When she turned to look at him, she saw his profile in the moonlight. His chin was up, his eyes on the stars, and his soft words were getting swallowed by the dense marine air. She leaned forward, trying to hear him better. For some reason she didn’t understand, his stories seemed both to repulse and attract her.
“It was after he sent the book that his letters dried up. I’d stopped writing back. We had no communication at all the last three years of his life. The last message I got from him was a birthday present when I turned thirty.” Cole lifted the coin on its chain to his chin and looked down at it. “This. I didn’t bother to save the card. He’d written a message in it saying something to the effect that this coin was a key.”
He ran his thumb over the face of the coin as she’d seen him do that first day.
“What did he mean? A key to what?”
“I didn’t know back then,” he said.
“And now?”
He nodded. “It’s why they killed him.”
She brushed her hair off her forehead and rested her palm against her brow. Oh Mikey, she thought. I know what that is like to have suspicions but not be able to prove anything. The sense of déjà vu was making her feel nauseous. Cole’s words were making her head hurt. “What makes you so sure he was murdered?”
Cole took a deep breath. “Will you come back inside? There’s something else I want to show you.”
“Nobody contacted me at first when he died,” he said after they had both slid back onto the benches of the dining booth. “It was several months after his death when this package arrived in the mail from Bodwin, England.” He opened the box, lifted the journals out, then retrieved the yellowed clipping from the bottom of the box. “Inside were these old leather-bound books,” he said tapping the journals. “There was also a note from my father’s solicitors saying the old man had specified in his will that he wanted his son in America to receive these. Tucked inside one of the volumes, I found this article from the London Times about his death.”
He unfolded the newspaper clipping and placed it front of her. She began to read.
“Bodwin, Cornwall. Late Thursday morning, James Thatcher was found hanging from a skylight in his loft at his house in Cornwall. When the body was discovered by a housekeeper, Thatcher was dressed in a green hazmat suit for use in nuclear, biological or chemical warfare, green overalls, a black plastic mackintosh and thick rubber gloves. His face was covered by a gas mask and he was also wearing a sou’wester. His body was suspended from two ropes, attached to shackles that had been fastened to a piece of wood, and he was surrounded by pornographic photos of women in bondage. According to consultant pathologist Dr. Jonathon Yates, Thatcher died from asphyxia in what is now called auto-erotic asphyxiation.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and then she closed it again. She didn’t know what to say. What did he want from her? Why was he sharing all this? Where the hell was Theo with her dinghy?
“Riley, I may not have spent much time with my father, but I knew him well enough.” He shook his head and pointed his finger at the clipping. “I can’t buy that story. It’s not the lurid sex part of it. It’s too over the top. I mean, it’s not even practical if you think about it. Thick rubber gloves? And you know, there couldn’t have been a more effective or symbolic way to silence and discredit him. He wouldn’t write any more books or letters throwing scorn on the British Official Secrets Act. No more investigations into Britain’s World War II code breakers or the real reasons for the invasion of the Falklands or the secrets kept by the Royal Family. And the body of his life’s work, like the body dangling from those ropes, had been made a mockery.”
“Cole, I’m sorry, but —”
“I didn’t communicate directly with my father the last three years of his life, but when I met Theo and decided to start my own exploration company to do underwater archeological work, we got a large anonymous donation that allowed us to buy Shadow Chaser and fit her out. That was our seed money. After he died, I discovered something. That anonymous donor was my father. He sent the money — not because he wanted to help me out. He wanted me to help him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted me to find Surcouf.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Aboard the Shadow Chaser
March 26, 2008
11:15 p.m.
Riley sat looking down at the hands folded on her lap and tried to digest everything he had told her over the last couple of hours. Far-fetched was the word that kept coming to mind. Cole Thatcher might be attractive, well-educated, funny, and a good boatman — but, and this was no small item — the man was nuts. He didn’t have so much as his big toe grounded in reality. She reached across the table, picked up the heavy gold coin, and turned it over in her hands.
“I know the answer to Surcouf’s location is on that coin,” Cole said, staring at the coin. “And that’s why the Brewsters are following me. I was stupid enough to tell them as much.” He glanced up, met her eyes. “Alcohol was involved.” He attempted a smile, his lips pressed together in thin lines.
“You must have been a pretty convincing drunk for them to follow you this far.”
“And an idiot.”
He stood up then and began pacing in the confined galley like a figure skater doing figure eights. He stopped and stabbed his finger in the air pointing at the chart. “It’s got to be there. Everything points to it. There’s something in the old man’s journal – a cipher or code – and that coin is the key!” Then he added, “I know it.”
She was about to respond, to shift the subject matter to something that made her a little less uncomfortable, when he spun on his heel, braced his hands on the door frame and leaned out into the night.
“She’s out there. Surcouf. Close by. It’s like I can smell her.”
The deck breeze ruffled his shaggy hair and rippled his T-shirt where it hung from his arms. She was fascinated by the pent-up, almost manic energy in him.
