Wood's Wreck (2 page)

She needed a cause, and had started volunteering for a non-profit in Key West. Friction had started when the group’s good intentions conflicted with Mac’s way of life. There was conservation and preservation. The former—although sometimes misguided, like in the case of protecting jewfish that in turn decimated the stone crab population—was generally helpful to the ecosystem; the latter shut down the economy, severely limiting the use of the protected areas. This only encouraged poaching, as it forced lifelong fisherman to ply their trade illegally.

The boat crossed into the lighter green water, broken by dark patches indicating the small reefs that dotted the shallows. These passed quickly, and the visibility decreased, as he moved into the deeper channel and entered Boot Harbor. The engines dropped to a murmur as he eased off the throttles. At idle speed, he slipped between the red and green markers, past several gas docks and restaurants, before turning left into a canal. Several houses in, he adjusted for wind and current, eased the forty-two-foot boat up to the dock, and shut down the engines. He looped the stern line around the cleat and tied it off, then did the same with the bow. 

The boat secured, he stepped onto the dock and went to the back of his stilt-framed house; the bottom housed an enclosed workshop, while the upstairs was his living area. Without entering he went around the side, smiling as he saw the driveway empty. At least he would have a few minutes of peace before Mel got home. 

Back at the boat, he checked the lines, adding a spring line to the bow, and hosed off the deck and gear. Despite his current mood, he knew better than to ignore the effects the sea water would have on his equipment. With a beer in one hand and the hose in the other, he worked slowly, in no rush to finish the task and face tomorrow.

Chapter 2

Mel was watching the one-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium filled with farmed coral in the hall outside her office when she heard the sound of despair through the open door of the room adjacent to hers. She looked over at the woman with the flaming red hair, who sat and stared at her computer monitor, pounded her fist again on her glass desk and turned toward the window overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. 

She turned her attention back to the tank, which distracted her from watching yet another tantrum. She liked the tank and often gazed at it, wondering how much longer she could handle the bipolar behavior of the woman, Cayenne Cannady, and if she could even make a difference here.
She isn’t really your boss unless you get a paycheck,
she thought, referring to the pro-bono work she was doing for the non-profit. 

Cayenne had to be in her fifties and wore clothes you were supposed to stop wearing in your twenties. Her hair resembled her name, and her parts were not all hers. Mel’s attorney friend Keith Fricker said
that makeup didn’t hide crazy
, and in this case he was definitely right. 

She took her eyes from the aquarium and looked down at the ledgers spread in front of her. They were grossly incomplete, but from her experience most non-profits did not view themselves as businesses, and spent little time or effort on bookkeeping. Even with the sparse information she’d been able to collect she had analyzed the state of Coral Gardens, the non-profit that Cayenne had founded three years ago. The mission was to grow coral on her permitted site, using profits from the sales of their products to aquarium enthusiasts to fund transplants of Elkhorn and Staghorn corals to the reef. Coral Gardens was originally funded by several research grants and a large donation from her father, all of which had been exhausted last year. 

Saving the reefs was a good cause, and Mel, having trouble adjusting to the standard Key’s lifestyle of rise, drink, rinse, and repeat, was in need of a project; something to relieve the boredom of the mind-numbing routine of island life. She had seen this as worthwhile, offering her legal services to Cayenne in exchange for a desk and a cause to fight for. The concept fascinated her. Growing coral in the same manner as oysters, using ropes and bins to cultivate the specimens. 

But the business plan to raise money by selling farmed coral to saltwater aquarium enthusiasts had tanked with the recession a few years ago, and had suffered the same fate as every other disposable income luxury industry. But as Mel went into the books, she began to see cash deposits that mysteriously matched the non-profit’s expenses. Many of them were large, and had no explanation. She knew there were no coincidences in accounting, and the books said danger all over them. 

What she needed were the tax returns. She doubted Cayenne would do the complicated forms herself, and that meant, at least, that a professional would have reviewed the books.

