by E. A. House
“What the hell are you thinking! Get back here!” Chris yelled. “What the hell?” he added to Carrie when nobody turned back. Carrie raised an eyebrow as much as possible while also struggling into the lifejacket Chris had brought her.
“You’re swearing,” she said mildly.
“We just got dumped in the middle of the ocean!” Chris pointed out, on the off-chance Carrie hadn’t quite noticed it.
“Gee, I hadn’t noticed,” Carrie grumbled, spitting out seawater. “Even though Brad threw me overboard.”
“He what?”
“Chris, chill,” Carrie said. “Save your energy. We have no idea how long we’re going to be stuck here.”
“That—that—oh I’m going to kill him!” Chris snarled, punching the water. And to think they’d brought Professor Griffin into this because they were afraid he might be in danger.
“Chris!” Carrie said. “Stop thrashing around!”
Chris froze completely, remembering with sudden horrifying detail all the times they’d been told to avoid wearing shiny things or thrashing around in shallow water or looking too much like a seal for fear of sharks. Really, he knew that shark attacks were less of a danger than car crashes, but then, car crashes seemed to be a problem for people in his family. And now that the first heat of anger had passed the “should-have-dones” were occurring to Chris.
“I probably shouldn’t have jumped over the side after you,” Chris admitted.
“At least you remembered to grab two lifejackets before you jumped overboard,” Carrie allowed. “And to be honest I’m not sure you would have been safe on board the Triangle anyway. At least the ocean is up-front about how dangerous it is.”
“But what I don’t understand,” Maddison said to her dad, “is why Professor Griffin would want to blame you for everything.”
She was pacing back and forth in Mr. Lyndon’s study, her dad doing the same thing but in a different direction. She’d tried to put her dad’s admission behind them, as much as possible, but she kept going back and asking questions. Talking about Elsie Kingsolver had devastated Maddison’s dad, but for the first time ever he was answering all of Maddison’s questions and she was desperately seizing the chance to brainstorm with him before he decided to clam up again.
And he didn’t seem to mind her too much. Maddison had left the dinner table and gone off to find a quiet place to think and her dad had followed a minute later and started poring over a handful of newspaper clippings from a file folder, but then Maddison had demanded he tell her if her summary of the situation was correct and he’d abandoned his reading material to help her.
“I can understand you looking like the most likely subject to everyone,” Maddison said. “You were the last person to see Ryan alive and had also argued with him recently and that would put you at the top of any suspect list.”
“Gee thanks, Mads.”
“But if Professor Griffin was the only person who said he saw you with Ryan, then that sounds as though he was trying to make it look like you were responsible,” Maddison continued. “Which might make sense if he were trying to throw suspicion away from someone, but then who would he be trying to protect?” Maddison turned to her dad. “Was there anybody Professor Griffin cared about more than the rest?”
“Well,” her dad said, stopping short. “Elsie? But Elsie was the only person who tried to contact me after the fact, so that could point either way, really.”
“And if she was responsible for Ryan’s disappearance—and if we assume that the disappearance had something to do with the San Telmo—then why would she warn you right before she died?”
“We’re assuming Ryan’s disappearance was linked to the San Telmo?” Maddison’s dad asked.
“It’s a decent intuitive leap,” Mr. Lyndon offered. He had wandered in and settled in his desk chair with a glass of cider and a pleased expression, as if he were greatly enjoying Maddison and her father working in tandem and quite pleased with what he had wrought. And to be fair, he was mostly responsible. “If only we had made such a leap nineteen years ago . . . ” Mr. Lyndon added.
“I get it, I get it!” Maddison’s dad waved his arms in the air. “In that case, though . . . after Ryan, the person who got most into searching for the San Telmo was Willis.”
“Really?”
“He saw it as a chance to prove himself, I think. I never really understood what he thought about the ship. He did always want to talk about what we’d do when we found it, instead of if we found it. He worked twice as hard as the rest of us digging for clues and looking for the ship in the historical record.”
