“I have no idea.”
“Your sister,” he said slowly, deliberately, “was leaning on the propeller, trying to see inside the plane. That’s what pulled the plane under. That’s why the pilot is dead.”
Daria was speechless.
“But when I turned to look at her, she was just treading water. I think she was trying to buoy the plane up.”
“After I yelled at her.”
“Yes,” Daria admitted. Horrified, the weight of his words sank in.
“I
can’t believe it,” she said. Surely Shelly would have known she was making matters worse by leaning on the propeller.
“Believe it,” Pete said.
“I was this close” -he held his thumb and forefinger apart by half an inch “—to freeing that woman—that girl —when the plane went under. Shelly has no common sense.”
“Oh, my God, this is horrible.” Daria thought of the report she would have to write on the accident and the debriefing that would occur the following day. What could she say happened? It would destroy Shelly to know her role in the pilot’s death.
Pete seemed to soften at seeing Daria’s distress. He put his arm around her.
“Look,” he said, his gaze toward the sea once again, his jaw tight.
“No one else knows what happened out there. Just you and me. Shelly doesn’t have a clue what she did. I doubt Andy realized what was going on, and there’s a good chance the plane would have gone down, anyway,” he conceded with a shrug.
“And maybe the pilot would have died no matter what we did. I think we should just keep this to ourselves.”
“I have to write a report,” Daria protested. “Then write it just as you would have without my input,” Pete said.
“Pretend I didn’t tell you anything.”
“It would kill Shelly if she…”
“I know,” Pete said.
“That’s why… you should just forget about what I said.”
She nodded woodenly. She had little choice, and what difference would it make now? The pilot was gone. Nothing would bring her back.
She spotted Shelly wandering among the thinning crowd, walked over to her and put an arm around her shivering shoulders.
“Come on, hon,” she said.
“My car’s at the cottage where I was working. I’ll drive you home after I write my report.”
They walked in silence to her car. Daria spotted Pete’s truck a few cottages down the street and wondered how long he would stay at the scene. Wrapped in the blanket, she sat in the driver’s seat and pulled the notebook containing her field-note forms from the back seat. She propped the notebook against her knees and started writing. The plane simply began sinking and the rescuers had been helpless to do anything about it, she wrote. She would have to recount the same story in her verbal debriefing the following day. This was the first time she had ever lied in the course of her job as an EMT, and she wondered if anything could ever ease the sick, guilty feeling in her gut.
When she finished the report and slipped it inside the notebook, she looked down the street to see that Pete’s truck was gone. He would have had to walk right past her car to get to it, and he had not even bothered to say goodbye. She was worried about him, as worried as she was about herself.
Neither she nor Shelly said a word on the drive home. The only sound inside the car was that of Shelly’s teeth chattering.
That night, after she and Shelly had eaten a quiet dinner in the kitchen of the Sea Shanty and fallen, exhausted, into bed, Pete called. Daria pulled the phone from her nightstand onto her pillow.
“How are you doing?” Pete asked.
“Not so great,” Daria said. Everything seemed wrong. She’d lied on a report. Shelly had unknowingly made a terrible mistake, a young woman had died a horrible death before her eyes. She stared at the darkened ceiling, the phone against her ear.
“I know,” Pete said.
“That was one ugly scene.”
“Mmm.”
She heard Pete draw in a breath.
“I think we need to talk about Shelly,” he said.
She stiffened. This would not be their first discussion about Shelly, but this time she knew he had the upper hand.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
