***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Copyright © 2016 Erika Marks
TO: Sam Felder [email protected]
FROM: Beth Henson <[email protected]>
Sam:
I hope this email finds you, and finds you well.
Last week, our curator discovered a logbook in the home of a Buxton collector. It appears the last few entries were written by Theodosia Burr Alston in the months following the Patriot’s disappearance, so of course I thought of you right away.
I don’t know if you are still entertaining your investigation of the mystery, but I did want to let you know in the event you might wish to come to the museum to have a look. If you do, I’ll gladly reserve any announcements to the press until you’ve had a chance to see the journal for yourself. We are, as you can imagine, excited beyond words at this acquisition.
Also, I have an extra bedroom if you need a place to stay.
It would be lovely to catch up.
Fondly,
Beth
Bethany Henson
Director, Outer Banks Shipwreck Museum
Nags Head, NC
She descends through the mist, the weight of her tank rolling along her spine, the smooth motor of her fins cutting silently through the water.
She is looking for the wreck’s debris field, the pieces of its battered puzzle emerging through the murky haze, and the clouds of sand and silt that have kept the ship’s bones hidden for so long will part like smoke.
But something is wrong.
The strange color of the water is her first warning—a purplish black, bearing no resemblance to any ocean she has ever dived beneath. When she slides her hands through this water, it feels thick and warm, which the sea never is at such depths. She swims on, diving deeper, her weight belt fighting her body’s natural buoyancy. Where is the bottom? She should have reached it by now. Her bearings lost, she looks the only way she can, side to side, her vision restricted by the small window of her mask. She is desperate for some marker to ground her, the towline to the boat or telltale humps to signal the ocean floor. It is as if she has been set adrift in space, an eternity of nothingness around her, no edges, no corners, just endless dark and the curdling certainty that she is alone in the universe.
She reaches for her gauge to check her oxygen and sees the impossible—only a hundred pounds left; just a few minutes in the water and the tank is nearly drained. Blood rushes to her scalp, panic surges. She has to turn around, go back, go up.
Rising, she is relieved for a glorious second to feel her body obey; then fear returns. She swims harder, hands clawing as they race toward the glowing surface, as if she is buried in dirt and trying to dig out.
But she knows she swims too fast. Her joints ache. She has to slow down, but still her arms and legs continue to fight, even as excruciating pain tears through her elbows and wrists.
If she can just get back to the boat, back to the top.
If she can just breathe.
One
Key Largo, Florida
June 25
Liv bolts upright, her chest squeezed like a fist. She needs a breath, just one, but there’s no air, only hollow wheezing. She reaches into the dark and slaps at the nightstand, finding the drawer pull and tugging hard, sending the clutter of shells and hair clips inside it skidding to the edge like unbelted children in a swerving car. When her fingers finally land on her inhaler, she shoves the cylinder into her mouth and sucks in as she depresses the top, relief shuddering through her to feel the rescue of air.
Safe.
She falls back against the headboard, blinking into the black, and waits for her breathing to slow.
Stupid, awful dream. Third time this week. Whit would surely blame the leftover Thai she devoured shortly before ten, or the cup of mocha chip she indulged in afterward.
Whit.
She reaches out for the long compass of her husband’s sleeping body, but her fingers land on the empty mattress.
She feels for her phone and clicks it to life.
Three thirty-two.
He did return from dinner with Phil Edwards, didn’t he?
Or did she just dream the crash of him coming into their bedroom, the groan of the bed when he fell on it, still dressed, the two thumps of his shoes hitting the floor? What about when he rolled against her and reached up under her T-shirt, wanting to make love, then falling asleep before he could get her underwear off?
She scans the dark, listening. The familiar clanging of metal blows through the screens, the telltale clamoring of movement on the boat, then the frothy growl of Theo’s propellers spinning to life.
Oh God.
She kicks herself free of the sheet and lands on the cool Mexican tile of their bedroom floor, knotting her red hair as she rushes down the hall to the living room. Through the sliders, beyond the line of palms that separate the lanai from the concrete of the dock, she can see him on the upper deck of their thirty-foot dive boat.
She yanks the door open, no time to close it behind her. The humid air clings to her bare legs, a curtain of moisture, as if she’s stepped through a giant spiderweb.
“Whit!” She yells as she runs down the steps, terrified he won’t hear her over the whir of the motor. “Whit!”
Miraculously he turns and sees her, a drowsy, pleased smile spreading across his face. He’s wearing only a pair of boxers. Her immediate thought: Please, God, don’t let him fall in. Sober, he is the strongest, surest swimmer she knows; drunk, he will sink like a stone, and with his six-three and two hundred twenty pounds, his rescue will be impossible for her small frame.
