Wreckers' Key

by Christine Kling

  And that left me and B.J. After what felt like weeks of talking into microphones, telling the story over and over again, they cleared B.J. in both deaths. In those first couple of days, when we were still in Key West, they hadn’t allowed us to talk to each other very much, and I worried about him. Then Jeannie arrived, and once she’d swept in and taken over on the legal front, things started to go a little easier for us.

  On our second day back in Fort Lauderdale, when Jeannie and I had been sitting in the hallway outside another office in the county courthouse, she told me she wanted to talk to me about all the consequences of Ben Baker’s actions. She wanted to know how I was feeling, about where my future was headed.

  Jeannie had, in her inimitable way, learned a great deal about the Bakers via courthouse and waterfront gossip. She’d learned that Ben had been the one offering to buy Gorda and that he did indeed own a black Lincoln Navigator. He had inherited a trust fund worth more than two million when his mother died, so for Ben, the whole GPS wrecking business had never been about the money.

  As happens in many cities that are really just big small towns, Junior Baker had always gotten special treatment from the Fort Lauderdale police when they were called out to his house. He had been one of the jolly boys who ate breakfast at the Floridian with the mayor and the chamber president and the local developers. If he lost his temper with the wife and kid, the cops usually just drove him around for a while to calm him down and then took him back home to sleep it off. No one except me had ever seen any hint of what Ben’s mother had done, where she had turned for solace when her husband left the house.

  “You know what’s strange?” Jeannie said, not really expecting an answer. “Even as modern as we supposedly are today, as open and tolerant, males who are victims of maternal sexual abuse still have the toughest time finding help. It’s one of our last and deepest taboos. I’ve never been one to excuse criminal behavior because somebody had a bad childhood—there are just too many survivors who make it through and are okay. But from what I’ve heard was going on in that house, that poor kid didn’t have much of a chance. I guess his mother’s death was the thing that nudged him over the edge.”

  “Jeannie, it seems like being a mother should be something that comes naturally. Look at you. You make it look so easy when you’re with your sons. I mean, where did you learn this stuff? How do you know what to do? And why do so many of the rest of us screw it up so bad?”

  “Sey, I don’t think it’s a question of mothering taking all that much talent. Really, I don’t. It’s a question of what kind of heart you’ve got. You know, there are good people and there are bad people in this world. The real heart of goodness is found in the ability to love unconditionally. To love someone else so much that you would sacrifice your life for his happiness. That’s all it takes to be a good mother. And you already know how to do that. Women like Ben’s mama? They only know how to think of themselves.” She patted my knee. “Honey, that will never be your problem.”

  She only had to ask me once where I stood on the whole issue of motherhood and baby Nestor, and she wasn’t the least bit surprised by my response.

  I was right to worry about B.J. It didn’t matter which he saw as worse, the taking of a life or the failing to save a life: he bore the responsibility for both like a coat of nails. There was no more lovemaking or laughter in our lives. He wouldn’t talk, he barely ate. And I was the one who sailed Annie down to the Keys while B.J. slept on a settee belowdecks. Once inside the five-bedroom house, he’d chosen his room and come out only to work on Annie.

  The third week in March, Jeannie called to say that my brother Pit was back from his delivery and Maddy had agreed to bring everyone down to the Keys. She told me that the time had come for us to open our doors to the world, hold the wake for those we’d lost, and move on with our lives. When I told B.J. they were coming, he unloaded some gear from the sailboat, including the two boxes of ashes, and then motored Annie out and anchored off the dock.

  That afternoon, Maddy’s sportfishing boat, the Lady Jane, arrived with Jeannie, Molly, Zale, Pit, and all the gang. They had brought a ton of food and CDs and soon the place was rocking with music and laughter. Maddy volunteered to take us all out to an island he knew on Florida Bay on the Lady Jane the next day. The time had come for Catalina and Nestor to find their last home.

