“You’re the one who cracked the case,” the sheriff said to Faye, as they sat in his office and tried to disentangle what had happened to them. “You deserve to see this.” He slid a tablet computer and a cocktail napkin across his desk toward her.
The napkin was covered with the elegant, stylized script of a rich man writing with an expensive fountain pen. In large letters and numbers, he had written down the passwords to open the tablet and to access his note-taking software. Faye used them, and she found the notes Ray had taken for two explosive articles he was writing for his newspaper.
One set of notes was a meticulous compilation of the sins of Greta Haines. Ray had before-and-after photos of multiple properties that she’d sabotaged to drum up business. Faye recognized the captain’s house and yard among photos he’d taken both by drone and with a handheld camera. Ray had testimony from people pressured to sign powers of attorney. And he had witnesses prepared to testify that Greta had worked the same scams during the last hurricane. She was going down, and she would likely take Cyndee with her.
The other notes were for an article to be co-written with Nate. They included a transcription of Nate’s testimony, taken at his sickbed:
After Joe sent me his photo, I showed it to Cody and Thad. Since it showed the Philomela, we decided I should crop it, so nobody else would know where it was. Cody’s yellow bimini was so obvious. It said, “Hey, look at me!” and we didn’t want anybody to know we’d been down to the wreck.
That was the only time we dived on the wreck together, and we just took one bottle of brandy as a souvenir. We weren’t ever going back, as far as Thad and I knew, because we liked the idea of protecting it from people who would destroy it for money. At least, that’s how Thad and I felt.
Cody talked me into finding out where Joe stored the photos, saying that they were dangerous. They could show treasure hunters where the ship was. I thought that was a little extreme, but it was fun feeling like a secret agent. I helped him figure out how to destroy Joe’s pictures. I cropped the cover photo. I helped steal that one bottle of brandy. I own those mistakes, but that’s all I did. I didn’t know Cody killed the captain until I realized he was trying to kill me.
I didn’t know that Cody was hiding in the swamp when he shot Ossie. He heard the sheriff and Joe make plans to fly Ossie with Lieutenant Baker, so he hid and waited to shoot her down. I accidentally made things easier for him by taking her up before the lieutenant got there and by doing such a crappy job of flying her.
It didn’t occur to me that the shooter was Cody until I was in the middle of telling him everything Joe said about where he stored the photos. I realized that something wasn’t right and I called him on it, but he seemed sorry. Said he’d gotten too caught up in the shipwreck. Acted like he wanted to make things up with me by going out for a dive someplace new, deeper than we usually went. (I really should have suspected something when he didn’t invite Thad.)
My guess is that he sabotaged my gas. Too much helium and nitrogen. Not enough oxygen. I know the symptoms of nitrogen narcolepsy, and I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to die from lack of oxygen. That’s what it was like.
I realized what was happening and kicked hard for the surface. When I got there, Cody and his boat were gone.
I had a long time to think about things when I was floating out in the Gulf. It’s clear to me that the captain died the same way that Cody wanted me to die. There was no way that the captain was going to stay quiet about Cody using his library to find the Philomena. Cody had never imagined that people existed who couldn’t be bribed to shut up, so he had to do something. But he knew the captain well enough to know that if he promised to take him diving and keep him safe, the captain would believe him. How anybody could kill a man like the captain is beyond me.
Somebody has to stop Cody before the same thing happens to Thad. And who knows who else?
It took Faye a moment to come up with the words for what she was feeling. When she did, she said, “I know exactly why Ray shot the man who did this to his son. What’s going to happen to Ray?”
“He killed Cody in front of a crowd. It wasn’t self-defense. He showed up with a gun and he left us this note, so there was at least some degree of premeditation, although he can certainly afford a lawyer who’ll say it was temporary insanity. And maybe it was. So I don’t know. I do know that it’s going to be hard to find a jury in Micco County who will want to see Ray suffer for what he did.”
Faye knew that she didn’t.
* * *
Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had hardly shown herself out of the sheriff’s office when Lieutenant Baker showed up on his doorstep.
“I was wrong,” she said. “If it weren’t for Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, Cody might have gotten away and taken that young woman with him.”
“I suspect Cody would have found Amande to be more than his match. She’d have probably brought him to us, hog-tied and with a signed confession pinned to his shirt.”
Baker wasn’t in the mood to joke.
“I should have respected your judgment.”
