Fallen Mangrove: A Jesse McDermitt Novel

Book 5: Caribbean Adventure Series

by Wayne Stinnett

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sea Adventures

Synopsis

A Spanish treasure ship is driven by a hurricane onto the rocky shoreline of Elbow Cay in September of 1566. Few of the crew survive, but they manage to salvage most of the treasure and bury it on the island, leaving a clue to its location locked in a chest and placed in the bough of a young mangrove tree.. Four-hundred and forty years later, Jesse McDermitt and his friends solve the riddle that was hidden inside a chest found encased in an ancient mangrove tree and go in search of the treasure. When the Miami based Croatian mob learns about the treasure they go to great lengths and expense, in an attempt to relieve Jesse and his friends of the riches. A demented, hyper sexed island woman also wants it for her own, as does a Miami attorney who is married to Jesse’s estranged daughter. As the body count grows, will the crew of Gaspar’s Revenge find the treasure or become one of the island’s statistics?

Release date: September 28, 2014

Publisher: Down Island Press

Print pages: 427

Sample

Chapter One

September, 2006

 

“What’s this?” Bob asked, lifting an old chest from the attic floor. Bob Talbot and his new wife, Nikki, had come to Hunters Creek, a suburb south of Orlando, two days earlier on Bob’s Indian Chief motorcycle. It was a four-hundred-mile ride from their home on Stock Island in the Keys. They were visiting Nikki’s parents to help them move out of their house and into a condo.

“Looks old,” Nikki said. “I don’t remember ever seeing it before. Anything in it?”

“Like everything else around here.” Bob gave the chest a quick shake and something large rattled inside. “Should we open it?”

“The house is a hundred years old—of course everything in it’s old. Better set it aside and let Dad open it. It might be personal.”

He placed it by the ladder leading down to the second floor. They were nearly finished with the attic and after moving a few other items to the ladder, Nikki went down so her husband could hand the things down to her.

It seemed a shame that her parents were moving out of the old house. It was where she’d grown up and where her father had grown up before her. The home had been in the family for several generations. Her father had offered it to her, but neither she nor Bob wanted to leave the Keys. So for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the old house would be owned by someone unrelated.

They carried the things from the attic down to the kitchen, where her mother was sorting what was to be kept. The upper floor had already been cleared out and everything given away or sold off. Only her parents’ bedroom furniture and the furniture in her father’s study remained. That would go to the new condo in Satellite Beach, some fifty miles away on the east coast.

Bob gently placed the old chest on the table. Abbey Godsey, Nikki’s mom, looked at it with disdain. “Carry that into the study, please, Bob. Frank will have to decide what to do with it.”

Bob picked up the chest and carried it through the kitchen and across the hall to his father-in-law’s study. Frank Godsey was a retired Orange County Judge and although he liked the man, Bob sensed the Judge was skeptical about Bob’s chosen profession. Bob was the First Mate of a combination fishing and diving charter boat out of Marathon.

“Hey, Judge,” Bob said from the doorway to the man’s inner sanctum, addressing him by his former title out of respect. “Your wife said to bring this to you.” Placing the small chest on a table in front of the older man, Bob thought he saw a glimmer in the man’s eye.

“Ah, the chest,” Frank said and looked up at Bob with a grin. “I’ve tried to solve the mystery of that thing since I was a kid. My dad gave it to me when Abbey and I married, and his father gave it to him on his wedding day. Story is, that chest has been handed down from father to first son for over two centuries and not a one of us has ever figured out the mystery.”

His face changed, a look of melancholy replacing the glimmer of fun that had been there. “Have a seat, Bob, and I’ll tell you the story.” When Bob sat down across from the older man, he noticed another facial change, to an expression of resolve.

“I have no son to give this chest to,” he finally said. “Nikki’s my only child, so this thing’s yours now.”

