Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (35 page)

“Do you think there’s a shipwreck down there?” she asked.

“Yes. Of course there is. There’s lots of shipwrecks down there that nobody will ever find. But have I found one of them? Yeah, I’d like to think so.”

He opened the small bag and pulled out two boxes. “I didn’t find all of these, but I thought you’d like to see them. Especially since yours got stolen.” He handed her the first box.

Nestled on cushioning material at the bottom of one shallow box were two silver coins and a gold one. He gestured toward them and said, “I found those. But I bought the others.”

The second box held two silver coins. Even if she hadn’t recognized the box, Amande would have known them. She’d looked at them under magnification countless times. She’d held them in her hand until her fingertips knew their shape and texture. She knew them by their weight, to the very last gram.

She grabbed her coins, one in each hand, and rose to her feet. “Of course, you didn’t find these.
I
found them.” She started backing toward the door, reaching behind her to unlock it. “If you took my coins, you probably killed my grandmother. Why did you bring them back here? Did you think I was so young and stupid that I couldn’t figure it out?”

“Wait!”

Oh, God, now he was coming after her.

“No, I didn’t take your coins, and nobody could ever think you were stupid.”

How far was it to the door?

She took a step backwards, then another. “Those coins were in my drawer when I left that morning with Faye and her family. When I got home, my grandmother was dead and my coins were gone. If you have the coins, then probability says that you killed her. It’s simple statistics.”

“I bought the coins, honestly. Steve told me they came from his island, the one he wants to sell me as soon as—”

“As soon as he figures out a way to steal my part from me. You bought these coins from Steve? Are you nuts? You’re ignoring the obvious.”

It was Dane’s turn to look awkward and clueless.

“He stole my coins, you idiot. He killed my grandmother and stole my coins. I bet you even told him I had them, didn’t you? Steve probably stole them because he knew you were looking for stuff from the sixteen hundreds and would buy them from him. And because he knew that telling you he found them on the island would make you want to buy it even more. Geez. How stupid can you be?”

Amande reached the door and fumbled behind her, only to feel the doorknob vibrate as someone on the other side turned a key in the lock. The door opened and she fell into Steve’s arms.

Dane’s eyes locked on Steve and, for a moment, Amande could see that he had forgotten her. “You stole her coins? When? Did you sneak over here while I was talking to Miranda about buying Amande’s share of the island?” Dane said. “That was idiotic. I
asked
her if she knew where the coins came from, for God’s sake. And you knew I was planning to ask her that. Surely, you knew she would suspect me…or maybe you knew she’d never get a chance to suspect me, since you were already planning to kill her when you came over here.”

“You didn’t need to be dealing with the old lady. I told you I could get control of the whole island, if you gave me time.”

“I’ve got no time to waste, not with the oil coming.”

Amande knew that she should probably let them forget she was there while she came up with an escape plan, but she had listened long enough to the two of them discussing ways to cheat her.

“You were trying to get Grandmère to sell you my island? And then you stole my coins? When is somebody in this goddamn world going to recognize that something…anything…belongs to
me
?”

Amande dropped into a squat and leaned hard to the left, hoping to use her body weight to throw Steve off-balance. It was worth a try, because she was sturdily built and no shorter than he was, but he still had a hundred pounds on her. He yanked the girl to her feet, and she could feel new bruises on her rib cage. She wasn’t surprised when Steve pulled a knife from a hidden scabbard in his pants. She had felt the shape of it digging into her back when he first grabbed her.

The point of the knife was poking into her throat, just below the jaw. Dane’s freckled face bore a sheen of perspiration. “What good is this going to do you, Steve? All you need to do is get control of the island for me, so I can solidify my claim on the wreck. When I find it, I’ll buy the island from you at twice what it’s worth. Tell you what. If you let the girl go, I’ll raise my offer to three times the island’s appraised value.”

“When you find it…that’s the problem, ain’t it? How long you been diving for it, and you still don’t know where it is? This little bitch knows where she found them coins, and I think it was on that island I own a piece of. Maybe there’s more out there. More old silver can’t be a bad thing, even if there’s not a shipload of it. Maybe if I know where her coins come from, I won’t need you to figure out where the treasure ship wrecked.”

Steve was obviously proud of this feat of logic, so much so that he decided to parade his mental superiority in front of Dane and Amande. “If you’re not smart enough to find that boat after all that diving, then I got no more use for you. I got diving equipment. When the island is all mine and I’m living rent-free in this houseboat, I can look for the treasure ship myself, any time I feel like it.”

“What happens to us, now that we know you killed my grandmother?”

Steve ran the point of the knife along Amande’s jaw, heading for her ear. “I never said I killed your grandmother. I think maybe you should probably stop saying it. We need to get in the boat now and go find that shipwreck.”

“The wreck’s mine,” Dane said. Amande thought it was rather brave of him to talk back to an armed man, though his bravery was mitigated by the fact that it wasn’t his throat being caressed by a humongous hunting knife. The romantic in her hoped that he was doing this to get Steve to rub the knife all over
his
throat, instead of hers.

No luck. Dane was still focused on the wreck. He was still negotiating a business deal.

