by Laura Pender
But he had left her better off than before, hadn’t he? He’d left her with the means to continue her fight to clear her name. And he wouldn’t have her sit here mourning when there was still work to be done, would he? No, she could not imagine the intrepid Irishman weeping like a baby. No matter what he felt, how much he might be torn up inside, he could carry on with his life. He would overcome his grief rather than give in to it.
She knew, too, that he would expect the same of her. A man who held on to life as tenaciously as he had would have no patience for anyone who chose to spend their life grieving. Tess wasn’t about to dishonor his memory by acting like a fool out here on the gulf. She would do her mourning later, in private.
“Okay,” she said to herself. “One thing at a time, right? Tackle each problem as it comes up. Right now, you’ve got to get back to shore and figure out how to turn these jewels and antique money into real cash. You’ve got to pay your lawyer if you want to stay out of jail.”
The sound of her own voice calmed her, allowing her to concentrate on her task enough to get on with it. She pulled the anchor up and then started the engine. The cool air rushing over her face as she sped back toward the shore dried her tears. It almost made her feel like a sailor facing the ocean waves as Gabriel had done in his life, and with that feeling, she was able to achieve a kind of closeness with his memory.
For a moment, the thought of Gabriel brought fresh tears to her eyes, but she brushed them away and set her jaw with determination. Later, she promised herself, she would mourn him later.
Of course, she didn’t have a clue how to go about dealing with the coins and gems. There were probably legal formalities to go through—claims to make on the treasure. It looked as if she would need her lawyer for more than a criminal defense.
Walter Chambers was probably the man she needed to see next. Yes, she would visit him and ask for advice on how to convert the treasure into cash and protect her interests in the find. After all, she had more claim to it than anyone. One of the owners had given her that claim.
Tess piloted the boat back to Tommy’s bar, got out and tied up at the dock. Then she slipped her blouse over her swimsuit. She stuffed her slacks into the plastic bag from the store where she had purchased the goggles. She used her straw tote bag to hold the jewelry and encrusted coins, for the leather bag was beyond any use now.
After she’d scooped the coins and jewelry into the tote, she picked up the amulet from the floor of the skiff where Gabriel had dropped it. Her first impulse was to throw it back into the sea, but as she clasped it, the warmth it gave off stopped her, and she stood looking down at her clenched hand.
The carved charm was definitely warm and it seemed to grow hotter within her closed fingers. She wasn’t worried about suffering the same fate as Gabriel, but the thing was becoming increasingly uncomfortable to hold. Finally, she opened her hand and let it rest on her flat palm.
The heat immediately dissipated into the air.
Something made her keep the token. She thought that if its heat could ebb and flow like that, its effect on Gabriel might also come and go There was a possibility, though a slim one, that she still might need this magic carving, and she slipped it into the tote along with the rest of the treasure.
CHARLES DUMONT was confused by Tess’s activities in the gulf until he saw her bring something up from the ocean floor. Then, though he didn’t know what she’d dropped into the boat, he felt reasonably certain that it involved money in some way. Why else would anyone go to so much trouble? Maybe he should have checked her background more carefully. But it didn’t really matter, did it? Anything she’d be willing to hide beneath salt water couldn’t be worth much money, could it?
When he saw a man appear out of thin air on the boat and shout something that was carried away on the breeze, his interest was piqued. Charles knew he wasn’t hallucinating. He saw the man blink into existence as clearly as he could see Tess’s boat. And then he saw the man burst into flame and disappear again as some small object flew out of his grasp.
Now that was something worth looking into.
TOMMY MOTT WAS BEHIND the bar when Tess entered. There were no customers and he was working on a crossword puzzle in the paper.
“Hey, done fishing?” he called out when she entered.
“All done. I’ll help you put your boat away,” she said.
“No problem. I’ll get it later. Any luck?”
“Yes, some,” she said without much enthusiasm. “Where’s your ladies’ room? I have to get out of this wet suit.”
“Right over there,” he said, pointing. “Can I interest you in a soft drink? Orange juice?”
“No, I...well, I guess a glass of orange juice would go good right now. I’ll be right out.”
Tess changed quickly, putting her wet bathing suit into the bag with the goggles. She paused a moment, studying her face in the mirror. Her lip trembled a bit, but she clenched her teeth and then washed away the traces of her tears. She left the rest room determined to put the best face possible on things.
“You must have found quite a load of shells,” Tommy said when she returned to the bar.
“What?”
“Well, that bag looks pretty heavy,” he said. “I figured you were looking for shells to sell to curio shops.”
“Yes, well, not exactly.”
Tess regarded the bar owner thoughtfully. Gabriel had warned her not to trust him at first, but then he’d changed his mind. What would he say now? Would he trust the smiling bartender? She thought that his counsel would be to trust her own instincts on the matter, and she now felt she could trust Tommy. If Gabriel was indeed gone, she would need more than just a lawyer to help her.
“Do you have a safe here?” she asked as she drank some of the orange juice he’d set out for her.
“Sure. Two of them. There’s one in my office and a drop safe out here.”
