by Rachel Lee
The gold royal was tucked into her toiletries case, wrapped in layers of tissue, under a pile of cotton balls. The rest of the coins, much dirtier with tarnish and deposits, were hidden in a drawer, not far from the bed, under an old pair of coveralls.
The act of hiding them had brought home to her the reality of her father’s warnings. She’d been dismissing them as exaggerated, but Dugan’s reaction, telling her he didn’t even want his friend Tam to see the coins, had cut through her denial.
What she was doing was dangerous indeed. If Dugan thought there was sufficient temptation to be worried about Tam, then maybe she was foolish to dismiss her father’s concerns. One woman, two men, and a small boat were hardly safe from the unscrupulous. People sometimes got killed in those waters just because someone wanted their boat, never mind millions of dollars in gold. And while it didn’t happen often, it still happened.
Her mother’s death had probably been accidental. She still believed that because Renata hadn’t found anything, so unless someone wanted to prevent her from finding something, there could have been no reason to kill her.
But this was different. She’d been so focused on finding the mask, to complete her mother’s quest and to convince her father that her mother hadn’t been deluded, that she’d been dismissing the sheer value of the find.
Rising from the bunk, she went to open the drawer where the silver and copper coins were stashed. Some of them were stuck together by the crust that coated them, but some were still individual. On them, even through the tarnish and deposits, she could see some of the patterns underneath. The hint of the royal crest, the suggestions of markings around the edges, probably the name of the king at the time of minting, and the year.
There was a knock on the door, and she hurriedly covered the coins and closed the drawer. “Yes?”
She recognized Dugan’s voice, even though she couldn’t make out what he was saying. “Come in.”
He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “I was wondering if you still had your hearing aids in.”
She nodded. “I was just thinking about taking them out for the night.”
“Give me a few minutes?”
“Sure.” She took the bench, and he perched on the bunk.
“What exactly are your priorities here?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you here to find the mask, or to do a complete excavation?”
The questions surprised her. “Why do you ask?” She thought she’d made that clear earlier today.
“Well, when we talked at the outset of this venture, you said you wanted to find a wreck. That was tough enough. Then you said you wanted to find this mask. You might as well search for a needle in a haystack, and I kind of thought the whole thing was insane.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Come on, you know it is. We’ve found a wreck, but you could spend years salvaging and never run across that mask.”
“I know that. What’s your point, Dugan?”
“Just that I’m wondering what your plans are. Up until this afternoon, I figured you’d found your wreck, we’d go stumbling around for a while trying to find the mask, then you’d pack up and go home. Now you’re talking about doing a major archaeological excavation.”
“What difference does it make? If I found a vessel, I was naturally going to excavate. I don’t see where the problem is.”
He blew air between his lips and looked down at his hands. She waited, telling herself that whatever he was hedging around didn’t matter, but she felt her stomach sinking anyway. She didn’t want to have to continue the venture without Dugan.
The thought opened another door inside her, one that gave her a jolt as she realized how dependent she had become on him. She read his lips easily, often more easily than she read her father’s. There was something about the way he enunciated that made conversing with him easy. With other people, it was not so easy. In fact, it could be overwhelming. And all she had to do was miss a key word to be totally lost.
Dugan had become her buffer. She could talk to him, and he would make it all happen. It was the same with her father. She talked to him, and he made arrangements for her. If she lost either one of them, she was going to be alone in a hearing world that she couldn’t fully understand, amidst people who might not care that she couldn’t hear.
Disappointment started edging on panic. These past weeks Dugan had, all unintentionally, wrapped her in a safe cocoon where her disability was all but insignificant. She had even gotten used to not being able to understand Tam, and he had gotten used to not being understood. He either used gestures, or Dugan told her what she needed to know.
And if she lost Dugan, all of that was going to go away. She was going to have to hire another boat, one that might be captained by a man who wouldn’t care about her disability, who might only get annoyed if she didn’t understand him—or who, worse yet, might use her hearing problem against her.
She would have to deal with divers and crew members and God knew what else, with no one to buffer her against all the misunderstandings. With no one to be her trustworthy ears, the way Dugan had the past months.
She shouldn’t have allowed herself to become so dependent, but she had. And worse yet, she knew she always would, because she had become terrified of the world. She no longer felt confident of herself in dealing with other people, even friends. Most of her friends had drifted away anyway, reluctant to deal with her disability, and those few that hadn’t utterly vanished hardly came around anymore.
Some of that was surely her fault. But not all of it. She had good reason to be scared of the world. Most of the world had become opaque to her.
Dugan looked up. “I have a business to run,” he said slowly. “I don’t see what part I would have in all of this.”
