Burden of Proof Read online

  An East Coast surf contest didn’t normally draw that sort of audience. This one was different. A hurricane had threatened to demolish the contest before it even got started, but at the last moment the storm had veered northeast, away from landfall.

  The waves thrown up by the storm had arrived Saturday, just hours before the first heats. Legendary surf. Mountainous. The sort of waves that remained a marvel for decades.

  Ethan saw the workers pausing now and then and staring out to sea. The surrounding structures blocked his own view. But he did not need to see the ocean to know what they were watching.

  Pandemonium.

  The sun rose over a crystal-blue sea and cloudless sky. There was not a breath of wind. The waves were huge. The biggest and most perfect conditions to hit the Florida coast in a generation. The local press was calling it fifteen feet, but at this size, such measurements were meaningless.

  As Ethan rose slowly from his car, he heard the compressive crump of very big waves falling far out to sea. The ground beneath his feet shook slightly from the shorebreak’s constant roar. As he stood there, the first television van careened around the corner and skidded to a halt, and the crew spilled out with their equipment.

  Remember, Sonya had begged him.

  Ethan remembered every moment.

  The adrenaline pumping through his veins, the spicy smell of the salt spray blown up by the massive surf, the place . . .

  Ethan breathed the words aloud. “I’m back.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Ethan grabbed two breakfast burritos and settled on the stand’s top tier, away from the growing crowds down below. The loudspeakers played some electropunk surf music that Ethan did not recognize.

  The first time around, he and other local surfers had waited atop the judging platform for the quarterfinals to begin, using the elevated deck to watch the waves and find some hint of assurance in the company of buddies. This time, he took another bite and studied the group seated to his right. One of the pros dragged here by O’Neill was the South African Hennie Bacchus. Hennie had not announced it yet, but this was going to be his last year competing. He was twenty-nine, old for a pro, and had helped shape the current trends in surfing. His grace was as strong on the beach as in the water, and his smile and looks would eventually help him build a successful career in politics. Hennie was also a pastor and ran a surf ministry that within a decade would plant a counselor in every pro tournament around the world.

  When the O’Neill guys drifted away, Ethan slipped over and introduced himself.

  Hennie studied Ethan and asked, “You a local, mate?”

  “Born and raised in Cocoa Beach,” Ethan said.

  “You did all right out there yesterday. Have you ever made it to a big-wave spot?”

  Ethan hesitated, unsure how to respond. The answer was, he had surfed his way around the globe four times. But that all remained in a future that had yet to become reality.

  Hennie seemed to take his silence as fear. “Listen up, mate. No matter how good you are or what you think you know about your local spot, you need to adjust your surfing to fit the size. Because straight up, those monsters can kill you stone dead.”

  Ethan studied the honeyed skin, the clear eyes, the genuine concern. “I’ve admired you ever since I read my first surfing magazine.” He offered Hennie his hand. “See you in the water.”

  As the clock wound down to the start of the quarterfinals, Ethan filtered the day through two different lenses. He vividly recalled how the contest had gone down before. The previous day, he had eked by with four second places in a row. He was the surfer with the lowest overall point score who made it into the quarter round. That night, he retreated from his buddies and slept on the end of the Holiday Marina pier. The water and gentle breeze worked their magic, which was why he felt even semi-rested. Not that it had helped.

  This particular morning, he had suffered a bad wipeout on his first wave and never recovered. It was to be his one brush with fame. In the years to come, when his buddies spoke of that day, it was mostly about watching him go over the falls on an eighteen-foot behemoth.

  Had he returned on any other day, Ethan would have been consumed by the impossibility of this. But today was different, unique. There simply wasn’t room to implode. He had dwelled on this day his entire life. The contest and the loss had defined so much of what was to come.

