Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (38 page)

When the binoculars showed her fins—many fins and big ones—gathering around Dane’s body, she knew what she had to do. She couldn’t take this boat into a group of sharks and fight them for a bleeding body. When she made the decision to leave Dane’s corpse defenseless, that’s when the shaking started. There were no tears yet, but they would come. Right now, Faye needed to get control of her rebellious body. She had no time to go into shock, or even to just sit and weep.

Why couldn’t she look away from Dane? In a totally inadequate way, training her binoculars on him felt like a way to be his companion on this last journey. As she drew closer, she could see streams of his blood weaving through floating bands of oil.

She imagined that she could smell the blood, but the truth was that its iron odor was swamped by the unnatural stench of petroleum. She forced herself to point the binoculars at Steve’s boat, because she needed to focus on maintaining the right distance and on formulating a plan. Every passing minute that didn’t involve Amande’s corpse being thrown overboard into the water and oil and blood was a good one.

She busied herself by making a mental list of her advantages in a contest with Steve for Amande’s life. She didn’t have a weapon, and he surely did. It would be reasonable to assume he had a knife. It would also be reasonable to pray that he did not have a gun, so she did.

While she was at it, she prayed that Joe had gotten her message and that he was coming to her rescue at top speed.

In the meantime, Faye’s binoculars were her only inarguable advantage. She’d combed through the equipment stored on the boat for something that resembled a weapon, but her pointy and sharp-edged trowel was the best she could do. She wasn’t actually sure it was a better weapon than the small pocketknife she carried everywhere, but it was bigger and heavier. That must count for something.

Michael stirred in the bottom of the boat, and Faye’s denial cracked. What did she think she was going to do? She couldn’t walk into a confrontation while holding him by the hand, but her mind wouldn’t stop cataloging the things that Steve might be planning to do to Amande. Why did parents ever choose to have more than one child? There was no way to put each of them first, always.

Her pale and weak plan traded heavily on the binoculars. After Steve’s boat reached the island, Faye would lurk in her boat, far from shore, and watch for a chance to…um…do something heroic. Her grasp of the details was still a little vague.

***

Steve dropped the anchor and stood, wrapping both arms around Amande and dragging her with him as he climbed over the side and into the water. She went down on her knees, drenching her clothes from the neck down, then he hoisted her to her feet. “The coins, bitch. Where did you find them?”

Amande considered what she should tell him. One of her coins had come from a spot currently submerged in three feet of water. The other one, though, had been in the place where Faye had uncovered bits of very old wood. This suited her purpose better. Steve would spend more time poking around in a spot where it was easy to dig and where he stood a chance of finding something soon enough to keep him distracted. And distracted was good.

He nodded when she pointed to the trees, saying, “Yeah, Justine used to tell me about digging up stuff on this island. Maybe that was the spot. That goddamn Dane was obsessed with finding a shipwreck. He just wanted the island to use as a base. Said it would be a lot easier to salvage a big load thataway. And there was some fancy legal reason that having the island would help him claim the treasure, but none of that makes any nevermind now that he’s dead. Justine knew a lot more about this island than he did, and she always thought there was a chest of gold buried here. We come to look for it a few times, before she got sick. I’m going with her story.”

Getting there was a slow experience, since Steve insisted on dragging her. He seemed to think it was too risky just to let her walk. As they walked, Amande thought of her mother as a child, running free over this very same patch of sand.

Steve kept her body clamped against his, her back to his chest and his knife to her throat. When they reached the spot, the disturbed soil from Faye’s digging was still visible. The tremble in Steve’s body said that he wanted to drop everything and shovel dirt until he got to a pile of treasure. But he couldn’t do that with his arms wrapped around a prisoner.

Amande felt a tremble seize her own body. This was a moment when he might decide to kill her. Seconds passed and she was still alive, so he either thought she still possessed valuable information, or else he had other plans for her before she died. She felt a chill at her core that only made the trembling worse.

Then Steve spoke, but his words didn’t reveal the full scope of his plans for her. They only gave a glimpse into the next phase of her torture.

“I got a shovel in the cabin. And some rope.”

***

Faye had found a handy patch of marsh grass big enough to hide her boat. She’d anchored, then slid overboard with her trowel in one hand, her pocketknife in the other, and the binoculars hanging around her neck. Standing in waist-deep water, she’d maneuvered herself into a spot where she could see the entire near side of the island without much risk of being seen.

Michael had been inconsolable when he saw that she was “swimming” and he wasn’t, so she’d put him in Joe’s backpack and strapped it on herself. He wanted to be fully submerged, but his little legs were dragging in the water, so he was happy enough for the moment.

Faye had watched Steve drag Amande into the cabin and come out alone.

It made little sense to pass up the opportunity for a neat and tidy murder aboard the boat, like Dane’s, opting instead for messing up the interior of a house. Granted, it wasn’t much of a house, but what kind of nut would leave a young girl on its floor in a puddle of blood?

The same kind of nut who had been committing low-stakes murders all week, that’s who. Was a treasure that might not even exist worth doing murder? If you were a person who would kill for a ratty old houseboat, Faye figured it was.

She had to get into that cabin.

If she came ashore on the far side of the island, Steve’s view would be blocked by the trees and by the tallest part of the island and by the cabin itself. By making her way from one clump of grass to another, she could maintain some degree of cover for most of the journey.

