by Sandra Hill
“Would you have come?”
“Probably not.”
Frank raised both hands in a “So there!” manner.
“I don’t understand you.”
He arched his eyebrows in question.
“Always, even when I was a child, you pushed me. ‘Learn to swim.’ ‘Don’t you have any normal clothes?’ ‘What do you mean, you never went on a roller coaster?’ ‘Why don’t you go to a public school like everyone else?’ ‘Why do you have to go to a fancy-pantsy school like Cedar Hill?’ ‘Didn’t your father ever take you to a baseball game?’ ‘Do you ever get dirty?’”
Frank winced at her mimicking him. “Listen, your grandmother and I were like two cats in a room full of rocking chairs for years after our divorce. When she was pregnant with your father, she earned her full membership in the Bitch of the Month Club. At first, I steered clear of her, which proved to be a mistake. I ended up not seeing Joey, your dad, while he was a kid, before she had a chance to poison him against me. Then, when I got my act together and tried to be a father to him, she made every little request a bargaining tool. The measliest overnight visit cost me big-time—not in money, but other things.” He coughed and turned away from her. After a long moment, he turned back and said, “By the time you came along, and after Joey died, the only communication I had with Lillian were battles. So, when I did get to visit with you, my temper was already riled, and I could see how much you hated being around me.”
Veronica practically gaped at her grandfather. That was the most personal information he’d ever disclosed to her, but he raised a million other questions. There were big, big holes in his story, important things she could tell he’d left out. She wasn’t about to let him off so easy. “And that’s your excuse for being a miserable, crude bully to me over the years?”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “I better go over and help lay out the diving gear.”
He left with a cloud of cigar smoke following in his wake.
Veronica decided to go down below and help prepare lunch. The first thing she saw was Brenda, stirring a pot while dancing in place to the music coming from the radio on the cabinet next to a restaurant-quality range. It was the old Bob Seger version of “Old Time Rock & Roll.”
“Can I help?” Veronica asked.
Brenda jumped and almost dropped her wooden spoon. “Oh, I didn’t hear you come in. Yeah. How about setting the table? Eight, I think. Me, you, Flossie, Frank, Steve, Adam, Caleb, and John.”
“What are you making?” Veronica asked as she took out the plates and cutlery.
Brenda laughed. “As if you couldn’t tell! Sauerkraut.” She pointed with her spoon at the commercial-size kettle holding what had to be two gallons of sauerkraut. Already on the counters were hot dogs and baked beans, coleslaw, and a tossed salad. Glancing in the freezer, she saw several cartons of ice cream—her grandfather’s choice for dessert, she supposed.
When Veronica made no comment on the menu, Brenda laughed again. “I’m on a diet. Nothing but sauerkraut and baked beans. The rest of the stuff is for everyone else.”
“Uh . . . how long do you have to be on a sauerkraut and bean diet?”
“Four weeks . . . or until I lose twenty pounds.”
Twenty pounds in four weeks? Good luck! “You don’t look overweight,” Veronica remarked. And Brenda didn’t. Truth to tell, she was just right. “With you, I would think losing twenty pounds would be kind of drastic.”
Brenda shook her head vehemently. “I have a fifteen-year high school reunion coming up and a slinky, siren red, size seven dress I intend to wear, or die trying. I weigh one hundred and fifty friggin’ pounds.” Just then, Veronica noticed the scale in the corner. “I weigh myself three times a day,” Brenda admitted.
“But, Brenda, you’ve got to be, what, five foot six?”
“Five-six and a half, but no woman in the world wants to weigh that much.”
Veronica had to admit one hundred and fifty had a distasteful sound to it. “So, are you hoping to hook up with some old high school sweetheart at the reunion?”
“Hell, no. I just want to show my ex-husband—the only boyfriend I ever had as a teenager—what he’s missing. He’ll be there with his latest bimbo; she weighs no more than one hundred pounds, and twenty of that is in her boobs.”
They both smiled at that image.
“It’s probably silicone,” Veronica offered.