She looked back at her computer screen, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The web browser was open to Google Trends and showed that the saltwater aquarium industry had spiked before the recession of 2008, followed by a crash and a flat line at the bottom of the graph. Mel might have been a lawyer, but after helping her father manage his construction business, she knew that sales were king and without them nothing else mattered. Without revenue, it didn’t matter how well you controlled your costs.

Cayenne was coming toward her now and she looked up at the fake boobs arriving a few seconds before the rest of her. The woman had on a sundress shear enough to see the very little bit of a bathing suit clearly outlined beneath it. A wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses shadowed her face, the wrinkles and lines covered with a heavy dose of makeup. Someone really should tell her the look didn’t work for her, especially in Key West, but Mel averted her eyes instead. 

“Hey. You want to take a run out to the farm with me? You’ve been staring at the computer and those pesky ledgers for hours. You could use a break.”

Mel looked back at her. She had no interest in a boat ride to the backwaters of the Keys where the farm was located. She knew those waters all too well after growing up here. Her father had lived his last years on an island close to the farm. But this might be a good opportunity to corner Cayenne and tell her exactly where the business stood. Trying to explain to the flighty woman that this was really a business first and a non-profit second had been close to impossible. Sure, saving the world was noble, but without money there would be no nobility. Maybe now they would get a chance to talk about it.

“Sure. That would be great,” Mel said. She got up, grabbed her phone, and started walking toward the door.

“Don’t you want to change?” Cayenne asked.

Mel looked down at herself and wondered why most people felt a bathing suit was required gear for a boat ride. The wind and sun would dry her if she got wet. “I’m good.”

They left the three-story Victorian house and walked toward Cayenne’s Prius, parked in the narrow hibiscus lined driveway separating her’s from the other similar houses on the block, their only difference the style of gingerbread and paint colors. They got in the car and Cayenne pulled out of the driveway. 

Ten minutes later, they reached the marina, parked, and walked down the dock to the charter boat. Another expense that wasn’t needed, Mel thought as she casually hopped onto the deck of the twenty-four-foot center console. The captain offered a hand to Cayenne and helped her down. Cayenne settled into one of the seats situated on opposite sides of the single outboard and waited as Mel untied the lines.

“You look like you know what to do on these things,” Cayenne said.

“I grew up around this.” Mel dismissed her, the sound of the engine making conversation difficult, and the boat moved out of the slip. She watched the other boats as they made their way through the marina toward the red and green markers showing the channel to open water. As they passed the last marker, the man pushed down on the throttles and increased speed until the boat came up on plane. 

Mel planned her strategy to approach Cayenne as the breeze blew through her short hair. There was no way to talk now as the boat cruised at what she figured was 30 knots. It would take them a little less than an hour to reach the coral farm located in the Sawyer Keys Wildlife Management Area, where Cayenne had somehow obtained a permit to grow the coral. 

They headed northwest, quickly covering the five miles to the outside of the barrier made by the myriad of small islands and shoals, which formed a line running fifty miles east to Bahia Honda. Once they passed through a small marked channel that led to deeper water, the man turned northeast. Mel knew from experience that you often had to go backwards before you could go forwards through the intricate waters of the back country. Half an hour later, the boat slowed as they approached a line of buoys one hundred yards off one of the Sawyer Key’s mangrove-lined shores. 

Mel waited patiently while the man helped Cayenne into her dive gear. As she was about to place her mask on her face and step off the swim platform, she turned. “Too bad you can’t come with me. It’s really cool.”

“Why can’t I?” Mel turned to the man. Might as well see what this is all about. “You have any gear? Mask, fins, and a weight belt?”

“Really, you’re going to snorkel?” Cayenne asked.

