The Don Saved Me From the Ice, Then Buried Me in the Sea novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Valve

In the stranger's cliff house she learns her tank was rigged and why: her father's will. Her funeral wreath is already on the dock.

The diver took me to a house cut into the cliff above the bay.

I shook the whole way up the stone steps, and he did not ask me to stop.

He put me in a chair by a stove, wrapped me in two blankets, and set a mug of hot sweet tea in my hands.

"Drink," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Santo Riva. I run dive boats out of this bay."

"You were down there at midnight with bolt cutters."

"I dive that statue most nights." He shrugged. "I carry cutters because the fishermen lose their nets on it."

It was a bad answer, and we both knew it.

I was too cold to argue.

"Why did you come to the cage?"

"I saw a woman go in with a man who came out alone."

He took the tank I had worn off the table behind him and set it in front of me.

"You tell me what's wrong with this."

I was a diver before I was anything else.

My father put me in the water when I was six, and I could strip a regulator blind by sixteen.

I turned the tank in my hands and checked the gauge, the valve, and the first stage.

The first stage was wrong.

A pinhole, no wider than a needle, had been drilled into the seal.

It would hold pressure on the boat deck and in shallow water.

At seventeen meters it would bleed air out a little faster every minute.

I put it down very carefully.

"Somebody did this on purpose."

"Somebody did," Santo said.

"The gauge said a third left in the cage. It was full when I got in the boat. I checked it myself."

"Who handled your tank after that?"

I did not want to answer.

Dario had checked it for me on the deck.

He had kissed my forehead and said, you worry too much, amore, and he had screwed the regulator on himself.

"It was a bet," I said. "They said it was a bet."

"People do not drill a tank for a bet."

I stared at the little hole.

For six years I had told myself he was kind to me and cruel to everyone else.

That was never true, and the tank in my lap said so.

"Why would he kill me? I was marrying him. I was having his child."

My own voice sounded far away.

Santo went still.

"You are pregnant."

"Nine weeks. I told him this morning."

He looked at the stove for a moment.

"Then you have two reasons to stay alive, and he has one reason to need you dead."

"Say it plainly."

"Who gets your father's shipping company if you die?"

My father had a stroke in March.

He lay in a private clinic in Genoa and could move his eyes and his left hand, and nothing else.

His lawyer had read me the will last month, in the hospital corridor.

Everything to me, and to any child of mine.

If I died with no child, everything went to my sister.

"Ilaria," I said.

"And Ilaria is marrying Dario tomorrow."

I laughed.

It came out wrong, high and thin, and I pressed my hand over my mouth.

Santo waited until I had finished.

"The pirates, the ketchup, the bet, the kneeling," he said. "Do you know why they did all that, if the plan was only a bad tank?"

I did know.

"For the video," I whispered.

"Your sister wanted it. A girl who drowns mid-prank looks careless and silly. A girl who drowns after being humiliated on video is a woman who threw herself into the sea."

My stomach turned over.

"They were building a reason for me to do it myself."

"Yes."

I stood up.

The blankets fell off, and I wobbled and caught the edge of the table.

"I'm going to the police."

"With what? A drilled tank you have been holding for ten minutes, and the word of a dead woman?"

"I'm not dead."

"You are on the radio. You are on the coast guard log. At sunrise you will be on the front page of every paper in Liguria."

"I'll call my father's lawyer."

"He is paid by the Castellani family. So is the harbor master, and so is half the town."

"Then I'll go to the chapel and tell the whole wedding."

"And they will say you are a hysterical girl who survived a prank and a nervous breakdown."

"Then what do you want me to do?" I shouted.

Santo took the mug from my hands and refilled it.

"Rule one. You are dead until I say you are not."

"No phone, no calls, no ring on your finger, and no walking back into that house."

"And if I don't?"

"Then next time he will use a better tank."

I took the mug.

My hands were still shaking, and I held it tight.

"Rule one," I said. "I want a rule two."

"What is it?"

"When I stop being dead, I do it in front of everyone."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

It was not quite a smile.

"Agreed."

He went to the window and pulled the curtain back.

The sun was coming up over the bay, and far below, a small boat was laying a ring of white flowers on the water.

A card was pinned to it, and I could read it from here.

For our beloved Viola.

Beyond the boat, up on the headland, the chapel bells began to ring.

"The wedding is at noon," Santo said.

"Do you want to see it?"

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