The Treasure Man

by Pamela Browning

  “Did she leave a note?”

  “She propped a sweet little card on her pillow, telling us not to worry.”

  “As if you wouldn’t.”

  “As if,” Naomi agreed with a sigh.

  “At least Tara took her exams,” Chloe pointed out.

  “Why do you find this funny?” Naomi asked with remarkable forbearance. “We’re beside ourselves with worry.”

  “Tara confided before I left Farish that she’d reformed. My guess is that she’s hiding at a friend’s house and they’re pigging out on hot-fudge sundaes. You used to do that when finals were over, remember?”

  “We’re checking with all her friends, and in the old bunkhouses on some of their parents’ ranches, and every other possible place. The police don’t consider her disappearance a criminal matter because Tara left a note, went of her own accord and kids run away all the time. They believe she’ll be back. I’m not so sure, Chloe. Tara and I had a big argument a couple of days ago.”

  Chloe’s heart sank. “I’m sorry to hear that. Care to tell me about it?” She’d hoped that Tara was sufficiently chastened after her latest transgression of hosting an unchaperoned party when her parents weren’t home. But then, Chloe knew about rebellion for rebellion’s sake. She’d been a difficult teenager herself.

  “On Sunday, Tara wanted to wear this really horrible outfit to church. I mean, it was so short that it would have raised the eyebrows of every little old lady in the congregation, including Grandma. Especially Grandma. And no bra, and—”

  “I don’t wear a bra sometimes.” Like maybe never, Chloe was thinking, if the weather didn’t cool off.

  “You’re a grown woman, free to make your own decisions about how you dress. Tara’s still a kid. I told her that over my dead body would she leave the house in that getup, and she said that she hoped I wasn’t planning to assume room temperature any time soon, but she was going, like it or not. And I said she wasn’t, and she said I was a bitch, and—”

  “She called you a bitch?”

  “As well as other names I would rather not repeat. Then she stormed out of the house, wearing a dress no bigger than a sticky note. Ray and the twins and I waited for her to come home and were late for church because she never showed up. Or at least, she didn’t come home until we were gone. I didn’t figure out until late that night that she’d taken a duffel. She packed clothes, Chloe, and her teddy bear. She never goes anywhere without that bear.”

  Chloe sighed. This sounded like an updated version of her own difficult adolescence, though she hadn’t had the comfort of a stuffed animal when, during Christmas vacation in her senior year of high school, she hitchhiked to visit a boyfriend who had recently moved to California.

  “That’s awful, Naomi. You have my heartfelt sympathies,” Chloe told her.

  “We’ve set off alarms in every direction. I’ve alerted Marilyn and her group in case she shows up in Dallas.” Marilyn, their cousin, and her husband, Donald, had five kids. Tara had been close to that branch of the family most of her life.

  “You’ll call when you find her, won’t you?”

  “Sure. Let’s hope it’s soon.”

  “I’m sure it will be. She’s a good kid, Naomi.”

  “I keep expecting her to walk through the front door—” Naomi broke off her sentence, a sob catching in her throat.

  “I’m so sorry, Mimi.” Chloe was the only one allowed to call Naomi by her old childhood nickname.

  “I’ll keep you posted. I wish I were in Florida with you. I worry about you being all alone there.”

  “Well, don’t. Ben Derrick showed up.”

  “Who?”

  “You wouldn’t remember. You were already married to Ray the summer that Ben boarded at the inn and I was here.”

  “He’s nice?”

  “Also helpful.”

  “Age?”

  It took a moment for Chloe to figure this out. “Thirty-seven.”

  She could picture her sister narrowing her eyes on the other end of the phone. “You haven’t taken up with him already, have you?”

  Chloe let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours, Naomi. Surely you jest.”

  “I am not in the mood for joking, Chloe. I’m falling apart. I can’t even pull myself together long enough to throw a load of laundry into the washing machine.”

  “Do you want me to come home, Naomi? Help you out?” She waited with dread for her sister’s answer, knowing that she’d go if Naomi needed her.

  “No, Chloe,” Naomi said. “We’ll get through this. But thanks.”

