Now Faye was really concerned. “It was that bad where she was, and you still haven’t seen her? Or heard from her?”
“No, no, no, don’t worry. She’s okay. One of her neighbors was able to chain-saw his way out far enough to get a cell signal. He called to say that her house is in terrible shape but she’s fine, just scared and lonely. He thinks the road to her place will be open tomorrow. She may even have cell service by then. I’m heading out bright and early to lay eyes on her, maybe even bring her here. If she’s willing to leave her house, that is.”
“Well, I’m glad she’s okay, and I’m glad you’re going to able to see her.”
“I was actually more worried about your family, living out there on that island, but I saw Joe at the store. He said you missed the worst of the storm.”
She began, “Thanks, but speaking of my family, Joe took a picture that you really need to—” but he was too excited to wait for her to finish.
“I saw it!” he said. He reached into a pile of papers on his desk and pulled out a newspaper, smacking it down on the table with Joe’s aerial photo facing up. He jabbed a finger at the dark spot off the coast of Joyeuse Island.
“That picture is why I’m here. Well, besides making sure you’re okay,” she said. “I thought you’d be interested in that spot. Actually, I thought you might know what it is.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I have a theory.”
His face had an ask-me-please glow, so she did. “What’s your theory?”
“Somewhere near here, a ship went down during the Civil War.”
Chapter Four
Joe loved to send Ossie into the sky, so nobody had to twist his arm to get him to send the drone up. Just let a little kid say, “Hey, Mr. Joe, I haven’t got to see Ossie fly yet,” and he’d be fetching her from the back seat of his car. He felt a little guilty playing with his toy instead of chain-sawing more dead trees, so whenever he made a kid smile by flying Ossie, he justified himself by taking aerial shots of storm-damaged roofs while she was up there.
Really, though, he couldn’t feel too bad about spending his time with Ossie. People’s spirits rose when she rose. When Ossie flew, they smiled, and Joe saw. To keep people smiling, he took the time put her through her paces, every time. He sent her straight up. He brought her back down in a steep dive. He sent her far out over the water and brought her home. He spun her in the air over their heads and everybody cheered.
When they were happy, Joe was happy.
* * *
Not far away from where Joe’s happy audience watched him send Ossie out over the water, someone was aboard an anchored boat, working at a task that was nowhere near so generous as helping neighbors dig themselves out after a disaster. Ossie was a quiet machine, so there was almost no sound as she approached the boat. The waves drowned out any sound she made, but her shadow slid across the boat as she passed overhead.
A face looked up as if to say “What’s that up there? Is this okay?”
Ossie took a wide turn out over the water, and then passed above the boat again, lower this time. Its passenger was quick-witted enough to lean far out over the gunwale, putting a human body between the drone’s lens and the boat’s registration number. Crouching there, hat brim flipped low to hide a guilty face, the interloper pondered whether the drone posed a real threat and, if so, what to do about it.
Chapter Five
Faye didn’t think she’d ever seen the captain this excited.
“You think Joe’s picture shows a sunken ship, Captain? Confederate or Union?”
“Neither, not really. Blockade runners did their own thing.”
Now Faye was intrigued. Blockade runners had risked their lives during the Civil War, doing extremely dubious things for money. They ran cash crops from the Confederacy past the federal blockade and brought cash and trade goods back in. And guns. When there’s a war on, the value of a gun skyrockets. Blockade runners were smugglers by any definition—criminals, actually—but Margaret Mitchell had draped a cloak of roguish respectability over them in 1936 when she created Gone with the Wind’s notorious blockade runner, Rhett Butler.
Sometimes blockade runners lost their cargo. Sometimes they lost their ships. Sometimes they lost their freedom. And sometimes they lost their lives. But the successful ones got rich, some of them beyond their wildest dreams. There was an air of romance around their memory, and Captain Eubank was a sucker for historical romance.
“I think it’s the Philomela,” he said. “I’ve been hoping for years that somebody would find her, and they have certainly been looking. You wouldn’t believe how many people come in here, asking me where I think she is. Treasure hunters. Historians. Conspiracy theorists.” He smiled. “Even archaeologists like you.”
He slapped his hand on the clipboard holding the stack of the sign-in sheets that kept track of the foot traffic coming through his library. These careful records proved that his work was valuable, and they had paid off several times in the form of grants to support his collection.
The captain shook his head. “The people who come to me looking for the Philomela? They’re all starry-eyed dreamers. They all think she was loaded with gold. But why would she be?”
And there it was, the romantic belief that all sunken ships carried hoards of gold. But then, maybe the Philomela did. Blockade runners were all about buying and selling, and both of those things involved money. The value of waterlogged paper money, especially Confederate money, was sketchy at best, but this wasn’t a problem with gold. So yeah, maybe some of the money onboard the Philomela when she sank was in gold. And maybe you might call that treasure, but this was beside the point for the captain. He didn’t care about the treasure. He cared about the ship.
She hated to disappoint her friend, but it couldn’t be helped. “I don’t think it’s the Philomela. First of all, it’s a very small anomaly for a ship that size—”
Ever hopeful, he said, “But maybe most of it’s still under the sand. Maybe the storm only uncovered a little of it.”