  The desires, the fears, the inability to handle the ocean’s force—Ethan had run from this and toward this for years. He had surfed seven of the biggest waves on earth. And repeatedly on the days when he had surfed his best, from Hawaii to Australia to Chile to Portugal, he’d ended with the same wish. If only he could have gone back and relived this contest, knowing what he did now.

  This time around, Ethan gathered on the shore with the other quarterfinalists. When the horn sounded, he launched his board into the water, reveling in a twenty-year-old body honed by constant workouts and youth. Added to this was what he brought from the first go-round: years of surfing the world’s big breaks.

  The paddle-out was grueling. But Ethan had been through worse. Of course, that was in the months and years still to come.

  Then he was in the lineup with four other guys. All of them staring out to sea, breathing hard from the paddle-out, hearts close to redline.

  When the next set formed shadow lines on the horizon, Ethan moved into position.

  Ready.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  The next morning, Ethan woke up to discover Banzai snoring softly at his side. He rolled from his bed, knowing today he would face everything the contest had kept at bay.

  He stood by the cracked window in his eight-by-ten room and recalled being strapped to the gurney. Sonya hissing for him to remember. Then the blinding mental flash, the crushing weight of a stopped heart, the clenching pain, the immobility, the end.

  Banzai scratched at the door and whined, drawing him back to the new present. Ethan slipped on a pair of board shorts and opened the door.

  Sawyer called, “Yo, champ.”

  “I didn’t win,” he replied and slipped into the bathroom. When he emerged, Sawyer was still standing there, grinning. Ethan added, “Not even close.”

  “That’s not what Hennie said. He told the reporter that if Florida was growing a crop of surfers like Ethan Barrett, the pro tour had better watch out. On account of—”

  “I heard it already.” He walked out back and greeted his other roomies. They looked so young, so confident. The invulnerability of youth shone from their sleepy faces. Ethan made himself a bowl of cereal and endured their play-by-play, wishing he could lose himself in the simple pleasure of rewriting his own memories.

  The contest final had been better than any midnight imaginings. He and Hennie had dominated the heat. The other finalists were basically left fighting for third place. The waves backed off a trifle, the closeouts had lessened in number, and the two of them had started taking incredible risks. Pushing each other’s envelope, shouting encouragement, laughing and joking and owning the hour.

  Ethan had intentionally let Hennie take the top three waves and build up an insurmountable lead. Hennie responded with a warrior’s honor, twice telling Ethan that he should go pro and Hennie would back his play. The second time he said it, Ethan paddled up close. The waves were bunched and muscled, but it didn’t matter. Nothing did. They owned the day.

  Hennie’s mother was Indian, and his father was a Zulu chief. He had been barred from competing in apartheid South Africa, so with O’Neill’s support, he had taken his act abroad. The year he first won the world title, the pro surfing association gave the South African apartheid regime a choice: let Hennie compete, or they would never support another contest in their country. Surfing was the third most popular sport in South Africa after rugby and soccer. The Botha regime caved.

  Ethan had actually visited the slum outside Port Elizabeth where Hennie was born. By the time Ethan arrived, Mandela was in power an
d Hennie was a rising star in the new South African parliament. Botha’s regime had been relegated to the history books, along with his hated secret police. But as Ethan had walked the rutted road with the sewage spilling down the open trench, he could almost hear the snarling police dogs.

  Ethan said to Hennie, “This is your heat. Your contest.”

  “What is this, some new form of a psych-out?”

  “I’m not . . . I don’t want to go pro.”

  Hennie checked to make sure there was no incoming set, then asked, “You sure about that?”

  “This is your last season,” Ethan said. “Win here in Florida. Rejoin the main circuit and take Hawaii. Go out as the world number one. When you return home, you lift up some other kid from the slums of Durban.”

  Hennie’s jaw bunched up tight as a fist. “You really know how to blow a mate out of the water.”

  “Some other kid the world wants to dismiss as a no-account,” Ethan went on. “Some kid who is almost ready to give in to the temptation of futile rage.”

