The news spread fast. It had started at the Coast Guard station at Tampa, I would learn later, and beamed its way down the Florida shoreline, island to island, marina to marina, just as fast as VHF radios and cell phones could spread the news.
Janet Mueller, our Janet, was missing. The news hit me hard. Same with the entire marina community. She was one of us; a favorite member of the fun and quirky saltwater family that, on the islands of Sanibel and Captiva, is made up of fishing guides and liveaboards, waiters and waitresses, bartenders, tackle store and marina employees, and anyone else who makes a living on or around the Gulf of Mexico and its mangrove bays.
She was the quiet girl with glasses, the sisterly type, always there when you needed her, but never out front in any showy way. Janet was the one with the mousy hair and heavy hips, but a cute face; the one who liked to laugh and socialize, but who never displayed much self-confidence. If you were a man, take one look at her, and you had an inexplicable urge to protect her, just as women, on first meeting, knew they could trust and confide in her without even having to think about it much.
Janet arrived at the marina a few years back in pretty bad emotional shape. She’d been a schoolteacher in some small Ohio town. She’d had a husband who adored her, and the two of them worked hard at remodeling their house for the baby they were expecting. Janet was solid, happy, with her future securely mapped and under way. Or so she thought.
It happens very fast, sometimes, and almost always to people who don’t deserve it and who never, never expect it. Her solid world began to wobble out of control, and then it disintegrated. One snowy night, Janet lost her husband in a car accident. Then she lost their baby to a miscarriage.
After a year or so of psychological counseling, she sought refuge and change by moving to Florida. She showed up at the marina one day in a little blue houseboat. Knew nothing about the water, nothing about boats, but Janet was smart enough to realize that she needed to reinvent her own life or slip slowly, inexorably off the edge of sanity.
Ours is a small and selective community, and we appreciate raving individualists. We like small, brave people who find small, brave ways to endure and achieve. We welcomed Janet as one of us; took her under the communal wing, and she soon was one of us.
She started dating Jeth, fishing guide and handyman, then moved her houseboat up to Jensen’s Marina on Captiva after a spat. But her relationship with Dinkin’s Bay Marina continued. She’d stop by several times a week. She never missed the marina’s traditional Friday party, and she was one of the few people I trusted to look after my lab and fish tanks when I was away.
Janet had found a way to find her way. Better than most and with a great deal of humor and grace, she’d done credit to the mandate of our species. She had battled back and discovered a way to survive.
Which was why it seemed so mind-boggling that she was now missing, her boat overdue. So damn tragic and unfair. We all expect life to deal us a few bad cards, but no one person is supposed to be dealt all bad cards. Especially not someone as decent and kind-spirited as Janet Mueller, the woman who’d come to Florida to reconstruct her soul and her future.
As Jeth stood there on the dock, with Tomlinson and then Ransom, too, behind me, I told him, “Calm down, Jeth. It’s going to be okay. Let’s meet down at the bait tanks and get things organized. You go tell Mack and the others.”
He was breathing heavily. Not because he’d been running, but because of the panic he was in. Jeth is a big, good-looking guy with the dense muscularity and loyal face of a high school linebacker. The expression on his face was heartbreaking. The love affair between him and Janet had had its share of setbacks. But they loved each other and would almost certainly end up together. No one at the marina doubted that.
For the last couple of weeks, Jeth and Janet had been suffering through an off-again cycle, and now the man appeared to be near tears. “We’ve got to get going, Doc! We’ve got to get out there and find her!” He pounded a big fist hard against his own thigh. “Christ!” he said miserably, “I can’t believe I let her go!”
I walked over to him, put my hand on his shoulder, and told him, “She’ll be okay. We’ll find her. I promise.”
I saw a small surge of relief come into his face. If I were that confident, so certain she would be found, then there was hope.
The first thing I did was send Tomlinson and Ransom over to the docks to meet with the others so they could start formulating a plan. With winds blowing fifteen to twenty knots, and seas four to six feet offshore, our small boats wouldn’t be able to make the thirty-mile trip to Marco Island via water. Too dangerous, too exhausting. We’d have to trailer our skiffs south and hope that a couple of the liveaboards would volunteer to run down in their much bigger vessels and let us use them as mother ships.
That was assuming, of course, that Janet and her party weren’t found before we got started. Which is why the second thing I did was go to the telephone and call my friend Dalton Dorsey who’s a lieutenant commander at Coast Guard Group, St. Petersburg.
Group St. Pete oversees five small-boat Coast Guard stations and is responsible for patrolling several hundred miles of coastline, from Tallahassee to the Everglades and beyond. It’s a massive area, but the Coasties, as they are called, do an extraordinarily good job. What most people don’t know is that the Coast Guard is under the control of the U.S. Department of Transportation, not the Department of Defense, but its men and women are as well trained, as professional, and often as heroic as any military specialty group.
Which is why, when Jeth first told me that Janet was in a boat reported overdue, I wasn’t overly concerned. If Janet was somewhere out there in a broken-down vessel, it wouldn’t take long for the Coasties to find her.
Or so I believed at the time.
