Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) (6 page)

“That takes us to the next step, Doc. There’s two options for if and when we find any treasure and you should decide up front which route you’re gonna take.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“About twenty years ago,” I began, “me and Deuce’s dad found some treasure. A bunch of silver coins. We found it in a place we shouldn’t have been looking. That said, our only recourse was to sell it to a less-than-reputable collector who probably melted it all down.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Doc said.

“If these clues do lead you to a 1566 Spanish treasure ship, the government of Spain is going to declare ownership and the government of the Bahamas is going to declare sovereignty. You’ll be lucky to get a tenth of the actual worth after months in Admiralty Court, but you will have the satisfaction of getting your picture in papers all over the world and you might have a wing to some museum in Spain named after you.”

“The alternative would be what you and Deuce’s dad did? Sell it on the black market?”

“Didn’t sit well with me either, but it was Russ’s find and I left it up to him.”

“The historical value of finding this one ship could be really significant,” Tony said.

“No need on deciding right now,” Doc said. “We don’t know anything about these ships and for all we know, they all were loaded with rum.”

I laughed. “If it had a cargo of four-hundred-year-old rum, that’d be worth keeping secret.”

“Then we’ll wait until tomorrow and see if Chyrel can find a manifest,” Doc said.

I walked up to the deck with the two men and sat down at the table on the rear deck to finish my beer as they headed across the clearing to the bunkhouse. It was clear and cooler than it had been in a while. After a few minutes, my eyes adjusted and the vastness of the night sky revealed itself. Rusty had taught me years ago how to read the timeless and predictable stars to figure my location. Now I didn’t even need a clock. Knowing the month, I could tell the time by where the stars were. The Pleiades were rising out of the east. The Seven Sisters are a winter constellation. Fleeing Orion, they were a reminder to early seafarers to leave their ships tied to the docks and tend the land. It was also a reminder to me that it was late, so I turned in.

The phone on the desk was ringing as the slight, balding man walked into his office. He picked it up and spoke into the receiver, “Good morning, Florida Historical Society.”

“I think we finally have something,” came a voice over the phone.

“Who is this?” the man said.

“I just listened to the tape,” said the voice. “They have a lead on another treasure find.”

The man in the office was middle-aged and out of shape. Not that he’d ever been in good shape. He was five feet seven inches tall and a flabby one hundred seventy pounds. His skin was chalky from lack of sunshine and his hairline seemed to be in a race with time to see if it could reach the bald spot in back before the bald spot reached it. He walked over and closed his office door before speaking again.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Listen for yourself,” said the voice on the phone. Then after a couple of clicks, a different voice, tinny and slightly distorted, came over the phone. “
If these clues do lead you to a 1566 Spanish treasure ship, the government of Spain is going to declare ownership and the government of the Bahamas is going to declare sovereignty. You’ll be lucky to get a tenth of the actual worth after years in court, but you will have the satisfaction of getting your picture in papers all over the world and you might have a wing to some museum in Spain named after you.
”
Then there was another click and the man’s voice came back on. “The name of the ship is
Magdalena
. There’s more on the tape. See if you can find out anything on the ship. You should come down here. Today.”

The man loosened his cheap necktie and thought for a moment while checking his calendar. “I can’t get away this morning,” he finally said. “But I can be down there this afternoon.” Without a word, the call was ended and he placed the receiver in its cradle.

A gentle wind was blowing from the west, my hammock swaying slightly to the beat of the song in my head. I could hear the gentle whoosh of the tiny waves as they washed ashore just a few yards away. The smell of fresh rain, frangipani, and jasmine filled my nostrils with an intoxicating fragrance. A light, warm rain fell on my face, but that didn’t bother me. I opened my eyes to the sight of the fronds of a coconut palm being gently pushed by the breeze above my head. The sun was just showing through the trees to my left, silhouetting a woman in a white blouse and tight jeans. Her wet blouse was plastered to her body like a second skin, showing off her ample curves and the flatness of her belly. Her thick blond hair fell across her face and draped her shoulders, rainwater dripping from the ends.

Her voice sounded like an angel. “Red sky in morn, Captain Sleepy Head.”

I bolted upright in my bed. “Alex!”

