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  More rain coming.

  I was at the marina, moving from pod to pod of partygoers, drinking iced tea from a plastic cup. The crowd was sufficiently relaxed and fun, there was no need to drink anything stronger. I was dressed for my visit with the stylish Chessie Engle, wearing a white Cuban guayabera tonight with khaki slacks. Me, a guy whose standard uniform is fishing shorts and a pullover shirt, so I got some comments: Who you all dressed up for? Gotta new one on the line, Doc?

  Most of the liveaboards were present. JoAnn Smallwood and Rhonda Lister were holding court from the stern of Tiger Lilly. They had the music turned loud, blasting Capt. Buffett’s tales of sharks and motel maids across the bay. Dieter Rasmussen and his exotic-looking new girlfriend were serving drinks to visitors aboard his forty-six-foot Grand Banks trawler, Das Stasi. Several off-duty restaurant employees were there, too, along with Mack and his marina staff.

  Mack had mellowed. In fact, Mack was at his cheery best, as were Ozzie and Doug Fischer, Alex, Dave Case, Neville, and the other fishing guides. It was because Bill Gutek, who’d been sent to Baileys for potato chips, returned with a dozen attractive, active women in tow. The women had stopped their bachelorette limo to ask Bill if he knew a place they could all dance, and maybe go for a late swim.

  He’d led them through the marina gates, into Dinkin’s Bay, and then locked the gates behind him. Which is why all the men were cheerful, and why Bill Gutek was enjoying celebrity status that exceeded the status of owning a beautifully refurbished thirty-two-foot Island Gypsy trawler that had a massage table installed in the master cabin.

  I was content to drink tea because the party had all the required elements for a long and memorable evening. It would still be going when I returned from Chestra’s, and timing was an important consideration. When I saw rain clouds, though, I threw my cup in the trash, and went to get my first beer.

  More rain?

  I’ve been a water person all my life. It’s my work, and also a refuge. It represents safety. More than once over the years, locating water, escaping into water, has saved my life.

  When the hurricane hit, though, water became a new enemy. The earth, the sky, even dust molecules were saturated with the stuff. It was inescapable, seeping into every dry and precious space. Each day, I battled a leaking roof, leaky windows, footpath quagmires, sinking boats, the water-enraged tempers of friends, and temperamental pumps, all the while aware that the incursion of freshwater into salt water was also killing the bay on which I live.

  In comparison, the ten days prior to the storm, which I had spent in a foreign land, had seemed undemanding despite tumbling off a rock, and cracking my head open.

  Almost undemanding.

  At incremental spots around the docks, Mack’s crew had placed buckets filled with ice and bottles of beer. They’d added rock salt to the ice—a trick I’d taught them—because salt water freezes at thirty degrees, not thirty-two degrees, so bottles floated in an Arctic slush.

  I plucked a bottle of Coors from a bucket, popped the top, and drank until I felt the first hint of brain freeze—refreshing on this wind-hot September night. Then I walked to a corner of dock where a shepherd’s crook lamp illuminated water.

  The water was green beneath the yellow light, with just enough clarity so that I could see the head and jagged teeth of an alligator gar protruding from under the dock. The fish was as long as my arm. Alligator gars are commonly found in the Everglades. Strictly a freshwater animal, but here it was.

  The gar was here because inland Florida and Lake Okeechobee were flooded. The Army Corps of Engineers was opening locks, dumping metric tons of storm offal, a chemical soup of fertilizers and poisons. Now the polluted mess had reached the sea, carrying freshwater exotics with it.

  Usually, the Corps dumped the offal into canals that carried it to three different regions of the state. Lately, though, they’d been routing the entire mess to the west coast of Florida.

  Criminal.

  Because the water was murky, I couldn’t see a killing blue algae smothering sea grasses, but I knew it was there. I couldn’t see the oil-based pesticides and insecticides used by Florida’s sugar industry, and its thousands of golf courses, but I knew they were there, too.

  Laws regulating the use of such chemicals, and the treatment of water, don’t anticipate catastrophe. Nor do they address the unyielding adhesive properties of three elemental atoms in union: H2O. Once joined, they will transport poisons as dependably as they transport surfers.