  As they settled into the big house, Jeannie walked out on the dock with me. She was carrying a special basket she had brought just for me. I’d been waiting for them all morning, pacing the dock, watching to see if B.J. was going to raise his head or show any interest in me or the rest of the world. There had been no sign of him.

  “Seychelle Sullivan,” she said. “You never cease to amaze me.”

  “Ah, Jeannie, come on.”

  She indicated the Annie resting at anchor. “I would have expected him to be the strong one and you to fall apart. Not the other way around.”

  “No way. I don’t think any of us will ever fully understand what that day cost him. He’s lost himself. It’s been so hard standing by, feeling helpless to make him better. He was the guy who caught mosquitoes and let them go outside the house. To have taken a human life—even if it was to protect the lives of himself and those he loved— cost him more than you or I can ever imagine. And then to lose his first patient. Jeannie, I’m so afraid I’ll never get him back.”

  “You know, there’s still a long legal road to walk here.”

  “Yeah, but I can never thank you enough for helping make this happen. He may not be getting the best deal offered, but it’s what she wanted.”

  I climbed down the dock ladder and stepped into the dory. She handed me the basket, and I set it carefully in the bottom of the dink. I sat on the thwart, fitted the oars into the locks, and looked out at the Annie sitting at anchor not more than fifty feet off the dock. “Don’t worry Jeannie. I’ll take good care of him.”

  I rapped my knuckles on the hull. “Hey, sailor, you want to give me a hand?” I hollered.

  B.J. appeared in the cockpit looking like he’d been fast asleep. His long black hair hung in dull tangles around his unshaven face. “Come on,” he said. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Sorry, I need a hand to get our passenger aboard.” He ran a tired hand through his hair and looked more annoyed than puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  I lifted the basket and held it out to him. “B.J., this is Nestor. You two have already met, but I think it’s time you got better acquainted.”

  THE END

  Thank you for purchasing and reading

  WRECKERS’ KEY

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  Christine is always pleased to hear from readers, and she welcomes comments and feedback.

  ck@christinekling.com

  Bonus Material

  Read the first chapters from

  CIRCLE OF BONES: A CARIBBEAN THRILLER

  From CIRCLE OF BONES: A CARIBBEAN THRILLER

  PROLOGUE

  Cherbourg, France

  November 19, 2008

  The man lingered in the dark alley, the bill of his hat pointing through the gray veil of rain that poured off the café’s awning. From her seat inside the window, Riley blew at the steam rising off her café au lait and watched him from the corner of her eye. He rocked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Rain dribbled from the baseball cap jutting out from under his hood. She couldn’t see his face, but she looked down anyway. She knew it in her gut. He was watching her.

  Her chest got that dizzy, hollow feeling as her heart rate climbed. She concentrated on slowing her breathing as she had been trained to do. She tried to sip her coffee with nonchalance but grimaced at the taste of it. Either the French had forgotten how to make coffee, or her mouth was dry from nerves. She’d thought she was over all this.

  When she glanced up again, the man had disappeared. Riley brushed the hair bac
k from her eyes and pressed her nose to the window. She checked the street in both directions. Her breath fogged the glass, but there was no sign of him. Closing her eyes for a moment, she rested her hot forehead against the cool glass. She was getting as bad as Cole. Perhaps paranoia was contagious, she thought, and that made her sit back in her chair and shake her head.

  God, how she missed him. After all these months, she thought of him almost daily. Even the steady morning rain outside the café window reminded her of the falling ash. Down in the islands, it had covered everything – been impossible to wash away. It had blanketed her boat’s decks, clogged her nostrils, turned her sails gray.

  But that was more than six months ago. Now she was back in France, in Normandy, watching as another shower battered the awning in front of the café where she sipped from a soup-sized bowl of café au lait, thinking of all the dead – and tasting ash.

  Tossing some euros onto the table, she abandoned her coffee and pushed back her chair. She pulled on her yellow foul weather jacket. The rain had stopped abruptly so, when she reached the sidewalk, she left her hood down and glanced up at the gray sky. A last fat raindrop caught her in the eye. She brushed the back of her hand across her wet cheek. Not today. No tears.