The only answer to my shout was the sound of a light rain on the metal roof of my little stilt house. I rose from our bed, went into the galley where the coffee was already brewing, and poured a cup. I started to sit down at the little table when I heard footsteps coming up the rear steps. I walked over and opened the door as Tony and Carl came across the deck. Both men were dressed in standard island attire, cargo pants and bare feet.

“Thought I heard a shout,” Tony said with a worried look.

“Spilled hot coffee on my hand,” I lied. “Want some?” It wasn’t the first time my late wife had come to me in a dream. It seemed to happen as a warning of something ahead.
Red sky in morn?
I thought.

“Sure,” they both replied. I poured two more cups and we sat down.

“Got the tilapia tank done,” Carl said. “It’s filling now. I’m going up to Homestead this afternoon in Skeeter’s flatbed to pick up the fry.”

“Already?” I asked.

“Yeah, Tony and I were up early and finished plumbing it just before the rain started. Doesn’t look like it’ll last long. It’s already light to the east.”

“Doc was up late,” Tony said. “Filling Nikki in on what we’d learned. I think he’s leaning toward making the search public.”

“I hope he does,” I said. “If that rock with the house on it is where the riddle is pointing, it won’t be much fun digging up someone’s yard in the middle of the night.”

Tony laughed and said, “No, it could get downright troublesome, too.”

“Let’s go check out what you guys got done,” I said.

We walked down to the aquaculture setup on the southeast side of the clearing. My island’s pretty small and beginning to get crowded. At just over two acres, the clearing in the middle takes up the majority of it and it’s barely one hundred feet across at its narrowest. Still, it’s more than double the diameter of a helicopter’s rotor, and more than one competent chopper jock has landed here. The new fourth tank was filling fast. It and the tank with the crawfish were tucked back under the tree line for shading, but the two growing tanks were out in the sun. I noticed the plumbing was in a loop, from the new fish tank to the crawfish tank and from there to the first farm tank, then the second, before dumping back into the fish tank.

“The intake from the new tank goes all the way to the bottom,” Carl said. “The bottom of the tank is covered with a raised screen to allow the fish waste to fall through.”

“They’ll breed, right?” I asked. “What about the eggs?”

“We’ll be raising Nile Tilapia, which are mouth brooders,” Carl said. “At the far end are a bunch of foot-long PVC pipes, all strapped together and anchored on the bottom. That’s where the males will build their nests and where the eggs are laid. Once the eggs are fertilized, the females will take them in their mouths and leave the nests. They hatch in the female’s mouth and she’ll release them when they’re ready to swim, usually a week to ten days after laying.”

“So why is the intake at the bottom?” Tony asked.

“It’ll help keep the water clear,” Carl explained. “The solid waste from the fish will fall through the mesh and be siphoned up along with the water as the water’s pumped out of the crawfish tank up into the farm tanks. The crawfish will feed on anything edible in the fish’s waste and break it up, so it can flow more easily through the pumps and bio filters to the plants. The bio filters break the ammonia down into nitrite and then further into nitrate, which the plants thrive on.”

“Glad you know what you’re doing, Carl,” I said. “It’s all Greek to me.”

I could hear the sound of an outboard approaching from the southeast. I left them there and went back up to the deck. Looking out beyond Harbor Channel, I could see Rusty’s familiar skiff approaching. He had Deuce with him.

“Why didn’t Julie come with you?” I asked once we’d tied Rusty’s skiff off to the south dock.

“She’s nesting,” Rusty said. “Run us off, so she could get their boat cleaned up.”

“She’s kind of fussy about that,” Deuce said. “Two months of sailing all over the Caribbean has been kind of rough on the interior.”

We walked up to the deck, then down the back steps and across the clearing. Doc was sitting with Chyrel at one of the tables outside the bunkhouses. We brought Rusty and Deuce up to speed on what was written on the coconut, the translation, and what we thought it all meant.

“Sounds to me like you guys are goin’ on a treasure hunt,” Rusty said.

“We have a lot more to find out before we go off looking for anything,” Doc said.

