“Since you didn’t ask what it was about Shane they exploited, it was financial. They knew he was in danger of his boat being foreclosed on, and offered him a lot of money.” Gillian deliberately didn’t look at Shane, knowing he’d be embarrassed by it. “Even needing the money, once he heard what the dive entailed, he still turned it down. That’s when they threatened him, threatened his friend Jagger, and burned down his friend’s bar. He’s helping me in order to keep the people he cares about safe—and that includes you.”
Gillian paused briefly and softened her voice. “So stop the critical bullshit. Shane is brave and unselfish and…” she ran out of steam. “And that’s all I have to say.”
Sometime during the last part of her tirade, Charlie had looked down at the table. Now he looked up at his nephew. “Does she say true?”
“Yes.” Shane paused. “Except for the brave and unselfish part. These people scare the hell out of me.”
“There’s no shame in being afraid,” Charlie said. “Shame is in running from it. Sounds like you have turned and confronted it.” He cleared his throat and looked at the stove.
Gillian looked back at Shane, waiting for him to yield, say thank you, smile, do something. He kept his eyes down.
Good grief. “Obviously, you two are too stubborn to talk to each other directly. So, Shane, your uncle’s proud of you for facing your fears and doing the right thing. Charlie, your nephew wants to please you, and it means a lot to him that you recognize it.”
Men. They were hopeless. “Now, I am going to take a decent shower for the first time in a week if it’s okay with Charlie.”
He nodded.
She stood up and paused next to Shane. “You okay?” she asked softly.
He nodded, much as his uncle had done.
Fine. The Burke men could sit there and be guys.
“C’mon Tank. Let’s go. I don’t want you picking up any bad Burke habits.” She stopped in the doorway and looked at her dog, who rolled his eyes at her from his position beside Charlie’s foot and made no effort to get up.
“Traitor.”
CHAPTER 18
Shane swore the temperature dropped at least ten degrees when Hurricane Gillian blew out of the dining room. A chill silence settled in. He didn’t know what to say to keep the conversation with Charlie going. He’d apologized for being an idiot ten years ago and said a silent prayer of thanks that Gillian hadn’t asked what happened between them.
No, he’d just let her ride to his rescue while he sat here with his foot up his ass so far it had his tongue pinned down. She’d very succinctly told Charlie all he needed to know without too many details. Shane was horrified that Tex had been in Charlie’s house, had threatened a crippled old man, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
He pretended to examine his splinter cut while taking a closer look at his uncle. He’d been so shocked at Charlie’s missing leg, he hadn’t registered that Charlie, like the house itself, seemed so much smaller than he remembered, his torso lost inside a green plaid shirt that billowed around him like a sail. His uncle still had the booming voice and the intimidating stare and the rough edges, but his hands trembled a little when he reached down to wield his cane like a hammer or pet the dog.
That would be the dog who’d never treated Shane with anything better than benign neglect if not outright hostility, but who had fawned over Charlie from the minute they’d arrived. Hellhound.
“There’s some bourbon in the cabinet over the fridge,” Charlie finally said, as if none of the previous hour had occurred. “You got two good legs. Why don’t you pour us a drink?”
Shane found the bottle, smiling at the black Jack Daniel’s label. Charlie had had more influence on Shane than either of them realized, even down to the choice of poison. He rummaged around in the cabinets until he found a couple of glasses and set them on the table, pouring each of them a couple of fingers of bourbon.
“Need water or ice?” Shane asked.
“Water is for wimps and ice is for goddamned pansies.”
Charlie was nothing if not eloquent. That much hadn’t changed.
He waited until Shane was seated before he cleared his throat. “Tell me what you know about these blackmailers.”
“Not a lot.” Shane went through the story about the money and the blackmailers’ uncanny ability to make things happen quickly. “We figure it has to be somebody in the military or government to move things that fast, not to mention highly placed and rich as God. You used to work the waters off Canada’s east coast. How long would it normally take to get the paperwork cleared to bring in a boat from the US?”
