by Lee, Rachel
He always paid attention to the permits issued by the state of Florida for exploration for ancient wrecks. The contents of those wrecks, after all, were his bread and butter. He had a Florida state employee who kept him advised of all applications and grants, and Emilio made it a habit to check out everything. Most he discarded as pipe dreams.
But this one was different. This one had given him a gut-clenching thrill when he learned of it. Not just because of the mask.
No. Because the new archaeologist was the daughter of the one who had died. And Emilio had always suspected there was some knowledge there that wasn’t shared by the world at large. Now he was sure of it.
And the letter in his hand confirmed it. Dr. Veronica Coleridge had left for Key West. She believed she knew where the mask was.
And Emilio Zaragosa was going to keep a very close eye on her.
He was just deciding which of his informants to put in place when his wife called him for dinner. When the glass door opened as she stuck her head out, he could hear the laughter of his grandchildren.
The sound hardened his resolve. He would let Veronica Coleridge do the hard work, then he would step in and take what he wanted as he always had. Because those children inside his house were never going to be hungry or homeless.
Not while Emilio Zaragosa lived.
Veronica woke up from a nightmare, and momentarily felt frightened and disoriented. She didn’t recognize the shadows in the room where she slept, and her deafness struck her afresh, offering her no cues to her whereabouts.
Adrenaline coursing through her, she searched frantically for a light, and finally found a small lamp on the night table. As soon as she switched it on, she knew where she was. In the cottage in Key West. The cottage she was renting from a friend of Drew Hunnecutt’s. Her father, she recalled, was sleeping in the loft above.
Throwing back the covers, she climbed out of bed. The air was still and warm, and she imagined the air conditioner must have turned off. Making her way barefoot into the kitchenette, she turned on a light there and poured herself a glass of milk. Then, sitting at the bar, she pulled out the papers where she had listed all the things she needed for her exploration.
But she couldn’t concentrate on it, because she was aware of the crushing silence around her. At night there were no sounds to pierce the cocoon of her deafness. There was nothing to orient her in the world, and she might have been adrift in a vacuum.
And tonight it was even worse, because in her dream she had been hearing. She had been on a boat on a sunny sea, listening to the waves lap against the side of the vessel. She’d been standing at the bow, watching waves roll toward her, listening to the ceaseless whisper of the water. Listening to the wind hum in the rigging behind her.
Listening to the wind hum in the rigging.
That detail surprised her. Where had her mind drawn that sound from? She had sailed on small boats, with small sails, and she knew the sound of wind in canvas. But this had sounded bigger, much bigger, and her mind had insisted that she was on a large boat sailing swiftly before a strong wind.
But they had been sailing into a dark cloud. A black cloud. And as she had stood at the bow, rising and falling on the waves with the sound of wind power behind her, she had watched the black wall of cloud grow larger, darker, denser, until it filled the sky. And with its growth had come the terror that had awakened her, every instinct shrieking for flight.
The dream, she told herself, was the result of all the warnings her father had been giving her, and nothing else. His uneasiness about her quest had begun to make her uneasy.
She forced herself to look at her lists and notes. Underwater metal detectors, the best brand made. A magnetometer, absolutely essential for finding the areas to dive and sweep. Bouys to mark those areas. A global positioning system so she could record and return to interesting positions. The list was, to her way of thinking, surprisingly short. But, upon reflection, she realized that the exploration part was relatively uncomplicated. Use the magnetometer to detect iron deposits, dive to check them out and sweep the immediate area with metal detectors. Simple enough.
The hard part was locating the wreck. Despite what Dugan Gallagher might think, she wasn’t deluded about the difficulty of the search, or about the vast areas that might need to be covered.
Information about where old wrecks had gone down was unreliable at best. Survivors rarely knew the exact position of the vessel at the time it broke I up or sank. At best they knew the last measured position— and that might have been taken hours before the disaster occurred, and might well have been inaccurate.
In this case, there had been only two survivors, one of them an infant. The conquistador who had managed to save himself and his child had washed aground on some unnamed island, then had made a boat to carry himself and the child island to island until he made the mainland of Florida, where he then spent more than a year hiking his way up the coast until he reached St. Augustine. He thought the ship had gone down in the Straits of Florida. But a few things in his description had led Veronica’s mother and now Veronica herself to believe the boat had been seriously off course at the time the hurricane had hit.