“Avast, me beauty!” He swings his glass high, sending a necklace of liquor arching through the dock lights, and her pulse quickens.
He only speaks pirate when there’s bad news.
The concrete is damp and prickly under her bare feet. “Whit, what are you doing?”
“I thought I’d take the old girl out for a moonlight ride. Join me?” His blue eyes are wild, wolfish.
“There’s no moon,” she says, as if the correction might deter him. “And you’re not even dressed.”
“Right you are, lass.” He tugs a faded Marlins cap off the throttle handle and snaps it over his tousled blond hair, giving her a satisfied grin. “Better?”
Terrific.
She rushes onto the boat and climbs the ladder to the flybridge, feeling the tremors of panic soften when she arrives at the helm. This close, she could lunge for the ignition if she had to—but the current of dread still sizzles in the muggy air. A nearly drained bottle of scotch sits by the wheel, the amber liquid shuddering with the vibration of the engine. He’s done something foolish, but what? The possible transgressions race through her: An impulsive purchase they don’t need? The coltish blond he flirted with at Rachael and Daniel’s solstice party? Has he totaled the van . . . ?
Despite his height and sturdy build, her husband looks fragile, something glued and not yet dried, and it scares her.
She can hear the tremble of uncertainty in her voice. “Love, shut her down and come back to bed. You need sleep.”
“God, I love this boat.” He drops into the captain’s chair and swivels around, his expression wistful as he scans the controls. “Do you realize that we could chart our entire life together on this boat, Red? That every moment of significance for us happened right here?”
She nods, nostalgia falling like a shawl over her too, snug and warm. Even now, beneath the diesel fumes, she can still find the scent of rusted metal and warm rubber, the intoxicating smells of a perfect dive.
But when Whit lifts his gaze to find hers, his eyes crackle with lust—it’s not their early memories of treasure hunting that he’s recalling.
“The first time I kissed you was on this boat,” he says. “The first time I held that gorgeous hair in my hands.” He opens his huge palms and closes them in fists. “Christ, I couldn’t get deep enough inside you.”
His eyes slide down her body, drinking her in, and the familiar tug of longing pulls at the space below her stomach, the weight of wanting his words could always coax from her like a fever.
But despite desire, impatience burns. She just wants it over with—wants to know what he’s done. Let it be something small, something easily and quickly repairable. They have only two weeks before they are scheduled to begin their next mission in North Carolina, the one Whit has promised will bring them the success their recent salvage missions haven’t.
“Whit, please.” She’s begging now. “What’s wrong?”
He spins the chair back around and lands under the glare of the spotlight. For a blissful moment, she thinks the crescent of purple under his right eye is a trick of the night, a reflection from the surface of the canal, and her heart holds for a second before it crashes.
“My God, your face!”
“It’s not so bad,” he says cheerfully. “Feel worse for the table.”
“You should be putting ice on it.”
“Good idea.” He slams his tumbler against his eye and winces. “Shit.”
She tries to help guide the glass to the worst of the bruise, but he waves her off. “It was all a big misunderstanding.” His voice is conversational, as if she might actually enjoy this story. “Phil and I were waiting for our beers, and this knucklehead next to us accuses Phil of stealing his seat, so I tried to—”
Phil? Blood rushes to her forehead. “Whit, please just tell me you didn’t let our project archaeologist see you get into a bar fight.”
He squints his uninjured eye. “I don’t think he saw much after that unfortunate pop to the side of his face.”
“He got hit?”
“It was just a tap, really. I doubt he’ll need more than a couple stitches. Serves him right for having such a lousy swing.”
“Whit!” Liv claps both hands over her mouth, sure if she doesn’t she will let go a scream that will draw every one of their neighbors out of bed.
They have spent months putting together this salvage project of the Siren, a blockade runner buried off the coast of Wilmington that sank with a fortune in her hold, and he has blown it up in a single night. All the pieces they’ve secured, the beach house in Topsail that is to be their base of operations, already rented. A seventy-eight-foot commercial dive boat, already chartered.
Panic sends her heart into a gallop, thumping hard against her ribs. “What are we supposed to do without an on-site archaeologist?”
Whit tugs off his cap and tosses it behind him. “We’ll just hire someone else.”
“Who? There isn’t anyone left on the planet who’ll put up with you!”
“Then you’re stuck with me, lass.” His eyes flash wickedly. “Let’s go below and I’ll shiver your timbers.”
“Whit—I’m serious!”
“Aye, so be I,” he growls playfully, yanking her into his lap and getting a bite on her neck before she wriggles free and moves for the ladder. “Red, wait.”