“Let me see the papers.”
Shane walked into the living room and fell over a stack of…something. Forget this paranoid crap; he needed a light. Once he’d felt around for the switch to turn on the lamp, he stepped over the stack of old newspapers that had tripped him and retrieved his suitcase. Charlie had always been a slob; they’d lived like one would expect a bachelor and his nephew to live—somewhere between pigsty and hovel. Not quite this bad, however. Shane, in turn, had grown up to be obsessively neat.
He unzipped the front compartment of his bag, where he’d stashed the travel documents after turning over the provisioning and retrofitting paperwork to Harley.
“What did the guy who came here look like?” Shane asked, returning to the dining room.
“Hell, I don’t know. Several years older’n you, I guess. Dark hair going to gray a little on the sides.”
Sounded like the fake Levy County marine deputy that had threatened him not to leave Cedar Key. It was a different guy than the one who’d set fire to Harley’s, who’d been dark-haired and about Shane’s age. Shane filed the mental images away to examine later. Charlie’s visitor and the fake deputy might be Tex himself.
He took his seat and slid the papers across the table to Charlie. “They filed the itinerary and navigation plans with both the US Coast Guard and Canadian Customs. Everything looks legitimate to me, but you’ve done a lot more border crossings than I have.”
Charlie took his time, reading each document top to bottom, holding it close to his face so he could see. If Charlie’s diabetes was bad enough to have cost him a leg, Shane figured it probably had screwed with his vision as well. “You need glasses?”
Charlie squinted over the top of a pink sheet of paper and muttered, “Got some. Don’t like ’em.”
What a surprise. Shane nodded and kept his mouth shut until Charlie finally set the papers down. “They look real enough. The nav route they filed for you was done by somebody who knew the waters between here and Nova Scotia and what to look for in September, which means they hired it done and paid to get it done fast. And they got that go-ahead from Canadian Customs in less than twenty-four hours. Who the hell can make government offices jump like that?”
Shane shrugged. “That’s the million-dollar question—literally. When they, whoever ‘they’ are, first approached me about this dive job, working through Gillian, they offered me a million under the table plus expenses.”
“Humph. Now that they’re using threats instead of bribes, do you still get the million if you find this thing they want? And what the hell is it they want so bad?”
“It’s an old ruby cross that supposedly belonged to the Knights Templars—you know, from the Crusades. Middle Ages. If I can manage to find it, I’ll be damned sure they pay the million if they want their precious treasure, because I’m guessing it’s worth a hell of a lot more than that. I want the money, and I want some kind of believable guarantee that they’ll leave all of us alone.”
He hadn’t quite figured out what kind of guarantee he’d find believable, but if they survived this venture, all of them—he and Gillian and their friends and family members—needed to go on with their lives without wondering when someone would creep out of the dark with a can of gasoline and a match, or set an explosive inside their boat or car.
“As for where the cross might be, Gillian ca
n answer that question better than I can.” Shane had heard the water from the shower cut off a few minutes earlier and hoped she’d rejoin them. “I think she also can give us a clearer idea of when the ship sank. Otherwise, I don’t have a lot of hope of finding it. The North Atlantic’s a big place.” And not a safe place to dive.
“You screwed up by getting involved with the woman.”
What was Charlie smoking? “I’m not—”
Charlie made an alarming noise that sounded like a cross between a wheeze and a honk. Shane pushed his chair away from the table, ready to rush over for a try at the Heimlich maneuver or at least to pound his uncle on the back. Then he realized Charlie was laughing. If the old man would do it more often, it might sound more natural. Shane slumped back in his seat and gave Charlie a sour look.
“That expression of yours was worth a million bucks by itself,” Charlie gasped. “Don’t deny it. If you and that Gillian girl ain’t knocking knees yet, you will be. But it’s still a mistake.”
Knocking knees? God Almighty, did people still talk like that? Shane had fallen into a time warp without knowing it. “Even if it were true, which it isn’t, it might not be a mistake.”
Of course it was a mistake, but he was admitting nothing.
“There might come a time when you have to choose between her and surviving.” Charlie’s voice softened. “You been in that place before, son, and it almost destroyed you. In fact, until today, I thought it had destroyed you. Was convinced of it. If it happens again, you make the same choice as last time, you hear me? You choose to live. Just don’t let it eat you up from the inside.”
Shane found himself back in a dark place he rarely let himself visit, a dark, cold emptiness where death lay above him and life, in the form of a single rope, lay clutched in his hands. He shuddered as the familiar, icy tendrils of panic took him by the throat and squeezed.
“Shane—you okay?” Gillian’s hand rested on his shoulder, and he looked up at her. Warm. Real. Alive.
The panic subsided and left Shane feeling akin to melted Jell-O as the adrenaline drained from his muscles. “Yeah, you up to talking about our friend Duncan Campbell?”
Her wet hair swept her shoulders, leaving damp spots on her dark green Scrub State Reserve t-shirt. She looked from him to Charlie and paused at the navigation sheets. “Yeah, let me get some stuff out of my bag.”
By the time she returned, Shane had poured a couple of fingers of bourbon for her and set it on the table.
“Thanks.” She pulled out a map and some typed sheets. “I found out a few things by talking to one of my great-uncles, but most of what I’ve learned came from one of those online genealogy sites.”
“You’ve been holding out on me.” Shane bit back the urge to grouse at her. He’d suspected she knew more than she’d told him, and that she’d planned to use it as leverage to get herself included on the dive. Now that she’d proven useful on shipboard, she figured it was safe to trot it out. He reached out and grasped her wrist. “Just so we’re clear, no more holding back information. The time for playing games with each other is done. We’re either all in or we’re not. Agreed?”
At least she had the good grace to look embarrassed, even to blush a bit—which looked damned good on her. “Agreed. I’m sorry. I’d planned to tell you when we left Cedar Key, and then…I just didn’t.”
He nodded. She didn’t tell him for the same reason he hadn’t pushed himself too hard to develop a preliminary dive plan. It was easier to enjoy those past four days of peace and pretend they were together by choice and not under duress. “So, what can you tell us?”
Gillian sorted through her papers and pulled one out. “Okay, here’s what I know of Duncan Campbell. According to the genealogy site, he was in his middle twenties, the youngest son of a youngest son who’d grown up near Glasgow. That pretty much meant he had no social prospects. He was married and had a young son himself when he took a job with a family, the Sandilands, who were tied in with the Knights Templars. Not knights themselves, I don’t think, but some kind of patrons. I’m guessing the Campbells were part of the household staff. Maybe even servants.”
Shane could imagine how Duncan, with a young family and no way to move up in a society that rewarded people for their birth order, would be tempted if surrounded by riches. “So he helped himself to some Templars treasure and hopped a ship?”
“Sort of.” Gillian rustled through her papers. “One branch of the Sandilands moved to France, and Duncan and his family went with them. I couldn’t find out why they moved, but that was where Duncan allegedly stole the ruby cross and caught a supply ship, The Marcus Aurelius, that was headed to a place in Nova Scotia called Port Royal. Slipped his family out in the dead of night.”
She set the papers back down and looked off into space. Shane had learned to recognize it as her thinking pose.
“The genealogists were full of theories about how the Sandilands sent the cross with Duncan to get it out of France. They think the plan was for the Sandilands to follow along later, help sell the cross to the British, and then split the profits.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how any of them would know that; it’s probably guesswork.”
“I know where Port Royal is, or was.” Charlie spoke up for the first time. “It’s on the northwest side of the province. Hard to get to, but a good place to harbor once you navigate in. That’s where Duncan’s ship went down?”
As badly as Shane felt about Charlie getting dragged into this mess, he was thankful for the man’s experience. He might be able to help them in ways they didn’t know.