“Good. Listen, Tommy, how are you on keeping secrets?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess,” he said. “I did snitch on my older brother once when he broke a window, but he taught me how to keep a secret after that. Why?”
“I don’t know. I think I need a partner, though I don’t know for sure.”
“A partner in what?” He smiled broadly, obviously expecting some kind of joke. “I don’t have any money to loan you.”
“I don’t need a loan. Actually, I’d like to make a payment.” Tess hefted her tote bag onto the bar and looked inside to select an item and bring it out. “I would like to pay you for the use of the boat and rent space in your office safe,” she said. “I’m going to trust you because I have no one else to trust.”
“That’s as good a reason as any, I suppose,” Tommy said. “What’s the gag here?”
She placed a necklace on the bar before her. It was a gold chain, blackened by time, with four gems that appeared to be emeralds.
Tommy looked down at the bar, then quickly picked up the necklace and looked at it. His eyes widened. He turned the piece in the light “You, ah, you weren’t exactly collecting shells, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“My God,” he whispered. “This is how you pay for a boat? With a necklace that’s probably worth thousands of dollars?”
“I need a partner, Tommy. I can’t haul this stuff downtown to my safe-deposit box, and it probably wouldn’t fit anyway. I sure as hell can’t hide it at my house.”
“No, that might be a problem,” he admitted. “But why a partner? I mean, if that bag is full of stuff like this, then we’re talking about a whole lot of money. Why do you want to cut me in on it?”
“Because I need time and I need help,” she said. “It’ll likely take a couple of weeks just to convert this into cash. I don’t know where I stand legally, Tommy. I may need to stake some sort of claim.”
“I know some people who could probably cash something like this for you without going public,” he offered.
“No, I want it all legal,” she
insisted. “Taxes, fees, whatever. This bag is just the start of it ”
“What do you mean?”
“You remember telling me about the shipwreck? Well, it’s not a legend. It’s true, and it’s out there. I just need time to find it and lay claim to it. I know that word of a sunken pirate ship offshore here would probably help your business quite a bit, so I’m asking you to keep it under your hat. Don’t tell anyone anything about me except that I borrowed your boat and brought it back a few hours later. I don’t want cops or reporters or anyone to know about this until I have clear legal title to the wreck.”
“Fair enough.” He extended his hand to shake hers. “You’ve got yourself a partner. Now get yourself a good lawyer and call the state.”
“I’ve got a lawyer who can probably help.” She took out several coins and laid them on the bar. “I wonder what’s the best way to clean this crust off the coins?”
“Try vinegar,” he suggested, examining one of the coins. “Soak them in it till the crust comes off. That works with coins folks find along the beach with metal detectors. Of course, those are modern coins and they haven’t been in the water so long.”
“It will probably work for these, too,” she said. “See, you’ve helped me already.”
“Worth every cent, too, huh?” he joked, giving her back the coin.
“Yes, every cent. I’d better go talk to my lawyer.”
“Uh, before you leave, I should tell you what I already know,” Tommy said. “More than likely you’re going after the Maria Louisa. That would be, ah, don’t tell me...Dyer,” he said. “Gabriel Dyer’s ship.”
“Yes, how did you know?” she asked in surprise.
“I grew up here,” he said. “Playing pirate was one of our favorite games when we were kids. There’s a finger of land sticking out of the beach north of here that they used to call Dyer Point.”
“Yes, that’s near where I found this.”
“Boy, I guess that stuff I read about it was true. And to bring up a haul like this without equipment is fantastic. You must have had damn good directions.”
“What do you know about the Maria Louisa?” Tess asked, steering the conversation away from the topic of her source of information.
“She went down in a hurricane,” he said. “That’s common knowledge. Though it’s always been assumed that she was several miles out to sea. About the middle of the gulf. That’s obviously not the case, is it?”
“No. But how did anyone know about Captain Dyer? I thought all hands went down with the ship.”
“A couple of the crew got to shore and settled here. The crew was mostly Spanish. They said the ship was loaded to the gills with loot. But then they said they were miles out, too. Neither one of them lived long but their story got around. I came across it in a local history book when I was a kid. Apparently, this Dyer was bad luck. Something about witchcraft. It wasn’t very clear in the book, but it seems they tossed him overboard trying to get the storm off their backs.”
“Didn’t anyone ever look for the ship?”
“Yeah, some guy in the mid-sixties, but way out in the gulf. He never found anything.”
“Do you know anything else about Captain Dyer?”
“The stuff I read said he was a wild man. He stranded the captain with the help of some crew members and took over as captain. They never had a moment of luck after that and eventually went down. Of course,” he added, grinning, “that story came from two of the people who threw him over the side. It’s probably a bit exaggerated.”
“Probably.” Tess laughed. It was strange to hear this about a man she’d just been talking to. A man who...no, she wouldn’t think of that. “I didn’t know any of this,” she said quickly.
“I bet the books are still in the library,” he said. “I sure did love this stuff when I was a kid.”
“Do they still call that part of the beach Dyer Point?”
“No, they just complain about how it ruins the beach. The state won’t let them change the configuration of rocks there, though. It helps protect the coastline.”
