Salvage Read Online Free PDF Page B

to himself as he headed down the darkened hall, remembering what Lori's dive instructor had said about that syndrome with the peculiar name. "And I'm not even underwater…"
    He blew out a breath through his teeth, trying to relax himself. Still, he couldn't shake the idea that Lori had been trying to tell him something. That she'd come back for a reason. These troubles followed him into sleep.
     

 

CHAPTER 2
Baptism
     
     
    1
     
     
    OWEN FELT CONFLICTED leaving his mother alone when he returned to his downtown condo late Sunday night. She was a strong woman, he reasoned. She'd survived years before him, before Lori, and she'd survive even now that one of her brood was gone for good.
    He knew he was just making excuses for abandoning her, but he needed to get back to work sooner or later—sooner seemed the best option for his own health, if not for his sanity, considering what he'd seen, or thought he'd seen, in her bathroom. The wind farm project wasn't going to finish itself, and although Teri Avery, his business partner, could handle herself in the boardroom and the work site, it wasn't fair to leave her to handle the protesters, too. So he determined to throw himself into his work. It was the best way to get through the grieving process, he decided, to move beyond all the morbid imagery and imaginings, to stop his mind from wandering to thoughts of death and drowning and lakes up north where the water was dark and cold and deep enough to drown in.
    All well and good, as his mother might have said, except that it didn't work. By Tuesday, he found himself stopping in front of a dive shop on his way out of town, and on Thursday, he actually dared to go in. An hour later, after a quick call placed to Avery to let her know he'd be a little late, he came out with a shopping cart full of stuff, some of which he didn't even know what to call, let alone what they were for: wet suit, fins and booties, a regulator, something called a "safety sausage," another thing the sun-ravaged clerk had called a "pony" (which looked like a smaller version of the large scuba tank), and an underwater camera. It all came with a free T-shirt branded with the store logo on the lapel and DIVERS DO IT DEEPER stenciled on the back. The clerk had a good chuckle over this, and Owen laughed along amiably even though he hadn't found it funny. It would make a decent rag, at the very least.
    Driving to the job site with the equipment heaped on the passenger seat, he felt incredibly pleased with himself, as if he'd taken a big step toward recovery, and hadn't just plunged headfirst into the initial stages of obsession.
    Protesters were there in large numbers when he finally made it to the site. So many angry faces, their rage directed at his car as he passed, shaking their signs like swords at their enemy. Since they'd broken ground on the site three weeks back, the marshy area leading up to the site had been packed with the usual suspects: the environmental activist groups (Save the Wetlands was in charge this time, since the wind farm project was otherwise a benefit to "Mother Earth"); a First Nations group, some wearing traditional garb and waving the flags of their tribes; the youth groups, their faces and bodies painted with slogans, their chants aggravatingly catchy ("One, two, three, four," they sang, "we know what we're fighting for!" Do tell , Owen thought with gentle mirth); the NIMBY people, who weren't protesting the project, but its location, and their polar opposite, local citizens who would benefit from the jobs created, there to protest the protesters. Hence, the final component necessary for any good protest, the Provincial Police, a half dozen officers standing sentry in strategic positions between the factions.
    With so many reasons for protest, their signs were an odd jumble. A silver-haired man shook a NO MORE WIND TURBINES sign at Owen's windshield. Flanking the car was a group with matching professional SAVE THE GRAY TREE FROG!