[Indigo Brothers 01.0] Indigo Fire

by Vickie McKeehan

  “We’re forced to act like a swarm when we don’t even know why they left. It almost felt like Walker and Livvy were living separate lives in that house. I swear I never knew she was that unhappy.”

  “I guess some marriages are more like nightmares than fairy tales.”

  “But it shouldn’t be that way. If only I’d paid closer attention. Maybe I could’ve done something.”

  “Livvy could’ve left, Jackson. Your parents were practically around the corner.”

  “I know. That’s why the whole thing seems so bizarre.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was like anticipating a picnic under the stars.

  On their way to the beach Jackson stopped to pick up barbecue sandwiches with chips and soft drinks to-go at a local dive along Largo Avenue called Smokin’ Sal’s. The fast food joint was small but it was the aroma of slow-simmered brisket flavoring the air that drew most of the customers in from the street. The place had a missing poster plastered in the window about Walker, Livvy, and the kids.

  Jackson treated the guy behind the counter like an old friend. The two men spoke about an incident that happened in study hall back in middle school before moving on to a litany of questions about family. Keeping to an easy banter and a friendliness that seemed to go back to childhood, they high-fived each other like teammates.

  “Sorry about this business with Livvy. I haven’t had a chance to make it to any of the searches yet. Meredith and I keep this place going seven days a week just to keep our heads above water. I’m here from seven in the morning doing the books while she gets the girls off to school before coming in to help me with the lunch crowd. I usually don’t leave for home until eleven at night because I’m here cleaning up.”

  “It’s okay. We appreciate you putting up the poster.”

  “It’s the least I could do.”

  “How’s Meredith?”

  “Expecting our third in December. We’re hoping for a boy this time.”

  “Good luck with that. How much do I owe you?”

  “Don’t worry about it. This meal’s on me and Meredith.”

  “Thanks,” Jackson said, scooping up the bag of food.

  “Who was that?” Tessa asked when they started down the sidewalk again.

  “Salvador Bartholomew, a distant cousin, twice removed on my mom’s side. Sal inherited this place from his dad. You’ll find most of the businesses around here go back second and third generations.”

  “Salvador Bartholomew are two names you rarely hear together.”

  Jackson chuckled. “What can I say? We’re a quirky bunch in the Keys.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “You’ll love the barbecue, too. It has a sweet Caribbean zing that you only get on island.”

  “Personally, back in North Carolina, we favor our pulled pork.”

  “Sal serves that up as well, but with a cinnamon sauce to die for.”

  When they reached the shore, they sought out a place to sit, picking a spot under a towering coconut palm with long-reaching feathery branches. There’d been a question brewing at the back of Tessa’s mind for several days. “How long do you plan to stay here?”

  Jackson dug out a sandwich and handed it off. “My boss is getting antsy for an answer to that same question. Right now, I’m uncertain how long it’ll be before I’m willing to give anyone an answer. How about you?”

  “Maybe another week if I’m lucky.”

  He sipped his soda, contemplated her leaving. “Don’t go. You’ll regret it if you get back to Nags Head without a resolution. You won’t be able to focus on anything but Ryan. You’ll stay up late at night until one or two in the morning, spend hours online sending out inquiries until you can’t sleep. Insomnia will start getting to you.”

  Tessa smiled and unwrapped her food. “That’s a bleak outlook but sounds fairly prophetic. That’s exactly how I’d spend my time. Well, Raine offering me a place to stay definitely helps the finances. But there’s still the blog I do for the hardware store. Without daily posts, they may decide to can me and get someone else. I mean, what’s more important, finding my brother or some stupid blog?”

  “That’s the way I feel. I love what I do. But how do I go back to work without knowing what happened to Livvy?”

  “Like you said, Ryan consumes my every waking thought. I’ve lost the ability to write a clever post. I have to face the fact that I may not get my creative DIY juices flowing again.”

  He reached out, his fingers brushing a trail through that mane of Tahitian red. “I get the impression there’s no one waiting for you back home.”

  “Nope. I broke up last year with a guy who had a problem flirting with everything in a skirt that came within twenty feet of him. I’ve been free and clear ever since. How about you?”

  “There’s a woman I see every now and then. We’re coworkers, different responsibilities, different departments. I travel. So does she. When it’s convenient we spend the night with each other.”

  “Does she see this arrangement as casually as you do?”

  “Absolutely. Rachel won’t even meet my family. We’ve known each other for two years and she’s never been down here. Not once. This thing with Livvy came up and I haven’t heard from her.”

  “She hasn’t called to ask about how the case is progressing?”

  “Did I mention Rachel isn’t really the warm and fuzzy type? She’s all about ambition, getting ahead in her career.”

  “Ah, the old Type A personality.”

  “Exactly. Now that I think about it, I don’t know what attracted me to her.”

  “It’s the sex,” Tessa said with a snicker, elbowing him in the ribs. “Never underestimate the bond that forms from sexual release.”

  “I’m not sure Rachel and I have any bond other than physical contact. It’s certainly nothing like the heat I feel with you.”