She hears the engine go quiet, but she is already back down and across the deck, training her eyes on the water and trying to find focus in the calm surface.
Two weeks. Maybe there is still a chance they can find someone else to take over the PA role in that time, even on such short notice. It would have to be someone familiar, with a good reputation. Someone who could step right in, no handholding. Someone who could keep Whit straight, keep him coloring in the lines, as Sam used to say—
Sam.
Gooseflesh flares up her bare arms. She grabs herself and rubs hard, afraid Whit will see the tiny, traitorous bumps.
She takes a seat on the bench and waits for him to descend the ladder. “What about Sam?” she asks.
Whit’s eyes cool, the teasing cornflower blue darkening to pewter.
“He used to be one of the best marine archaeologists out there, Whit.”
“Until he went back to law school.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s washed his hands of the field completely.”
Whit stares down at her with disbelief. “Felder left, Red. He left you—he left us. He made it clear he wanted out.”
“That was nine years ago. Maybe he’s let that all go.”
No wonder he continues to look at her as if she’s lost her mind. Sam who believed sentimentality was a character flaw; Sam who could—and did—turn off emotions like car engines?
Still she presses on. “Maybe he’s forgiven us.”
“Forgiven us?” Whit frowns at her. “What the hell did we ever do to need his forgiveness?”
We fell in love, Liv wants to say but doesn’t—and she doesn’t need to. Whit’s eyes find hers and flash with understanding.
“We have to at least consider asking him,” Liv says calmly. “Scrapping this project isn’t an option. Not when we’re so dangerously close to being in debt.”
Close? God, who is she kidding? They’re already sunk. The fortune they made from the recovery of the Bella Donna six years earlier has been bled—not to mention the legal fees they incurred fighting for their fair share of the valuables—and they are hemorrhaging with the cost of this new mission. The Siren may have held millions in gold when she sank on her way to Charleston—or so Whit insists. Even if they recover only a piece of that fortune, they’d be on firm ground again.
Whit blows out a hard breath and joins her on the bench, swinging his nearly drained bottle between his knees. “I don’t know, Red. There’s too much history there.”
“This time would be different,” she says. “This wouldn’t be about the Patriot.”
“Wouldn’t it?” Whit’s eyes hold hers, demanding truth. The mystery of the Patriot’s 1813 disappearance was the thread that had always stitched their lives together—hers, Whit’s, and Sam’s—from the moment they united as students to find the elusive shipwreck until the day they each went their separate ways.
Whit promised her that he’d find the answers Sam couldn’t. It had been a fierce and heartfelt vow—the only kind Whit could ever make. He’d even renamed their boat Theo’s Wish for the wreck’s most famous passenger, Theodosia Burr Alston, knowing how attached Liv had become to the lost woman. Whit had sworn not to quit until he and Liv solved the mystery, and proved what they’d always believed, that pirates had seized the Patriot and taken Theodosia captive. But thirteen years after their first expedition to search for the lost schooner, life and the pursuit of treasure have taken them far from their precious investigation, and Liv still doesn’t have her answer.
Tears sting the insides of her cheeks. She could tell Whit about her nightmare, make him feel especially guilty for putting all this at risk when he knows she has promised her doctor this will be her last deep dive, but she doesn’t want to relive it. And she doesn’t have to confess her dream to convince him.
He downs the last of his scotch, wincing as if he’s swallowing nails. Around them, the music of night animals stirs in the quiet, the buzz of insect wings, the trill of frogs. Whit’s phone sits on the hatch—he scoops it up and begins to type.
“You won’t find him that way,” Liv says.
“Watch me.”
She shivers, her hands clasped, toes clenched. She considered searches like this a hundred times, curious to where life took Sam in the years after he left her. It is the ease that has kept her from looking—knowing how much she could find out, and how quickly.
“He’s on the cape,” Whit announces, holding out the phone to show her. “Captain of a dive charter boat.”
Liv takes it, startled. Sam back to dive charters? Is Whit sure it’s the same Sam Felder? What happened to his pursuit of maritime law? She scrolls to read all about the captain of the Flotsam. There isn’t a picture, but there’s no question Whit’s found him.
She hands back the phone quickly, as if she couldn’t care less what has become of Sam Felder, only that he’ll accept their offer, and Whit begins to dial.
“You’re calling him now?” she says.
“Why not?”
Her skin warms again, regret surging. She stands, too quickly, and feels light-headed. A wave of guilt quickly steadies her.
In all her disappointment and fear, she’s been neglectful too.
“Maybe we should see if there’s another time, a better time,” she says sheepishly. “Maybe wait till the fall now.”
