by Nora Roberts
Often when his fingers felt like icicles and the exposed skin around his mouth was blue with cold, Matthew dreamed about the days when he’d dived for pleasure as well as profit.
In warm, mirrorlike water in the company of jeweled fish. He remembered what it had felt like to see that flash of gold, or a blackened disk of silver.
But treasure-hunting was a gamble, and he was a man with debts to pay. Doctors, lawyers, rehab centers. Jesus, the more he worked, the more he owed. Ten years before if anyone had suggested his life would turn out to be a cycle of work and bills to be paid, he would have laughed in their faces.
Instead, he’d discovered that life was laughing in his.
Through the murk, he signaled to his team. It was time to start the slow rise to the surface. The damned ugly Reliant lay on its side, already half hacked away by the crew. Matthew poured salt on his own wounds by studying it as he stopped at the first rest point.
To think he’d once dreamed of galleons and man-of-wars. Privateers bursting at the seams with bullion. Worse, he’d had one only to lose it. And everything else.
Now he was little better than a junkyard dog, harvesting and guarding scraps. Here, the sea was a cave, dark, hostile, almost colorless, cold as fish blood. A man never felt quite human here—not free and weightless as a diver felt in the live waters, but distant and alien where there was little to see that wasn’t eating or being eaten.
A careless movement sent an icy spurt of water down the neck of his suit, reminding him that like it or not, human he was.
He kicked to the next point, knowing better than to hurry. However cold the water, however tedious the dive, biology and physics were kings here. Once, five years before, he’d watched a careless diver collapse on deck and die painfully from the bends because he’d hurried the rest stops. It wasn’t an experience Matthew intended to have.
Once he’d boarded, Matthew reached for the hot coffee a galley mate offered. When his teeth stopped chattering, he gave his orders to the next team. And he damn well intended to tell Fricke that the men were getting a bonus on this trip.
It pleased him that Fricke, the miserly bastard, was just enough afraid of him to dip a little deeper into his tight pockets.
“Mail came in.” The mate, a scrawny French Canadian who went only by LaRue, shouldered Matthew’s tanks. “Put yours in your cabin.” He grinned, showing a gleaming gold front tooth. “One letter, many bills. Me. I get six letters from six sweethearts. I feel so bad, maybe I give one to you. Marcella, she not so pretty, but she fuck you blind, deaf and dumb, eh?”
Matthew peeled off the hood of his wet suit. The chill Atlantic air breathed frigidly on his ears. “I’ll pick my own women.”
“Then why don’t you? You need you a good bounce or two, Matthew. LaRue, he can spot these things.”
Matthew brooded out toward the cold, gray sea. “Women are a little scarce out here.”
“You come with me to Quebec, Matthew. I show you where to get a good drink and a good lay.”
“Get your mind off sex, LaRue. At this rate, we’re going to be out here another month.”
“If my mind’s all I can get on sex, then it’s going to stay there,” LaRue called out as Matthew stalked away. Chuckling to himself, he took out his precious tobacco pouch to roll one of his favored fat, foul-smelling cigarettes. The boy needed guidance, the wisdom of an older man, and a good fuck.
What Matthew wanted were warm clothes and another shot of coffee. He found the first in his cabin. After he’d tugged on a sweater and jeans, he poked through the envelopes braced under a rock on the small table that served as his desk.
Bills, of course. Medical, the rent on Buck’s apartment in Florida, the lawyer Matthew had hired to square things when Buck had wrecked a bar in Fort Lauderdale, the last statement from the last rehabilitation center he’d hauled Buck into in hopes of drying out his uncle.
They wouldn’t break him, he mused. But they sure as hell weren’t going to leave him a lot to play with. The single letter gave him some pleasure.
Ray and Marla, he thought as he sat down with the rest of his coffee to enjoy it. They never failed. Once a month, rain or shine, wherever he happened to be, they’d get a letter to him.
Not once in eight years had they let him down.
