Amber Beach

by Elizabeth Lowell

“You bet it is. As long as the wind holds, we won’t need to worry about being overrun by the Tupperware navy.”

  Honor blinked.

  Despite the urgency and impatience gnawing at him, Jake smiled at her look of sleepy confusion. “Pleasure craft,” he explained. “Made of cheap plastic.”

  The effort it took for her to smile told him just how edgy she felt. Underneath her forced calm, she was vibrating like a wire too tightly stretched.

  And so was he. He had shared the good news about the wind, but not the bad: diving wouldn’t be any fun, for either of them.

  He changed to the hailing band on the radio and listened. Nothing. He surfed through the other channels several times, listening. Nothing. For all that he could hear on the radio, they had gotten away clean.

  He wished he believed it.

  They washed down salmon sandwiches with hot coffee. Dawn was barely a hint of gray on the eastern horizon. Jake hit the blower. A few minutes later he started the engine. While it came up to operating temperature, he went to work on the chart plotter again. Nothing new there, either.

  “Seal Rock?” Honor asked.

  He grunted.

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” she said.

  “I’m not. It will be cold, rough, and windy.”

  “Isn’t there a lee side?”

  “Only if you’re a seal and it’s low tide, when the rocks are above water.”

  “Then why are we going? Kyle won’t be there.”

  “You have a better idea?” he challenged.

  She bit her lip and shook her head, not trusting her temper enough to respond. It wasn’t Jake’s fault she felt like she was breathing nettles.

  He sighed and cursed under his breath. He really didn’t want to point out that on Seal Rock they were looking for something that didn’t have to breathe oxygen—like amber or a dead body.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling Honor close. “Right now I’m not any happier about this mess than you are.”

  “He’s not your brother,” she said against Jake’s flannel shirt.

  “But you’re his sister.”

  While Honor tried to make sense of Jake’s words, he went out on the bow and pulled up the anchor. Before she had time to get nervous about being adrift, he was back in the helm seat. Anxiously she looked to the east, needing dawn in a way she couldn’t explain. If only there was enough light, surely she would be able to see where Kyle was, wouldn’t she?

  Dawn hadn’t arrived yet. The wind had. It caught them as soon as they left the lee of the island. But by the time they hammered through the waves to Seal Rock, it was light enough to see everything.

  There was nothing to see except foam.

  Even though her head had known it would be this way, disappointment broke over Honor in a long, cold wave.

  Kyle, where are you?

  “He can’t be dead,” she said hoarsely. “He’s my brother . . .”

  Jake saw a tear slide down her cheek. He had tried to prepare her for the bleak reef. Obviously he hadn’t done a very good job.

  “You believe he’s dead, don’t you?” she demanded. “A thief and a murderer and dead!”

  “It’s one explanation for his disappearance,” Jake said in a neutral tone.

  “He isn’t dead,” she said, her voice ragged. “What else is around here?”

  “Water.”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “This may surprise you,” Jake said bitterly, “but I didn’t come here just to rub your face in the most probable explanation for Kyle’s disappearance. This is the last place Kyle recorded on the chart plotter. Period. No hidden agenda.”

  “If Kyle can’t be here, why bother?”

  “Because there’s a chance, just a chance, that a panel from the Amber Room is tied to the bottom somewhere around Seal Rock.”

  “And if you find it, you’ll be back in business.”

  Jake didn’t say a word.

  For a time Honor tipped back her head and closed her eyes as though to stop tears from falling. It didn’t work. “How long will it take you to search for the amber?”

  He grimaced. There was nothing in her voice, no color, no life, like a room with no light in it.

  “Not too long,” he said. “There are only a few places where it would be safe to stash the panel.”

  She blinked hard and looked out at the ragged rock and white water. “What are you talking about? You could hide the Queen Mary out there.”

  “If something is down there, it has to be safe from tides, currents, and storms. We get some pretty steep tides around here, so you’re looking at least fifteen feet down.”

