Benoit nodded, but Joe wasn’t finished. “I’m going to go rent a boat from Manny, then I’m getting on the water and going out to this island here.” He pointed at the map. “You police people can do what you please. You can come with me or not, but I’m going.”
***
Amande could tell that the tide was high, because her island was far smaller than it had been during her last visit. It was hardly bigger than the low rise beneath the cabin and its adjacent copse of trees. Iridescent brown smears marked the sliver of sand that remained, and the hot sun made the stink of oil even more pronounced. Steve had cut the motor when the island came in sight, but he still had one arm around her like a crawdad’s pincer. The knife had stayed at her throat for the entire ride while he operated the tiller with his other hand.
“Where is it? Tell me where it is.”
Steve didn’t sound rational. He’d never sounded rational.
“Where’s what?” She hated the sound of her voice, squeaky and shrill. If he planned to kill her, she didn’t want to die sounding like a scared little girl.
“I’m not talking to you. Where’s the wreck, Sechrist?”
Dane had been silent and still since they left the houseboat. It wasn’t obvious to Amande whether he considered himself Steve’s partner or his prisoner. “I told you. I don’t know.”
“I’ve never believed that. You say it all the time, but I don’t believe it. You been looking too long, you been spending too much money, you been offering me a big pile of money for an island that ain’t worth nothing. Where is it?”
“I never found anything but a pile of ballast stones. Honestly. The pile was big enough to be a ship. For a while, I thought it was. I’ve been burning time and money ever since, because I’m just so close. When I found the underwater coins, I thought I was in the debris trail. Then nothing. Then I found another coin of the right age, and some worthless things like nails and hinges were with it, but they were on the island, on the far side from the sunken stones. Now I’m thinking the crew dumped the stones during a storm to keep from running aground and maybe the wreck isn’t as close to them as I thought.”
He scanned the horizon like a man looking for something precious that he lost just yesterday, something that he could find if he looked a little longer and a little harder.
Steve’s mouth was so close to Amande’s ear that she could feel the spit when he talked. But he still wasn’t talking to her. She was only a tool to control Dane, and she was useful as a source of information that could lead to a boundless treasure. From the way he moved when he held her body against his, she’d begun to fear that he intended to use her for other things far worse.
One thing was clear. Her worth began and ended with her usefulness to Steve. How could her mother have lived with this man?
She hated the sound of his voice in her ear as he taunted Dane. “Maybe it worked. Dumping the stones, I mean. Maybe there ain’t no treasure ship here at all. If they dumped the stones to save the ship, then you gotta take into consideration that maybe they saved the ship. Don’t tell me you been wasting my time.”
Amande thought this was a remarkably astute observation from someone as stupid as Steve.
Even in crisis, Dane couldn’t be made to imagine that his treasure ship wasn’t there. He rose to its defense. “Then why did Amande and I both find gold and silver? You don’t throw the treasure overboard unless you’re on the verge of going down. It’s human nature. If a crew gets desperate enough to throw away gold, the ship is already lost, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. There’s a treasure ship here waiting for me. It’s a sure thing.”
Amande knew enough about statistics to know that “ninety-nine times out of a hundred” was not at all the same as a sure thing.
“Then show me the big pile of rocks and show me where you found the coins, asshole. I’ll take it from there.”
Dane sat for a moment, looking from the water to the knife to Steve’s face. For a moment, Amande thought he was going to defy a man with a deadly weapon, just to protect a treasure ship that might not actually exist. Then she saw the dreamer’s light in Dane’s eyes fade as he made his choice.
“It’s back there. We came right over it a minute ago,” he said, gesturing behind Steve.
The big man turned to look over his shoulder. “Where?”
Behind them was nothing but open water, dotted by grasses.
“I use my GPS nowadays, but I didn’t have one when I first started diving, so I learned to use landmarks. See how some of these islands are big enough to have a few trees? I picked four of them. Draw a line in your head from this one to that one, and from that one to that other one over there. X marks the spot.”
