by Lee, Rachel
“Well, your brother and his friend made the front page when they were arrested, and the papers aren’t letting the story quiet down. Which means the State Attorney’s office isn’t going to turn loose its two best suspects unless they get something better to replace them with. For now, the status is quo, Callie. The sword is still hanging there. Or whatever other lousy metaphor you prefer.”
“God.” She closed her eyes, struggling against an overwhelming sense of despair.
“It could be worse. They could have found something on the boat or in his clothes. What I’m saying is, this isn’t going to go away quickly.”
After she hung up the phone, Callie went out to get the newspapers. Her hands were shaking, and she felt as if she were taking a violent roller-coaster ride. She didn’t want to read the stories in the paper, didn’t want to see how her brother was being cast in the press, but it was the only way she could find out enough information to start her own investigation.
And she was damn well going to start one. She couldn’t wait for the state to get around to looking for someone else. It sounded as if their minds were pretty well made up.
Jeff was outside, standing on a ladder, scraping the last of the flaking paint from the gables.
“Mornin’, sis. I’ll start painting this afternoon,” he called down to her when he heard her come outside. Callie stepped to the edge of the porch and looked up at him. He was high on a ladder, wearing nothing but stained denim shorts and deck shoes.
“You don’t have to, Jeff.”
“I want to. It’ll keep me busy.”
She hesitated, then asked, “Did you ever call Mr. Donleavy?”
“Yeah, when I got up this morning. I guess he doesn’t want a murderer working for him.”
“Oh, Jeff…” Her heart ached for her little brother.
He shrugged a shoulder. “Can’t blame him. Say, are you making breakfast this morning?”
“Thinking about it. Are you hungry?”
“I could eat a horse.”
“Okay, I’ll make something.”
Back in the kitchen, Callie dropped the papers on the table and resisted the urge to smash something, or at the very least to call Donleavy and give him a piece of her mind. Right now she didn’t know who she was angrier with. The State Attorney or Mr. Donleavy. She could have cheerfully throttled either one.
Instead she started making skillet potatoes. Busy. She had to keep busy. And she wasn’t ready yet to look at the papers.
Fifteen minutes later, she thought she heard Jeff talking to someone. Her heart slammed, wondering if it were the police come to take him back to jail. At this point she wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d found something else to charge him with.
Dropping the potato she was dicing, she wiped her hands on a paper towel and hurried out onto the veranda to see Chase standing near Jeff’s ladder, talking to him. When he saw her, he smiled faintly. “Morning,” he said.
“Good morning.”
He was wearing a white T-shirt and cuttoff jeans, and in the bright sunlight he looked strong and powerful, like a bulwark against life, not at all like the disturbed man she had met last night. She had the worst urge to dump all her problems on him and ask him to deal with them.
And for an instant, just one small instant, she had the self-pitying wish that just once in her life she wouldn’t have to face everything alone.
“I thought I’d come over and help with the paint job,” Chase said. “If you don’t mind.”
“Callie’s making breakfast,” Jeff said from his high perch. “There’ll be enough for Chase, too, won’t there, Cal-lie?”
“Sure. There’ll be plenty. It’ll be ready in about an hour.”
Back in the kitchen she threw a couple more potatoes in the microwave to cook while she finished cubing the ones she had cooked earlier. Fifteen minutes later, the potatoes were browning in the frying pan, and she was dicing scallions, green peppers, and ham to throw in with them.
The cooking gave her an excuse to avoid looking at the stack of newspapers on the table. Much as she needed to glean information so she would know where to start her own investigation, she was mortally afraid of what she was going to read there and how it was going to make her feel. No matter what they said about Jeff and Eric it was going to make her angry, and there was no way the paper could even begin to reflect the truth about the young men who were accused.
All she could do was promise herself that she would skim over the parts about the boys and concentrate on the information about the men who were missing.
Jeff and Chase came in when she called them and took turns in the bathroom washing up.
“Oh, man, skillet potatoes,” Jeff said approvingly as he came to the table.
“Not without a shirt, you don’t,” Callie told him sternly.
He made a face at her. “I don’t see why I can’t eat without a shirt. I can work without one.”
“It’s different. When I’m eating I don’t want to see your hairy underarms and chest. Now get a T-shirt.”
Jeff looked at Chase as if for support, but Chase shook his head. “I’m with Callie,” he said.
Grumbling, Jeff went back to his bedroom.
“You’d think,” Callie remarked, “that this rule hasn’t been in effect all along. I never let him eat shirtless.”
Chase chuckled. “I think he was trying to pull a fast one.”
“You mean because you’re here he thought I wouldn’t scold?” She shook her head. “He knows better now.”
Chase saw the pile of newspapers that she’d moved to one end of the counter. “You’re not going to read those.”
“Yes, I am.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“How else am I going to find out who was killed so I can start trying to find out what happened?”
“Well, we could find out who the boat was registered to. Or you could ask me to read that crap so you don’t have to see it.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Sure.”