It wasn’t going to be easy to do this while carrying a one-year-old on her back and a trowel in one hand. Even the binoculars were starting to look heavy to Faye. There was no help for it, so she took the first step. Michael splashed his feet into the water and laughed out of the sheer joy of being alive in such a beautiful place.

At least her passenger was happy.

***

Amande lay spread-eagled on the floor of the cabin, one arm and leg tied to a post in the middle of the room that had apparently been installed to hold the sagging roof up. Her other arm and leg were tied to a tremendous old brass bed that was topped with a soiled and rotting mattress.

Her brain didn’t seem to be working well. She’d always been able to count on her sharp mind but now, when she most needed it, she found her thoughts to be as slippery as wet swamp muck.

She should be thinking of a way to escape, instead of lying here in this most vulnerable of positions, wondering what Steve had planned for her when he got tired of digging for treasure. Efforts to free herself had accomplished nothing, other than to show just how tightly Steve had tied her bonds. There seemed to be no way to cut those bonds, when she couldn’t reach the stone blade hidden in her pocket.

Instead of plotting her escape, she found her mind wandering in the direction of Henry the Mutineer. Henry had been kidnapped and forced to serve on a pirate ship, then lived to rule a pirate ship himself, at Gola George’s side. If only she had a seven-foot-tall pirate coming to rescue her…

But that pirate had turned on Henry the Mutineer. No, wait. Her frantic brain was scrambling the story, and that just wasn’t like her. Gola George had indeed turned on Henry the Mutineer, but Henry had betrayed him first. On the day that George put his hands on Marisol, and she defied him by splaying her ivory fan in his face, George had shattered the fan with one big hand and prepared to take her by force.

How could he have possibly predicted that the foppish Henry would pull his jeweled dagger from the decorative scabbard strapped to his leg, burying its blade in the thick shoulder muscles attached to George’s sword-wielding arm?

And then Henry and Marisol had run for their lives. They ran from George and from his crew of pirates, who would have turned on Henry the instant they heard what he’d done. They ran from Henry’s paintings and Marisol’s lute and their silk clothes. They fled down the gangplank, straight through the shabby settlement where George housed his women, and right out the other side. They hid deep in the swamp, so deep that Marisol had to shed the heavy skirts that dragged in the mud and caught in the thick grasses. She stripped to her linen chemise and drawers, and it was a long time before she owned clothes other than those.

Just before dawn, after the pirates had given up their hunt and gone to sleep, Henry and Marisol stole every last rowboat and dinghy in the settlement. Why did two people need all those boats? And how did they steal them, with only the two of them to row?

They needed all those boats for Henry’s final mutiny, because they took every last one of George’s women with them, and all of George’s children. Amande had heard it said that George hunted Henry till the end of his days, but she doubted it. According to the stories, Henry had hidden in plain sight, with the river pilots who lived near the great river’s mouth at Head-of-Waters. If Gola George had wanted to find Henry and kill him, he could have done it. But that would have meant looking straight in the face of his betrayer and his lifelong friend, and he would have had to do it while knowing full well that, by attacking Marisol, he had betrayed Henry, too.

It was no coincidence that Amande was thinking of Henry’s spectacular escape and of the rescue of Gola George’s women and children, and she knew it. She was a self-sufficient person, and she liked to think that she could take care of herself, but at that moment, right then, she knew that she just couldn’t. Sometimes a person needs rescue. Amande wondered if a rescuer would ever come for her.

Perhaps she had been hallucinating, but she could have sworn she saw something at the moment of Dane’s death. It was nothing metaphysical. She’d seen no spectral spirit rising heavenward, but at the moment she rose from the bottom of the boat where Dane had thrown her to save her life, she’d seen…something. It had been nothing more than a speck on the horizon that was too hard-edged to be natural, but it had been something.

Amande’s dreams of rescue had been dashed with Justine’s death. Her mother was never going to sweep into her world and fix it, but maybe there was somebody out there who would.

Something about that speck on the horizon had brought Amande comfort and hope.

Something about it made her think of Faye.

Chapter Thirty-one

Faye’s goal was in sight. She had a clear view of the path Steve would take when he returned to the cabin, so she knew that Amande was still in there alone. The only door was on the far side of the cabin, which wasn’t as bad as it seemed. There was no need for her to walk around and go through that door, risking being seen by Steve. The glass had been gone from both windows on her side for years, from the looks of things.

It wouldn’t be easy to shove Michael through one of them and then crawl through herself, but it wouldn’t be the hardest thing she would do before bedtime, either. The land between her and the cabin was covered with shrubby underbrush and marsh grass where she wouldn’t leave obvious footprints. For once, nature was on her side.

Faye had lingered in the water until she’d almost worked out a way to get Amande out of there and to get all three of them off the island, but Michael’s presence complicated every plan she tried to make. She was going to have to improvise. She’d never seen an old movie that climaxed with the cavalry topping the hill, coming to the rescue with bugles blaring, while the soldiers cared for the toddlers astride their saddles in front of them. This did not mean that it couldn’t be done.

Sticking a pacifier in Michael’s mouth and clipping its handle firmly to his shirt, she crept up to the window and manhandled him and herself through it. Her little pocketknife was sufficient to cut through the ropes binding Amande, but it took some time. Finally, the girl was free. It was time to get out of the cabin.

Faye struggled back through the window, then took Michael from Amande and helped her crawl through. Bowed down by the weight of Michael in a heavy backpack designed for Joe, she could barely stand, but it made more sense to crawl anyway. Only the waving of the underbrush and marsh grasses would give away their position as they made their way back to the boat.