The Treasure Man

by Pamela Browning

  A shadow passed over Dave’s face. “I heard.”

  “The thing is, Dave, I’m still a certified scuba instructor. I’d like to pick up a class or two. It would help me make ends meet.”

  Seeming thoughtful, Dave circled back behind the counter. “I can help you out,” he said slowly. “I’m teaching a group of beginners, but I’d like some time off. Would you consider taking over? The class is on Thursday evenings, seven to ten, in the pool out back. I teach the basic stuff.”

  “You’ve got a deal,” Ben said, his hopes rising. Maybe reestablishing himself around here wouldn’t be so difficult to after all.

  “See you next Thursday? I’ll introduce you to the students and bug out right away.”

  “Sure.”

  Dave rummaged on a shelf under the counter. “Here’s the scuba manual. I can’t teach you much about diving, but you should be familiar with questions the students will ask.”

  “No problem,” Ben assured him.

  His spirits were high as he drove down Loquat Street, which passed for the main drag in Sanluca. The town’s appellation was a corruption of San Luca, which was the name of the spring-fed river that drained into the Intracoastal Waterway, known in these parts as Spaniard’s Lagoon. Back in the days when Florida belonged to Spain, the lagoon, protected by several barrier islands and accessible from the ocean through a natural inlet, had been a popular safe anchorage for ships that plied the shore.

  A sign at the edge of town welcomed visitors: Sanluca, it proclaimed. Home Of Sea Search, Inc., And Not Much Else. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said, Proudly Undeveloped. True, because on Florida’s east coast, to find any place that hadn’t been overbuilt, straining schools, social services and infrastructure, was rare. Sanluca had avoided that fate because the town was small in area and most of it had been set aside as a nature preserve.

  Besides Dave’s dive shop, Sanluca’s business district encompassed a post office, a gas station, a combined art gallery and gift shop, a small treasure museum and the Sand Bar, which was a local hangout at the city marina. For nostalgia’s sake and in celebration of landing the teaching job, Ben acted on impulse and stopped in at the Sand Bar to order a burger, medium rare, with cheese and onions.

  “Want a beer?” asked Joe Devane, the beefy bushy-haired bartender. He and Ben went back a long way, to the first year Ben worked at Sea Search.

  “No, a glass of water will do,” Ben told him, reacquainting himself with the Sand Bar’s decor, which consisted of fishnet draped around dried starfish hung on the wall. An old ship’s wheel was mounted above the pool table, and outside was a thatched hut where you could belly up to the bar and listen to pickup jazz sessions at night.

  Joe slid a glass across to Ben, leaving a slick, wet trail on the polished wood. Ben drained the drink in almost one gulp. It was easy to get dehydrated in this tropical climate. The sun baked the moisture right out of a person’s skin.

  “You working for Andy McGehee again?” Joe asked.

  Ben shrugged. “I’ve talked to him about it. He’s full up. Got enough divers, he says.” He wasn’t surprised at Joe’s question. At the Sand Bar, local treasure hunters talked casually and often about the business.

  “There’re always one or two divers who quit in the course of a summer. He’ll hire you.”

  “Maybe. In the meantime, I’m going to be teaching a scuba class for Dave Keefe.”

  “That’s great, but don’t give up on Andy. He was in here the other day with some of the guys on his crew. They were talking about last year’s hurricane and how it uncovered new sections of the wrecks offshore.”

  “Couldn’t help but do that,” Ben agreed. A good storm was a treasure hunter’s dream.

  “He’ll need all the divers he can get.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ben said. He understood Andy’s unwillingness to hire him after he’d let him go during what Ben privately thought of as the bad time. Andy was probably unconvinced that Ben had since shaped up, and that was understandable.