I got lucky. Caught Dalton on his cell phone outside the old St. Pete Coast Guard Administration and Operations Building. It’s a whitewashed, two-story fortress, built back in the 1920s, overlooking Bayboro Harbor and Tampa Bay, just a couple of miles from the Sunshine Skyway. He was there on a Saturday, he said, because he’d scheduled a special inspection, but now he was in the parking lot, headed for his pickup truck and the golf course at McDill Airbase.
When I told him why I’d called, he said, “Our group had three boats reported overdue yesterday, and I don’t remember the specifics of all of ’em, so let me go upstairs to my office and I’ll check the incident report.”
We talked about baseball, then a mutual friend of ours, Tony Johnson, who’s a Florida county court judge but still works in naval intelligence as a reserve officer. Then I heard a rustling of paper, and Dalton said, “Okay, here’s a copy. Everything you want to know. Missing small boat. The call came in at nine-ten to our Fort Myers Beach station. A woman named Sherry Meyer, a friend of the guy who owns the boat, Michael Sanford. She’s the one who called. Are you friends with all these people, Doc?”
“No, just Janet Mueller. I’ve never met the others.”
“Well… she’s listed as being aboard. According to Meyer, anyway… only she said the name was spelled M-i-l-l-e-r, which I’ll change right now. Her, Sanford, a woman named Grace Walker, and another one named Amelia Gardner. Four in all.”
I said, “And you said there are two other boats reported missing? Three in one day, that’s a pretty weird coincidence, isn’t it, Dalt?”
“Not missing, just reported overdue. The other two boats, they’ve been accounted for already. There’s a standard way we handle these things-our five stations do about two thousand SAR missions a year, so we’ve got it down to a science almost.”
SAR-search and rescue. The uniformed branches love acronyms. A language that outsiders can’t understand empowers and insulates.
He said, “The watch officers have formatted check-off sheets. When someone calls in an overdue vessel, there’re standard questions and we check the little boxes off the list one by one. Where’d the vessel leave from? Where’d they park their car? What kind of car? Who was aboard? That sort of thing.
“Meyer said the boat we’re talking about, the Seminole Wind, left from Marco Island Marina early yesterday morning and that her friends were due back at sunset because they were all supposed to go out to dinner that night at the Marco Island Inn. Ms. Meyer said-I’m reading from the incident sheet-‘Ms. Meyer said her friends had gone offshore to dive a wreck that’s called the California. ’ Are you familiar with that wreck, Doc?”
I told him, “Yeah, I’ve dived it. Baja California, that’s the actual name. It’s not a simple dive-the thing’s in, what, a hundred-ten, a hundred-twenty feet of water, and the visibility’s usually not great. I don’t know how experienced the other three are, but my friend Janet has no business making a dive like that. She just took up the sport. Did her first open-water dive a month ago at Pennekamp off Key Largo with a guy we both know, John Martinez. So she’s a novice; the Baja California is way out of her league. You said they were in a small boat? How small’s small?”
“Let’s see… we’ve got it down as a twenty-five-footer with twin two-twenty-five Johnsons. The watch officer from Fort Myers Beach talked to a mechanic at Marco Island Marina and got a full description.”
“Over four hundred horsepower on a boat that size, it sounds like a floating rocket,” I said. “Who’s the manufacturer?”
I was hoping to hear a name like Grady White or Mako or Pursuit or any of the other reputable manufacturers of pleasure craft.
Instead, I heard, “It’s a custom boat. Built by a little shop near Lauderdale. A semi-V hull with a blue Bimini top, the name Seminole Wind in big red letters on the side.”
“The Baja, I can’t remember exactly, but it’s got to be at least fifty or sixty miles offshore. With winds like this, that’s way too far for a boat that size.”
Dalton said, “Well, according to Ms. Meyer, that’s where they were headed. When they still hadn’t come back by eight-thirty-they were all staying in a rental condo there-Meyer tried to call the marina, but they were closed, so she drove down and confirmed that Sanford’s SUV was still there and the boat wasn’t back.”
I checked my watch and, for the first time, felt a surge of the same anxiety that Jeth was feeling. “That was nearly twenty hours ago, and still no word from them. That’s not good.”
“Maybe, but don’t start worrying yet, Doc. The majority of the overdue reports we get, they’ve left from one marina, but end up going back to another. Because of engine trouble, or they decided at the last minute to go exploring, or because they started partying and got carried away.”
I said, “That doesn’t sound like my friend Janet.”
“Yeah, but like you said, you don’t know the others. You wouldn’t believe some of the cases we work. I’ll give you an example: Last month, we got an overdue report-this guy in a twenty-five-foot Mako-and we went through the whole procedure with his distraught wife. The call comes into us, we go through the checklist on the incident report. We have local law enforcement confirm the guy’s car is still parked at the marina and his boat’s definitely not there.
“So we call our district headquarters in Miami and discuss which of our assets to scramble. According to his wife, he was going to run offshore and fish the ledges. So we send out the big helo. No boat, no guy. So then we send out a C-130. Still nothing. Okay, now it’s panic time, so we deploy every asset we have. For three days, we search-all day, all night. You have any idea how much it costs per hour to fly a