After a pause, Gustave said, “I… I suppose I will be. It’s just so hard to believe. But Wendy always was a bit foolhardy when diving. Where are her belongings?”
“I’ve packed them,” Marissa said, surprised and relieved that Gustave was taking the horrid news so well. She guessed he was relying on his practiced surgeon’s objectivity and that the reality would hit later when he was alone.
“It must have been a terrible shock for you,” Gustave said.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m managing,” Marissa said.
“Marissa, I appreciate your calling. If you could just ship her belongings to me I would be most grateful. I’ll contact the Augtralian authorities. I’d better go. Goodbye.”
The line clicked dead and Marissa slowly replaced the receiver in its cradle. Her heart ached with the same pain she knew Gustave was feeling.
Flopping back on the bed, Marissa covered her face with her hands and sobbed until she could no longer cry. Then, with her hands still covering her face, her sadness began to transform to irritation, then even to anger.
Instead of being pleased with how much in control Gustave had been, it began to bother her. When she replayed the conversation in her mind, she hated that Gustave had sounded so cold and detached, as if she had been giving him a report on one of his patients and not on his wife. It made her suddenly wonder if the problems spawned by the infertility treatments were such that Gustave was relieved to some extent by Wendy’s untimely death.
Rethinking Gustave’s conversation made Marissa do the same with Robert’s and with a similar result. The idea that Robert wouldn’t volunteer to come instantly to Australia, knowing what kind of trauma she’d experienced, was unforgivable. Taxes!
What an absurd excuse. After all that had happened, she would have hoped that he would make their marriage a priority.
Marissa got up from the bed and walked to the window. The ocean glistened in the late afternoon sunlight. It was hard to believe that Wendy had met such a brutal fate in so serene a milieu. She wondered what her own fate would have been had nausea and fatigue not forced her back to the boat. Maybe she’d be dead as well. Maybe that had been the idea: to get rid of them both.
Marissa’s throat went dry. She swallowed hard. She was thinking dangerous thoughts, maybe even crazy ones. Her mind went back to the vicious Chinese security guards at the Women’s Clinic. Could they possibly be related to the sinister Chinese aboard the Oz? Marissa wondered if there was any connection between the Women’s Clinic in the States and the FCA in Australia.
Marissa went out onto her balcony. She sank into the chaise lounge. That Wendy died for nothing hit her hard. How could she just let it go and return to Boston? Her thoughts drifted to the elusive Tristan Williams. Why would a trained pathologist make up the ridiculous data that could easily be proven false, all for the questionable benefit of publishing an article? It just didn’t fit.
Marissa tapped her fingers nervously against the arm of her chair. She thought again of those men tossing chum over the side.
If they were so innocent, why did they flee the instant she called out to them? She could assume Tristan Williams had committed professional hara-kiri on a whim. She could talk herself into believing that those two on the Oz had not realized what they were doing. But the whole weird thing was beginning to remind her of the way she felt in the early days of the Ebola outbreaks when she’d been with the CDC, Back then, Marissa had begun to suspect a sinister force at work long before her colleagues did.
Despite setbacks, she clung to her beliefs, ultimately proving the existence of a cabal even more diabolic than she had ever imagined. Now, as then, she was beginning to think it was time to go with her instincts.
Even if she didn’t have much more than a hunch that there was more to these events than met the eye, she had to dig deeper.
Impulsively she went back inside and called Robert back. She woke him a second time.