  Chloe, all but heaving a giant sigh of relief, decided to broach a new topic. “How are Jennifer and Jodie?” she asked. Naomi and Ray’s twin daughters were ten years old and never gave them any trouble. So far, anyway.

  “J and J are upset that Tara’s disappeared, like all of us.”

  “Give them my love.”

  “I will.”

  “And Grandma Nell—is she adjusting to the assisted-living home? Or is she still trying to decide if she likes it?”

  “Chloe,” Naomi said patiently. “Stop assuming responsibility for other people’s well-being. Our grandmother is doing fine. She’s made a new friend, and they watch their favorite TV program together every day. The friend’s family treats them to dinner at the country club. Grandma’s happy. Repeat after me. Grandma’s happy.”

  “‘Grandma’s happy,’” Chloe recited as if by rote.

  “You’ve got it. You’ve got it! Listen, Chloe, I’d better hang up in case Tara tries to call home on this line instead of our cell phones.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Love you,” said Naomi.

  “Love you, too.”

  She heard the sliding glass door to the annex grinding along its track. It was located under her bedroom window, and a glance outside told her that Ben was no longer sitting and staring morosely out to sea. While she dressed, she heard the Jeep’s engine roar to life as Ben left. Briefly, she wondered where he was going, but she didn’t have time to mull it over. She had work to do.

  Downstairs, she threw all the windows open and hauled the wicker rockers outside to the front porch, where last night’s rain had washed everything fresh and clean. A row of red hibiscus bushes bordered the porch, their flowers as big as saucers, and overhead, in a nearby palmetto tree, a mockingbird’s white feathers flashed as it flitted to and fro. Beyond the rolling dunes, the sea was glassy and calm. This day, like every day in summer, would be scorchingly hot. The sun was already blazing down on the sand.

  Unfortunately, the Frangipani Inn wasn’t air-conditioned. Tayloe had been adamant that the winds off the ocean cooled it enough; she’d insisted that if the natural breezes had been good enough for her grandparents, they were good enough for her. Chloe wasn’t so sure. Sea breeze or not, air-conditioning seemed like a really good idea in this hot and steamy climate.

  Once she’d opened the house, she tackled the dirty dishes in the sink, then measured the small study off the library, where she intended to set up her workshop. The space was cluttered with an old treadle sewing machine, a box of dusty jelly jars and various other debris. She’d place a workbench at one end of the long, narrow room A telephone outlet behind Tayloe’s old desk would make it convenient to connect to the Internet. Between the workshop and the kitchen, a large closet, formerly a butler’s pantry, would house her jewelry-making supplies. The closet contained a safe, where she’d keep the precious and semiprecious gems she used in her one-of-a-kind designs.

  All that decided, she was finishing off a slice of peanut butter toast when someone began hammering on the front door.

  Through the sidelight, Chloe spotted a tattered white sailor hat with the brim pulled low. She threw the door open to Zephyr Wills, one of the most senior of Sanluca’s senior citizens. Known as the Turtle Lady, she felt that it was her obligation to safeguard the big loggerhead turtles that nested up and down the coast. />
  “Chloe!” Zephyr cried, her round wizened face crinkling into a broad smile. She was under five feet tall and as frail as a bird. “Gwynne told me you were driving all the way from Texas, gal. What’s the matter—you tired of cowboys?”

  “And how,” Chloe said with feeling.

  “Well, no wonder. All those sweaty horses, all that nasty dust. I knew a cowboy once, but never mind about that right now. Thought you’d never open the door. With Tayloe and Gwynne, I always walked right in. Didn’t think you’d care for that, though.”

  “I, um, wouldn’t have expected it,” Chloe admitted.

  The Turtle Lady wore her customary white long-sleeved shirt, which she donned every day for protection from the hot sun. Chloe could have sworn that Zephyr’s plaid shorts were twenty years old, which was almost as long as Chloe had been vacationing at the Frangipani Inn. Zephyr carried a ruffled parasol; it was her trademark.

  “Come for a walk with me, Chloe. We’ll check out the latest nests.”

