m glad she didn’t shoot you.”
Aja and Seabrook thoroughly cleaned the house, then went outside and scrubbed the dock. The bloody footprints came out fairly quickly, but the stain where the dead man had lain was deeply drenched in blood. No matter how much they scoured the planks it seemed like the bloodstains wouldn’t come out. They could still see traces of it after working at it for an hour. Eventually they gave up. Seabrook planned to spill fish blood from the bait tub over the spot to camouflage and obliterate any trace of human blood the next day.
They returned to the house. They locked the kitchen door and set a plank of wood on the door runner to jam the glass door in the living room shut. They tried to make themselves feel as safe as possible. It was 3:08 a.m.
They showered together. They soaped and cleaned each other but did not make love. Nothing could take their mind off what had happened. They lay in their bed with their dive knives, the bedroom door locked and the Hawaiian sling spears by their bedsides. The noisy air conditioner rattled though it was set on low. Aja got cold at night and used an extra blanket. She clumped it around her like a nest and cuddled next to Seabrook for his body warmth.
Time went slowly.
Seabrook could not sleep. He stared at the window most of the night and watched the sky outside. His eyes felt sleepy and scratchy.
As a couple, they were used to living with risk. Their work was extremely dangerous. Aja feared, and once had a nightmare, that Seabrook would be eaten by sharks. She knew that sharks were normally harmless, except in specific instances—like when a person was spearfishing or when there was bait in the water.
In her dream, Seabrook had been swimming with an adult lemon shark to revive the fish, when twin tiger sharks, attracted by bait on the long line, glided out of the blue when he wasn’t paying attention. The tiger sharks were big females, fifteen feet long, and stalked him from behind, sneaking closer and closer, rising to the surface where he swam. They bit down on his legs, violently tearing from side to side. The shark he was reviving turned on him too. He couldn’t fight off three sharks by himself. He died alone in the sea, in a cloud of his own blood, eaten alive.
Because Seabrook usually worked by himself at the long line, the nightmare seemed plausible, and it haunted her. Aja always grew nervous whenever he was gone longer than usual when tagging and releasing sharks.
For his part, Seabrook worried about Aja because the cone snails (Conus geographus) in her Indo-Pacific specimen tank might one day crawl onto the upper glass on the inside of the tank or hide in a place where Aja wouldn’t notice them in the sand. If she were absent-minded or careless for one small instant and inadvertently brushed against a cone snail while cleaning the tank, it could be fatal.
One sting from the harpoon-like barb would kill Aja almost immediately. Her Indo-Pacific tank contained snails whose venom was among the deadliest in the world. The toxicity was comparable to the venom of king cobras, Brazilian wandering spiders, or Middle East deathstalker scorpions. But in the case of the cone snail, there was no known antivenom to treat victims. Paralysis, agony, and death quickly followed a sting. Sometimes, when Seabrook was out working at sea and had a bad feeling, he would start to worry, and would call Aja on the walkie-talkie to check on her.
As real as the dangers that Seabrook and Aja lived with were, they had chosen their work with their eyes open and both knew how to minimize the risks. And the dangers seemed paltry when compared to the crazy violence of drug cartels.
Aja slept fitfully. Her breathing told him she was nearly awake.
Seabrook kept hearing the Earless Man’s warning: “Say nothing to nobody. You didn’t see me.” And, “She’ll kill you and everything you love.”
Who the hell was she?
Something else also kept him awake: the old woman’s eyes.
Now that he’d had a little time to think about it, he remembered seeing eyes flicker like that before. It was a decades-old memory but still sharp in his mind. In fourth grade one of his classmates, Rudy Defarge, became seriously ill and missed many weeks of school.
When he finally returned to school, Rudy told everyone that he had been diagnosed with a brain and nervous system disorder called dystonia and said that he’d been given medicine to take for it. Dystonia caused him to have erratic muscle spasms and made his eyes flicker. Looking back on it, Seabrook was surprised Rudy had been so candid and open about his medical condition. He actually seemed kind of proud of it and had talked about his disorder in a lot of detail for a fourth grader. But his symptoms got worse.
After missing more school and seeing different doctors, Rudy came back to school in the late spring. He had a new diagnosis to brag about: a rare form of multiple sclerosis. Despite medicine and treatment, his muscle spasms and flickering eyes still worsened. His eyes became downright scary because they changed even more—all traces of innocence and human warmth disappeared. Instead, they became malefic and hungry.
Seabrook remembered it well because he and Rudy had been placed in the same reading group and taken turns reading aloud a passage in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Whenever it was Seabrook’s turn to read, Rudy Defarge stared intensely at him the entire time. His eyes, a light brown color, had pupils dilated to an unnatural degree; and they trembled as if an earthquake or a furnace were rumbling inside him, the eyeballs constantly recalibrating—a fraction of a centimeter up, a fraction of a centimeter down, a fraction of a centimeter back up, or to the left, or to the right—both eyes in unison, again and again and again. The adjustments were small and rapid. It never stopped, not even in his sleep, Rudy said.
Then Rudy started to blurt out vile and nasty things in the middle of class: yelling obscenities and ordering their grandmotherly homeroom teacher to give him a blowjob. When she tried to send him to the principal’s office, he hissed something much worse, and she fainted. Her head hit the floor with a loud knock, and Rudy exploded with laughter.
He threatened to hurt children in first and second grade, and menaced them during recess, throwing rocks at them when teachers weren’t watching carefully enough. One little girl was nearly blinded by a rock that Rudy threw. That occurred right about the same time that he started walking with a strange spasmodic hitch in his stride—not quite a limp, not quite a stagger. Something in between. But it made your skin crawl to see him coming down the hall like that; it was even worse if he looked your way and you locked eyes with him. They shined with a weird animalistic glee, like he couldn’t wait to hurt you.
Students and a few teachers became terrified of him, and the complaints started. The parents of the little girl who was nearly blinded threatened to sue the school district. Things got so bad that Rudy’s parents finally disenrolled him from public school. They were going to homeschool him and seek psychiatric help. That was the last time anyone in the fourth grade ever saw him.
Things went completely off the rails for the Defarge family. Seabrook overheard his mother talking to another mom on Parents’ Day before spring break. The woman said that Rudy didn’t have a brain or nervous system disorder. Something else was happening to him. The doctors were still doing tests.
Then Rudy’s baby brother mysteriously died in his crib one night. According to the obituary in the papers, the cause of death was sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Two weeks after that, the newspapers reported that Rudy tragically drowned in the family swimming pool. Two deaths in one family, within one month, whipped the community gossip grapevine into overdrive.
Some older kids on the school bus talked trash about it to scare the younger kids. The story went that Rudy’s parents became convinced he wasn’t their son anymore, that he’d changed into something else. Something unholy. And they believed he’d sneaked into the nursery in the middle of the night and killed his baby brother.
So, one sunny afternoon, the story went, Rudy’s parents pushed him into the deep end of their own swimming pool; they watched their sick, disabled boy sink and drown. Then they claimed that his death was an accident.
Seabrook didn’t believe any of the older kids’ story—it had been exaggerated and embellished into a campfire monster tale—except for the look of Rudy’s face. The old woman’s eyes brought it all back.
Her eyes looked exactly like Rudy Defarge’s eyes.
Seabrook rolled over in bed.
Was it safe for them to stay in Bimini? Or should they take the next seaplane back to Miami?
He turned the questions over in his mind again and again, trying to get a read on things, but no answers came. A cold knot formed in his stomach. He wished the morning would come. Maybe the daylight would bring clarity, and maybe some solutions.