  Hennie’s tension grew to where he looked ready to fight. Or weep. He pointed out beyond Ethan and said, “Here comes your wave, mate.”

  He was right. The peak was taking aim straight at Ethan. He glanced around and saw one of the finalists flailing through a ragged closeout, the other struggling down in the impact zone. It was Ethan’s wave.

  Sometimes the wave communicated through the board, or so it seemed to Ethan. Sometimes the connection to the ocean was so strong that the concept of limits, of fear, even of thought, just vanished. For one fleeting instant, he did not just bond with the wave. He joined it.

  This was one of those waves.

  Ethan entered the tube, came out, spun off the lip, slipped down to the pit, saw the lip curling over, and got tubed a second time. When the ledge started to feather and close out, Ethan took a ridiculous risk because he knew he could make it. He lifted up so that his board actually danced along the feathering lip. It was a small-wave maneuver, when there was not the sort of power and risk of today’s swell. When the wave crashed down, Ethan did not slide off and finish as logic dictated. Instead, he kept surfing the broken wave, riding on top of the foam ball. The move was called a floater, because that was exactly how it felt, just coasting over air and spume. There was no control, no way to even steer. But instead of eating him like it should, the wave did not completely fall. Rather, it sectioned, and up ahead the wall held up like a pristine invitation. Ethan’s floater brought him into an inside section where he crouched down, so tight his knees met his chest, and was tubed a third time.

  When he came out and the wave ended and reality gripped him once more, he was close enough to the shore to hear the crowd screaming.

  The clock showed less than three minutes left, not enough time for him to paddle out. Ethan rode the next break to shore, then watched Hennie take the wave of the day. The tube was so large that Hennie stood up straight, all six feet two of him, and extended his arms out wide to either side without touching water. He emerged and threw two sweeping trough-to-lip maneuvers that sent rooster tails up high as the sky. He rode and he flipped and he rode, and when it was all done and the Klaxon had sounded, Hennie had stepped off the board onto dry sand.

  Now Ethan ate his cereal and studied the photograph that dominated the Florida Today’s front page. He and Hennie were on the winners’ stand, cups and checks in one hand, arms around each other’s shoulders, still laughing from the thrill of owning the day.

  Sawyer rose from the table and tapped his watch. “We’ve got to clock in.”

  There were good-natured groans from the others, until Ethan said, “I’m not coming. I quit.”

  The guys who had formed his team through college stared at him. Sawyer said, “There’s the matter of your paycheck.”

  One of the others said, “Second place paid twenty-five thou. I’d already be gone.”

  Sawyer whined, “But you love that job.”

  “I did,” Ethan agreed. He felt a flutter of nerves over changing the course of history already written. Again.

  Sawyer demanded, “What are you going to do?”

  Because he was his best friend, Ethan replied, “I need to give my brother a hand with something important.”

  Ethan did not bother to call Adrian and say he was coming. His brother had made Ethan a key to every place he had ever lived. They were never much for personal discussions, especially when it came to family. Adrian was a closed book. He lived for work. Where so many of the firm’s young associates burned out after a few years of eighty-hour weeks, Adrian thrived. When he finally married, fourteen months before getting murdered, his widow-to-be was a neurobiologist running her own research company. Sonya was as driven as Adrian.

  There was a bland comfort to the drive up I-95. Ethan had the highway and the late August day pretty much to himself. He drove with all the windows open because the AC had not worked in years. As the humid air washed over him, he pulled out the central question and let it hang there in the heat.

  Ethan’s task was to change the course of time.

  He knew at a gut level that simply alerting his brother to a coming threat would not work. Besides, he did not want to warn Adrian. He wanted to rescue him. Keep him alive to enjoy a full life, raise his daughter, become the rising star in the Jacksonville legal world, fulfill the potential Ethan knew his brother possessed.

  The question that accompanied him was how.

