Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  “I think the killer took them diving someplace deeper and farther from shore,” Faye said. “The captain wouldn’t know the difference. And maybe Nate was told that they were going somewhere else to see something new and wonderful at the bottom of the Gulf. If they were partners, why would he question it?”

  “Nate’s a reporter,” Joe said. “Maybe he got too close to the truth.”

  Faye waved the picture at Joe. “Somebody really needed this photo to stop existing. And I guess they needed the people who saw the uncropped photo to stop existing.”

  Oh, Joe. Will they be after you now?

  “Because somebody else might try to go out there and take stuff before they can finish stealing it?”

  “Well, yeah,” Faye said. “But also, the State of Florida’s going to want a big cut, at the very least, and settling that dispute would tie up their right to dive on the wreck for a long time. It took Mel Fisher years to get rights to the treasure he found on the Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Why wait that long if you can avoid it? And why take the risk that somebody else will go out there and take the treasure you’ve worked so hard to find?”

  “Who found the wreck?” Joe asked. “Because that’s probably who killed the captain. Do you think it was Nate? Or Thad or Cody?”

  “An academic has been sniffing around his library. Samantha Kennedy is her name. You remember her. We interviewed her. Well, she knows her stuff. If you told me she’d found a shipwreck using library methods, without ever getting her toes damp, I’d believe you.”

  Joe knew they hadn’t hired her, so he knew that Faye had her doubts about Samantha Kennedy.

  Faye was still rattling through suspects. “The captain’s visitors could just have easily been the insurance adjuster and tree surgeon that I told you about, Greta Haines and Cyndee Stamp, coming to coerce him into signing away his right to his own money. They could’ve been softening him up by pretending to be interested in his library. Or maybe they actually were interested. Greta could be using that big boat to loot the Philomela every minute of the day that she’s not cheating old people. But my money’s on either Thad or Cody. And maybe Nate, too, but he couldn’t have been working alone.”

  Faye heard herself say “Cody” and “Thad” and “Nate,” and imagined her daughter being wooed by the man responsible for the captain’s death. She needed to do something. She and Joe needed to get off the island, and they needed to let the sheriff know what was going on.

  “We have to go. Let me try talking to Amande before you crank up the motor too loud for me to hear.”

  Faye dialed Amande’s number, but her daughter was evidently still angry. The call went straight to voicemail, so Faye left a message:

  Somebody dangerous is out there, and I’m not sure any of us are safe. Joe and I are coming to you as fast as we can. I’m calling the sheriff. When you get to the marina, find a crowd. So go in the restaurant, I guess. Yeah. Go sit in the restaurant, and wait for the sheriff there.

  Then she dialed the sheriff and got no answer. She left a message, but what she needed was the reassuring voice of someone promising to take care of everything.

  * * *

  Amande’s running lights were still visible on the horizon. Every now and then, they winked out of sight when her boat slid down into a wave’s trough.

  And every time, they reappeared. Faye could only pray that this kept happening.

  * * *

  Faye knew that Joe hated shouting over the sound of a boat motor, but he was doing it. “The person—people?—diving on the shipwreck. They found it ’cause the captain shared his books and maps with them. Right? Couldn’t they have just shared the treasure, instead of killing him?”

  He shook his head like a man who didn’t have it in him to be a criminal. He couldn’t even imagine it.

  Faye had a bit more of a dastardly streak. She could totally imagine being a criminal now and then. She just didn’t have it in her to follow through on her larcenous ideas.

  Faye used her dastardly streak to explain things to Joe. “Try to imagine the captain staying quiet about a shipwreck. I can’t. He had to be shut up.”

  As Faye thought it through, she doubted that the captain had even recognized the real Philomela in Joe’s photo. The dark blotch at The Cold Spot was far more obvious. It would have been so easy for an evil person to offer to take him out there. Even when he said he didn’t dive, he’d happily suit up if he was with someone who promised to keep him safe. The captain had trusted everybody.