“Definitely. Lance probably thinks they’re real, though. Men! Clueless slimeballs, all of them.”
“I’ll second that,” Veronica said. “My ex is engaged to Casino Barbie. When she’s not being Ms. Premed Barbie.”
“God, I hate Barbie,” Brenda said. “Do you know there’s even a NASCAR Barbie? Like those breasts would fit inside a race car harness! Not!”
They laughed again.
“You ought to bring some handsome guy with you to the reunion,” Veronica suggested. “No strings. Just for show.”
“Now where would I find one of those on such short notice?”
“There’s probably some agency called Studs “R” Us.”
“If there was, they’d make a mint.”
“Or try eBay. They have everything there.”
“I heard what you said about eBay,” Flossie remarked with excitement. She was coming down the steps, followed by Frank, Adam, and Caleb. Steve had probably volunteered to man the wheel while everyone ate lunch. “I have a friend, Ginger, a divorcée, who bought a weekend date with a celebrity on eBay. It was all for some charity. Eye candy, and then some! Well, he wasn’t really a celebrity. I think he came from one of those male escort places, but who cares! He looked like Johnny Depp.”
“Is that the guy who put ten thousand dollars on her Visa card?” Frank inquired snidely.
“I love eBay,” Flossie continued, ignoring Frank as she helped put the remaining dishes on the table, along with pitchers of ice water and iced tea. “I bought a sable coat on eBay last week. It was only five thousand dollars.”
“Whaaat?” Frank roared. “You spent five thousand frickin’ bucks on a rat skin? Are you nuts?”
Veronica fully expected Flossie to burst out crying, as was her pattern lately, menopause having turned her into a pendulum of moods. Instead, she lashed out. “Yeah, I spent five thousand dollars. Of my own money. And maybe I’ll spend another five thousand dollars next time I log onto the Internet. Betcha there’s a one-day spa treatment I can bid on at Manhattan Magic. I’d bid up to two thousand, even. eBay has everything.”
Frank looked as if he might choke but thankfully held his tongue for once.
But only for a minute.
After everyone had washed their hands in the tiny bathroom and sat down on benches bracketing the galley table, he took one long look at the dishes placed in front of them. He especially went wide-eyed over the stainless steel bowl, probably a washbasin, filled almost to overflowing with sauerkraut. That and a slightly smaller bowl of baked beans held center stage.
“What the hell is this?”
Brenda immediately stiffened and put a hand on each side of her curvy hips. “I’m on a diet, a sauerkraut and bean diet. Wanna make something of it?”
Everyone at the table knew enough to keep quiet, although the men barely stifled grins as they studied their plates, then began to help themselves to the food.
Except for Frank. “A sauerkraut and baked bean diet? Holy crap!” he said. “What? You gonna fart the fat off?”
It didn’t help matters that Frank’s tape deck launched into the rowdy “Too Fat” polka. What a coincidence!
“At least you coulda thrown some kielbasa in. What? Don’t tell me. You didn’t bring any kielbasa? That does it. I am definitely depressed.”
Brenda glowered at Frank, then picked up a pitcher of ice water and dumped it over his head.
It was something they’d all wanted to do at one time or another.
Chapter
12
Catching the fever . . .
; By midafternoon, they were anchored at the designated site.
It was a perfect day for diving. The ocean was calm, like a sheet of glass. Underwater visibility should be great.
Frank basked in the pitch of excitement. Everyone was chomping at the bit to get started, even his granddaughter. Ronnie was in the wheelhouse with Famosa, learning how to use the computer mapping equipment. Oh, Ronnie tried to pretend she was here against her will and that she couldn’t care less whether they found anything or not. But, hot damn, Frank could see by the gleam in her eyes and her eagerness to help that she was catching the fever. That had been his goal all along.
LeDeux was running the side sonar scan while Brenda showed Steve how the magnetometer worked. Even Flossie—slathered head to toe with sunscreen and wearing rhinestone-studded sunglasses—had been put to work, watching the fishing lines that had been cast over the other side of the boat. Dinner, they expected optimistically. He hoped she didn’t have one of her hot flashes in the middle of reeling in a big ol’ fish; she might just scare the fish, he thought with a grin. Not that I would tell her that. I am not that dumb!