  Unwillingly Honor turned and faced Jake. His expression was intent, his eyes like hammered silver as he stared out over the nasty-looking rock.

  “Kyle was limited by the amount of air in his tank,” Jake continued, “even if he had a spare. I’m betting that he free dove to check out possible hiding places. I doubt that he went much deeper than twenty-five feet, because it gets real dark in these waters and the breath is squeezed right out of you by pressure unless you’re used to free diving.”

  “As far as I know, he always used a tank.”

  “That’s what I figured. According to the charts, there are maybe five places near Seal Rock that meet the requirements of tide, relatively calm water, and depth.”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, haven’t you?”

  Jake ignored the accusation in Honor’s voice. “Yes. Ever since I found out that Kyle’s dive equipment was missing along with his Zodiac.”

  “Why didn’t you say something to me?”

  “You believe he’s innocent. That doesn’t leave much to talk about, does it?”

  “You believe he’s guilty. That doesn’t leave much to talk about, does it?”

  “How about me?” Jake demanded. “Do you think I’m guilty of stealing the amber?”

  “No.”

  His eyes widened in surprise. “Archer does.”

  She shrugged. “Archer is wrong.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Observation. I watched you with Resnikov’s amber. You appreciated all of it, but your real passion was reserved for the Stone Age carvings. The Amber Room isn’t Stone Age.”

  “You don’t think I’d do it for sixty million bucks?” Jake asked curiously.

  “Money isn’t your passion either.”

  He would have preferred to have Honor’s faith in him based on something warmer than observation—something like the unqualified love she gave her brother—but Jake wasn’t in a position to be fussy.

  “Kyle’s passion is ancient jade,” she continued, “not ancient amber, and he doesn’t need money.”

  “If you’re looking for a motive, don’t forget Kyle’s other passion,” Jake said evenly. “The very modern Marju.”

  “He left her!”

  “Did he? Or did he run out of luck doing something dumb in order to finance his love life?”

  The downward curve of Honor’s mouth said that she didn’t like thinking about her brother’s fiancé, a red-hot motive for real stupidity.

  “He still didn’t need money,” Honor insisted.

  “How long would Kyle’s personal checkbook hold out living high in Brazil? Not the Donovan family money, but his own?”

  A ripple went through her body, a signal of the tension that was increasing with every word Jake spoke.

  “Don’t ask me to believe Kyle is a thief,” Honor said harshly. “Please, don’t!”

  Jake reached for her, wanting to hold her and comfort her. She drew back as though he had offered to hit her. His mouth thinned in anger and frustration. She might trust him when she thought about it, and she sure enjoyed sex with him, but she still lumped him with her brother’s enemies.

  “It will be slack tide soon,” Jake said, turning away. “I’ll drop anchor and get the dive gear ready.”

  Instead of answering, Honor grabbed a fishing rod
and a heavy lure and went out on the stern. The motion of the boat in choppy water had become so familiar to her that she didn’t even notice it. She simply widened her stance, lifted the rod, and sent the lure whipping out over the water with all the force of her fear and anger behind it.

  Honor didn’t say anything when Jake went over the stern and into the water wearing wet suit, mask, hood, flippers, and snorkel. She didn’t seem to notice when he finally returned and put on the air tank. Yet when he went off the swim step and sank below the cold water, she shivered as though she were chilled clear through. After a few more casts she reeled in, put the rod in a holder, and stretched her aching arms.

  No matter how carefully Honor looked at the ocean around Seal Rock, she saw no sign of Jake other than the dive buoy he had set out. To make the time pass more quickly, she went inside the cabin and tried to sketch. The pencil felt awkward in her hand. The images in her mind were more horrifying than artful.

  With a sound of disgust, she put away her sketching materials and looked around. At home she would have paced away her nervous energy. But there wasn’t room for pacing on the boat, and the substitute she had discovered—casting—didn’t appeal to her right now.