He proceeded to tell Bob about his early family history. The Judge’s fifth great-grandfather, Quincy Godsey, had been a sea-faring man. He’d been born in Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Revolution and went to sea at an early age. At twenty-five, two years after the birth of his first son in 1802, his ship ran aground off the island of Elbow Cay in the northern Bahamas. At the time, it had only recently been settled by colonial Loyalists who had left Charleston after the war. The situation with the British on the islands and the former colonists was tenuous at best. As it turned out, one of the first settlers on the island knew Quincy’s mother, Elizabeth. Quincy was by that time the First Mate of the merchant ship Gloria and was able to negotiate a price with the local wreckers to help pull the ship off of a sandbar, with the help of Winston Malone, the son of his mother’s friend.

While waiting for the tide to rise the following day, young Quincy went exploring on the northern shore of the island. A recent hurricane had submerged that part of the island and most of the trees had been swept away. Quincy’s sharp eyes noticed something unusual in the high boughs of an ancient mangrove that had been toppled by the wind and waves. The branches had grown around and encased an ancient chest that was now exposed after the branches had broken apart.

With some difficulty, Quincy was able to remove the chest and open it. The chest was watertight and when he opened it he found nothing more than a coconut inside. It was at this part of the story that Nikki came into the study and the Judge opened the chest, revealing the coconut.

“A coconut?” she asked. “Your ancestors handed down a coconut through how many generations?”

Bob was enthralled with the story and said, “Eight, beginning with your sixth great-grandfather, Captain Quincy Godfrey.”

The Judge smiled. “Nine now,” he said as he closed the chest and pushed it toward Bob. “If you can’t figure out the mystery, give it to my grandson.”

“You’re giving this to us?” Nikki asked. 

“It needs a new home and a new set of eyes on it. Do you know Spanish?”

“I speak a little,” Bob replied. “Everyone in south Florida does. Why?”

“There’s some sort of riddle carved into the coconut and it’s in Spanish. Old Spanish. And parts of it have just faded away with time and can’t even be guessed at.”

“Thanks, Judge,” Bob said. “Means a lot to me. What have eight generations learned so far?”

“Almost nothing,” the Judge replied. “A few words translated, but like I said, it’s old Spanish. Even people in Spain don’t talk like that anymore. I’ll tell you exactly what my dad told me forty-two years ago. It’s better if you just start from scratch.”

Bob studied the chest a moment. It was longer than normal, nearly two feet, but only about a foot tall and less than that in width. The top was rounded and it had two ornate iron straps that became the hinges on one side and the clasps on the other.

“Did any of your ancestors learn anything about the chest itself?” Bob asked.

“The box?” asked the Judge. “No, not that I know of.”

“Is it the original box the coconut was found in?”

The Judge sat forward, glancing curiously from the chest to Bob and back again. “So far as I know,” he replied at last. “I don’t see why anyone would have put it in a different box. Why?”

“I have a friend that can probably tell us where and when the box was made,” Bob said.

“The ‘when’ was figured out a long time ago,” said the Judge. “The coconut has a date carved into it—September twenty-third, 1566. It’s partially rubbed off, but still legible.”

Nikki sat down next to her father. “1566? That’s right after Columbus discovered America.”

The Judge snorted and grinned. “A lifetime after, Peanut. And Columbus didn’t ‘discover’ anything, least of all America.”

She looked from her father to Bob with a puzzled glance. Bob explained, “The Judge is right. Columbus first landed on the islands of the northern Bahamas, where he was greeted by the people that lived there. Being a staunch Catholic, he named the first island San Salvador, after the Savior, and the second Santa Maria de la Concepción, after the Virgin Mary. It wasn’t until his third voyage that he landed on the mainland of South America. Thinking it was an island he named it Isla Santa, now called Venezuela. He was greeted by the people that lived there, also. You can’t really ‘discover’ a land where people already live.”

“You know your history, Bob,” the Judge quipped.

“It was my favorite subject all through school.”

“Back to the box,” the Judge said. “If the writing on the coconut is in Spanish and dated 1566, why wouldn’t you think the box was the same?”

“No reason to think it’s not,” Bob replied. “However, the early explorers bought and traded things all over the known world. Whoever put that coconut in the box might have bought it somewhere in their travels. It’s at least worth finding out. It’s in pretty good shape and could be worth a fortune itself.”

“Why would they put it inside a tree?” the Judge asked.