  I remembered Tomlinson saying that a great storm was cleansing. Something about it exposing decay.

  This water was the definition of decay. The contaminants it contained were killing the bay’s own natural filtration system.

  Buffett was now singing about an over-forty pirate as I took a long, slow swallow of beer, and watched the gar. The fish was a few inches below the surface, in the shadow of the dock. I considered its armor work of scales, the reptilian head and lateral fins. It was pterodactyl-like. A primitive sniper, I decided, balanced on the edge of light, waiting for a target to appear.

  The imagery became less fanciful as my thoughts transitioned to fresh memory: a lone figure beneath a desert sky, clothes acidic with the odor of horse and sweat. The weight of a rifle…the weight of elbow on rock. The firefly luminescence of a night-vision scope as the figure knelt at the edge of darkness—me, the lone figure, waiting for a target. Me, holding a weapon’s scope to my eye hoping to see a human profile appear from…

  “Doc! Did you hear me?”

  I was so deep in thought that I fumbled my beer and dropped the bottle. When the bottle hit, there was a suctioning sound created by the sudden displacement of water.

  The fish spooked, its mouth wide in the yellow light. It displayed its teeth to discourage pursuit…

  I turned. Jeth was standing in the shadows where the dock T-ed. Tomlinson was gliding up behind him, both men barefoot, their voices easy to hear now because the music had stopped.

  From the distance, as Rhonda called, “What do you beach bums wanna hear next?”, Jeth told me, “I want to dive the wreck tomorrow; Javier, too. We don’t care what the weather is. Tomlinson agrees.”

  I glanced to see my bottle do a cobralike descent into the murk. Normally, I’d have found a net and retrieved the litter. After riding out a category 4 storm, though, I watched the thing sink. I pictured it as a good habitat for some lucky octopus or lizard fish.

  I looked at the streaming clouds above us, then at the thunderheads—lightning flashing in them now. “What about a boat? No Mas is too slow, mine’s not big enough, and that Mako you borrowed—”

  No need to finish. The boat from St. James City was so old, its deck was springy as a trampoline. Javier had begged off, so Jeth had nursed the thing back to Dinkin’s Bay alone. We couldn’t take it.

  “Bill said we could use his Island Gypsy. He’s not going to be in any condition for rough water tomorrow because of the girls he met, and I’ve let him use my boat lots of times. Javier’s looking for a boat, too, but we know the Island Gypsy. It’s a sure thing.”

  I asked, “Javier’s looking for a boat to borrow? I hope so, because if he goes back to Indian Harbor he’ll be in jail again.”

  “I’m sure he meant borrow,” Jeth said, but he didn’t sound certain.

  Borrowing another person’s boat, I wasn’t wild about the idea. Both men were looking at me. I shrugged, and said, “The last I heard, it’s supposed to blow fifteen, twenty tomorrow out of the southeast. Anchor in that slop, then get in the water?”

  “We don’t care, Doc. It’s better then letting someone else get out there first.”

  That was true. I agreed to go, adding, “Here’s why—”

  I explained what I planned to tell Jeth, anyway: my archaeologist pal from Key West had called. It was a brief conversation—he was en route to Madrid.

  “In his opinion,” I said, “the state of Florida has no claim on your wreck because it’s twelve miles offshore�
��outside state boundary waters. There’s a federal statute, though, called the Abandoned Shipwreck Act. If we dive the wreck, draw some diagrams, and fill out the right forms, we can file a claim in federal court. That doesn’t mean we’ll own what we find. We’ll have to deal with the boat’s previous owner, or an insurance company, and try to come to some agreement.”

  Tomlinson added, “If it turns out the boat’s owned by someone we can contact and get to agree to let us salvage the things, it’s not complicated.” He’d been in the lab when I got the call, Arlis Futch still jabbering away, and had agreed to do some research on admiralty laws. “Either way, it’s important we’re the first to dive it and bring up something, in case we need to file a claim. Salvage isn’t finders keepers. But that’s the way we need to approach it.”

  “If someone else doesn’t dive it first,” Jeth said, meaning Heller’s bunch. “Maybe they’ll smarten up and use seasick medicine next time.”

