“Lucid?”
“I wouldn’t say he was lucid. It wasn’t like you could ask him a question and get an answer. I know I must have said, ‘What happened to you, Nate?’ about a dozen times and didn’t get an answer once. I thought maybe he’d stayed down too long and run out of gas to breathe, but I checked his gauge. It showed plenty of pressure. All of his gear looked perfectly fine.”
“Did he say how long he was out there?”
Manny shook his head. “But he was conscious, ’cause he kept telling me how bad he hurt. Tried to get me to go in the bar and pour him some liquor to take away the pain. Straight brandy’s what he wanted. I woulda totally poured him a shot of brandy, if I woulda thought it would make him rest easier until the ambulance came, but I didn’t dare. I figured it might kill him. That didn’t stop him from asking, though.”
“Could you see any injuries?”
“You mean like the bloody foam that was coming out of his mouth? Yeah, he’s injured. My best guess is a collapsed lung or an air embolism. He came up too fast from wherever he was diving. When that happens…well…I guess it’s like your lungs burst. Or they leak air or whatever mix you’re breathing into your blood vessels. None of those are good things.”
Faye’s hand went to her own chest. For an instant, she felt like she was the one who was underwater and couldn’t breathe.
“I’m not a doctor,” Manny said, “but I think that’s what happened to Nate. It’s what I told the sheriff, anyway.”
Faye felt like she was reliving something terrible, a nightmare that had only just happened. “He was in scuba gear? Is Nate a diver? Or is this like the captain, where somebody just shows up hurt or dead in scuba gear that nobody’s ever seen him wear?”
“Nate lives to dive. He dives every chance he gets.”
“Do we know that for a fact?”
“Oh, yeah. I sell him gear, and I hear him telling tales about the cool things he’s seen down there. This ain’t at all like the captain, where he looked uncomfortable in his gear, even when he was dead. But it’s still weird.”
“Because Nate’s got enough diving experience to avoid getting an air embolism?”
“Exactly. If Nate came up that fast, it means that something went really wrong.”
Where was Nate diving when things went so wrong? Faye thought of the captain’s belief that the Philomela was nearby, maybe even at The Cold Spot. Was Nate looking for it? Had this terrible thing happened to him just off the coast of her island?
No, that couldn’t be right. The water at The Cold Spot was too shallow to cause Nate’s terrible injuries. If surfacing quickly after diving in six feet of water could kill a person, Faye would have died snorkeling before she hit her teens.
And yet Nate lay at death’s door. Faye could feel a nameless danger all around them, one that had consumed the captain and was trying to take Nate. She couldn’t name it, but she couldn’t avoid speaking of it, either.
“Maybe he stayed down there too long, waiting until it was too late to come up safely.” Faye studied Manny’s face to see whether an experienced diver agreed or whether he thought she’d lost her mind. “Maybe there was something on the surface that scared him even more than an air embolism or the bends.”
Manny nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, only you put it into words better than I could’ve. Why don’t you two go home and check on Amande? I’ll call you if I hear something, but I worry about her out there all alone. Especially when there’s so much happening that I don’t understand.”
Faye went weak in the knees at the thought of Amande, alone and vulnerable in a place that was supposed to be perfectly safe.
She started to walk toward Joe, ready to get in a boat and hurry home, then she paused and drew her phone out of her pocket. She pulled up an image of the photo that the captain had given her, handed it to Manny, and asked, “See anything weird about this picture?”
He took the phone from her hand and expanded the photo to get a better look. “Nope. Making it bigger don’t help.”
“Recognize any of the boats?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Can’t say for sure, since more boats come through this marina than you’d believe. Too much glare off the water to see any details, and there ain’t nothing nearby to give them any scale. I’m gonna say no.”
She squinted at the phone’s face. “The one with the yellow bimini catches my eye. It’s not in all the photos. It wasn’t even in the photo printed in the paper, but I keep looking at it. I’ve never seen a bimini quite that color.”
“That’s a really light yellow, and my customers are practical. They don’t go for nothing that shows dirt so easy. Unless it’s white, so they can spray the heck out of it with bleach. Without bleach, the mildew gets away from you. Can you imagine something that color covered in mold and mildew? Even a chrome yellow would hide mildew better than that creamy pale yellow. Yeah, I think I’d have noticed if I’d seen that boat. But why are you asking about that one boat? There’s others in the frame, too.”
Faye took the photo back. “I’m curious about all of them. I’m also curious about the photos themselves. Prints of some of them got stolen from the captain’s house. The ones in Ossie’s memory got blasted out of the sky. The ones in Joe’s phone got lost or stolen. I just got to wondering about the boat with the yellow bimini because it’s in some of the photos, and it is such an unusual color.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for it,” Manny said. “Oh, in case you haven’t noticed, Nate’s boat is gray with black trim. And a black bimini. So this boat ain’t his, if you’re wondering.”
Faye walked quietly over to Joe and sat down beside him on the bench. It was hard for her to even think about Nate’s condition, because accepting it meant that she couldn’t push her own fears away. She was afraid to get in her own boat and go to her own island, because she was scared of something unnameable in the water. Or on it. Or deep underneath it.
