Blue Voyage Read online

  “Yeah, I bet he was depressed,” said Sage. “Can you imagine going to school all those years and not being able to work in your field? That’s why I want to take my time before I decide what to do about college.”

  Sage was giving me hope. Maybe my family drama would pass, or I could go somewhere someday and leave it behind. Life after high school? It was possible. Maybe.

  “Just remember,” Sage said, turning her empty glass round and round in her hands. “‘The beckoning counts, and not the clicking latch behind you.’”

  “Huh?”

  “Freya Stark. I really have to loan you that book. Remind me tomorrow.”

  “Sure.” Who said stuff like that? But Sage intrigued me. I suddenly wanted to read everything she had ever read, to know everything she knew, to see the world through her eyes. “I’m not the fastest reader,” I confessed. “I don’t know if I can finish before the cruise ends.”

  “No problem. Just return it to me in Istanbul.”

  “Istanbul?”

  “Yeah. I have to go back to my host family, to pack up. I’ll have a few days there. We can hang.”

  “Oh! Okay. Great.” I hoped I didn’t sound too eager.

  Sage beamed. “It’ll be fun! I’ll take you to my favorite hammam—a Turkish bathhouse. There’s one that I love by the Grand Bazaar. Oh, and we have to go to the Grand Bazaar. They have so many amazing shops there.”

  “Sounds good.” I smiled, warmed more from her words than from the sips of raki that still burned in my veins. Sage was so different from anyone I’d hung with at my high school. Or anywhere. I mean, what kind of person went around spouting quotes from some dead British explorer lady no one had ever heard of, or geeked out over Ancient Lycians? She didn’t seem to care how she dressed, or what people thought of her interests. She was just who she was.

  Sage stood up, wobbling slightly. Then she slipped off her cover-up, revealing a black one-piece swimsuit.

  “Wait. You’re going in the water? In the dark?”

  “Why not? It’s the best time. It’s gorgeous.” She retrieved the ladder from its storage bin under the kitchen window. I watched, confused, as she hooked it to the side of the boat. Wasn’t she going to invite me, after all we’d just talked about? After drinking together?

  “Hey, wait up,” I said, peering over the railing. The water was an inky indigo, not turquoise or teal like during the day. Where was she planning to go? Sage dropped into the sea with a small splash, and propelled herself away from the boat in a brisk crawlstroke.

  I tore off my hoodie and sweats so I was just in my tank top and pajama shorts. I scrambled down the swim ladder, stifling a scream when I hit the cold slap of water.

  I chased Sage, finally putting my face in the water and doing the crawlstroke, too. She was too good a swimmer, though. I realized she’d been holding back when we’d raced around the rocks earlier. Unleashed, with no rocks in her way, she was a torpedo. And now I saw where she was headed—the Gulet Anilar, which had moved sometime before dinner to the other side of an outcropping of rocks.

  It was farther than I wanted to swim, so I started to turn back. Sage could handle herself.

  But the alcohol might catch up to her when she was too far from either boat, or from shore. She could get a cramp. Or worse. Once, I’d drunk past my limits at a party and completely passed out, right on the edge of the swimming pool. The party host had called my mom. Mom’s face had been the first thing I saw when I came to, and the first words I heard after “Are you okay?” were “Oh my God, you could have drowned!”

  “Sage!” I called out, treading water. “Come back!”

  She didn’t hear me.

  I couldn’t leave her alone. Maybe she’d been drinking before I joined her—who knows how much she’d had. I plunged ahead, following her.

  A few feet before the Anilar, gasping, I paused to tread water and get my bearings. A dim blue light shone from the hull of the boat, now just a few yards away. Everyone had gone to bed on that yacht too, except maybe one person. Light leaked out of a porthole.

  I panicked. I couldn’t see Sage. I was about to call out, when I heard voices. I swam to the back of the boat. Then I saw her, holding the anchor chain of the Anilar and eyeing the ladder a few feet away. What the hell? Was she actually going to go on board?

