Beached_A Mer Cavallo Mystery

by Micki Browning

  "I'll be fine."

  "Then it's time you got ready." He increased speed. "I set up the decoy gear while you gals were gabbing. Gina has yours all set up in the cabin. You got time for a safety check. Remember you need to be over-weight so you'll go in negatively buoyant."

  It was going to happen. Suddenly her stomach churned as if she'd swallowed an entire school of grunts and they were doing their best to swim out of her belly.

  "You can scrap this any time before you splash, but if you're going to do this..." Leroy said. "Well, best get going."

  A head bob was all she could manage. She took her empty gear bag and entered the cabin. Gina held Mer's mask and a bottle of defog. Her assembled gear was propped by the couch.

  "Showtime!" The deputy set the items in the galley sink. "Let's get you ready."

  Mer sat on the cabin couch and slid her feet into her wetsuit and drew it up to her waist. Thrusting her arms into the sleeves, she shrugged it up over her shoulders. "Zip me?"

  Gina grabbed the lanyard and pulled.

  The restricting neoprene made breathing difficult and Mer practiced a few deep breaths while Gina lifted Mer's gear onto the couch.

  Mer turned the air on, checked her gauges and confirmed the weight. She flayed the buoyancy compensator vest open and sat on the couch. Gina guided her arms through the BC and helped cinch it up so Mer didn't have to twist.

  "I defogged your mask and here are your fins," Gina said. "The gunnels are fairly high. If you can, stay low. I'm going to move up to the bow and prance around a bit. Hopefully, anyone watching will be tracking me. The quicker you can do this, the better."

  "Got it." Mer said.

  Gina handed Mer her mask. "Captain, how we doing?" she shouted.

  "Two-minute warning."

  "Anyone on the horizon?"

  "Just the Dock Holiday."

  "Alrighty." Gina did a last minute examination of Mer's equipment. "I'm leaving. Count to ten and go. You'll be great."

  And she was gone.

  Mer counted the beats. Ten interminable seconds that she ticked off with her dive watch. She settled her mask over her face and wiggled her jaw to make sure she could equalize her ears on the way down. Satisfied, she opened the cabin door. The Dock Holiday floated off starboard and she shot an estimated bearing to the other boat.

  Leroy throttled back and gave her a nod.

  Mer walked across the deck, slipped on her fins, and strode off the platform into the endless blue of the Atlantic.

  29

  The water greeted Mer with a slap that reverberated all the way into her fillings and flooded her mask. Maybe she should have asked Selkie for advice.

  With the extra weight she wore, she sank quickly. The drone of Finders Keeper's engines cut through the water. Even though she knew the boat was traveling away from her, her brain couldn't decipher the direction of the sound.

  First things first. Mer feathered air into her vest to slow her descent. Now, safely away from the slicing propellers, she needed to stabilize her buoyancy and start her swim. She tilted her head back and cleared her mask. The snorkel was gone. In hindsight, she should have removed it. Lesson learned.

  Leveling her compass, she focused on the dial, adjusted her position, and kicked. No red and white dive flag flew over her position to warn people of her underwater presence. She needed to keep deep enough to avoid any incoming boat traffic until she arrived at the Dock Holiday.

  Powerful kicks propelled her across the sand and over an eel garden. Hundreds of small pencil-thin brown eels poked their heads out of their burrows and swayed in the surge. They reminded her of prairie dogs. Her shadow swept over them, and they disappeared in a blink.

  Grecian Rocks, a half-mile long spur and grove reef, loomed in front of her. A shallow reef, it earned its name because at certain tides, the coral jutted above the water and was often mistaken for rocks.

  She found the encrusted cannon embedded in the reef. It served as her landmark and placed her about seventy-five feet south of where she wanted to be.

  Too early for other dive charters, the waters held only the noises of the reef—clicks, crunches, and the surf crashing against the shallowest corals. Confident she was safe from boat traffic, she surfaced. The Dock Holiday bobbed on the nearest mooring. Phoenix stood on the deck wearing shorts and a bikini top. As soon as she sighted Mer, Phoenix swung her arm in an arc and tapped the top of her head with her fist. Mer returned the signal indicating she was fine, and then ducked under water to avoid the surface chop while she swam the rest of the way to the boat.

