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by Randy Wayne White

  In his mind, Moe was yelling at the Cuban, telling him: Run! Get the hell out of here, you idiot! You can’t see why he’s being so nice?

  Moe wanted to run, too. He wanted to get in his truck, leave the marina, leave Florida, go back to Indiana and get a factory job; dump his fiancée who never stopped badgering him to get a better job, make more money, move up the ladder. Join the Kiwanis? He told her he’d do it, and it still wasn’t enough.

  But he couldn’t run. Not now. Not after witnessing what had come out of that barrel.

  In Moe’s mind, a question kept cycling over and over: How did Bern Heller know that the bird-looking creature with the human hand was a woman?

  Something else: How much would it be worth to Bern if Moe didn’t ask?

  25

  218 September, Saturday

  Sunset 7:27 P.M.

  Low tide 7:28 P.M.

  Two more tropical cyclones designated; weather deteriorating in Gulf.

  At noon, two hours later than planned, we freed the lines of the thirty-two-foot Island Gypsy after Jeth came aboard and told us, “I give up. Javier doesn’t answer his cell phone, and his home phone hasn’t worked since the hurricane. We’ll have to dive the wreck without him.”

  We motored out the channel toward Pine Island Sound. Jeth was at the wheel, his mood as glum as the weather. His attitude: Javier’s desperate for money, but the bonehead doesn’t show up for a paying job? Even so, he provided a steady flow of excuses in his pal’s defense.

  “Maybe he and his wife got back together—that would explain why he didn’t call. Or maybe one of his daughters got hurt or sick…”

  He was irritated. Understandable. He’d wasted most of the morning making phone calls, hailing other skippers on the VHF, trying to track down his buddy. Javier had not only stood us up, he’d made us late—intolerable, in the world of charter boat captains.

  “Or maybe Javier fell off the dock with the phone in his pocket, I’ve done that plenty of times…”

  Aggravated and protective both. Worried, too. We all were. What we knew about Javier Castillo was this: The man was a professional. To miss a charter and not notify us? Something serious had happened.

  Wind had swung from the southwest, fifteen to twenty knots, seas six to eight feet, according to the VHF radio mounted above the Island Gypsy’s stainless wheel, clutch levers to the left, chrome throttles on the right. The vessel had twin Volvo diesels, so it was fast for a trawler—thirteen knots cruising speed, if the weather was right. Her control console was mahogany, gauges mounted flush: fuel, oil pressure, water temp, twin tachometers. Electronics were in Plexiglas cabinets—sonar, GPS, and radar—all screens easy to read without having to look away from the vessel’s huge windshield.

  Looking through the windshield now, I could see the foredeck begin to lift and fall, Picnic Island and Punta Rassa in the distance, gray waves bigger as we turned south toward the causeway, already lots of car traffic lined up on this Saturday afternoon—because of storm damage, the bridge was closed every other hour for repairs.

  Sanibel Lighthouse lay beyond, and the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Last time I was in a boat this big, I was still managing the fish co-op at Gumbo Limbo. Before the Yankee bastards tore the place down and named it Indian Harbor. It was a big ol’ Hatteras, and Hannah Smith was aboard. She’d never seen the Tortugas.”

  Arlis Futch was talking, standing next to Tomlinson, who was at the chart table reviewing my dive plan. Tomlinson shot me a quick look when Arlis mentioned Hannah Smith. I’m not sure what my reaction was, but it seemed to amuse him.

  As far as I was concerned, Arlis was good news. He’d heard Jeth hailing skippers on the radio and offered to check Javier’s house, see if the man was there.

  He wasn’t. Neither was his truck.

  Arlis showed up at Dinkin’s Bay in his mullet boat half an hour later and offered to fill in.

  The old man liked to talk, but that was okay. Maybe I was a little uncomfortable when he discussed Hannah, but I could endure that for a while, too. We needed another person who was good with boats and who had enough experience on the water that he could be trusted in a tight spot. This was going to be a difficult dive and I was glad he was along. Besides, I had questions to ask Arlis.

  He was answering one now, which is why he was on the subject of women.

