09-Twelve Mile Limit Read Free Page A

connection to one of the few people who could cause Jeth to react as he was now.
    Which is when Jeth told us that, the day before, Janet had gone diving with three people off Marco Island, and she and her party were now eighteen hours overdue. “With that idiot she was dating, that Mike-asshole from Sarasota!” he added miserably. “The one she met at the bachelorette party. And I’m the one who let her go.”

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    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