Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Joe, who knew the details about where you kept your photos? Both the physical ones and the electronic files?”

  Joe’s hearing was better than perfect, so the fact that he didn’t seem to hear her was evidence that he, too, was at the end of his rope.

  Faye’s position on Joe’s file storage habits was changing rapidly. If he’d been as adept at file handling as the average middle schooler, it would have been a lot harder for their adversary to put the photographic genie back in the bottle. Maybe it could have been done by kidnapping Joe, torturing him for his passwords, and then killing him. Faye was deeply grateful that this hadn’t proven necessary.

  And maybe this was an important clue. The person trying to squash Joe’s photographs out of existence clearly knew that it was possible to do so.

  She thought through the major players in the events of the last few days. The captain was no better at managing his electronic life than Joe was.

  Thad didn’t know Joe, and he had no reason to know anything about Joe’s file storage habits. Faye didn’t know much about him, other than that he worked down the street from the captain in a store he’d inherited from his father. He came to Manny’s Marina from time to time to hang out with his buddies, but Faye didn’t ever remember seeing him with a boat of his own. Surely a dive shop owner would have a boat. The odds were good that he kept it at a marina nearer his home in Crawfordville, maybe in Panacea. He apparently admired Amande, not that Faye could see how this was related to any criminal activity.

  Cody didn’t know anything about Joe or his file storage idiosyncrasies, either, as far as Faye knew. All she knew about Cody was that he worked for Manny in the dive shop and he lived in a rented fishing cabin up the same creek where Manny’s boat slips were. He rented space from Manny for the boat repair business that paid his bills, and that business had enabled him to trade up to a boat that was way more posh than the rest of his life. He, too, was one of her daughter’s admirers.

  Greta Haines, as far as Faye was concerned, was a crook. Like the others, she had an enviable boat. She used Manny’s boat ramp to get it into the water. Faye wasn’t sure whether Cyndee Stamp was a crook or whether she had a boat of her own, but she hung out with a crook and had access to a crook’s boat, so she stayed on Faye’s suspect list.

  Samantha Kennedy remained on the periphery of it all. Faye knew of no contact between Samantha and any of the suspects, but Faye didn’t like the way she was hanging around Jeanine. She could potentially be romantically linked to any of the three young men, which put the disturbing thought in Faye’s head that she might be jealous of Amande, but she knew almost nothing about Samantha outside of her professional life. She did know that the woman was far more interested in old books and drawings than she was in up-to-the-minute photos taken by drone.

  Manny sat at the center of all these things, at the marina where the captain and Nate had presumably left shore and gone to disaster, but Faye knew of no reason why Manny would know anything about how Joe stored his files. Nate, however, would. She could just imagine the conversations that had passed between Joe and his friend Nate before that front-page article.

  Nate would have been saying, “What do you mean you can’t send it to me from your phone? I have a deadline.”

  Joe would have been saying, “What’s your hurry? I can print it out and bring it to you next time I’m in town.”

  It would have been stupidly easy for Nate to ask as many questions as it took to nail down the locations of everything that needed destroying.

  “Joe.”

  He was still busy asking Amande whether she was okay, so she tried again.

  “Joe, did you and Nate talk about how you stored your photos? And where?”

  “Sure thing. He was real interested in how Ossie’s pictures got stored, because he was wanting to get a drone like her for his newspaper work. He was asking me about it on the very day she went down. Right when it was happening, actually.”

  Well, there it was. Evidence that Joe’s friend may have been behind this effort to lock down a bunch of aerial photos that showed…something. Did any of these people—or all of them—think that The Cold Spot marked the location of the Philomela? Because Faye was sure that it did not.

  Did someone think that safeguarding the location of the Philomela was worth the risk of shooting Ossie down? Or of breaking into their home?

  Her heart went cold. Was the explanation for the captain’s death as simple and ugly as that? Was he dead so that his killer could keep hiding the location of a sunken treasure?

