Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (37 page)

Should she turn back? If her rescuers were
en route
, they’d probably be in binocular range very soon. If they weren’t coming, then she needed to go all the way back to the marina to get help, then turn around and head back out. This would give Steve nearly an hour to take Amande…anywhere. She couldn’t bring herself to leave the girl without a protector, even such a feeble protector as herself.

She tried hard to think of other reasons than murder for Steve to take Amande.

To bond with her as a potential adoptive father? Doubtful.

To get her to help him with his search for island treasure? Maybe.

Miranda’s fate nagged at her. Faye thought she’d probably been murdered on a boat, then dropped into the water. Is that what Steve had in mind for Amande, opening the way for him to jockey for ownership of everything—the island, the houseboat, and the stock? Faye could think of no reason why it wasn’t.

And Dane. He was on the boat, so Faye figured he and Steve were working together. It made sense. They both wanted the island, and Amande kept them from controlling it.

She wondered why Dane had never just come out and asked how much Amande wanted for her share. Certainly he wasn’t rich, but the girl needed money. More to the point, Didi needed money, and she would have cut Dane a deal, even if Amande didn’t want her to sell. Then Faye remembered that she was dealing with a treasure hunter. He wouldn’t want to give away the secret of what he’d found and where he’d found it. No, cutting a shady deal with Steve made a lot more sense than going for a straightforward purchase.

Faye kept worrying over her text to Joe and Benoit. Even if they didn’t get it, they had known she was out on the boat, and they were smart men. When she didn’t show up, surely they’d be able to figure out where in this vast expanse of water to look for her.

Her common sense asked her how much difference her presence made to Amande. What could Faye do to save the girl from a large and dangerous man?

Not much, without a weapon more fearsome than an archaeologist’s trowel. But if the worst happened…if Steve wasn’t taking Amande to the island to hunt for treasure…if he was planning to do to the girl what he’d done to her uncle and grandmother…

If someone had come along right after Hebert and Miranda had been stabbed and thrown into the water, maybe they could have been saved. If Amande went into the water bleeding, then Faye, with her binoculars, would know. She could be there instantly. The slender chance that this was true drove Faye forward, not back.

Nobody had to tell Faye that desperate mothers placed their bets on slender chances every single day. She stroked Michael’s cheek and adjusted his hat to better shade his face, glad that he’d drifted off to sleep again. And she kept the boat moving.

Chapter Thirty

Amande had caught the first whiff of oil when they were barely out of sight of the marina. The further they traveled, the more its mineral odor invaded her awareness. Now, after nearly an hour on the water, her eyes burned and her mouth tasted like she’d been sipping turpentine.

Yet another gleaming streak passed beneath the boat as the oil slick reached its fingers inland. Barataria Bay spread out around her, and she couldn’t remember when they’d last seen another boat. Of course all the fishing boats had gone home. Why would they be out here now? Who would want to eat fish taken from these waters?

What was her island going to look like when they finally got there?

***

Joe squatted beside the sextant and the wrinkled map wrapping it. There was no question that it depicted the area surrounding Amande’s island. In his mind, he knew that Steve had a claim on it, too. In his heart, though, it belonged to Amande.

Catching Benoit’s eye, Joe jerked his chin in the direction of a tiny ceramic chip that looked pretty much like a fleck of dirt, since pottery is nothing more than petrified dirt. It lay a few feet from another, similar chip. Then he turned and jerked his chin at two more potsherds lying on the floor of the houseboat’s main cabin.

“It ain’t much different from tracking deer. The girl left us a trail from the houseboat to where Steve Daigle has been mooring his boat. There’s a few drops of water on the deck over there, probably splashed up when he shoved off. It only makes sense that she was on the boat when it left.”

“You hunt?” Benoit might as well have asked Joe if he breathed. “You see anything else my investigators might’ve missed?”

“Fifty feet that way,” Joe said, waving in the direction of the marina, “is a low spot where water collects on the dock. Next to it is a footprint, nearly dry, where my little boy stomped in the water. I hope that means he wasn’t on Daigle’s boat. If he wasn’t, then my wife wasn’t. I can guarantee you that. Thirty feet past that little footprint is the slip where we keep the boat Faye rented for the project. My guess is that Michael stomped in the water while my wife was on her way to that boat. There’s no sign that the boat ever came back, even though she told me she’d be here by now. I think she figured out where Steve was taking Amande. If so, then I know where she’s going.”

Benoit nodded, but Joe wasn’t finished. “I’m going to go rent a boat from Manny, then I’m getting on the water and going out to this island here.” He pointed at the map. “You police people can do what you please. You can come with me or not, but I’m going.”

***

Amande could tell that the tide was high, because her island was far smaller than it had been during her last visit. It was hardly bigger than the low rise beneath the cabin and its adjacent copse of trees. Iridescent brown smears marked the sliver of sand that remained, and the hot sun made the stink of oil even more pronounced. Steve had cut the motor when the island came in sight, but he still had one arm around her like a crawdad’s pincer. The knife had stayed at her throat for the entire ride while he operated the tiller with his other hand.

“Where is it? Tell me where it is.”

Steve didn’t sound rational. He’d never sounded rational.

“Where’s what?” She hated the sound of her voice, squeaky and shrill. If he planned to kill her, she didn’t want to die sounding like a scared little girl.

“I’m not talking to you. Where’s the wreck, Sechrist?”