Her heart plummeted. “Are you sure you can’t continue?” She didn’t know how she was going to get along without him, and some childish part of her wanted to tell him so. But she didn’t want him to stay because he felt obligated by her deafness. That would be the only thing that could be worse than being on her own in a hearing world. She’d feel so awful about that, so guilty, that she didn’t think she could live with herself.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Funny, isn’t it, how things change.”
“What’s changed?”
“My involvement in all of this.” He gave her a sad, wry smile. “It wasn’t what I had in mind when I agreed to contract with you for three months.”
“No? What did you have in mind?” Should she tell him how wonderful it was for her to be able to converse with him this way, almost as well as she would have been able to before her accident? No. That would obligate him.
“I don’t know. Three months of sun and sea looking for a needle in a haystack. I didn’t really want to do it.”
“Then why did you?”
“Because I didn’t want you to fall in with someone less scrupulous who might take advantage of you.”
“So what’s changed?”
“That I have a business to run. I can’t let my business manager fill in for me indefinitely.”
She felt her throat tighten. “Do what you have to.”
“That’s usually the way, isn’t it? But it’s not what I want to do.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “What?”
“It’s not what I want to do. Today . . . well, today reminded me just how fun and exciting life can be. But you need a bigger boat.”
“And you need to run your business.”
He nodded.
“But we still need to finish the survey.”
“I can do that.” He sighed and rubbed his chin. “Hell, maybe I can make . . .” His words trailed off, vanishing in the veil of her disability.
“What? I’m sorry. You said . . . ?”
“Ginny. My business manager. Well, she’s really just an office manager. I guess she could run things for a while. If I raise her salary.”
�
�Would that make her happy?”
“Ginny would do it for nothing if I asked her to. I’m the one who has to be comfortable with this. I don’t want to take advantage of her.”
Veronica couldn’t argue with that.
“But I’ll need to spend a little more time on shore. I’m having trouble keeping up with the stuff she can’t handle while we’re away. We’ll need to take two days between outings.”
Veronica was only too willing to do that, if it would keep him from abandoning her. “We can do that,” she said.
“You won’t get too impatient?”
“No. I promise. I . . . like working with you. You understand me.” In more ways than one, she found herself thinking. Dugan had been like a balm to her soul these past weeks. Even though they’d been a little distant, he’d still been there whenever she needed him. And he seemed to understand her frustration and anger with her current situation, enough so that he didn’t become impatient with her on the occasions when she couldn’t understand him. He seemed to know that it had to be worse for her than for him.
“Okay, then. I’d like to continue.” He suddenly flashed a wide smile. “Hell, I want to be here when they start bringing stuff up. It’ll be like reaching three hundred years back into history.”
“There’ve been some really exciting finds,” she told him, wanting to keep his enthusiasm up. “On one wreck they even found a book that was still readable after three centuries. In fact, wrecks are actually better than land sites for making discoveries.”
“How come?”
“Because they’re a perfect capsule of a single point in time. And everything on them was usable and valuable. A lot of what an archaeologist does on land is dig through people’s garbage pits and try to ascertain time periods from how deep the find is. This is different. Instead of finding only discards, things that are broken and unwanted, we find all kinds of things that are still in good condition, things that would never have been thrown away whole. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”
“But still a very limited time period.”
“Well, yes, around here at any rate. The Mediterranean is a different matter. There you can find wrecks going back thousands of years, with all the same advantages. Those ships carried things that were considered valuable in their time, but more than that, they carry the daily implements and tools of life. It’s like getting a huge snapshot of an instant in time that tells you nearly everything about how people lived and worked, and what they valued.”
He was smiling, she saw, and afraid that he was laughing at her, she fell silent.
“Don’t stop,” he said. “You have a lot of passion for your work, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s a good thing.”
She felt herself flushing with pleasure. Impulsively, she turned and opened the drawer containing the coins and took some of them out. She passed a couple to him, and kept one for herself.
“I’ve been looking at these, thinking about the fact that my ancestors could have handled these very coins.” She rubbed the one she held gently between her fingers. “It gives me chills.”
He nodded and held up one of the coins, studying it. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? When I was looking at that cannon down there today, I found myself wondering where it had been. How many ports, how many stormy seas before it wound up buried here. Then I got to thinking about the people who sailed these ships and had to rely on cannons for safe passage against pirates. It must have been one hell of a wild time.”
He laughed. “Well, hell, I’m a wild guy myself. I’ve been getting too stodgy running the business. I’ve forgotten that I always wanted adventure.”
“Did you?”
He pressed the coins back to her. “I sure did.”
“Then how did you come to have a business?”
“Life takes some crazy turns sometimes. It sure wasn’t my plan when I came to Key West.”
“What was?”
“I was going to be a drunken beach bum.”
The words startled a laugh out of her. “I thought you were kidding when you said that.”
“Nope.” He shook his head, a twinkle dancing in his dark eyes. “Keep in mind that I was only twenty-six.”