  Rubbing the salt water out of my eyes, I lunged for the chain and held on tight. “Sage!” I hissed. “What are you doing?”

  She turned. “Oh! I didn’t think you could swim this far.”

  “I was worried about you. Were you talking to someone just now?”

  “The first mate. His name’s Riza,” she said. “I asked him to put out the ladder.”

  “But—but—how do you know him?” I felt a twinge of jealousy. I’d been trying to catch his eye all day, from afar, and had come to feel a weird sense of ownership toward him.

  “I met him on the shore excursion this afternoon. He came down the Dalyan River with the boat’s passengers, Ron and Judy Clarkson. They joined our tour of the ruins. Since we let them tag along, they said to come by anytime and say hi, and see the boat.”

  “It’s kind of far to swim in the dark, don’t you think?” I said. “And kind of late? Won’t everyone be asleep?”

  “I saw Riza on deck,” she insisted. “And he saw me. He waved. I thought I’d get a closer look at him.”

  My face must have betrayed how I felt about being left behind on her moonlight swim. She swam a few short strokes over to the anchor chain, grabbing on to a link near me. “Hey, I’m sorry. I would have invited you, but you said you had a toothache.” Then she looked at me. Really looked. I saw her face register surprise. The slight upward lift of her eyebrows.

  The moonlight. I was bathed in it. She was seeing my face, full on. I turned sideways, but knew with a sinking feeling that it was too late.

  But before she could say anything, I heard a loud click above us, and looked up at the Anilar’s deck. At the unsmiling face of a man.

  And a rifle pointing right at us.

  9

  Gun control was a big part of Dad’s platform. I’d seen pictures of all the guns he wanted to ban. The semiautomatic rifle pointed at me now was one of them, ugly and huge.

  The man with the rifle called out something over his shoulder, in what I assumed was Turkish. Then another man, similarly dressed in all black, appeared by his side, holding a pistol aimed at our heads. In his other hand, he held a flashlight, its beam searching the water until it came to rest on our faces. The light hurt to look at. I squinted and blinked, and tried to melt back into the shadows, but the light found me again.

  My heart was pounding so hard. What if I hyperventilated, slipped underwater, and drowned? At least that sounded marginally better than being shot. I glanced at Sage. She too looked frozen with fear, hanging off the anchor chain.

  The man with the rifle said something to us, in Turkish or English, or maybe some other language—I couldn’t tell. Nothing made sense. Couldn’t they see we were just two girls in the water? Who did they think we were?

  And who were they? All day I’d seen only the hot first mate and the couple on the Anilar, and occasional glimpses of the captain and the cook. Did these thugs hide below deck all day? Or had they recently joined the cruise?

  Worse—had they hijacked the boat?

  Sage glanced back at our boat, as if gauging the distance. Then she took a deep breath and held up her free hand, as if in surrender, so I did the same.

  “Don’t shoot us!” she begged, a tremor in her voice. “Please. We’re just swimming.”

  They didn’t shoot, but they didn’t lower their weapons, either. The guy with the flashlight and pistol shifted the beam so that it caught all of my face. Then they said something else to each other, harsh and guttural, that I couldn’t understand.

  Suddenly a light switche
d on in the boat’s cabin. A string of tiny white lights hanging from an awning winked on. A woman wearing a filmy white bathrobe appeared on the deck. “What’s going on?” she asked the two men in alarm.

  “Oh, thank God. That’s Judy Clarkson,” Sage whispered to me while the man with the rifle talked to the woman in English. I could sense the relief in her voice. I felt the relief, too. If the woman knew who these guys were, this wasn’t a hostage situation.

  My relief quickly turned to annoyance. “She didn’t happen to mention she had two armed thugs on their boat? I might have thought twice about swimming out here if I’d known.”

  “Actually, no, she didn’t mention them. She said it was just the captain and the first mate on board. Oh, and the captain’s wife, Elif, who cooks for everyone.” Sage took another deep breath, as if about to go underwater, and shouted, “Judy! It’s me! Sage Powell! From the Gulet Yasemin!”