She felt a smile, a genuine smile, stretching her mouth for what felt like the first time in ages. His offer touched her and made her feel a little less alone. “Thank you.”
He shrugged. “No problem. It seems like the least I can do.”
The least he could do? This man didn’t understand the word least, Callie thought. Helping paint her house, and reading through those newspapers was a lot more than “least.”
On a sudden impulse she asked Jeff to say the blessing when he rejoined them. To her surprise, Chase immediately reached out and took her hand and Jeff’s, bowing his head for the prayer. It had been a long time since she had clasped hands with others while saying grace. Not since her mother had died. For the first time in days, a sense of peace stole over her.
“Amen,” she heard Jeff and Chase say, and echoed it herself. When she lifted her bowed head, she felt as if the meal had indeed been blessed.
Both men piled their plates high with the skillet potatoes, and filled their glasses full of orange juice. Callie took a smaller portion, not really feeling hungry.
At first the conversation revolved around the food—Chase asked for her recipe—and the painting, but inevitably, as the meal drew to a close, it began to swing back around to the charges against Jeff.
“It’s weird,” Jeff said, “to have people believing I killed those guys. I don’t even know their names or what they look like.”
Callie looked at him. “Do you want to know?”
“Sort of. I mean, this is affecting the rest of my life.”
“It’s in the paper,” Chase said with a nod toward the stack on the counter. “I’ve suggested to Callie that I read the articles, though. Neither of you really needs to know what the press is saying about you.”
The corners of Jeff’s mouth drew down, and he pushed his plate aside. “You’re probably right. I probably sound like some kind of monster.”
Call
ie reached out and covered his hand with hers. “You’re not a monster. We know that.”
“But no one else does. And Eric’s still in jail. His parents won’t help him make bail.”
Callie felt her heart squeeze. “Maybe they can’t, Jeff.”
“Maybe not.”
“We were lucky that this house is all paid for. Otherwise, I couldn’t have bailed you out either.”
“I know.” He looked down at the table. “Do you think I can visit him?”
Callie looked at Chase and he shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let me ask Shirley. There might be a reason why you shouldn’t.”
“What reason?” he asked bitterly. “Are we going to make up a new story? Why would we? They don’t even believe the truth.”
“Easy, son,” Chase said quietly. “Getting angry and bitter isn’t going to help anything. You need to keep your head clear.”
Jeff jumped up from the table. “I need to do something.” He grabbed dishes and carried them to the sink.
Callie started to reach out to him, but stopped, acutely aware that there wasn’t anything at all she could do to make Jeff feel any better. She hadn’t felt this helpless since she had found their mother dying in a lake of blood on the kitchen floor.
The same kitchen floor that Jeff was pacing across now. For an instant, time shifted, and she saw again the scarlet pool spreading around her mother.
Chase spoke, jerking Callie back to the present, “Why don’t we talk about what happened out there that day? In detail. We’ll write down every last thing you can remember about it, and we’ll write down everything Callie and I can remember about talking to you on the radio. Maybe there’ll be something there that’ll be useful.”
Jeff shrugged, saying nothing, and finished clearing the table.
Chase looked at Callie. “Do you have a pad or a tape recorder we can use?”
Grateful for something to do, Callie went to the desk in the living room and returned with a yellow legal pad and a pen.
“Okay,” Chase said. “Callie, will you take notes? Or do you want me to?”
“I’ll do it.”
“All right. When exactly did you first see the boat, Jeff?”
The boy leaned back against the counter, folding his arms across his chest. “I don’t know. I guess it was sometime around two. We’d been fishing but hadn’t had much luck, and it was right around then we realized that we’d drifted out a whole lot farther than we’d planned to go. I was checking our position when Eric saw the boat.”
“Do you remember what your position was?”
“Sure.” He closed his eyes a moment and recited coordinates. Callie scribbled them down quickly.
“How sure of that are you?” Chase asked, his heart beginning to pound. In his mind he carried a mental map of where he did his salvage diving, and what he was seeing in his mind’s eye right now didn’t seem possible.
“Pretty positive,” Jeff said. “I was using the global positioning system. Why?”
Chase took the pad from Callie and read the coordinates again. “Do you have a navigational chart?”
“Sure, on the boat.”
“Get it, would you?”
Jeff hurried out and Callie looked at Chase. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Maybe nothing. Probably nothing. Let me check a chart before I say anything, okay?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Okay.”
Chase waited impatiently, telling himself that he’d misremembered the coordinates, but he was sure he hadn’t. All looking at the navigational chart would do was confirm what he already suspected, and his suspicions were tightening his stomach until it felt like a ball of lead.
Jeff returned a few minutes later with a plastic-covered chart. He spread it on the table and they all helped hold down the corners.
“Here,” he said, pointing to a red X. “I marked the spot when I got the reading.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t take this chart during the search,” Callie said, eyeing it uneasily.
Jeff shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t think it was significant. It’s just a chart. Thousands of boats have the same one.”
Chase hardly heard them. He was bent over the map, looking for coordinates where The Happy Maggie—the boat he had almost died trying to salvage—had gone down, his fingers tracing the contour lines.
