A DEEP OCEAN OF SECRETS
Chapter One
It was midday in Malibu, Florida.
The sun was shining through puffy white clouds, looking like cotton balls in
the big blue sky. Elisabeth Calvert, or Lizzy as she preferred to be called,
was cooking—or trying—lunch, but was having a hard time while she stirred the
soup, washed the dishes, and had her and her grandmother’s Pomeranian, Buddy,
around her feet.
"Down, Buddy! I’ll feed you
in a minute!" Lizzy cried, making her way across the kitchen and passing a
TV tuned to CNN. She grabbed Buddy’s dish and began to fill it with dog food.
On the added-on porch next to the
kitchen, there was an ancient woman at a pottery wheel, shaping clay into what
looked like a tall bowl. Her white hair was tied into a bun at the crook of her
neck, and her jade eyes seemed to be intent on the clay she was forming. At the
age of one hundred, turning one hundred one next month, Rose Calvert looked
like she had been walking the earth forever.
From the TV sitting on the
counter of the connected kitchen-dining room, a reporter spoke clearly into a
microphone, her hair swirling around her face in all directions from the wind.
"Treasure hunter Brock Lovett is best known for finding Spanish gold in
sunken galleons in the Caribbean. Now he is using deep submergence technology
to work two and a half miles down at another famous wreck...the Titanic. He is
with us live via satellite from a Russian research ship in the middle of the
Atlantic...hello, Brock," she spoke, holding her ear.
The picture switched to a
middle-aged man standing on a ship, also holding a mike. "Yes, hi,
Tracy," Brock Lovett said. "Titanic is not just any shipwreck. It is the
shipwreck. It’s the Mount Everest of all shipwrecks." Rose stopped the
pottery wheel and looked up questioningly, a new expression on her face,
listening to the TV. Brock continued, "I’ve been planning this expedition
for three years, and we’re out here above the Titanic recovering amazing
things…"
Rose clutched her cane; her old
hands covered in wet clay, and slowly made her way to the dining room, her eyes
fixed on the TV screen.
Lizzy watched her grandmother,
eyeing her closely. "Nana?" the woman in her early forties asked.
"Turn that up, dear,"
Rose replied, and took a seat at the table, not taking her eyes off the screen.
Lizzy’s face scrunched up in confusion, but she turned off the stove and took a
seat next to her grandmother.
Brock spoke. "Just look what
we found today." The camera turned to an old drawing, the paper yellowing
with age, the edges torn and brown. The charcoal drawing was of a beautiful
young lady lying across an elegant, old-fashioned couch. She was gazing at
something straight ahead, her eyes big and round, so young. Her loose, curly
hair was around her shoulders casually, some strands on the pillow her head was
resting on. Her hand framed the top of her head as it lay there casually. The
girl was completely naked except for a large, heart-shaped diamond resting on
her chest, the chain made of smaller diamonds. "A piece of paper that has
been underwater for more than eighty-four years, and my team was able to
preserve it intact. Should this have remained unseen at the bottom of the ocean
for eternity? Look at the date--April 14, 1912."
Rose shook her head softly in
disbelief, her eyes and mind fighting something that she couldn’t reconcile.
Her gaze fell to the date at the bottom of the drawing, and she gasped,
realizing her thoughts were completely and utterly true. "I’ll be
Goddamned," she said to herself, memories flooding back.
Lizzy turned her eyes away from
the screen and looked at her grandmother in disbelief. "What?" she
asked flatly. "Nana…"
Rose gestured to the cordless
phone sitting next to the TV, which had turned back to the reporter signing
off. "Hand me the phone, Elisabeth." Lizzy looked at her ancient
grandmother again in confusion, knowing that when she used her full name, she
meant business. But nonetheless, she reached over and grabbed the phone.
"Thank you," Rose said, and Lizzy turned off the TV.
"Nana, what are you
doing?" Lizzy asked.
Rose punched in a phone number
and held the tan phone to her ear. After a moment, she said, "Yes, I was
watching your story on Brock Lovett and his discoveries on the Titanic, and I
was wondering if you could please tell me the number I could reach him at; it’s
rather urgent. Yes, I’ll hold…oh, you will? That would be helpful." Rose
spoke into the phone. She winked at her granddaughter, who looked unbelievably
confused, and then began to speak again when another man was put on the phone.
"Rose Calvert," Rose said as Brock Lovett asked for her name. "I
was just wondering if you had found the Heart of the Ocean yet, Mr. Lovett."