  “Sage?” Judy leaned over the railing. “My goodness! What are you doing out there?”

  “Just out for a moonlight swim with my friend here.”

  Judy Clarkson turned to the two men. “Hey, those things really give me the willies. Do you mind putting them away?”

  The men slowly lowered their weapons. But they did not lower their gaze. Their eyes seemed to pierce right through us.

  “Come on up, girls,” Judy called. “It’s too dangerous to swim at night.” I heard her voice tremble slightly with concern. “My apologies if our security staff frightened you. There’s been some criminal activity in the area lately, and they’re alert to every approach. We’ll get you dried off and send you back to your boat in the tender.”

  “Oh, it’s not so far. We can swim,” said Sage. “We don’t want to trouble you.”

  I stared at Sage in disbelief. “I want a ride back,” I whispered. “It’s dark.”

  “Are you kidding me? They almost shot us!” Sage protested. “You want to hop into a rowboat with a couple of trigger-happy thugs?”

  “It’s absolutely no trouble,” Judy called down to us. “Really. I insist!” Then she turned toward the cabin: “Ron? Sweetie? There’s two kids in the water!”

  “Kids? Children?” said a male voice from the cabin.

  “Teenagers. It’s Sage, that girl we met on the ruins tour today. She’s here with her friend!”

  Her friend. I warmed. I had a friend. Hearing someone else say the words made it real.

  “They’ve swum over from that other boat. You know, the Yasemin—the one that’s been following us to the choice spots and hijacking our itinerary.”

  Wait. Our boat was following theirs? I thought it was the other way around! But now it made sense. A private charter with wealthy passengers would gravitate toward the most secluded spots. Maybe Captain Mehmet was following the Anilar to give us some sense of exclusivity, as a way to compensate for the cancelled archaeological lecture. And there were a couple of other small boats not too far off, whose captains probably had the same idea to follow the private charter.

  Judy beckoned to us again. “Girls, come on up. We have cookies, and hot tea.”

  “Come on,” I urged Sage, in a low voice. “You wanted to see the boat, didn’t you? Isn’t that why you swam here? Plus, cookies.” My own mom didn’t call me in for cookies and tea.

  Sage looked doubtful. But when I jerked my head toward the Anilar, she pushed off the anchor chain and crawlstroked to the boat’s swim ladder. I followed.

  We hauled ourselves up the swim ladder. The two men grabbed us roughly by the arms and pulled us onto the deck. Now, in the light, I could get a better look at them. I did a mental “You Are Here” journal entry. Both men wore black caps with some kind of white logo on the front. They also had on black windbreaker-type jackets, with the same indistinct logo, and black pants. I could also make out collared shirts and ties beneath the black jackets.

  Up close, the guy with the semiautomatic rifle was really tall. He had an unusually long nose, a goatee, and a mop of dark, shaggy hair. He looked like he could be an indie rock star, with a guitar slung around his neck instead of a lethal weapon. He could even be handsome, or the kind of guy who wrote poetry in the back of class in high school—if his eyes didn’t glitter in that unsettling way, and if the right side of his lip didn’t curl up in a sneer.

  The guy with the flashlight and pistol was shorter and stockier. He had close-cut hair and dark facial stubble, and a shapeless nose that made me think of a potato. With his broad shoulders and pissed-off expression, he looked like he’d make a great bouncer at a nightclub.

  Then two more men appeared, looking at us like we were a very strange catch of the day. One slipped his arm around Judy, so that had to be Ron Clarkson, her husband. The other was a gray-haired Turkish man, short and stocky, who wore a white polo shirt and khakis just like Captain Mehmet, so I figured he must be the Anilar’s captain.

  And that hot first mate—the inspiration for Sage’s moonlight swim? After all we’d been through to get on this boat, he was nowhere to be seen.

  Judy Clarkson handed us enormous, lavender-scented white towels, two each, which we gratefully accepted. “Oh, to be young and crazy again,” she said with a kind, almost wistful smile. “A moonlight swim. What a riot!”

  Something inside me melted. Mom wouldn’t have reacted that way. She would have launched into a lecture.

