“Yeah. I put ’em on there so I could show ’em to people. But you know, Faye, Ossie didn’t just get stolen.”
He was right. Somebody had blasted Ossie apart.
Faye felt herself giving in to panic. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to eradicate Joe’s photographs, destroy the device that had taken them, and steal a device where they’d been stored. Was the person who had done those things satisfied now, confident that a critical secret was protected? This would be an unwise position for that person to take, since the pictures in her hand were proof that the thief had failed.
The photos felt radioactive. The captain, one of the few people to see them all, was dead. Nate Peterson had seen at least one of them, and he was fighting for his life. There was another target, an obvious one, and he was standing beside her. Was Joe’s life in danger?
She couldn’t stop shuffling through the photos. If she could just figure out what made them dangerous, maybe she could protect Joe.
“Faye.” Joe was saying her name, and it probably wasn’t the first time. She was too freaked out at the thought of somebody stalking her husband to think clearly.
“Faye, don’t forget. I’ve got more pictures on my office computer.”
“Why don’t you go on and wake up the computer? Make sure you remember what folder you stored the photos in. Stuff like that. There’s something I want to check out.”
Faye had sent Joe on his way so she could do her favorite thing, which was to obsess on the internet. She was having a little trouble concentrating, though, because Joe had decided he needed another sandwich before he vacated the kitchen and gave her room to think.
Trying to block the sound of Joe’s knife bumping around in a mayonnaise jar, she focused on a single question: If the Philomela was the key to everything, and she thought it was, what had it been carrying that was worth murdering someone over?
She knew that blockade runners mostly hauled cash crops like cotton and tobacco out of the Confederacy, dodging the Union ships that blockaded southern ports. Their destinations included ports in the Caribbean, on Bermuda, and beyond. Cally’s oral history said that the Philomela had been headed for Havana after it left Joyeuse Island, and it was definitely on the list of known ports for blockade runners.
If the Philomela had gone down right after it left Cally, it would have been loaded with trade goods grown by people living in the Confederacy, things like cotton, tobacco, rice, and indigo. It didn’t seem to Faye that this kind of cargo would be worth much after a hundred and fifty years underwater, if it had survived at all.
But what if the Philomela had made it to Havana? What if its captain had sold the trade goods and loaded the ship with desperately needed food, but also with the kind of luxury items that would yield the most profit possible from a crowded cargo hold?
What would those luxury items be? Faye thought that they might include silk, paintings, jewels, silver, gold, books, wine, or liquor. Maybe all of the above. Would they have survived in a condition that would still interest treasure hunters? Jewels certainly could have survived, which was why they constituted the classic image of treasure from a sunken ship. Liquor and wine, too, might have had a shot, as long as they were stored in something sealed well enough to keep out saltwater for a long, long time.
Silk, paintings, and books? Surely they would have rotted beyond repair.
In a war zone, guns were moneymakers for those willing to risk their lives smuggling them in. Since there was a war on and the Confederacy did not begin the war with significant weapons manufacturing capabilities, the Philomela was almost certainly carrying weapons as it ran past the Union gunboats into blockaded Southern ports. Guns would be a lot more likely to survive a long stint underwater than perishable goods. There were collectors who would pay a pretty price for Civil War weaponry, even after being submerged for all this time.
The ship would also have been carrying money, of course, so that the captain could purchase another load of cash crops and do the whole thing again. If any paper money had survived that long underwater—English, Confederate, Union, or the currency of some other nation—it might be worth something on the collector’s market, but gold was the currency that sang a siren song for people who dreamed of sunken treasure. Faye knew that any treasure hunters diving on an old shipwreck would be hoping for gold ingots, but they wouldn’t turn their noses up at guns, liquor, table silver, or jewelry.
If Captain Eubank had been killed by someone trying to protect the location of the Philomela, would the killer have been brazen enough to offer goods traceable to the ship for public sale? Maybe. Greed made people stupid. And also, recreational divers who stumbled on a wreck would not be experienced in fencing their goods. The internet might seem to them to be an anonymous way to go about it.
Faye went to the obvious place first. She checked eBay for listings of old gold coins or ingots, but nothing from the right time period had been listed during the past week. She had the same result on a search of antique jewelry sites. Nobody had tried recently to unload saltwater-corroded, Civil War–era guns, either. To really be sure they weren’t out there, she’d need to search every pawn shop and the home of every black-market-shopping collector in the world, but this was a useful first-blush result.
Moving away from eBay, Faye did a general web search for some specific nineteenth-century luxury items that could have survived a century and a half of being wet. Here, she struck pay dirt.
A man in south Georgia had been posting on social media about his recent purchase of a stash of brandy and rum that was more than a hundred and fifty years old.
Manny had said that Nate was talking about brandy. Maybe he didn’t want brandy to drink. Maybe he was trying to tell Manny why someone had tried to kill him.
The local paper of the man who bought the old rum and brandy had done the only logical thing and sent a reporter right over. With the lightning speed of modern media, the article was already online.