  Zephyr had always liked company on her morning nest-hunting expeditions. Tayloe was usually willing to oblige; Gwynne, too.

  “I’d love to,” Chloe told her, nudging Butch back inside with her foot.

  “Get a hat. You don’t want to have a sunstroke. Is your cat coming with us?

  “No, he doesn’t much like the beach.”

  “That’s just as well. No telling what trouble he could get into out there.”

  Chloe found a hat on the rack inside the door and skipped down the steps with a kind of heady anticipation. In her girlhood, she had listened with fascination to Zephyr’s explanation of the habits of loggerhead turtles. During their summer breeding season, female turtles lumbered onto land to lay eggs in a shallow nest in the sand. Then they returned to the ocean, never to see their own offspring, which hatched in a matter of weeks and clambered down the beach to the ocean, subject to predators and often so confused by the lights on land that they headed the wrong way. Zephyr considered it her mission in life to make sure the babies found the sea, and she sent them off with a little blessing and prayer for their safety.

  Due to the nearby coral reefs being constantly ground to bits by wave action, the sand on this beach was famously pink. The ocean at this hour was still a deep cerulean blue, but as the day progressed and the sun climbed higher, its color would change to a cool, inviting turquoise. An onshore breeze, picking up now, fluttered the brim of Chloe’s hat and ruffled her hair. As they walked, Zephyr cast inquisitive glances at her from under the parasol.

  “You used to be a redhead,” Zephyr stated. “What happened?”

  “Uh, well, magenta and bronze and green and a color called Desert Dream, which I’ve settled on, finally. I want to look like a normal person for a change.” She wore her hair in a straight bob slightly longer than chin length, having dispensed with the spiky style she’d tried last year.

  “You always were kind of different,” Zephyr ventured. “Gwynne was predictable, Naomi was sedate, but you were always turning cartwheels down the beach or ripping off all your clothes and jumping in the water.”

  Chloe laughed. “I doubt if I’ll be doing any nude swimming around here now. There are lots more people on the beach these days.”

  “We have the new wilderness preserve to thank for that,” Zephyr told her. “Lost Galleons Park, they call it, after the 1715 Spanish fleet that wrecked on the reefs while transporting gold and silver from the New World to Spain. Strange juxtaposition if you ask me—galleons in the New World and space launches right up the coast trying to find other new worlds. We’re going to have a space-shuttle launch later this summer. You going to be around?”

  “I’m sure I will. I like the name Lost Galleons Park.”

  “Ha! It’s a descriptive name, but I wish they’d named the park after the turtles. Someone at the state capitol must have decided treasure is more important than loggerheads, though I don’t see how.”

  “So much of the economy around here derives from the search for treasure,” Chloe said. “Sanluca owes a lot to those sunken ships.”

  “Oh, it’s ‘treasure this and treasure that,’” Zephyr agreed. “Since I was knee-high to a sandpiper, those old ships have been the sole local industry.”

  “Gwynne told me the Frangipani Inn will become part of the park complex eventually.”

  “The house and its land will be absorbed into the system once Gwynne and her mother die. That’s the way Tayloe wanted it. Can’t say if it’s a good idea of not. Bunch of tourists browsing through that grand old house! The park people intend to use it for a museum or some such.”

  “That’s better than tearing it down and building a condominium,” Chloe said with conviction. She regretted that concrete-and-glass condo buildings had sprung up along much of the Florida coastline. The tall towers blocked the very thing that people had moved here to enjoy—abundant sunshine.

  “Ben, now, he’d agree with us about condos,” Zephyr said.

  Chloe kept planting one foot in front of the other. “You’ve seen him lately, I take it.”

  “I ran into him on the beach last night before the storm. First met him years ago when he first came to Sanluca from a little town in the Glades. I already knew his mama and daddy from a time when I lived out there. I hadn’t seen him in a long while. Hardly had a chance to talk with him before the wind and rain came up. Bad storm, that. Knocked a bunch of mangoes off the tree at my house. Look over there now and you’ll see the latest turtle clutch.”