“You said the tree was a huge mangrove,” Bob replied. “The chest might have been placed in the branches of a small tree to protect it from the water and the tree grew around it. What year did you say Quincy found it?”

“His son, George, was two years old, so it would have been around 1804.”

Bob let out a low whistle. “If the date’s right, the chest was in that tree for almost two hundred and forty years. I know mangroves live over two hundred years sometimes, so it’s possible.”

“You’ve already figured out a part of this mystery nobody else has,” the Judge said, smiling. “I’ve no doubt you’ll be the one to finally solve it.”

A horn sounded from outside the house and Abbey shouted, “The moving van is here.”

Within a few hours, the movers had everything loaded on the truck and had left for the coast. Bob and Nikki, along with her parents, stood outside the old house as Frank and Abbey said their goodbyes to the neighbors, some of whom Frank had known all his life.

“You sure you won’t reconsider?” Abbey asked Nikki.

“About the house?”

“Yes, it’s been in your father’s family since they moved down here from Charleston during the War of 1812.”

“We like it in the Keys, Mom,” Nikki said. “It’s where our roots will be planted.”

Frank and Abbey took one last look at the old house, with its stately oaks dripping with Spanish moss, before handing the keys to the real estate agent who had just arrived. With that last formality, they each hugged their daughter and son-in-law, got in Frank’s big Mercury and drove away.

The day before, Nikki had arranged a small van to pick up the few things she wanted to keep and had them shipped to their home on Stock Island. Bob had strapped the chest to the small luggage rack on the back of the motorcycle after first stuffing it with padding that one of the movers had given him to keep the coconut from bouncing around inside. The ride back home was uneventful and they arrived in Marathon just before sunset.

Chapter Two

“Shouldn’t they be here already?” Rusty asked. I rolled my eyes at my old friend. He’d asked the same question about every fifteen minutes since I got here. Deuce had called me at 0600 to say they were passing Alligator Reef, and I’d come down to the Rusty Anchor in my skiff from my island in the Content Keys.

“Dammit, Rusty!” I said a bit too excitedly, causing Pescador to lift his shaggy black head from the floor. “They’ll be here when they get here. It’s a sailboat, not a Donzi. The wind’s light, so they’re probably under power.” Pescador is my dog. I found him a year ago, stranded on a sandbar after a hurricane, catching fish. He was catching the fish, not me. Turns out that even though I’m a licensed offshore fishing charter boat Captain, my dog was the better fisherman—hence his name, Spanish for fisherman. He’s been living with me ever since.

My relationship with the short, three-hundred-pound, bald, bearded man on the other side of the bar went back much further, nearly three decades. We first met on a Greyhound bus headed to Parris Island in the early summer of 1979. We were in the same platoon in Boot Camp and were stationed together a couple of times before he left the Marine Corps. I was his best man when he married his high school sweetheart in 1981 and sat next to him at her funeral, just two years later. She died giving birth to their only child, Julie, named for her mother, Juliet.

We’d stayed in touch over the years since he’d returned home to the Keys to take care of his daughter. I’d visited from time to time, staying at his home in Marathon. Seven years ago last June, I retired from the Corps after twenty years of service and moved down here myself. I’d always loved the Keys, ever since I was a kid growing up in Fort Myers. I’d also stood as best man when Julie married Deuce. They were due back from their honeymoon today. The wedding was almost two months ago and had been marred by an explosion that took the life of a young man I’d grown to trust.

I first met Deuce when he was just a teen. His father was Rusty’s and my Platoon Sergeant when we were stationed together in Okinawa, Japan. Sergeant Russ Livingston, Senior, and I became friends, and when we both found ourselves stationed in North Carolina together, we took every opportunity we could to go diving. Many times we came to the Keys, and we’d sat right at this very bar on more than one occasion.

I met Russell “Deuce” Livingston, Junior, for the second time when he came here looking for me. His dad had been murdered and Deuce wanted to spread his ashes on a reef we’d both loved. By then Deuce was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy SEALs. Together, we’d found the man that killed his dad. His bleached bones can probably still be found on a tiny island just a few miles from mine.

