Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  “She cheats more openly than any married woman I’ve ever seen. She thinks that teaching a child to hold her liquor is one of the responsibilities of motherhood. According to the gossip that’s rampaging through Plaquemines Parish. Didi is so unburdened by guilt that she was willing to pretend her husband was killed when the oil rig exploded, so she could weasel herself into some undeserved widow’s compensation. Yes, I think her judgment is poor enough to allow her to take up with a man like Steve.”

  “I take it that you don’t like Didi.”

  Even when she was holding a wriggling child with one hand and trying not to drop her phone overboard with the other, Benoit’s understated style could make her laugh…

  …until he turned around and made her stop laughing, just by making a logical point. “Steve and Didi have a problem though. Their plan only works until Amande is eighteen. Then she’ll control her own property and her own money.”

  Why did Benoit have to point that out? Deep down, she knew that Amande was worth more dead than alive to Steve and that this would be even more true when she came of age, but she couldn’t think about that now. Amande was vulnerable to Steve in yet another way, and she needed to make Benoit understand that.

  “Follow me just a little further, Detective. Consider Amande’s island. When Steve came to town, he probably knew about it, but he thought it was worthless compared to the houseboat and stock. Suddenly, it has become a very popular place. We have a treasure hunter, Dane Sechrist, sniffing around those waters, and Manny has told us that Steve was hanging out with Dane even before he showed up on Miranda’s doorstep. Right?”

  “So Manny says.”

  “We know from my cousin Bobby that Dane is interested enough in the island to drive to New Orleans and study old maps of it. We also know that somebody who is too sloppy to be Dane, somebody who is probably Steve, has been storing diving gear on the island. That island has become the center of the universe for some people, and I think it’s obvious why. Whether there’s treasure out there or not, people think there is, and treasure has been the motive for many a killing. Who owns that island?”

  “Justine’s heirs—Steve and Amande. That’s all, I think. Not Didi, because she wasn’t related to Justine’s father.”

  “Yes!” Faye said again. “Now tell me…how can Steve get control of the island?”

  “It’s even easier than controlling the houseboat, because Didi has no ownership in her own right. He can control the island by controlling Amande’s guardian—Didi—or he can get himself named Amande’s guardian.”

  “Or he can get her to marry him.” The very thought made Faye want to wash her brain with soap.

  “Or he could kill her. That’s all very complicated, Faye.”

  “Sure it is. Life is complicated.”

  “Let me uncomplicate it for you.” There was pity in his voice. “Here’s what I think, and you’re not going to like it. Didi and Amande have no other known living relatives, correct? Other than Tebo and Amande’s missing father?”

  “Correct.”

  “In the absence of some guy with DNA that proves he’s Amande’s father, who would have the best chance of inheriting Justine’s stuff if Didi and Amande died? I’d say that Justine’s widower would have the best shot, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve told me that you think Steve is capable of committing murder twice, in such an out-front and straightforward way that it’s sheer luck we haven’t found witnesses or evidence yet who can help us nail him. He’s been lucky. What’s to keep him from believing he can get away with doing it twice more?”

  Faye couldn’t think of an answer she liked, so she said, “I need to go back to the marina and get that girl. I can be there in ten minutes.”

  “Was Steve around when you left?”

  “No. I’d have noticed that stupid-looking boat.”

  “That’s not to say he’s not there now. I’m on my way, and I won’t be alone. Call me when you get close to the marina.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Dane stayed a shy step further from the door than most people would have.

  “Hey, there,” he said to Amande.

  If Amande had been more experienced with romance, she would have been amused at this grown man, tentative in the presence of a sixteen-year-old girl. She would also have been able to see that he liked her and that he didn’t know what to do about it, because she was sixteen. “I have something to show you,” he said, holding out a bag.

  Still feeling awkward and tongue-tied, she took too long to speak and he blundered on. “Some artifacts, I mean. I’ve got some things that I know you’ll want to see. Do you—” He looked around him and noticed two deck chairs and a low table nearby. “Do you want to sit out here and look at them?”

  Amande, feeling that refusing to let him in her house would say she thought he was some kind of a criminal, said, “Oh, the sun’s kinda brutal out here. Do you want to come in?”

  She let Dane in and, knowing that Detective Benoit would be proud of her, she locked the door behind him. Amande had never entertained a guest of her own, not in the role of hostess, but she didn’t want him to know that. She played it cool. “Would you like something to drink? Maybe a beer?”

  “It’s a little early for me. I just had lunch. Some water would be fine.”

  So much for her effort to be sophisticated. Now he thought she was as big a lush as the rest of her family. Amande wanted to drop through the boat’s deck and never look at Dane again. She hurriedly stuck two glasses under the tap and filled them with water, then she dumped the rest of the barbecue chips into a bowl. How sophisticated.

  Dane didn’t even look up when she put his glass of water in front of him. He had reached into the bag and pulled out three broken pieces of pottery and a smaller bag.

  “Look,” he said, holding out the pottery and finally meeting her eyes. “I found these yesterday, and I’ve been all over the Internet, trying to date them. I think they’re pieces of an olive jar, very old. This is probably a piece of the rim. And here…see? This piece is curved like the neck of a jar.”