  At the swim platform, she handed her fins to Phoenix.

  "You want to shuck your tank in the water?" the archeologist asked. "I can haul it up. Save you some wear and tear on your body."

  "I just hit the water from a moving boat. I can climb the ladder."

  "Ha! I suppose you can."

  Mer pulled herself up the aluminum ladder. Water shed from her gear as she paused at the top. Skipper stood at the helm watching Finders Keepers shrink in the distance.

  "It's a sad day when a captain watches his boat disappear without him." He narrowed his eyes. "You better be right about this, girlie."

  No pressure.

  Phoenix walked Mer to the bench and guided her tank into the holder. "Good thing you're here. Another ten minutes and we'd have killed each other."

  Skipper tossed a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth. "What'd you call 'em? Philosophical differences?"

  "Surprised you remembered that, being multi-syllabic words and all," Phoenix shot back.

  "Only takes half the syllables to say you're wrong."

  Mer swiveled her head between the two of them and briefly wondered who'd win if they came to blows. Hopefully, she'd never find out. Mer eased out of her gear and gingerly tugged the wetsuit to her waist. The sun was still low on the horizon and stingy with warmth.

  "Your dry bag is on the dashboard," Phoenix said.

  "Thanks." Mer stowed her fins under the bench and clipped her mask to the wet BC, tucking her gauges out of the way in case the tank shifted. She pulled on a T-shirt, but left her wetsuit at half-mast. "So, what's next?"

  "Ain't going nowhere if one of you don't unhook us," Skipper barked.

  This was going to be a long day.

  Mer released the mooring line and Skipper set course for the El Infante.

  He spit shells into a cup. A stray hull stuck to his front tooth. "Time to mow the lawn."

  Off the reef, he opened up the engines and the boat bumped across the swells at a brisk pace.

  Mer shouted over the combined noise of wind, engines and thumping hull. "Mow the lawn?"

  "Girlie, you're gonna have to learn the lingo if you go salvaging with me."

  Phoenix interjected, "We're not salvaging anything. We're here to discover and preserve."

  "Your fancy museums would be empty, weren't for us."

  "There's more to a site than treasure. How do things relate to each other? Who did they belong to? Salvors don't give a fig about historical significance. If it's not shiny, who cares? Treasure hunters are nothing but glorified grave robbers."

  "Don't see how writing a university paper on it makes it any less grave robbing."

  Phoenix squared off on Skipper, as fired up as the bird tattooed on her back.

  Mer interrupted. "I'm not going to learn the lingo if no one tells me what it means."

  Skipper glanced over his shoulder at her. "Mowing the lawn—"

  "Geez, at least give her context." Phoenix pointed at a torpedo-shaped device tucked under the port bench, "That is a cesium-vapor marine magnetometer, otherwise known as a fish. When it passes over ferrous material, it detects the change in the earth's magnetic field. This one belongs to the university and costs more than the GDP of some third-world countries."

  "Don't know what was wrong with mine," Skipper said.

  "Other than it being on another boat?" Phoenix swung her backpack off the dashboard and pulled out
a laptop. "Once we get inside our search area, we'll lower the fish into the water and tow it behind the boat. Give or take, each row will be a mile long. Then we'll jog over about seventy-five feet and take another pass. We keep doing that until we've surveyed the whole area."

  Simple and repetitive. "Mowing the lawn," Mer said.

  "Bingo. Provided you have a captain who knows what he's doing, the data you collect is amazingly accurate. The trick is keeping the magnetometer about ten feet above the seabed."

  "You think it's as easy as following lines on a screen, you're welcome to try your hand at it," Skipper groused.

  Phoenix leaned closer to Mer and lowered her voice. "I can already tell just from watching him that he knows his stuff. No sense giving him a false sense of importance though."

