Page 60 of No Escape

I stayed in the pool, moving the hose forward and lifting it onto the pool deck as the rest of the team dragged it across the pool deck. Thankfully, we managed to get it right on the first try. When Tito pulled the can off in the bottom of the hot tub, water started gushing out of the hose into the hot tub.

“It worked!” I exclaimed. “Great job, guys.”

I carefully climbed out of the pool and padded over to the hot tub, watching the speed and volume of the flow. It was a rough guesstimate, but I calculated it would take about thirty minutes to remove the desired amount of water. That would make it about 2:20. That gave us just over an hour to complete the rest of the challenge.

Hopefully that will be enough time.

“Lexi, come here, please,” Juliette said. She and Oscar had returned to the deck at the middle point of the pool and were talking softly. Juliette held the dripping skimmer pole. “While you guys were working with the hose, Oscar and I took a closer look to see if we could disassemble the last remaining pool recliner for parts. We might have been able to make a useful pole retriever if we had all three recliners and were able to quickly disassemble them, which, without tools, would be highly unlikely. Added to which, two of them are currently residing at the bottom of the pool. Oscar and I tried to pull them up with the pool skimmer, but they kept slipping off the hook.”

“So, we’re out of luck?”

“Not entirely, as we’ve just discovered something that looks promising,” Oscar interjected. “Well, Juliette did.” He beamed at his wife. It was so sweet, my heart tripped slightly. I wondered if I had the same adoring expression when I looked at Slash.

“What did you discover?”

Juliette shook the pool skimmer slightly, sending water droplets over my feet. “It occurred to me that maybe that square wasn’t the only invisible thing in the pool. So, Oscar and I tried walking carefully around the edge of the pool, periodically sticking our feet in, looking for anything that might indicate the presence of another object. But we found nothing. Then I tried to put myself in the mind of the puzzle maker. He’d expect us to look for a pathway of some kind to get to the middle of the water, right? Logically, that pathway would have to be anchored to the sides. I told Oscar to get the skimmer and stick it in the pool at about a forty-five-degree angle. Within the first two meters, Oscar hit something. I think we’ve found one of the walkway anchors.”

There was a splash at the end of the pool by the cans, and I turned to see Vittoria get in the pool, with her head perilously close to the water. She was hanging on to one of the cans, using it as a float. It was rocking unsteadily as she tried to ride on the can to keep her head out of the water. As I watched in horror, she almost tipped over as she tried to find her way back to the steps, her head coming within inches of the water.

Before I could move, Tito raced over to the steps and into the water. He slowed as he got close to Vittoria so the waves from his motion wouldn’t further disturb her precarious balance.

“Hold still,” Tito instructed her. “Keep your head up and I’ll pull you back until you can stand up.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Lexi Carmichael

Tito slowly pulled Vittoria to the pool steps. When she was finally able to stand, I realized I’d been holding my breath for the last minute.

“Thanks, Tito,” Vittoria said. “That was closer than I’d like to admit. I’ve used floats in the water for many years, so I was confident I could ride one of the cans to the middle, but the shallow depth of the cans, the stiff sides, and my pregnant belly made them much harder to ride than I expected. Clearly, it didn’t work. We’ll need another approach.”

“No problem, Vittoria,” I said. “It’s just one more option we can eliminate, which is useful in determining the best course of action.” I pointed at the hot tub. “In the meantime, can you keep an eye on the water level and let us know when it’s getting close to full?”

“Of course,” she said, shaking the water from her hands and legs.

“Come on, Lexi.” Juliette tugged on my arm. “I’ll show you what we found.”

My in-laws and I walked along the side of the pool, away from the end with the siphon hose. Approximately eight feet from the center, Oscar stopped and put the skimmer into the water. It hit something solid.

I bent down at the edge of the pool, peering into the water. Now that I knew it was there, I could see it. “It’s a glass platform about a foot under the water. It looks like it’s about a half meter wide and curves upward toward the edges. I bet that makes it harder to slip off if someone was to walk on it. I’m not sure how far it goes out, but my guess is all the way to the center of the pool, directly above the float.”

To test my theory, Oscar pushed the skimmer as far out as it would go, and from that I was able to confirm the invisible shelf pointed on a diagonal toward the square in the center of the pool. Running the skimmer back toward the edge, the platform stopped about a foot from the edge of the pool.

“This glass or plastic walkway is our access to the float and eventually the disc,” Juliette said. “We just have to be careful with the first step.”

No kidding, I thought. We had a means to the middle, but what was the best way to test it out? If the walkway was a red herring solution—much like trying to float on the cans—and wouldn’t hold our weight, then we’d be sunk, literally. I was also troubled about the slippery walkway and not being able to see it while walking on it.

Still, it was a way forward.

“This is amazing deductive work by both of you,” I said to Oscar and Juliette. I felt ridiculously proud of my in-laws and couldn’t wait to tell Slash about their contributions. “Well done.”

Tito knelt beside me and reached out to touch the walkway. “Das ist clever.I’m confident the curved effect on the path will help keep us from slipping off.”

“The key will be to make sure we don’t accidentally step off the edge,” Stefan said.

The mere thought of standing on a glass walkway in the middle of a swimming pool caused me to shudder. I hoped no one noticed.

“Maybe we could first lay out the skimmer pole out along the walkway to help identify where it is,” Vittoria called out from near the hot tub.

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