“So, he would care about being the one to find it?” Maddison suggested.
“Well, more than the rest of us,” her dad agreed. “And we used to joke that the Florida tax on shipwrecks was so high that the fewer of us alive when we found the ship the better—oh hell.”
“You don’t think?” Maddison said. Mr. Lyndon sat up abruptly. “You don’t think he would—would get rid of someone before they could find the San Telmo before him?”
“I—I never did know, with Willis.”
“You knew something,” Maddison said. “You didn’t want him anywhere near me!”
“Because he has it in for me!” her dad protested. “And Willis Griffin holds long grudges!”
“Long enough for murder?” Maddison asked. “We never did figure out who was behind the guy who did those car crashes, but we know he used to work for the school through dining services. And then someone has always been one step behind us, especially Chris and Carrie, and they tell Professor Griffin everything because he’s an old family friend! What if—what if the reason we’ve always been one step ahead of this person, and only one step ahead of them, is because they’ve always been right there listening at the dinner table?!”
Her dad had gone white.
“Maddison, do you know if Griffin is still out on a boat with Chris and Carrie right now?” he asked.
“No,” Maddison admitted miserably, “I still can’t get through to them.”
“But they’re just looking for some of the landmarks for the ship, right?” her dad asked, and Maddison realized that in all the confusion she had never told her father exactly what the trip on the boat was supposed to accomplish. The steps they’d taken to get to the San Telmo had felt, at the time, like a lot of one step forward and two steps back, with occasional falling into cisterns, and then the last bit had snuck up on them and Maddison hadn’t really let it sink in that if they played it right Chris and Carrie could have found the ship on this trip.
But it probably had occurred to Professor Griffin.
“Dad,” Maddison said, “Carrie was in the middle of narrowing the shipwreck sites down to three or four points in the same area. They were hoping to actually find the ship today or tomorrow.”
“Oh no,” her father sighed, and scrabbled around on the end table until he came up with his phone. Maddison decided this was a good time to try dialing Chris and Carrie again, and Mr. Lyndon excused himself to go do something. Possibly to call a contact in the National Guard; Mr. Lyndon was terrifyingly resourceful.
“Hi, Helen,” her dad said as Maddison sat down with a phone pressed to her ear. The call went directly to voicemail and she groaned. “No, I—yes, it was very rude of me to hang up on you like that. No, I—yes, I owe you an apology. I know your time is very valuable, will you just—Helen! Yes! Oh for—you still have a brother in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, right?”
“Hi Chris, it’s Maddison,” Maddison said, leaving her eighteenth message of the day and not even feeling awkward about it. “I’m just trying to see where you are, call me when you get this?” She hung up. If all she could do now was wait she might explode.
“Okay, I’ve poked the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Helen has some pull with them,” Maddison’s dad said. He looked mildly confused, which he always did whenever he had to talk to Helen Kinney. “I think we should probably be back in Archer’s Grove as soon as possi
ble—” he added when Mr. Lyndon stuck his head back in the doorway.
“Already handled,” Mr. Lyndon said. “Of course you need to go pack up your things now, the flight I booked you on leaves in two hours.”
“Greg—”
“Go. Answer any and all questions to the best of your ability, try not to act too suspicious around the agents or the officers, and for the love of the blasted chickens”—there was one roosting in the window box—“visit me without a tragedy following you next time,” Mr. Lyndon said.
Michelle Grey was one of the few people so used to being called out of bed at all hours of the night that she didn’t grumble about it. She just opened the door and caught Forrest when he fell through mid-knock.
“Please tell me it’s just the confirmation on the dental matches,” she said. “This is a nice, pleasant community, if there is an underground drug trade they want us to help root out I’ll bet it’s nasty.”
“Detective Hermann said to ask the park service about that, apparently they deal with some smuggling in the national forests,” Forrest told her. “It seems the mussels are sometimes in danger.”