  "How does the fish log the hits?" Mer asked.

  "Downloaded direct to this computer. It's pretty zoomy." She slapped the cover of her laptop. "Each magnetometer reading is stamped with time and position info. We're looking for a sine-wave spike, followed by a dip, and then it should even out at baseline again."

  "Sounds fairly straightforward."

  Phoenix propped her sunglasses on her head. "Only because computer software translates the majority of the data. Fortunately, we're searching a relatively shallow area. Provided we don't get hung up on reefs, we can still pull ten or so knots. When we're through mowing, we'll dive the hits, poke around a bit. Maybe get lucky."

  Mer didn't believe in luck. Hope without hard work rarely led to success. She believed in the scientific method—but to date, her methodology for finding a legendary ship left a lot to be desired. She didn't have enough facts to employ deductive reasoning as a method of elimination. Instead, she found herself in the wild-ass guess territory of the scientific community: abductive reasoning.

  If there were a ship, then its likeliest location would be within these parameters. Sure, the hypothesis was still based on the best information available, but when the evidence was drawn from a legend, a painting, a mystery, and an egomaniac in a wheelchair parsing out a cryptic message, how accurate could the hypothesis really be?

  They didn't need luck. They needed a miracle.

  30

  They'd been mowing the lawn for hours and the sun had passed its zenith. Until they had coordinates to dive, Mer could do nothing but stay out of the way and try to avoid getting sunburned.

  At first, she watched Skipper. The first two times she'd interacted with him, he'd been behind a bar—a man of indeterminate age whose expression suggested that he'd just as soon kick a patron out of the bar as serve her.

  A different man stood at the helm. He didn't wear sunglasses and his squint deepened the lines radiating from the corner of his eyes. While he wasn't exactly smiling, the stubborn line of his mouth had relaxed. Wrap a bandana around his head, give him a flintlock or saber, and with his wide-set stance and gold hoop earring, he could be a pirate.

  Phoenix's earlier words reminded Mer that the task at hand was not an easy one. Skipper maintained course, monitored his depth, adjusted his speed, and kept the magnetometer in position over a constantly changing seafloor.

  He turned for another pass, the fish swinging wide before settling behind them.

  "A photo'd last longer." He shoved another handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth.

  Mer blushed. "How long have you been a captain?"

  "How old are you?" he asked.

  "Thirty-three."

  "Add a couple years to that."

  "Navy?"

  "'Til I got kicked out."

  Phoenix sat sideways on the bench opposite the helm, her back to the bulkhead. She cradled her computer on her lap and held a deli sandwich in her hand. "Let me guess. Following the rules turned out to be a tad difficult?"

  "Suppose you could call it that. They found out I joined at sixteen."

  "I might come around to liking you yet," Phoenix said. She bit off a mouthful that would make a thirteen-year-old boy proud.

  "And to think I managed all these years without your approval."

  Phoenix returned to her computer, occasionally letting loose a bark when the magnetometer registered a particularly strong hit.

  Mer grabbed another of the sandwiches from the cooler and extended it to Skipper. He shook his head so she unwrapped it for herself. The ocean air always made her hungry and things that tasted mediocre on land often tasted far better at sea.

  "Hey Skipper." Phoenix crumpled the paper sandwich wrapper into a ball and handed it off to Mer to throw in the trash bucket. "Run one more pass, would you?"

  "That'll take us over the El Infante."

  "I know. I want a comparison reading."

  Skipper swung the Dock Holiday and paralleled the shore for one final pass.

  At the end of the mile, Phoenix stood and wedged the computer on the left side of the dashboard. "That's a wrap." She twined her fingers behind her back and straightened her arms into a stretch. "Time to reel in our fish."

  Skipper placed the props in neutral. Mer managed the cable and when it neared, Phoenix hauled the magnetometer into the boat.

  "I can do a quick analysis," Phoenix said. "Identify a site to dive before we head in. But I'll have a much better idea of what's going on out here after I run the data tonight." She pointed at the half sandwich Mer was about to put back in the cooler. "You going to eat that?"