In fact, Veronica was so sure of it that she was prepared to sink a lot of money into her own theory that the boat had gone down somewhere southeast of the Marquesas.
She had left the conquistador’s original account, faded ink on narchment, safely locked up in her bank, but she had a translation copy with her, something she had typed up without identifying the source. The document itself was a family heirloom, a treasure she would never risk losing.
Juan Bernal Vasquez y Maria had been an old man at the time he wrote the account that had passed down to Veronica, and she allowed for the fact that he might have misremembered some of the details of his arduous journey with a two-year-old child through the wilds of Florida at a time when mosquitoes and Indians were both deadly threats. He might also have exaggerated greatly. Memory and time had a way of enlarging things.
But what she didn’t doubt was his description of the island where he washed ashore with the child, nor of the length of the journey he took from that island to the next. And while he might indeed have washed up on any of the Keys that ran along the Straits of Florida, she was willing to give Juan Vasquez credit for being able to tell the direction of his travel by the stars.
If the ship had gone down where the legajos her mother had found in the archives in Spain had suggested, then Juan Vasquez couldn’t have traveled as far east as he claimed without being lost in the Atlantic. Combining his description of his journey with a map, it hadn’t taken all that long for Veronica to conclude that the ship had gone down somewhere between the Marquesas and Key West. Nor was it completely unlikely that the ship had gone so far astray from the Straits, not with the cloud cover that had existed for two days before they were caught in the edge of the hurricane that had caused the ship to founder.
The fact that the ship had foundered, rather than broken up on reefs, added to her conviction that the vessel hadn’t been in the Straits when it went down.
The Alcantara had been within sight of land when it foundered, but only Vasquez and his infant daughter had made it to shore. He had strapped the child to an empty barrel, then clung to it, keeping the baby up right, while the waves carried them to land. There he had watched the wind and rain batter the ship and sweep its remains away “to the southeast,” he said.
Veronica assumed he came up with that direction after the clouds had cleared and he could observe the heavens again.
So, unless he had misremembered, and unless her calculations were completely off base, she thought she had a pretty good idea where the wreckage would be found.
There wouldn’t be much of it, she was sure. The area she was looking at wasn’t isolated. If there was enough of that ship left to see from the surface, someone would have already found the remains.
Instead she was going to be seeking broken remains, probably deeply buried in
silt and sand. And gold. The Alcantara had been heavily laden with plundered gold, an estimated ten million dollars of it, melted into bars.
But she didn’t care about that. It was merely a signpost to the one treasure she really wanted: the mask of the Storm Mother.
Look for the rest of Rachel Lee’s
upcoming novel,
WHEN I WAKE,
available everywhere
in November 2000.
RACHEL LEE, winner of numerous awards for her best-selling romance fiction, is the author of Silhouette’s #1 miniseries, Conard County. She also writes light-hearted contemporary romances as Sue Civil-Brown. But suspense fiction that zings like a high-tension wire with excitement and passion has become her signature style—and has made her previous Warner book, Before I Sleep, one of the best romantic reads of the year! As Romantic Times says, Rachel Lee is “an author to treasure”.
THE DEVIL, THE DEEP BLUE SEA… AND DESIRE
Psychologist Callie Carlson lives in the lush Florida Keys. Some call it paradise. Callie, a young woman who fears the sea, calls it hell. Now her brother has found a mysterious boat adrift off the coast—and has been charged with murdering its crew. He faces the death penalty unless a desperate Callie can find a way to prove his innocence.
Former Navy SEAL Chase Mattingly lost his nerve after a near-fatal diving accident. Investigating for Callie is his chance to prove he still has guts. And a heart. But soon someone is trying to stop them both. And as a killer stalks by night, only an act of love and courage can save Callie and Chase: a dive to perilous depths where truth—or death—is waiting…
After I Dream
With over four million books in print, Rachel Lee has captured readers, imaginations with edge’of’the’seat thrdls. Here she holds us spellbound once agayi with a tale of deep emotions, wild hungers, and chilling suspense…