  Chloe shaded her eyes from the sun when she spied the orange flag signaling a turtle nest. Zephyr gestured at the mesh net, about two feet high, that she’d placed around the nest to keep raccoons, possums and other land predators from disturbing the eggs. “Last night, I was watching the mama turtle and waiting for her to finish when Ben came along with his metal detector,” Zephyr said. “The man startled me, I’ll grant him that. I was paying attention to the eggs dropping into the sand when up walks someone I didn’t recognize at first. Never saw Ben Derrick with a beard before.”

  “It’s not quite a beard, only the beginning of one.”

  “You ask me, he’s going for the whole megillah. You should talk him out of it.”

  “Like he’d pay any attention,” Chloe retorted as they headed back toward the inn. “I hardly know him.” She wished her friend would talk more about Ben, but she was disappointed when instead, Zephyr changed the subject.

  “Say, about that cat of yours. You’ll need to put a bell on him if he’s to run loose. Prevent him from sneaking up on the shore birds,” she said.

  “He’ll have enough to do with keeping the mice at bay in the inn.”

  “Never saw a cat that didn’t stalk birds.”

  “Butch is different.” She decided against telling Zephyr that Butch was toilet trained. Zephyr probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

  They started up the boardwalk, which meant that if Chloe was going to learn anything more about Ben, she’d better get Zephyr talking. “Ben’s been away from Sanluca a long time, I guess,” she prodded.

  “Couple of years. Had to leave after he got fired from Sea Search. Not that I pay much attention to what people say, when all’s said and done. People say too much. That’s why I like animals a lot more.”

  Keeping Zephyr on the topic was hard. “Ben was fired?” Chloe asked. This was electrifying information; she’d had no idea.

  “That’s all I’ll mention, though he’s lucky to be alive after that accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “Not on that motorcycle of his, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “He drives a Jeep now.”

  “It was a diving accident. He surfaced from one of the shipwreck sites too fast. They get the bends, divers do, if they don’t take time to decompress on the way up.”

  “They can die,” Chloe said, remembering how Gwynne had explained it to her one summer, complete with facial grimaces and elaborate descriptions of how a diver’s blood could b
oil and their hearts could burst. Now that she was grown-up, Chloe suspected that Gwynne had embellished her story for effect, but the bends—or DCS, which stood for decompression sickness—was still nothing to fool with.

  “Dumb thing, that,” Zephyr said. “Ben not taking care of himself, I mean. Losing his job. By the way, I’ve got some of those windfall mangoes in my car. Thought you might like a few to eat. I’ll get them for you.”

  “Great,” Chloe said with little enthusiasm as Zephyr left her to go to the parking lot. She wondered why Ben had surfaced too fast from a dive. As an experienced diver, he would have known better.

  Zephyr returned with the mangoes, and Chloe invited her inside for a while.

  “Nope, I’ve got to get back home. Maybe some other time. I’m glad you’re here, Chloe. The inn has been vacant too long.”

  “The whole place needs tidying up,” Chloe confessed, “but I’m too busy right now setting up my workshop. Maybe I’ll get around to cleaning in a few days.” Privately, she doubted she’d have time.

  “You want that big place clean you should hire locals to do it. Too many people are without jobs these days. Citrus harvest is in the winter, and in the summer the packing houses are closed. Teenagers especially need work,” Zephyr said. She gestured down the boardwalk, where a group of girls and boys were horsing around, slapping one another with damp towels and shrieking. “They get up to no good if they don’t have enough to do for three months. Ben may know someone. Maybe even those kids.”

  “Perhaps I’ll ask him,” Chloe said, and left it at that.

  THE FIRST THING Ben did when he left the inn the morning after his arrival was to stop by Keefe’s Dive Shop, where local divers congregated and bought equipment as well as supplies. Dave Keefe, the genial owner who had outfitted Ben with scuba gear years ago when he’d first come to town, greeted him effusively.

  “Ben, I’m glad to see you,” he said, after clapping Ben on the back and shaking his hand. “You’ve been gone too long. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Trying to earn a living. I don’t work for Sea Search anymore.”