But there’s something in his demeanor, something in the set of his shoulders, that makes my blood freeze. Something bad is happening. Mark thinks something very bad is happening.
Thunk, thunk. Insistent now.Thunk, thunk.Mark steps toward the noise.Thunk thunk. He braces himself against the boat, arms spread, then he inhales sharply and leans over the side.
He doesn’t move now.Thunk thunk. He’s looking down at whatever it is, frozen.Thunk thunk. And then he shifts, and he ever so carefully lowers a hand overboard. It disappears from view.Thunk thu—
With a grunt Mark heaves a waterlogged object onto the deck between us. It lands with a wet suck on the floor. A few bits of soggy paper stick to it. We stand and stare at it. It’s a black canvas duffel bag just under a meter in length. It’s too big for a gym bag but too small for a holiday suitcase.
It’s clearly good quality but there don’t seem to be any labels, no writing. Mark bends to inspect it. No tag. No handy address label. He looks for the zip, hidden black on black, and finds it. The zip is padlocked to the fastening of the bag by a matte black combination lock. Huh.
Okay. Obviously valuable. It’s obviously not garbage, right? Mark glances up at me.
Should he try to open it?
I nod.
He tries to force the zipper, padlock and all. It won’t budge. He tries again.
He looks up. I shrug. I want to open it too but…
He tries the fabric around the zip. Pulls at it. It doesn’t give. He partially lifts the bag as he wrestles with it, the wet fabric smacking against the fiberglass deck as he struggles.
The bag has things in it. I can make out hard, angular shapes moving around inside as Mark tries to force a way in. He stops abruptly.
“Maybe we should wait,” Mark says. His voice is taut, concerned. “Whoever owns it definitely doesn’t want anyone getting into it. Right?”
I guess not. But the allure of finding out what’s inside is pretty fucking strong right now. He’s right, though. He’s definitely right. It’s not ours to open, is it?
“Can I?” I gesture toward it.
I just want to hold it, feel it. Maybe I’ll know what’s in it by weight, by shape. Like a Christmas present.
“Sure, go ahead.” He stands back, giving me room.
“It’s heavier than it looks,” he adds, just as I lift the handles. And it is. Deceptively heavy. I pick it up slowly and it hangs around my calves. Wet and weighted. It feels like…It feels like…
I drop it immediately and it hits the fiberglass with a familiarthunk. Mark stares at me. Shakes his head.
“It’s not.” He knows what I’m thinking.
“It’s not, Erin. They’d have eaten it. They’d have smelled it and eaten it. Especially the grays. It’s not,” he insists, but it’s the way he says it. I know he was thinking it too.
Of course he’s right, if it was a body the sharkswould have had it by now. It’s not organic; it’s just some things in a bag.
Probably just someone’s business accounts or something, judging by all the paper around. Maybe some dodgy bookkeeping. Just accounting, at the end of the day. I’m sure it’s really not that interesting. Right? Just some stuff in a bag.
In a padlocked bag, Erin. Floating in the middle of the South Pacific. Surrounded by ten meters of illegible papers.
“What should we do?” I ask. “Should we even do anything? Should we put it back in the water and just leave it?”
Mark looks at his watch. It’s getting late now; the sun will be setting in the next half hour or so and we’ve still got a forty-five-minute journey back. I do not want to be out in the middle of nowhere when it gets dark. Mark doesn’t either.
“We need to get going. I’ll note the coordinates and we’ll take the bag back with us. Hand it in or something. Okay, Erin? We let someone know about this mess. Whatever happened here.” He finds a pad and pencil in a locker under the seat. Jots down the location on the GPS.
I look out across the water at the papers, searching for some other clue to what this strange situation could be. But there’s just that familiar blue, all around. Nothing else bobbing in the water. Nothing drifting on the waves. Just paper and blue. I turn back to Mark.
“Yes, okay. We’ll hand it in at the hotel and they can sort it out.” I sit back down.
It’s none of our business really. Someone probably just dumped it.