Deuce and two of his best operatives had left the SEALs and gone to work for Homeland Security. The group of men that his dad’s killer belonged to also happened to be responsible for the death of my own wife. It didn’t take much for Deuce and his merry band of misfits to rope me into working with them. They now trained and lived part-time on my little island.

“Are you losing your hearing, man?” Rusty shouted, interrupting my thoughts.

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I asked what time was it that Deuce called you?”

“Probably about the same time Julie called you, numbnuts. As soon as they got in range of a cell tower. About zero six hundred.”

He looked at the clock on the wall over the bar and said, “Well, that was nine hours ago.”

Just then, Jimmy walked in. He used to be my First Mate until about a year ago, and now he worked part-time at the bar.

“Jimmy,” I said, “thank God you’re here. Take over so me and Rusty can go down to the boat ramp, will ya?”

“Take over what, dude? You two are the only ones in here.”

“Just watch the bar,” Rusty said as he came from behind the large slab of oak.

Rusty and I left the bar, with Pescador trotting ahead of us, and walked down the crushed-shell drive to the boat ramp at the back of the property. It was more like a pair of overgrown ruts through the backyard than a driveway. This land had been in his family for several generations. An old shack off to the east of the boat ramp was where Rusty’s grandfather had once made illegal rum during Prohibition. Now it was where Rufus, Rusty’s old Jamaican cook, lived and whiled away his retirement.

We got to the boat ramp and sat down at a small table under the shade of an old gumbo-limbo tree. Beyond was the Atlantic Ocean. More precisely, Hawk Channel and the Straits of Florida, a narrow funnel between the Florida coast and the islands of Cuba to the south and the Bahamas to the east. Through this funnel ran the greatest river on Earth, the Gulf Stream, moving warm water from the Gulf of Mexico through the Straits and up into the North Atlantic. It was this current that Britain owed its climate to.

“What time is it?” Rusty asked again.

“Ten minutes later than last time you asked,” I replied. “You’re acting like a worried dad whose daughter’s out on prom night with Alice Cooper.”

“Jesse, she’s my only kin. And these last two months has been the longest we’ve been apart since the day she was born.”

“What about when she went through basic?” I asked. Julie had enlisted in the Coast Guard nearly a year ago.

“I flew up every other weekend.”

“Really?” I said incredulously. “Bet that went over well with her CO.”

He stood up suddenly. “Hey! There they are!”

I looked where he was pointing and sure enough, I saw the distinctive red and white sails on Deuce and Julie’s blue Whitby ketch clearing the point at Key Colony Beach. Although the wind was light, I’d been wrong assuming they were under power. They had every inch of canvas up. Still, it took twenty minutes before they made the turn toward Rusty’s channel, started the little diesel engine and dropped the sails, then another ten minutes before they putted into the canal and were tied up at the docks.

“It’s a great boat, Dad,” Julie said after we’d helped them tie up and were seated at the bar. “She sails really well, whether in light wind or heavy seas. We finally came up with a name—James Caird.”

Rusty smiled as he wiped down glasses behind the bar. He’d never been a fan of wind power, but seeing the boat under full sail in winds too light for most sailboats, he was starting to change his mind. A little.

“Shackleton’s lifeboat,” he said. “I never thought you paid much attention to those old sea stories I told you.”

“She told me about it,” Deuce said. “I remembered hearing about it in college, but she made the story come alive one night while sailing in the Leewards. When we made port the next day, we looked it up on the Web—,” The sound of a motorcycle outside interrupted the debate between power and sail. A moment later my First Mate, Bob Talbot, and his wife, Nikki, walked in. Bob had been a Navy Corpsman with 1st Battalion, 9th Marines when they met. Nikki had been a Marine clerk at 9th Marines’ regimental headquarters. In the Corps, we affectionately called all our Corpsmen ‘Doc’, even though they weren’t really doctors. Doc was carrying what looked like a treasure chest. Pescador rose from his spot next to my stool at the end of the bar and trotted over to them to welcome them by allowing each to give him an ear scratch.

“Hey, Doc,” I said as Pescador accepted the ear scratch from both of them. “How’d the move go, Nikki?”