“Why here? Why Guadaloupe?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Why was she encouraging him? Maybe she was nuts, too. But she had to admit she was curious about this code thing. She’d always enjoyed a good puzzle, and like her brother, she was pretty good at them.
He swung around to face her again. “In the last eighteen months of his life, my father flew down here twice, landed at Pointe-à-Pitre, stayed several weeks. It’s all in the journals here.” He picked up one of the volumes and began to thumb through the pages. “It was right after his second stay that Theo and I got the anonymous donation. He found something here. Maybe it was the actual wreck. I don’t know. There were only two more journal entries after that. But those two entries don’t read like the rest of the pages. The words don’t make sense; the sentences don’t connect, and sometimes the words aren’t even words. It’s got to be a code. Take a look.”
He placed the open book in front of her. The handwriting on the page was uneven, almost chaotic. It leaned left in places and to the right in others. In some places, the letters were neat, and in others, the script was barely legible. Riley knew nothing of handwriting analysis, but it didn’t take an expert to see that this was the writing of a disturbed individual. On the final page, she read:
Dear son,
Wits end is where I am. Spent a bit of time there. Expect to be there til the end of days. Got to stop. Them. American president is part and parcel. What goes up must come down. Not a nickel to my name. It’s all yours now. Got to stop. Them. The Creoles sing a song in the islands. It’s called Fais pas do do. Like this.
Fais pas do do, Cole mon p’tit coco
Fais pas do do, tu l’auras du lolo
Yayd d’dir
Y’did yd
Jamais fais do do.
Cole leaned back in the seat opposite her and his shoulders slumped. “But I’ve tried everything. I’ve searched the text for a hint that he used a book code, tried various field ciphers. For a while, I thought the coin’s date
was a key to the cipher. Then I figured that a letter/number substitution was giving me the longitude and latitude of an area off the west coast of the island. That’s why I was diving out there yesterday. None of it’s worked.”
“This is a weird version of a well-known French lullaby. Don’t go to sleep, Cole my little coconut, Don’t go to sleep, you will have a treat, then those weird letters as a chorus, and finally, Never go to sleep.”
“I know. I had a friend translate that much. Give me some credit. I get that he’s telling me to never be caught sleeping. But the code? I don’t have a clue. Yet I know it’s the key to this thing.”
He lifted the lockbox aside, and she saw there were still a few objects in the bottom. “What’s that?”
“It’s just some other stuff the old man sent me over the years. Kid’s stuff.”
“Anything might be relevant.”
“No, it’s this coin,” he said pointing again at the heavy gold piece. “I’m sure of it.”
She picked up the coin again. “Have you got a magnifying glass?” Riley asked. “There’s a mark here, a scratch or something that I can’t read.”
“Sure.” He disappeared into the wheel house and when he returned, he handed her a small leather case. Inside was a round brass magnifier. There was a ring around the lens with three slender legs that kept it about an inch off the table.
“Nice,” she said. She turned the ring round the lens and saw that it adjusted the height to focus the lens. “I’ve never seen one of these.”
“It’s an old chart magnifier I found at a nautical flea market. My eyes aren’t so good when it comes to the fine print on charts – or anything else for that matter.”
Riley slid the coin under the lens. The nude angel’s arm crossed the tablet and he held a pen of some sort in his hand. She saw the big letters above that hand that spelled out the word “Constitution.” But there was something else. Beneath the angel’s hand where a drape of fabric crossed the tablet, there appeared to be something scratched into the gold. She moved the coin back and forth in the light hoping to make it more clear in the reflected light.
“What’s that written on the tablet?” she asked.
“Like I told you, Dupres designed this coin to honor the new French Constitution.”
“No, under the word. Beneath the angel’s hand. In tiny script.”
He leaned forward, his arms resting on the table, his head touching hers as he peered at the coin. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing under it.”
“Yes, there is.” She adjusted the outer ring on the chart magnifier, trying to bring the image into focus. “I think it’s a number.”
“What? Let me see.” He took the magnifier from her hand, slid the coin across to his side of the table, and squinted into the eye piece, one eye closed. “I don’t see anything.”
She put a hand on her hip and leaned back. “Okay. You think I’m making it up? Aren’t you the one who told me you can’t make out the fine print on charts?”
He sat up straight and without a word, pushed the coin and the magnifier back across the dinette table.
She lined up the coin and the eyepiece. “Have you got any better light?” she asked.
He got up, brought over a flashlight, a sheet of paper and a pen. She repositioned the magnifier and coin on top of the paper while Cole angled the beam under the lens. “There,” she said. “That’s it.”
“What is it? What does it say?”
“It’s three digits.” She stopped before saying any more. Her pulse began to throb in her neck, and she tried to slow her breathing.
“Yeah? I’m listening. What three digits?”