“That’s possible, I guess, but I’ve done a lot of swimming in that very spot. Snorkeling, too. So has everyone in my family. I just can’t believe that none of us has ever seen anything related to a shipwreck. No timbers, no anchor, no cargo, no nails. Nothing. I guess Mother Nature could have buried it that well, but she’s not usually such a perfectionist.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue. He just changed his tactics, like the military man he probably was. “Well, then, what do you think it is?”
“I think it’s a submarine spring, a place where fresh groundwater from down below seeps into the saltwater above. When the flow from a spring like that is strong enough, you can see the surface of the seawater over it mound up and churn. People call that a ‘boil.’”
“I fish enough that I’ve seen lots of boils in creeks, but I didn’t know you could see a spring boil offshore. You think your spring was stopped up and the hurricane opened it again?”
“Could be.”
His lips were pursed and he drummed his fingers on the table. She could see that he wasn’t convinced, but the captain was a logical man. If he couldn’t marshal a strong argument to refute hers, he wasn’t going to waste her time.
“Hmmm.” He drummed a while longer. “You seem pretty excited for somebody who thinks she might have found a wet hole in the ground underneath a really big wet hole in the ground.”
The captain knew her well. Faye pulled her phone out of her pocket, pulled up a photo, and handed the phone over. “Take a look at these.”
On the screen was a photo of two chunks of nondescript beige stone. Faye knew that Captain Eubank would recognize them for what they were, hand-chipped projectile points. But he might not realize how old they were, so she told him.
“I think they’re pre-Clovis. Fourteen, fifteen thousand years old. I found them years a
go, when I was a kid. They were right near the spring, if it is a spring. I wasn’t even looking for anything. I was just snorkeling around but there they were, lying on the sea bottom like they were pointing at…something.”
She remembered the feel of wet stone on her palm as she pulled them out of the water and lifted them up to the hot sun.
“Well, you’re not nuts to think they might be that old,” he said, holding the phone on his palm to study the photo, exactly as she had held the points themselves. “There’s been some papers published about pre-Clovis sites in the Aucilla River. Seems to me like finding something under a river is different from finding something under the Gulf, though.”
“That’s just it. It’s not different at all. The sea level was a lot lower then because the Earth was colder and lots of its water was tied up in the ice caps. If that spot’s a spring, it wouldn’t have been underwater then. It would’ve been on land and it would’ve made a handy watering hole for thirsty animals.”
“Humans are animals,” he said, holding the phone closer to his face and squinting.
Faye reached over and used two fingers to expand the photo so that the tech-phobic captain could get a better look at the points’ meticulously shaped edges.
“You do have a point about springs,” he said, “being as how they’ve found artifacts kinda like these at Wakulla Springs.”
“There are subterranean springs in the Aucilla River, too.” Trying not to let her excitement show, she said, “There really could be a Paleolithic occupation site right off the coast of Joyeuse Island, practically in my back yard. How cool would that be?”
“Pretty cool.” He opened a drawer in the desk behind him and pulled out a stack of photos, big and glossy eight-by-tens. “Do you see anything in these pictures that might help you find your precious occupation site? Or my precious blockade-running ship?”
“We both have our own personal Great White Whales that we’ll do anything to find,” she said, reaching for the stack of photos.
“Don’t I know it? I think everybody’s got one. I get the biggest part of my foot traffic from people looking for their Moby Dick. People come here looking for shipwrecks. Mysterious ancestors. Rare maps that will help them write the book that earns them tenure. Legendary fishing holes. Family histories. Hidden beaches. Even archaeological sites.”
Faye grinned, because this was how they had met.
“And all that foot traffic gets me the grant money that keeps this place afloat. Everybody wins.”
The captain handed her the photos and she spread them out on the table. They had to be some of Joe’s photos, because they looked so much like the one that had appeared in the newspaper. They might even have been taken within a few minutes of that one. Faye’s heart beat quicker. The newspaper photo had been fuzzy, as newspaper photos always are. These originals were sharp and clear. Joe and Ossie did good work.
“Joe gave me these that day I saw him in the store,” he said, picking one up and studying it. “He knows I don’t do computers, so he was kind enough to bring me print copies. The resolution is astonishing. I’d get myself a drone like his, but then I’d have to buy a computer and a cell phone. And I’d have to learn to use them. I’m an old man. I don’t have that kind of time left.”
“You won’t be old until you stop being excited about shipwrecks and library books, Captain. Tell Joe what photos you want, and he’ll take them for you.”
Faye scrutinized the images. She loved aerial photographs as much as Captain Eubank did, so she and her friend had a geeky good time studying Joe’s pictures and comparing them to old maps.
“You sure can see how the storm changed the coastline,” she said. “And look. It almost cut this little sandbar out by Seagreen Island in two.”
She handed him a photo so he could see for himself, then she said, “It didn’t take the pleasure boaters long to get out there. Look at them all.”