“You were right about the missing woman,” he said. “The neighbor came forward as a witness as soon as word got out that we’d arrested the husband for looting. That neighbor’s gonna be a local hero when word gets out, because he put a battered wife and her kid in his car, drove twenty-four hours, dropped her off at her sister’s, slept for twelve hours, turned around, and drove home. And never breathed a word to anybody about where she was until the man who hurt her was safely in jail.”
“So I heard. I understand that the neighbor’s wife’s got a future as a local hero, too,” Baker said. “She had the good sense to get video of the missing woman telling why she’d run away, complete with closeups of her cuts and bruises. And cigarette burns. Even if we hadn’t nailed him on the looting, we’d have him on the domestic violence.”
“You’re kind of a hero, too, Lieutenant. You put her sorry husband in jail.”
This made Lieutenant Baker laugh out loud. “Up next to Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth and Manny laying down their lives? Or the next-door neighbor who probably saved her life? No way. I’m just a cop who was right about one case and wrong about the other.”
“Same here, Lieutenant. But sometimes you’re not right at all, and this time we know that neither of the bad guys is going to be hurting anybody any time soon. Cody won’t hurt anybody ever again. You were right to chase your case and I was right to chase mine. I think we should enjoy the moment, don’t you?”
* * *
Several long days sitting in the hospital at Nate’s bedside had convinced Amande that she knew all there was to know about him. Faye was amused, but she did enjoy listening to her daughter explain things from Nate’s point of view. Maybe he was as innocent as he claimed.
Faye had a suspicious soul, but she was inclined to believe him. And she was inclined to believe his father’s obvious remorse. Ray blamed himself for not finding out the truth in time to prevent the attempt on Nate’s life. He was having trouble finding a way to take responsibility for the captain’s death, but he was on a roll, guilt-wise. Give him time, and he’d find a way.
Faye sat at the bar at Manny’s Marina, eating breakfast with her daughter as Amande prepared for her daily “Let’s go cheer Nate up!” trip to the hospital. Manny had done an admirable job of frying their eggs with just his left hand. He would be working in a sling until the deep cut that Cody had carved into the muscles of his right upper arm had healed. Somehow, Manny managed to give that arm sling a hip pirate charm. He gave his spatula a deft bounce, and a patty of hash browns flew into the air, flipped, and landed right beside Amande’s fried eggs.
“Hey, Manny. Got any hundred-and-fifty-year-old brandy on one of those shelves behind you?” Amande dug her fork into her hash browns and waited for his answer.
“Naw, but I’ve got some that’s pretty good. Smooth, and it don’t cost a hundred bucks a sip. But you’re not twenty-one yet, are you, little girl?”
“Nope, but you made me a promise you’ll have to keep when I get there.”
Faye held her breath. She knew that Amande had been hanging onto this promise for years.
“I promised a long time ago that I’d tell you everything I know about your birth father when you’re twenty-one, and I will. I’m warning you that he’s a nasty piece of work. But, you know, when you blast into his life, you’ll either cure him of that or you’ll make him pay for every terrible thing he ever did.”
“Maybe I’ll do both.”
Faye saw Sheriff Rainey walk up behind them. She could see that he was listening to Amande’s challenge to Manny and to her birth father and, she supposed, to life itself, but he was pretending like he wasn’t. He settled himself on the stool next to Amande, caught Faye’s eye, and said hello. Other than that, he didn’t speak, but Faye could see him listening to Amande’s rapid-fire chatter. If the young woman noticed, she didn’t seem to care.
“Nate’s not your average snotty, rich guy,” she said, shaking her egg-coated fork in Faye’s face to emphasize her point. “Well, he was, but he’s learned a lot, what with being double-crossed by a man he thought was his friend. And spending a lot of time in a hospital bed.”
Faye would have added, “Not to mention floating alone in the Gulf of Mexico for hours and hours, in pain and on the brink of death,” but she hadn’t yet recovered from Cody’s threat to do the same thing to Amande. Also, she didn’t want to glorify Nate too much. Amande was capable of doing that all by herself.
Amande had warmed to Nate after she’d extracted his side of the story, slowly but persistently. She had sat with him in silence as his lungs began to heal, and maybe she’d spent that time remembering those moments when she’d believed that Cody would be tossing her overboard, too, to float alone and perhaps to die.
