Page 2 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“No,” I tell the laptop. “Absolutely not. Do you know how long that staghorn took to come back?”

The laptop does not answer. Carl makes a low grumbling noise, which I choose to interpret as solidarity.

I rewind. Watch it again. Watch it a third time with my face six inches from the screen like proximity will change the facts. Somebody is dumping over my reef. My reef, which is technically the State of Florida’s reef, but I have counted every colony on that shelf by hand and that makes it mine.

Deep breath, Abby. You are a scientist. You are a professional. You have a protocol for this.

The protocol is: I screenshot the hull, and the registration number that’s visible for exactly nine frames, and I write it all up in the calm, factual language of a person whose eye is not twitching. One copy to the Coast Guard’s environmental crimes tip line. One copy to the state environmental agency, attention of the very nice woman named Renata who processed my research permits and once mailed me a corrected form with a smiley face on it.

Then, because the public deserves transparency and also because I’m mad, I post a thirty-second clip to my research blog. Caption:This is what illegal dumping looks like over a recovering reef system. Three years of regrowth under that debris field. Do better, humans.

Send. Post. Done.

For context, my research blog has around nine hundred followers, and I’d estimate four hundred of them are my mother’s book club, two hundred are colleagues, and the rest are people who arrived for one viral video of a loggerhead sneezing and stayed out of politeness. It is not a media empire. But the comments start within the hour—outrage, sad crab emojis, one guy from a dive forum offering to “handle it,” whom I gently talk down—and there’s something bracing about it, the whole little community leaning in the same direction at once.

I also leave Renata a voicemail, because Renata likes a heads-up before paperwork lands. “Hi, it’s Abby Marlowe, permits 44-B and 44-C, you’ll see a report from me tonight and I want to say in advance: I’m calm, the documentation is thorough, and I’ve already drafted the incident narrative in your agency’s preferred format, because I love you and I know Tuesdays are hard. Okay. Bye.”

“And that,” I tell Carl, closing the laptop with the satisfying click of civic duty, “is how the system works. They’ll trace the registration, somebody gets a fine, maybe a very stern letter, and the reef gets cleaned up. Justice, Carl.”

Carl yawns. Pelicans can yawn. It’s horrifying and I respect it.

By Thursday I’ve mostly stopped thinking about the boat, because it’s peak nesting season and the loggerheads have no interest in my crusade against maritime crime.

Nest forty-one is my problem child. It sits high on the beach north of the pier, close enough to the dune line that I’ve been watching it like a nervous stage mom. Tonight I’m on my knees in the cooling sand, checking the marker stakes and the screenmesh, narrating my findings to the clipboard because my field assistant is a clipboard.

“Marker’s solid. Mesh is intact. And nobody’s been partying on top of you,” I tell the nest. “You’re welcome. Sixty days, ladies. Give or take.”

Loggerhead eggs incubate for about sixty days, and warmer sand skews the hatchlings female, which means climate change is out here running a matriarchy program on Florida’s beaches, and I think about that constantly. I once explained it to Marnie’s book club in such detail that they now call me Turtle Girl, which—fine. There are worse brands. I have a t-shirt that says SHELL YEAH on it. I’m wearing it right now.

The sun is doing its nightly showoff routine, the water’s gone pink and gold, and a pelican that is statistically probably not Carl but that I greet as Carl anyway sails past the pier. This is the part of the job they can’t put in the grant reports. You can’t cite a sunset.

My phone buzzes. Renata, from the environmental agency, and I answer on the first ring because I’m hoping for news about my dumping report.

“Abby.” She sounds odd. Careful. “That footage you sent over. Did you post any of it publicly?”

“On my research blog, yeah. Just a clip. Why, do you need me to take it down for the case? I can take it down.”

There’s a pause with texture to it.

“It might be a good idea,” Renata says, “to take it down. And Abby—the registration on that hull came back interesting. I passed it up the chain. Someone may contact you.”

“Interesting like paperwork, or interesting like a bigger fine?”

“Interesting like I’m not supposed to say,” she says. “Take the clip down, okay? Tonight.”

She hangs up before I can ask a follow-up question, which has never happened in my relationship with Renata, a woman who once spent twenty minutes on the phone with me about margin formatting.

“Huh,” I tell the clipboard.

The clipboard, like everyone else in my professional life, offers no comment.

I take the clip down sitting right there in the sand, and I tell myself the weird feeling in my stomach is just low blood sugar, and I mostly even believe it. Besides. I did the right thing. I reported it through official channels like a responsible citizen. If the boat belongs to somebodyinteresting, that’s the Coast Guard’s problem now, not mine. I study turtles. Nobody sends a strongly worded anything to the turtle lady.

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, all the way through packing up my kit and shaking the sand out of my sneakers and walking back to where my sad old kayak-hauling Subaru waits in the beach lot.

That’s when I see it the first time. A black SUV, parked across the lot, engine running. Tinted windows, the works. It looks like it got lost on its way to a movie about the Secret Service.

I notice it the way you notice anything shiny and out of place in a town where the median vehicle is a pickup with a cooler in the bed. Which is to say, I notice it, invent a story where it belongs to a rich tourist looking for the resort two towns over, and forget it by dinner.