Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (29 page)

“The same guy.”

“Yeah, I think it had to be a guy. He had an easier time of it, stabbing the life out of an old lady, but yes. My judgment is that the same man killed both victims. And he is not someone who needs to be walking the same earth as you or your little boy or Miranda’s granddaughter or…well…anybody. I’m going to find him, ma’am. And I do appreciate your help. You’re the best unpaid consultant a man could want.”

Episode 4 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 1

by Amande Marie Landreneau

A woman aboard a sailing ship brings bad luck. Men have been saying so for many, many years, but that doesn’t make it true.

Yes, I’m sure that having a woman aboard—or even a few—will bring about jealousy aboard a ship full of men so lonely that they will fight for a woman, any woman. When pirates are involved, then fighting is the same as killing, I’d guess. So unless there’s a woman for every man, I expect there would be trouble, but I wouldn’t say it was the woman’s fault. The bad luck comes when men misbehave, so I’d say it was their fault, wouldn’t you? Regardless of where the fault lies, the “no-woman” rule wasn’t a bad one, when it came to keeping the peace aboard ship.

Every man who sailed with Gola George knew the rules. No one without a Y-chromosome boards a pirate ship. Actually, come to think of it, George was already violating that rule. He was stealing women, or buying them, at every port in the Caribbean, but they didn’t stay on his ship long enough to cause trouble. That was the point of his island harem—to keep his ships free of women.

I’m sure he intended to dump Marisol in the hellhole where all the other women lived, and I’m sure you think I’m about to tell you that Gola George was so taken with her beauty that he couldn’t bear to see her go.

No.

It was Henry the Mutineer who couldn’t bear to see something so beautiful crushed into the mud. Henry was the one who flouted the pirate code for Marisol.

Surprised? Maybe you’re wondering what use a gay man would have for the companionship of a pretty woman? If so, then you’re on the right track. The word “companionship” is the key to the story of Henry the Mutineer and Marisol and Gola George.

Probably, Gola George wanted Marisol, just for her beauty, but what could a gentleman’s daughter have to say to an illiterate man who rose to riches because he was able to kill people well? George was no companion for her.

I think Henry the Mutineer wanted George for the same reason George wanted Marisol—for his beauty. That is why he stayed on the pirate ship where he so obviously didn’t belong. But what, really, could they have had to say to each other, once the loot from their last voyage had been duly entered into Henry’s account books? Henry was forced to seek companionship with his books and his paints and his music.

Marisol’s arrival changed all that. She changed everything.

Marisol was thrilled by the breadth of topics covered by Henry’s library. She shared his tastes in art and music, especially music. Grandmère’s stories all say that Marisol played the lute and that Henry bought her one, so that they could play music in his chamber at all hours. He had a berth built in his cabin, just for her, probably because leaving her alone while she slept on a ship full of lonely, barbaric men would have been just stupid. He bought her silk dresses in every color, which sounds exactly like something an artist would do with a beautiful woman when he didn’t want to sleep with her.

The descriptions of Marisol that survive sound like they come straight from an artist’s lips:
Her hair was golden and red, like sunrise over Barataria Bay, and her deep green eyes were the color of the Bay’s shadowed depths.
I don’t know how many times I heard my grandmother say those words, and I still believe that they have come down to us from Henry’s lips.

Henry taught her to play chess. Marisol taught him to play her lute. He bought her bonnets to shade her fair skin and—this is important—he bought her an intricately carved ivory fan, for those times when a lady must fend off prying eyes.

Surely George was jealous, but of whom? Was he jealous that Henry’s devotion made Marisol sexually unavailable to him? Many other women were available, but George was the kind of man who wanted what he couldn’t have. So maybe he just wanted Marisol to himself.

Or was he jealous at having lost Henry’s single-minded attention? None of George’s words have slipped down through the years, so we will never know, but the stories all agree on one thing: George did eventually snap.

On the day that he grabbed Marisol’s slender body with both meaty hands, she fended off his kiss with a swiftly lifted ivory fan, the way a lady would deter an impulsive gentleman. George was only deterred for the split-second it took for him to shatter the fan against the bulkhead behind him. Marisol’s fate should have been sealed, but Henry the Mutineer was capable of things that George could never have imagined.

Chapter Twenty-four

As it turned out, neither Faye nor Joe had to concoct a reason to go check Didi’s trash cans. When Amande left after breakfast, she asked Faye to meet her at the houseboat later.

“I called my lawyer and told him that a client who had lost three family members in a week deserved more attention than I’m getting. Especially since I’m being forced to live with a woman who’s planning to take everything I have.”

Faye swallowed, trying to decide how enthusiastically to agree with Amande’s assessment of Didi’s plans. She thought the situation was about as dire as Amande said, but what would be the point of rubbing the girl’s face in it?

“I also told him that I’d come to him, because I don’t want Didi to be part of the conversation. He offered to pick me up, since he knows I can’t drive, but I don’t even want her to know I’m talking to him. So could you pick me up, pretending like we’re going out to check some more historic sites?”

Faye had agreed.

“I wanted to make the appointment early, so that Didi would still be in bed and we wouldn’t have to deal with her, but Reuss couldn’t do anything earlier than eleven. I guess he
does
have some other clients. Still, even though Didi will probably be awake, she won’t be real sharp. I’ll take any advantage I can get.”