She’d drawn the story out of him slowly, like a spinner coaxing a thread from a ball of raw wool. It would be the sheriff’s job to make sure Nate was telling the truth when he claimed to be innocent of anything but stealing a single bottle of brandy off the wreck of the Philomela, but even suspicious Faye found his story convincing. Amande’s suspicions had faded away once she decided that Nate wasn’t such a rich daddy’s boy after all.
Faye had decided to believe Nate. For one thing, his story hung together logically. And for another, one thing about his story tracked with what she knew to be true. The captain would have certainly asked too many questions for Cody to be comfortable leaving him alive. Also arguing in Nate’s favor was the fact that Cody had tried very hard to kill him.
“Nate says Cody got the mixture of gases right for killing the captain,” Amande said. “Obviously. Because he died. But Nate is young, and he knows diving, and he knows his body. After Cody left him to die, he woke up just long enough to realize that he had to get to the surface, even if he burst his lungs open doing it.”
Faye shivered at the thought of what Nate had gone through. The moment underwater when he realized that he might not have enough air to get to the surface haunted her. So did the moment when he looked around from the spot where he floated, gravely injured, and saw nothing but open water in all directions.
“Cody’s boat was the one with the yellow bimini,” the sheriff said. “Correct?”
“Not anymore, but yep. It used to have one. Nate says Cody must have been out there every free minute after they found the wreck, even at night, looking for things he could sell. It’s dark enough down in the wreck that you’re gonna need lights, day or night. Might as well dive at night, too. That tracks with Manny’s time sheet records. Cody didn’t put in many hours on those days. It was easy for him to come and go without being seen. It’s not easy to walk through that swamp, but you can get from the marina to Cody’s house that way. No problem. And it wasn’t any problem for him to walk home after he killed the captain and grounded his boat in the swamp.”
Faye had spent time on that creek. This story was plausible.
Manny, who wasn’t above eavesdropping, refilled Amande’s coffee. “Don’t forget. Killing Nate meant that Cody didn’t have to split the money he got from selling the liquor. If you want my opinion—”
Faye hadn’t asked for it, but Manny had skyrocketed in her estimation since he had laid his life on the line for Amande.
“—I think Thad was next. He’s real lucky that we all stopped Cody when we did. And also”—he topped off Faye’s coffee cup—“I believe Nate when he says he didn’t know what Cody was up to. When you scratch off a layer of the rich-boy attitude, he’s a stand-up guy.”
Amande beamed and Faye resolved to be okay with Nate dating her daughter. Not that she had any say in the matter.
Faye glanced at the sheriff. “Did he find anything else on the Philomela besides the old rum and brandy?”
“Not that we know of. What would you wish for?”
“There’s a book that may be on the boat, autographed. Even considering that it’s been soaked in saltwater and nibbled by fish, I’d give a lot to have that book.”
The sheriff looked at Faye oddly, but she didn’t explain. Faye was telling the truth that she’d love to have Cally’s book, but a romantic part of her liked to think of it at the bottom of the sea, forever.
“If Cody had gotten away with all that old brandy and rum, he would have done very well for himself.”
What did the sheriff mean by “very well”? How much had Cody really made on that rum? Faye tried to do the math on crates of old liquor, but she didn’t have enough information. Still, she didn’t think that they held the kind of immeasurable wealth you’d expect from a ship loaded with gold and jewels. Had they held enough liquid gold to justify murder?
Faye decided that she didn’t have the information to answer that question, either, because she couldn’t fathom doing the kind of premeditated killing that Cody had. Brutal honesty required her to admit that she would do some shady things to save Joe’s life or the lives of her children, but coldblooded murder for a few thousand dollars or even a few hundred thousand dollars? Millions?
No. She couldn’t imagine it.
“Did I tell you that I’ve hired Samantha Kennedy to help us run the captain’s library?” Faye asked the sheriff. “Since Jeanine gave it to us on the condition that we keep it available to the public, we’ve got to take care of it. We need somebody who knows how. The money left in the captain’s grant will help us get started, but it’ll take all my grant-writing skill to get it renewed. Emma and Ray have donated enough money to make those grants go further, and donations of all sizes are coming in from all the captain’s friends. Samantha is more than capable of helping me administer the library and its funding.”
“I thought you didn’t trust her,” Amande said, her mouth full of cherry pie.
“I wasn’t sure, until fingerprint data showed that Cody was the one who broke a window to get into the captain’s library and steal the photos and sign-in sheet. Samantha sheds tears every time she thinks about how badly she was tempted to break into that library. She came close, but she never did it. And she absolutely did step up and help the sheriff and lieutenant administer first aid to all of us that night, even Cody. She might not be cut out to be a field archaeologist, but she was paying attention to the first aid training at field school. Magda gave me a chance when I was struggling. I think Samantha has earned her chance.”