  “Hannah Smith—now, there was a woman. Not beautiful in a flashy way. Not like that actress I told you about. Close my eyes, I can still picture her face, not all the details, of course—what was that, fifty-some years ago? I’m dang glad that she didn’t live to see what happened to her little yellow house on the Indian mound.”

  Meaning Hannah, not the actress. He already told me that the name Marlissa Dorn didn’t ring any bells.

  “I knowed there was some Dorns that vacationed on the islands. There was another family, too, and they was all part of the same clan by the name of…I can’t remember. You want to talk about beautiful women, though? Those women were all pretty as pictures, every single one. They come from money—of course, most people with mansions do.”

  I asked, “Was the other name Engle, or Brusthoff?”

  He said, “Maybe.”

  A few minutes later, though, he said, “Marlissa…Marlissa. Hmm. Maybe I did hear that name a time or two before. Brusthoff, I know I heard that name.”

  He remembered the boat—a good-sized Matthews with a black hull, and lightning fast for the times. It could’ve been the Coast Watch boat that went down the night of 19 October 1944. The name, though, hadn’t stuck with him.

  “Dark Light,” he said, thinking about it. I watched him tilt his head upward and his eyes drift to the left. People commonly do that, I’ve noticed, when they’re trying to recall visual images. Numbers and hard facts, though, the reaction’s different. They often look downward or to the right. Arlis was trying to picture the boat.

  “The name would make sense with that black hull. Thing is, I was working at the P-O-W camp in Fort Myers by then. So I’d lost touch with all the little details about what was going on on these islands.

  “I hadn’t been on Sanibel for eight, ten months until a week or so before that dang storm hit. Talk about bad timing. That’s the only reason I know someone reported seeing what was maybe a U-boat but was probably a couple of Cuban fishing smacks.

  “A Coast Watch boat went out that night,” he said, “and it never came back. I didn’t know the men who was aboard her, either. That I would remember.”

  I asked, “Men?”

  Arlis replied, “Aboard the Coast Watch boat, you mean? That’s the way it usually worked. The crews were civil defense volunteers, and they’d take turns. Alternate shifts, but they ’most always worked in teams of two or three men. I don’t think women was ever assigned to boat crews. Maybe beach patrols but not boats.”

  Beach patrols, he added, consisted of watching for suspicious activity and maintaining an island blackout, but also the more hazardous duty of regular sweeps of Bowman’s beach and Captiva, confirming they were deserted. Nearby military bases used the islands for target practice. Live fire—.50 caliber machine guns and bombs.

  “Nobody knows how many tons of bombs they dropped on North Captiva. Cayo Costa, too. Volunteers weren’t always locals, neither—so it was dangerous. They shifted around the state, depending on what was needed. They could get lost, or stranded.”

  I listened to him tell Jeth about the Cuban fishermen washing up on the beach but no vultures being around because the storm was so bad, before he told me, “There mighta been a woman drowned, too. Seems like there was…”

  I’d asked about that, and also if he remembered a German named Frederick.

  “What you’ve got to keep in mind, Doc, is a lot of people died in the fall of 1944. A couple hundred folks killed by a storm was minor compared to the number dying in Europe and the Pacific. I guess we got used to it. Death. It’s something we dealt with every day. Back then, it was personal and sad, but it
wasn’t news. You see what I mean? Families took care of their own. We buried our own. There wasn’t all the forms and crap there is now. Someone died? You said words and put ’em in the ground.”

  We were coming around Lighthouse Point. The trawler began to lunge and fall in cement silver waves that rolled toward us at wheelhouse level. I was standing at the galley’s stainless sink, making sandwiches and storing them in plastic bags for later—a good thing I’d started early, because it was too rough now to do much besides hold on, and try to talk above the noise of creaking hull, and the pots-and-pans clatter of a small boat struggling in big sea.

  The chart table was on the starboard side. Tomlinson and Arlis were both seated there now. I watched Arlis lean toward the cabin window, pull the curtain aside, and look toward the island. We were only a few hundred yards off the beach. “Right there’s where we buried those Cuban fishermen. They had no family, so we did it for ’em.”