  “Are you staying around here somewhere?” Joe asked. There weren’t many options, even in the off-season. The Sanluca Motel was a dilapidated scratcher with ten dimly lit rooms where people rarely wanted to spend more than one night. The nearest real hotel was twelve miles away and charged for one night’s lodging twice what most locals earned in a day. The other alternative was an RV park where the owner, old Ducky Hester of the gnarled teeth and bodacious BO, might let someone stay for a night or two in the trailer of an owner who only occupied it in the winter; Ducky pocketed the money with the owner none the wiser. Ben considered himself lucky to have run into Chloe Timberlake last night, and even luckier that she was allowing him to stay in the apartment at the Frangipani Inn.

  “I’m living at Tayloe and Gwynne’s place,” he said.

  “I heard they closed up the inn and moved away.”

  Ben shrugged. “Tayloe’s niece is looking after things,” he said.

  “That’s good. For you, I mean.”

  Ben nodded and took a long drink of water as Joe moved away to greet another customer.

  His hamburger was done perfectly, and Ben soon became aware that the waitress, who wore a halter top and sported a silver ring in her navel, was sending soulful looks in his direction. When she slapped the check on the table, she sidled a little closer than necessary. “Joe says you’re hoping to sign on with Sea Search,” she said. He made himself focus on a large white pelican, one of a flock that roosted on the pilings around the place.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the plan.”

  “My brother works for Andy McGehee. I could put in a good word for you.”

  The pelican flew away, flapping its wings as it soared awkwardly above the lagoon. “Sure,” he said easily. “If you want.” He waited for her to reel in whatever strings were attached.

  “Okay, I’ll mention it. You’re Ben, right?”

  “Ben Derrick,” he said.

  “I’m Liss,” she said. “Liss Alderman.”

  He vaguely remembered a young guy named Alderman. The kid had hung around the city docks a lot, and in fact, Tommy Alderman had still been in high school back when Ben had worked for Andy McGehee.

  “Nice to meet you,” Ben said. He didn’t mention that he’d met Tommy. That would only encourage her.

  “Same here.” Liss favored him with a blindingly white smile and flounced away, twitching her derriere. Damn, but she was young. Only twenty-two or so, and that was too much of an age difference. He didn’t dare bring women around to the inn anyway, since his landlady might object.

  Not that Chloe was interested in him, though she’d warmed up considerably after he played Bwana of the Jungle and wiped out a couple of palmetto bugs. He smiled, recollecting how she’d flown into his arms when the mouse ran over her foot. She’d reacted like a scared schoolgirl, like his thirteen-year-old daughter, for Pete’s sake.

  That thought sobered him quickly, and a mantle of sadness settled over him. After two years, he should have stopped obsessing about what had happened. About how it was all his fault.

  He tossed money on the table, gave Joe a salute of sorts, and, head down, hurried to his Jeep. Better to stay busy doing something, anything, than to start thinking. Booze used to work, but he’d given it up after drinking had almost scuttled what was left of his life deeper than any of those old shipwrecks out on the reef. But, finally, he was sober again. The trick would be to stay that way. Some trick.

  “’Bye, Ben,” Liss called through one of the open windows.

  He waved halfheartedly in her direction, wondering what days she didn’t work. No need to come back if she was going to put the moves on him.

  He’d managed to avoid Chloe this morning. If his luck held, she’d be out when he got back to the Frangipani Inn. That way, he wouldn’t have to talk to her. Not that she was hard to talk to, really. He even liked her, sort of. He almost remembered her from the year when his life had changed, the year when he’d married Emily.


  Marrying Emily had taught him not to get close to anyone. He’d abandoned that precept when Ashley was alive, but those circumstances had been different. Ashley had been his adored daughter, and it had been easy to give her his heart.

  Never again. He didn’t want to love anyone that much. Saying goodbye was always so painful. And sometimes goodbyes happened whether you expected them or not.

  “BEN!” CHLOE CALLED.

  Ben stuck his head out of the closet where he was installing a new heating element in the annex water heater. He’d hoped he’d be through in here and could make himself scarce before Chloe stopped pushing and dragging things around Tayloe’s old study. He’d heard her at it when he returned home after lunch, and he’d called out an offer to help, which she’d turned down. Well, he had enough to do, and he wished Chloe hadn’t chosen this moment to pay a visit.

  “Back here,” he replied. “In the annex.”