Dane gestured with both hands at faraway trees clinging to tiny specks of dry land, and Steve turned further in his seat as he tried to spot the imaginary crosshairs marking an old pile of submerged stones. Then Amande found herself facedown in the bottom of the boat as Dane grabbed with his right hand at the hilt of the knife Steve was holding to her throat, using his left hand to throw her clear.
If Dane hadn’t been such a gentleman, things might have turned out differently. As a slender but well-built six-footer, he was no physical match for a man who was his equal in height, but weighed half-again as much. And he was no match in ruthlessness for a man who had killed at least twice.
However, Amande, too, was a slender but well-built six-footer. If Dane hadn’t tried so hard to get her out of reach of the knife, they might have been able together to overpower Steve. Failing that, she might have been able to go for the tiller and gain control of the boat, although heaven only knew what good that would have done.
Instead, Dane’s mutiny was over in seconds, and it ended with a blade in his throat.
Amande was astonished by how quickly Steve heaved Dane’s bleeding body overboard and held his head underwater until there was no doubt he was dead. This explained a lot about the investigators’ failure to find physical evidence of her grandmother’s and uncle’s murders. There was hardly any mess to be seen aboard the boat after Dane’s murder, beyond a few blood spatters on Steve’s face and shoulders. Steve had been able to prepare for the other killings, choosing his time and method of attack, so there likely would have been even less telltale gore. Amande supposed this was how it would be when he eventually killed her.
Why couldn’t she stop thinking about Gola George and his bloodstained white silk shirts?
***
Faye was still shaking. This would be a poor time to break down completely, body and soul, but what really is the appropriate response to watching a young and vital man be knifed to death? For a timeless time, she’d thought it was Amande’s limp body being thrown into the bay, and she’d heedlessly gunned her motor and rushed toward the scene of a murder. Steve had been busy being a killer, so she’d had no sign that he’d heard or seen her before hurrying from the scene.
She knew long before she got near the body that it belonged to Dane and not to Amande. Once again, the binoculars came in very handy. They showed her the sun glinting on his golden hair. They also told her that he was floating facedown with no sign of a struggle, so she knew he was beyond help. They did not tell her the right thing to do.
Every instinct told her to go fish the poor man’s body out of the water. It seemed so disrespectful to leave him there. But she didn’t think she was strong enough to do it alone, and all the while she was trying, Steve would be taking Amande further away.
When the binoculars showed her fins—many fins and big ones—gathering around Dane’s body, she knew what she had to do. She couldn’t take this boat into a group of sharks and fight them for a bleeding body. When she made the decision to leave Dane’s corpse defenseless, that’s when the shaking started. There were no tears yet, but they would come. Right now, Faye needed to get control of her rebellious body. She had no time to go into shock, or even to just sit and weep.
Why couldn’t she look away from Dane? In a totally inad
equate way, training her binoculars on him felt like a way to be his companion on this last journey. As she drew closer, she could see streams of his blood weaving through floating bands of oil.
She imagined that she could smell the blood, but the truth was that its iron odor was swamped by the unnatural stench of petroleum. She forced herself to point the binoculars at Steve’s boat, because she needed to focus on maintaining the right distance and on formulating a plan. Every passing minute that didn’t involve Amande’s corpse being thrown overboard into the water and oil and blood was a good one.
She busied herself by making a mental list of her advantages in a contest with Steve for Amande’s life. She didn’t have a weapon, and he surely did. It would be reasonable to assume he had a knife. It would also be reasonable to pray that he did not have a gun, so she did.
While she was at it, she prayed that Joe had gotten her message and that he was coming to her rescue at top speed.
In the meantime, Faye’s binoculars were her only inarguable advantage. She’d combed through the equipment stored on the boat for something that resembled a weapon, but her pointy and sharp-edged trowel was the best she could do. She wasn’t actually sure it was a better weapon than the small pocketknife she carried everywhere, but it was bigger and heavier. That must count for something.