When she glances back at Whit, he is frowning at her. “What are you talking about?”
She shrugs. “I’m just saying, why rush? We’ve hit a bump—it happens. Maybe the best thing to do is step back and see if we can’t reschedule the project.”
“Red . . .” His voice deepens. “If this is about your father . . .”
She shakes her head and looks away. “It’s a long time to leave him.”
Whit groans. “For Christ’s sake, you’re not leaving him—you’re going away for a few weeks. For work. Besides, he won’t even know you’re gone.”
She closes her eyes, the reminder terribly painful though she knows Whit doesn’t mean to hurt her.
“Baby, he has people there to take care of him.” His tone has turned tender, all reproach gone.
But still she can’t relent. “People,” she says. “Not his daughter.”
“At some point, you’re going to have let yourself off this cross, you know.” He reaches out to stroke her cheek, but she turns away and rises. There’s no point in this argument—it’s always been so simple for him. But then Whit was the one who’d convinced her to move out of her father’s house into the dorms, when Sam had cautioned her to use patience, to live at home awhile longer. Sam who promised her there would be a reward for propping up her overly dependent father—Whit who’d urged her to cast aside duty and spread her wings, to soar the way her mother never had the chance to do.
“I’m going in,” she says.
“Red.” Whit’s call stops her at the edge of the boat. She turns back, seeing a flash of trepidation spark in his eyes. He levels a hard look at her, those silver-blue pools like two whitecapped seas, swirling and deep and blowing right through her. His appeal is a force of nature—as unyielding as the tide.
“She’s still out there somewhere and we’ll find her,” he says. “I intend to keep my promise.”
She blinks back tears as she turns for the house. “You always do.”
Damn.
Whit climbs back up to the flybridge and stares out at the canal. He never meant to finish the bottle. He never meant start that fight in the bar—or lose them their PA.
He never means any of it.
Dueling points of pain pierce his temples. He squeezes his eyes shut.
Livy.
She can look at him, flutter those long red lashes, and wreck him. Whit tells himself he’s made her happy all these years and most days he believes it. Then there are nights like this one, black nights so silent you have to remind yourself you’re not underwater—and how do you know you’re not? When you breathe, which sometimes you have to remind yourself to do too—and then you’re full of doubt, fat and bloated with it like a tick.
He worries about her diving. The Siren is deep—nearly a hundred and fifty feet down—the deepest she’s ever dared to go. But how can he forbid her now, when he was the one who’d convinced her to learn to dive in the first place, teaching her that weekend Sam was out of town and she’d nearly drowned in the process?
Jesus, he’d been so scared of losing her that day. And she hadn’t even been his to lose yet.
If he weren’t so drunk, Whit knows he could untangle his thoughts, but maybe it’s best they stay all knotted up. He’s not dumb—not even when he’s drunk. Sometimes he thinks he might just be sharper this way. People get lazy when they know you’re drunk, unguarded and loose, sure you won’t remember their confessions or even hear them. He’s learned a lot at the bottom of a bottle.
And now he has to ask Sam Felder to save his skin. And Sam will see that Whit hasn’t kept his promise to Liv—the only one she ever really cared about: to find out what happened to the Patriot, and, more important, to Theodosia. Theo.
Maybe Liv’s right—Sam never hung on to the past. Of course Sam’s probably given up the mystery of the Patriot. Whit has nothing to prove—especially not to Sam Felder. Only to Liv. Only her.
The light in their bedroom blinks out. Whit stares at the dark rectangle of glass, imagining Livy lying in her usual pose: one leg long, the other bent. His flamingo. Just like the one he’d had tattooed on his shoulder three years ago after he lost their wreck claim in a poker game on Wes’s boat. Still furious, she’d told him the tattoo looked like a mutant crawfish, but she’d kept them in bed until noon the next day admiring it until she teared up. “I thought flamingos were supposed to be pink,” she said. “Not mine,” he told her.
Yes, maybe it’s better that he’s plastered, he thinks as he rolls his thumb over the screen to find Sam’s number. Maybe numb like this, he can pretend he doesn’t care. He’s done it before.
Provincetown, Massachusetts
“Yours.”
Justine’s voice purrs through the darkness, so effortlessly Sam thinks he dreams the word, but the chimes continue, growing louder.
He turns his head, disparate pieces of information coming together in sharp focus. His ring. His phone. He reaches across her naked body for his cell, squinting to read the screen. He doesn’t recognize the number, so he lets the call go to voice mail, dropping the phone back on the shelf and blinking up into the watery blue-black, listening to the familiar sounds of the sea at rest all around him, the slap and suck of waves against the hull. The lullaby of the tide. He was dreaming of a coral reef, curtains of fish like stained glass, and he wants to get back there.