Michelle risked a glance at the digital clock and glared. Then she transferred the glare to Forrest. “I’m going to pretend I was dreaming, because otherwise I could swear you just told me the mussels are sometimes in danger.”
“But more importantly they finally got the DNA and dental results confirmed,” Forrest said hurriedly. “You were right. This is now a reopened and reclassified case that initially dates back to the early nineties and involved”—he stopped halfway down the page—“a lot of people from the Kingsolver case, actually. Way more than random chance, they do look connected.”
“I so hate it when I’m right,” Michelle said, scanning the page Forrest offered her. “Have you talked with Detective Hermann about putting any of these people in protective custody?”
“I just got off the phone with him,” Forrest said, “and . . . there’s a complication.”
“Moon’s pretty,” Chris offered. Carrie poked him hard in the side. They were treading water facing each other, trying very, very hard to avoid thinking about what might be out there in the water with them and how they were going to get home. They’d had a brief, furious argument about staying put or trying to swim for shore which Carrie had won by pointing out that they didn’t know what direction to swim in. They were now out of conversation topics.
It was maddening, because they couldn’t be that far from land. The Vanishing Triangle had been hugging the coastline for most of its trip and Archer’s Grove had been visible from the deck the whole time, but the professor had steered the ship into open waters as soon as Carrie had given him the coordinates, and when Carrie and Chris had fallen overboard they’d lost all sense of direction. The Triangle could not have made it that far before they’d fallen overboard, but without knowing which direction to go Chris and Carrie couldn’t risk swimming for it and sending themselves farther out to sea. Staying put looked like the best option, especially with the ocean currently so calm, and so it was the safest thing to do.
“Although I don’t think the survival tips are designed for people who have purposely been thrown overboard,” Chris pointed out. “The idea is to stay in one place so the ship can come back and get you, and we might not want the professor to find us.”
Carrie had agreed, for the time being. Carrie’s phone had managed to stay in her pocket even as she fell, but taking it out to see if the plastic bag had held and if they could even use it in the middle of nowhere seemed like an action that could go horribly wrong.
“Plus, if it’s still working even a little bit someone might be able to find us through the signal,” Carrie had added, so it stayed in her pocket.
“Well, I could talk about sharks or ghost ships,” Chris told his cousin since she’d rejected his admiration of the moon. “But I don’t want to scare myself.”
“Chris, you cussed out the whole ocean for about fifteen minutes, there isn’t a life form in shouting distance that hasn’t fled by this point.”
“I was angry!” Chris said. He’d been left in the ocean to drown. He had every right to be mad. “Aren’t you furious?”
“Oh, yeah,” Carrie said. “Three of the books in my bag were library books!”
“Carrie . . . ”
“Even if we get out of this, who knows if I’ll ever get them back! One was an out-of-state loan, too, they have a fifty-cent per day fine and the replacement costs are super high!”
“Are you seriously going to freak out about losing a couple of library books?” Chris asked. It was a very Carrie thing to do, but Chris had a vague feeling that panicking was a bad idea and he should definitely not let her cry. She’d lose precious fluids if she cried, and she might swallow even more seawater.
“I don’t want to pay thirty dollars in library fines,” Carrie wailed.
Chris was kind of at a loss. “Do you want a hug?” he offered. Carrie bit down on the tears and took a couple of deep breaths and shook her head.
“No, I’m fine. I actually should have thrown my whole bag over the side if I had the chance. If I have left even one hint for that jerk to find the San Telmo I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I don’t think—” Chris stopped.
“You were about to say, ‘I don’t think the professor’s going to go through your bag,’ weren’t you?” Carrie said. “This sucks. Go ahead and tell me about the ghost ship.”
“Er.” Chris had accidentally spent a night last week reading about ghost ships, but he was hardly an expert.