“I found dozens of geological survey reports dating back to the late 1920s,” Chyrel said. “They contain beach erosion data on Elbow Cay. Using those, along with dozens of early nautical charts, I was able to create a drawing of what the coast line might have looked like four hundred and forty years ago. The island has lost a good three hundred feet of beach. That’s why there are so many exposed rocks along the shoreline. The rock with the house on it was well inland back then, and bigger. The rock that’s now well offshore was on the beach then.”

Tony gave her the list of things we’d thought of last night, and she disappeared into her little office. She’d printed out many nautical charts of the northern Bahamas dating back to the early 1600s and a history of the islands. The Spanish had had little use for the tiny islands, except to enslave the populace that had once lived and flourished there. By the early 1500s, there were no people on any of the Abacos. Ownership passed back and forth between England and Spain until 1783, when England ceded Florida to Spain in exchange for the Bahamas.

Doc pointed at the satellite view. “According to the scale, two to three hundred feet west of that rock is quite a ways offshore today.”

“Early nautical charts were very accurate as far as latitude,” Rusty said. “That’s just a simple matter of shooting the North Star. But determining longitude was still a matter of sailing due east or west and measuring speed to determine distance. Very unreliable”

He pulled out a chart dated 1728 and placed it next to one dated 1898. “See how wide they show Abaco here and again a hundred and seventy years later?” Before anyone could answer, he placed a modern chart over them, and pointing to the narrow isthmus between the southern end of Abaco and the northern end, he said, “The reality is that the island narrows to just a few yards here.”

“Okay, what’s your point?” I asked.

“Even this early map shows Hole Rok, now called Hole in the Wall, at the southern tip of Abaco. Major landmarks for navigation were usually pretty accurate. Life depended on it. This early one shows a rock offshore of Isla Lucayoneque and the reef beyond.”

“I see what you mean,” Tony said. “If that rock was offshore almost two hundred and eighty years ago, it was probably offshore a hundred and sixty years before that.”

“I’d bet on it,” Doc said. “My money’s on the big rock with the house on it being the ‘prodigious mainstay’ clue on the coconut.”

“Have you decided, Doc?” I asked. “This is your call, yours and Nikki’s.”

“We talked about it last night. If we go after the treasure, we agree we should do it right. Announce our findings and everything.”

Chyrel came out of the office with a file folder and handed it to Doc. “Maybe you should call Nikki back and go over what I found here. You can use my office.”

Doc opened the file and scanned the first document. “Are you sure about this?”

Cheryl nodded, “Like I said, the Spanish kept very good records, but from what I’ve read, there was usually a lot of contraband in the form of pesos and jewels that weren’t on the manifest.” Doc walked toward the office, flipping through more pages.

“What’d you find out?” I asked.

She turned to the four of us and said, “The
Magdalena
carried one and a half million pesos, along with about two thousand pounds of gold and three twenty-pound chests of uncut emeralds.”

“Holy shit!” Rusty exclaimed. “A peso is just shy of an ounce. At today’s price, worth about thirteen bucks. That’s almost twenty million dollars, right there.”

“Gold’s at about eight hundred an ounce,” Tony said. “That’s what? Another two and a half million?”

“Twenty-five million,” Chyrel said with a smile. “You didn’t carry one of those zeroes.”

Only minutes later Doc came out of the office and walked back toward us. “Just this ship alone carried about fifty million in silver and gold, plus another two million in emeralds. Nikki and I both agree, we still should do what’s right.”

I smiled, knowing that was a hard decision, but he’d made the right one.
Hell
, I thought,
ten percent of fifty million is still a huge chunk of change.

“Further,” he said, “we thought it right to split anything we find with everyone here that’s helped figure out where to look.”

“The find’s yours,” Rusty said. “You get half off the top.”

Doc started to say something, but I interrupted him. “And don’t argue about it.”

“Well, I am going to argue,” Doc said.

“Look, old son,” Rusty said. “You and your missus are the rightful owners of whatever you find. You got more than just the two of you to think about. You’ll have kids someday.”

“Trust me, Doc,” Deuce said. “You’re not gonna win this argument. They did the same with me.”

“And from the story you told,” I added, “you have quite a few generations to satisfy.”

Chyrel stood up and said, “I’ll get started right away on the protocol of who needs to be alerted for you and try to get a handle on the salvage laws in the Bahamas.”