Shark River (34 page)

Ransom said quickly, “Did one of ’em got gold stars on his teeth, and the other was big as a cow?”

Dunn was nodding. “And accents. Accents very much like yours—not as lovely, of course.”

Ransom ignored him. She looked at me, her eyes fierce. Said, “It them two no-account Rasta niggers again. They not done fuckin’ with us, my brother. We see them come around again, what I’m gonna do is mix up the herbs and powders and drop a spell on them that’ll make their prissy cocks shrivel up like raisins.”

Tomlinson was suddenly very interested. “Really? I don’t suppose there’s some spell you know that does the reverse?”

Hers was a bawdy, lusty laugh. “Mister Thomas, somebody done already dropped a double whammy of that spell on you judging by that big ol’ thing you got swingin’ between your legs.” Then she turned back to Dunn, who had paled slightly, and she said, “Thank you very much for them kind words. Now can we see that letter?”

There was a postscript written in a different color of ink:

After I’d finished reading, I handed the letter to Ransom and walked to the fireplace. Tucker had owned a big, rawboned Chesapeake that he adored, and the dog usually slept in front of the stone fireplace.

I leaned my weight against the mantelpiece and knelt to look at the rock. The fireplace had been made by stacking uneven layers of fossilized pink coral—coquina rock, some people called it—that had been quarried from Key Largo nearly a century before. As a child, I’d found those blocks fascinating because every close inspection revealed something not seen before. Imprinted on the limestone were miniature brain corals, staghorns, and the fabricked impressions of sponges—all sorts of animals that had lived and died a thousand years or more before the first calendar was conceived. Something I also remembered about that fireplace was that a couple of the rocks slid out like heavy drawers and, behind them, Tuck would sometimes hide money or anything else he thought was valuable.

But which rocks?

Tomlinson said, “Secret compartments, man. That’s what he’s looking for. Ol’ Tucker was a true romantic. I love stuff like this.”

I was feeling around the edges of the rock with my fingers, trying to remember. I knew it was toward the top, but I wasn’t quite sure where. “No secret compartments. Just sloppy workmanship. Tuck built the house himself, which is why it should be no surprise whatsoever.”

High on the fireplace, off to the right, I felt one of the slabs move at my touch. It seemed to be in the right area. I wedged my fingers into the cracks and pulled . . . out came a section of stone that I nearly dropped, it was so heavy. I placed it gently on the floor and looked into the cavern its removal had created.

“Mister Dunn? I don’t suppose you have a flashlight?”

“Why, yes, I do. Got one out in the truck.”

As he went out the screen door, I pulled out another section of stone. I could see a box or something set back there; I decided to wait for the light.

Yes, there was a small wooden box, heavily waxed, made out of some black and exotic wood. Probably something he’d picked up on one of his trips to Central America or Cuba.

I handed the box to Ransom, then reached in again. I removed what had the weight and feel of a weapon.

It was: Tuck’s pearl-handled and engraved revolver. It had been wrapped in an oilcloth, mounted inside its holster, then wrapped again in more oilcloth. He was seldom fussy about the maintenance of anything he owned, but the revolver was in good condition. It was an old Smith & Wesson .44 long barrel, a weapon with sufficient fire-power to bring down—in Tuck’s words—“anything on two legs and most things on four.”

I flipped the loading gate and spun the cylinder. Five of the chambers were loaded, the sixth empty—an old-time safety measure used particularly by men who rode on horseback.

I remembered Tuck saying more than once, “The only dangerous gun is a gun that’s not loaded.”

Not necessarily.

I pressed the ejector rod, punched out all five cartridges, dumped them in my pocket, then looked down the muzzle. Clean rifling, too.

I heard Ransom say, “My oh my, you don’t believe Daddy Gatrell left us something nice now? I don’t care a thing no more about that cash was supposed to be there.”

She had the box open. She was holding up two more gold coins, one large, one small, similar to the ones she’d already showed me, but not the same. On these, the name of the king was Philip, and the dates were 1612 and 1640.

“He left us three silver coins, too. See there in the box?”

Tomlinson held up a lead-colored coin between his thumb and forefinger. It was about the size of a nickel. He was squinting to read what was on it. “Interesting, very interesting. These coins, they were all struck between 1556 and 1598 . . . and let’s see . . . they’ve got the Habsburg shield plus the legend. It’s in Latin, it says ‘Philippus II Dei Gratia,’ which means ‘Philip the Second by the Grace of God.’ That’s the way I translate it, anyway.”