Joe arrived, Michael in tow, and dropped onto the stool next to Faye. The sheriff nodded at Faye and said, “I’ll leave you people some privacy,” as he left.
“Are you people finished worrying over the killings and all that?” Joe asked. “Because if you’re not, I’ll go find someplace else to eat. We all just lived through a bad time. Seems to me like there’s no point in dwelling on it.”
“Sure thing, Dad. We can talk about something else.” Amande studied the swirls of cream on the surface of her coffee. “In fact, I have news.”
Faye wondered how Amande had squeezed any extra thoughts into a mind that was so full of Nate Peterson.
“Spit it out,” Joe said. “I knew you had a secret.”
Faye had not known, but Joe was so tuned in to the people around him that he could sometimes pass as telepathic.
“I’m starting school full-time in the spring. It’s too late to register for the fall semester, and I’ve still got stuff to do, like help with the hurricane cleanup. You know that’s gonna take months and months. Emma wants to pay me to do her insurance paperwork, which I told her was stupid, but she said she’d put the money straight in my college account if I said no. I’m gonna help Miss Jeanine, too, but I’ll eat dirt before I let her pay me. Not after she gave us the captain’s whole library. We owe her forever for that. Good thing we’ve got a big house with a lot of empty rooms to hold all those books.”
“School?” Faye asked, failing to match her husband’s air of nonchalance. “Brick-and-mortar school?” She desperately wanted Amande to go away to college, and yet she didn’t want her to go away.
“Thank you for not saying ‘real school.’ My online classes are quite real, thank you very much. But yes, a brick-and-mortar school.”
Afraid that Amande was going to add, “And it’s half a continent away in Nevada,” Faye held her breath and waited for the other shoe to drop.
“I’ve been talking to Magda.”
This wasn’t good. Magda had probably told her to apply to colleges in Australia.
“I told her that the family business needed an underwater archaeologist real bad. Here we sit right on the coast, and we’re losing business left and right to companies that have divers.”
“I could learn—” Faye began, but Joe and Amande’s snorts drowned her out.
“Repeat after me, Mom. ‘I don’t have to be the one who does everything.’”
Faye tried, but she couldn’t make her lips form the words.
“Nobody swims at the surface better than you do, but you’re terrified of deep water.” Amande’s voice was gentle but it told the unvarnished truth. “It’s so, so, so obvious. I’ve never known you to fail at anything so, yeah, you could learn. But why should you be miserable when I would love being down there? I’m driving to Tallahassee tomorrow, and Magda’s going to show me around her university. Introduce me to the right professors. Stuff like that. She says that there’s a field school in Australia next summer that would be just perfect for me!”
Faye had some choice words for Magda and her Australia obsession, but she knew her friend and mentor was right. Amande needed to carve out her own professional niche that was separate from her parents’. Magda would be a superb role model for Faye’s daughter, just as she had been for Faye.
“Magda also says that she wants to talk to you about teaching some classes at the university. I think you should do it. It wouldn’t kill you and Dad to live in Tallahassee during the week while you taught. You could go home to Joyeuse Island on the weekends. We’re coming up on the day when Michael needs to go to kindergarten, and you’re going to have to figure out how to get him there. It’d be a heckuva lot easier to do that in Tallahassee.”
Now Faye’s daughter was trying to help Magda run her life. Charming. But Amande and Magda weren’t wrong.
Amande was still rattling on. “You’d be surprised at how much college credit I’ve piled up from all those online courses. I can start right in on my archaeology courses and I’ll be diving by summer.”
In Australia.
Faye’s daughter was going to the other side of the planet. In the special way of mothers, Faye could glory in the knowledge that her daughter was going to see the world while she grieved her impending absence deeply.
“You’ll get your dive instructor’s license eventually?” Faye asked, although it was a given that her ambitious daughter planned to amass all the credentials there were.
“Sure thing,” Amande said before she poured a tremendous slug of caffeine and cream down her throat.
“When you do, will you teach me to dive, sweetheart?”
Faye might be terrified of The Cold Spot, but she’d do whatever it took to be shoulder to shoulder with her daughter.
“Absolutely, but get ready to kick hard if you’re planning to keep up with me.”