As usual it was a chatty letter of several pages. Marla’s looping, feminine handwriting was offset by Ray’s quick scrawl in notes and messages in the margins. Nearly five years earlier, they’d moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and built a cottage on the sound side of Hatteras Island. Marla would pepper the letters with descriptions of Ray’s puttering around the house, her luck, good or bad, with her garden. Woven through were details of their adventures at sea. Their trips to Greece, Mexico, the Red Sea, their impulsive dives along the coast of the Carolinas.
And of course, they wrote of Tate.
Matthew knew she was nearing thirty, working on her Ph.D., joining varying expeditions. Yet he still saw her as she’d been that long-ago summer. Young and fresh and full of promise. Over the years when he thought of her, it was with a vaguely pleasant nostalgic tug. In his mind, she and those days they’d spent together had taken on a burnished golden hue. Almost too perfect for reality.
He’d long ago stopped dreaming of her.
There were debts to be paid, and plans, still in the dim future, to be settled.
Matthew savored each word on each page. The expected invitation for him to visit touched a chord, making him both wistful and bitter. Three years before, he’d browbeaten Buck into making the trip. The four-day visit had been anything but a success.
Still, he could remember how quietly at home he felt, looking at the serene waters of the sound through the fan of pines and bay trees, smelling Marla’s cooking, listening to Ray talk of the next wreck and the next shot at gold. Until Buck had managed to hitch a ride over to Ocracoke on the ferry and get himself stinking drunk.
There wasn’t any point in going back, Matthew thought. Humiliating himself, putting the Beaumonts in that miserable position. The letters were enough.
When he shuffled the last page to the front, Ray’s crablike handwriting shot Tate, and that summer in the West Indies, into sharp and painful focus.
Matthew, I’ve got some concerns I haven’t shared with Marla. I will, but I wanted to get your thoughts first. You know Tate is in the Pacific, working for SeaSearch. She’s thrilled with the assignment. We all were. But a few days ago, I was researching some stocks for an old client. I had an impulse to invest in SeaSearch myself, a kind of personal tribute to Tate’s success. I discovered that the company is an arm of Trident, which in turn is a part of The VanDyke Corporation. Our VanDyke. Obviously this concerns me. I don’t know if Tate is aware. I strongly doubt it. There’s probably no need for me to worry. I can’t imagine Silas VanDyke would take a personal interest in one of his marine archeologists. It’s doubtful he even remembers her, or would care. And yet, I’m uncomfortable knowing she’s so far away and even remotely associated with him. I haven’t decided if I should contact Tate and let her know what I’ve learned, or leave well enough alone. I’d very much like your thoughts on this.
Matthew, I’d like them in person, if you can find a way to come to Hatteras. There’s something more I want very much to discuss with you. I made an incredible find only a few weeks ago—something I’ve been searching for for nearly eight years. I want to show it to you. When I do, I hope you’ll share my excitement. Matthew, I’m going back for the Isabella. I need you and Buck with me. Please, come to Hatteras and take a look at what I’ve put together before you reject the idea.
She’s ours, Matthew. She’s always been ours. It’s time for us to claim her.
Fondly,
Ray
Jesus. Matthew skipped back to the beginning of the page and read it a second time. Ray Beaumont didn’t believe in dropping his bombshells lightly. In a couple of quick paragraphs he had set off charges that exploded from Tate to VanDyke to the
Isabella.
Go back? Suddenly, fiercely angry, Matthew slapped the letter down on the table. Damned if he’d go back and dredge up his most complete and horrendous failure. He was making his life, wasn’t he? Such as it was. He didn’t need old ghosts tempting him back toward that glint of gold.
He wasn’t a hunter anymore, he thought as he lunged out of the chair to pace the small cabin. He neither wanted nor needed to be. Some men could live on dreams. He had once—and didn’t intend to do so again.
It was money he needed, he fumed, money and time. When both were in his pocket, he would finish what was begun half a lifetime ago over his father’s body. He would find VanDyke, and he would kill him.
And as for Tate, she wasn’t his problem. He’d done her a good turn once, Matthew remembered, and scowled down at the letter on the table. The best turn of her life. If she’d screwed it up by getting hooked into one of VanDyke’s schemes, it was on her head. She was a grown woman now, wasn’t she? With a potload of education and fancy degrees. Goddamn it, she owed him every bit of it, and no one had the right to make him feel responsible for her now.
