Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  Change was in the nature of water. The water that drowned the captain had moved on, dispersed by currents in all directions. One of those currents had carried his body to the marina. Those currents might also have carried away everything he left behind—strands of hair, DNA-carrying skin particles, maybe even a carabiner from his equipment bag. It wasn’t likely that evidence remained from his death, but the odds weren’t zero. For example, she doubted that a current could carry a weight belt very far.

  Joe reached into the storage shed that he’d built on their beach so that their equipment would always be handy. “What do we need? Masks and snorkels, but no fins?”

  “Sounds about right. The water’s so shallow that fins would just get in our way, especially if we need to stop swimming and walk. Let’s just wade in.”

  The water was only cold on Faye’s legs for a moment. The sun was rising so fast that she could see it move, and the color of the water was changing just as fast. As its rays reached the bright white sand beneath her bare feet, reflected light made the water glow electric green. By the time the water reached her knees, it was the color of the turquoise ring her grandmother had given her when she was thirteen. As it reached her hips, it was a clear, pure, uncomplicated blue, and Faye’s happiness at being there in that moment was just as uncomplicated.

  “I know about where The Cold Spot is,” Joe said, “but I’m not a hundred percent sure I could walk straight out to it.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “That’s another reason I thought it made sense not to bring the boat. This way, we’ll feel it when the water gets cold.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, and the look on his face said what he was thinking so plainly—You know how bad I hate cold water—that Faye couldn’t help laughing.

  “Look at me,” she said. “This water’s up to my shoulders and it hardly covers your navel. I don’t want to hear anything about how cold you are.”

  He shifted the conversation back to the question of where in the heck they were going. “I know The Cold Spot isn’t quite straight out from the beach. It’s more to the west, getting toward the end of the island.”

  “Good thing the hurricane wasn’t too bad here. If it changed the shape of the coastline too much, we may never figure out where we’re going.”

  “Let’s hope it didn’t,” he said, wading farther from shore.

  It took ten minutes of walking for the water to reach her chin. Faye put on her mask, put her snorkel in her mouth, lowered her face into the calm water, and stretched out on top of it. Patches of dark seagrass dotted the sand below her. Brown-shelled scallops were tangled in them, each with a rim of bright-blue eyes. The rhythmic opening and closing of their shells seemed to Faye to drive the motion of the water around her.

  As she paddled slowly forward, she passed a school of fish, each as small and silvery as a new dime. She could see the bottom falling away a bit, so she raised her face to tread water, reaching her toes for the bottom.

  The sand was out of reach, deeper than she’d expected. Even Joe couldn’t quite touch bottom while keeping his face out of the water. She put her snorkel back in her mouth, pointed her head downward and kicked hard for the bottom.

  The sea grasses tickled her belly as she skimmed over them. If the Philomela had gone down near here, she sure didn’t see any sign of it. It looked to her like Captain Eubank had risked his life for nothing, but she wasn’t surprised that she saw no sign of the old steamship. If it had sunk here, so close to Joyeuse Island, Cally would surely have known and she would have talked about the wreck in her oral history. Faye knew for a fact that she didn’t.

  The sand beneath her continued to slope downward. Taking a moment to surface and grab a chest full of air, she dropped to the bottom again, beckoning to Joe as she swam. Everything looked as it should—seagrasses, shells, sand, fish—and that’s not what she was hoping to see. She wanted to see something human-made and disruptive. Part of her wanted it to be a shipwreck at the end of a long debris field. A bigger part of her wanted to see stone tools, the black burn mark of a hearth, mastodon bones, and anything else that would prove her theory that The Cold Spot marked a Paleolithic occupation site.

  She didn’t actually want to find evidence that her friend had drowned here, but she had to admit to herself that seeing it would be a positive thing. It would make his death more real to her, and it might ease his sister’s mind. Hard evidence might prove, once and for all, whether his drowning was really an accident.

  She didn’t know what kind of evidence to hope for. Maybe the captain had left behind a flashlight or some other piece of equipment that he’d dropped while struggling not to drown. And, of course, there was the missing weight belt. Surely the loss of a human life would have left a trace, no matter how small.

  She surfaced for another breath. Joe surfaced next to her, blowing the water out of his snorkel before diving for the bottom again.

  The water around her was chilly, much colder than it had been when she first got into the water. She hadn’t even noticed it cooling off. It appeared that they’d found The Cold Spot, proving that Joe’s navigational skills were as fearsome in the water as they were in the woods. She’d been to this place countless times, but something was different today. How could there be something different about an expanse of wide open water?

  Treading water, Faye kept her face above the surface as she turned in a slow circle. It quickly became clear what the difference was. In all directions, small wind-driven waves rippled the water’s surface, as they always did on a day when the waves were calm, but she and Joe hovered in a patch of water that was as smooth as ice. The area of calm water extended for twenty feet or more in all directions.

  She’d seen this phenomenon many times in freshwater creeks but never in the Gulf. It marked a place where the flow of a constant, steady upwelling of water was strong enough to blunt the effects of the wind rippling the water’s surface.