“We agreed early on that I’d buy the island from you, then I found out that you didn’t own it all. We have a deal when I can see a way to get full title to the island, not before. That’s all the money I’ll ever owe you. You’ve got no piece of the wreck.”

Amande felt cool metal travel down to the hollow of her neck.

“The island belongs to me and this girl. Three fourths of it is mine. The rest is hers. If I kill her, it’ll all be mine. Then we’ll have a deal, won’t we, Sechrist?”

Ignoring the fact that calling a knife-wielding man names was unwise, Amande said, “You really are stupid. If I die without a will, the state of Louisiana will decide who gets my property, and I bet it won’t be you. I’m thinking it’ll be Didi. But maybe I do have a will. You don’t know, do you? If I do, I can guarantee that
you’re
not on my list of heirs.”

“Shut up.”

She felt more bruises form under his cruel hands.

“The girl’s smarter than you are, and she’s right. I won’t be buying that island until I know for sure that you have the title, and I won’t be showing you where any of the artifacts were found, ever.”

“Yes, you will. You’ll take me there, if you want to keep this little bitch alive.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Amande tried to turn her head enough to look Steve in the face. “I’ll show you the rest of my coins and I’ll tell you where I got them, if you let me go. Some of them are silver, so they’re worth something. They’re in my room.”

She eyed Dane. He knew that she didn’t have any more artifacts that Steve would give a damn about, because she’d described her collection to him in excruciating detail, but he was keeping his mouth shut. Maybe he was on her side.

Steve twisted Amande’s arm behind her back and shoved her toward her bedroom. Dane followed.

She pulled the folder of silver American money out of the drawer first and handed it to Steve. With luck, he’d be too intoxicated by the smell of a precious metal to notice what else she was doing.

While he was pawing through the twentieth-century coins, she reached in the drawer again and pulled out a tray of stone tools. A flint blade lay atop the other implements. Joe had praised its finely honed edge. She palmed it.

With her free hand, she retrieved a tray of European import goods—buttons, a pipe, a green glass jar. After she handed it to Steve, who was starting to need more than one free hand to deal with everything she was throwing at him, she surreptitiously swiped the sextant from her desktop and crumpled a carefully chosen map around it in a loose wad. Those import goods were all far newer than the seventeenth-century shipwreck Dane and Steve were hoping to find, but Steve didn’t know that. It would take him a few moments to rifle through them and find that they bored him. Maybe in those few moments Amande would think of something to save her life.

Or maybe in those few moments someone would come to help her. Faye would be at her side in an instant if she knew Amande was in trouble, despite the fact that she was just a brand-new acquaintance who would be going away soon. Amande had known the same kind of loyalty in her grandmother. She wondered if she would ever have that in her life again.

Steve thrust the trays back at her. “Nothing’s in here that’s any good. We’re going out to the island, and you’re gonna show me where you found them Spanish coins.”

He twisted her right arm behind her again. It hurt, but if one of her arms had to be yanked half-off, this was the one she wanted yanked. The stone blade was wrapped tight in that hand where he couldn’t see it, biting into her palm, and she didn’t need it right now. She did need her left hand free, and she let it dangle beside her leg, keeping her body between Steve and that hand.

There were more things than a sextant and a crumpled map in that left hand. As he dragged her to his boat, she dropped tiny potsherds that she’d grabbed from the basket on her desk. One by one, they marked her trail. Dane followed them silently. Once, she saw him nudge a sherd with his toe, moving it into a position that would be more obvious to anyone searching the boat. It felt good to have an ally, although she would have been more grateful for an ally with a gun.

At the door, she let the sextant drop. The map wrapping it cushioned its impact with the wooden deck, so it fell silently. Dane nudged it with his toe until the paper opened slightly, revealing old brass. She could see that it had fallen so that it pointed toward the spot where Steve’s boat was moored, the very boat he would be using to take her from her home. Could her meaning possibly be more clear?

Come and get me. Come this way…

Amande hoped it was Faye who found the trail she’d left behind. Some people wouldn’t understand the meaning of those cast-off pieces of old trash, but Faye would know to look for her on the island, the only place Amande had ever found anything of value.

Faye would come get her. Amande hoped she had enough sense to bring Joe.

***

Joe was still far enough away from New Orleans and its urban amenities to enjoy crappy cell phone coverage. He figured he must have driven through a tiny zone where his phone worked, because Faye’s messages and texts had all come through at once. He wasn’t as much of a talker as Faye, so he’d just sent her one text that read, in its entirety:

I think we should adopt the girl. Reuss is working on it.

Going by the length and number of her messages, some of which rambled on about how awful it would be if Amande married somebody to get herself free of Didi, he inferred that he had underestimated the amount of communication an event like adoption required. What else was new?

He also inferred that she hadn’t received the one succinct message he
had
sent. Joe had been married long enough to know that he probably needed to talk to her in person, before her emotions got away from her. Faye might be a doctor and a scientist and probably the smartest person he would ever know, but she was also a woman. When it came to emotional stuff, life worked better when they did things her way.

He’d spent a fair amount of time talking to Reuss, then he’d stopped for gas and a cup of coffee, so he really hadn’t gotten very far down the road. It only made sense to turn around and go talk to Faye.