Faye shook her head at the foolishness of it all. The looters might have been smart enough not to list their loot on eBay, but they had sold it to somebody too stupid to keep his dubious shopping habits to himself. Did it truly not occur to him that people selling really old stuff on the quiet might be crooks?
And what about the newspaper? Did the reporter think this purchase of ridiculously old liquor was legitimate? If he’d asked the man where the rum and brandy had come from, he hadn’t reported it in the article. To be fair, though, he’d written the piece in such a way that readers might read between the lines. He didn’t seem to like the man he was interviewing, which was also something that the average reader could certainly read between the lines.
Faye was pretty sure that the reporter thought rich people should buy cheap liquor that did its job of getting them drunk, then spend a little bit of the savings on something important like feeding people or buying them medicine. Faye thought she and that reporter could be good friends.
The thought of drinking mid-nineteenth-century rum made Faye’s breath catch in her throat. It brought home the reality of the trade in enslaved human beings. Africans were brought to the West Indies, where they were forced to grow sugar cane that became molasses. Molasses was sold to New England rum makers. Rum was shipped to Africa and traded for people who were sold to the West Indies, and truthfully to all of the New World, and this started it all over again. This shameful triangle went on for centuries, and now a too-wealthy-for-his-own-good man in Georgia had paid a probably unholy sum for rum distilled from human misery.
Actually the sum paid for that rum wasn’t just probably unholy. Its unholiness was certain. If he hadn’t paid a ridiculous amount for the rum and then bragged to someone about it, the newspaper wouldn’t have sent someone to report on his conspicuous consumption.
The liquor-buyer had prattled on about how lucky it was that the labels were still somewhat legible. The newspaper had prin
ted a photo of some of the old bottles, and it was obvious to Faye that the labels weren’t damaged by mere age. They had been soaked in water, and she’d bet it was seawater.
Those bottles of rum and brandy were a morning’s drive from Crawfordville. Faye was as certain as she could be that they came from the shipwreck that the captain had been chasing.
The liquor-buyer had said, “I opened a bottle of the brandy and I take a sip of it every night at bedtime. My stash of liquid gold is big enough to last me for years at that rate.”
The reporter had asked what would happen when he ran out.
“I’ll buy more, no matter the price. I’ve never slept better, and that’s worth something.”
The reporter, who Faye figured would never in his life be able to afford such an extravagant sleep aid, was allowed to take his own sip of the old brandy. How else could he could write the most complete story possible?
His article concluded with a statement that suggested he was not as grateful as the liquor-buyer might have liked. “It tasted good, but drinking a hundred-dollar bill should taste good.”
Faye imagined bottle after bottle, cases and cases of them, all filled with the alcoholic equivalent of hundred-dollar bills. Now she knew for sure that the Philomela had gone down carrying cargo valuable enough to inspire a thief. Or a murderer.
Joe must have gotten carried away with his sandwich-making, because he slid a sandwich, tall with roast beef, lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles, in front of her. He set an open beer beside it and said, “When you finish whatever it is you’re doing, bring this with you. We can chow down while the computer’s clouding.” He picked up the stack of photos and headed for his office.
Faye blew him a kiss and shot off a text to the sheriff with a link to the article, suggesting that he get this man on the phone and find out everything he could about who sold him that old brandy. As she hit “Send,” she heard Joe calling her.
“Faye. Come quick.”
Because denial is a powerful survival mechanism, she had almost convinced herself that there was no reason to be scared by the time she reached Joe. He stood in his office door and a breeze wafted through it. The balmy air smelled like pine trees and the sea because the room’s single window had been broken. The glass had been two hundred years old, so its loss was a kick in the gut for Faye. Shattered shards of it covered the floor completely, reaching into all four of the room’s corners.
Joe’s computer was gone, as Faye had feared or guessed or expected. The only thought left in Faye’s head came out of her mouth.
“Where are the children?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Faye loved her house, but she knew it was too big. It was too big to furnish, too big to clean, too big to heat and cool and insure. It was way too big when it came to paying property taxes. On this night, the distance from the old house’s aboveground basement to Amande’s upstairs bedroom was just too damned far.
After the first moment of panic, she had realized that Michael was safe. She knew this because Amande had texted that she’d left him with Emma. Amande had also said that she was tired and was coming home early. Thus, their daughter had to be somewhere in this big house, alone. She had to be.
Both Faye and Joe were calling out for Amande as they scuttled up the narrow sneak stair that had carried her enslaved ancestors up from the basement, past the main floor with its towering ceilings, and up to the bedrooms where they had waited on their captors, night and day. The sneak stair opened into their bedroom with its finely detailed murals, painted by those same enslaved ancestors.
Their work boots clattered on the heart pine floor as she and Joe ran for their bedroom door, which led out onto the landing at the head of the massive circular staircase rising through the center of the old house. The staircase had collapsed during a hurricane that had almost consumed the whole house, and the landing had gone down with it. Faye and Joe had spent a long, long time rebuilding it, all by historically accurate methods and completely by hand.