  The radio crackled, making her jump. She heard the Coast Guard “All Stations” broadcast for information about a twenty-seven-foot SeaSport, name Tomorrow probable destination the San Juan or the Gulf Islands. Hurriedly she stepped up into the helm seat and switched from the hailing channel to the work channel.

  No one answered the Coast Guard’s query.

  After a few minutes of listening, Honor let out a sigh of relief. Her glance fell on the chart plotter. Jake had left it on, displaying the last entry Kyle had made. She stared at the representation of Seal Rock and the dotted lines that seemed to circle around the rock at random. Seven “hits” were recorded.

  Honor went back to the menu, called up the first stored route, and looked at it. Nothing had changed since the last ten times she had stared at it, silently demanding that the chart give up its secrets to her. She called up the second route. Nothing new. The third. The fourth. The fifth. The sixth.

  “Where are you, Kyle?” she said aloud. “Damn it! Where are you!”

  One by one, she retrieved and stared at all the routes Kyle had stored. Like her attempt to sketch, no inspiration came.

  “If you weren’t trying to hide something, why doesn’t your log show that you went to these places?”

  Silence and a slowly subsiding wind were her only answers.

  Honor pulled Kyle’s logbook off the dash and flipped through it as she had many times before. Nothing new leaped out at her.

  “Kyle, you’re going to have to help me on this one. I have the key, but it’s no good without the lock. Where did you hide the lock?”

  As soon as Honor said the words, a thread of excitement snaked through her. Almost afraid to believe, to try, and then to suffer disappointment all over again, she shut down the electronics with trembling fingers. Moments later she turned on everything again, as though she had just come on board and was starting up the boat for a day of fishing.

  Two separate sets of buttons lit up once more. They were the only access to the normal functions of depth sounder and chart plotter. They were also the only access to whatever unusual functions Kyle had added to the electronics.

  “Which set of buttons is the lock?” Honor asked, staring at the machine. “Or is it both, half on one set and half on the other? And which half? Or is it every other, back and forth?”

  There was only one way to find out. Starting with the keys that held letters rather than numbers, Honor punched in Kyle’s password, which could be rendered in numbers or as a word. Either way, it permitted access to his bank accounts, his computer, his telephone answering machine, everything.

  Nothing happened.

  She clenched her fist, shut off the electronics and started them again. This time she punched the password into the upper set of buttons. The picture on the chart plotter flickered, then went blank. Honor’s groan turned into a sound of surprise as the screen flickered again, then called up a different chart.

  Honor was still staring at the screen, trying to make out the location of the route, when she felt the boat shift as it took Jake’s weight on the swim step. She slid out of the helm seat and hurried to open the door.

  “Jake—” she began.

  “No,” he interrupted curtly, peeling off the dive harness. “I didn’t find anything.”

  “I did.”

  22

  IT TOOK AN hour for Honor and Jake to get to Kyle’s last, hidden route: Jade Island. Very small, uninhabited, and too far off the common routes to need navigation markers, the island was inaccessible a lot of the time by anything but a Zodiac or a kayak. During high tides there were several narrow channels leading through the rocks, reefs, and rafts of seaweed to the island itself, but there were few people who would risk their boats on the unmarked rocks.

  “I can see why Kyle took the Zodiac,” Jake said as he completed circling the island. “We’re lucky the tide is up. Otherwise you would get a chance to find out how you do in an open boat.”

  Honor shuddered.

  Jake tried the south side of the island first. After he threaded through the obstacles, he discovered a trough of deeper water surrounding much of the island itself. There was no year-round freshwater spring, no beaches except at low tide, and no good fishing or crabbing; in all, there was nothing to recommend Jade Island but isolation and scenery. The scenery, at least, could be duplicated on the more accessible islands.

  Jake stood in the stern well, still in his dive suit, handling the Tomorrow’s aft controls with the unthinking skill of a man who was thoroughly at home.