  The irony of this burned Faye’s heart, because she had been to The Cold Spot and she knew that there was no treasure there. The captain had died for nothing. Nate was suffering for nothing.

  Who did the killing and the maiming? Thad? Cody? Were they working together? Was Nate in on it until they turned on him?

  Maybe Greta and Cyndee? They seemed greedy enough, but they didn’t fit into her theory that the guilty party had unique knowledge of where Joe kept his photos.

  Samantha? Faye knew the woman’s library skills were formidable. If anybody could find that shipwreck’s location without ever dipping a foot in the water, it would be Samantha. That knowledge alone would be enough for a treasure-hunting diver to cut her in on the haul.

  Though she’d been working hard to like Manny better, for Amande’s sake, Faye couldn’t deny that he was uniquely positioned to make sure that the captain and Nate got out on the Gulf unseen. Like all of her other suspects, he was in charge of his own schedule. It would have been so easy for him to arrange to be on the captain’s boat with him when he died. He could have killed him…somehow. Faye wasn’t quite clear on how the captain had died, and she didn’t think the sheriff was yet, either.

  Manny could have dragged the captain’s boat onto the mud flats west of his marina and walked back to the marina through the swamp. So could any of the others.

  Joe could be in danger from the person who hurt Nate, who was probably the same person who shot down Ossie while Nate was busy distracting Joe. Nate and this person could have been partners in crime until the partner decided to cut Nate out. If the criminals were turning on each other now, anything could happen.

  Faye stared at the apparently dangerous photos in her hand. “Where is the shot that Nate printed? It stands to reason that the most important one is the one that the most people saw, but it’s not here. These are all just a shade different from each other, and none of them is the one from the newspaper.”

  “Yes, it is.” Joe took the deck and paged through it quickly, selecting a photo and holding it out to her. “This is the one.”

  She looked at it, puzzled. The boat with the yellow bimini was positioned near the southernmost edge of the shot, but it emphatically hadn’t been visible in the newspaper. She was sure of it. She would have remembered the sunny color.

  There was another reason she was sure that she’d never seen this photo. There was another anomaly in the water. Once she’d finally given it a good hard look, she couldn’t unsee it. A deep-blue shadow was located just south of the yellow-topped boat. Its contours were far more subtle than the clear-edged dark spot that she and the captain had seen on another photo, the one that had revealed the location of the subterranean spring. It was an indistinct shadow, just an oblong area that was very slightly darker than the surrounding water. An amateur like the captain might not have realized what he was seeing, but Faye couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  This thing couldn’t possibly be natural. Its edges were too smooth. The two corners to the north were too close to ninety degrees, which was a sharp contrast to the way the other end of it faded away, as if it had broken off or been buried in sand. This long, dark…something…lay on the seaward side of the little boat with the yellow bimini. It lurked like a submerged whale, dwarfing the small craft.

  This was a photo that Faye could believe tha
t someone might want to hide, for she felt sure that she was looking at a long-lost shipwreck. Perhaps it was the Philomela, found again after a hundred and fifty years underwater. Perhaps it was something newer, a sunken cargo ship that was potentially as valuable but far less romantic. Or perhaps it was something even older, a tall-masted sailing ship that had been protected by sand until the hurricane scoured it away.

  It was time to go. Faye and Joe had business with the sheriff, and they needed to get their daughter out of harm’s way immediately. It was way too dangerous to stay on Joyeuse Island.

  Unfortunately, Faye was having trouble getting up off the floor. Maybe it was because she was emotionally flattened or maybe it was because she’d been pushing herself beyond her physical limits since the hurricane blew up her life. She wasn’t sure. As she put a hand on the floor, hoping she could push herself to her feet, it brushed the box that Amande had dropped.

  The box fell open beneath her hand. Faye leaned over to look at it and saw a bracelet, obviously made of real gold and so heavy that it must have cost many hundreds of dollars. More likely, it had cost thousands.