  Chloe appeared in the hall from the kitchen, her hair piled on top of her head and damp tendrils trailing down her neck. She was wearing a sleeveless tie-dyed T-shirt cut off above her waist, and a pair of the shortest shorts he’d ever seen. Last night he hadn’t paid much attention to her, except for that remark about his being hot. Well, she hadn’t meant him—he was pretty sure of that by the way she’d slunk off to her room afterward—but now, well, she was the hot one. He made himself pull his gaze away from the swell of her breasts under that tight-fitting shirt.

  “What’s wrong with the water heater?” she asked.

  “The thermostat. Not too difficult to repair, but it gets hot in the closet.” There was that word again. Hot. It had popped out without his thinking about it. Embarrassed, he wedged himself back into the stifling space.

  “We could open these windows wider,” she said, walking past him and heading for his bedroom. He didn’t like her trespassing on what he now considered his territory; it was only a bedroom, a living area and a small kitchen, but he’d spread his meager possessions throughout, and it would be his home for a while. He hoped.

  “Euwww, there’s a lizard in here.” Chloe made tracks back toward the kitchen.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Ben said curtly. “In fact, he’ll help keep the insect population down.”

  “Well, I guess a lizard’s not so bad. I was used to them in Texas. Didn’t you spray insecticide in this apartment?”

  “Nah, I don’t like the smell of it. Me and my lizard buddy will make out fine. Say, could you see if there’s a rubber gasket lying around anywhere? I’m missing one.”

  “Here it is.” She handed it to him, which meant that she had to step inside the closet, which meant he got a close-up view of most of her.

  She had a freckle in the white of her eye, an adjunct to the liberal dusting of freckles on her upturned nose. This fascinating combination caused him to stare at her a tad longer than made her comfortable, if fidgeting was any indication.

  “The fridge in the apartment works okay?” she asked. She lifted a straggle of pale hair off her face.

  “Sure. I put bottles of water in there earlier. Help yourself.”

  “Got any beer?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” She wore multiple earrings, which jingled as she went to the kitchen, and he heard the sound of her opening and closing the refrigerator door. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “I’ll be through in here in a minute.” He cast a glance out of the closet and saw her sauntering to the glass door. He liked the way she looked silhouetted against the sand dunes outside, all legs and pout. Not a perturbed pout, just one that occurred naturally when she was thinking. What would she be thinking at the moment? He had no idea.

  He edged his way out of the closet and mopped his brow with a rag. She turned toward him. “I’ve arranged for the phone to be hooked up, and the water-softener folks are sending a man out as soon as possible.”

  “Good, since I’ve never owned a cell phone and hope I never will,” he replied. “Plus bottled water can get pricey after a while.”

  “Also, Ben, keep track of your expenses for the water heater and everything else that you do. I’ll see that you’re reimbursed, but whether it’ll be me who does the reimbursing, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Gwynne.”

  “You talk to her much?” He brushed past Chloe into the kitchen. Her hair was the prettiest shade of blond, shimmery like sunbeams. It wasn’t her natural color—he remembered her as a redhead. Not that it mattered. She was one of those women who was born to be blond. In the sun streaming through the window, her skin, damp with perspiration, gleamed.

  She kept her head turned away. “Gwynne doesn’t answer her phone.”

  While he washed his hands at the kitchen sink, Chloe wandered over to a shelf built into the wall. “What’s all this?” she asked with interest.

  “A collection of artifacts that I’ve recovered over the course of my career.” He didn’t add that they were small and could be transported easily when moving around a lot. They were his connection with his chosen line of work, the only remembrance he’d kept of his past life before the bad time.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that statuette,” she said.

  “It’s a clay dog, probably a toy made by descendants of the Mayans in Mexico. That’s a silver bosun’s whistle beside it, and a pewter shoe buckle in the front. All those objects date from the 1700s.”

  “This must be a wine bottle,” she said, studying it.

  “Not too many bottles survived in perfect condition like that one,” he told her.

  “And this?” She gestured at a slim gold ring intricately carved and set with three emeralds.

