“When you find it…that’s the problem, ain’t it? How long you been diving for it, and you still don’t know where it is? This little bitch knows where she found them coins, and I think it was on that island I own a piece of. Maybe there’s more out there. More old silver can’t be a bad thing, even if there’s not a shipload of it. Maybe if I know where her coins come from, I won’t need you to figure out where the treasure ship wrecked.”
Steve was obviously proud of this feat of logic, so much so that he decided to parade his mental superiority in front of Dane and Amande. “If you’re not smart enough to find that boat after all that diving, then I got no more use for you. I got diving equipment. When the island is all mine and I’m living rent-free in this houseboat, I can look for the treasure ship myself, any time I feel like it.”
“What happens to us, now that we know you killed my grandmother?”
Steve ran the point of the knife along Amande’s jaw, heading for her ear. “I never said I killed your grandmother. I think maybe you should probably stop saying it. We need to get in the boat now and go find that shipwreck.”
“The wreck’s mine,” Dane said. Amande thought it was rather brave of him to talk back to an armed man, though his bravery was mitigated by the fact that it wasn’t his throat being caressed by a humongous hunting knife. The romantic in her hoped that he was doing this to get Steve to rub the knife all over his throat, instead of hers.
No luck. Dane was still focused on the wreck. He was still negotiating a business deal.
“We agreed early on that I’d buy the island from you, then I found out that you didn’t own it all. We have a deal when I can see a way to get full title to the island, not before. That’s all the money I’ll ever owe you. You’ve got no piece of the wreck.”
Amande felt cool metal travel down to the hollow of her neck.
“The island belongs to me and this girl. Three fourths of it is mine. The rest is hers. If I kill her, it’ll all be mine. Then we’ll have a deal, won’t we, Sechrist?”
Ignoring the fact that calling a knife-wielding man names was unwise, Amande said, “You really are stupid. If I die without a will, the state of Louisiana will decide who gets my property, and I bet it won’t be you. I’m thinking it’ll be Didi. But maybe I do have a will. You don’t know, do you? If I do, I can guarantee that you’re not on my list of heirs.”
“Shut up.”
She felt more bruises form under his cruel hands.
“The girl’s smarter than you are, and she’s right. I won’t be buying that island until I know for sure that you have the title, and I won’t be showing you where any of the artifacts were found, ever.”
“Yes, you will. You’ll take me there, if you want to keep this little bitch alive.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Amande tried to turn her head enough to look Steve in the face. “I’ll show you the rest of my coins and I’ll tell you where I got them, if you let me go. Some of them are silver, so they’re worth something. They’re in my room.”
She eyed Dane. He knew that she didn’t have any more artifacts that Steve would give a damn about, because she’d described her collection to him in excruciating detail, but he was keeping his mouth shut. Maybe he was on her side.
Steve twisted Amande’s arm behind her back and shoved her toward her bedroom. Dane followed.
She pulled the folder of silver American money out of the drawer first and handed it to Steve. With luck, he’d be too intoxicated by the smell of a precious metal to notice what else she was doing.
While he was pawing through the twentieth-century coins, she reached in the drawer again and pulled out a tray of stone tools. A flint blade lay atop the other implements. Joe had praised its finely honed edge. She palmed it.
With her free hand, she retrieved a tray of European import goods—buttons, a pipe, a green glass jar. After she handed it to Steve, who was starting to need more than one free hand to deal with everything she was throwing at him, she surreptitiously swiped the sextant from her desktop and crumpled a carefully chosen map around it in a loose wad. Those import goods were all far newer than the seventeenth-century shipwreck Dane and Steve were hoping to find, but Steve didn’t know that. It would take him a few moments to rifle through them and find that they bored him. Maybe in those few moments Amande would think of something to save her life.
Or maybe in those few moments someone would come to help her. Faye would be at her side in an instant if she knew Amande was in trouble, despite the fact that she was just a brand-new acquaintance who would be going away soon. Amande had known the same kind of loyalty in her grandmother. She wondered if she would ever have that in her life again.
Steve thrust the trays back at her. “Nothing’s in here that’s any good. We’re going out to the island, and you’re gonna show me where you found them Spanish coins.”
He twisted her right arm behind her again. It hurt, but if one of her arms had to be yanked half-off, this was the one she wanted yanked. The stone blade was wrapped tight in that hand where he couldn’t see it, biting into her palm, and she didn’t need it right now. She did need her left hand free, and she let it dangle beside her leg, keeping her body between Steve and that hand.
There were more things than a sextant and a crumpled map in that left hand. As he dragged her to his boat, she dropped tiny potsherds that she’d grabbed from the basket on her desk. One by one, they marked her trail. Dane followed them silently. Once, she saw him nudge a sherd with his toe, moving it into a position that would be more obvious to anyone searching the boat. It felt good to have an ally, although she would have been more grateful for an ally with a gun.