Faye knew every brick and crevice of the old house, because she’d patched, polished, and painted every inch of it. She knew every board under her feet as she ran to find Amande.
When she thought of the thief (or was it thieves?) shattering the rippled glass of windows her ancestors had hung in the 1800s, she felt personally violated, but this was a feeling she could survive. When she thought that the thief (or thieves?) might then have hurt Amande, her heart twisted in her chest and threatened to stop beating.
Nothing in Faye’s life mattered but the people she loved. Everything else was expendable.
Every original bedroom in the house opened onto the reconstructed landing, including Amande’s. Their daughter’s room was the place where Faye had slept while she dreamed of a family, the family that would someday come to live with her in this house that was way too big for one lonely woman.
When the door to Amande’s room burst open, Faye’s heart stopped as she waited for a single split-second to see who had opened it. Was Amande safe, or would the person on the other side be the same one who had broken a window and stolen Joe’s computer?
When she saw the beautiful curves of her daughter’s face, framed with unruly curls the color of the burnished pine floors under her feet, Faye was so overcome with relief that her legs failed her. She plopped onto the beautiful floor under her feet and let the tears come.
“What’s wrong?” Amande asked.
For one of the few times in their married life, Joe did all the talking. He led with, “Are you okay? Somebody broke in the house. Did you hear them? Or see them? Amande, are you okay?”
Amande dropped the box in her hands, a long and slender white gift box with golden lettering. “Oh, my God. No! I didn’t hear anything. I’ve been home at least an hour. Do you think it happened before that?”
Faye thought back through the trek from the basement to this spot. She doubted Amande could have heard anything happening down there, not even if the burglars had smashed the window with a baseball bat and then flung the bat through the window against the office’s heavy oak door. The thick, tabby cement walls of the basement were so sturdily built that they could have contained the sound of a bomb blast.
Faye was still weeping, and for no good reason since her daughter stood there in perfect health, but she was able to gasp out, “It could have happened any time since we left the house this morning.”
Joe looked a lot calmer than Faye, although there was something a trifle unhinged about the way he grabbed Amande, hugged her, held her out to look at her, hugged her again, and kept chanting, “You’re okay. You look okay. Do you think you’re okay? Do you feel okay?”
Faye, though she might look stupid as she sprawled helplessly on the floor, still clung hard to reality. She sorted through the facts as she knew them. First, they had been robbed. Second, they didn’t know why. And third, they didn’t know when.
“Y’all,” she said, trying to be heard over Joe, “somebody could still be on this island. Several somebodies, actually. We’ve got to go. I just wish we’d been able to get those picture files to the sheriff, because I’m guessing they’re the reason Joe’s computer got stolen. They must be pretty dang important, but they’re gone now.”
“Not all of them,” Joe said, turning his focus from Amande to Faye.
“Of course they’re gone. Since you wouldn’t sign up for the cloud storage I told you about, they’re not floating in the ether. Even the prints you gave the captain got stolen, all except one, and I already gave it to the sheriff. Your computer’s gone. Your phone’s gone. Ossie’s gone, and her memory chip went with her. We haven’t bought the backup hard drive you wanted yet. Are you saying that you saved the files somewhere else?”
He was still holding the duplicates he’d made of the prints he’d given the captain, so he waved them in her face. “We don’t have computer files, but we have hard copies.
”
“That short stack of photos isn’t much help. I just can’t believe that, out of all the photos you took, these are all we’ve got left. They stole hundreds of images. We have maybe twenty, and only because you stuck them in a kitchen drawer instead of taking them to your office.”
Something about the existence of those photos in the kitchen, the room where Faye’s family gathered around the table to eat and talk and laugh, put a hot iron lump in her stomach. She didn’t know what made them dangerous, but they obviously were. How many times had somebody stolen or destroyed those same images?
Underscoring their untouchable nature was a simple, incontrovertible fact: the captain was the last person who had seen them, and he was dead. No, that wasn’t exactly true. Faye had looked at the photos on that last day with the captain, so the two of them together might have been the last to see these shots. This was not a comforting thought.
And then there was Nate. There were any number of reasons he might have found himself grievously injured and afloat in the Gulf, but he too had sent Ossie into the sky. He was directly linked to at least one of the drone’s photos, the one he’d published with his front-page story. Now he was gravely injured. Ossie’s photos were somehow poisonous.
And those photos weren’t yet out of their lives. She and Joe were holding twenty prints, but the sheriff would be holding them just as soon as she could unload them on him.
She wanted them out of her house.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Sitting sprawled on the floor at Amande and Joe’s feet, Faye couldn’t come up with an answer to the question of why anybody had been in her house in the first place. How did the thief know that stealing Joe’s computer would solve a lot of problems for anyone who wanted those photos out of circulation?
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