  I ’d also told Jeth I’d done preliminary cleaning on several more pieces. It wasn’t encouraging news, but I told him, anyway: There were some brass screws and a brass bolt. Nothing spectacular. There was also a bullet, a live round, which could be interesting once I got the brass clean enough to read the manufacturer’s stamp.

  “Why’s that interesting?” Jeth asked, sounding disappointed. A couple of brass screws and a bullet?

  “Because it’s a nine-millimeter cartridge. German Lugers fired nine-millimeter parabellums. That’s the pistol the Nazis used.”

  “Oh, I get it. There could be some guns down there.”

  “Well, if there’s ammunition…” I gestured with my hands: Could be. “Weapons from that era are valuable to collectors. But what kind of shape they’ll be in if we do find them?” Who knows?

  Jeth looked in the direction of the marina store. His bride was there, Janet Mueller Nichols. She was waiting in the glow of security lights, the parking lot behind her. Even at that distance, Janet looked glossy and ripe in her pale maternity blouse. Judging from the way she shifted from one foot to the other, she was also impatient, ready to drive to their rental apartment in Iona.

  Jeth noticed, too. “Well,” he said, “maybe we’ll have some luck for a change and the weather will break tomorrow. Doc? About the stuff you’ve already got cleaned—that diamond Nazi thing, the coins? Can I try and sell them now?”

  Before we found out the boat’s identity? I told him it was risky. Also, the metal might disintegrate if we removed objects from the sodium solution too soon.

  He shook his head, frustrated, and I watched him glance toward his wife again. After only two months of marriage, he already knew the importance of body language. “I wish we could make it faster because…well, with the baby coming and all. Janet, she’s worried…and, hell, I don’t blame her. What I’m saying is—”

  Tomlinson decided to help. “Money’s tight, and Janet’s thinking it might be smart to move back to Ohio to be with her family. Jeth’s asking you for a timetable. When you think he’ll start seeing some cash.”

  I said, “You two separating during a pregnancy,” then paused, realizing how judgmental I sounded. I tried again. “I wouldn’t do anything drastic until you talk to Mack. And until we get a look at what’s on your wreck.”

  Jeth didn’t brighten much when Tomlinson tried to change the mood. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll pack ourselves a nice lunch, throw beer in the cooler, and have some fun. Maybe water visibility will be better when we get near the bottom. Hell, compadre, you could be a rich man and don’t even know it.”

  I had another beer, but dumped the remainder into the water—no late-night drinking for me if we were diving in the morning—then looked up, checking weather: Stars were hazy with smoke from trash fires. In the jet stream, thirty miles above Sanibel, bands of stratus clouds filed southward. Wind currents were volatile up there on the rim of weightlessness, reacting to hurricanes now gathering power off Cuba. The precise arc of clouds reminded me of the incremental lines of magnetic power.

  I listened to Jeth tell me he’d have the boat fueled, loaded, and ready to go by late morning, while also thinking about Chestra’s offer to pay him and Javier a salary. It would take a lot of pressure off two very good men, but what was her angle?

  I checked my watch: 9:30. Time to find out.

  19

  I’d misjudged the woman’s age, possibly because of the tricky lighting on the second floor, with its Tiffany lamps dimmed and candle shadows flickering in the wind that had drifted through the open balcony doors.

  The doors were open now.

  Chestra Engle was younger by a decade. Or more. Soft light is supposed to be kind. Instead, it had contributed to yesterday’s misimpression—my first impression, which is why the snapshot had imprinted so convincingly: wrinkled face on the shrinking scaffolding of Mildred Chestra Engle.

  Tomlinson had been surprised when I called her an old woman. I now understood why, sitting in the same room, with the same candles and lamps, but seeing her clearly for the first time. The woman had wrinkles—smile furrows; a sagging area beneath the chin—but her skin wasn’t a tragedy of lines, and she wasn’t old.

  No. My amended guess: she was a few years beyond what some call middle age; a mature woman who, when the light was right, was still attractive. Handsome is a word commonly used to describe women her age. Lean, fit—some curves evident beneath the gold lamé gown she wore tonight. You didn’t need an imagination to know that she’d once been extraordinarily beautiful.

