Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  As the sound of Michael’s soft and rhythmic breaths filled the cabin, Faye found herself imagining the kind of person who was capable of knifing a big streetwise man to death. Since she knew that this person was neither Joe nor Dauphine, she was left to spend her evening hours with an imaginary killer.

  That killer was somewhere near. The good condition of Hebert’s body made this clear. He…She?…could be creeping stealthily through the marsh behind her cabin, looking for a safe and dry place to hide. As Faye waited for Joe and Dauphine to come invade her aloneness, she listened for the sploosh of a fleeing foot in the mud or the telltale scratching of a pick attacking her door’s lock.

  By the time Joe’s key turned in that lock, Faye had spent far more time alone with her imagination than was strictly healthy.

  Episode 1 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 2

  by Amande Marie Landreneau

  Sally the Social Worker thinks that all the deaths in my family must be affecting me, but this makes no sense. For example, I never met my Uncle Hebert.

  He wasn’t even my blood uncle. He was Grandmère’s son from her first marriage, and my mother was my grandfather’s daughter from his first marriage, so they were stepbrother and stepsister.

  Did you follow that? I didn’t think so.

  How’s this? When my mother and Uncle Hebert were little kids, her dad married his mom.

  This means that I’m not actually any blood-kin to Grandmère at all. When you think about it, it was pretty awesome of her to take responsibility for me when my mom walked out. I wasn’t even potty-trained. That’s a pretty huge thing for a woman to take on when most of her kids are already grown and gone.

  So I’m not kin to Uncle Hebert and I never met him. That means my only personal connection with him is that awful moment when I looked down and saw his dead face in the water.

  If there are things in my family that haunt my psyche, Sally probably doesn’t need to look any further than the stories my grandmother weaned me on. Let’s take Gola George and his friend Henry the Mutineer, who Grandmère says we’re supposed to be related to, somehow. Was it right for my supposedly distant cousin-by-marriage Henry to help Gola George slaughter every sailor on that slave ship?

  Well, maybe. Slave ships were floating buckets of evil, and that mutiny might have saved the lives of hundreds of people who were about to be sold into slavery. But maybe Henry wasn’t the only innocent sailor on that ship who was kidnapped and forced to steal slaves.

  And is that really innocent, anyway? Maybe Henry should have just let the captain kill him on the very day he was captured, instead of taking charge of the keys and calmly locking up hundreds of men, women, and…oh, God…little children. Lots of human beings died in those shackles.

  Henry the Mutineer worked on that slave ship for years before he helped Gola George take it over. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he was part of something monstrous.

  So, yeah, it’s entirely possible that I’m haunted by deaths in my family, but I don’t think Uncle Hebert’s is one of them.

  Chapter Six

  Dane Sechrist never wanted to see another rock again.

  Dane had been diving for weeks now, and he was doing it alone, which wasn’t precisely safe. He was also spending dollar after dollar on fuel for his boat and air for his scuba tanks. These were dollars that weren’t precisely his to spend. Sooner or later, the Mastercard people were going to want those dollars back.

  Granted, he hadn’t had to pay for the sonar or the magnetometry. Who knew that a crappy summer job doing scut work on an archaeology boat would pay off so well? Or, rather, that it would pay off so well on the day—hopefully soon—when he stopped finding rocks and started finding Spanish gold?

  Though Dane was pushing six feet and carried plenty of lean muscle, he wasn’t heavily built, so he’d learned early to stand back and watch larger men jockey for position. When he was in high school, the jocks would strut and threaten and insult each other, vying for the coveted spot of alpha male. Eventually, the posturing would end in a fight behind the gym, complete with broken noses, black eyes, a bloodthirsty crowd, and weeping girlfriends. After a coach or two arrived to break up the fight, the sweaty and bleeding would-be alpha males didn’t look nearly so good to their weeping girlfriends. Dane, who had spent the fight wiping those girlfriends’ tears with his gentle hands, looked like a hero by comparison. He’d earned quite a few girlfriends of his own with those gentle hands.

  Dane’s finely honed beta-male skills had served him well while he worked aboard the archaeology boat, when the principal investigator had squared off against his most talented graduate student, time and again, over the remote sensing results. Dane had simply taken a step back and looked over their shoulders to see what all the fuss was about.

  It had been interesting to see that, despite a boatload of expensive equipment and overeducated people, underwater archaeology was still more of an art than a science. And even when the hearts of the artists were pure, money still swamped everything.

  The artists/scientists could argue for hours about the things detected by their fancy machines.

  The future-alpha-male graduate student would bark, “Look at the shape of that anomaly. It has to be a wreck.”

  And the tenured professor would shoot him down. “Too small.”

  Fueled by excess testosterone, the grad student would make the unwise decision to argue. “It could have started out bigger. Who knows what happened to it over the past four hundred years?”

  A PhD and tenure would bolster the professor’s denial. “Nope. Too small. Not worth the money to check it out.”

  The young man’s surging testosterone would urge him to try again. “What about this one, then?”

  But the older man still had enough circulating male hormones to deny him. “That? That’s nothing. Just background noise.”

