He sat up. “Hear that? It’s a chopper!”
“How can you tell from so far off?”
The boy raised one arm to block out the sun. “They’re headin’ our way.”
Eugenie switched off the camera. Honey’s kid was right-it sounded like a helicopter, not a plane. She remembered the man called Lester bragging of secret arrangements to leave the island; possibly she’d underestimated him. Although Gillian’s young Seminole had promised to provide a boat and a map for returning to the mainland, air travel was much more appealing to Genie.
“I need to ask you somethin’ important,” she said to Fry. “Say I caught a ride outta here-would you be all right until your old man shows up?”
With a whoosh the helicopter passed over the treetops.
“Coast Guard. They’re circling.” Fry craned for a better view. “You get going. I’ll be okay,” he said.
Genie helped the boy to his feet. “Or how about you and me leave together? They’ll send somebody back to find your folks, for sure.”
“No, ma’am, you go.”
Hurriedly she packed the video gear. “Promise you’ll wait right here for your dad? Don’t be a typical dumbass male and get yourself lost in the woods.”
“Promise.”
“Hey, I know you’re quite the jock. I saw all those track trophies at your mom’s place.”
Fry said, “I’m not goin’ anywhere. I feel like crap.”
Genie shielded her eyes and pivoted on one heel, following the hum of the chopper. “How they gonna land with all these damn trees?”
“They’re not. You’ve gotta get in the creek or they won’t see you.” Fry pointed. “Try that way-the kayaks are stashed in the mangroves. Dad and I found ’em last night.”
She squeezed the boy and thumped the side of his helmet. “If you were ten years older, bucko, you’d be in serious trouble.”
Fry squirmed and said, “Better hurry.”
Eugenie Fonda snatched up the camera case and took off. She laughed when she heard him call out: “Wait! Are you sure you don’t want your pearl?”
Priceless, she thought. One in a million.
Shortly before sunrise, the U.S. Coast Guard station in Fort Myers Beach had received a call from Fort Worth, Texas. A woman who gave her name as Lily Shreave reported that a cousin named Dealey had contacted her by cellular phone to say he was stranded without provisions on an unknown island near the town of Everglades City. The woman said her cousin was a well-known nature photographer working on a documentary about orphaned pelicans. She said he suffered from a rare condition known as aphenphosmphobia, of which the petty officer taking the report had never heard and didn’t even attempt to spell. Ms. Shreave went on to say that her cousin was in dire need of his anti-aphenphosmphobia medication, which he’d forgotten on the front seat of a rental car parked at his motel.
When the petty officer inquired how Mr. Dealey had come to be marooned, his cousin said he’d blacked out in a small boat while photographing a rookery. She said the battery in her cousin’s phone had gone dead during his call, so she had no other information to help pinpoint the location. She provided a thorough description of the missing man-fifty-seven years old, brown eyes, balding, five ten, 215 pounds. Ms. Shreave also said he was wearing a slate-gray Brooks Brothers suit. When the Coast Guard officer remarked that such attire seemed strange for a field trip to the Ten Thousand Islands, Ms. Shreave explained that her cousin, like many artistic types, was an eccentric.
At 0700 hours, an HH60 Jayhawk helicopter carrying a search-and-rescue crew lifted off and headed south along the coast, passing directly over Naples, Marco Island and then Cape Romano Shoals. The chopper angled slightly toward the mainland and dropped altitude before looping around the fishing village of Chokoloskee. The pilot then banked westward to place the rising sun behind the spotters who would be searching the green tapestry of mangroves and hammocks for Mr. Dealey. It was a limpid morning, and visibility was superb.
Lily Shreave was rolling up her yoga mat when a Coast Guard ensign called with good news. Her “cousin” had been pulled alive from a creek near an uninhabited island called Dismal Key, a few nautical miles outside the boundary of Everglades National Park. Also rescued were two women, who gave their names as Gillian St. Croix and Jean Leigh Hill and stated their respective occupations as a TV weather personality and a freelance videographer.
Ms. Shreave said she had no idea who they were.
Twenty-two
As soon as Boyd Shreave heard the helicopter, he began scrambling up the old poinciana. Without Honey’s assistance he couldn’t reach the top, but he got high enough to consider it a lifetime achievement.
As a boy, Shreave had avoided tree play, impaired as he was by flabby musculature and a loathing for exertion. Now, wedged snugly into a crook of three branches, he felt like he belonged in an episode of Survivor, his favorite TV reality show. Every season a crop of youthful competitors was deposited on some remote tropical location and put through a delightfully pointless series of physical challenges resulting in the elimination of the weak and unreliable. While the program usually featured one or two contestants who were as desultory and unathletic as Shreave himself, he never rooted for them. It was the sunburned babes in their frayed cutoffs and ill-fitting halters whom he avidly tuned in to watch.
From the tree, Shreave flagged his arms and hollered for help. The crew of the hovering helicopter never glanced his way, and Shreave realized that he needed to go higher. However, he was intimidated by the prospect of scaling to a more visible position above the canopy-the breezy conditions, the slipperiness of the branches and his own lack of agility argued for caution.
From a pocket of his windbreaker he extracted what he falsely believed to be a portable marine radio, which along with two granola bars he’d pilfered from Honey’s belongings after she was snatched by the club-handed lunatic. Shreave started pressing buttons on the compact gadget and barking, “Mayday! Mayday!”
There was no response from the Coast Guard pilot or any other human, and for good reason. Except for its LED screen, the instrument in Shreave’s possession was electronically dissimilar to a radio in all significant respects. Most crucial was the absence of either an audio receiver or a transmitter.
“SOS! SOS!” he persisted. “Help!”
The device was in fact a mobile GPS unit, as technologically impenetrable to Shreave as the Taser gun he’d found beneath Honey’s bed. Commonly carried by boaters, campers and hunters, a GPS enables users to precisely track and then retrace their movements anywhere on the planet. Satellites record intermediate points in longitude and latitude in the instrument’s memory, which displays the information in a mapping format so elementary that even a drooling moron can read it.
Not Boyd Shreave. The singular result of his frantic button pushing was to engage the satellite signal and successfully identify his location as approximately 81°33' west of the prime meridian and 25°53' north of the equator. However, the flashing numerals were a meaningless jumble to Shreave.
“Mayday! SOS! Nine one one!” he screamed at the mute GPS as he watched the orange-and-white helicopter repositioning above the creek. From his bushy perch, Shreave couldn’t see what the Coast Guard spotters saw, so he was unable to appreciate their gallantry and resourcefulness. A routine search mission for an ailing middle-aged photographer had been complicated by the unexpected appearance of not one but two extremely attractive female evacuees.
The first woman had dived nearly naked into the chilly water to assist the wayward photographer as he clung to a small overturned vessel. Minutes later the second woman had emerged in a yellow kayak from the mangroves, waving what appeared to be a festively colored undergarment at the chopper. Swiftly the crew members took action to expand the retrieval operation, proceeding with an unbreakable focus and esprit de corps that reduced to zero the chances of them noticing a lone pale figure halfway up a distant tree and obscured by heavy foliage.