Dane had been silent and still since they left the houseboat. It wasn’t obvious to Amande whether he considered himself Steve’s partner or his prisoner. “I told you. I don’t know.”

“I’ve never believed that. You say it all the time, but I don’t believe it. You been looking too long, you been spending too much money, you been offering me a big pile of money for an island that ain’t worth nothing. Where is it?”

“I never found anything but a pile of ballast stones. Honestly. The pile was big enough to be a ship. For a while, I thought it was. I’ve been burning time and money ever since, because I’m just so close. When I found the underwater coins, I thought I was in the debris trail. Then nothing. Then I found another coin of the right age, and some worthless things like nails and hinges were with it, but they were on the island, on the far side from the sunken stones. Now I’m thinking the crew dumped the stones during a storm to keep from running aground and maybe the wreck isn’t as close to them as I thought.”

He scanned the horizon like a man looking for something precious that he lost just yesterday, something that he could find if he looked a little longer and a little harder.

Steve’s mouth was so close to Amande’s ear that she could feel the spit when he talked. But he still wasn’t talking to her. She was only a tool to control Dane, and she was useful as a source of information that could lead to a boundless treasure. From the way he moved when he held her body against his, she’d begun to fear that he intended to use her for other things far worse.

One thing was clear. Her worth began and ended with her usefulness to Steve. How could her mother have lived with this man?

She hated the sound of his voice in her ear as he taunted Dane. “Maybe it worked. Dumping the stones, I mean. Maybe there ain’t no treasure ship here at all. If they dumped the stones to save the ship, then you gotta take into consideration that maybe they saved the ship. Don’t tell me you been wasting my time.”

Amande thought this was a remarkably astute observation from someone as stupid as Steve.

Even in crisis, Dane couldn’t be made to imagine that his treasure ship wasn’t there. He rose to its defense. “Then why did Amande and I both find gold and silver? You don’t throw the treasure overboard unless you’re on the verge of going down. It’s human nature. If a crew gets desperate enough to throw away gold, the ship is already lost, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. There’s a treasure ship here waiting for me. It’s a sure thing.”

Amande knew enough about statistics to know that “ninety-nine times out of a hundred” was not at all the same as a sure thing.

“Then show me the big pile of rocks and show me where you found the coins, asshole. I’ll take it from there.”

Dane sat for a moment, looking from the water to the knife to Steve’s face. For a moment, Amande thought he was going to defy a man with a deadly weapon, just to protect a treasure ship that might not actually exist. Then she saw the dreamer’s light in Dane’s eyes fade as he made his choice.

“It’s back there. We came right over it a minute ago,” he said, gesturing behind Steve.

The big man turned to look over his shoulder. “Where?”

Behind them was nothing but open water, dotted by grasses.

“I use my GPS nowadays, but I didn’t have one when I first started diving, so I learned to use landmarks. See how some of these islands are big enough to have a few trees? I picked four of them. Draw a line in your head from this one to that one, and from that one to that other one over there. X marks the spot.”

Dane gestured with both hands at faraway trees clinging to tiny specks of dry land, and Steve turned further in his seat as he tried to spot the imaginary crosshairs marking an old pile of submerged stones. Then Amande found herself facedown in the bottom of the boat as Dane grabbed with his right hand at the hilt of the knife Steve was holding to her throat, using his left hand to throw her clear.

If Dane hadn’t been such a gentleman, things might have turned out differently. As a slender but well-built six-footer, he was no physical match for a man who was his equal in height, but weighed half-again as much. And he was no match in ruthlessness for a man who had killed at least twice.

However, Amande, too, was a slender but well-built six-footer. If Dane hadn’t tried so hard to get her out of reach of the knife, they might have been able together to overpower Steve. Failing that, she might have been able to go for the tiller and gain control of the boat, although heaven only knew what good that would have done.

Instead, Dane’s mutiny was over in seconds, and it ended with a blade in his throat.

Amande was astonished by how quickly Steve heaved Dane’s bleeding body overboard and held his head underwater until there was no doubt he was dead. This explained a lot about the investigators’ failure to find physical evidence of her grandmother’s and uncle’s murders. There was hardly any mess to be seen aboard the boat after Dane’s murder, beyond a few blood spatters on Steve’s face and shoulders. Steve had been able to prepare for the other killings, choosing his time and method of attack, so there likely would have been even less telltale gore. Amande supposed this was how it would be when he eventually killed her.

Why couldn’t she stop thinking about Gola George and his bloodstained white silk shirts?

***

Faye was still shaking. This would be a poor time to break down completely, body and soul, but what really is the appropriate response to watching a young and vital man be knifed to death? For a timeless time, she’d thought it was Amande’s limp body being thrown into the bay, and she’d heedlessly gunned her motor and rushed toward the scene of a murder. Steve had been busy being a killer, so she’d had no sign that he’d heard or seen her before hurrying from the scene.

She knew long before she got near the body that it belonged to Dane and not to Amande. Once again, the binoculars came in very handy. They showed her the sun glinting on his golden hair. They also told her that he was floating facedown with no sign of a struggle, so she knew he was beyond help. They did not tell her the right thing to do.

Every instinct told her to go fish the poor man’s body out of the water. It seemed so disrespectful to leave him there. But she didn’t think she was strong enough to do it alone, and all the while she was trying, Steve would be taking Amande further away.