  Again, her lips curved. It felt good to toss around a few flirtations. She pushed up her sleeves and poked him in the ribs again. “Haven’t you heard? It’s that North Carolina sizzle. It’s so special I hauled it all the way down to south Florida just for you.”

  “Works for me.” He took her chin, fastened his mouth to hers. His blood thumped through his veins like a pressure cooker about to explode. He wanted her flat on her back.

  The kiss was all tangled tongues and greedy tastes. Her breath hitched as she pulled him in. His mouth did things to her that made her lightheaded. Off balance, she threw caution to the wind. “Seducing me is pointless. I’m bunking with Raine and you’re staying with your parents. We have no access to anything but a vehicle.”

  He let out a sigh. “Even I’m too old for my dad’s truck.”

  “Exactly. So where does that leave us?”

  “We have two hotels in this town.”

  “Come on, Jackson. That option is fairly obvious. You really want to give the people here something else to add to their play list?”

  “I don’t give a hang.”

  “Yes, you do. Try to picture the email Dandridge sends out to his flock about us that your mother would likely read.”

  Jackson puffed out his cheeks. “I truly wouldn’t care. But it might hurt Mom in some way. I don’t think Dad would care either.”

  “I don’t want to cause Lenore any more pain. Then there’s this Rachel thing back in New York. You have to deal with her first. You owe her that much.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s the next thing on my to-do list.”

  By the time he walked Tessa around the marina to Raine’s houseboat, he’d had ample time to think. On the trek back to Livvy’s to pick up his dad’s truck Jackson had already made up his mind. He’d been putting it off long enough.

  He took out his cell phone and keyed in a text message to Rachel. It was short, simple, and to the point. We’ve had a good run but whatever we had is over.

  Rachel’s reply came back in a matter of minutes. You’re on the road now and tired but when you get back to New York, I ha
ve no doubt we’ll pick up right where we left off.

  The words on the road jumped out at him. Didn’t Rachel realize he was back in Florida in the midst of the worst crisis he’d ever faced? Did she think he was on a work assignment somewhere? Had Rachel forgotten all about his sister?

  By the time he reached the truck, he keyed in his response. Don’t hold your breath. We’re finished. I met someone else.

  He almost typed in the rest, the simple truth. Tessa made him feel more alive than he had in years.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They decided to forego another organized land search, at least for a day or two until they could regroup. Instead, Mitch had been itching to get back on the water. He dragged Jackson and Garret out of bed before the sun came up. They boarded The Black Rum before daybreak, before the curious had a chance to show up and gawk.

  With coffee in hand, Mitch stood on the deck as the boat swayed under his feet. He watched the sun come up standing between his brothers. The crystal clear sky indicated the weather would provide a perfect day of calm seas.

  The blue water rippled onto shore. With each soft foamy whitecap he knew this was his element, the only thing that made sense in his life. The sea had always trumped any other type of relationship. It wasn’t lost on Mitch that he and his brothers had all chosen professions where the ocean played a huge part in their lives. No doubt the roots they’d formed in Indigo Key were deep and lasting, a testament to their upbringing.

  If only Livvy could be here to echo that tribute. How had they reached this point? What could the Buchanan family have done to anyone that led them to searching the bay for something no one wanted to consider? Bodies. Remains. What sin could Walker have committed that would have brought down his entire family?

  This early in the day, no one voiced those sentiments aloud. They didn’t have to.

  In Mitch’s mind he had the best man at reading side scan sonar in Walsh. But his brother, Jackson, was no slouch in that regard either. As a tech geek, Jackson did more than dabble in his share of marine electronic gadgetry. An oceanographer was used to studying underwater terrain. Using advanced technology was part of the job. So detecting anomalies in the water should be a piece of cake for either man. Mitch just wasn’t sure their vast experience covered locating submerged objects that contained bodies.

  After getting the sonar wand over the side and into the water, Mitch sent Jackson and Garret to the nav station to join Walsh. The command center of the ship had a satellite system, Wi-Fi capability, VHF radios, two fixed, two hand-held, two Iridium satellite phones, an assortment of walkie-talkies, several laptop computers, a Navtex system, and a demodulator for pulling down weather forecasts and alerts.

  In the closed quarters of the ship, Jackson stood next to a computer screen doing his part to finish off a pot of coffee. As if he’d read Mitch’s thoughts, he sidestepped to the helm. “The good news is the bay isn’t all that deep. The bad news is if I needed to get rid of bodies, I’d go out fifty, maybe sixty miles offshore, which puts us in the Atlantic, and dump them there. On that, I agree with Walsh.”

  Mitch ran a hand through his thick, longish hair. “Yeah, I would too, make sure I was far enough away from curious eyes not to get spotted.”

  Garret took a swig of coffee. “So where exactly does that leave us? Covering sixty miles out to sea is impractical and will likely take us into next year.”

  Jackson chewed the inside of his jaw. “We don’t stop to explore every single object we see on the scan, only those that look manmade, anything that might hold a body or look like the shape of a body. Think of it like…”

  “A treasure hunt,” Mitch supplied. When he got a nasty glare from Garret, he lifted a shoulder. “Sorry. But we have a vast ocean and it’s a great deal like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “Then where’s our starting point?”