At the door, she let the sextant drop. The map wrapping it cushioned its impact with the wooden deck, so it fell silently. Dane nudged it with his toe until the paper opened slightly, revealing old brass. She could see that it had fallen so that it pointed toward the spot where Steve’s boat was moored, the very boat he would be using to take her from her home. Could her meaning possibly be more clear?
Come and get me. Come this way…
Amande hoped it was Faye who found the trail she’d left behind. Some people wouldn’t understand the meaning of those cast-off pieces of old trash, but Faye would know to look for her on the island, the only place Amande had ever found anything of value.
Faye would come get her. Amande hoped she had enough sense to bring Joe.
***
Joe was still far enough away from New Orleans and its urban amenities to enjoy crappy cell phone coverage. He figured he must have driven through a tiny zone where his phone worked, because Faye’s messages and texts had all come through at once. He wasn’t as much of a talker as Faye, so he’d just sent her one text that read, in its entirety:
I think we should adopt the girl. Reuss is working on it.
Going by the length and number of her messages, some of which rambled on about how awful it would be if Amande married somebody to get herself free of Didi, he inferred that he had underestimated the amount of communication an event like adoption required. What else was new?
He also inferred that she hadn’t received the one succinct message he had sent. Joe had been married long enough to know that he probably needed to talk to her in person, before her emotions got away from her. Faye might be a doctor and a scientist and probably the smartest person he would ever know, but she was also a woman. When it came to emotional stuff, life worked better when they did things her way.
He’d spent a fair amount of time talking to Reuss, then he’d stopped for gas and a cup of coffee, so he really hadn’t gotten very far down the road. It only made sense to turn around and go talk to Faye.
***
Faye wasn’t at the rental cabin. Joe thought maybe Amande might know where she was, so he went down to the houseboat. No one answered his knock th
ere.
Standing at the front door, he dialed Faye and actually reached her. “She’s not here. Nobody is,” he told Faye. “Didi’s car and Steve’s boat are gone. Maybe Tebo is keeping one of them company. Maybe Amande is, too.”
Faye’s tart response was, “Please God, don’t let her be off marrying someone awful.”
When he didn’t laugh, she followed up with, “Is something wrong?”
“Naw,” he said, “I just saw something weird.”
At his feet, he noticed the sun glinting off something metallic and a dull red-gold. He bent easily to pick it up. “It’s the old sextant fragment Amande found, wrapped in paper and lying just outside the doorframe. I coulda stepped on it.”
“Amande wouldn’t be so careless with something that old. Since her coins were stolen, that’s the choicest artifact she has.”
“I bet somebody came back to steal the rest of her stuff, and they dropped this.”
“I’m out in the rental boat, but I’m on my way back. I can be there in ten minutes. Less.”
He reached for the doorknob and it turned in his hands. “The door’s unlocked. Wouldn’t she have locked it when she left?”
“If she left. She could still be in there, tied up by the thief or…you’ve got to go in, Joe.”
“I’m already in. Call Benoit and tell him to send somebody over here. Then get your butt home.”
“He’s already on his way. So am I. I bet I can get there first.”
***
Benoit’s voice blasted out of the phone at Faye’s ear, cursing her in real time while Joe was getting killed by entering the houseboat alone and unarmed. Or so Benoit presumed, as he described in excruciating detail what he thought Steve was doing to her husband, even as he spoke.
She chose not to tell him that Joe was never unarmed. He hated guns, and he didn’t understand the point of metal knives when there was flint in the world, but he was never unarmed.
“Give me his number,” Benoit said. “At least I can be talking to him while he’s getting stabbed.”
***
Faye revved the motor. It was time to quit lurking in this bayou while she talked on the phone. It was time to get back to where the action was. Carrying on a phone conversation would be impossible while she was underway, with the wind and the boat noise in her ears, so she was going to have to maintain contact with Joe and Benoit by text. It hardly mattered. She was only a few minutes from the marina.
Then she heard a boat louder than hers whoosh past her secluded spot in the bayou. It was painted in a dappled green-and-tan camouflage, and it had an odd-looking motor protruding from the stern.
Faye idled the motor and snatched up her binoculars. She could make out two blond heads and a brunette one. Steve was a long-haired blond and it was his boat, so identifying him was a no-brainer. Dane was the only other blond she’d seen lately, and the second man had a close-to-the-head haircut very like his. But who was the brunette?
She could have gone through an elimination process—the boat’s occupant was too big to be Didi and too dainty to be Manny and the hair was too long to be Tebo and the brightly colored shirt was a dead giveaway—but she had no need. She knew without thinking that the person sitting way too close to Steve was Amande. Mothers know these things.
She tapped out a text, addressed to both Joe and Benoit.
Steve has Amande on his boat. Don’t know where he’s taking her. Probably her island. Will text you if I’m wrong. I’ll follow so we don’t lose sight of her. Come help me.
***
Joe entered the houseboat cautiously, but there was no one inside. No burglar, no slutty aunt, no worthless uncle, no sleazy step-father, and no sixteen-year-old girl. Amande’s room looked no different than usual. Benoit had called his cell and was even then yelling at him for going in alone, but Joe was only half-listening.