But he could see her, as she’d been then, awed by a simple silver coin, glowing in his arms, courageously attacking a shark with a diver’s knife.
He swore again, viciously. Then again, quietly. Leaving the letter and the mug where they were, he headed out to the radio room. He needed to make some calls.
Tate entered the room the crew had dubbed “Ground Zero.” It was crammed with computers, keyboards, monitors. The sonar dial glowed green as the needle swept. Remotes for the cameras that took stereophotos were easily at hand.
At the moment, however, the area was more of a rec room for adolescents than a scientific lab.
Dart was in a corner with Bowers, relieving tedium by trouncing the computer at a game of Mortal Combat.
It was late, nearly midnight, and she’d have been better off in her cabin, getting a good night’s sleep or working on her dissertation. But she was restless, and Lorraine had been edgy. The cabin had seemed too small for both of them.
Taking a handful of Dart’s candy, she settled down to watch the monitor that showed the sweep of the seafloor.
It was so dark, she mused. Cold. Tiny luminescent fish hunted food. They moved slowly, surrounded by points of phosphorescence that resembled stars. The soft, even sediments of the sea plane were featureless. Yet there was life. She saw a sea worm, hardly more than a primitive stomach, glide by the camera’s range. The huge eyes of a cystosoma made her smile.
It was, in its own way, a kind of fairy land, she thought. Hardly the wasteland a number of oceanographers had once thought. And certainly not the dumping ground certain industries chose to regard it as. It was colorless, true, but those magically transparent, pulsing fish and animals turned it into an eerie wonder.
Tate was comforted by it, the continuity, the antiquity. The monitor lulled her like an old late-night movie until she was nearly dozing in the chair.
Then she was blinking, her subconscious struggling to transmit to her eyes what she was viewing.
Coral crabs. They would colonize any handy structure. And they were busily doing so. It was wood, she realized, leaning forward. It was the hull of a ship, encrusted with life of the deep sea.
“Bowers.”
“Just a minute, Tate, I gotta finish ragging on this boy.”
“Bowers, now!”
“What’s the hurry?” Forehead furrowed, he swiveled back to her. “Nobody’s going anywhere. Holy hell.” Staring at the monitor, he slipped his chair forward, hitting the necessary controls to stop the camera’s sweep.
But for the beep of the equipment, the room was silent as the three of them stared at the screen.
“It could be her.” Tate’s voice was thin with excitement.
“Could be,” Bowers replied and got to work. “Handle the digitals, Dart. Tate, signal the bridge for full stop.”
They didn’t speak again for several moments. While the tapes ran, Bowers zoomed in closer and sent the camera on a slow sweep.
The wreck was teaming with life. Tate imagined that Litz and the other biologists on board would soon be singing hosannahs. With her lips pressed together, she held her breath. Then let it out on an explosive puff.
“Oh Christ, look! Do you see it?”
Dart’s answer was a nervous giggle. “It’s the wheel. Look at that honey lying there, just waiting for us to come along and find her. She’s a side-wheeler, Bowers. It’s the goddamn beautiful Justine.”
Bowers halted the camera. “Children,” he said and got shakily to his feet. “At a moment like this, I believe I should say something profound.” He laid a hand on his heart. “We’ve done did it.”
With one wild hoot, he grabbed Tate and did a fast boogie. Laughter and excitement had tears rushing to her eyes.
“Let’s wake up the ship,” she decided and dashed off.
She raced to her own cabin first to rouse a cranky Lorraine. “Get down to Ground Zero, now.”
“What? Are we sinking? Go away, Tate. I’m busy being seduced by Harrison Ford.”
“He’ll wait. Get down there.” To ensure obedience, Tate ripped the sheet off Lorraine’s curled, naked body. “But for God’s sake put a robe on first.”
Leaving Lorraine swearing at her, she dashed down the corridor to Hayden’s cabin. “Hayden?” Struggling with giggles, she pounded on his door. “Come on, Hayden, red alert, all hands on deck, get the lead out.”