Michael stirred in the bottom of the boat, and Faye’s denial cracked. What did she think she was going to do? She couldn’t walk into a confrontation while holding him by the hand, but her mind wouldn’t stop cataloging the things that Steve might be planning to do to Amande. Why did parents ever choose to have more than one child? There was no way to put each of them first, always.
Her pale and weak plan traded heavily on the binoculars. After Steve’s boat reached the island, Faye would lurk in her boat, far from shore, and watch for a chance to…um…do something heroic. Her grasp of the details was still a little vague.
***
Steve dropped the anchor and stood, wrapping both arms around Amande and dragging her with him as he climbed over the side and into the water. She went down on her knees, drenching her clothes from the neck down, then he hoisted her to her feet. “The coins, bitch. Where did you find them?”
Amande considered what she should tell him. One of her coins had come from a spot currently submerged in three feet of water. The other one, though, had been in the place where Faye had uncovered bits of very old wood. This suited her purpose better. Steve would spend more time poking around in a spot where it was easy to dig and where he stood a chance of finding something soon enough to keep him distracted. And distracted was good.
He nodded when she pointed to the trees, saying, “Yeah, Justine used to tell me about digging up stuff on this island. Maybe that was the spot. That goddamn Dane was obsessed with finding a shipwreck. He just wanted the island to use as a base. Said it would be a lot easier to salvage a big load thataway. And there was some fancy legal reason that having the island would help him claim the treasure, but none of that makes any nevermind now that he’s dead. Justine knew a lot more about this island than he did, and she always thought there was a chest of gold buried here. We come to look for it a few times, before she got sick. I’m going with her story.”
Getting there was a slow experience, since Steve insisted on dragging her. He seemed to think it was too risky just to let her walk. As they walked, Amande thought of her mother as a child, running free over this very same patch of sand.
Steve kept her body clamped against his, her back to his chest and his knife to her throat. When they reached the spot, the disturbed soil from Faye’s digging was still visible. The tremble in Steve’s body said that he wanted to drop everything and shovel dirt until he got to a pile of treasure. But he couldn’t do that with his arms wrapped around a prisoner.
Amande felt a tremble seize her own body. This was a moment when he might decide to kill her. Seconds passed and she was still alive, so he either thought she still possessed valuable information, or else he had other plans for her before she died. She felt a chill at her core that only made the trembling worse.
Then Steve spoke, but his words didn’t reveal the full scope of his plans for her. They only gave a glimpse into the next phase of her torture.
“I got a shovel in the cabin. And some rope.”
***
Faye had found a handy patch of marsh grass big enough to hide her boat. She’d anchored, then slid overboard with her trowel in one hand, her pocketknife in the other, and the binoculars hanging around her neck. Standing in waist-deep water, she’d maneuvered herself into a spot where she could see the entire near side of the island without much risk of being seen.
Michael had been inconsolable when he saw that she was “swimming” and he wasn’t, so she’d put him in Joe’s backpack and strapped it on herself. He wanted to be fully submerged, but his little legs were dragging in the water, so he was happy enough for the moment.
Faye had watched Steve drag Amande into the cabin and come out alone.
It made little sense to pass up the opportunity for a neat and tidy murder aboard the boat, like Dane’s, opting instead for messing up the interior of a house. Granted, it wasn’t much of a house, but what kind of nut would leave a young girl on its floor in a puddle of blood?
The same kind of nut who had been committing low-stakes murders all week, that’s who. Was a treasure that might not even exist worth doing murder? If you were a person who would kill for a ratty old houseboat, Faye figured it was.
She had to get into that cabin.
If she came ashore on the far side of the island, Steve’s view would be blocked by the trees and by the tallest part of the island and by the cabin itself. By making her way from one clump of grass to another, she could maintain some degree of cover for most of the journey.
