Fathom (14 page)

New sounds could suddenly be heard over the courtyard walls. Words spoken casually, with no intent of hiding them, slipped across the lawn.

The leader swore, and the others looked back and forth at one another as if searching for directions.

“Put out the lights,” the leader hissed. “Put them out now.”

Flames were hastily extinguished and smoldering candles were whisked under robes.

But the conversation still came closer. It was idle and argumentative, and Nia thought she recognized one speaker as Sam, the clerk with the clipboard who had visited a few days previously.

A fragment floated close enough for all the quiet, hooded people to hear.

“I’m telling you, the place is deserted and no one has been bothering it!”

“You’re wrong!”

“I’m wrong?”

“Yes. And you don’t even seem to care.”

“Out!” the leader mouthed, and he put just enough air behind it to give the word some audible weight. “Out the back, through the arch.
Now.
”

Hoods came down and robes were wadded up, but without the candles, and since they were shaded from the moon by the towering trees, Nia couldn’t see any faces. She watched them gather themselves together and flee. One of them grabbed the rib cage with its dangling shreds of meat, and one kicked madly at a patch of earth that had caught a spark and tried to flare.

And last of all, the grim-faced leader dashed up to Nia.

He tore a brittle crown off her head, cast it into the pulpy remains of the vineyard, and fled.

A round bob of yellow light slid into the yard, followed by Sam, who was holding the lantern that cast it.

“Do you smell that?” he demanded, lifting the lantern and illuminating his own face and the face of the fireman who’d joined him once before.

“Smell what?”

Sam frowned and made an exasperated, exaggerated sigh. “Fire? You don’t smell it? Don’t you fight them for a living?”

“Shut up,” Dave said. “I smell it. Not like a bonfire or anything. Just a little bit of smoke.”

“With wax,” Sam added. “Candles. Someone blew out some candles over here, and they didn’t do it very long ago.”

He swung the lantern to brighten the corner where Nia sat, and he gave her a good, long look.

Dave rolled his eyes. “If you dragged me all the way out here just to get another look at the naked statue, I swear to God—”

It was Sam’s turn to snap. “Stop it. Look, there’s something on her.”

“Where?”

Sam stepped closer. “On her feet,” he said, as his own feet landed on something crunchy and slightly damp. He dropped the lantern to his knees. “Dave. Dave. Dave. Look at this.
Dave.
”

“I’m looking, I’m looking,” Dave said, starting to sound nervous rather than annoyed.

The men stood there, lantern lifted and eyes cast down to the grass. They’d found the tail. Someone must have kicked it away from the fountain in all the commotion of escaping, and it had turned up underneath Sam’s shoe.

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

“It’s disgusting.”

“I can see that. What is it?”

“It looks like . . .” Dave wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t know, so he reached for logical answers. “It’s part of an animal, don’t you see?”

Sam was sweating more than the balmy night called for. He shoved at his glasses again and tugged at his shirt collar. “I see, I see. What kind of animal? And what part of it?”

Dave crouched down and beckoned for Sam to lower the light. He found a stick and used it to poke the strip of bone and muscle. “I can’t tell. Maybe it’s a snake,” he guessed. “It looks like it could be a snake, one with all the skin peeled off it.”

He stood up straight and took a deep breath. He brushed his hands against his knees, rubbing away some dirt and grass. Having come to a reasonable conclusion, he felt much better.

“A snake?” Sam was less certain, but he was also willing to leap at any plausible solution. “Do you think? I’ve never seen the inside of one. Those don’t look like ribs, though. They look like backbones.”

“Snakes have got backbones, don’t they?”

“I thought they were more, I don’t know,
ribby
in the middle.”

“Have you ever seen the inside of a snake?” Dave asked.

“No.”

Dave’s grin radiated smugness. “Well, then. What would you know, anyway? We catch them and kill them sometimes around the house, little black snakes and garter snakes. Once in a blue moon, something meaner. On the inside they just look like, I don’t know. Like that, more or less.”

“Sure,” Sam agreed, but he still backed away. “But look at all this blood. So you think something caught it and meant to eat it?”

“Probably an owl. Maybe a cat.”

The corner of Sam’s eye snagged on Nia again, her sharply outlined form crouching at the edge of the lantern’s glow. Happy to have an excuse to leave the nasty thing on the ground, he approached her, wiping his shoes on the grass as he went.

“Where you going? Come back here with the light.”

“You should’ve brought your own,” Sam said. He held the lantern aloft and let the watery rays pour down over Nia’s form. “Hey, if an animal killed that thing, then it probably wouldn’t take a moment to rub the bloody corpse all over this statue, would it?”

“Why?” Dave asked, tempering the question with reluctant caution.

“No reason.” Sam stood up straight and turned his back to Nia. He sniffed again at the last withering curls of candle smoke and shook his head. “Let’s go. I’ll write another report and see if anything comes of it.”

“I don’t know why you bother.”

Sam didn’t answer right away, and when he did, his reply was irritated, but not resigned. “I’m not sure either, sometimes. But we told this guy we’d check his house—”

“Not his house, yet.”

“You know what I mean. And I’m not going to tell him that the coast is clear and he ought to buy the place, not until . . .”

Dave followed him out of the yard. “Until when?”

“Until I know what’s going on,” he finished weakly. “Or until it stops going on, whichever comes first. None of it sits right.”

“You worry too much. We get paid either way.”

“I know. But that only means we’ve got no reason to lie. He buys the place, he doesn’t buy the place. We still get paid.”

“In my book,” Dave griped, “that means we should leave it the hell alone.”

“You and me, we’re working off two different books, then.”