There was a silence, and Rose smiled, knowing that she had made an impression,
and continued. "Oh, yes, the woman in the picture is me." The smile
never left Rose’s face, and Lizzy’s jaw dropped onto the tabletop. "You
wouldn’t be calling me a liar, would you? Well, I’m not, Mr. Lovett. I would
actually like to come down to your vessel and tell you for myself. Yes, I’ll
wait…" Rose turned to her granddaughter.
"What are you talking about,
Nana?" Lizzy asked, still confused.
"Start packing your bags,
Lizzy. We’re going to pay Mr. Lovett a little visit," Rose said, a twinkle
in her eye that Lizzy knew well.
"When?" Lizzy asked,
standing up in disbelief. "What are you talking about? When are we gonna
go?"
Rose continued to smile, her aged
features creating even more wrinkles as she worked her muscles to grin like the
young self she was so many years ago. "As soon as I get off the
phone."
*****
A helicopter charged across the
Atlantic Ocean, floating in the air as it made its way to the Keldysh, the
vessel that Brock Lovett and his team were on, two and a half miles above the
Titanic. From inside, Rose stared out at the water from above through a small
circular window, Lizzy Calvert sitting next to her, her eyes hidden by dark
sunglasses. Memories swirled around, and the Keldysh could be seen on the water
in the distance.
Lizzy turned to face her
grandmother. She said, shaking her head, "Nana, I still don’t understand
why we’re in a helicopter in the middle of the Atlantic, headed for a vessel
we’ve never heard of, to meet a man we haven’t met, about some ship we don’t
know anything about! Why did you have to lie about that girl in the drawing
being you?"
Rose turned to her granddaughter,
her jade eyes full of wisdom. "But, dear, I do know about the Titanic,
more than anyone could truly know, and why would I lie about being the girl in
the drawing? Do you think I would really want the attention by lying, since
I’ve had my fun?"
Lizzy sighed and nodded. She knew
that her grandmother was a Broadway actress, and she wouldn’t lie about
something as big as being a girl in a drawing that was found aboard the
Titanic. "Fine, Nana, fine." The helicopter was above the Keldysh
now, and slowly landed on the H-marked spot. Rose was carefully lifted from the
giant machine in her wheelchair, Buddy seated in her lap, and shook Brock
Lovett’s hand. Lizzy came out of the helicopter next and gently pried away a
man’s fingers from the wheelchair so she could steer it. All of Rose and
Lizzy’s luggage was being unpacked in front of Brock’s right-hand man, Lewis
Bodine, who mumbled something.
They made introductions at the
helipad and were led into the Keldysh, distant memories swarming the mind of
the old woman in the wheelchair, and when she reached her stateroom, she sighed
heavily.
"I’ll give you some time to
unpack and get settled," Brock Lovett said in the doorway, and as Rose and
Lizzy nodded, he turned and left, closing the door behind him.
When he came back forty minutes
later, Rose was setting out the last of her photos at the side of her bed.
Brock knocked on the door and entered. "Is your stateroom all right?"
he asked.
"Yes, very nice, thank
you," Rose said, perched on the bed while Lizzy kneeled on the floor next
to her, helping her sort through her suitcase. "Have you met my
granddaughter, Lizzy? She takes care of me." Rose smiled proudly.
Lizzy smiled, chuckling.
"Yes, we met a few minutes ago, Nana. Remember, up on deck?"
Rose mumbled to herself and
looked at her collection of photos. "I have to have my pictures when I
travel."
"Can I get you anything? Is
there anything you’d like?" Brock asked.
Rose sat there for a moment,
thinking to herself. Then she lifted up her head slowly and smiled distantly.
"Yes, there is. I would like to see my drawing."
Brock nodded, and he and his
party went below to the lab, where the drawing of the naked girl lay in a
rectangular pan filled with water. Rose leaned over and looked at the drawing,
her eyes dancing. The young girl’s eyes from the picture stared back at her,
ones that were familiar so long ago, and her eyes drifted to the initials at
the bottom of the drawing next to the date--JD. Sadness took over Rose’s mind,
longing as well, and she closed her eyes. She saw a young hand sketching the
drawing, moving slowly and smoothly across the paper. Rose saw the man’s face,
his eyes concentrating on the drawing, glancing up at his real model, his
blonde hair flipping into his icy blue eyes. Rose opened her eyes and saw the
girl’s face in the drawing dancing underneath the waves of the water.