  A few feet from him Honor looked through binoculars at the uneven, rugged stone wall rising from the sea. She felt a hundred years old and frozen to the marrow of her bones. She didn’t even have the relief of tears. The disappointment she felt was so deep that it was impossible to cry. She had been so triumphant when she had finally found the hidden chart and so relieved that she was almost light-headed.

  “Let me look,” Jake said, taking the binoculars from her. “You’re making yourself sick staring through these.”

  Even though the wind had fallen off steadily and whitecaps were disappearing, there was still a noticeable chop beneath the Tomorrow’s white hull. Yet it wasn’t seasickness that was making Honor’s skin feel clammy. It was the suffocating fear that she had done everything she could and still had failed her brother completely.

  There was nothing on the tiny island but rock, fir trees, and more rock.

  Jake divided his attention between driving the very slowly moving boat and looking through the glasses. Numbly Honor waited for him to tell her what she already had seen for herself: Kyle wasn’t there.

  But when Jake lowered the binoculars, all he said was, “Let’s try the north side.”

  Her shrug said more than words. She didn’t think the other side of this unforgiving island would have anything to offer but more disappointment.

  Slowly the Tomorrow cruised the length of the north side, picking through obstacles to the deeper water close to shore. Other than being in the lee of the southeast wind, and having more trees, the north side of the island wasn’t much different from the south. There was no place to run a Zodiac up onto a beach because there were no real beaches.

  Turning away from the empty island, Honor fought the cold tide of despair that kept threatening to overwhelm her. She had been so certain that Kyle would be there, safe, able to explain everything that had happened . . . .

  So certain, and so wrong.

  “What does the bottom look like?” Jake asked in a clipped voice.

  Honor didn’t answer.

  He set his jaw. He had been in a lethal mood since he discovered how little Honor trusted him; she had known Kyle’s access code but hadn’t mentioned it until an hour ago.

  The rational part of Jake admitted th
at he could hardly blame her. But he wasn’t feeling particularly rational at the moment.

  “Go inside and check the fish finder,” he said without lowering the binoculars. “I need to know what the bottom is like. I’ll tell you if I see anything.”

  Honor went into the cabin and switched the lower screen from chart to fish finder. She stared at the gaudy blue-and-red display while the boat crept closer to the island. The angle of approach Jake chose was very shallow. Each time the depth changed more than a few feet, she read out the number in a voice loud enough to carry through the open cabin door to the stern.

  “Forty-four, forty-one, thirty-two-going up fast. Twenty-five. Twenty. Fourteen. Nine!”

  Jake reversed the throttle, killing all but a tiny bit of forward momentum.

  Honor glanced up and gasped. The rugged cliff looked close enough to touch. “Jake, the rocks!”

  “I see them. We can get closer if we have to. There’s still water to spare under the hull. What does the radar show?”

  “An island right in front of us, what do you think?”

  “Behind us,” he snapped.

  She forced herself to look at the radar screen instead of the looming cliff. An island was back there, too. She tried to remember its name. All she could think of was her sense of failure, the aching feeling of having come so very close but not close enough to make a difference.

  “I can see the little island we came past to get here,” Honor said. “That uninhabited one on the left, about a mile off. You know which one I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Jake also knew that a small boat could hide quite handily in the island’s dense radar shadow. But there was no point in bringing it up. Honor was unhappy enough without adding more to her worries.

  Besides, he couldn’t be sure they were being followed. He was just being paranoid about something that probably was no more than an occasional flicker way out at the edge of the radar screen. Getting sucked back into Ellen’s world had that effect on him. He didn’t like living in a place where everyone had false smiles, multiple motives, and top secret agendas.

  He adjusted course to go around a small nose of rock, then ducked back into the cabin and slid into the pilot seat. Honor was staring out the window. The bleak expression on her face told him exactly what she was thinking.