  The embossed cardboard gift box had come from a jewelry store that would never stoop so low as to carry something cheap. A card lay next to the box, but it said only “Cody,” so it told her exactly nothing about a man who was apparently very serious about her daughter. Or, at the very least, he was a man who was financially serious about her daughter.

  In reconstructing that moment later, Faye was always pretty sure that she’d done nothing wrong, at least not in the moment. She had done nothing but pick up the box, look at the bracelet and the card, then look up at her daughter’s face. These are things that any person might do. They weren’t the actions of a manipulative and controlling mother. Faye knew this to be true.

  To be fair to Amande, though, perhaps Faye paid the price that night for the things she’d already said. She paid, in that awful moment on the floor, for weeks of questions about Manny, for months of single-minded focus on Amande’s college plans, and for her unending schizophrenic need for her daughter to live a full and happy life while simultaneously never leaving her mother’s side.

  With all of that conflict as prologue, perhaps her simple glance up at Amande’s face actually was sufficient cause for the eruption that followed.

  Amande towered over Faye, even when they were both standing. At that moment, from Faye’s perspective on the floor, Amande looked like a righteously indignant giant. She leaned down, snatched the bracelet in its box out of Faye’s hand, and said, “That was a gift to me. I can keep it. I can wear it. I can give it back. And I can take my boat far, far, far out in the Gulf of Mexico and throw it overboard. This bracelet is not your concern.”

  And then she used those long legs to step over Faye and sweep down the spiral staircase. Turn by turn, she moved away from her mother, even though Faye had never said a word to make her go.

  She scrambled to her feet, leaned over the bannister, and called out, “Amande, I love you. I’m sorry. Please don’t go.”

  There was no answer. All she heard was the bang as her daughter slammed her way through the door to the sneak stair that would take her to the basement and out of the house. For all Faye knew, she intended to leave forever. Faye hurried through her own bedroom to the top of the sneak stair and ran headlong down the winding and uneven stair treads without ever considering the risk of a broken ankle or a broken neck.

  Joe’s voice echoed down the stairwell. “Amande? Honey, what’s going on?”

  Amande turned to answer him and Faye felt a glimmer of hope that she was coming back. But her next words stirred up the fear again.

  “I’ve got to go, Dad.”

  “Honey, where are you going? It’s late and the thief could be anywhere on this island. Your mom and I are just about to get on a boat and take you with us to stay with Magda and Sheriff Mike.”

  “Manny’s apartment’s tiny, but there’s a lot of buildings at the marina and he owns them all. I know he’ll find me someplace to sleep. The booths in the bar have nice comfy benches. Maybe I’ll just curl up on one of those after the drunks go home. It’ll be better than being here. You two can stop worrying about me. It makes you unhappy, and it’s making me miserable.”

  Faye was still saying “Don’t go,” when the door to the outside world closed behind the daughter who was walking away from her.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I’m Manny and I’d love to take your message, but the fish are bitin’ and I’ve gotta help my customers catch their fair share. Leave a message on this phone, and I’ll get right back to ya. Unless one of you fine people wants to hold down the fort so’s I can go fishin’. Naw. I didn’t think so. Leave a message…

  Faye cut off Manny’s voicemail message by thumbing her phone off, wishing that she were holding an old-fashioned dial phone so that she could slam down the receiver properly. Of course, an old-fashioned dial phone wouldn’t have been much good to her as she hustled down an island path to the dock where her boat waited. The sound of Amande’s boat motor revved loud, then quickly began to fade as she moved away fast.

  “Amande will be okay.” Joe sounded more hopeful than certain. “Yeah, she’s got a couple minutes’ head start on us, but look. We can see her running lights from here.”

  This was true.