“You got everything?” he asked Peach, who was gearing up. He would be the first diver to splash down today.
Peach nodded, adjusting his face mask and doing a last-minute check on his dry suit, flippers, and, most important, the twin tanks on his back.
“If everything goes according to plan—”
“Which it rarely does,” Peach quipped.
“And assuming we find the wreck site on our first try—”
“Which pretty much never happens,” Peach interrupted again.
Frank glared at Peach for his smart remarks. “Then we should have enough time, before dark, for two more dives—first Famosa, then LeDeux.”
They had drawn up a grid, a one-mile square, of where the wreck should be. It was impossible to be more precise. Any number of factors could have affected the location, including faulty human reporting, currents that could have moved the debris, and hurricanes over the years. Right now, they sat over one corner of the square. If that didn’t work out, they would move forward about a quarter mile and dive again. On and on till they reached the opposite corner, which would probably be tomorrow morning, if Frank’s guess was correct. If that row on the grid didn’t pan out, they would start on the next quarter-mile down, over and over till they got to the exact wreck site. It was pretty much like mowing a lawn.
The problem was, the dives were deep, below two hundred feet, which meant that a diver could spend only about twenty-five minutes down below and an hour coming back up, stopping at intervals to decompress. The bends or narcosis was always a concern, even with modern equipment. Once the diver came back up, he couldn’t return to the water for two or three hours because he continued to decompress. That meant that another diver would make the next dive. That would be Famosa. Then LeDeux. Then they would start all over again with Peach. Slow, methodical, but necessary for the safety of all concerned.
Once they hit pay dirt, the first diver would case the site, foregoing any treasure retrieval and just gaining knowledge. The next diver would secure the grapple to the wreckage and take some videos. The third and subsequent divers would actually bring up the artifacts, or in this case, diamonds.
Frank wished he was going down himself. He had on many occasions. But his age and physical condition precluded that now; divers had to be in top form.
“Good to go?” he asked Peach.
Peach bit down on his regulator, gave a little wave to him and the others, then allowed himself to roll backward over the gunwale and into the water.
Veronica and the rest of the crew came down to stand beside Frank at the rail. The tension in the air could be cut with a knife. “This is really exciting,” she admitted.
“Yep,” he agreed without an “I told you so,” as she would have expected.
“Remember that trip, Frank, two years ago off the North Carolina Outer Banks?” Brenda said from Frank’s other side. “We were looking for that sunken Spanish galleon, but, man, we didn’t know what we were going to find down there, the Sea Witch or any one of the hundreds of wrecks in that area.”
“Yeah, that was a good one. Paid for itself tenfold,” Frank replied. “Even after we gave half the artifacts to the state for museums and the like. Definitely exciting.”
Veronica frowned with confusion. “Hundreds of wrecks? Just off the Carolina coast? Really?”
“Oh, yeah!” Brenda answered. “Of all those gold-laden sailing ships from England and Spain, many of them never made it through the rough Atlantic waters, especially during hurricane season.”
“Hey, I’ve researched this. It’s my area of expertise,” Adam added. “If you count all the shipwrecks over the past three thousand years, three million, or more, still lie at the bottom of deep waters around the world. Three million! During a five-year period in the nineteenth century alone, one thousand of the ten thousand ships insured in England went down and have never been found. Some are down too deep. Some have deteriorated over time. But most are in unknown spots.”
Veronica smiled at Adam’s little spiel. He sounded like the professor he was.
“The Florida Keys are supposed to be paradise for us treasure hunters since there are so many lost ships there. But, really, they’re everywhere,” Frank elaborated.
John leaned forward to address Brenda. “Like you said, chère, there are thousands of wrecks here on the East Coast. But we have our share off the Gulf of Mexico, too, especially Spanish and French. Oil drillers find evidence of them all the time. Divers even uncovered a Nazi sub there years ago.”