There had been an inquest after her brother’s death. She’d read the court documents that described how the frat boys had tied off the end of the old musty sleeping bag so he couldn’t escape, the signs of his struggle as his asthma made his throat constrict, the condition of the body. She’d once teased her brother about that pocket pencil protector with his collection of pens and pencils. He’d used one of them to write on his hand.
“Are you okay?”
She was sitting up, staring into space. His voice brought her back. She blinked. “Sorry.” She ran her hand over her eyes then picked up the pen and started to write. Three numbers. Three-two-two. She was looking at what she had written, but she was seeing the police photo of the pale hand, hearing the husky voice of the New Haven detective asking her parents if the number meant anything to them.
“Riley? You look like you’re going to throw up. What’s wrong?”
She realized she’d started rocking and rubbing her hands on her thighs as though trying to warm herself up. Forcing herself to stop, she laced her fingers together, rested her hands on the table. “It’s about my older brother,” she said. She took a deep breath. “He died his freshman year at college. A fraternity hazing. It was his asthma. He suffocated trapped inside a sleeping bag. Didn’t have his inhaler. Before he died, he managed to write three numbers on his hand.”
In the distance, she heard the whine of her outboard approaching. Finally. Theo returning with her dinghy. She’d been afraid he would stay away all night. But maybe Theo understood more than she was giving him credit for. Maybe he knew that after hearing all these tales about gold coins, shipwrecks, murder, conspiracies, and secret societies, she would be counting the minutes until he returned.
“There’s Theo,” she said. “I need to go. Now.” And, she thought, I need to figure out how or if any of this connects to Michael.
Cole reached across the table and placed his hand on top of hers. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
She glanced at his sea green eyes, but she had to look away. He was much easier to take when he was joking around.
“I need to get back to my boat.”
He squeezed her hand. “No, please. Riley. Don’t go. This is the first break we’ve had in weeks. We’re close, I know it.”
She slid her fingers out of his grip and moved her folded hands to her lap. She stared at the coin, unable to look at Cole. She, too, wanted answers. But hers were different questions.
Through the open galley door came the sputtering sound of the outboard shutting down, then the thudding of scrambling feet.
“Riley, I need your fresh set of eyes. I still can’t see those numbers. Theo never picked up on it. Stay and help me figure out what they mean.”
“Cole!” Theo called.
She glanced across the table and saw worry lines appear between his eyebrows.
He lifted his chin toward the open door and called out, “We’re in the galley!”
Theo appeared in the doorway, his glasses askew and his breath rasping in his throat. His elbows were both raised over his head as he attempted to take off his backpack.
“They’re here,” he said. “I saw them both in town. And another fellow on the powerboat.” As he spoke, Theo untangled his arms from the straps, swung the backpack onto the table, and unzipped the front compartment.
“Slow down, Theo. You talking about the Brewsters? We know — we both saw Spyder.”
The younger man nodded and pulled a small digital camera from the backpack’s pocket. He pushed a button on the camera and the LCD screen lit up. “Check this out. I couldn’t use the flash – obviously – but I thought you’d like to get a look at this guy.” Theo handed the small camera to Cole. “The brothers went to town to buy provisions. I saw them leave, so I went down to check out the boat. Then this other chap comes out. Push that silver button on the back of the camera to scroll through. I got three different shots of him before I took off.”
Cole moved the camera farther away from his body, then tilted the little screen, squinting to see the dark images. “He doesn’t look like he’d be friend or family of the Brewsters, that’s for sure.”
“Not a boatman either, judging from the leather-soled loafers,” Theo said. “Pricey ones, I bet. When the brothers left the boat, they were complaining about him bossing them a
round.”
Cole looked across the table at her. “Check this guy out. Looks like he stepped right out of an ad in GQ.” Cole set the camera down in the middle of the table and then spun it around so that Riley could see the image on the screen.
She glanced at it more out of politeness than interest. She had been listening for a break in the conversation so she could make her excuses. She hadn’t at all expected to recognize the man in the photos.
She didn’t say anything.
“Riley? What is it?”
She said nothing. She couldn’t breathe.
“Cole,” Theo said. “She doesn’t look too good.”
Cole slid off the table bench and stood. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Riley?”
She looked up and blinked at him. “Yeah,” she said, her voice sounded stronger than she felt.
“You know him, don’t you? You recognize this guy.”
When she had first agreed to meet him in Pointe-à-Pitre it was because she needed answers but all she kept finding was more questions.
She reached for the pen, underlined the number she had written on the paper. “Let me tell you about this number 322.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Atlantic south of Bermuda
February 13, 1942
By the time Michaut returned to the hold, they had armed themselves, Woolsey with his pocket knife, Lamoreaux and McKay with broken bottle glass. They waited in the darkness with only the occasional cough or shuffling feet to indicate the state of their nerves. Their plan was to go straight to the bridge, to take out Gohin first, and then hope the others would return to their senses once the man who had bullied them into this mad mutiny was out of the picture.
Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller Page 19