“What is it?” His eyes owlishly wide without his glasses, his hair sticking straight up and a blanket held modestly around his waist, he blinked at Tate. “Is somebody hurt?”
“No, everybody’s wonderful.” In that moment, she was sure he was quite simply the sweetest man she had ever met. Following impulse, she threw her arms around him, nearly knocking him down, and kissed him. “Oh, Hayden, I can’t wait to—”
The first shock of his mouth closing hungrily over hers had her going still. She knew desire when she tasted it on a man’s lips, knew need when she felt it trembling in a man’s arms.
For both of them, she relaxed, lifting a hand gently to his cheek until the kiss played out.
“Hayden—”
“I’m sorry.” Appalled, he stepped stiffly back. “You caught me off guard, Tate. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s all right.” She smiled, laid both hands on his shoulders. “Really it’s all right, Hayden. I’d say we caught each other off guard, and it was nice.”
“As associates,” he began, terrified he might stammer. “As your superior, I had no right to make an advance.”
She suppressed a sigh. “Hayden, it was only a kiss. And I kissed you first. I don’t think you’re going to fire me over it.”
“No, of course not. I only meant—”
“You meant you wanted to kiss me, you did, and it was nice.” Patiently, she took his hand. “Let’s not go crazy over it. Especially since we’ve got a lot more to go crazy over. You want to know why I beat on your door, dragged you out of bed and threw myself at you?”
“Well, I . . .” He pushed at glasses he wasn’t wearing and poked himself in the nose. “Yes.”
“Hayden, we found the Justine. Now hold onto yourself,” she warned, “because I’m going to kiss you again.”
CHAPTER 12
T HE DROID DID the work. And that was the problem. A week into the excavation of the Justine, Tate found herself struggling with a vague sense of dissatisfaction.
It was everything they’d hoped for. The wreck was rich. There were gold coins, gold bars—some of them a full sixty pounds. Artifacts were transferred to the surface in abundance. The droid worked busily, digging, lifting, shifting booty with Bowers and Dart working the controls at Ground Zero.
Now and again Tate took a break from her own work to watch the monitor and observe how the machine would haul a heavy load in its mechanical arms, or snag a sea sponge delicately with its pincers for the biologist
s to study.
The expedition was a complete success.
Tate was suffering through a profound sense of envy for an ugly metal robot.
At her station in a forward cabin, she photographed, examined and catalogued the bits and pieces of mid-nineteenth-century life. A cameo brooch, bits of crockery, spoons, a pewter inkwell, a child’s worm-eaten wooden top. And, of course, the coins. Both silver and gold were stacked on her worktable. They glittered, thanks to Lorraine’s work in the lab, as though they were freshly minted.
Tate picked up a five-dollar gold piece, a beautiful little disk dated 1857, the year the Justine sank. How many hands had it passed through? she wondered. Perhaps only a few. It might have been tucked into a lady’s purse or a gentleman’s pocket. Maybe it had paid for a bottle of wine or a Cuban cigar. A new hat. Or maybe it had never been used, only held in anticipation of some small treat it could buy at the end of the journey.
Now it was in her hand, part of so many lost treasures.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Lorraine came in. She carried a tray of artifacts newly decalcified and cleaned in her lab.
“Yeah.” Tate replaced the coin, logged it in her computer. “There’s enough work here for a year.”
“You sound real happy about it.” Curious, Lorraine tilted her head. “Scientists are supposed to be pleased when they have themselves steady field work.”
“I am pleased.” Tate meticulously logged the brooch, set it aside in a tray. “Why wouldn’t I be? I’m involved in one of the most exciting finds of my career, part of a team of top scientists. I have the very best equipment, better-than-average working and living conditions.” She picked up the child’s toy. “I’d be crazy not to be pleased.”
“So why don’t you tell me why you’re crazy?”
Lips pursed, Tate gave the toy a quick spin. “You’ve never dived. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never gone down, never seen it.”
Lorraine sat down, tipped her feet up on the edge of the table. A tattoo of a unicorn rode colorfully over the inside of her ankle. “I’ve got some time. Why don’t you try?”