Captiva Island

B
ernice made an impatient little noise and braced her hands on the rail of the
Gasparilla.
“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I told you,” José said. “My old island. It’s not very far from here.”

She cocked her head to the right and frowned, but it wasn’t an unhappy frown. “It’s been a long time since you’ve been there, right?”

“True. But I imagine it’s right where I left it.”

“The treasure?”

“The island.” He smiled at her over his shoulder. He leaned against the wheel, and the small ship’s path curved out of the bay, slipping past the last of the party boats. “The treasure I cannot
vouch for. It’s probably there, but there’s always the chance that someone has stumbled across it. Still. It would very much surprise me if it’s gone.”

On Bernice’s shoulder there was a wide smear of blood. It reached into her hair, where it plastered one shiny blond curl against her ear. “And you said there’s gold there?”

“Necklaces, rings, earrings. Not to mention the diamonds.”

“Why is all of it jewelry? Most of the bootleggers I’ve met preferred cold, hard cash.”

“Bootleggers?”

“Kind of like a pirate. Like a land pirate. My stepfather was one—or anyway, he worked with some of them.”

“Ah.”

Open ocean sprawled before them, and the full expanse of a perfectly cloudless sky stretched above. He would hang close to the coast, but he loved the possibility of it all—the vast and black spread of water tipped with white where the moon grazed the waves.

He said, “Then times have changed. In my day, precious metal was heavy, and it was heavily taxed. The travelers we met were wearing their fortunes, because it cost them less to transport it that way.”

He was happier than he could ever remember being.

For the first time since he’d thrown his body overboard, tangled in chains and determined to die, he was truly delighted to find himself alive.

It almost made him change his mind. Seeing the Gulf, wild and whole—and glancing again at Bernice, beautiful and awful—for one rebellious moment he thought it might be worth making a break for it.

He could take to the open sea; he could dash for . . . for what?

Again he looked at Bernice, standing at the edge of the deck.
She leaned over the side and gazed down into the water, and it looked like her eyes were on fire. Even in the dark they glittered.

He could take her with him . . . but to where?

There was no good reason to even finish the thought. When he was alive, he’d taken to the water as soon as he’d been able. For all his life he’d known the feel of a rolling deck under his feet, and for most of his afterlife, too, riding the water or waiting beneath it. If he cut himself, he wondered, would he bleed anything but brine?

His smile, nearly fixed from cheek to cheek, spread another fraction. A good breeze lifted and pushed at the sails, and again, he thought his chest might implode with pleasure.

In the back of his mind, though, behind all sense and beneath his happiness, the half-formed plot unfolded unencouraged.

I could race with her to the other shore. We could run inland, as far as the earth would hold us. No one could touch us there, not even Mother. No more errands, no more . . .

No more ocean.

Not worth considering. The prospect fled even the furthest corners of possibility. Why nurture it? There was no indignity or price worth that one last loss. He was immortal, so far as he knew, and his Mother was the queen of her kind, mistress of the tides. He might escape her if he wished hard enough, but it would cost too much.

But deep down, still underneath and mostly unheard, a small part of him mustered a faint objection.
It was not so long ago that I settled for no master. Even the seas, I commanded
.

The
Gasparilla
strained against him, only a little—only a nudge as the wind hauled it across the calm Gulf surface. He adjusted to account for the extra air and looked up at the stars so quickly that Bernice didn’t see him do it, even though she was suddenly standing beside him.

She put an arm around his waist and asked, “What’s it called? The island?”

“Captiva. You’ll like it there,” he murmured, unwilling for the moment to be drawn into old stories of prisoners and plunder. “It is beautiful. You might say that it’s captivating.”

She hopped down off the stand where the pilot’s wheel was mounted and went back to the rail. “I never liked living on an island
last time.
”

He’d forgotten about that. “But you won’t be
living
there now. We’ll only visit, and we’ll leave richer than we came. Surely you find that acceptable?”

Bernice thought it over and then shrugged, tossing her sticky curls. “I guess. Is it hot there?”

“Is it hot
here
? How far do you think we’re going?”

“It’s kind of hot. It’s not that bad, though,” she corrected herself quickly. “It’s nice with the breeze, here on the water.”

José tried to relax; he tried to shake off the irritation. “Yes, the water is fine. And I think you can suffer a few minutes of excessive warmth on shore—it won’t be the end of you. I wonder if . . . I can’t remember. There was a crown, a woman’s crown—a tiara, I think they call them. It was white gold with a blue-green diamond set in the forehead. I’m almost certain I left it with the chest at Captiva.”

“And if it’s there, I can have it?”

“I can think of no fairer home for it than upon your brow. I was saving it for someone who was worthy of it,” he said, more because it sounded nice than because it was true. He’d held on to the crown for the same reason he ever held on to anything—it was valuable, and eventually he could have sold it.

“Aren’t you sweet,” she said, batting her eyelashes and being deliberately, overtly coy. Between her fingers she was holding something small and shining. She twisted and tweaked it. She held it up to the sky and let it catch moonlight.

“Not in the least,” José cheerfully assured her. “I only believe that you’d slit my throat and take it if I tried to keep it from you.”

She laughed then, merry and fierce. The object in her hand bounced into the air and she caught it in her palm; she tossed it again, and caught it again.

“And you can’t even contradict me! What’s that you’re playing with?”

Bernice lifted it to show him, though it was too small to see from where he stood at the wheel. “It’s a mermaid, I think. A weird-looking mermaid.”

“Where did you get it?”

“In that music box. You know how they sometimes have little dancers or ballerinas in them?”

“Yes,” he said. He didn’t know, but he could guess what she meant.