  She caught Joe’s eye and knew that he saw it, too.

  “Do I feel water coming up from the bottom?” he asked.

  “You do,” Faye said.

  They each dove for the sandy seafloor below.

  The seagrass obscured her view of the seabed, but the feel of rising water on her skin took Faye where she wanted to go. As she got closer to its source, the moving water began to tickle her skin like bubbles in champagne. Her face was barely a yard from the bottom when she saw it.

  There was a crack in the world. The bare white sand was interrupted by an almost-circular expanse of exposed tan-to-dark-brown rock, about seven feet across, which must have been the reason for the dark round area that Ossie had seen from so high in the air. In its center was a long narrow crack that had to be the thin black slash that Faye had seen in Joe’s sharpest, closest photo. She could see through the crack into a dark void that was like a small cave.

  Water flowed out of the crack with enough force to stir the green grasses surrounding the area of exposed rock. The hurricane had scoured away the sand and debris that had once filled it. Many, many years had probably gone by since the water had flowed freely, but it was doing that now.

  Faye had been right about the spring, but this didn’t necessarily mean that Captain Eubank had been wrong about a sunken ship. It wasn’t impossible for the two things to exist in the same place.

  She looked around for signs of anything man-made. There was no hull, no debris field, not even a torn section of the Philomela’s rusted iron sheathing. If Captain Eubank did drown in that spot, he had seen no shipwreck in his last moments.

  She moved as close to the crack as she could, wishing she had her fins to help her make headway against the strong current belching out of it. Did Captain Eubank swim into the opening, trying to access a cave on the other side?

  She had friends who couldn’t have resisted the call of this crack in the earth. She worried that one of those friends might someday d
ie from insatiable curiosity. Cave diving was one of the most dangerous sports in existence. Even a few skydivers had survived equipment failure, still alive after a long fall to the ground. A cave diver whose equipment fails dies, every single time.

  Desperate for a breath of air, she lingered, exploring the lips of the opening with her fingers. The crack was big enough to admit both her hands to the wrist, just barely, if she’d been foolish enough to cram them in there.

  Was it big enough for even one arm? Nope, not that she planned to try it. There was no way Captain Eubank could have thought this crack was big enough to swim through, even if he’d somehow been able to shed his equipment.

  Joe dropped down beside her. Her lungs were bursting, so she left him staring into the slender opening and headed up for air. Shortly after she broke the surface, he followed.

  “You see that?” he asked as soon as he could get his snorkel out of his mouth.

  “The spring vent? I absolutely did. And the opening’s not big enough for Captain Eubank to pass through.”

  “D’you think he might have gotten stuck somehow? My heart nearly stopped when you stuck your hands in there.”

  “My hands never passed through the opening. Not even the tips of my fingers. I might take some risks sometimes, but I’m not stupid. But here’s an important thing—I didn’t see any signs of a struggle. Did you? It seems to me that if the captain was stuck in an opening like that one, you’d see evidence that he’d tried to get himself free. The area of exposed rock is small enough that his legs would totally have extended into the sand. You’d see marks where he struggled. And his weight belt would be somewhere nearby.”

  “You’d see torn-up seagrass, too.”

  “Exactly,” Faye said. “I didn’t notice any traces of a struggle at all. Did you? Honestly, everything I saw looked pristine, but let’s go back down and look again, just to make sure.”

  She tried not to think about a man flailing around, trying to free a stuck foot or hand from that opening in the rock. Water would have been piled on top of him, waiting to silently end his life, and this image made Faye want to stay on dry land forever. She honestly didn’t think the captain was foolish enough to jam any body parts into the crack, at least not hard enough to get stuck.

  And if he wasn’t trapped like that, how could he have drowned? The water was so shallow here that he could literally have bounced off the seabed and breached the surface over and over again, grabbing one breath after another while he worked to shed his gear. Then he could have walked or swam to shore as easily as they’d gotten to this spot.

  Heck. He could have dog-paddled.

  “This isn’t the place,” Faye said, surprising herself by how certain she was. “This isn’t where the captain drowned. I’m sure of it.”

  “Me, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Faye wished she liked Lieutenant Baker better. The young woman was probably a perfectly lovely human being, but weren’t officers of the law supposed to know how to deal with the public?

  Faye had left the lieutenant a voicemail as soon as she and Joe got back from their snorkeling expedition. She supposed that the woman’s three-hour delay in responding was reasonable, but Faye was not a patient person. Baker’s delay in meeting Joe on the day Ossie was shot had been rude, to say the least. This delay in returning Faye’s call made the rudeness seem intentional.

  By the time her phone rang, Faye and her family had taken both oyster skiffs to shore. They had consumed heaping plates of Manny’s pancakes, and now they were splitting up for the day. She’d just finished buckling Michael into his car seat in Amande’s car when her phone rang. As she pulled it out of her pocket, Amande pulled out of the parking lot, on her way to do her daily rounds.

  “You wanted to speak to me?” The lieutenant’s tone was cool and professional, but it would not have hurt her to say hello before launching into the conversation.

  “I wanted to let you know that Joe and I swam out to the spot where we were thinking Captain Eubank might have been diving.”