  “Recovered from a wreck of a merchant ship in the keys. It was so beautiful I’ve never wanted to sell it. See, the emeralds aren’t cut with the precision we’ve grown to expect in modern times. They’re rough, without many facets. That only adds to the charm as far as I’m concerned.” He’d planned to give the ring to Ashley when she was older, and now it made him sad.

  He went abruptly to the refrigerator, twisted off the top of a bottle of water and drank deeply.

  “It’s beautiful,” Chloe said, still appraising the ring. “Artistically crafted.”

  He surmised that since she designed jewelry, the ring was of particular interest to her, but he didn’t want to discuss it anymore.

  “I could use a swim about now,” he said. It was a remark meant to distract, not necessarily to produce results.

  “Race you to the beach.”

  In a matter of seconds, Chloe had wriggled out of her shirt. Her breasts were covered—if you could call it that—by a wisp of a bikini bra in a delicate shell-pink. It was almost the exact shade of her skin, and he did a double take before he figured out that it wasn’t her underwear but a swimsuit.

  Next, she stepped out of her shorts, revealing an even briefer excuse for a bikini bottom.

  “Let’s go!” she said.

  “I—well, I have to put on swim trunks.”

  “Okay, meet you down there.” She set the empty water bottle on the table beside a chair and headed out the sliding glass door, leaving him agog in her wake.

  Nothing shy about Chloe Timberlake, that was certain. He wondered if she was as easygoing about the rest of her life, like making love, for instance.

  Why this occurred to him he couldn’t imagine, though he supposed that her near-naked body might have something to do with it. His memories of her when she was a kid were spotty at best, but he was sure that she hadn’t been this well-endowed, her breasts high and firm, her derriere rounded in the right places.

  He pulled on his trunks in record time, grabbed a towel and followed her. The sky above was laced with slow-moving clouds, and the sun-baked sand burned his bare feet. As he jogged out of the dunes, he spotted Chloe lolling in the shallows close to shore where last night’s wave action had scooped out a tidal pool right below the high-tide line.

  “Hi,” Chloe said, interrupting his rever
ie. “Come on in. I’d forgotten how this is like having our own little swimming pool right down here on the beach.”

  He waded in. The water was too warm, more like the temperature of a bathtub than the ocean, and it was translucent, so that every shell and rock on the bottom was clear.

  “I know what I want,” Chloe said, leaping to her feet and scrambling out of the water. That swimsuit of hers was almost transparent; the outlines of her nipples were visible. He glanced away, his mouth suddenly dry.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. She ran up the beach and disappeared into the dunes.

  I know what I want, she’d said. He tried to stop thinking about what he wanted, which was, let’s be honest here, a tumble with her.

  Once, he wouldn’t have put it in those terms. Each woman he’d met before the bad time was new territory to be explored, and he didn’t only consider their bodies. No, he’d always been vitally interested in what went on in their heads. He’d been fascinated with the dimensions of women’s minds, how they brought different perspectives to life than men, how they never failed to surprise and delight him. There had been many women after Ashley’s mother, from whom he’d been divorced shortly after their daughter was born.

  All the women after Emily had enriched his life immeasurably, but he’d never remarried. He’d flitted here and there like a butterfly, alighting in one place for a while and then moving on to something that promised to be sweeter but often wasn’t. He wouldn’t ever do that again. It was a way of life requiring optimism, a quality that was missing in his makeup these days.

  So why was he feeling positively hopeful as Chloe Timberlake reappeared on the path?

  Chapter Three

  Chloe, he saw as she moved closer, was carrying a couple of deflated beach rafts over her arm.

  “I discovered these in the hall closet,” she said as she sat on the sand at the edge of the pool. “Here, one’s for you.” She tossed it to him.

  Chloe made a comical sight with her cheeks puffed out as she prepared to blow up the raft. This was a woman who was as unselfconscious as they came.

  “I’m looking forward to floating around in the water and getting a suntan,” she said between breaths. She acted as if anything she suggested should be all right with him.