  “It’s insanity to swim here at night,” Judy added, almost cheerfully, “but it’s something I would have done in my carefree youth.” She winked at us and smiled, revealing a gap between her two front teeth. My dad always said that he liked people with gap-toothed smiles, that they had a good sense of humor.

  “Me too,” said Ron Clarkson. “Those were the days. When you felt indestructible.”

  Neither Judy nor Ron seemed that old, I thought, as I wrapped one of the plush towels around me. They were both somewhere in their fifties. Judy was naturally pretty, like some classy British movie star. Unlike Mom and her friends, she didn’t seem to be fighting her age with expensive products and procedures. Her honey-colored hair, swept back in a low ponytail, was silver-frosted. The lines on her face weren’t Botoxed out. Ron, too, looked tanned and weathered, like he spent lots of time on boats or outdoors, and his muscular arms and legs suggested an active lifestyle. They fussed over us like my own parents hadn’t in a long time. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that. Being looked after instead of yelled at.

  We dried ourselves while the security guards watched, their guns lowered but still in plain sight. I peeked at their hat and jacket logos while I toweled off. I couldn’t read the Turkish letters stitched beneath, or even make out the design—a tree? A lion? A hand with claws? Before I could wrap my mind around it, Judy and Ron were leading us to a cushioned seat at the stern.

  The stern area was similar to the one on our yacht, only bigger, cleaner, and overstuffed. All the furnishings were immaculately white except for the cushions, which looked like rich red Oriental rugs or tapestries. I had thought the Gulet Yasemin was an elegant yacht, but now, in comparison to the Anilar, I saw how tired our boat was. The Yasemin needed fresh oil on the teak, and its bolsters and cushions were ripped and stained. Some things didn’t work right, like the medicine cabinet door in our bathroom that constantly banged around, and the floorboards that squeaked, and the toilet that had overflowed twice. It was still a more luxurious boat than I’d ever been on, and a vacation vessel that many people could only dream of. But everything on the Anilar was pristine, plush, and perfect.

  Finally the first mate emerged from the kitchen carrying a steaming samovar and a tray of tiny glass cups with no handles. Hot tea. Hot guy. My hand flew to the left side of my face, where I pretended to be fidgeting with a stray lock of hair. Judy introduced us. “This is Riza,” she said. “The captain and the cook on this boat are his uncle and aunt. He’s trying out the family business.”

  “Hello,”
he said with a broad smile. He was even more gorgeous up close and in person. Tall. Plump lips. Dimpled cheeks. He wore his clothes effortlessly, his shirt untucked, and one lock of his wild, dark hair fell forward and hung in his eyes as he poured the tea. He was straight out of a Turkish Tommy Hilfiger ad. He smelled of fresh apples.

  And there I was with half a face. I kept my head out of the light, sitting at a slight angle across from the Clarksons and from Riza. Not that it mattered. He was looking at Sage, with the same sort of lost-puppy look I’d seen Orhan use on Mom.

  “We met Sage at the ruins today, but I don’t believe we got your name,” said Judy, looking at me.

  “Oh. Um. I’m Zan,” I said, pulling the towel partly over my head, like a hoodie. The Clarksons were Americans. My dad’s campaign, and his scandal, had made national news. But if they knew who I was, they said nothing.

  Judy sent Riza to the kitchen for some cookies. Their captain disappeared below deck, taking the security guys with him. As I turned my head to watch them go, my makeshift hoodie slipped, suddenly exposing my face full-on. The Clarksons looked at me. Really looked. I could feel their curiosity, their gaze burning through me, wondering what was up with my Phantom of the Opera face. Was I a burn victim? A cancer patient? Fortunately they said nothing as I quickly readjusted the towel.

  “You girls are very lucky, you know,” Ron said, still kind but more stern now, sounding a little bit like a dad. Like my dad, before he got all weird about the campaign and about Victoria, back when my transgressions were less frequent. “You could have been hurt. Cut up on the rocks. Or you could have stepped on a sea urchin.”