It wasn’t going to be easy to do this while carrying a one-year-old on her back and a trowel in one hand. Even the binoculars were starting to look heavy to Faye. There was no help for it, so she took the first step. Michael splashed his feet into the water and laughed out of the sheer joy of being alive in such a beautiful place.
At least her passenger was happy.
***
Amande lay spread-eagled on the floor of the cabin, one arm and leg tied to a post in the middle of the room that had apparently been installed to hold the sagging roof up. Her other arm and leg were tied to a tremendous old brass bed that was topped with a soiled and rotting mattress.
Her brain didn’t seem to be working well. She’d always been able to count on her sharp mind but now, when she most needed it, she found her thoughts to be as slippery as wet swamp muck.
She should be thinking of a way to escape, instead of lying here in this most vulnerable of positions, wondering what Steve had planned for her when he got tired of digging for treasure. Efforts to free herself had accomplished nothing, other than to show just how tightly Steve had tied her bonds. There seemed to be no way to cut those bonds, when she couldn’t reach the stone blade hidden in her pocket.
Instead of plotting her escape, she found her mind wandering in the direction of Henry the Mutineer. Henry had been kidnapped and forced to serve on a pirate ship, then lived to rule a pirate ship himself, at Gola George’s side. If only she had a seven-foot-tall pirate coming to rescue her…
But that pirate had turned on Henry the Mutineer. No, wait. Her frantic brain was scrambling the story, and that just wasn’t like her. Gola George had indeed turned on Henry the Mutineer, but Henry had betrayed him first. On the day that George put his hands on Marisol, and she defied him by splaying her ivory fan in his face, George had shattered the fan with one big hand and prepared to take her by force.
How could he have possibly predicted that the foppish Henry would pull his jeweled dagger from the decorative scabbard strapped to his leg, burying its blade in the thick shoulder muscles attached to George’s sword-wielding arm?
And then Henry and Marisol had run for their lives. They ran from George
and from his crew of pirates, who would have turned on Henry the instant they heard what he’d done. They ran from Henry’s paintings and Marisol’s lute and their silk clothes. They fled down the gangplank, straight through the shabby settlement where George housed his women, and right out the other side. They hid deep in the swamp, so deep that Marisol had to shed the heavy skirts that dragged in the mud and caught in the thick grasses. She stripped to her linen chemise and drawers, and it was a long time before she owned clothes other than those.
Just before dawn, after the pirates had given up their hunt and gone to sleep, Henry and Marisol stole every last rowboat and dinghy in the settlement. Why did two people need all those boats? And how did they steal them, with only the two of them to row?
They needed all those boats for Henry’s final mutiny, because they took every last one of George’s women with them, and all of George’s children. Amande had heard it said that George hunted Henry till the end of his days, but she doubted it. According to the stories, Henry had hidden in plain sight, with the river pilots who lived near the great river’s mouth at Head-of-Waters. If Gola George had wanted to find Henry and kill him, he could have done it. But that would have meant looking straight in the face of his betrayer and his lifelong friend, and he would have had to do it while knowing full well that, by attacking Marisol, he had betrayed Henry, too.
It was no coincidence that Amande was thinking of Henry’s spectacular escape and of the rescue of Gola George’s women and children, and she knew it. She was a self-sufficient person, and she liked to think that she could take care of herself, but at that moment, right then, she knew that she just couldn’t. Sometimes a person needs rescue. Amande wondered if a rescuer would ever come for her.
Perhaps she had been hallucinating, but she could have sworn she saw something at the moment of Dane’s death. It was nothing metaphysical. She’d seen no spectral spirit rising heavenward, but at the moment she rose from the bottom of the boat where Dane had thrown her to save her life, she’d seen…something. It had been nothing more than a speck on the horizon that was too hard-edged to be natural, but it had been something.
Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) Page 26