They walked over and Doc placed the chest on the end of the bar as Rusty slid two cold Dos Equis in front of them. Rusty had a terrific memory for what people liked to drink.

“It was pretty emotional, Jesse,” Nikki said. “Their house has been in the family for almost a hundred years.”

“I can understand that,” Rusty said. “My great-grandpa built this place and the house. My grandpa rebuilt them after both were blown down in the Labor Day hurricane of thirty-five.”

“Where’d you get the chart chest?” Deuce asked.

“Chart chest?” Doc said.

“That’s what it looks like,” Deuce said, pointing at the chest on the bar. “A sixteenth-century chart chest. I’m guessing German.”

“German?” Doc said with a quizzical expression. “We were thinking it was Spanish.”

Deuce walked over to the end of the bar and examined it more closely. “No, not Spanish,” he said. “They used mostly brass fittings. These are iron. And in damned good shape, too. Is it real?”

“As far as we know,” Doc replied. “Nikki’s dad gave it to us.”

“Is it full of doubloons?” Rusty whispered with a grin.

“Nope, nothing in it but a coconut,” Doc said. Then with a half grin, he added, “And a riddle.”

“A coconut?” Julie asked.

Doc unclasped the chest and opened it, taking out an old, dried-out coconut that looked like it’d been baked and placing it on the bar. He turned to Deuce and asked, “So, what’s a chart chest?”

Deuce was still examining the chest. “Usually longer than a standard chest, like this. Also, like this one, it has a seal around the inside, making it watertight. They were carried by ship’s navigators and used to keep their nautical charts, logbooks, and diaries dry. I’m almost certain that’s what you have here. What made you think it was Spanish?”

“This right here,” Jimmy said. “The coconut has Spanish writing on it.”

“What’s it say, Jimmy?” I asked, knowing that he had a pretty good knowledge of the language.

“I can only make out a few words,” he replied, studying it. “The date is definitely September twenty-third, 1566, even though part of it is rubbed away. First part says something about mist, then something about a woman.” Turning the nut, he pointed to two more words, adding, “This word here, ‘suprimio,’ means suppressed, and this one means trade. It’s not like any Spanish I’ve ever read, though.”

“Dad said it’s old Spanish,” Nikki said. “From the old country.”

“You should let Chyrel take a look at it,” Deuce said. “I can call her and ask her to come down.”

“No need,” I said. “She’s up on the island. She bought herself a little skiff and has been exploring for the last month.”

Chyrel Koshinski is our resident tech guru. She handles all of the communications and computer wizardry for Deuce’s Homeland Security team. Just over a year ago, while serving as a SEAL Team Commander, Deuce was recruited by the Department of Homeland Security to create and head up a team of the best operators from military, civilian, and investigative services. Their mission at the time was to monitor and, if need be, intervene in the ever-growing terrorist threat in the Caribbean and south Florida. I serve as a transporter, occasionally moving field operators and equipment around on my boat, Gaspar’s Revenge. She’s a forty-five-foot Rampage fishing boat, perfect for moving small groups around undetected. Chyrel joined the team out of the CIA and proved extremely valuable this past year in the takedown of some high-level terrorists, drug smugglers and murderers.

“What can she do with it?” Nikki asked.

“For one thing,” Deuce replied, “she can enter the writing into her computer’s translator. She probably has some forensics tools to bring the words into sharper focus, too. Any idea what it all means?”

Doc grinned and said, “Better open a few more beers for everyone, Rusty. I’ll tell you the story that was told to me.” In fifteen minutes, Doc had spun a tale of Spanish treasure, shipwrecks and early American history.

“So this chest,” Rusty said, “was found inside a busted-up mangrove tree?”

“That’s the story,” Doc replied. “I asked the Judge if he could give me any more information on what his ancestors might have found out about it, but he said it would be better to start from scratch.”