  Jackson turned to look at Garret. “Good question. My vote is just before we reach the mouth of the bay, before it opens up to the truly deep part of the Atlantic, and then beyond that in a methodical grid. Guesswork aside, Anniston’s working on getting us the GPS settings Walker used to take Ryan out fishing. That’s a lot more definitive. But until then we scour the bay first on our way to the mouth.”

  As he always did, Mitch punched in coordinates into the ship’s computer. But it occurred to him as they rolled through the water another issue loomed. He turned to Walsh. “What did you find out about the Patagonia Pike?”

  His crew chief shrugged. “Not a thing. According to the chat rooms, the Patagonia Pike is still anchored in Puerto Nuevo.”

  “But we know that isn’t true.”

  “Yeah. So what does that tell you? They’re likely on the hunt for something big.”

  Mitch went to a laptop to pull up the Internet. “I don’t understand what they could be looking for. I thought I knew all the hotspots offering the big prizes around the Keys, certainly any that would be large enough to bring Dietrich’s crew up from South America and this close to Indigo.”

  Walsh didn’t hesitate. “Obviously they’ve discovered something we don’t know about, something new.”

  “Or something old,” Jackson amended. “Doesn’t a pirate’s fortune go back centuries?”

  Walsh slapped him on the shoulder. “I may like the way you think yet.”

  “Wait until you’ve been around him longer than fifteen minutes,” Garret offered. “I guarantee he’ll eventually hit all your nerves.”

  “I grow on people,” Jackson said evenly as he got back to the job of watching the monitor. That is, until Garret interrupted, complaining about the boredom.

  “How do people stand being cooped up in these close quarters for weeks at a time? I know you did it in college aboard that research vessel. It would drive me up the wall if I had to do this on a daily basis. The bunks are too close together, the heads are too small, and the shower stalls are tiny.”

  Tired of listening to him whine, Jackson patted him on the back. “Now Sally, you could at least wait another hour before bitching again. I wondered if you’d be able to handle the claustrophobic environment. You like freedom and openness. Maybe that’s why you surf like you were born in the water and the size of a wave doesn’t faze you in the least.”

  “I’ll handle the boat because I have to, but it wouldn’t be my first choice of how to spend my day.” Garret glanced at the screen, studied the colorful light and dark imaging. It all looked incredibly difficult to read. “So how are we doing? See anything of interest yet?”

  Jackson hit a few keys to enhance the pictures. “All we have so far is a bunch of flat-line data. But then, we’ve only been out for a few hours.” He checked another monitor, tapped the screen. “The thing is, the weather is about to change. We’re not out of the rainy season yet. May to October it isn’t unusual for a cloudburst to form around this time of day and it’s not even noon. There’s ominous weather forming. Clouds are coming in fast from the open sea. Looks like heavy rain will cut this voyage shorter than we thought.”

  Feeling edgier, Garret challenged, “It’s just a little shower. We could still dive with a little drizzle spitting down on us.”

  Jackson gritted his teeth. “If it were drizzle I wouldn’t have mentioned it. And if we’d found anything to prompt a dive, I might agree. But we haven’t. This rainstorm looks like it might hold some punch. You want to rock on this tub in a storm, be my guest. But I’m voting for going in. As claustrophobic as you are, I would, too.”

  Walsh overheard the chatter and turned on Garret. “Save your bravado for when we find a target area. Now’s not the time to buck a squall.”

  Garret appealed to Mitch for the final ruling. But Mitch deferred to Jackson and his crew chief. “We’ll stay out until those clouds get closer, but as soon as the wind picks up, we’re heading back to port.”

  While his sons looked to the sea for answers, down the street within view of the marina, Tanner prepared to carry out his own agenda.

  A
s Tanner stood on the sidewalk looking at the Life Stone Church, he thought back to the first time Lenore had dragged him here. His Sunday mornings were meant for relaxing not for plopping his hardworking butt down on a hard pew in a stifling hot chapel and listening to Boone Dandridge lecture him on how best to live his life. He knew how to live, had done so for all of his adult life without interference from some preacher man.

  But over the years that mule-headed attitude of his had morphed into something he looked forward to doing. What started out as an annoyance turned into years of devoted Sundays. He’d done everything he could to make sure the church continued its growth, all the while nurturing his spiritual side, a side he didn’t even know he had. Not only that, he’d found good friends along the way.

  Or so he’d thought.

  Tanner rubbed the whiskers on his chin. He hadn’t bothered to shave since Livvy went missing. If he had timed this visit right, this time of day, he hoped to catch Boone Dandridge in his office. Unless the preacher had altered his daily routine, Tanner fully expected to see the man huddled at his desk working on his next sermon.

  For more than forty-eight hours, Tanner had stewed over Boone’s email. He’d read the message more than twenty times. The idea that Boone’s comments had influenced longtime friends to downplay Livvy’s disappearance turning it into a frivolous trip infuriated him. For two days, he’d been mulling over how best to deal with what he saw as Boone’s betrayal, not just the stabbing in the back aspect, but turning on parishioners. There were kids who attended Sunday school, who’d grown up in the church. If they couldn’t depend on their pastor in a time of crisis then what was the point?