  He was pointing at Sanibel Lighthouse, and two white clapboard houses on pilings that were visible above the surf line. The houses were old, and looked vaguely Polynesian with their pitched roofs and cupolas. The lighthouse resembled an oil derrick, except for the glass lantern room at the top.

  “The Coast Guard had three or four men stationed in those very houses when the storm hit. They said the lighthouse swayed back and forth like a tree in the wind. The military built a separate tower nearby, and the wind blowed that thing away. They built it especially so they could climb up high and watch for German submarines.”

  Arlis added, “Funny, huh? The night someone reports a U-boat out there, the tower gets blown away.”

  I was about to nudge the old man back onto the subject of Frederick Roth when Jeth interrupted, saying, “Doc, the visibility down here sucks. Do you mind taking the wheel until I get up on the flybridge? Probably would be best if there were two of us—a buddy system kinda deal.”

  We were quartering waves on the port side, and every sixth or seventh roller broke over the bow, causing the Island Gypsy to shudder as her propellers cavitated. The foredeck was awash; wheelhouse Plexiglas streamed with water. Jeth had the windshield wipers on, and they provided frail, pyramid-framed glimpses of the horizon ahead.

  Jeth waited until I was at the helm before zipping his foul weather jacket, then tightrope-walked to the cabin door and stuck his head out. Disgusted, he said, “Hell, I think it’s raining, too.” At the same instant, Arlis surprised me, saying something unexpected: “And right there’s where we captured the prisoner who escaped.” He was still looking through his thick glasses out the starboard window.

  Standing with the wheel in my hands, I said, “What?”

  Arlis repeated himself and pointed toward shore.

  We were running parallel the beach, scrawny-looking casuarina trees and coconut palms visible from the peak of each freighting wave. Through the trawler’s windshield, I could see houses, hotels, and condos, too, most of them patched with blue tarps.

  I said, “You captured a German prisoner? Or was he an escaped prisoner of war?” I was confused.

  The cabin door banged shut as Jeth went out into the weather.

  Arlis’s tone became impatient—wasn’t I following along? Or was I dense? “Of course it was an escaped POW. We got the whole Atlantic Ocean between Florida and Germany, how was a Nazi gonna get here if he wasn’t already a prisoner?

  “That’s why the Army captain sent me back to Sanibel even with the weather bad as it was. Three Kraut prisoners escaped the camp at Belle Glade. We got a tip at least one of them was hiding out somewhere on the islands and nobody knowed the area better than me. Plus, I had my own boat, and the ferry wasn’t running.”

  Above me, I heard Jeth bang twice on the cabin roof. He wanted me up there. An extra set of eyes in foul weather.

  “You caught the German?”

  “What did I just tell you?” That irritable tone again. “Me and a couple of them big island boys, the Naves and Woodrings. I don’t know what happened to the other two Krauts. Ours, though, he went back to prison and hung himself. Good thing, too, ’cause he was as bad as they come.

  “It was during that time Oscar Jefferson’s daddy got burned up at a moonshine still. Somebody poured corn liquor on him and lit a match. We figured it was the Nazi. Peter, that was his name. We caught him right there.”

  I said, “The escaped POW was Peter?”

  Arlis looked at me like I was an idiot. “No. Oscar Jefferson’s daddy was Peter. The Nazi, he’s the one we caught right there by that old house.” He banged his index finger on the cabin window, pointing to the spot, but then got a brief cheerful look on his face, a light going on inside his head. “You asked me about those people. Mr. Brusthoff, and the Dorn girls. That’s their place right there.

  “Hell, I thought that house was torn down long ago. But that’s where we found him. What I remember is, there was a rumor one of those Dorn girls was being especially nice to that German. Maybe Oscar Jefferson’s daddy, too. People loved to talk in those days.”

  Above me, Jeth kicked the cabin roof twice more.

  My squall jacket is green, made of waxed cotton. I put it on after making eye contact with Tomlinson, who’d been listening to Arlis as carefully as I. No need to talk—he would pay attention and take the wheel if I called. Next to Tomlinson’s arm, I noticed, was a file he was assembling. The folder was labeled: ADMIRALTY LAW.