“I know a little bit about the early Spaniards in the West Indies, man” Jimmy said. “They were brutal, dude. They believed what they had to offer the natives of the islands was worth all the gold and silver they could carry off. The islanders didn’t have much need of what the Spaniards offered, namely the Roman Catholic religion and civilization. For over two hundred years, anyone that wouldn’t accept those gifts were usually put to death in a lot of nasty ways, including Protestants. From when Columbus first landed in 1492 to 1530, less than forty years later, all but a handful of the native people of the Caribbean were murdered or enslaved. By the date on this nut, the Spaniards controlled all of the Caribbean, with forts in Cuba, Florida, and South America, and they’d begun moving cargo and treasure from the Orient across the Pacific to southern Mexico and Panama. From there, they took it overland to El Caribe and eventually to Spain. The age of the Conquistadors, man.”

“So, why would someone put the coconut in a chest meant to keep charts dry?” Julie asked.

“That’s easy,” Rusty said. “To protect the nut.”

“Okay, so why hide it inside a tree, instead of burying it?”

“Ever see how a tree can grow around a rope or chain-link fence?” I asked. “If whoever put that nut in the chest, did it over four hundred years ago, he might have simply put the chest in the crook of a tree for safe keeping, and the tree grew around it.”

“Exactly what I told the Judge,” Doc said with a crooked grin.

“Still begs the question, why did he want to protect the nut?” Julie asked.

“Seems to me,” Doc said with that half grin of his, “there’s really only one answer to that. He didn’t have anything else to draw a treasure map on.”

Looking at the others, I thought it over. Many years ago, me and Deuce’s dad found a little treasure up in Fort Pierce. Last year, Deuce’s dad was killed looking for another treasure, when he found part of it. Earlier this year, me, Deuce, and Rusty went up there and found the rest. It was enough that Deuce and Julie’s kids wouldn’t have to worry about college, Rusty could do some renovations on the bar and his house, and I was able to spread a little around the tiny community that had grown up on my island.

Besides myself, I had a caretaker who had his own little house and looked after things for me. We’d started a fledgling business growing vegetables and crawfish in an aquaculture system. The sale of the crawfish was becoming pretty lucrative for him, his wife, and their two small children.

At any given time, there might be a few others living in two small bunkhouses, and the vegetable garden had quickly become a part-time hobby for many of them during their downtime. These were members of Deuce’s team and they ranged from a former female Olympic swimmer turned Miami cop to a number of SpecOps-type guys from the SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Rangers, CIA, and the Coast Guard’s elite Maritime Enforcement.

“You guys in a hurry to get home?” I asked. “We can head up to the island and see what Chyrel can do right now.”

“I have to work in the morning,” Nikki said. “You go ahead, Bob. Call me when you get there.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Deuce said. “We’ll come up in the morning. We have a lot of things to do on the boat this evening.”

Doc and I walked out to the docks behind the bar, where he kissed his wife goodbye and we shoved off after I promised her I’d have him home before she got off work. Pescador took his usual spot on the casting deck. We’d just cleared the jetty when we heard Doc’s motorcycle start up and I brought my little skiff up on plane.

We turned toward the Seven Mile Bridge and skimmed across the skinny water between East Sister Rock and Boot Key. Rounding the tip of Boot Key and turning north, I pushed the throttle a little more. Crossing under the bridge, we heard a horn behind us. We both looked back and saw Nikki waving as she headed up the long span on Doc’s motorcycle. We waved back.

I turned more westerly and wound my way through the small islands of Cocoanut, Teakettle, and Sandfly Keys. Looking over at Doc, I could tell he was happy to be back on the water. Being cooped up sixty miles inland doesn’t sit well with a waterman.

It was only twenty miles in the skiff, and it took only thirty minutes to get to my island. I’d bought it and the Revenge a month after I retired from the Corps in ’99, pretty much on a whim. I did some work on it off and on for a couple of years and camped out there when the weather was cool, until I met a woman named Alex. We became friends, but after a little more than a year, she’d had to go back to Oregon to take care of a sick brother. I really went to work on it then. In less than a year, I’d built my little house on stilts, mostly from scrap lumber I’d picked up at the Miami shipping docks and fallen hardwood trees that I’d cut up and had milled in Homestead. The pilings were concrete and went down into the limestone and coral base quite a few feet. All in all, it was a simple, sturdy little house. The first I’d ever owned.