He stopped and turned the coin, showing it to Ransom. The kindly teacher sharing knowledge. “On the obverse . . . the back side, I mean, there’s the Spanish cross with castles and royal lions in quarters, and the words, ‘The King of Spain and the Indies.’ ” He handed the coin to her for inspection.

Ransom was beaming. She said to Dunn, “These two men I’m with, they about the smartest people you ever gonna meet. This one—” She used her chin to indicate Tomlinson. “He reads languages. Knows all about everything.”

Tomlinson seemed pleased. “Oh . . . not really. The way I know is, I lived aboard in Key West for awhile. Did some work with dear old Mel Fisher when his people were salvaging the
Atocha.
So I learned a little about coins. These silver ones, they’re called eight-reals—portions of pieces of eight. Two pieces of eight are worth a gold escudo”—he touched his finger to the smaller of the gold coins that Ransom held—“and eight gold escudos equal a doubloon.”

She was following along. “Why’s the gold one perfect, very round, but this silver one look like it made by a child?”

“The reals, they’re irregular like that because they were made by cutting little chunks off bars of silver bullion and carved down ’til the weight was right, then hand-hammered between engraved dies. Very crude stuff. The mint was down in Ecuador, I think.”

“And they worth a lot of money. A man in Nassau offered me three hundred dollars apiece for the gold ones. Said even the little gold one, he’d give me the same.”

Tomlinson made a sound of derision. “Never trust that shyster, ever. By weight, yeah, they might be worth something like that. But they’re worth twenty, maybe thirty, times their weight because they’re so rare. A doubloon in excellent condition, even the escudos—” He shrugged. “—my guess is, if you had forty of them, you could sell them off carefully, find the right collectors, big money people, and you’d end up with enough to buy a pretty nice house on Sanibel. If you had sixty of them, you could buy an inexpensive place on Captiva.” He shrugged again. “That’s about all I can tell you. Where they’re from, how Tuck got them, I have no idea.”

I was beginning to have my suspicions, although I said nothing. Presumably, the coins had all been lost during transit somewhere between South America and Spain, but they obviously were not from the same ship nor the same shipwreck. They immortalized different kings from a variety of dates. That suggested to me that Tucker had not gotten the coins from some lucky diver who’d found a solitary wreck. He’d gotten them from a collector, someone who had acquired them over a period of time.

Sinclair Benton, according to Ransom, had been a powerful man on Cat Island for many decades. He’d sold his spells to the locals and they weren’t cheap, so they had to pay for them with what they could. So make some rough calculations. For two and a half centuries, the Spaniards shipped gold and silver from the mines of South America to Spain. In those two hundred fifty years or so, they lost many dozens of ships throughout the Caribbean to poor navigation and storms. Over the passage of, say, thirty years, what are the chances that people on Cat Island and surrounding islands found the occasional Spanish coin or two while beachcombing or diving or hacking coral out of the reefs?

Of course they did. People are still finding gold and silver coins on the beaches of Florida, particularly places like Sebastian Inlet and Key West.

Okay, then multiply X number of lucky people by X number of accessible coins and you’d probably end up with a sizable number of available doubloons, escudos, and reals. Or maybe Benton found the coins himself—listened to the fishermen, tracked down the rumored wrecks, and had his people work them. He could have found a little; he could have found a lot.

Ransom was beaming, very pleased with the knowledge of her new wealth. She reached into the box again and said, “Here you go, another letter he wrote to you. My brother, how can you not like a man who so thoughtful he always writing you notes?”

As she handed me the envelope, I said, “Yeah, he’s really starting to win me over, that father of yours.”

After Tomlinson read the letter, he looked at me and said, “You know what he’s doing, don’t you?”

We’d walked outside, putting some distance between Dunn and ourselves so we could speak privately. The three of us standing in the shade of a big oak, Spanish moss hanging, Mango Bay holding blue light beyond, its islands undefined, ledges of black and gray.

“Taking one last opportunity to manipulate people,” I answered. “He could have trusted his attorney with the letters, the photos, the coins, everything. But that just wasn’t Tuck’s way.”

Tomlinson was shaking his head, his arm over Ransom’s shoulder, telling me I was wrong. “No. You don’t see the pattern? It’s for Ransom. All of it. And you. What he’s doing is making sure the daughter he never really got to know sees the Florida he loved. Tucker had his quirks, I don’t argue that, but he was crazy about this country. That’s what this is all about. He figured out a way to get you two together, a way so you’d have to take her around to the places he cared about, the places that made him the man he was.”