  From behind, someone grabbed her arm. Her fists flew up as she spun around, then she yanked her arm out of the grip of that hard hand. Adrenaline shot through her system and her pulse roared in her ears. The man in the black slicker and ball cap stood behind her. He grunted and held a cardboard sign in front of his chest. Words scrawled in black marker stated that he was both deaf and dumb, a veteran of la guerre l’Indochine.

  She lowered her hands and examined him. His face was partially covered by wraparound sunglasses. Was he blind as well? Scraggly whiskers framed his yellow teeth, and beneath the slicker she saw layers of torn and dirty clothes. He bent down and picked up a crutch; his left leg was wrapped in bandages. Long strands of wet gray hair trailed out from under his cap. Riley inhaled a whiff of day-old garbage, and she saw the look of disgust on her own face reflected in the large mirrored lenses. He reached out a grimy hand, offering her one of several small brown paper bags of roasted chestnuts.

  He had been watching her — but only because she was a tourist, a likely mark.

  She swallowed the sour taste in her throat and dug into her bag. He was a soldier. Or had been. Like her. She placed a ten euro note in his palm and his fingers closed around hers.

  All the nerve endings in her fingers lit up as his hot flesh squeezed her hand tight. Her heart ricocheted in her chest as she tried to pull free, and she felt the flush travel from her hand to her face. She gulped several shallow breaths. What was going on? The Marine Corps had trained her not to react, to be a stone-faced sentry, and she’d been damn good at it.

  Then he pulled her fingers open and started to place the brown bag in her hand. She yanked her hand free. Waving off the bag, she backed away. Not certain if he could see her, she mumbled, “Non, non.”

  She turned and started walking.

  The man hobbled after her, grunting with insistence. He shook the brown paper, and she heard the sound of the nuts clicking together. She saw that she would have to take the bag to make him leave her alone.

  “Merci,” she said as she stuffed the paper bag into the pocket of her rain jacket, careful not to touch him again. She turned and marched down the street, not knowing where she was going, but only that she had to get away.

  When she’d put enough distance between herself and the old man, she stopped and leaned against the wet stones of a small church. What was that about? Her reaction hadn’t been fright – but what was it?

  Thinking about the past was making her jittery. But that was why she was there. Riley pulled out the small map the hotel concierge had given her. She found her way to the yacht basin, circled the marina to the outer jetty.

  It was important to arrive first. She didn’t know what she’d say to him, but she wanted to have a chance to see the meeting place and to think.

  From the sea, the Surcouf memorial was designed to look like a submarine’s periscope. The large bronze plaque on the face of the monument had weathered so green from battling years of sea spray, it was difficult to read. Riley ran her fingers over the names of the dead. Speak to me. She listened for their voices on the gusting North Atlantic wind but heard nothing aside from the whoosh of the waves breaking on the jetty and the cries of the gulls swooping behind a fishing boat chugging out to sea. Just because her brother Michael spoke to her on occasion, it didn’t mean all the dead would.

  So many names. There were one hundred and thirty of them. LAMOREAUX - CLAIRMONT - MICHAUT - GOHIN, and on and on, including the three British Royal Navy men: MCKAY - MULLINS - WOOLSEY. Column after column like the stark white crosses in a military cemetery. But each name had once been a living, breathing man — a son, a brother, a father.

  The blustery wind whipped her cotton skirt against her legs, and she tried in vain to keep the stray wisps of hair from blowing into her mouth as she read aloud:

  Aux morts

  du

  Sous-marin Surcouf

  Le Surcouf construit et lancé a Cherbourg le 18 octobre, 1929

  Disparu en mer le 18 fevrier, 1942 sous le commandement du Capitaine Alain Lamoreaux

  The big boat had fled France before the Nazi occupation, assisted Allied convoys in the Atlantic, and finally, left Bermuda bound for Panama just weeks after Pearl Harbor. But she never arrived.