  Without enough life experience to tell him he could never win, the student would persist. “Couldn’t it be a debris field?”

  Again, the student would be shot down.

  “Noise. But I like the looks of this thing over here…”

  And so it went. The opinion of the principal investigator trumped anything anybody else said, and money trumped everything.

  Dane watched and learned, and he made notes on the locations of the anomalies that he thought were worth checking out. Later, when his employers published their work, he had access to their data and their (possibly wrong) interpretations. He’d been diving on the anomalies they’d ignored ever since, focusing on the ones in shallowish water, because he wasn’t idiot enough to go after the deep ones alone. Dane enjoyed breathing.

  At first, these exploratory dives had been a harmless thing to do on Saturdays. Now that he’d actually found something, they were an obsession. If only he could find something besides rocks.

  He’d checked the Internet, and he knew these weren’t ordinary rocks. They looked like the ballast stones carried deep in the bellies of old sailing ships, and here they sat under Barataria Bay, stacked in a ship-shaped pile. Dane was no artist and he was no scientist, but he was romantic enough to appreciate that the rocks making him so miserable had been plucked off the shores of faraway seas.

  It didn’t take an archaeologist to appreciate the romance in the stones Dane had discovered. And it didn’t take an archaeologist to think up the notion that a ship had foundered here long ago. Somewhere in the vicinity of those rocks lay the broken and rotting pieces of the ship. More importantly, somewhere in the vicinity of those rocks lay everything that had been aboard that ship. Dane believed to the core of his soul that it had been loaded with treasure bound for the court of some European monarch or other. The next shapeless lump that he lifted out of the sandy muck could be made of gold. He knew this, because it had already happened three times…well
, only one of those times had he uncovered gold. The other two times, he’d uncovered silver, but silver was treasure enough for Dane.

  Lots of ships had been lost near the mouth of the Mississippi. The shifting shoals built by the river itself had seen to that. Combine these treacherous waters and their hurricanes with the constant flow of ships sent from the Old World to plunder the New, and there was no numbering the lost ships waiting to be found. There was also no limit to the amount of treasure that might be waiting with them.

  Dane had found one of those treasure ships. He knew it to his very core. So how come this wreck hadn’t yielded anything but stone and a few nails and a couple of hinges and three lone coins?

  ***

  If Faye had been a pirate, she was pretty sure that she could have found a better place for a pirate lair than this godforsaken swamp.

  Maybe it wasn’t a swamp in the eighteenth century when the pirates were doing their pirating?

  Nah. She was pretty sure that it was. Most all the land south of New Orleans was of the gelatinous variety—glistening with organic material and barely able to support the weight of a full-grown man. It was a good thing Joe’s feet were huge. Even a lean man like Joe carried more than a little weight at six foot six. Joe’s feet seemed to hold him above the muck like water skis, or even surfboards.

  Faye’s small, narrow feet functioned more like the blades of a pair of ice skates. She was certain that, if she ever stopped her forward motion, she would sink up to her knees and never get free.

  They’d driven several miles down Plaquemines Highway, the road that served as the backbone of civilization here. Faye’s map had told her to leave the highway and drive out onto a patch of land protruding into the waterways on the Gulf side, but Faye really didn’t trust the map’s assertion that the land under this dirt road could support her fully loaded car. She pulled onto the highway shoulder to think about whether she really wanted to do this.

  Joe had read her mind, saying only, “The map says you can drive on this road. So does our client.”

  “Our client’s project manager wants us to finish this job yesterday. And he wants us to do it cheap. Do you trust him?”

  “I think you can drive on this road.”

  With a sigh, Faye put the car in drive and pulled out onto the squishy-looking dirt roadway. When dealing with a situation that required book smarts or potsherd identification skills or child discipline, Faye was the go-to woman in their family. But when it came to woodcraft and accounting and lithics and an instinctive knowledge of the natural world, Joe was in the driver’s seat. If Joe said the car wouldn’t sink, then she would bet the car on it.

  The squishy road had wound deep into the marsh, sometimes comfortably bounded by solid ground and sometimes running along a causeway, one car wide, that only rose above water at high tide because somebody had piled up a lane of dirt. This lane of dirt was necessary because, unbelievably, people lived on top of all this squishiness.

  Taking a hard right onto a barely marked side road and following it to its end, they reached their destination—a mound built by Native Americans before Columbus arrived, surrounded on three sides by water. Oral history said that pirates had used it as a meeting place, centuries later, where they gathered to trade contraband, and also to drink more rum than was strictly good for them.

  Faye and Joe were only contracted to locate known sites and document their condition, not to excavate but, oh, how badly Faye wanted to get out her trowel and start to dig. She could just see the pirates perched on the side of this mound, drinking and carousing.

  She grinned at Dauphine. “Reckon Gola George and Henry the Mutineer ever came here?”

  Dauphine grunted, as if to say that she didn’t want to be reminded of anything Miranda had said. She was wearing a charm around her neck that Faye had never seen before, a silver vial with a red wax stopper.

