Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  But where were his wife and son? Faye had said she was so close to the marina that she would beat Benoit and his guys. Well, she hadn’t. Every second that ticked past made Joe antsier.

  He tried to call her, and her phone went straight to voice mail. This did not make him feel any better.

  Impatiently, he showed Benoit the sherds and the sextant and the map, and started explaining what he thought they meant. The clock kept ticking. Still no Faye.

  ***

  Faye was finding her boat chase to be remarkably tame. Steve didn’t know anyone was on his tail, so he wasn’t traveling particularly fast. Well, yes, he was, but Faye was known for her speed. Right this minute, she felt like she was just puttering along.

  There was another reason for her lack of speed. She was making good use of the only advantage she had—her binoculars—and they enabled her to hang back. She didn’t know whether he had a pair, too, but he had no reason to be looking for a tail. She presumed he was operating with his naked eyes, which meant that she could lurk just inside her binoculars’ limits and he’d never know she was there. Judging by his heading, she grew more sure with every minute that Steve was indeed taking the girl out to the island they shared.

  She wished Joe or Benoit had answered her text. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? She wasn’t moving at top speed, but she’d been traveling inexorably away from them for every one of those minutes. Faye pulled the phone out of her pocket, hoping the wind had drowned the sound of a return text.

  No. It hadn’t, and the truth was so much worse. The wind had drowned the familiar sound of a dying phone. Her battery hadn’t survived the hard work she’d put it through that morning. All those calls and texts to Benoit and Reuss and Joe had taken their toll. Thank God she’d had a chance to get that last text out before she went incommunicado. She’d guess that Benoit’s people had boats that would move like bats out of hell, so they’d be showing up soon.

  She trained her binoculars behind her, hoping to see the cavalry riding to her rescue. Not yet. What would she do if they didn’t show?

  Another, worse, question bubbled into her brain. What would she do if that text hadn’t gone through? Was her phone already dying when she sent it? Had she been momentarily out of range? If so, she would have gotten an error message, or maybe a message that the text would go through once she was back in range. And maybe one of those things had happened, but now the screen was dark and blank, so she couldn’t check.

  Should she turn back? If her rescuers were en route, they’d probably be in binocular range very soon. If they weren’t coming, then she needed to go all the way back to the marina to get help, then turn around and head back out. This would give Steve nearly an hour to take Amande…anywhere. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the girl without a protector, even such a feeble protector as herself.

  She tried hard to think of other reasons than murder for Steve to take Amande.

  To bond with her as a potential adoptive father? Doubtful.

  To get her to help him with his search for island treasure? Maybe.

  Miranda’s fate nagged at her. Faye thought she’d probably been murdered on a boat, then dropped into the water. Is that what Steve had in mind for Amande, opening the way for him to jockey for ownership of everything—the island, the houseboat, and the stock? Faye could think of no reason why it wasn’t.

  And Dane. He was on the boat, so Faye figured he and Steve were working together. It made sense. They both wanted the island, and Amande kept them from controlling it.

  She wondered why Dane had never just come out and asked how much Amande wanted for her share. Certainly he wasn’t rich, but the girl needed money. More to the point, Didi needed money, and she would have cut Dane a deal, even if Amande didn’t want her to sell. Then Faye remembered that she was dealing with a treasure hunter. He wouldn’t want to give away the secret of what he’d found and where he’d found it. No, cutting a shady deal with Steve made a lot more sense than going for a straightforward purchase.

  Faye kept worrying over her text to Joe and Benoit. Even if they didn’t get it, they had known she was out on the boat, and they were smart men. When she didn’t show up, surely they’d be able to figure out where in this vast expanse of water to look for her.

  Her common sense asked her how much difference her presence made to Amande. What could Faye do to save the girl from a large and dangerous man?

  Not much, without a weapon more fearsome than an archaeologist’s trowel. But if the worst happened…if Steve wasn’t taking Amande to the island to hunt for treasure…if he was planning to do to the girl what he’d done to her uncle and grandmother…

  If someone had come along right after Hebert and Miranda had been stabbed and thrown into the water, maybe they could have been saved. If Amande went into the water bleeding, then Faye, with her binoculars, would know. She could be there instantly. The slender chance that this was true drove Faye forward, not back.

  Nobody had to tell Faye that desperate mothers placed their bets on slender chances every single day. She stroked Michael’s cheek and adjusted his hat to better shade his face, glad that he’d drifted off to sleep again. And she kept the boat moving.

  Chapter Thirty

  Amande had caught the first whiff of oil when they were barely out of sight of the marina. The further they traveled, the more its mineral odor invaded her awareness. Now, after nearly an hour on the water, her eyes burned and her mouth tasted like she’d been sipping turpentine.

  Yet another gleaming streak passed beneath the boat as the oil slick reached its fingers inland. Barataria Bay spread out around her, and she couldn’t remember when they’d last seen another boat. Of course all the fishing boats had gone home. Why would they be out here now? Who would want to eat fish taken from these waters?

  What was her island going to look like when they finally got there?