“Don’t know why. The fishing’s terrible right now—not that this is keeping me from going out every day and hoping I catch a few. Takes two weeks for things to get better after a big storm, minimum.”
This was a fisherman’s response. Sometimes people boated just because they enjoyed the water and the sunshine, and there had certainly been plenty of both since the storm cleared. Most of the boaters in the photo had responded to that day’s bright sun by raising their bimini tops, awning-like pieces of canvas mounted on metal frames that could be raised to shade the boat’s passengers. While it was possible to boat in Florida and allow oneself to broil in the unshaded sunshine, biminis made everything more fun.
Biminis were usually chosen to match the boat, so they came in shades that were common boat finishes and trim colors. Though only a handful of boats were visible in any of Joe’s photos, the spots of color drew the eye. Blotches of blue, red, black, burgundy, and white, set against the Gulf water, made the boats look like a handful of marbles tossed onto a blue slate tabletop.
Seeing all the boats on the water made Faye hope that nobody else had noticed the dark spot. She did not need sightseers and treasure hunters hanging around so close to her house.
Faye sighed. “I don’t see that dark spot in any of these shots. It’s out of range of every photo but the one in the newspaper. I’ll have to get Joe to make me a copy of my own.”
“Here, take one of these with you,” the captain said, holding out a photo that was only subtly different from the one on the paper’s front page. It covered the area just east of the missing photo, so most of Joyeuse Island was visible.
Faye knew that Joe could make her a print of any one of the photos in the stack whenever she asked, but the captain’s offer was a symbolic gesture. By holding out the photo, he was saying Fellow researchers share what they find. She took it.
“Some of these are almost duplicates,” he said. “I don’t need them all for my library.”
The captain was right. The only real difference between this photo and the one in the paper was the slightly shifted field of view and the slightly changed pattern of boats. One of them, located near the bottom left of the frame, hadn’t been in the newspaper photo. She knew this for sure, because its light-yellow bimini stood out. She would have remembered it.
“You planning to go out there and see what’s waiting under the water?” he said. “I know you are.”
“I absolutely am, once I get a spare minute. If you’re right, the Philomela’s been waiting for a century and a half for somebody to find her. And if I’m right, that Paleolithic occupation site could have been waiting for me for fifteen thousand years. Neither of them is going anywhere.”
She hugged the captain goodbye and headed out, taking a carload of baby wipes and bottled water to people who would be very glad to see them.
Chapter Six
The job at hand could be done in the daytime, when the water was warmer and brighter, but the danger of discovery was high. Nighttime was safer. This job was tailor-made for night diving. For a diver with the right skills, experience, and equipment, doing this work at night didn’t require much more than handheld lights and patience. And time, which was unfortunately in short supply.
Because time was short and the potential rewards were long indeed, the occasional daytime dive like this one was worth the risk. It had been a productive morning and it would be a productive night. In the meantime, though, there were things to be done.
Attention to detail was critical, but this was a fact of diving life. When swimming so far underwater, a single error could kill. Duplication of equipment helped guard against a deadly mistake.
This meant carrying two lights at all times. Even in the daytime, the water at this depth was too dark for safety.
Two specially built contraptions hoisted the contraband thirty feet or more to the surface. And if either of them failed, the redundancy kept that dive from being a complete failure.
Two
knives strapped to an arm and a leg guarded against sharks, but also against the constant risk of entanglement when diving in tight, unfamiliar spaces.
These precautions had paid off. They were still paying off. Night after night, and occasionally in the daytime, a fortune was emerging from the dark water.
There was danger afoot, but it didn’t lurk in the water. It existed in the form of a man who asked too damn many questions. He hadn’t proven receptive to suggestions that he might want to keep his mouth shut.
Finishing the work quickly, before the blabbermouth could endanger the operation, wasn’t possible. The process couldn’t be rushed, not safely, but cutting things short was equivalent to pouring money down the drain, piles and piles of it. Or setting it on fire.
It was time to visit the blabbermouth, and it was time to silence him.
Chapter Seven
Captain Edward Eubank was in an opalescent heaven. It was like no place he had ever seen.
He had been boating on the Gulf of Mexico hundreds of times during his long life. He had swum in the Gulf and fished in the Gulf. He had sat on the deck at the marina, beer in hand, and simply enjoyed looking at a million colors of blue and green. But he had never donned scuba gear and slipped into the warm water, drifting down so far that he saw nothing but blue in all directions.
He’d done a lot of snorkeling, so he moved comfortably with the swim fins on his feet. The regulator in his mouth wasn’t so very different from his snorkel’s plastic mouthpiece. It brought air to his lungs, and they sent it to all the rest of his body. The tank on his back made swimming awkward at first, but he stopped noticing its weight after about thirty seconds of watching sunlight filter through the lovely water.
He knew the fish around him on sight. He had caught so many speckled trout in his life that he recognized them like old friends. Tawny redfish moved among them. So did black drum, with their dark scales and pugilistic faces. When he held out a hand, schools of tiny fish hovered around his fingertips, covering them in tiny kisses and then scattering in a million directions.
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