“I keep wondering if I’ve felt something nudging my leg,” Carrie explained. “I need some sort of distraction.”
“Well, there are a whole lot of ghost ships,” Chris said, every single fact he knew about ghost ships flying out of his head as he did. Famous ghost ships, famous ghost ships, even just famous ships with strange things connected to them, he thought frantically. “Well, there’s the Flying Dutchman,” he said desperately. “Cursed to sail the seas forever after the captain swore to reach his destination or die trying. There’s the Lady Lovibond, the Mary Celeste, the MV Joyita—those two don’t haunt so much as they went mysteriously missing and then turned up deserted—the Young Teazer . . . ”
“That ship,” Carrie said faintly.
“Which ship?” Chris asked. Carrie grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around. Chris choked, and it wasn’t on seawater.
It certainly did not look like a ship any sane living human would get on. The hull was two different colors, and the deck appeared to be painted with blood. There was a strange purple figure floating just above the cabin, and it was glowing.
“Do we try to flag them down?” Carrie asked.
“You see it too?” Chris asked. A silly question, since Carrie was the one who’d pointed it out to him, but he was toying with the idea of plunging under the surface and holding his breath until it sailed away.
The moon had made it over the horizon, and moonlight shone off a sliver of sand and bounced amongst the tangles of vegetation all along the stretch of shoreline. It was pretty, in an entirely unromantic way, and the boat hugging the edge of the shoreline only added to the picture. This was a shame, because the two people leaning against the railing were hardly cut out for appreciating the gentle beauty of nature.
Harvey Tanner was leaning heavily against the railing, trying not to be sick a second time, and his lifelong friend Brad Green was nursing a throbbing nose, and sulking. Neither man was a graduate student. Brad was the sort of person who picked up and dropped jobs every other week for many reasons which all boiled down to his bad attitude, and Harvey had a steady if low-paying job at a car wash on Amelia Island. The graduate studies in coastal erosion had been a polite fiction cooked up by Professor Willis Griffin so he could bring them along without—he had claimed—having to explain to the college why he was using school property for investigations of a personal nature.
Harvey w
as starting to wish he had never agreed to come along. Harvey Tanner was not cut out for this sort of thing; he had been encouraged to volunteer his services to Professor Griffin by his now-deceased half brother Cliff Dodson and his friend Brad, after Cliff dazzled Harvey with tales of the vast amounts of money this one academic type was willing to part with for a bit of dirty work and some acting. The idea of killing anyone hadn’t occurred to Harvey until Professor Griffin had spelled it out, grimacing in refined distaste the whole time, and then he had been in far too deep to back out. Plus, Brad had insisted that they would probably never even have to do more than push a few teenagers around.
“You don’t think they’re dead, do you?” Harvey asked Brad for the fifth time. The plan, at least as it had been laid out for Harvey, had been to “accidentally” lock Chris and Carrie Kingsolver in the equipment room while Brad and Harvey helped the professor scout out the site of the lost treasure ship, tell both teenagers that the ship had not been at the coordinates as expected, and then head back to shore. The professor would then get a professional diver and begin excavation of the site, with Brad and Harvey standing guard and getting rewarded handsomely for their assistance. But then Carrie had come out of the bathroom and looked at Harvey and somehow seemed to know exactly what the plan was, and in trying to stop her before she warned her cousin, Harvey had chased her onto the deck and then Brad had turned up to help and instead she had gone overboard. And Harvey knew his friend’s temper. Brad might say that Carrie had gone overboard accidentally, but she’d given him a nasty broken nose and he wasn’t at all upset about what had happened.
“Oh for—Harv, you better hope they are,” Brad replied, and Harvey gulped. “Because if they aren’t, then we could be on the hook for all sorts of trouble. You’d better believe the professor will blame us and get away scot free.”
“What a terrible thing to accuse me of,” the professor said right behind Harvey, who jumped.
“He didn’t mean it!” Harvey said.