He throws an arm over his eyes and sleep returns.
Justine is already dressed when he gets to the galley to make coffee at six thirty.
Her blue eyes ice over. “I’m not sleeping here anymore. My back can’t take it.”
She made the same ultimatum the last time he met her for dinner. After all, she argued, she has a beautiful town house with windows instead of portholes, and sheets that don’t smell like salt and rust. She should have known him three years ago when he was still at the firm and living in a condo with a tenth-floor view of the Chicago River. She would have liked his digs just fine then.
He knocks the old grinds out and gives the basket a rough rinse.
“You could rent a real place, you know,” she says. “God knows you could afford it.” Her face softens slightly when she reaches out to touch his short beard. “The office gets new listings in every day. I could show you some.”
“This is a real place.”
“I mean a real place on the ground.”
He pops the top off the coffee can.
“So, who was that who called last night?” she asks. “And please don’t tell me you’re married.”
The phone. Sam walks back to the berth and picks up his cell, seeing the telltale envelope in the corner of the screen. He listens to the message as he returns to the galley. The man’s voice is rough, tentative, familiar.
“Sam, it’s Whit . . . Yeah, that Whit . . .”
After that he hears only pieces.
“—need a new project archaeologist—
“—I screwed the pooch—
“—kind of last minute, I know—”
An interminable rambling minute later, Sam hangs up.
Justine studies him as he returns to the galley. “Everything okay?”
“Fine.”
“Who was it?”
“Wrong number.”
He returns to the coffeemaker and frees the empty carafe. Justine slides in between him and the counter, blocking him, her eyes trying to hold his. Her fingers dance up his bare chest. “My first showing canceled,” she says. “Maybe we could give that awful bed of yours another try?”
Sam reaches around her to push the pot back onto the plate. It’s almost seven. He doesn’t have time for coffee—what was he thinking?
“I need to get the boat ready,” he says. “It’s late.”
Justine steps aside. “Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bunk, Captain.” She sweeps up her purse and moves to the ladder.
Sam watches her exit the cabin, thinking he could stop her if he wanted, say something kind, but his thoughts are already a million miles, another lifetime, away.
Today’s passengers are a bachelor party, three men from Boston, all in their late twenties. Cape Cod is loaded with wrecks, several of which are in the harbor and easily accessible—others, such as the famous pirate ship Whydah—lay just outside park waters. Sam has chartered to those sites on occasion, but since today’s tour members have requested an easier dive, he will take them to Marisol, a trawler not far from shore that sank in forty feet of water, her pilothouse still intact and covered in a colorful rug of anemones.
His first mate, a good kid named Pete, helps the men set up on the deck. Sam watches them carefully as they strap in. Often divers inflate their experience to be allowed down without a guide, and Sam fears these men have done just that. Two stumble with their gear—and though Sam can’t know if it is the effect of too much partying the night before or a general lack of skill, it doesn’t matter. Even an easy dive comes with risks, and he is not a betting man. Sam has dived and crewed with careless men and he knows the ripple effect of one poor decision when you’re under.
He tells Pete to suit up and follow them down as a guide. The ringleader, a cocky, doughy-faced blond, is insulted and resistant, insisting the charter company assured them they could dive on their own, but Sam is feeling especially agitated this morning and he doesn’t care. The guy can agree to a guide, or they can all go back to the marina. There are a few tense moments of indecision, but the man finally consents. Minutes later, the four take their giant strides off the swim platform and descend, leaving Sam on board to watch the water and the horizon. Bad weather can appear without warning and churn the sea in a heartbeat. Still it will be a good dive for them, he thinks as he walks the deck. Good visibility.
If it was a tougher dive, he might have considered joining them. The water seems too quiet up top. Or maybe his thoughts are too loud.
An hour later, the group surfaces, and just in time too. Clouds have gathered and the sea is building a steady chop. Out of their gear, the men congregate on the benches and drain sodas.
The blond cowboy makes his way over to Sam at the bridge, wearing an admonished smile.
“Sorry about that earlier,” the younger man says. “I was thinking maybe we’d find ourselves a little luck down there. A few gold coins, you know?”
“Not likely on a fishing boat,” Sam reminds him.
“You ever find treasure around here?”
“Not here, no.”
The man’s eyes brighten. “But somewhere, right?”
Sam shrugs, his patience thinning again. “Somewhere, yeah,” he says, turning his attention to the wheel.
Back at the marina, the men pile into their cars and head into town for their last night of debauchery. Sam tells Pete he can take off early, that he’s more than paid his dues for the day, and the young man is grateful. More than anything, Sam
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