  But the murderer had sabotaged his gear and taken him someplace else, someplace way deeper than The Cold Spot. Or maybe sabotage hadn’t even been necessary. It would probably be easy to take a trusting person with no scuba experience diving, then keep him down there until it was too late. The captain didn’t know his equipment, and he would have believed whatever his fellow shipwreck researcher told him.

  It was a pretty perfect crime to Faye’s way of thinking. No marks on the body. No crime scene evidence. No visible equipment tampering.

  She couldn’t shout all of this over the roaring motor, so she just yelled, “Somehow, somebody killed him. Probably tampered with his equipment.”

  Joe asked, “Do you think that’s what happened to Nate?” and Faye could see how much he was hurting for his friend.

  Faye stopped trying to talk over the wind and the motor. She slashed her hand across her throat, signaling for Joe to cut the motor.

  “Yeah, that may well be what happened to Nate. Getting double-crossed by a friend when you’re deep underwater is one way for an experienced diver to die.”

  “Was he in on it? Was he okay with stealing from the wreck? And…Faye, this is awful…was he okay with killing the captain? That doesn’t seem like the Nate I know.”

  Faye sat quiet with her feet braced against the deck as one wave after another rocked the boat’s hull. She was growing convinced that Nate was complicit in Ossie’s destruction, and she had no reason to think he wasn’t capable of worse, but there wasn’t any driving need to rub Joe’s face in his injured buddy’s possible guilt.

  “Coulda been his friends Thad and Cody. Coulda been Greta or Cyndee or Samantha. Thad has a dive shop and Cody helps Manny run one, but that doesn’t mean they’re the ones diving on that ship. And it doesn’t mean that they’re responsible for Nate’s condition. Let’s hope Nate pulls through. If not, maybe Thad and Cody will be able to clear up those questions.”

  * * *

  Thad has a dive shop and Cody helps Manny run one.

  Faye’s own words echoed in her head. It was dark, and she could hear nothing but the boat’s racing motor, so no sensory input was coming in to drive that sentence from her brain.

  How would you try to kill an accomplished diver?

  Faye wasn’t sure, but it seemed to her that someone who worked in a dive shop would have a pretty good idea. She had been in two dive shops within the last few days. What had she seen in each of them? Racks of gear and a tank-filling station with multiple cylinders of pressurized gas.

  She remembered what the captain’s gear had looked like—mask, tank, flippers, wetsuit—and nothing had been out of the ordinary. Not visibly, at least.

  Not visibly.

  Like a bolt, she realized that the most important thing that a diver took underwater wasn’t visible. It was the invisible gas in the tank that provided a diver with lifesaving oxygen.

  Faye wasn’t a diver, but she’d spent enough time at a marina to have picked up the lingo. Divers didn’t say that they had air in their tanks. They called it “gas,” and one reason for that was the varied gas mixtures that they used. This was why dive shops didn’t just have oxygen tanks onsite. They had oxygen, nitrogen, and helium, so that they could fill divers’ tanks with gas mixes suitable for the diving they planned to do.

  Faye knew that most recreational divers used compressed air,
filtered and dehumidified, but divers who wanted to go deeper or stay down longer needed different mixes. “Enriched air,” which allowed diving at greater depths with reduced decompression times, was composed of nitrogen and oxygen, and the percentage of each component could vary according to the situation. Other mixes included helium at various concentrations to increase depth limits or dive times even more.

  All these mixtures were safe when used as intended, but what if the person doing the mixing wanted to kill you? Too much nitrogen would induce nitrogen narcosis, a state of inebriation known as the “rapture of the deep.” Tank volumes weren’t infinite, so extra nitrogen meant there was less room for oxygen. Adding more helium than safety allowed reduced oxygen in the mix even more.