“It’s lucky they didn’t take it out,” she said, hefting her bag again, “or I wouldn’t have found this.”
“How’d you find it at all if you didn’t know any of this?”
“Just lucky,” she said. “I’d better go now.”
“Right, you take care of your business,” he said. “I’ll hang on to the booty. Here—” he brought a small box out from behind the bar “—dump the stuff in this so you can take your purse out with you. You don’t want the cops noticing that you left it.”
“Good idea. I knew I needed a partner.” She did as he suggested, slipping a few coins into her pocket along with the amulet, and then she packed her bag with the goggles and bathing suit into the straw tote. “Okay, I’ll be in touch.”
Tess left the man happily humming to himself as he polished his bar and dreamed of gold doubloons.
WALTER CHAMBERS’S law office was not exactly in the most prestigious part of town. Though she wouldn’t quite describe it as run-down, his neighborhood had a definite low-rent feel to it. His office was on the second floor of what was apparently a renovated motel three blocks from the ocean. The newer hotels closer to the beach had drawn the business away, leaving this example of fifties architecture to find new uses. It had done so by providing office space for debt collection agencies, unsuccessful lawyers and other, less savory, businesses. The building itself was well kept, however, with a fairly new coat of paint and potted plants along the sidewalk in front.
Tess parked and hurried up the steps leading to the north end of the balcony and to the door bearing the number on Chambers’s business card. Then she went inside.
The reception room was small. A secretary’s desk and three padded chairs were in front of the picture window. No one was there.
“Hello?” she called out.
No reply.
The door to the side of the desk was slightly ajar, as though someone had pulled it shut on the way out and it hadn’t latched. Walter Chambers didn’t strike her as a man who didn’t close doors behind him, and he surely wouldn’t leave his office unlocked if it was empty. Tess assumed that he had stepped out for a moment and would be back soon.
She sat on one of the chairs by the window, picked up a magazine and thumbed through it for a couple of minutes. Nobody returned to the office, and after five minutes, Tess began to feel very uneasy. In fact, she began to feel that she should get out of the lawyer’s office right away.
Feeling sudden panic, Tess stood and opened the door leading out. Then she stopped herself and took a deep breath. No, she shouldn’t go without leaving a message of some kind. She turned back toward the office. Then she frowned. She didn’t want to leave it here for the secretary—or anyone else who wandered into the unlocked reception room to see. No, she would leave it on Chambers’s desk.
Tess strode quickly to his office door, pushed it open and stepped inside, only to find herself standing across the desk from her lawyer.
She froze, caught by Walter Chambers’s sightless gaze. The lawyer whom she had come to rely on was beyond helping anyone now. The slash across his throat guaranteed that.
The office was silent, the traffic noises and even the sound of her own breathing seemingly sucked into the same void into which Walter Chambers’s life had gone. It was as if all sound and sensation was absorbed by the dark red blood that stained the lawyer’s shirt.
And as she stared at him, her breath caught painfully in her throat. She knew with deadly certainty that Darrell’s murder, the attack at her home and her lawyer’s grisly death were linked. Just as she knew that the murderer would not be satisfied until he’d completed the chain of deaths with her own.
Chapter Sixteen
Walter Chambers sat slightly slouched, his eyelids drooping, as though he were half-asleep in his chair. Only the cut across his throat and the blood disturbed the apparent tranquillity of his posture.
Tes
s wanted to run from the room and try to pretend she’d never gone there. She wanted to hide be-neath the covers of her bed, to sleep and to see if in slumber she might be able to turn it all into a dream But she knew she couldn’t do that; she knew running wouldn’t help her now.
If only Gabriel were here.
But he wasn’t, and she had only her own wits to rely on.
Once she had taken a moment to collect her thoughts, Tess’s mind seemed to become more clear in adversity, and her initial panic ebbed as she considered her options. She had very few.
She noted, with rather detached clarity, that she was standing just inside the door wearing the sneakers she had worn on the beach. She was probably leaving telltale grains of sand that could be used to link her to the crime. One of her sneakers was still wet, which meant she was leaving further evidence with each step.
She could not remember everything she had touched in the office to this point, but she felt she must have touched everything. And since she’d never been to the office before today, even a single fingerprint could be incriminating. She felt as though even the exhalations of her breath would leave some sign the police could use to link her to this murder
Besides, if the police were following her as they had promised, there was a good chance they’d seen her come in here.
No, it wouldn’t be wise to erase the signs of her visit, so the only thing to do was to make good use of her presence now that she was. But how could she do that?
Tess took another step into the room and forced herself to look at the papers on top of the desk in front of the lawyer’s body. Blood had spattered all over the surface. It was quite dry now, however.
Walking around to the side of the desk, Tess tried to read the papers without touching anything. It looked like lots of legal mumbo jumbo. Even if the papers pertained to his death, Tess didn’t have the background to understand them.
Looking around the room, Tess couldn’t find much else to help her, either. The file drawers were all closed, and she wasn’t about to open any of them to look inside. Aside from those on the desk, no other papers were visible. There was nothing to indicate who had done this or why. Maybe there was nothing to be gained by staying. She should get out now.