  She picked up the curved piece and ran a finger over it. “They look like they came from the same jar. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could put all the pieces together? How old do you think it is?”

  “Maybe from the sixteen hundreds.”

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “From the bottom of Barataria Bay, right where the pirates used to sail.”

  Amande held another potsherd up to the light and sighed. She was too distracted to notice the intent gaze that said Dane had never met a woman who cared about such things, except for the much older and very married Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth.

  “Do you think there’s a shipwreck down there?” she asked.

  “Yes. Of course there is. There’s lots of shipwrecks down there that nobody will ever find. But have I found one of them? Yeah, I’d like to think so.”

  He opened the small bag and pulled out two boxes. “I didn’t find all of these, but I thought you’d like to see them. Especially since yours got stolen.” He handed her the first box.

  Nestled on cushioning material at the bottom of one shallow box were two silver coins and a gold one. He gestured toward them and said, “I found those. But I bought the others.”

  The second box held two silver coins. Even if she hadn’t recognized the box, Amande would have known them. She’d looked at them under magnification countless times. She’d held them in her hand until her fingertips knew their shape and texture. She knew them by their weight, to the very last gram.

  She grabbed her coins, one in each hand, and rose to her feet. “Of course, you didn’t find these. I found them.” She started backing toward the door, reaching behind her to unlock it. “If you took my coins, you probably killed my grandmother. Why did you bring them back here? Did you think I was so young and stupid that I couldn’t figure it out?”

  “Wait!”

&nbs
p; Oh, God, now he was coming after her.

  “No, I didn’t take your coins, and nobody could ever think you were stupid.”

  How far was it to the door?

  She took a step backwards, then another. “Those coins were in my drawer when I left that morning with Faye and her family. When I got home, my grandmother was dead and my coins were gone. If you have the coins, then probability says that you killed her. It’s simple statistics.”

  “I bought the coins, honestly. Steve told me they came from his island, the one he wants to sell me as soon as—”

  “As soon as he figures out a way to steal my part from me. You bought these coins from Steve? Are you nuts? You’re ignoring the obvious.”

  It was Dane’s turn to look awkward and clueless.

  “He stole my coins, you idiot. He killed my grandmother and stole my coins. I bet you even told him I had them, didn’t you? Steve probably stole them because he knew you were looking for stuff from the sixteen hundreds and would buy them from him. And because he knew that telling you he found them on the island would make you want to buy it even more. Geez. How stupid can you be?”

  Amande reached the door and fumbled behind her, only to feel the doorknob vibrate as someone on the other side turned a key in the lock. The door opened and she fell into Steve’s arms.

  Dane’s eyes locked on Steve and, for a moment, Amande could see that he had forgotten her. “You stole her coins? When? Did you sneak over here while I was talking to Miranda about buying Amande’s share of the island?” Dane said. “That was idiotic. I asked her if she knew where the coins came from, for God’s sake. And you knew I was planning to ask her that. Surely, you knew she would suspect me…or maybe you knew she’d never get a chance to suspect me, since you were already planning to kill her when you came over here.”

  “You didn’t need to be dealing with the old lady. I told you I could get control of the whole island, if you gave me time.”

  “I’ve got no time to waste, not with the oil coming.”

  Amande knew that she should probably let them forget she was there while she came up with an escape plan, but she had listened long enough to the two of them discussing ways to cheat her.

  “You were trying to get Grandmère to sell you my island? And then you stole my coins? When is somebody in this goddamn world going to recognize that something…anything…belongs to me?”

  Amande dropped into a squat and leaned hard to the left, hoping to use her body weight to throw Steve off-balance. It was worth a try, because she was sturdily built and no shorter than he was, but he still had a hundred pounds on her. He yanked the girl to her feet, and she could feel new bruises on her rib cage. She wasn’t surprised when Steve pulled a knife from a hidden scabbard in his pants. She had felt the shape of it digging into her back when he first grabbed her.

  The point of the knife was poking into her throat, just below the jaw. Dane’s freckled face bore a sheen of perspiration. “What good is this going to do you, Steve? All you need to do is get control of the island for me, so I can solidify my claim on the wreck. When I find it, I’ll buy the island from you at twice what it’s worth. Tell you what. If you let the girl go, I’ll raise my offer to three times the island’s appraised value.”

  “When you find it…that’s the problem, ain’t it? How long you been diving for it, and you still don’t know where it is? This little bitch knows where she found them coins, and I think it was on that island I own a piece of. Maybe there’s more out there. More old silver can’t be a bad thing, even if there’s not a shipload of it. Maybe if I know where her coins come from, I won’t need you to figure out where the treasure ship wrecked.”

  Steve was obviously proud of this feat of logic, so much so that he decided to parade his mental superiority in front of Dane and Amande. “If you’re not smart enough to find that boat after all that diving, then I got no more use for you. I got diving equipment. When the island is all mine and I’m living rent-free in this houseboat, I can look for the treasure ship myself, any time I feel like it.”

  “What happens to us, now that we know you killed my grandmother?”