Gillian shook her head. “No, the ship Duncan was on didn’t make it as far as Port Royal. That’s where it gets even more dicey.” She rustled through some more papers. “I couldn’t find any official documents on The Marcus Aurelius, but there were several accounts of the shipwreck from Duncan’s descendants, stuff written down in family Bibles from different generations and different branches of the family. I guess the original story had been passed down by Duncan’s son—who survived the shipwreck—to his children, and so on. But all the written accounts agree that the ship foundered off the coast northeast of what’s now Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, on the farthest eastern point of Cape Breton Island.”
She pulled out the provincial map of Nova Scotia and pushed it to the center of the table, pointing to a spot on the eastern shore.
“I don’t need to see that map.” Charlie leaned back. “That’s the death coast, from Louisbourg all the way up to the tip of Cape Breton. Locals say there’s shipwrecks stacked one on top of the other on the ocean floor off that whole area. What year did your ship go down?”
“About 1670, give or take a few years—originally, I’d thought it was earlier. That’s the most I could narrow it down.”
Charlie shook his head. “Chances of finding a ship that old in those waters aren’t good at all. Shane, you’re a talented diver, or at least you used to be. But you can’t find what can’t be found. It would take a miracle.”
Shane pulled the map to him and studied it. The jagged coastline of Cape Breton protruded far into the North Atlantic, dotted with various small islands and one or two larger ones. He found Louisbourg, tucked on the south shore of the peninsula, and traced his finger eastward to open water.
A ship coming from Europe would’ve been following the old Viking trade routes. If it wanted to navigate to the St. Lawrence Seaway, it would have to skirt the coast where it jutted out. One slight miscalculation or renegade wind would mean disaster. That largest outlying island would’ve been a definite hazard in a day where navigators didn’t have conveniences like sonar or even freaking lighthouses.
He tapped a finger on the big island, which was shaped kind of like a bird with its wings outstretched, flying to the west. “My guess would be that this is the most likely trouble spot for a ship that got caught in bad weather trying to round that cape.”
Gillian stood up and leaned over the table so they could both see the map. “Y
ep, that’s the one. The closest community to it now is a place called Main-à-Dieu. The island is called…wait a second.” She sat back down and rifled through the papers.
“Scaterie,” Charlie said, his voice flat. “Scaterie Island. Last I heard, she was still bringing ships down. There’s a big old tanker sitting on the rocks right now. Ran aground back in 2010 or 2011, I think, and sits there while everybody fights over what to do with her.”
“You know anything about diving that area?” Shane slid the bourbon bottle across the table and Charlie caught it without a fumble. The man might be paranoid, and with good reason, but his reflexes were still sharp.
“A little. It’s a hard dive, or so I’ve heard. And your chances of finding something aren’t good. Most of the wrecks that’ve been cataloged around there are in fairly shallow water, but it’s rough. Lots of wave action. Hard to handle a boat even during the calmest time of year, in June and July.” He shook his head. “And this is September. Up there, it’s not summer anymore.”
Shane cursed inwardly, not wanting Gillian to see how concerned he was about this dive. Even the map looked menacing, and without an exact idea of where the ship went down, he was going to eat up a lot of time doing scouting dives. “I don’t guess you know anybody in the area who could help us, do you?” he asked Charlie. “A local? Somebody who knows the legends and rumors and where the bodies are buried. Somebody who might be willing to help a guy who’s diving for something not quite legal?”
The navigation plans said Shane Burke and his boat The Evangeline would be taking a pleasure trip, not trying to locate a shipwreck and recover treasure that legally belonged to Canada and the province of Nova Scotia.
Charlie tugged his crutch under his right arm and hoisted himself up with a dexterity that both surprised Shane and shamed him—clearly, his uncle had had time to learn how to get around with one leg, but he’d done it without the help of the closest thing he had to a son.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep (The Collectors) Page 16