When Alex had returned to the Keys a year ago, we’d both realized our friendship had changed to a lot more than that while she’d been gone. She loved the little house and we’d both realized we wanted to live out our lives there. In a week, we were married. She was murdered the next day.

That was when I fell in with Deuce and his team on a more permanent basis. Together we’d found those responsible and dealt with them in our own way. Not really vigilantism, as Deuce’s team had the full backing of the federal government, but none of those guys will ever hurt anyone again.

Since then, I’d added the two bunkhouses, the aquaculture system, a battery shack, a generator system, and a water maker. With the addition of my caretaker Carl Trent’s little house, we had five permanent structures. Together, they didn’t add up to the square footage of a decent-sized house on the mainland, but it was home for us.

I keep my boats under the house to avoid prying eyes. When I’d first built the house, the channel I’d dug by hand was barely deep enough for the skiff and the underside of the house was open. After Alex died, I redoubled my efforts and dredged the channel eight feet deep and twenty wide, building a pier on top of the spoils and enclosing the area under the house, adding large doors to the south side.

Using the fob on my keychain, I released the latch and the east door slowly began to swing open on its spring-loaded hinges as a light came on inside. The main house was still completely on its own solar and wind system that charged a bank of deep-cycle marine batteries. All of the electric in the house was twelve volt. The doors had an electric motor that pulled them closed.

When I’d originally built the place, I’d had it in mind to dock the Revenge under there, so I’d built it with the floor beams fourteen feet above the high tide. There are two bays, with a narrow dock all the way around three sides and another narrow dock in the center, and large hanging closets for gear at the front of each of the three docks.

The Revenge was tied up on the far western side. Over the last year, I’d acquired a few other boats. As a wedding gift, Deuce and Julie had given us Russ’s twenty-foot Grady-White. It now belonged to the Trents. I’d given it to them so Carl’s wife, Charlie, could get back and forth to go shopping on Big Pine Key and take their kids to school. It was tied off against the far eastern dock, along with my late wife’s red Maverick Mirage skiff. Tied up to the center pier on the east side was a thirty-two-foot Winter center console named El Cazador, the Hunter. It fell into our possession last winter, having been confiscated during a drug bust. On the opposite side of the center dock was a Cigarette 42x, one of the fastest boats on the water. It came to us from the terrorist smuggler who was ultimately responsible for my wife’s death. The previous owner didn’t have any more use for it now that he was vacationing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a guest of the federal government.

I turned the skiff around in front of the house and backed it in between Cazador and the Grady, tying off sideways to the rear pier behind Cazador. I was surprised there wasn’t a welcoming committee. Usually the Trents’ two kids were always at the dock when any boat came in.

“We weren’t up there long,” Doc said, “but it’s sure great to be back down here.”

As we stepped up onto the pier, I said, “I was worried Nikki might con you into accepting the Judge’s house.”

He handed the chest up to me before climbing out. “I kind of got the impression she was reluctant to give it up, but in the end she loves it down here as much as I do.”

Walking around the back of the docks and along the western pier to the door, I clicked the fob again to close the doors and said, “I wonder where everyone is.”

The door opened just as I reached it. “Hey, Jesse,” Carl said, standing in the doorway. “Welcome back, Doc.”

“Thanks, Carl,” Doc said. “It’s good to be back.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“I heard you coming. Tony’s down by the fire pit telling a story to the kids, Chyrel, and Charlie.”

“The man can spin a tale,” Doc said with a chuckle.

Pescador looked up at me, his ears up and tail wagging. “Go ahead,” I said, and he bolted up the steps.

Carl grinned and asked, “What’s in the treasure chest?”

“We’re hoping Chyrel can tell us. It’s a coconut with some kind of riddle carved into it.”

“A riddle? Don’t mention that to Charlie.”

“Don’t mention what to me?” Trent’s wife asked from the top of the steps leading up to the deck surrounding three sides of my little stilt house.

“Oh?” Doc said, glancing at Carl. Then looking up at Charlie he asked, “You good at riddles, are you?”

“Can’t resist trying to figure one out,” she replied, smiling. “Welcome home, Doc.”