  Steve ran the point of the knife along Amande’s jaw, heading for her ear. “I never said I killed your grandmother. I think maybe you should probably stop saying it. We need to get in the boat now and go find that shipwreck.”

  “The wreck’s mine,” Dane said. Amande thought it was rather brave of him to talk back to an armed man, though his bravery was mitigated by the fact that it wasn’t his throat being caressed by a humongous hunting knife. The romantic in her hoped that he was doing this to get Steve to rub the knife all over his throat, instead of hers.

  No luck. Dane was still focused on the wreck. He was still negotiating a business deal.

  “We agreed early on that I’d buy the island from you, then I found out that you didn’t own it all. We have a deal when I can see a way to get full title to the island, not before. That’s all the money I’ll ever owe you. You’ve got no piece of the wreck.”

  Amande felt cool metal travel down to the hollow of her neck.

  “The island belongs to me and this girl. Three fourths of it is mine. The rest is hers. If I kill her, it’ll all be mine. Then we’ll have a deal, won’t we, Sechrist?”

  Ignoring the fact that calling a knife-wielding man names was unwise, Amande said, “You really are stupid. If I die without a will, the state of Louisiana will decide who gets my property, and I bet it won’t be you. I’m thinking it’ll be Didi. But maybe I do have a will. You don’t know, do you? If I do, I can guarantee that you’re not on my list of heirs.”

  “Shut up.”

  She felt more bruises form under his cruel hands.

  “The girl’s smarter than you are, and she’s right. I won’t be buying that island until I know for sure that you have the title, and I won’t be showing you where any of the artifacts were found, ever.”

  “Yes, you will. You’ll take me there, if you want to keep this little bitch alive.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Amande tried to turn her head enough to look Steve in the face. “I’ll show you the rest of my coins and I’ll tell you where I got them, if you let me go. Some of them are silver, so they’re worth something. They’re in my room.”

  She eyed Dane. He knew that she didn’t have any more artifacts that Steve would give a damn about, because she’d described her collection to him in excruciating detail, but he was keeping his mouth shut. Maybe he was on her side.

  Steve twisted Amande’s arm behind her back and shoved her toward her bedroom. Dane followed.

  She pulled the folder of silver American money out of the drawer first and handed it to Steve. With luck, he’d be too intoxicated by the smell of a precious metal to notice what else she was doing.

  While he was pawing through the twentieth-century coins, she reached in the drawer again and pulled out a tray of stone tools. A flint blade lay atop the other implements. Joe had praised its finely honed edge. She palmed it.

  With her free hand, she retrieved a tray of European import goods—buttons, a pipe, a green glass jar. After she handed it to Steve, who was starting to need more than one free hand to deal with everything she was throwing at him, she surreptitiously swiped the sextant from her desktop and crumpled a carefully chosen map around it in a loose wad. Those import goods were all far newer than the seventeenth-century shipwreck Dane and Steve were hoping to find, but Steve didn’t know that. It would take him a few moments to rifle through them and find that they bored him. Maybe in those few moments Amande would think of something to save her life.

  Or maybe in those few moments someone would come to help her. Faye would be at her side in an instant if she knew Amande was in trouble, despite the fact that she was just a brand-new acquaintance who would be going away soon. Amande had known the same kind of loyalty in her grandmother. She wondered if she would ever have that in her life again.

  Steve thrust the trays back at her.
“Nothing’s in here that’s any good. We’re going out to the island, and you’re gonna show me where you found them Spanish coins.”

  He twisted her right arm behind her again. It hurt, but if one of her arms had to be yanked half-off, this was the one she wanted yanked. The stone blade was wrapped tight in that hand where he couldn’t see it, biting into her palm, and she didn’t need it right now. She did need her left hand free, and she let it dangle beside her leg, keeping her body between Steve and that hand.

  There were more things than a sextant and a crumpled map in that left hand. As he dragged her to his boat, she dropped tiny potsherds that she’d grabbed from the basket on her desk. One by one, they marked her trail. Dane followed them silently. Once, she saw him nudge a sherd with his toe, moving it into a position that would be more obvious to anyone searching the boat. It felt good to have an ally, although she would have been more grateful for an ally with a gun.

  At the door, she let the sextant drop. The map wrapping it cushioned its impact with the wooden deck, so it fell silently. Dane nudged it with his toe until the paper opened slightly, revealing old brass. She could see that it had fallen so that it pointed toward the spot where Steve’s boat was moored, the very boat he would be using to take her from her home. Could her meaning possibly be more clear?

  Come and get me. Come this way…

  Amande hoped it was Faye who found the trail she’d left behind. Some people wouldn’t understand the meaning of those cast-off pieces of old trash, but Faye would know to look for her on the island, the only place Amande had ever found anything of value.

  Faye would come get her. Amande hoped she had enough sense to bring Joe.

  ***

  Joe was still far enough away from New Orleans and its urban amenities to enjoy crappy cell phone coverage. He figured he must have driven through a tiny zone where his phone worked, because Faye’s messages and texts had all come through at once. He wasn’t as much of a talker as Faye, so he’d just sent her one text that read, in its entirety: