Dangerous Waters

by Laurey Bright

  "Thank you, but I don't think I'll be staying in Mokohina." She should have checked out, herself, but it was Sunday and the sky was blue now with a few insubstantial clouds drifting across it, the harbor a deep satiny green, and after yesterday's exertions she felt lazy. Maybe she could stay a day longer.

  Rogan pushed away his plate as the waitress came with coffee and poured for all of them. Rogan took his black, Granger added a dash of cream.

  Rogan asked Camille, "Aren't you on holiday?"

  "A working one." She stirred cream and brown sugar crystals into her cup. "I'm preparing a presentation on the interaction of Maori and European women during the early settlement period."

  When Barney had been so insistent that she come to Mokohina she'd decided to make the trip an opportunity for research. The Bay of Islands, first visited by Europeans in the late eighteenth century and with missionary settlement since 1814, was a good place to find obscure local material.

  "So where are you off to next?" Rogan inquired.

  "Maybe Kerikeri." The town was home to some of New Zealand's oldest buildings and had a charming river. But its views didn't compete with those of Mokohina. "My plans aren't fixed."

  Granger warned, "The holiday season's starting. You could have trouble finding casual accommodation." He pushed back his chair and stood up, glancing at his watch. "I'll be off shortly," he said to Rogan, and nodded pleasantly to Camille. "Thanks for your help yesterday."

  "No problem," she murmured, and began to move, herself.

  Rogan stood too. "I'll bring along that box for you."

  He left her at the reception desk, where she managed to extend her stay to the following day. Ten minutes later she opened her door to Rogan's knock.

  "Where do you want it?" he asked, ignoring her attempt to take the box from his arms.

  "On the table, I suppose." There was a round glass-topped table by the window, flanked by two cushioned wicker chairs that had been freshly painted white.

  The telephone on the night table burred. Camille hurried to answer it as Rogan edged a vase of artificial flowers away from the center of the table to ease the box down.

  Camille picked up the phone. "James here," his voice said quietly in her ear. "I wondered if you'd like to meet a retired headmaster who's made almost a lifetime study of the history of this area. He buys old books from me and has a collection of family papers and other original documents he's amassed over the years. But perhaps you're not interested in talking with amateurs."

  She'd been intrigued on her visit to the tiny museum, her interest in localized history piqued. "I'd be very interested," she assured him, watching Rogan rescue the vase as it toppled, and look around for somewhere safe to put it.

  James was saying, "He'll be at church this morning, but I could take you to his place this afternoon."

  "I don't like to impose on you, James."

  "It will be a pleasure. Please don't deprive me of it."

  James sometimes seemed like a gentleman from another era. She laughed quietly. "If you put it like that…"

  Rogan carefully placed the vase on the 1930s dressing table and sent her a piercing look.

  "Good," James said. "Is one-thirty too early?"

  "Not too early at all. I'll be ready."

  "Ready for what?" Rogan shot at her as she replaced the receiver, and when she raised her brows in surprise he looked mulish for a moment before muttering, "Sorry, none of my business." He looked down at the box. "Well, there it is."

  "Thank you."

  Rogan still didn't move. "You won't…um…you won't throw out anything that might…"

  "Might what?"

  "There could be some clue here, if Dad and Taff really found treasure…"

  Camille didn't believe for a minute that there was any treasure, much less that her father's pathetic belongings would hold the key to its whereabouts. "If you like," she said indifferently, "you can go through it with me."

  She wasn't sure why she made the offer, but perhaps it was because somehow she was dreading tackling this task, and company—any company—might ease it.

  Later she would have to phone her mother and ask her to find the certificates Granger had asked for—and explain why. At least Rogan's presence was a good excuse to stave that off for a while. Although she was wary of the potent sexuality he exuded, the undeniably pleasurable if unsettling sensations she experienced whenever he was around were an antidote to the depressive mood that threatened her.

  She sat staring at the box for a second or two, then lifted out the pictures she'd already seen, removed the bundle of letters beneath, and after glancing through the envelopes laid them aside.

  "You're not going to read them?" Rogan asked.

  Camille shook her head. "They're from my mother." The postmarks showed they had been sent more than twenty years ago. "I'll ask her what she wants done with them." But she could guess anyway. Burn them, Mona would say with a brittle laugh. Throw away everything. The way Thomas McIndoe had thrown away their marriage, their daughter's love.

  Camille wished she had the courage to do it without looking any further, but a small, niggling, useless curiosity made her keep digging into the box.

  She withdrew a battered peaked cap that gave off a faint whiff of salt water and tobacco and another elusive odor, bringing an instant memory of a big laughing man lifting her off her feet when she must have been only a tot, giving her a bear hug and planting a smacking kiss on her cheek, his skin like rough sandpaper. And a voice, with that same rasping quality, "How's my little girl?"

  The picture was so vivid her breath momentarily snagged before she quickly put the hat down alongside the letters.

  There were a number of wood carvings, none bigger than her hand—a turtle, a fish, boats of various shapes, and a few crude human figures, one more detailed than the others, of a girl child in a dress, her hair rippling down her back.

  "You?" Rogan queried.

  She put the figure down among the others. "I don't know." It could have been any anonymous child. Even if it was supposed to be her, he probably hadn't remembered what she looked like.

  There was a bundle of maps, most of them brown-stained with age and worn along the folds. She handed them to Rogan to look through.

  She found several books. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Two Years Before the Mast, navigation manuals, a few dog-eared paperback thrillers. Next came a pile of outdated National Geographics and a Boy Scout manual, the edges nibbled by mice or silverfish. Had her father been a Boy Scout once? Or just picked this up somewhere, perhaps for the pages illustrating how to tie knots?

  Under that a passport, well-stamped. Briefly Camille studied the photo of a bearded man gazing fiercely at the camera. He was a stranger.

  Right at the bottom she found a brown envelope containing unframed snapshots that she peeked at before adding it to the pile on the table, and a large imitation brass cigar tin, rusting at the corners.

  * * *

  Trying to be patient, Rogan watched her lever open the lid of the tin, revealing a magpie collection. Oddly shaped coins from obscure Pacific nations, a gold tiepin—when had Taff ever worn a tie? A pair of mother-of-pearl cuff links, another pair with some kind of dark red stone set in them. Beneath the trinkets and coins some yellowed newspaper cuttings. Camille studied one for a moment before putting it aside. Rogan peered sideways at the announcement of a wedding—Thomas William McIndoe to Mona Violet Hartley. There was a picture of the happy couple, Taff resplendent in a suit and tie, fair hair waving onto his shoulders, looking young and pleased with himself, and his bride in white frills and a cloudy veil, smiling adoringly at him.

  The other clipping was a birth notice. McIndoe: To Mona and Thomas, a darling daughter.

  Camille was carefully unfolding a larger piece of paper. He saw her eyes dilate momentarily, and her hands trembled. Then with a fierce, unexpected movement she crumpled the paper into her hand, her mouth tight and eyes bright and angry.

  "
What is it?" Rogan queried.

  "Nothing. Just rubbish." She dropped the screwed-up ball into a wastebasket near the table and began tipping the other things back into the tin. "If there's anything else you want from this lot—" she waved at the cluttered tabletop "—take your pick."

  Taff had been bluffly kind to Barney's boys. Rogan picked out the wooden turtle, that just fitted in his palm. "I'll take this for my brother." Maybe Granger could use it for a paperweight or something.

  "What about you?"

  "I move around a lot." He traveled light and didn't burden himself with sentimental possessions.

  Camille began gathering up the other carvings and dropping them back in the box.

  "What are you going to do with them?" he asked.

  "Probably burn them. They're not good enough to sell."

  They weren't works of art, but Taff had spent hours happily carving them. Rogan and Granger had once had small wooden outrigger canoes with miniature sails that they'd watched him make for them. Rogan didn't recall what had happened to them.

  As she reached for the figure of the little girl he said, "I'll have that."

  It was an impulse that surprised him almost as much as it evidently had her. She looked disconcerted, and he said swiftly, "Unless you want it after all."

  Decisively she shook her head. "You're welcome to it."

  He picked it up, the wood cool in his hand. "There isn't anything inside those books is there? Papers?"

  She went through them one by one, holding them spine upward and letting the pages fall open. "Nothing." She began returning them to the box.

  "I wouldn't mind looking through the navigation tables."

  She cast him a rather mocking glance. "They're all yours. Do you want the National Geographics too?"

  "Sure." He didn't want to miss anything.

  She stood up and tossed more things into the box, leaving the cigar tin and the two large photos, then picked up the brown envelope and hesitated before throwing it on top of the rest. A few photographs spilled from it. "You haven't even looked at them," he said.

  "I don't want to." Her voice was tight.

  "There are photos of my dad there. D'you mind…?"

  Camille shrugged, and wrapped her arms defensively about her body. "Help yourself." Her eyes were fixed on the window with its view of the hillside. "Then I'll dispose of the rest. I suppose they have an incinerator here."

  Rogan made a decision. "I'll take care of it for you. You should get the stuff in the tin valued, maybe."

  "I doubt if anything's worth much." She sounded indifferent. A small pause, then a rather grudging, "Thank you for getting rid of that for me." She nodded at the box.

  He finished repacking it and hoisted it into his arms. "Are you all right?"

  "Of course." She smiled at him, brilliantly, then said in a brisk tone, "Now that's done I can concentrate on my research." She was already walking to the door, apparently eager to get rid of him. On a note of subtle mockery she said, "Good luck with your treasure hunt."

  * * *

  James was in the foyer when Camille came down.

  After driving inland to a tiny settlement surrounding an abandoned dairy factory, he stopped at a modest villa with an impeccable garden where lavender and roses and deep blue forget-me-nots flourished under kowhai and totara trees.

  Selwyn Trubshaw looked younger than the seventy-nine years he deprecatingly admitted to; a fit, erect man with cropped gray hair, his brown eyes alert behind rimless spectacles. His library in a large converted bedroom was stacked from floor to ceiling with books and neatly labeled files and boxes, while an impressive old oak desk held a computer and scanner.

  Invited to inspect the shelves, reading book titles and the labels on file boxes, Camille experienced a tingling along her spine, lifting the fine hair at her nape, an intuition that she had learned to respect.

  Three and a half hours later she was poring over an old diary, scanning the meticulous copperplate writing.

  "Given to me by an elderly neighbor," Mr. Trubshaw said. "It was her grandmother's, and she was afraid her children would burn it after she died."

  James rested a casual hand on Camille's shoulder. He smelled of cologne, probably expensive but slightly sharp. "Interesting?" he queried.

  "Wonderful! This is what you don't get enough of in travel books written by men—the everyday life of the past."

  Mr. Trubshaw looked pleased. "You're welcome to come back anytime," he said.

  Guiltily Camille realized how late it was, and that he seemed a little tired. He'd been eagerly showing her his treasures, but he wasn't a young man. "I'd love to," she assured him warmly. "James, you've been very patient."

  On the way back to the hotel she said, "He has a marvelous collection, and just the sort of thing I'm looking for. I'm very grateful to you."

  "Grateful enough to have dinner with me again?"

  "Only if you let me pay. I owe you, after all."

  He shook his head, but she was adamant, and he graciously gave in.

  Chapter 5

  Rogan was hot, unable to sleep. He'd sorted through the photographs in the box, and put aside several of Taff. They sat in a neat pile next to the little wooden girl he'd placed on the table after returning to his room.

  The maps had yielded nothing of immediate interest; they were old and hadn't been opened for years, he guessed. The nautical tables had some scribbled notes on the pages, but none that looked like directions to any hidden treasure.

  Well, what had he expected—X marks the spot?

  Dressed only in shorts, he got up and without switching on a light padded to the window, pushed the old-fashioned sash up high to encourage a breeze, and stood looking out beyond the ghostly shapes of the boats in the marina to the sea, or at least what he could discern of it in the darkness. Which wasn't much more than an occasional glimpse of restless white or a glint of silver, but the smell of it rose to the window and wrapped him in its welcome, familiar aroma.

  The stars were dimmed in patches by ghostly clouds, and the moon was a luminous half-egg. A car passed, its headlights sweeping the road ahead. The glow of a streetlight was a target for moths and beetles swooping and diving about it.

  Was he an idiot, thinking his father might have finally found his life's dream? And what chance did he have of uncovering the secret now?

  Granger thought he was nuts. So did Camille, obviously. They could be right.

  Something nagged at a corner of his mind, some half-formed thought that had first wormed its way into his brain on board the ketch, only to sink back into his subconscious. Trying to tease it out, he was distracted when a car came into view and glided to a halt outside the hotel.

  He recognized the man who climbed out and went to open the passenger door. And then Camille emerged.

  They were awfully close. The man said something and bent his head, and she didn't move away. Rogan closed his hands over the cool paint of the windowsill.

  Now the guy had both hands on Camille's shoulders and was kissing her. Two seconds, and Rogan couldn't tell who broke off the clinch. He heard the low murmur of her voice, and the man's indistinct reply. Then they both moved out of sight into the doorway.

  Hell, had she invited him up to her room? Rogan dived away from the window and was halfway into his jeans before he realized he was about to make a fool of himself, waiting in the hallway to see if Camille arrived with a man in tow.

  None of his damn business.

  He shucked off the jeans and switched on the bedside lamp. Immediately a large, whirring bug shot through the open window and batted itself against the pink satin shade. Rogan swore and flicked the switch again, hoping the huhu would return to the open air. Instead it flung itself about the room, blundering frantically into the walls.

  He certainly wasn't going to be able to sleep with that in here. For ten minutes he chased it about, swearing under his breath, trying to guide the stupid creature toward freedom with the help of a folded n
ewspaper, tempted to just swat the thing and be done with it.

  At last, with a final frenzied propeller-whirr, the beetle discovered the open square of freedom and hurried off into the night. Ready to slam down the window, Rogan paused. The car was gone. Good, he thought, carefully not analyzing his relief.

  It wasn't until half an hour later, on the brink of sleep, that it occurred to him the guy might have simply moved his vehicle to a less conspicuous place. The hotel car park, or around the corner into a secluded street.

  He hadn't heard anyone come upstairs or the sound of a door closing, but he'd been busy with the blasted huhu and it made enough noise to cover almost anything.

  * * *

  Having run out of excuses, Camille called home the next morning. As she'd expected, Mona told her to burn the letters and photographs, expressing acid surprise that Taff had bothered to keep them. When Camille asked her to make copies of her marriage certificate and Camille's birth certificate, it was too much to hope not to have to tell her why.

  "That old tub?" Mona laughed scornfully. "The thing was practically a wreck when I last saw it, over twenty years ago. It can't be worth much."

  "Granger said some classic boats have sold for a hundred thousand or even more."

  "I don't believe it! Well, at least you'll get something out of that good-for-nothing father of yours."

  Camille said, "I don't want the money. You're entitled to anything that he left."

  "Darling, that's very sweet of you! I won't say I couldn't do with it, and God knows that man owes me something, but you said one of the Broderick boys is a lawyer? He'll find some way of keeping it all."

  "I don't think they're like that, either of them. I wouldn't have known about the will if they hadn't told me."

  "Well, I'll send the papers, but I wouldn't count on seeing a cent."

  * * *

  Camille hadn't expected to see Rogan in the dining room at breakfast time.

  When he looked up from his plate and waved the knife in his hand, indicating the empty seat across from him, she hesitated only a moment before joining him. "I thought you were checking out yesterday," she said.

  Rogan swallowed a mouthful of sausage and egg. "Granger booked me through last night, and they do a good breakfast." He removed a piece of toast from a rack before him and began liberally spreading it with butter.