It wasn’t hard to find the place. The Florida Keys sat on the southern edge of the Florida Escarpment, a piece of the continental plate that extended westward from the Florida coast for around a hundred and fifty miles. The escarpment ended abruptly just a few miles south of the Keys, dropping away rapidly into the deep waters of the Atlantic. In the area where Jeff had found the boat, the average depth was about ten meters, too shallow for the dive he had been on. But little more than a mile farther out, and slightly to the east, was exactly the position where he had dived at fifty-seven meters. His heart began to pound. It was too damn close for coincidence.
“You say you found the boat around two o’clock?”
“Yeah. Somewhere around then.”
Chase sat back in his chair and thought about it. Trip time out, dive time, recovery time. It was possible. It was too possible, and he didn’t believe in coincidences this big. No way.
“Chase?” Callie said. “What is it?”
He looked at her, then back at the chart. He stabbed his index finger at the spot where he had gone on his last dive. “This is where I had my accident.” The corner of Jeff’s red X touched his index finger.
Callie leaned over, closer to the map. “That’s amazing. Quite a coincidence.”
“It’s no coincidence,” Chase said. “It can’t be.”
She looked at him, her eyes wary and doubtful. “Why couldn’t it be? Or better yet, what else could it be?”
His hand tightened into a fist then relaxed. “I find it very hard to believe that I nearly died here”—he stabbed the map with his finger—“and then two months later a scuttled boat is found here, and there’s evidence that at least two men were killed.”
“Things happen. It’s just a coincidence.”
“No,” Jeff said suddenly. “It’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. Eric and I were drifting out there. We were getting carried slowly landward, and from time to time I corrected and took us farther out. Nobody was correcting the boat we found. She would have drifted just that way that day.”
“No, it’s just a coincidence,” Callie said flatly. “It’s a leap to link these two things. In the first place, Chase had an accident. There’s no reason to think that could be tied in any way to the murder of these charter-boat operators. No reason at all!”
“No reason,” said Chase heavily, “except ten million dollars in uncut diamonds.”
CHAPTER 8
“Ten—” Callie broke off in amazement, astounded beyond words. “Wait a minute! Where did the diamonds come from?”
“From The Happy Maggie.”
Jeff sat down again and looked at Chase with all the eagerness of someone who expected to hear a great story. “That’s what you were diving for, wasn’t it?”
Chase nodded. “The boat’s owner claimed he was transporting ten million dollars in uncut diamonds when he hit an underwater obstacle and the boat sank. He was covered by insurance, but naturally the insurance company didn’t want to pay if they could find a way out of it.”
“I imagine not,” said Callie, still amazed by the thought of such sums.
“So I was hired along with another diver to go down there to find out what happened to the boat, and see if we could find the diamonds. They were supposed to be in a safe in the owner’s cabin. The insurance company was hoping either to recover the diamonds or to find out they weren’t there. They suspected a scam.”
“I can sure see why,” Callie said. She glanced at Jeff and saw that his eyes were sparkling. At least this story was getting his mind off his own problems.
“Either way,” Chase continued, “the company
would be happy” because either way they wouldn’t have to pay for the diamonds. So Bill Evers, a guy I often dive with, was supposed to get the diamonds, and I was supposed to check out the boat and find out why it sank.”
“Did you?”
Chase shook his head. “I don’t remember anything about it. I started hallucinating, and they had to yank me up. Bill reported that there appeared to have been a bilge fire on board—which directly contradicted the owner’s version of events—and there were no diamonds. I guess the company didn’t pay the owner a dime.”
“My God, the things people dream up,” Callie said. “Did the owner really think he could get away with both the diamonds and the insurance money?”
“I don’t know what he thought. But that’s not the point here. What if someone else thinks there are still ten million dollars’ worth of uncut diamonds out there on that boat?”
Jeff slapped his hand down on the table, startling Callie. “"Man oh man!”
“Whoa,” Callie said. “Wait a minute. There could also be a lot of other reasons those men were killed.”
“Sure there could,” Chase agreed as if it didn’t matter. But it did matter, to him. Because if someone had been willing to kill two men for those diamonds, they sure as hell wouldn’t have hesitated to try to kill him somehow.
Except, he reminded himself, reining in his own sense of excitement with difficulty, Bill Evers had said there were no diamonds down there. And Bill hadn’t run into any trouble.
No, it didn’t fit. Turning it around in his mind, he could see a dozen holes in the theory.
But somehow that didn’t shake his conviction that the two incidents were linked.
If he could find out what had happened to those two men who were killed, he might possibly find out what had happened to him. It was a slim possibility, but it was one he wasn’t willing to pass up.
He looked at Callie and Jeff. “We’re going to find out what the hell happened on that boat that day.”
“Well, I’m all in agreement with that,” Callie said, “but I’m not at all sure it’s going to be tied in to what happened to you.”
“If it is, it is,” Chase said. “But it might well be tied in to the diamonds. At least then we’d have a motive for what happened out there.”
