CLICKS - The Dolphin Prophecy

CHAPTER 7

“Gonna be a little hard to call this a coincidence now,” Mica said, pacing up and down so fast the ancient boards creaked louder than the water.

Only a week later, Darwen had had an accident like Shay’s. He was in a coma too.

The last bits of burnished red faded over the bay, bringing in all the sounds of night on the water. I sat with my legs dangling off the dock, steeling myself against the slight chill in the air that was so unusual for this time of year, but seemed so appropriate given the mood of everyone around. Mica had built a fire in the fire bowl on the deck for the two of us, and the snap and crackle sounded slow and lazy, like it was missing energy. I felt the same way.

Cool winds blew the reeds on the river dunes, whistling and whooshing, making them sound alive. Off in the distance, I heard the calls of the dolphins. They sounded sad tonight, but maybe that was just me projecting my feelings onto them. I desperately wanted to go for a swim to clear my head, and with my stitches finally out I’d finally been given the all-clear to get wet, but the beach was closed for the day.

I chimed in, “The Guard will have to get more involved now that Darwen…” But I stopped, because I was feeding Mica’s anger, which upset me even more. I couldn’t take on his feelings just then. I had far too many of my own to process. Luckily, he took the hint and went inside the house, taking his mad with him. Yesterday, they’d finally found the body of the boy who went missing at the Ocean Swim. He had turned up in the middle of the main beach along with ten dead dolphins.

We hadn’t had an accidental death from drowning on Pinhold in over twenty years. It was only the beginning of July and we’d already had two. It called our commitment, and our abilities, into question. While the boys’ deaths were labeled accidents, they’d happened during competition. So there was talk from the state about changing Surf Carnival regulations, which may have made sense but offended everybody here.

What no one wondered, at least out loud, was if Shay’s coma was somehow related to the death of the boys. Since she was technically still alive, her case hadn’t really been studied by anyone but local doctors. Mica seemed convinced that there was a link, which Doc knew, and that he was hiding something.

I was sure he was wrong, until today, when Darwen had nearly drowned as well. Now he was in the hospital bed next to Shay and it seemed impossible to think all these events were completely random, considering it all happened in one ocean, in our small part of the world. I’d been in the office getting my stitches out when word had come in. I’d asked, casually, if it was the same thing that had happened to Shay, and Doc had dismissed the notion so fast I wondered if he’d even heard me. So, I repeated it again and realized, he was deliberately ignoring me.

According to the onlookers who had notified the The Guard, Darwen had disappeared from the surface and hadn’t come back up again. Like Shay, he went down without the usual physiological signs of drowning. He simply disappeared below the surface of the ocean.

Because it was dusk, no one had noticed, immediately. In fact, the Guard had had a very difficult time locating him in the ocean. They had searched for at least a half hour before his location was identified by a pod of dolphins, keening sadly, like they had lost one of their own.

While they weren’t using words, I knew that they were talking out their pain. I so badly wanted to join them in the water, so I could do the same. I felt a yearning to see the white dolphin from the other night. After my rescue, she felt special to me, and I’d been more relieved than was right when her body was not one of those found lifeless on the beach. Feeling connected to a specific dolphin wasn’t unheard of on Pinhold—that’s how it used to be when there were more dolphins than people.