We crossed the deck together and I told the others to go ahead while I put away some things. I went inside and switched on the single lamp in the main room. My house really only has two rooms, three if you count the head. The main room is a combination galley and living room, with a small propane stove and sink in one corner. By the door is a small propane-fired refrigerator and across the room is a tiny table and two chairs, next to a small pantry. The living room part has a pair of recliners, with a small table between them. The rest of the room is cluttered with work benches, outboard motor parts and a wood-burning potbellied stove.

Beyond the living room are two doors. The one on the left is the head and the one on the right goes to my bedroom. It’s equally Spartan, with nothing more than a queen-sized bed and a chest of drawers. It has two windows, one looking out over the deck to the large clearing in the middle of the island and the other looking east, over the treetops to the multicolored waters of the flats and the Gulf beyond. I usually slept aboard the Revenge, as I’d sort of grown fond of air conditioning, and allowed any couples visiting to use the house. Although it’d been a year since my wife was killed and I’d enjoyed the company of a couple of women in the last few months, I wasn’t ready to share that bedroom on a permanent basis yet.

I opened the pantry door and put my go bag inside, took my Sig Sauer P-226 and holster from the small of my back and placed it on a shelf above the bag. I never go anywhere unarmed, but here on the island I felt safe. Only one person had ever made it to the shore undetected, but trying to get through the thick tangle of vegetation around the clearing was a different story. Pescador’s sharp ears had alerted us, and the intruder ended up with a huge knot on his head from a heavy lignum vitae tree branch, swung by Deuce.

I took a six pack of Red Stripe from the refrigerator and went back down to the docks. I stepped aboard the Revenge and went across the wide cockpit and up the steps into the salon, turning on the cockpit light and overhead lights in the salon and galley. Putting the beer in the fridge, I heard the generator start up. It was controlled by a voltage regulator and came on automatically whenever the onboard house batteries, which were separate from the engine’s batteries, got too low.

I went back upstairs to the deck and looked out over the north rail as the last rays of the sun painted the few clouds to the west a dark red and purple. I couldn’t help but think, Red sky at night, as I looked out over the island. Doc, Carl, and Charlie were standing around the fire pit on the northeast side of the clearing, with Tony, Chyrel, and the Trents’ two kids.

Directly across from my house stood the two tiny bunkhouses I’d built and Carl had remodeled. Originally, each had had six sets of bunk beds and a small desk at one end. I’d failed to take into account that lodging for women and an office might be needed, so Carl had converted the bunkhouse on the west side. He put up a wall separating two sets of bunks from the others, then turned the two in the smaller part of the bunkhouse so they were against the new wall, leaving more space for all of Chyrel’s electronic gizmos.

Just in front of the two bunkhouses were two identical heavy wooden picnic tables, a flagpole at one end and a huge stone fireplace and grill at the other. Originally, that’s where most of the cooking was done. When Carl built his house on the west side, overlooking the small beach and sandbar, I’d bought a top-of-the-line-oven for it. A big, commercial type oven and six-burner stove. Charlie cooked for everyone and a few times that had been more than twenty people.

I heard a small splash to my right and glanced over. There was a widening circle in the first tank of the aquaculture system we’d built. Carl was in the process of enlarging it, but for now there were only three tanks, each twenty feet by eight feet. He’d added the third just a few weeks earlier. The first tank was deeper than the other two, which were up on a platform so the tops were slightly higher than the first one. In the first were crawfish, separated into several sections with different-size mesh so the bigger ones couldn’t eat the littler ones. The second tank held a system of racks that grew several kinds of vegetables. The third one was to grow even more vegetables, and the one Trent was now building would grow tilapia, a farm-raised freshwater food fish that tastes like snapper.

Water was pumped from the bottom of the crawfish tank up to the first vegetable tank, where it flowed through to the second one before being gravity fed back to the crawfish. The nitrates in the water from the crawfish tank fed the plants, and the oxygenated water from the plants was returned to the crawfish tank. It was all Greek to me, but Trent had a friend in South America doing it and learned all there was to it. Apparently, it was working, because we always had fresh tomatoes, broccoli, and lettuce. He wanted to try to grow corn in the third tank, and the shoots were just starting to come up.