  Disparu. But what disappears can sometimes be found. They’d proved that. Riley remembered watching the clear green water, the odd, colorless fish, and feeling the eerie stillness in Shadow Chaser’s wheelhouse as they all crowded around the small video screen while Theo steered the remotely operated vehicle into the coral-encrusted hold.

  Closing her eyes, she tried to banish the images that replayed in her memory like some kind of Mobius filmstrip. She felt her face crumpling but she fought it off, because damn it all, it still hurt too much to see that last image of Cole Thatcher, his mouth grinning impossibly around his scuba regulator, his eyes seeming to look right into hers through the face mask, lens, camera, cable.

  Like the screen they had been watching that day, she tried to make her mind go blank. Now you see him, now you don’t. Disparu en mer.

  She swallowed hard. No tears.

  When it was over, when the searchers had given up, and all but two bodies had been collected, she learned that what disappears cannot always be found. Ashes to ashes.

  After everything that had happened these past six months, only a few words had drawn her back here to France. She came because this was the birthplace of the submarine that had once been Cole’s love, his passion. Riley came to see the memorial for herself and because she was tired of looking back over her shoulder all the time. She checked her watch for the hundredth time. But most of all, she thought as she gazed back down the pier, she had come to this sea-swept jetty because it was the perfect place for a reunion.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Royal Naval Dockyard

  Ireland Island, Bermuda

  February 12, 1942

  Lieutenant Gerald Woolsey shuffled down the quay, his head bent into the chill wind, his thick arms hugging the wooden crate to his chest as if in a passionate embrace. He had no desire to find out what might happen if he dropped the thing — he was no expert with explosives. Likely wind up nothing more than a red stain, and while that was happening to the rest of his countrymen with a gruesome regularity, he was determined to survive this war. His kind generally did.

  He stopped and hiked the crate up, lifting the weight of it with his thigh, trying to improve his grip on the rough wood planks.

  He was counting on the fact that the French sentries aboard the submarine had been doing a lousy job ever since he and the other two Brits, McKay and Mullins, had come aboard. His fellow Brits were a telegraphist and signalman, and Woolsey was the BNLO, British Navy Liaison Officer, assigned to serve aboar
d the Free French sub because God knows, you couldn’t exactly trust the Frogs with the Allied naval code books these days, not even these Free French sailors who claimed allegiance to De Gaulle instead of Admiral Darlan. Free French or not, this crew didn’t like the English one bit. But then, the feeling was mutual on that count.

  Most of the time, when he boarded the sub, the sentry, if there was one, merely gave him that Gallic look of disdain they all managed so well.

  As he closed in on the massive boat, Woolsey thought again that she looked a good bit better from afar than she did on closer inspection. Her tall conning tower and topsides were painted the same color as the low threatening sky, but her bulbous forward gun turret and aft hangar made her appear almost comical — like she sported some sort of sausage with a tumor. The French had named her Surcouf – after an eighteenth century privateer, Robert Surcouf. There were those who referred to her as the “Pride of the French Navy,” but they tended to be either Frogs or politicians. They didn’t know that at 361 feet and 3250 tons, she was the biggest white elephant on the sea.

  When they’d assigned him to this boat, his superiors had assured him Surcouf was the first of a new class of radically different submarines, an underwater cruiser with her twin eight-inch guns in that waterproof turret, antiaircraft cannons, machine guns, twelve torpedo tubes, and a hangar with her own reconnaissance seaplane. But the truth was, she’d been plagued with bloody French design flaws from the first — even before he came aboard. Everything from her electric motors with faulty armatures, to the batteries spilling sulphuric acid nearly poisoning all the crew, to the hydroplanes that struggled to keep her from rolling when she dove — all had kept this sub returning to shipyards from Portsmouth to Halifax. Though first launched in 1929, she had yet to fire her guns in battle, and the Allies were bloody tired of paying the tab to keep her afloat. Given the number of ships lost to the U-boats the last couple of months, who’d notice one more?