And then Amande was gone, leaving behind two adults shaking their heads at what the girl had accomplished for herself after they were awake, but before they were real sharp.

***

Dane Sechrist cut his boat’s motor, listening to the shush and grind as its hull slid over the sand ringing the little island where he’d been mooring for weeks now. Now that the motor was silent, he could hear the radio better. The newscaster was saying the same thing he’d said yesterday and the day before. That busted well was still pumping crude into the Gulf, and there seemed to be no way to make it stop. At least, that’s what the oil company responsible for the whole fiasco was saying.

He was trying to wrap his brain around the idea that a big thick layer of oil could come ashore hundreds of miles from the gushing well, spoiling beaches and marsh grasses and wide-open bays. There was almost no hope that it would fail to reach the secluded coves where he’d learned to fish, nor the bayou where he now sat.

Fish glinted in the clear water surrounding his boat. Pelicans plunged from high in the sky, scooping breakfast into the sagging pouches behind their bills. In just a few days, everything was going to change.

What would the oil do to the shipwreck he was hunting? Every instinct told him he’d nearly found it. The Spanish coins—one gold one and two nearly identical silver ones—mocked him. He’d found one of the silver coins here on this island, with a metal detector way more sensitive and expensive than the one he’d seen that sweet little girl waving around.

He could have thrown a rock into the water and hit the very spot where he’d found the other silver coin and its gold brother. And near
that
spot had been the great pile of ballast stones that mocked him still. At low tide, he could almost walk to it. The water was so shallow here that the island swelled and dwindled with the tide. An island was a landlubberish thing for a diver to crave, but Dane wanted this one badly.

Why? It wasn’t just because the logistics of recovering a shipload of gold and silver would be easier and cheaper if he could set up a base camp on a handy piece of solid ground. Although it would.

Dane had spent some time in legal libraries, and he’d developed an opinion on salvage law and the law of finds. His first opinion was that the United States and her various sovereign states had not been consistent in applying those laws, so there had to be loopholes to be exploited, if he should ever need to defend his right to salvage this shipwreck he believed he had found. Mel Fisher had certainly parlayed the
Atocha
into a nice pile of money, so it could be done, but Dane thought he’d found a workaround that would keep him out of court altogether.

As he understood the law, the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987 vested ownership of abandoned shipwrecks beneath state waters in the federal government. This, in Dane’s opinion was bad, very bad. Congress had then transferred those property rights to the states. Dane wanted the property rights for himself, so he didn’t see this as an improvement…if this wreck was beneath state waters. But was it?

The navigable waters of the state of Louisiana extended three miles offshore, but Dane wasn’t sure he’d ever want to be a judge who defined precisely where the Louisiana shore was. It varied with the tide and the wind. It changed as the river deposited silt here and there, and it changed some more as the land sank beneath the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately for Dane, this island and its probable wreck were in Barataria Bay, well within anyone’s definition of “three miles offshore.”

However, state waters had to be navigable, and he wasn’t all that sure most people would put these waters in that category. Most of the time, they looked more like mudflats than navigable water, and this played right into Dane’s hands, because there was another quirk in the case law. He’d found more than one instance of a wreck being awarded to a landowner, because it was embedded in soil on land owned by that landowner.

There was a solid chance that there was a shipwreck embedded in soils that could be reasonably claimed to be part of this island. The coin he’d found on dry land had been found in a place that was unequivocally part of it. Amande’s description of the spots where she’d found her own coins had been vague, but they’d matched what he’d seen during his own work, and one of her coins had been found on land that was always dry, as well. Therefore, Dane needed this dry land badly.

As long as he could plausibly claim that he believed the wreck to be on his island, and therefore that he believed it belonged to him, he figured he had a reasonable defense against accusations that he should have notified authorities as soon as he found it. He could work alone in this remote spot for a long time, possibly forever, without attracting attention. Why should fishermen care what he was doing?

And in the meantime, who was going to know where he found any riches he uncovered? Whether he found his treasure buried on the island or in the mudflats or far out in open water, Dane’s notes would say it was dug up on the island. Case closed.

He would get the island, no matter what he had to do, but the oil worried him. Just a little more time, just a few more dives, just a bit more patience, and he was confident that he’d find the important part of the wreck where the gold and silver waited. But if the oil came, would he be able to dive that wreck? Would the government let him pilot his boat into polluted water? Would all of the oil float, or would some portion of it sink to the bottom, settling over the wreck so thickly that he might never find it?

Damn the oil. Damn BP. Damn that little girl for not being able to describe to him exactly where she found those old Spanish coins. Damn the screwy title on this island. Damn Justine Landreneau Daigle for dying before he could buy it from her while the place was still owned by one single, solitary human being who probably would have been happy to sell. Who owned it now, anyway? Dane sure as hell wasn’t handing any money over to Steve Daigle until the man could prove that the land was his to sell.

Dane stepped out of the boat and started unloading his gear. The cool, wet sand molded to his bare feet. It was time to get out there and dive. He needed to find that wreck while he still could. But first he needed a cup of coffee.