  In his previous existence, Ethan had made this very same drive, only fifteen days from now. That time, he had not quit his job. There was no second-place check to justify such a move. Instead, he worked the final two weeks, received the bonus payment the marina paid every dockhand who stayed through the entire summer, then traveled to Jacksonville to tell Adrian he was quitting school.

  Of course, Ethan didn’t put it that way. What he said was he wanted to take a year off, surf some of his dream locations, and come back revived and ready for the real world.

  But Adrian, being Adrian, saw straight through to the truth. The reality was, Ethan had no interest in ever returning to his brother’s idea of a life.

  Their parents—a community college lecturer and a county librarian—had been far from wealthy. But their pensions and life insurance had been enough to ensure both sons could complete college without debt. What remained of Ethan’s share was in a trust run by his brother. Ethan had made the journey north hoping Adrian would release funds and cover his traveling expenses, at least for a while.

  Instead, Adrian blasted him with a barely controlled rage. He accused Ethan of running away.

  Ethan was utterly shocked by his brother’s wrath. He had expected to spend hours dickering, laughing, pressing, begging if necessary. Instead, Adrian accused him of being lazy, gutless, and living his life without a shred of direction. And then turned Ethan down flat.

  Hurt, still wounded by the contest loss, desperate to escape, Ethan lashed out with a fury of his own, saying that Adrian was blind to everything but his own ambition. That he had no life to speak of. That he had married a woman equally ignorant of life outside their comfort zones.

  It was the last time the brothers ever spoke.

  Two days later, Adrian was murdered on the courthouse steps.

  When a heavy afternoon thunderstorm struck, Ethan took the next exit and stopped for a late lunch. Rain blurred the truck stop’s windows and washed away the outside world. Ethan stared at his reflection in the glass and saw the impossible task ahead of him.

  Adrian was a trial attorney. He lived to grapple with facts. He thrived on courtroom combat. He loved nothing more than to hunt below the surface, find the opposition’s hidden weakness, and tear it apart.

  Ethan ran through various scenarios of trying to tell his brother what had happened, what would happen, and . . .

  His brother would laugh in his face. Accuse him of doing a nosedive into drug culture. And walk away.

  Approaching Sonya was a nonstarter. The woman woul
d not give him the time of day.

  Which meant . . .

  The waitress stopped by his table. “Everything all right, hon?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She picked up his plate. “You need anything else?”

  Ethan started to ask for coffee, his standard reply for years. “Maybe some more water.”

  “You got it.”

  The longer he sat there, the clearer his only course of action became. The only way for him to save his brother’s life was to do it himself.

  Yet this raised any number of dilemmas. Ethan had not been anywhere near Jacksonville when the events happened. He had no idea precisely how they had gone down.

  What if the threat was not just an isolated gunman? The authorities had never identified the shooter or given any definite reason for the attack. The police’s public statements alluded to a criminal who was sent to jail and vowed revenge. But why that day? Why in such a public place, in broad daylight?

  The questions and doubts hammered at his brain and heart while the storm continued to lash the window. Ethan grew increasingly frightened by everything he did not know.

  The waitress returned, set down another glass of water, and laid a copy of Time magazine beside it. “Here you go, hon. A customer just left this. Thought you might like some company.”

  “That’s really nice. Thank you.”

  The waitress’s scuffed shoes squeaked across the linoleum floor. Ethan picked up the magazine and started leafing through the pages. Anything to escape the thoughts that chased him round and round . . .

  Then he realized what he was staring at.

  The page coalesced with the same blistering intensity he had known back on the beach.

  The waitress passed by his booth and asked, “How about some dessert, hon? We make the best pecan pie in five states.”

  “No thank you. Could I have the check? It looks like the weather might be clearing.”

  “No problem.”

  “Thanks.” Ethan looked back down at the page. Staring up at him were photographs of America’s current tennis greats: Chris Evert Lloyd, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe. The article was about the US Open, scheduled to begin the next day.