  Too little oxygen would kill you, but it wouldn’t happen immediately. As you drifted off into a nitrogen narcotic rapture, you would slowly suffocate. And your pressure gauge would show that you had gas the whole time.

  Because you did. You just didn’t have oxygen.

  Faye wasn’t sure whether investigating a diving death included testing the mix of gases in the dead person’s tank. A quick web search on her phone wasn’t much help, but she did see that the equipment testing was often done by outside contractors. It had only been two days since the captain had been found, and that wasn’t a lot of time for the tank to go to the contractor and get tested. This delay could be giving the murderer time to empty the Philomela, kill the witnesses, and prepare to disappear.

  And would the excess helium even be measurable? Faye remembered enough chemistry to know that helium molecules were tiny. If anything was going to leak during Nate’s long day floating in the Gulf, the helium would go first.

  Cody and Thad both had access to the equipment needed to pull off this kind of murder. And they had the necessary knowledge. Which one did it? Or was it both of them?

  Worse, they’d both shown an interest in her daughter that Faye would call harassment, since Amande wasn’t welcoming it and they weren’t giving up. Faye had a queasy feeling that a man who had done murder to amass enough money to disappear wouldn’t hesitate at grabbing a woman to take with him.

  The sheriff hadn’t called back, so she texted him.

  Make sure that your investigators check the gas in those two scuba tanks. Oxygen? Nitrogen? Helium? Right mix? Wrong mix?

  We need to know.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Amande was running her boat at top speed so she didn’t hear her phone ring, but she felt it buzz in her jeans pocket. She slid it out, checked the screen, and saw that it said “Mom.”

  She declined the call, and she also declined to listen to the message. What she had to say to Faye was better said by text, when she wouldn’t have to hear the hurt in her mother’s voice.

  She took some time to think about what to say to Faye. When she was ready, she steered the boat with her elbows long enough to shoot off a string of return texts.

  Then she set her phone to silent, resolved to ignore any vibrations in her pocket that might come from a mother intent on convincing her to pick up the phone.

  * * *

  Faye tried to be patient as she waited for Amande or the sheriff to call her back, but she honestly didn’t have it in her to wait very long. She had one eye on the phone in her hand as Joe headed for the marina, throttle open.

  “Did you call the sheriff about the break-in at our house? Or Lieutenant Baker? Or 911?” Joe hollered over the wind and the motor.

  “Went straight to the sheriff. If I called Baker or a dispatcher, they’d just send out a deputy for a small-time burglary. We need more than that.”

  “He didn’t pick up?”

  “Nope, but I texted and said it was urgent.”

  “The man’s probably taking a bath. It’s that time of the night. Give him a few minutes.”

  “I’m just gonna keep texting. When he gets out of the tub, he’ll have a million texts and they’ll all be from me.”

  Bracing herself against the boat’s motion, Faye used her phone to snap a picture of the print showing the possible shipwreck and the telltale yellow bimini. It took her a few tries to get the flash right and to take a shot that wasn’t too blurry, but she managed. She sent it to the sheriff with a text saying,

  Somebody at the newspaper cropped this print because it shows that the Philomela was wrecked someplace south of here. (I think. Look at the shadow near the boat with the yellow bimini.)

  Maybe Nate did the cropping.

  Or maybe he’s in the hospital because the person who did it wants to shut him up.

  Maybe somebody at the newspaper is in on it.

  But who? Surely not his dad.

  Then she just kept texting, because it seemed important to have all her suspicions in writing, even if they were floating around as cell phone signals, waiting for somebody to read them.

  Also, somebody broke into our house and stole Joe’s computer.

  Still have a handful of prints but they’re all we’ve got left of his drone shots. Will send photos of those too.

  Once she’d communicated the critical information, she indulged in some speculation-by-text while she kept hoping that either he or Amande would text back.

  Doubt Nate had time to steal the computer and then float around in the Gulf until he nearly died. Not all in 1 day.