There was something wrong about the water lapping at the shores of her island. It had killed the captain and now it had tried to kill Nate. And Amande was out there in the middle of it.
Faye was afraid to stay where she was, on a deck overlooking that same water. She was afraid to drive to Emma’s house and wrap her arms around her son, because doing this would leave her daughter alone on Joyeuse Island, surrounded by water. She was afraid to move from the spot where she was standing and she was afraid to stand still. With loved ones strung out across the county, where was she supposed to be and what was she supposed to do?
Joe wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and said what she knew to be true. “I’m going to call Sheriff Mike to go get Emma and Michael. And then we need to get in the boat. Amande’s not safe out there all alone.”
Yes. Joe was right. It was obvious where they needed to go and why. Michael was safe with Emma—probably, oh God, he was only probably safe, but he’d be safer when he was with a retired but armed officer of the law—but Amande was alone. She needed them.
They got in the boat and opened up the throttle, leaving Manny standing alone on the dock as he watched them go.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Joe cut the motor. As soon as its racket died down, Faye pulled her phone out of her pocket. She’d had time to think of some things that the sheriff should know, so she called him.
“How’s Nate?”
The sheriff’s “Well…” was hesitant, like a time-waster that would delay the inevitable truth. “They’ve got him on oxygen and an IV of something or other, and they’re transporting him to someplace that has a hyperbaric chamber. It’s urgent that they get started with that, as I’m sure you know, particularly since we don’t know how long it’s been since he got sick.”
“What do his doctors say?”
His voice was soft. “They just don’t know, but it’s serious and it could get worse. The embolism could c
ause a stroke. His organs could be permanently damaged. It’s gonna be a while before we see how things play out for him.”
Faye thought of Nate, standing on a dock and peeling off his clothes because he couldn’t wait to get his boat out on the water. Youth and love for life had flowed through him. “Did he regain consciousness?”
“He was in and out the whole time I was with him. He tried so hard to tell me something, but he just couldn’t get it out. My contractors are gonna test his equipment, but they told me when they picked it up that they didn’t see anything obviously wrong with it. The pressure gauge was low, but the tank wasn’t empty. We’re guessing that the embolism happened because he’d been diving deep and came up too fast, but we don’t know why he took that risk.”
Faye tried to imagine having something important to say but no way to say it. It seemed like the definition of hell. “I know people dive alone, but it seems incredibly dangerous. Yet we’ve got two people within a week who either had terrible accidents while diving alone or else they were abandoned in the water by someone who’s not talking.”
The sheriff said, “If anybody was with the captain or Nate, I’ll get them in for questioning and they’ll talk.”
Faye said, “I’ve been thinking so hard, trying to come up with something helpful. I didn’t come up with much, but I did want to tell you that I saw Nate late yesterday afternoon. It might not have been long before things got bad for him.”
If she was right about that, then Nate had floated in the Gulf, injured, all night and all day. Her breath left her at the thought.
Faye forced herself to focus. “I saw Nate with two other men. One of them is a young man named Cody. He works for Manny, and that’s all I know about him.”
“I know Cody. I see him around the marina, coming to work and going home in a john boat. Keeps a way bigger and nicer boat up the creek from the marina at his house. Not much more than a kid, just a few years older than your daughter. It seems to me like I’ve seen him eyeing Amande, in fact.”
“So I hear.”
“Cody works hard. Plays hard. Clean record, as far as I know. That’s about all I can say.”
“The other man I saw with Nate is named Thad. You know—the one who owns Thad’s Surf and Dive Shop. It’s right down the street from the captain’s house and the newspaper office. I’m not sure whether that’s important, but it seems like it could be.”
“I know who Thad is. He’s never been in any trouble, either. Did you see the three men together at Thad’s store?”
“No. They were in Nate’s boat. I saw them heading out on the water yesterday. They were in high spirits. There’s no law against having a good time with your friends, but I sure hope they had a designated boat pilot, because Thad and Cody were already drinking before the boat left the dock. As far as I could tell, though, Nate was sober, which is good because he was piloting the boat.”
“I’m going to need to talk to Cody and Thad, and soon. If tonight’s like most nights, they’ll be drinking at the marina after sundown.”
The three men in Nate’s boat had all exuded the kind of arrogant carefree self-regard that tended to make Faye irrationally angry, so she tried to stuff that anger. It wasn’t helpful. She also tried to stuff her concern that these dudes arrogantly thought that they were good enough for her daughter. And worse, she needed to stuff her concern that they might try to do something about it. It was important to set aside her irrational thoughts, because she had some rational ones that the sheriff needed to hear.
“I think it’s possible that those guys are looking for a sunken ship. I told you about it—the Philomela. And maybe they’ve found her, but I doubt it. I took a good look at the spot that the captain thought might be the site of the shipwreck, and I saw nothing.”
“Without checking with me?”
“I was in water where I swim once a week, at least. Right off my island. Do I need to ask you before I do that? How about when I take a walk on my own land?”
