Page 30 of No One Aboard
“Right...”
Francis Cameron felt the draw of the sea. Hell, Tia probably inherited her fascination from him.Do you feel the power?his voice echoed in her head.
She did.
Tia pictured her father, strewn out on his king’s mattress belowdecks. She wondered if he slept well, if five-hundred-thread-count sheets and bamboo viscose pajamas were enough to get through the night or if nightmares woke him up too.
Nightmares about monsters in the hallway.
Nightmares about hands clamping her shoulder.
Nightmares about what he feared his children wouldn’t—orwould—become.
123 News
Millionaire Ghost Ship Found in Bermuda Triangle
Miriam H. Shulman
It has been three days sinceThe Old Eileenwas discovered empty, and officials’ only lead regarding the whereabouts of the seven people once onboard is an unidentified body reportedly recovered earlier this morning. No official statement regarding the remains has been made, and authorities have likely not confirmed whether or not the body is related to the ghost ship. We do know the empty boat was found by a local fisherman within the bounds of the Bermuda Triangle, an infamous area of ocean that has been the site of twenty plane crashes, fifty shipwrecks, and hundreds of disappearances in the last two centuries.
Also known as the Devil’s Triangle, Gateway to Hell, or Limbo of the Lost, the Bermuda Triangle has confounded the scientific and public community since the days of Christopher Columbus. Theories range from rogue waves and wormholes to methane bubbles and electromagnetism from a ninth-millennium BCE comet.
But in the case of the Cameron family, perhaps it is more important to ask what the people onThe Old Eileenwere doing near the Bermuda Triangle in the first place. According to friends of the Camerons as well as first mate Mary Jane Tuckett’s great-niece, the trip was supposed to end at Palm Beach Marina, near one of the Camerons’ homes.
The fisherman who found the ship recorded it at over one hundred and eighty nautical miles southeast of the family’s destination. Even accounting for leeward drift, the sailing yacht could only have been inside the Bermuda Triangle if something on the family’s trip caused them to deviate from their route.
“It’s unnerving,” Coast Guard Captain James Rayes told ABC regarding the investigation. “You don’t get that far off course, not with four experienced sailors onboard—you just don’t. Either there was an incompetent navigator, a reason to panic, or someone had something to hide.”
Chapter 14
Rylan Cameron
Call sign: Minnow
Day 3 at Sea
Rylan knocked on his mother’s bathroom door. It was the morning of their first dive. Everyone, including Francis and MJ, were up on deck preparing to dock at Icara Key. But he couldn’t bring himself to join them. He was excited. At least, he had been looking forward to diving for weeks. Only now, the thought of being below water his father and the woman he’d just told everything to seemed more claustrophobic than freeing.
Lila opened the door, wrapped in a buttermilk kimono, its long bell sleeves lined with marabou trim. She smiled, wrinkleless, and pulled her son into the bathroom.
“Sit, my love. Have you put your sunscreen on?”
Rylan let her guide him to a seat on the lip of the bathtub. “Not yet.” He watched her deposit a dollop of 50 SPF foundation onto her palm. She rubbed it into his face, starting with the crescent of acne along his jaw. Rylan shut his eyes. His mother’s hands moved along his cheeks to his temples until his whole face felt smoothed and cold.
“Won’t you come with us?” He knew the answer, but he wanted to ask just in case.
“Simply isn’t for me, my sweet.” Lila sat beside him and used her index finger to redefine Rylan’s curls.
“I know.”
Lila had only gone down with them once, the first time, when the twins had their open water certification dive with MJ eight years ago. Rylan had been astonished by his mother, always so graceful and empyrean, floundering underwater like a drowning kitten. Alejandro eventually fished her out, and from then on the extent of Lila’s relationship with the sea was to sunbathe beside it. Rylan had been so young at the time that the whole thing seemed silly. The water was safe to him. But all these years later, he wondered if his mother had been having a panic attack. He wondered if his anxiety and the stomach-flipping sensation that he was always out of his depth came from her.
“I just... don’t feel so good about it anymore.”
Rylan let himself lean slightly into Lila. She took his face in her hands and ushered him down until his head lay in a cloud of marabou trim in her lap, careful not to get the sunscreen from his face on her robe. Her fingernails ran along his scalp. She smelled like cherries. And roses, maybe. He felt cocooned by her robe, her hands, the room. Steam from the bath she must have just taken misted the mirrors and made the whole space warm and sleepy.
“You’ve been on edge this week,” Lila said. “Your sister has that effect on people.”