  Wish I knew Nate’s timeline better. Was he part of a group that had been looting the Philomena before he got hurt? Or was someone else working alone to loot the ship and kill people who knew too much?

  Did somebody try to kill Nate so they didn’t have to split the money? No clue.

  Same questions apply to the captain. I truly believe he was a diving newbie. Did somebody sabotage his gas and let him drown?

  Or maybe Nate’s partner (partners?) killed the captain and Nate wasn’t having it. Maybe they tried to shut him up by sabotaging his tank but he was a better diver than the captain and he managed to survive.

  As the last text left her phone, flying on invisible electromagnetic waves toward the sheriff, wherever he was, Faye felt a series of vibrations. They signaled that a string of texts had traveled on their own electromagnetic waves to her. She prayed that they were from Amande.

  And they were. Unfortunately, they did not say anything resembling, “I got your message and I am going someplace safe to wait for you.” They said,

  im okay

  i just don’t want to talk right now

  dont know when im coming home but it wont be tonight

  if something’s wrong ill text

  otherwise presume im fine

  i do love you both

  * * *

  Faye tried not to think about the daughter who wasn’t speaking to her. She figured that helping the sheriff lock up any criminals running around Micco County would be a concrete way to keep Amande safe.

  Shouting over the boat motor’s whine, she said, “We’ve gotta get these photos to Sheriff Rainey,” she said. “If Ossie was flying low enough, you might have even gotten the yellow-topped boat’s registration number. The sheriff has people who may be able to blow these pictures up enough to see that.”

  This, of course, was probably the reason somebody had blasted Ossie into tiny mechanical bits.

  Joe grabbed her wrist and made her look him in the face. Seeing his lips move didn’t make it easier to understand him over the motor’s racket. He said something starting with “You,” repeated it a few times, then gave up and cut the motor again.

  “You can’t be telling the whole county that you know something about that boat. What if you’re right? What if somebody really is trying to lock down my pictures because they’re hiding something?”

  Joe was right, so there was nothing to do but tell him so. “You make a good point.”

  He wasn’t finished making his point, so he didn’t let go of her wris
t. “You already talked to Manny about that yellow-topped boat, didn’t you? What if he’s in on it?”

  Faye had been suspicious of Manny for quite some time, so she was shocked to realize that she so firmly believed in his innocence that he hadn’t been a serious suspect in any of the scenarios she’d been considering. This could have been a deadly mistake, since Manny, too, had access to his own tank-filling station. He could have used it to kill somebody just as easily as Cody.

  “Manny? Do you really think he’s dangerous?” Faye felt like she had too many clues and they didn’t quite line up. “The facts we know point to the owner of a boat that we’re pretty sure isn’t Manny’s, unless he’s hiding a yellow bimini somewhere. I don’t even think he has a personal boat. If he ever has time to go out for fun—and it doesn’t seem like he does—he probably takes one of the boats he rents to tourists. The yellow bimini doesn’t match Nate’s boat or Greta’s, either. I don’t know what Thad’s boat looks like, or Cody’s. I don’t even know if Cyndee or Samantha have boats, but I’m thinking no. Regardless, I really doubt that any of them gets away from land, stops to change biminis, and then does it again before coming home.”

  “That don’t make a bit of sense.”

  “Exactly. Yes, Manny could still be involved, and Amande’s going to get to him before we do. We’ve just got to hope that he’s not a killer and that she stays safe until we can catch up with her.

  Chapter Forty

  Faye looked up from her phone, scanning the watery horizon. The running lights on Amande’s boat were dim in the distance, but they were there. She knew where her daughter was going. She was going to Manny.

  For reasons Faye didn’t understand, she was relatively okay with that. In her heart, she believed that Manny would protect her daughter.

  But Thad? Cody? Some other nameless person who liked to dive and liked money enough to kill for it? Any of them could be waiting at the marina for a young woman who was naive enough to think she was ready to take on the world.