Mel ignored her as she took the fins and mask from the man. “I need about four pounds of weight.” She sat on the transom and spit in her mask, rinsed it with water and placed it on her head. The man returned with a weight belt, which she took and placed around her waist before donning the fins. Then she back-rolled off the side of the boat into the water. She surfaced and gave Cayenne a thumbs up. 

They both swam on the surface to the first buoy, where Mel watched as Cayenne fumbled for the hose to deflate her BC. She knew the woman lacked experience by the way she swam with her hands. An experienced diver put all their energy into their legs, where the fins could do the work. Without waiting for her, she took several deep breaths to oxygenate her lungs and dove. She finned down, following the line attached to the buoy and observed the small pieces of corral attached to it every few feet. 

Just as she reached what felt like twenty feet, Cayenne passed her and she ascended for air. Another few breaths and she inspected the next line. 

A few minutes later, both women were on the surface, holding onto the buoy. Cayenne bobbed in the light chop and tried to talk, but kept taking water into her mouth. Mel reached over and inflated her BC for her, allowing the woman’s head to clear the surface more easily.

“Wow, you’re really good at that. I can barely get down there with all this stuff.”

“Just practice. You grow up here, you learn a few things.”

“Wish I could do that,” Cayenne said as she put her regulator back in her mouth.

Mel looked toward the next buoy, surprised that she was actually enjoying the water. As a teenager, she had been an accomplished free diver. The buoy was only fifty feet away, and she started toward it. She reached the buoy and started her rhythmic breathing sequence, clearing her lungs of CO2 and filling them with oxygen. After half a dozen breaths, she submerged and followed the line trying to reach the thirty-foot-deep bottom, checking out the horizontal lines attached every few feet, swinging in the current. The starter coral pieces clung to these lines, absorbing nourishment from the passing water. 

At twenty feet, she could just make out some structures sitting in the sea grass, but she was out of breath and had to surface. She tried once more to get deeper, but acknowledged her limits—nowhere near the forty feet she had so easily been able to free dive not too many years ago. 

They met back on the surface and swam to the boat, Cayenne arriving first. Mel held onto the swim platform while the man helped Cayenne out of the water.

“Did you see anything?” Cayenne asked.

“The coral is pretty cool. I thought I saw something on the bottom but I couldn’t get that deep. I guess I’m getting old.”

“But what did you see?” 

Mel sensed the unease in her voice. “Just some stuff on the bottom. I was a good ten feet away, so it was really hard to tell.” She took her fins off, tossed them over the transom, and climbed onto the boat.

“Oh. Those are probably these cool compartments that each piece of coral has to itself. The scientists have this theory that if they’re close together, they’ll nurture each other and grow faster. We’re just starting to experiment with that.”

Mel suspected something wasn’t right, but was forced to hold her tongue as Cayenne went to the man and whispered something in his ear. He went to the bow and let the line loose, then returned to the helm and started the engines. 

They reached the marina an hour later and Cayenne claimed a headache when Mel started to ask questions about finances. She squirmed in her seat as the car worked slowly through the throngs of people. Traffic was heavier now, making the drive longer and even more uncomfortable. Mel quickly left the car and went to her desk to check her email and close up for the day. Before she could leave, Cayenne stormed past her and slammed her office door. 

Seconds later, Mel heard her yelling into the phone.

***

“What do you mean you took someone out there?” the voice yelled at her.

“I had no idea that girl was like frickin’ Jacques Cousteau. She free dives like a fish. I thought she was going to stay on the boat,” Cayenne spat back. “And what are you doing putting those things so close to shore? They’re in my permit area.” 

She did not like the man or his attitude, but had been forced into an uneasy yet profitable alliance with him. The Sawyer Keys were a wildlife management area mainly set aside for nesting birds, but the northeast corner had been privately owned before the designation was added. Obtaining a permit to farm coral there had been easy, but the reclusive man that lived on the island was another matter. 

He had opposed her project from the beginning, often sabotaging her work. Finally, she had confronted him and made a deal that now looked like it might save her.