  Chessie’s facial bones had the classic structure: cheeks that created shadow, large eyes staring out, a jawline that curved into hairline on a delicate stem of a neck…

  I was thinking about that—facial subtleties, the structural dimensions of beauty—when I heard Chestra ask me, “When you disappear from the room, Dr. Ford, is someone special with you? Or are you all alone?”

  “Sorry, Chess. What did you say?”

  She repeated herself, laughing as she added, “Please be a dear and tell me I’m not boring you. I won’t be offended if it’s true. Why, at times I find myself a dreadful bore—”

  “Not at all. I apologize.” I realized I’d been staring at her face, something that was impolite in her world. No…it was an indelicacy. Her word. I reached for my glass of soda water, lime twist. “I was thinking about tomorrow’s dive, wondering if I’d forgotten something.”

  She looked at me for a moment, enjoying my dishonesty, before saying, “Really.” Said it with the familiar flat tone. Sat facing me, eyes searching mine, a woman who’d been stared at by men all her life, I realized, in exactly the same way I’d been staring, so knew when men were lying.

  She seemed oddly pleased by my discomfort but didn’t press. The polite thing to do was change the subject. She did the polite thing.

  Conversation is no longer considered a skill, but it is. Chestra was expert. Talking with her was effortless. She had the knack of asking questions that probed, but that also made me feel important. My opinion was valuable to her—she listened. I was interesting; the topics fascinating: sharks, water pollution, the dynamics of storms and open sea.

  She didn’t insult me by playing the role of the hopelessly ditzy female to reassure my male insecurities. She wasn’t cutesy, she didn’t chatter, she didn’t flirt, she didn’t ramble, and didn’t use double entendres to test what she, at least, considered tasteful boundaries. When I asked her a personal question, she was sometimes so shockingly frank that I felt it was safe to be honest in return. An example: “Men are pack animals, like wolves. That’s why I’ve learned never to show fear, and how to use a gun!”

  She had a wiseguy cynical side that I liked, especially when discussing relationships and marriage:

  “I think the reason most women marry, Doc, is they fear being alone more than they fear having a keeper.

  “I married once, never again. I don’t have the patience it takes to fall in love with a man I’m marrying for money…”

  When I told her
no, I’d never been married, she said, “Good for you. You’re smart. Too many women treat husbands like horses. They use love like a bridle to steer and control—or to punish them when they misbehave.”

  She was funny, too. Didn’t mind being the butt of her own jokes. One of her gambits was to ask some cliché rhetorical question—“What is life?”—but flip the emphasis so that she hinted at her own goofball mistakes. “What is life?” Use the profound cliché to illustrate life’s silliness. Endearing.

  Good conversation was as important to her as being a hostess who made good drinks, real drinks, and who served excellent hors d’oeuvres, such as the shrimp, black bread, and Feta cheese now on the table before us. Conversation was ceremonial, something that shouldn’t be rushed by business.

  So I didn’t press. She led, I followed. The woman was insightful, and entertaining.

  Even so, I still had to get home and plan what could be a difficult dive, and it was already ten-thirty…

  “Doc? Can you at least have a glass of wine? I have a very nice Riesling…or a Syrah from South Africa. I want to walk you around the houses, and show you why I want to be involved with salvaging that wreck.”

  “Show me?”

  “Photographs. They’ll make it easier for me to explain.”

  The woman’s instincts were excellent.

  C hestra believed that her great-aunt was aboard the vessel that Jeth had discovered, the night it went down in a storm.

  “She was from the Dorn branch of the family. Marlissa Dorn.” The woman searched my face briefly—had I heard the name?—before she continued. “The story’s become part of our family legend. I grew up hearing it, and now I want to know the truth. What happened that night? Was Marlissa the only one aboard who drowned? Those questions have never been answered. I’ve wondered about it for years. Fantasized, in fact, the story’s so romantic—I’m a sap for stuff like that.”

  The woman gave me a look that was, at once, tolerant and scolding. “I didn’t lie to you last night. I will get fabulous stories from this. But I don’t expect you to find anything valuable. If you do, we’ll split the profit, whatever way you think is fair. But I’d want to keep a memento or two, that’s all. Some small thing to remind me of Marlissa.”