“I kinda wish you would, but I guess that’s too much to hope for. The problem is that between the captain, Nate, and Ossie, we’ve got bad things happening on land and sea, and they’re happening in places that have always been perfectly safe.”
The sheriff wasn’t telling Faye anything new. She wanted a safe haven for her family, and she didn’t know how to find it.
“Anyway, I didn’t see any sign of the Philomela,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean that Nate’s buddies aren’t out there looking for her. And maybe Greta. Judging by the size of her boat, Greta could have already found the Philomela, hauled all her sunken treasure ashore, and turned it into cash. Not that I think it’s a sure thing that the Philomela was even carrying treasure. Even if none of them are anywhere close to finding her, you’re the face of law enforcement who’s closest to their amateur treasure-hunting escapades.”
“Well, that sounds just awesome.”
“No joke. And it means that you need to be aware of what’s going on. If they’ve found the thing and word gets out, there will be professional treasure hunters coming in here who know what they’re doing. Worse, there will be amateurs who don’t. People diving on that boat could get killed. One of them probably already has and another’s at death’s door.”
“Big money attracts big crime.”
“Exactly,” Faye said. “I think that Thad and Cody know something. Maybe Nate’s condition will shake them up. They just might talk to you now and I think you should force their hands. If people are out there diving on an old, dangerous, and possibly valuable shipwreck, you need to know about it. Lives are at stake.”
* * *
Ray got to the emergency room in time to see his son before the ambulance took him for barometric treatment. There wasn’t much time, only time enough to sit in the chair at Nate’s bedside, holding his son’s hand.
Nate was silent, fighting for breath, until the nurse tending him stepped out into the hall. Then his eyes opened and met his father’s.
His lips formed a word, then another, but Ray heard nothing but a gasp and a sigh. Still holding his father’s gaze, Nate raised a finger, so slightly, and crooked it.
Perhaps no one but his father could have understood this gesture, but Ray did. He dragged his chair even closer to the hospital bed and leaned forward. With his ear brushing Nate’s lips, he could hear words instead of gasps and sighs.
In order to hear Nate, he was forced to lean forward hard. Before long, his sixty-year-old back was spasming good and hard, but he ignored it. His boy was talking, so Ray kept listening until Nate had said all he had to say.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The house was quiet when Faye and Joe entered, stopping in the kitchen on their way to Joe’s office. The sheriff needed the digital files on his computer, and Joe’s antiquated system for dealing with photos wasn’t going to make it easy to get them to him. For one thing, the files were way too big to email at a usable resolution, not unless they planned to be chained to the computer all night and all the next day. Printing out a big stack of photos at high resolution would take an inordinate amount of time, too, and then they’d still have to take the physical images back to shore. Faye wondered if they should just put Joe’s desktop computer on the boat and ferry it to shore.
They sounded very married, even to Faye’s ears, as they stood in the kitchen making sandwiches, bickering the whole time.
Faye led with, “It’s a good thing one of us lives in this century. I have a cloud storage subscription. We can upload the files to my account, send an invitation to the sheriff so he can see them, then crack open a couple of beers, because that’s it. The whole thing’s done. You should listen to me when I tell you about this kind of stuff.”
And Joe was having none of it. “That seemed like a whole lot of trouble when I just wanted to take a few pictures. Who knew that the newspaper would want them?”
; “And law enforcement?”
“Well, yeah. You’re not planning to tell me that you knew the sheriff was going to need my pictures. Because you didn’t.”
Faye was busy telling Joe exactly how easy it would be to zap the photos where they needed to go when she remembered how slow their internet connection was. As she opened her mouth to say, “Maybe we better take the beers to your office to drink while we wait for your pictures to float slowly up to the cloud,” Joe plunked a stack of photos on the counter next to her ham sandwich.
“Maybe I live in the Stone Age, but here’s something for you to look at while we’re waiting for my computer to talk to the clouds. Or whatever it is that you’re planning to do with it.”
“What are these? Did you print out all those pictures you took with Ossie? No, that’s not possible. You must have taken hundreds of them, but there’s only twenty or so in this stack.”
“Nope, I didn’t print them all. But I did print two copies of the ones I gave the captain, one for him and one for me. I was giving him my very best shots out of all the pictures I took, so I thought ‘Why not make some prints for myself?’” He waved them at her. “These are them.”
“So this stack of pictures in my hands is exactly like the ones you gave the captain? The ones I saw in his library? Well, except for the photo that was in the paper, because he’d already given it away.”
“Yep. And unless the captain scrambled them—which I doubt, because you know how neat he was—they’re even in the same order.”
She rifled through the stack of photos, looking at the pleasure boats with their colorful biminis and trying to find the scene she remembered from Nate’s article. None of these photos were quite right. One of them was close, but it showed the boat with the yellow bimini and Faye was dead certain that she hadn’t seen it in the paper. Its path snaked in and out of the scene in stop-motion as she flipped quickly through the prints.
“The photos are important somehow,” she mumbled, mostly to herself but she knew Joe would hear. “They keep getting stolen. First somebody took them from the captain’s house. Then they took the ones stored in Ossie’s memory. And then your phone disappeared, which I guess had some of your drone pictures on it.”
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