  “Did he say he was planning to dive there? To you or to anybody else?”

  “No, but he and I were talking about a possible shipwreck in that spot just hours before he—”

  The lieutenant couldn’t be bothered to let her finish her sentence. “But there’s no physical evidence that places him at that spot. And no witnesses that say he planned to go there.”

  “No, but—”

  “I’m interested in evidence, not supposition. I’m working with scarce resources and that means I have to target my activities. I can’t run out into the Gulf on a hunch, not any more than I can randomly search all that water.”

  Faye was literally chewing on her tongue to keep from lashing out. There was no point in alienating one of the few people in a position to get justice for her friend.

  She took a deep breath and spoke calmly. “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m going to tell you what I know. You don’t have to listen, but I don’t have to stop trying to get you to listen. Even if you hang up on me, I’m going to write down what we saw and send it to you.”

  “You found some evidence that he’d been there? You found something that makes this spot different from the whole wide Gulf?”

  “No, I didn’t. That’s the thing. I thought that there was a good chance he’d gone out there, but I found no trace. No weight belt, for sure. I found the spring vent that I think he might have been heading for, though. There’s a chance that he could have caught a hand or foot in it and drowned, but I think we’d be able to see marks in the sand made by his legs as he fought for his life. And the vegetation in that area is undisturbed. The most important thing, though, is that the water there is very shallow. Yeah, you could drown there, but it wouldn’t be easy.”

  “Well, if you want to send me an email and include a map showing this place where the victim didn’t die, you can do that. That will make one less spot in the great big Gulf of Mexico for me to worry about. Right now, I need to get back to checking out the whole rest of the world. The autopsy is our best bet at finding something concrete. I also think that there’s nothing concrete to find. I think the autopsy will show no signs of foul play at all.”

  Faye wanted to say, “Why did the sheriff order it then, if he thought it was pointless?” Instead, she kept it simple. “Will the report be in soon? It’s been almost two days.”

  “Ma’am, I’m pretty sure that the autopsy is being done in a morgue that’s still using a generator for power. But everybody on this case is a professional. If there’s evidence of foul play on that body, it’ll be found. Maybe it has been found. The sheriff has other things to do besides babysit this case that you just won’t let go. But if the autopsy doesn’t turn up anything suspicious, I can’t see much reason to think this wasn’t a simple and sad diving accident.”

  Faye took a breath, intending to answer her, but Baker interrupted even her quiet breath.

  “I mean that. It is sad. Truly. But the time I spend trying to prove the obvious—which is that Captain Eubank’s death was an accident—is time when I’m not using my resources to find two missing people. Or to track down the looters who shot a gas station attendant last night.”

  Faye had the sense that Lieutenant Baker wasn’t always like this. She was coming off of a long string of nights without sleep and days full of never-ending work. Faye sympathized, so she didn’t reflect Baker’s anger back at her. She just said, “We’re all tired these days.”

  “I’m not tired. I’m outraged. Did you see the picture of that mother? The one who’s missing along with her little boy? I guarantee you that I’ve shed more tears over them than her husband has. There’s no way that his fairy tale holds water. He is not the kind of man who wades out into a flood to save his family. And I don’t believe the next-door neighbor, either. He knows something, and he won’t say what it is. One of them
knows what happened to that woman and child. Maybe both of them know. If you were wondering where I was while your husband was waiting for me, now you know. I was with the husband and then the neighbor—questioning them, pressing them, trying to get them to break.”

  Faye didn’t know what to say, other than “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “Next time you want to think that I should be watching your husband fly his toy instead of trying to get the truth about that woman and her child, you go get a copy of the newspaper and take a look at their faces.”

  * * *

  After another morning of boarding up broken windows, Faye took a break and called her daughter. She didn’t have a lot of hope of getting through, but lunch was the time when Amande was most likely to be picking up her afternoon supplies in Crawfordville. This meant that there was a decent chance that she had cell service. And she did.

  “You caught me just before I drove back out into the land of dead cell phones.”

  Amande sounded almost glad to hear from her. Faye hoped that this attitude stuck around. She needed to remember how happy it made her daughter to feel needed.

  “Did you do that favor for me?”

  “Yep, I went to Miss Jeanine’s house first, like you asked me to. Guess what’s in my back seat?”

  “A big, big pile of paperwork that includes a power of attorney made out to Greta Haines? Unsigned, I hope.”

  “Yep.”

  “Thank you, sweetie. You did something really important for Jeanine. What did she say about letting me check on the captain’s house?”

  “She said that you were more than welcome to do that. If you don’t mind, it would be a big help if you’d air it out a little while you’re there.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  “She said something else, and this made me a little sad.”

  Everything about Jeanine Eubank’s life was sad right now. “What did she say?”

  “She said that she wanted you to take anything you wanted from his library. She doesn’t want anything out of the house except family photos. She’s going to hire somebody to do an estate sale, but she knows you appreciate all his books and maps and stuff. She’d rather give them to you for free than sell them to somebody who just wants them because the shiny gold printing on the spines looks good.”