Chapter 6: The Camera That Wasn't Working
The Coast Guard helicopter reached us forty minutes later.
They took my father first.
The flight medic said his heart rhythm was irregular and he needed a hospital immediately. They loaded him into a basket litter and winched him up into the hovering helicopter while the rotor wash flattened the water around us into a white circle.
Celeste wanted to go with him.
There wasn't room.
"I'll meet you at the hospital, darling," she called up, waving, her hair whipping around her face. "I love you!"
My father didn't wave back.
The medic checked Zuri too. Her blood sugar was climbing back up. She had a scraped knee, a bruise on her ribs, and raw red marks on both palms from the steel rail.
"She's okay," the medic said gently. "Physically. She's going to be okay."
Physically.
I knew what he meant.
Zuri hadn't let go of me once. She was sitting in my lap on the aft deck wrapped in a beach towel, sucking her thumb, which she hadn't done since she was eighteen months old. Every time a wave slapped against the hull, her whole body flinched.
Captain Reyes turned the Margaret Rose back toward Key West.
We'd be at the marina in three hours.
My brother-in-law, sort of, Tyler, came out onto the deck. He was Celeste's son from her first marriage. Twenty-six, tan, an expensive watch, the kind of young man who had never needed a job and didn't seem to understand why anyone would want one. My father had legally adopted him as an adult three years ago, which I had learned about from a press release.
"Dude," he said. "That was insane. Is she okay?"
"She's okay."
"I was in my cabin with my headphones on. I didn't hear anything until the boat stopped." He shook his head. "How did she even get out there?"
"That's what I want to know."
Tyler looked at me for a moment. Then he looked away.
"Probably just climbed," he said. "Kids climb stuff."
He went back inside.
I sat there for a long time thinking about that.
Kids climb stuff.
Zuri was terrified of heights. She wouldn't go down the big slide at the playground. She cried on the escalator at the mall. She was three years old and thirty-eight inches tall, and the railing was forty-two inches.
And the gate had a child lock.
Captain Reyes came down from the bridge about an hour later. She stood beside me at the rail, keeping her voice low.
"Mr. Callahan. Can I talk to you for a second?"
"Ryan."
"Ryan." She glanced over her shoulder. "This boat has twelve exterior cameras. Two of them cover the starboard side deck. I pulled the footage to send to the Coast Guard."
My heart started pounding.
"And?"
"Both starboard cameras went offline at 12:19 this afternoon," she said. "They came back on at 12:46."
Twenty-seven minutes.
Zuri called me at 12:41.
"Is that normal?" I asked. "Do they just go offline?"
"No." Diane's jaw was tight. "They're on a separate circuit from everything else. Somebody has to physically pull a breaker in the engine room panel to cut them. And then somebody has to physically put it back."
The sun was beating down. I was shivering.
"Who has access to the engine room?"
"Me. My first mate. The two deckhands." She paused. "And the owner and his family. Mr. Callahan gave everybody the tour on the first day."
I looked down at my daughter.
She was asleep now, finally, exhausted, her cheek against my chest, her little hand still gripping a fistful of my shirt.
"Diane," I said quietly. "Somebody put my daughter over that rail."
The captain didn't answer right away.
Then she said, "I've been running boats for thirty-one years. I've never had a child go over a latched rail. Not once."
She looked toward the salon, where Celeste was on the phone with the hospital, pacing back and forth with one hand pressed dramatically against her forehead.
"I'm going to make sure the Coast Guard gets every second of what we do have," Diane said. "And I'm not going to let anybody near that breaker panel until somebody with a badge looks at it."
"Thank you."
She hesitated.
"And Ryan? Your father. When he came out on deck. He wasn't coming from his cabin."
"What do you mean?"
"I saw him on the bridge camera. He came out of the stairwell from the lower deck. Running. He was already running before anybody screamed."
I stared at her.
"How did he know?"
May you like
Diane shook her head.
"I don't know. But you should ask him."