  To Arlis I said, “You’re not your normal sweet self today. Have a sandwich—I think your blood sugar’s low,” then went out the cabin door, into a wind that was dense with rain and diesel fumes. I climbed the flybridge ladder and took the companion swivel seat on Jeth’s left.

  From the vantage point of the flybridge, it was easier to see Sanibel Island and the area where Arlis said they’d captured the German POW. We were near enough to the beach that I could see a few solitary strollers and a familiar boardwalk—this is where I often jogged. The boardwalk and the beach disappeared briefly as each wave peaked and slammed ashore.

  There were hotels and condos down the beach, but here the only structure was visible through leafless trees: a Cape Cod–style house and gazebo, all sided with gray shingles. Southwind.

  Through the rain, I could also see a tiny lone figure on the balcony bundled in a blanket. Chestra Engle held up her hand—a wave?

  No…more like an invitation to dance.

  26

  Jeth is not quick to use profanity—it’s risky with his stutter—but he used profanity now. “Sonuvabitch. We got company. And guess who?”

  I was so busy going over our scuba gear, double-checking gauges, regulators, flashlights, strobe lights, and safety lines, that I hadn’t noticed the forty-three-foot Viking sportfisherman dolphining over the horizon toward us.

  It was the boat from Indian Harbor Marina. I didn’t want to believe it. Bern Heller was giving it another shot after being so sick the day before?

  No…it was Augie up there on the high flybridge. It looked like his buddy Oswald was beside him. Both wearing yellow rain jackets—Augie shaped like a brick, Oswald pudgy enough to resemble a squash.

  Jeth was furious. “If they think they can come out here and chase us off this wreck, they can by God kiss my ass on the county square. Not after what we’ve been through already!”

  Our day had not gone smoothly. Javier had failed to show, and then we couldn’t find the wreck. Not at first, anyway. We’d banged, yawed, and surfed toward the horizon for more than an hour in the burly trawler before our electronic navigation equipment told us that we were 12.1 miles off Sanibel Lighthouse.

  “We should be right on it,” Jeth had said, then scampered below to use the GPS and a better sonar unit.

  He’d programmed the computer with the lat-long numbers and we all focused on the sonar screen as the GPS directed us the last few yards to our destination. For an instant, the wreck appeared on the screen: a geometric shape etched in red sitting on a white digital line that represented sand bottom—soft sand, bec
ause the line was thin.

  An instant later, the wreck was gone.

  Jeth swung the trawler around and tried again. Same thing happened.

  Problem was, waves and tidal current were pushing us with such force that it was impossible to stay over the wreck for more than a few seconds. Even with twin diesels, the Island Gypsy wasn’t nimble. It was built for open water cruising, not sharpshooting bottom structure in heavy seas.

  After a half-dozen failed attempts to hover above the wreck, Jeth hinted that maybe I’d have to change the dive plan. I told him yes, I could do that, but it would take time, which meant we’d have to come back another day. This kind of sea was no place to experiment with a haphazard underwater attack.

  I had a plan. We were going to stick with it.

  We’d made marker buoys—used the noodle-shaped Styrofoam floats you see at the beach and a hundred feet of fishing leader to attach them to concrete blocks. The foam noodles were six feet long, red or orange, which would make them easier to see in big water.

  My plan was to idle back and forth, watching the sonar, and to drop buoys to create a rough outline of the wreck that would be visible on the surface. Anchoring was going to be tough enough in this mess without a visual reference.

  When I told Jeth that I’d scrub the dive before changing the plan, he made a couple more tries and got lucky. He held the sonar’s transducer over the wreck long enough for us to get a buoy out.

  After that, it was easier to get the other markers positioned, but things still didn’t go smoothly. Two of the buoys drifted away because they were weighted with only half blocks of cement.

  It took me several attempts to swim the boat’s big Danforth to the bottom and get the anchor buried where we wanted it. The sand was soft, which is why the anchor pulled free on the first two tries.