“That’s nothing,” Frank added. “Just a decade ago, two young divers on a Brielle boat discovered a German U-boat. Off the New Jersey coast, for chrissake! Now, some Mafia don, wrapped in a concrete suit, that I could see. But an actual U-boat? Unbelievable. Neither the U.S. government nor the Germans had any idea it was there.”
Steve gave Frank a dirty look for the Mafia remark, but of course he said nothing because that would acknowledge his connection to the mob. Besides, it was hard to take Steve seriously at the moment since he was wearing that skimpy black Speedo, topped by an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, presumably to cover his shoulder holster. What he was going to shoot on this trip, Veronica had no idea. Maybe a shark.
“That is incredible,” Veronica commented, referring to the shipwreck information. She would bet that most people, like her, didn’t know what treasure the world’s oceans and seas still held. “Millions of shipwrecks still down there? I’ll need a little time to register that.”
Her grandfather checked his watch. “Peach has been down there twenty minutes, and he hasn’t blown a cup yet. My guess is there’s nothing there.”
Brenda quickly explained to her that divers took a couple Styrofoam cups down with them. If they located the wreck, they let a cup float to the surface, as a signal.
Everyone, except her, Frank, and Flossie, wandered off then to do their various jobs. Adam started putting on the rest of his diving gear, assuming he would be going down once Caleb came up and they moved anchor a quarter mile away.
Suddenly, Veronica thought of Jake and wished he was here. Not just to share in the excitement—he would get such a kick out of the adventure, deeming it the ultimate gamble—but so he could see how she was handling being out on the open sea. To her amazement, she was hardly nauseous, probably because she kept downing Pepto and Dramamine. And she was hardly afraid. In fact, she was thinking about letting Adam give her some diving lessons once this project was completed. Jake wouldn’t think she was just like her grandmother now. Nope, she was well on her way to being, if not interesting, at least not boring.
“I wish Jake was here,” Frank said, breaking the silence.
Veronica’s head shot up. Is the old man reading my mind now?
Flossie, misinterpreting the expression of dismay that must have been on her face, squeezed her hand and said, “He’ll come, honey. Some
thing must have held him up.”
Yeah, like a poker game. Or his fiancée. Without acknowledging Flossie’s sympathetic comment, Veronica turned and went to the galley to help Brenda prepare dinner.
It’s not that I miss the jerk. Nope. It’s just that we’ve always shared things. And this is important. To me. Oh, hell!
The sunny day had turned suddenly gray.
Would you please be my stud . . . uh, date?
Dinner was late that night, and, yes, it was fish. Lots of fish—sea bass, flounder, and even steaks from a small shark. Flossie made twice-baked potatoes that oozed cheddar cheese, and Veronica made her specialty, a wilted lettuce salad. For vegetables, there was more of the sauerkraut. Plus beans. For dessert—what else?—ice cream. Brenda might be subsisting on only sauerkraut and beans, but the rest of them feasted royally.
“So, we start tomorrow right after sunrise,” Frank said. “We should be able to get five or more dives in, if we don’t find the site right away.”
“The ocean in this area is great for diving,” Caleb remarked. “Calm, with no strong currents. And it has exceptional viz.”
“That will change once we work the wreck. It’s inevitable that silt will be raised,” Adam contributed.
“Hope the weather holds up,” John said. “Nothing like a storm to churn up the waters. Where I come from, the bayous are stained brown, like iced tea, from all the tree bark. Talk about a viz problem!”
“Is that when you wrestle alligators?” Adam teased John.
“Make fun of me. Go ahead. But I have wrestled gators, guar-an-teed. Come down and I’ll show you.”
Adam just rolled his eyes.
“Guess you and I are bunking together,” Adam told Caleb. “Do you want top or bottom?”
“Top.”
“I saw your duffel bag in there,” Adam continued. “Are you a neat freak, or what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never seen anyone pack so perfectly. You probably color-coordinate your tighty whities.”
“They’re all black.”