Brock spoke. "Louis XVIII
wore a fabulous stone called the blue diamond of the crown, which disappeared
in 1792, about the time Louis lost everything from the neck up. The theory goes
that the crown diamond was chopped, too...recut into a heart-like shape...and
it became le Coeur de la Mer. The Heart of the Ocean. Today it would be worth
more than the Hope Diamond."
"It was a dreadful, heavy
thing," Rose replied, still staring at the drawing. "I only wore it
this once." She pointed to the drawing.
Lizzy moved next to her
grandmother. "You really think this is you, Nana?"
Rose, with the same sense of
humor that she had when she was young, said, pretending to look shocked,
"It is me, dear! Wasn’t I a dish?"
"I tracked it down through insurance,
an old claim that was settled under absolute secrecy. Do you know who the
claimant was, Rose?"
Rose looked up at the middle-aged
face of Brock Lovett. "I should imagine someone named Hockley."
Brock smiled. "Nathan
Hockley. Right. Pittsburgh steel tycoon. For a diamond necklace his son Caledon
bought in France for his fiancée...you...a week before he sailed on Titanic.
And the claim was filed right after the sinking. So the diamond had to have
gone down with the ship. See the date?" He referred to the drawing.
Lizzy looked. "April 14,
1912."
Bodine spoke. "So, if your
grandmother is who she claims she is, then that means she was wearing the
diamond the day the Titanic sank." Rose smiled to herself, knowing a
secret no one else knew. Brock turned to her.
"And that makes you my new
best friend," he said childishly. Rose sat down at a table in front of a
couple of artifacts. "These are what we recovered from your
stateroom."
Rose looked in awe, caressing a
tortoiseshell comb, remembering the last time she wore it. She picked up a hand
mirror, gazing into the reflection. "This was mine! How
extraordinary!" she said in utter awe. She sighed and set down the mirror.
"The reflection’s changed a bit."
Brock squatted down level with
her. "Are you ready to go back to Titanic?"
*****
The party crowded into the
imaging shack, Rose seated in front of a computer screen, everyone surrounding
her. Bodine played the video and began to narrate. "She hits the berg on
the starboard side and it sort of bumps along...punching holes like Morse
code...dit dit dit, down the side. Now she's flooding in the forward
compartments...and the water spills over the tops of the bulkheads, going aft.
As her bow is going down, her stern is coming up...slow at first...and then
faster and faster until it's lifting all that weight, maybe twenty or thirty
thousand tons...out of the water and the hull can't deal...so SKRTTT! She
splits! Right down to the keel, which acts like a big hinge. Now the bow swings
down and the stern falls back level...but the weight of the bow pulls the stern
up vertical, and then the bow section detaches, heading for the bottom. The
stern bobs like a cork, floods and goes under about 2:20 AM. Two hours and
forty minutes after the collision. The bow pulls out of its dive and planes
away, almost a half a mile, before it hits the bottom going maybe twelve knots.
KABOOM! The bow impacts, digging deeply into the bottom. The animation now
follows the stern. The stern implodes as it sinks, from the pressure, and rips
apart from the force of the current as it falls, landing like a big pile of
junk. Pretty cool, huh?"
Rose watched the screen.
"Thank you for that fine forensic analysis, Mr. Bodine. But, of course,
the experience was…somewhat different."
Brock had turned serious now.
"Will you share it with us?" he asked.
Rose could feel hot tears
clouding her eyes, and she stood up and turned around to watch the monitors,
which showed parts of the Titanic live from vessels searching the ship at that
very moment. Everyone watched Rose as she gasped and covered her mouth with her
hand, obviously overwhelmed.
Lizzy got up and put a hand on
her grandmother’s shoulder. "I’m taking her to rest," Lizzy said.
"No," Rose mumbled,
closing her eyes.
"Come on, Nana," Lizzy
urged.
"No!" Rose cried with
such force that Lizzy backed up and sat down. Brock signaled everyone to be
quiet and Rose took her seat. Instead of the sweet old lady who had boarded the
Keldysh, there was a strong, stubborn woman with the same fire burning in her
that had so many years ago.
"Tell us, Rose," Brock
commanded softly, and turned on his tape recorder.
Rose sighed, debating in her mind
whether to speak or not. Finally, she gave in. "It’s been eighty-four
years…"
"Just try to remember,"
Brock said, and Rose’s gaze fell on him.
"Do you want to hear this
story or not, Mr. Lovett?" Brock smiled softly and shut his mouth. Rose
continued, her voice soft and gentle, slow, as if trying to bring back a flood
of memories that was hard to capture. But they weren’t.
Silently, everybody waited as
Rose Calvert began her story.