Chapter 1

It had been an irritating trip. Monday morning, and the lone road was clogged with weekenders heading north out of the Keys, to Miami and its bustle and business and further north. The rest of the week would be relatively clear until Friday afternoon, but this morning it was stop-and-go. She’d have to get used to that, but it was only two days a week and then only half the trip. At least there was plenty of parking. She took a deep breath to relax and headed into the motel lobby.

Morris was busy at the desk with checkouts. He waved her over. “Can’t talk now, it’s like this on Mondays,” he said brusquely. “Go on out, I’ll see you in a while. Jason’s there, introduce yourself.” He turned back to the impatient guest who was waiting for his credit card back.

She walked out through the sliding glass doors toward which he’d pointed. They opened, she found, onto a small boardwalk. Ahead she could see the lagoon, with a young-looking man hosing down the concrete apron.

The man—not much more than a boy, she thought as she drew nearer—turned and raised his head as she approached. “Sorry, ma’am, closed right now,” he said dismissively. “We’ll open back up at noon.” He started to turn away again.

“You’re Jason?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said tentatively.

“Margaret Russell,” she said. “Maggie.” She offered a hand. He simply stared. “Your new marine biologist,” she explained.

“Oh,” he said flatly. He looked at her outstretched hand long enough to border on open rudeness, but as she was about to withdraw it he finally reached out to take it in the briefest of grasps. “Gladdameetyou,” he muttered, with no more expression on his face than was in his voice. She stared at him; what was this? He turned back away to resume his washing, but she stopped him.

“Where’s—?” she began.

“Toby? He’s out there.” The boy gestured vaguely toward the lagoon. “He’s already had breakfast. He’ll be back later on. Usually comes back by noon, anyhow, or if he doesn’t I call him so we can do the first show. You’ll see him then.” He turned away again, clearly dismissing her.

She waited for a while, but he showed no signs of even acknowledging her presence much less an interest in talking. She shook her head. Teenagers! she thought. He couldn’t be much more. She hadn’t held out a lot of hope of real professionalism, but a surly kid was more than she’d bargained for. She was going to have to establish their working relationship quickly.

“Jason, please take me to my office,” she said firmly. “Morris is busy now, he said you’d show me around.” He hadn’t quite said that, but invoking the authority with which the boy was familiar had to help.

For a minute it appeared that he was going to ignore her, but then he dropped the hose—a lot too casually, she thought, as she sidestepped quickly to avoid the spray, and then had to sidestep again as it whipped around. He took his time reaching the outlet valve, receiving, she noticed, a fairly thorough drenching himself in the process, and rotated it off.

“Get wet here,” he muttered—seemingly to the air, he still wouldn’t look at her. “Follow me, office is there.” He pointed toward the endmost of a set of cabanas lining the apron.

The “office,” when they reached it and he shoved the door open, proved as barren as she’d feared. A cheap desk, an equally cheap (and fairly obviously uncomfortable) wooden chair, an electrical outlet that had clearly been recently installed, no more. The floor w was the same unadorned concrete as the apron itself, but had apparently gone without the cleansing spray of Jason’s hosing or anything like a sweeping; there was a fairly thick veneer of the marl that passed for dirt here, and cobwebs were prominent in the corners where it met the cinderblock wall

“That’s it, okay?” the boy said. “Got to get back to work.” He turned to leave.

She’d had enough; this would have to stop. “Jason!” she snapped. He stopped. “Are you always this rude, or do I rate special treatment?”

He turned back, and for the first time looked directly at her. It was an insolent stare; his eyes started at her face and gradually traversed downward to her feet and then back up. There was still no expression on his face.

“You’re from Flagler, right?” he said at last, naming the government research facility twenty-five miles south across Seven-Mile Bridge.

“That’s where I was working, yes,” she said, returning his level gaze.

There was another pause. Then, abruptly: “Look, we need to get a couple of things straight.”

“It appears that we do,” she responded flatly.

“I know how you work at Flagler,” he said with now-overt hostility. “The way you work with them. What you do to them.” He gestured sharply toward the lagoon.

“And what’s that?” she asked.

“You keep food away from them when they don’t do what you want. You starve them until they do like you tell them. There’s some kind of fancy name for it—”

“‘Positive reinforcement,’” she murmured.

“Whatever,” he said. “You hurt them, too. You whip them into submission, into doing just what you want them to do when you want them to do it. You—”

“Jason,” she interrupted loudly, cutting him off in the middle of what was obviously some kind of prepared speech. But instead of ending the tirade she had merely diverted it.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “that doesn’t go here, OK? None of it, not while I’m here, and I think I’m going to be here a while, Morris can’t get anybody else for what he’s paying me and he’s cheap. Toby eats when he’s hungry, OK? Not because he ‘earned it,’ nobody has to earn food. He does what he does because he wants to, not because I make him or anybody else makes him. And nobody hurts him. Nobody!”

“Jason,” she started again. But he wasn’t done.

“Morris said you’re here to take care of him, take care of his health, and that’s all right. He said you also want to study him, do your research, and I guess that’s all right, too, as long as you don’t hurt him. But I train him. Me. He responds to me, we’re friends, and all you’ll do is beat him down and that’ll finish the shows and there won’t be any good for Morris if the shows are done, and—”

“Jason!” she barked in her most commanding tone. “Shut up a moment.”

He looked at her in surprise, but with the same dislike hovering around the corners of his eyes.

“Do you know what Morris is paying me?” she asked obliquely. He didn’t respond. “A hundred bucks a week. Oh, I also get meals, all of them if I want. But that’s it. Not even a room, I pay for my own roof—and my car, and my clothes, and my medical care, and anything else I want or need.”

“Can’t live on that,” he muttered.

“No, I can’t,” she agreed. “I’m going on savings. Look, I have a doctorate in marine biology. Do you have any idea what that brings on the open market? What it brought me at Flagler?”

“No,” he said grudgingly.

“Not your business, either. But more. A lot more. So why am I here?”

“Fucked up?” he guessed. “Fired?”

“Not even. I didn’t fuck up, I wasn’t fired, in fact I had some commendations and I was in line for more. Care to try again?”

For the first time the hostility seemed to abate. Neither of them spoke for a moment, but she outwaited him. “So?” he said, but it was now clearly bluster.

“You tell me,” she challenged.

He looked away again, but this time in discomfort. “You didn’t like their way either,” he murmured.

“Bing-fucking-go,” she said, throwing in the obscenity to get his attention. There was another pause. “I spent eight years in school studying to be a marine biologist. Studying what everybody’d done before me so I could start my own research, begin to learn about these wonderful creatures. Do you know dolphins have bigger brains than we do? Not that that’s necessarily important, I mean Balzac’s brain was one of the smallest ever recorded, and some of the biggest human brains are in idiots. But they do, dolphins do, bigger than ours.”

“Okay.” The hostility was on full hold now, replaced with genuine interest.

“And they show it; they’re smart,” she went on. “You tell me Toby does the things he does because he wants to, not because you make him, and that means intelligence. Not just intelligence, you say you’re friends, and Toby wants to please his friend. Just like you want to please him, right?”

“Right!”

“So that means he’s smart enough to know what you want and cooperative enough to do it for you, follow me?”

“Sure.”

“Q.E.D., I don’t want to treat them like training chimpanzees, or dogs, or whatever. Any more than you do, smartass. It’s why I left Flagler for this bed of roses.”

“Huh.”

“The point is, I don’t need a teenage kid thinking he knows enough to tell me how I should do my work.”