  "All yours."

  "Thanks." The professor studied the computer screen while she chewed. "I think we should start here." Phoenix tapped the screen. Taking another bite, she spoke around the turkey. "I'll print maps for us to use tomorrow, but this hit is practically right underneath us." She shared the coordinates with Skipper.

  "Tell me what to do." Mer had explored plenty of shipwrecks in her life, most of which were steel-hulled and clearly identifiable as ships. By comparison, the dive on the Winchester, when she'd first met Phoenix, illustrated how efficient time was at ravaging wooden vessels, chewing away at the timbers until only pins, ballast, and inorganic artifacts remained to tell the tale of shipboard life. Still, her body hummed with excitement. After all the imagining, the hoping, the planning...they might actually find the wreck.

  Phoenix polished off the remainder of the sandwich and wiped her hands against her shorts. "Hold that thought." She disappeared into the V-berth and returned holding two handheld metal detectors. "Ever use one of these before?" She passed one of the detectors to Mer.

  It had a long handle with an arm brace at one end and an angled flat disk at the other that resembled a miniature steering wheel. A small yellow waterproof control box attached to the middle. "My dad combed the beach after storms when I was a kid. I played with his metal detector once or twice," Mer said.

  "Same idea except these work underwater. Wave it back and forth over the sand, under ledges. It'll squeal if it detects anything we need to take a closer look at." She indicated the controls. "On, off. The needle gauge will help you pinpoint your target. Pretty simple. Best thing about this particular beaut is it ignores minerals." She handed Mer a pair of headphones that looked no different than those used above ground. "Self explanatory, I hope."

  Skipper called over his shoulder. "We're here."

  In short order, they anchored, hoisted their dive flag, and the two women geared up.

  "Expanding circle, grid, jackstay?" Mer named off the common patterns. "How do you want to search?"

  Phoenix shouted over her shoulder, "Hey Skipper, how close are we to the coordinates?"

  "Any closer and you'd be the coordinates."

  Phoenix leaned over the side. "Visibility's good. How about we use the anchor line as ground zero. You go north, I'll go south and we'll do independent U-search patterns. Meet back at the center each turn. That way we won't be knocking into each other. Find something interesting, bang your tank."

  "Sounds good."

  Mer entered first. The water washed the warmth of the day off her body. She surfaced to the side of the platform and treaded wat
er until Phoenix entered, then Skipper handed them the detectors and headphones.

  Mer looked at Phoenix. "Ready?"

  The woman nodded. In unison, they dumped the air from their BCs and descended to the bottom.

  * * *

  Mer and Phoenix regrouped at the anchor. They clapped on their headphones, switched on their metal detectors, and swam in opposite directions. They'd agreed on a fifty-kick cycle before turning a quarter turn east, finning a body length and returning. If all worked out, they'd come face to face again, and then repeat the process until Phoenix called it quits. Then they'd return to the anchor line and complete the same search pattern westward.

  Mer snugged the brace against her forearm as she swept the metal detector in gentle arcs in front of her. She floated about a foot off the bottom, but the metal detector skimmed the sand. Silt billowed in little puffs around the disk, leaving particles suspended in the water column.

  The headphones muffled the already muted sounds around her. Despite feeling the press of water against her body, the lack of sound somehow distanced her from the experience. The rhythmic back and forth of the metal detector coupled with counting her fin kicks lulled her into a near meditative state.

  She approached the end of her first length and stared off into the distance. Somewhere out there was a shipwreck. If not the Thirteenth Galleon, then another ship. Another story.

  On a day like today, it was hard to imagine the ocean as anything other than a gentle cradle, as soothing as a lullaby. But ships rarely bilged against the reef on calm days. They might languish in the doldrums, but they didn't tear the bottom of their ship apart and sink.

  No, that required storm-whipped waves and wind that shredded sails and snapped masts. Currents that pushed ships into the shallows, grinding them against razor-edged corals, and then dragged them back to sea.