  ***

  Joe squatted beside the sextant and the wrinkled map wrapping it. There was no question that it depicted the area surrounding Amande’s island. In his mind, he knew that Steve had a claim on it, too. In his heart, though, it belonged to Amande.

  Catching Benoit’s eye, Joe jerked his chin in the direction of a tiny ceramic chip that looked pretty much like a fleck of dirt, since pottery is nothing more than petrified dirt. It lay a few feet from another, similar chip. Then he turned and jerked his chin at two more potsherds lying on the floor of the houseboat’s main cabin.

  “It ain’t much different from tracking deer. The girl left us a trail from the houseboat to where Steve Daigle has been mooring his boat. There’s a few drops of water on the deck over there, probably splashed up when he shoved off. It only makes sense that she was on the boat when it left.”

  “You hunt?” Benoit might as well have asked Joe if he breathed. “You see anything else my investigators might’ve missed?”

  “Fifty feet that way,” Joe said, waving in the direction of the marina, “is a low spot where water collects on the dock. Next to it is a footprint, nearly dry, where my little boy stomped in the water. I hope that means he wasn’t on Daigle’s boat. If he wasn’t, then my wife wasn’t. I can guarantee you that. Thirty feet past that little footprint is the slip where we keep the boat Faye rented for the project. My guess is that Michael stomped in the water while my wife was on her way to that boat. There’s no sign that the boat ever came back, even though she told me she’d be here by now. I think she figured out where Steve was taking Amande. If so, then I know where she’s going.”

  Benoit nodded, but Joe wasn’t finished. “I’m going to go rent a boat from Manny, then I’m getting on the water and going out to this island here.” He pointed at the map. “You police people can do what you please. You can come with me or not, but I’m going.”

  ***

  Amande could tell that
the tide was high, because her island was far smaller than it had been during her last visit. It was hardly bigger than the low rise beneath the cabin and its adjacent copse of trees. Iridescent brown smears marked the sliver of sand that remained, and the hot sun made the stink of oil even more pronounced. Steve had cut the motor when the island came in sight, but he still had one arm around her like a crawdad’s pincer. The knife had stayed at her throat for the entire ride while he operated the tiller with his other hand.

  “Where is it? Tell me where it is.”

  Steve didn’t sound rational. He’d never sounded rational.

  “Where’s what?” She hated the sound of her voice, squeaky and shrill. If he planned to kill her, she didn’t want to die sounding like a scared little girl.

  “I’m not talking to you. Where’s the wreck, Sechrist?”

  Dane had been silent and still since they left the houseboat. It wasn’t obvious to Amande whether he considered himself Steve’s partner or his prisoner. “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “I’ve never believed that. You say it all the time, but I don’t believe it. You been looking too long, you been spending too much money, you been offering me a big pile of money for an island that ain’t worth nothing. Where is it?”

  “I never found anything but a pile of ballast stones. Honestly. The pile was big enough to be a ship. For a while, I thought it was. I’ve been burning time and money ever since, because I’m just so close. When I found the underwater coins, I thought I was in the debris trail. Then nothing. Then I found another coin of the right age, and some worthless things like nails and hinges were with it, but they were on the island, on the far side from the sunken stones. Now I’m thinking the crew dumped the stones during a storm to keep from running aground and maybe the wreck isn’t as close to them as I thought.”

  He scanned the horizon like a man looking for something precious that he lost just yesterday, something that he could find if he looked a little longer and a little harder.

  Steve’s mouth was so close to Amande’s ear that she could feel the spit when he talked. But he still wasn’t talking to her. She was only a tool to control Dane, and she was useful as a source of information that could lead to a boundless treasure. From the way he moved when he held her body against his, she’d begun to fear that he intended to use her for other things far worse.

  One thing was clear. Her worth began and ended with her usefulness to Steve. How could her mother have lived with this man?

  She hated the sound of his voice in her ear as he taunted Dane. “Maybe it worked. Dumping the stones, I mean. Maybe there ain’t no treasure ship here at all. If they dumped the stones to save the ship, then you gotta take into consideration that maybe they saved the ship. Don’t tell me you been wasting my time.”

  Amande thought this was a remarkably astute observation from someone as stupid as Steve.

  Even in crisis, Dane couldn’t be made to imagine that his treasure ship wasn’t there. He rose to its defense. “Then why did Amande and I both find gold and silver? You don’t throw the treasure overboard unless you’re on the verge of going down. It’s human nature. If a crew gets desperate enough to throw away gold, the ship is already lost, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. There’s a treasure ship here waiting for me. It’s a sure thing.”

  Amande knew enough about statistics to know that “ninety-nine times out of a hundred” was not at all the same as a sure thing.

  “Then show me the big pile of rocks and show me where you found the coins, asshole. I’ll take it from there.”

  Dane sat for a moment, looking from the water to the knife to Steve’s face. For a moment, Amande thought he was going to defy a man with a deadly weapon, just to protect a treasure ship that might not actually exist. Then she saw the dreamer’s light in Dane’s eyes fade as he made his choice.

  “It’s back there. We came right over it a minute ago,” he said, gesturing behind Steve.