“Ahh. That explains a lot. But what happened to make you feel that way?”
He looked almost embarrassed. “Well, I had a helluva bad day.”
“Just one?”
“One was enough for a lifetime.”
“What happened?”
She heard his sigh, which was long and heavy. For a minute he looked down, hiding his mouth from her. But then, as if he remembered her hearing problem, he raised his head. “I lost my wife and my job in the space of two hours.”
“That’s awful!”
He shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t the biggest deal in his life anymore, but Veronica somehow doubted it. Measuring it against her own loss, and how she could still barely think about it, she suspected he was far more wounded than he was willing to admit, even to himself. “How did it happen?” She imagined a terrible accident.
“I got fired from my job because of a little scruple. Well, okay, it was a big scruple. Remember that scruples are bad things.”
She wasn’t sure she had followed him correctly, then understanding dawned. “They can get in the way.”
“And how. I vowed never to have any again, but . . . well, you know how that goes. Somehow they just keep cropping up.”
“What was your scruple?”
“I was running a mutual fund for a lot of small investors. You know, silly things like the entire savings of some little old lady in Des Moines. Chicken feed in the world of high finance, but that’s what mutuals are for. Anyway, my boss was really high on one particular electronics stock and kept pressuring me to put a significant amount of my fund into it, talking about its great growth potential. On paper it looked okay, but maybe a little mediocre. I was bothered mainly because the company wasn’t that old. You get just a little cautious when you’re handling the little old lady’s money.”
“I can imagine. I know I would.”
“Yeah.” His mouth twisted. “So I kept hesitating, and the pressure kept getting stronger, and finally it dawned on stupid me that there had to be a reason my boss was so insistent. That’s when I discovered he owned a significant chunk of the company. If I’d bought as many shares as he wanted me to, the price would have gone up and he could have sold at a pretty good profit. Alternatively, he could have bailed himself out of the arrangement by selling all his shares to my fund. Either way it stank, and I flat-out refused.”
“Good for you.”
His smile was wry. “Yeah. But to make matters worse, I accused him of being unethical. He, of course, painted it in a different light, telling me that he was only recommending a stock he believed in. As proof of that, he waved his shares in my face, telling me he wouldn’t have bought the stock if he didn’t think it was a damn good investment.”
Veronica didn’t know what to say to that.
“So I was a little hot. And I was in trouble. And I got fired. You gotta play by the rules. Never mind that the company in question folded three weeks later. When I heard about it, I thought of making a big stink, maybe suing the firm, then I decided it was too damn much trouble and a waste of time. Especially since I made enough of a stink when I got fired that the boss stopped pushing the stock, so none of my little old ladies got burned.”
“Thank goodness for that.” Veronica was feeling a surprising sense of indignation. It had been so long since she’d felt anything on behalf of anyone but herself that the feeling seemed almost alien. Then she welcomed it. It was a sign that her life hadn’t been completely blighted.
“Anyway,” he said slowly, “I guess I may as well finish the sordid tale. I went home, told my wife what had happened, she called me seven kinds of fool—or maybe more. I didn’t keep count. Suffice it to say, there was enough invective flowing to fill an Olympic pool. She got nasty
. I started to get nasty. I mean . . . stupid as it sounds, I felt betrayed. Felt like the money I was making was more important to her than I was.”
Impulsively, Veronica reached out to take his hand and squeeze it. He squeezed back. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Hell, I got off lucky. What if I hadn’t found that out until after we had kids? I wouldn’t have been able to drop out and become a beach bum.”
“Did you? Did you really?”
“Yeah, I did.” He gave a short laugh. “Juvenile angst, that’s what it was. I let her keep everything except my car—a Mercedes, so I wasn’t completely stupid. I packed up, drove down here, sold the car, and proceeded to get drunk for a week.”
Veronica felt something inside her curdle a bit. She tried to withdraw her hand, but he wouldn’t let her.
“That hangover nearly killed me,” he said. “I don’t drink a whole lot anymore. Anyway, I had all these grand ideas of just hanging around, working only when I had to, and wasting my life away on the beach or on a small boat. Just totally blowing it all off. But . . . I kinda got bored.”
She felt herself relaxing again, and a reluctant smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “You did, did you.”
“I sure did. Somehow I fell in with Tam, he was having trouble with his diving business—”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Uh . . .” He hesitated, then gave her an amused look. “Laziness trouble. Tam has a tendency to work in spurts and he likes easy money. Running a business full-time required a little too much. So I started helping out, and finally just bought the business.”
“Which ended your beach-bum days.”
“Aw, it was a lousy idea anyway. I hate to get wet.”
Veronica stared at him, then started laughing helplessly.
“Hey, what’s so funny?”
“You hate to get wet. You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding. I think I’m a reincarnated cat. I’ll do it if I have to, but I absolutely hate getting wet.”