  “What’s in that thing?” Joe had asked.

  “Boar bristles, if you must know.” Then, anticipating his next words, she’d barked, “Don’t ask,” and turned her attention to a fretting Michael, to no avail. The child had been whining all day, and Dauphine could work none of her usual magic on him.

  It worried Faye to see Dauphine standing atop the old mound, looking out at the water with Michael in her arms. The wind riffled his hair. It had always been straight and black, but lately it had begun to lose the downy look of baby hair. Soon, too soon, it would be time for haircuts and combs.

  Faye didn’t like Dauphine’s stiff silence. Her mambo friend was ordinarily in constant motion, a trait that was enhanced by the gauzy clothes that trailed behind her like a pursuing ghost. Dauphine was light on her feet for a woman her size, and it always made Faye smile to watch her flit constantly around Michael. Standing still made her look heavy…flat-footed…old.

  Dauphine saw Faye looking at her. She disengaged a hand from Michael’s tiny leg and gestured out at the water. “It’s coming,” she said. “The oil, I mean. I feel it, like a thundercloud rolling in.”

  Faye walked up the side of the mound toward Dauphine. “I know. I don’t feel it, but I know it in my head. It’s huge, and it’s coming, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Nothing except do our jobs. We can tell people what this mound is like now, before the oil gets here and spoils it forever.”

  Dauphine nodded, but she made no move. It was as if the strength had gone out of her during the hours she spent with Miranda. Faye knew that mambos considered contact with corpses to be powerfully bad magic. Discovering Amande’s Uncle Hebert floating dead in the water had weirded Faye out, and it could only have affected Dauphine more. Faye’s mambo friend was suffering from the aftereffects of a very, very bad day.

  Faye couldn’t get Dauphine to talk about it, and she’d spent the day getting nowhere with feeble jokes like, “If Miranda cursed you, can’t you curse her right back, only worse?”

  In answer, Dauphine would finger the vial at her neck or the hidden talisman in her pocket, saying only, “Such spells are beyond me.”

  Faye wasn’t ready to say she believed in voodoo. And she wasn’t ready to say she didn’t. She’d seen some strange things one dark night when the scent of Dauphine’s herb magic had hung in the air and clouded her mind. Still, Faye was at heart a rational person, and she wished desperately that Dauphine would snap out of it…or that she would come up with a miraculous counter-hex. Either would do, and as Dauphine’s employer, Faye didn’t care which it was.

  At least the fact that they had found the mound quickly put a positive spin on this day. It was a welcome change from days spent poking through mud for historical objects that had left no trace. Joe was sketching the site while Faye took pictures, when she heard a dull thud that just couldn’t be good.

  The good news was that Michael was fine. Dauphine, being who she was, had clung to him with both arms rather than extending an arm to break her fall. The bad news was that Dauphine had paid a price for protecting Faye’s son.

  Dauphine had been picking her way down the side of the old mound, wading through the shrubby vegetation that covered it. The mound’s builders had made it from a pile of oyster shells, many centuries before, so it had taken no voodoo hex to make her lose her footing on the uneven ground. She was on the hefty side, so no curse had been necessary to break off an inch-thick sapling when she landed on it. The fact that its broken trunk had stabbed deep into her right hamstring when she fell was completely explainable by simple physics. Nevertheless, Faye did not intend to argue with a heavily bleeding voodoo mambo who believed that another mambo had given her the evil eye. She just let Dauphine rave about Miranda’s evil act, when the poor old woman was in all likelihood completely innocent. Faye knew she needed to focus on getting Dauphine to a doctor before she bled to death.

  With Michael in his car seat and Joe in the backseat using Dauphine’s own shawl to apply pressure to
the blood gushing out of her wound, Faye dialed 911 while she made tracks for the main highway. They were so far out in the woods that it seemed worthwhile to meet the ambulance halfway.

  Faye’s mind was on her driving. She needed to push her luck just far enough and no more. How fast could she cross those raggedy little causeways? How fast did she dare make each turn? If she missed a turn, how soft was that shoulder, anyway? A hair-raising moment spent waiting for her right front tire to stop spinning and grab the ground told her that the shoulder was way softer than she wanted it to be.

  Dauphine’s head scarf was coming unwrapped, and a dangling end must have dragged through the blood, because it was red and dripping. Michael had settled into a pattern of rhythmic screams, as he clutched at Dauphine and she inexplicably didn’t hug him back. She just threw her head against the seat back and chanted something in a language Faye didn’t understand.

  Dauphine might be convinced that Miranda was the stronger mambo, but Faye wasn’t. She didn’t know what Dauphine was saying, but she didn’t like the sound of it.

  Chapter Seven

  The paramedics were working diligently, but Faye stood close-by and monitored their work, nonetheless. One of them had opened his mouth to suggest that Faye might have overreacted in calling an ambulance for something short of a bullet wound. Faye had silenced him by pulling back Dauphine’s bloody shawl to display an injury that looked an awful lot like the work of a gun. Embedded pieces of bark and exposed fatty tissue made Dauphine’s wound even more visually dramatic.