  “Faye, she’s as good in that boat as you are in yours and she’s an adult. We’re gonna have to trust her to take care of herself for a few minutes. There’s no way we can catch up to her before she gets to the marina, but she’s safer there than she is here and it ain’t possible that she could get lost. She says she’s going to sleep there tonight, and I believe her. I honestly think that Manny wants the best for her. He wants it almost as much as we do.”

  All this was probably true, but Faye still wanted to chew iron nails and spit out the heads.

  The sun was going down fast as they reached the dock, so she moved to stand under the security lamp that illuminated it. She wanted one more chance to thumb through Joe’s dangerous pictures while he got the boat untied and the motor started.

  It was hard to focus on the images. Faye kept glancing around at the shadows where the person who stole Joe’s computer might still hide. They needed to get out of there. They needed to catch up with Amande. They needed to protect her, and they needed to protect themselves.

  Somehow, she pushed her fears aside and looked at the photos, really looked at them. It was fitting that, while standing in a spot of light in the gathering darkness, a sunny spot of yellow was the thing that spoke the truth.

  Faye pulled her phone out of her pocket and searched for the web edition of the Micco County newspaper. There, on the front page of a paper just a few days old, was the answer.

  “I know why the captain’s pictures were stolen and I know why your computer’s gone.”

  “How’d this picture tell you that?”

  She held out her phone in one hand and a photo in the other.

  “Look. Somebody at the newspaper cropped the original photo before printing it. Maybe it was Nate who cropped it. Not sure. Coulda been his dad. Like I showed you, the uncropped photo shows the location of a shipwreck that may be the Philomela, south of The Cold Spot. It’s obvious that it was cropped off to protect the location of the wreck, but the photo was cropped harder than necessary if the person’s goal was just to hide the wreck. I think it was done so that the yellow bimini wouldn’t be in the frame, either. What do you want to bet that the person who did the cropping knows why the captain took his boat out, probably hoping to find this very ship, and never came home? Maybe that person was with him.”

  “Ain’t taking that bet. You’re pretty much always right.”

  Joe was a smart man.

  “Before the captain died,” Faye said, “your pictures needed to disappear because they could give away the location of a shipwreck that w
as going to make its finders a whole lot of money. That much is clear. I think the boat was cropped off, too, in case somebody found out that the wreck was being looted. This photo is evidence that could point to whoever was doing the looting.”

  Joe took the photo from her hand and held it closer to his eyes, looking for a killer.

  “After the captain died, pictures of the wreck and the boat really needed to disappear. Maybe he drowned by accident or maybe he was drowned on purpose. Either way, nobody reported his death. This photo ties a specific boat to the shipwreck that the captain was obsessing over. If he died while he was diving on that wreck, then anybody who was diving with him is in danger of a murder charge. What if the sheriff saw this picture and went looking for somebody whose boat has a yellow bimini? We know they’re not real common, so whoever owns this boat would be in for some uncomfortable legal scrutiny.”

  She held out the phone. The yellow blob was just north of the shadow that she believed was the Philomela. “Somebody in that boat might have been diving on the Philomela at the very time you took the picture. Days later, the captain mentioned the Philomela to me and died within a few hours. I think that the killer found that shipwreck by doing research with the captain’s collection.”

  “The captain’s sign-in sheets would answer that question.”

  “Yeah,” Faye said. “The captain figured all of this out. Everybody knows that he talked too much, so the treasure hunter offered to take the captain to look at the wreck and then made sure he drowned.”

  “It wouldn’t have been all that hard,” Joe said. “We know he wasn’t a diver.”

  “No kidding,” Faye said.

  “Look how close the wreck and the yellow boat are to shore. You’ve been saying that The Cold Spot is too shallow for the captain to drown there. Well, the Philomela’s in water that’s deeper than that, so it ain’t too shallow for drowning, but it also ain’t all that deep. If it was, we wouldn’t be able to see her. Do you really think the captain drowned there? Is that water deep enough that Nate could get hurt by coming up too fast?”