  The big man turned to look over his shoulder. “Where?”

  Behind them was nothing but open water, dotted by grasses.

  “I use my GPS nowadays, but I didn’t have one when I first started diving, so I learned to use landmarks. See how some of these islands are big enough to have a few trees? I picked four of them. Draw a line in your head from this one to that one, and from that one to that other one over there. X marks the spot.”

  Dane gestured with both hands at faraway trees clinging to tiny specks of dry land, and Steve turned further in his seat as he tried to spot the imaginary crosshairs marking an old pile of submerged stones. Then Amande found herself facedown in the bottom of the boat as Dane grabbed with his right hand at the hilt of the knife Steve was holding to her throat, using his left hand to throw her clear.

  If Dane hadn’t been such a gentleman, things might have turned out differently. As a slender but well-built six-footer, he was no physical match for a man who was his equal in height, but weighed half-again as much. And he was no match in ruthlessness for a man who had killed at least twice.

  However, Amande, too, was a slender but well-built six-footer. If Dane hadn’t tried so hard to get her out of reach of the knife, they might have been able together to overpower Steve. Failing that, she might have been able to go for the tiller and gain control of the boat, although heaven only knew what good that would have done.

  Instead, Dane’s mutiny was over in seconds, and it ended with a blade in his throat.

  Amande was astonished by how quickly Steve heaved Dane’s bleeding body overboard and held his head underwater until there was no doubt he was dead. This explained a lot about the investigators’ failure to find physical evidence of her grandmother’s and uncle’s murders. There was hardly any mess to be seen aboard the boat after Dane’s murder, beyond a few blood spatters on Steve’s face and shoulders. Steve had been able to prepare for the other killings, choosing his time and method of attack, so there likely would have been even less telltale gore. Amande supposed this was how it would be when he eventually killed her.

  Why couldn’t she stop thinking about Gola George and his bloodstained white silk shirts?

  ***

  Faye was still shaking. This would be a poor time to break down completely, body and soul, but what really is the appropriate response to watching a young and vital man be knifed to death? For a timeless time, she’d thought it was Amande’s limp body being thrown into the bay, and she’d heedlessly gunned her motor and rushed toward the scene of a murder. Steve had been busy being a killer, so she’d had no sign that he’d heard or seen her before hurrying from the scene.

  She knew long before she got near the body that it belonged to Dane and not to Amande. Once again, the binoculars came in very handy. They showed her the sun glinting on his golden hair. They also told her that he was floating facedown with no sign of a struggle, so she knew he was beyond help. They did not tell her the right thing to do.

  Every instinct told her to go fish the poor man’s body out of the water. It seemed so disrespectful to leave him there. But she didn’t think she was strong enough to do it alone, and all the while she was trying, Steve would be taking Amande further away.

  When the binoculars showed her fins—many fins and big ones—gathering around Dane’s body, she knew what she had to do. She couldn’t take this boat into a group of sharks and fight them for a bleeding body. When she made the decision to leave Dane’s corpse defenseless, that’s when the shaking started. There were no tears yet, but they would come. Right now, Faye needed to get control of her rebellious body. She had no time to go into shock, or even to just sit and weep.

  Why couldn’t she look away from Dane? In a totally inadequate way, training her binoculars on him felt like a way to be his companion on this last journey. As she drew closer, she could see streams of his blood weaving through floating bands of oil.

  She imagined
that she could smell the blood, but the truth was that its iron odor was swamped by the unnatural stench of petroleum. She forced herself to point the binoculars at Steve’s boat, because she needed to focus on maintaining the right distance and on formulating a plan. Every passing minute that didn’t involve Amande’s corpse being thrown overboard into the water and oil and blood was a good one.

  She busied herself by making a mental list of her advantages in a contest with Steve for Amande’s life. She didn’t have a weapon, and he surely did. It would be reasonable to assume he had a knife. It would also be reasonable to pray that he did not have a gun, so she did.

  While she was at it, she prayed that Joe had gotten her message and that he was coming to her rescue at top speed.

  In the meantime, Faye’s binoculars were her only inarguable advantage. She’d combed through the equipment stored on the boat for something that resembled a weapon, but her pointy and sharp-edged trowel was the best she could do. She wasn’t actually sure it was a better weapon than the small pocketknife she carried everywhere, but it was bigger and heavier. That must count for something.

  Michael stirred in the bottom of the boat, and Faye’s denial cracked. What did she think she was going to do? She couldn’t walk into a confrontation while holding him by the hand, but her mind wouldn’t stop cataloging the things that Steve might be planning to do to Amande. Why did parents ever choose to have more than one child? There was no way to put each of them first, always.

  Her pale and weak plan traded heavily on the binoculars. After Steve’s boat reached the island, Faye would lurk in her boat, far from shore, and watch for a chance to…um…do something heroic. Her grasp of the details was still a little vague.

  ***

  Steve dropped the anchor and stood, wrapping both arms around Amande and dragging her with him as he climbed over the side and into the water. She went down on her knees, drenching her clothes from the neck down, then he hoisted her to her feet. “The coins, bitch. Where did you find them?”