The only noteworthy things in the room were Amande’s computer, showing nothing on the monitor but the screen saver, and her open artifact drawers.
Joe peered into the drawers without touching the handles or their contents. There was a lot of stuff still in there, and it didn’t look like some ignorant thief had been plundering through it. The basket of potsherds still sat atop Amande’s desk, holding down her school papers. If anything that had been in this room was missing—other than Amande—it had been carefully selected and removed without disturbing the remaining items.
He’d let the phone drop from her ear, but Benoit was yelling loud enough that he could hear him anyway. “Are you okay? What’s happening? I’ve got some people coming your way, and I really hope we don’t find you dead. Stupid and dead, that’s what you’ll be. Say something to me, Joe.”
“I’m fine. There’s nobody here, but keep those officers coming. I feel like something’s wrong.”
“They’re already in the car, and so am I.”
Joe took the phone away from his ear again and used it to nudge the computer’s mouse. The screen saver went away and Amande’s statistics test appeared. At the bottom of the page was a series of messages that said:
Test will time out in 10 minutes. There will be a 10-point penalty for failing to pause properly.
Test will time out in five minutes. Click “pause” or you will need to begin again.
Test will time out in one minute. Click “pause” or you will lose your work.
Test is timing out in thirty seconds. Click “pause” now…
Timed out.
Joe checked the time stamps on these messages, then he looked at the time on the face of his phone. Those messages told him that Amande had been gone ten minutes, tops.
They also told him something else. Living with Faye had taught him something important about good students. They were predictable. They jumped every hurdle set by their teachers, no matter how nonsensical, if that was what it took to make good grades.
Amande had lost ten points on her statistics test by failing to make a simple mouse-click. Something was wrong.
“I’m still okay, but hang on a minute,” he said to Benoit, using a pencil eraser to scroll through Amande’s statistics test, but no other clues waited there.
Squinting at his phone and trying to remember how to work it, he successfully navigated away from his conversation with Benoit and opened up a text to Faye.
She’s not at home. Something isn’t right. Need you here.
Switching back to his call with Benoit, he said, “Amande walked away from a timed test and she left the door unlocked behind her. Her artifact drawers are open, but I can’t tell that they’ve been disturbed. There’s no sign of a struggle.”
“You’ve determined that the girl’s not there. Now get out into the parking lot where my people and I can see that you’re safe when we get there.”
“Just one more minute.”
“Now, Joe!”
Joe turned silently, scanning the room’s floor and walls and ceiling. The pieces of Amande’s guardian doll still lay piled beside her full clothes hamper. Her bed was made. Everything looked normal.
He took a step back to get a better look at one of the posters on her bedroom wall, and something crunched under his heel. Joe knelt down and gathered bits of crushed pottery, hundreds of years old, in his fingers. It wasn’t like Amande to leave her treasures in harm’s way.
Still kneeling, he saw Amande’s version of the bread crumbs that trailed behind Hansel and Gretel. There was a potsherd lying on the floor near the door that opened between Amande’s room and the room that had been Miranda’s, and another one just inside the door that led from her grandmother’s room out into the main cabin of the houseboat. Joe would lay odds that he’d stepped over another potsherd as he entered the boat, and that more were outside, waiting to lead him to a girl needing rescue.
He followed the sherds, le
aving each one where it lay, in case he got more data and needed to follow the trail again and reinterpret Amande’s message. When he reached the spot at the door where the sextant had served as his first signpost, he pulled it from his pocket. Unwrapping it, he saw that he’d missed another clue. The sextant was wrapped in a crumpled map—not a copy, but an original. Amande wouldn’t mess up an original.
Opening the map, he saw that her island was dead in its center. It was as if the girl had left him a note that said, “Come get me.” If she’d had a chance, Joe believed she would have taken a pen and labeled the map with an X that marked the spot. He replaced the sextant and map where he’d found them, as best he remembered. Then he stepped back and studied Amande’s trail of clues.
A moment later, he was distracted by the pounding sound of a pair of dress shoes worn by a man unaccustomed to running. Benoit came into view, followed by two uniformed officers. Joe put up a hand, palm out, so that they wouldn’t stomp onto the dock and crush Amande’s plea for help.
The trail of potsherds pointed Joe out of the living quarters and onto the houseboat’s floating dock. The last two potsherds lay on that dock. Like all the scattered sherds, they were tiny, barely visible to anyone who hadn’t spent the last few years searching for such things. He wasn’t sure Benoit and his technicians would have been able to tell them from miniscule gobs of dried dirt.
In aggregate, all the clues pointed to the spot where Steve’s boat had been moored.
Joe ran around the boat and scanned the parking lot. Steve’s car was there. Logic said that he’d left in his boat. Joe’s intuition and Amande’s map said that Steve was headed for the island. The potsherds, sextant, and map all said that Amande was with him.
Plunder Page 25
