The Last Treasure (12 page)

TOPSAIL ISLAND, NORTH CAROLINA

Wednesday

T
wo hours later, Liv is standing in the enormous kitchen they don't need and most certainly can't afford, stacking sliced cheddar and smoked ham into sandwiches as carefully as a mason building a brick wall, just grateful for the distraction while Sam tells the crew their plans to go to Nags Head. While she cleans up, the men wander in and out. She was worried that they might blame her for Whit's blunder, but their faces are pleasant as they retrieve sodas and cold cuts, almost pitying. Perhaps they understand that she's been as bamboozled as the rest of them. By one, Sam decides they are ready to leave.

She climbs into his truck, so much bigger than the yellow
pickup he used to own, but still as tidy. She marvels at the shiny dashboard, the empty cup holders. Whit's are forever stuffed with crumpled gas receipts and pens. Drives her crazy. She always wants to put down her coffee somewhere and never can.

For the first half hour of the drive, they say little, letting the air in the cab fill instead with music. Liv has to admit it felt good to flee that giant house; it feels good now to be moving forward, away from the wreck Whit has made of their mission, of everything, it seems.

The sun bakes the front seat. Liv makes a high knot of her hair to let the breeze at her neck, drawing in a breath of the deep, rich smell of hot leather.

Sam glances over. “I can turn on the AC if you're warm.”

“I'm fine.” She slips out of her sandals and pushes her bare feet into the cool rubber ridges of the floor mat, wiggling her toes until her heartbeat calms.

“I've been meaning to ask you about your dad,” Sam says. It's not the subject she hoped he'd suggest, but it's safer than others. “Is he still . . . ?”

“He is. Although he doesn't recognize much anymore. And he thinks the staff is poisoning him. He's sure that the powdered creamer is really anthrax because it has no smell. He'll only eat what I bring from the outside. I keep extra containers and if I'm pressed for time, I'll swing by the cafeteria and get them to dump their food into them so he won't know.” She glances guiltily at Sam. “Sad, isn't it?”

His eyes pool with sympathy.

Liv draws in a long breath, anxious to change the subject. “How's Michael?”

“Married with two kids and designing software in Vegas.”

Liv blinks at him. “
Your brother
, Michael?”

Sam grins. “Yeah, I know. It blows my mind too.”

She thinks about one of the last times she was in a truck with Sam, driving home from the restaurant after he announced he wanted to go back to Chicago for law school.

She never expected to see him again.

And now here they are, driving back to the Outer Banks to see Theo's diary.

Theo's diary
.

Liv still can't believe it.

“What do you know about the entries?” she asks.

Sam leans back in the seat, lowers his hand to the bottom of the wheel. “Beth didn't say much. Just that all the entries are dated right after the
Patriot
disappeared and that they were definitely written by Theodosia.”

Liv tucks a bare foot under her rear and smiles.

“What?” Sam asks.

“Beth obviously wants to make sure you'll come. If she shows all her cards, you won't need to.”

He frowns over at her.

“Oh, come on,” Liv says. “You know Beth Henson always had a thing for you.”

Sam snorts. “You're kidding.”

Was
he
? Exotic Beth Henson and her hammered-silver cuffs, her crisp black Bettie Page bob, bangs that might have been cut with a level.

“She's not going to be happy to see me show up with you now that you're finally single.”

“How do you know she's single?” Sam says.

A fair point.

“And for that matter, how do you know I am?” he asks without taking his eyes off the road.

Liv's cheeks warm; she is sure he'll confirm or deny his status, but he doesn't.

They advance on a station wagon, a golden retriever sticking its coppery head out the window. Sam steers them around the car. The dog's jowls are white-tipped and loose in the wind. Liv waves as they pass.

“I never pegged Whit for the marrying type,” Sam says. “But then he always did like a party.”

“Actually there wasn't any party. There weren't any guests. It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

The cab warms again with the uncomfortable heat of truth and Liv regrets her confession. There were so many wonderful things about that frenetic, glorious day at the courthouse. She wants to tell Sam how Whit got them the last room at the hotel and insisted on carrying her up ten flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator. How he snuck them up to the rooftop pool after it had closed and stripped down to his boxers for a game of Marco Polo. How they made love in seven different positions—one for every year they'd known each other. How he ordered a whole cheesecake from room service and fashioned a bride and groom for the top out of toilet paper rolls and a Sharpie.

“Did
you
marry?”

Sam shakes his head.

“Did you ever get close?”

“Just once.” He casts a look at her that makes her flush,
because she knows he is referring to her and she feels foolish for the question, that he'll suspect she's set him up. Then he rescues them both by adding, “Twice, actually.”

“What happened?” she asks blithely, as if she's just being polite, as if she hasn't wondered this for years.

Sam shrugs. “She wanted to get married. I didn't.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“Believe me, it wasn't.”

Katie Easterday. Liv would bet money that's who he's talking about, and a long-lost spark of jealousy flares for a moment, then fades. She wants to ask, to let him know their past isn't so far away that she doesn't remember the people who mattered to him, who came before her, but the chime of her cell sounds from her feet where she has stashed her purse, startling them both. She turns to the window, needing the air. It seems as if the rings will never stop.

“He'll just keep calling, you know,” Sam says.

“He might call you too.”

“He won't.” Sam glances at her. “I told him I was going back to the cape, remember?”

Guilt squeezes her ribs. Whit would never have left her alone with Sam willingly.

“He still lives in a world where he thinks it's better to ask forgiveness than permission,” she says, her voice so low she wonders if she even means to have Sam hear her.

“Nothing changes.”

“But he
has
changed, Sam. He's not the same Whit you knew.”

“I don't know, Liv. He seems exactly like the same Whit to me.”

She worries the hem of her shirt. “It's been a tough few years. We were on firm ground for a while, and then we started running out of money, and licenses became harder to get, and everything just seemed to . . .” She sighs. “I don't know.”

“People don't change, Liv.”

Liv considers his profile. “I like to think I've changed. Haven't you?”

“I don't know—you tell me. Have I?”

She frowns at him. “I always hated when you answered my question with a question.”

“I did that?”

“
Do
. Present tense.”

He smiles. “Then there you are: Apparently I haven't changed either.”

Oh, but he has. Liv studies his profile, noticing details she didn't want to see before but closer now, she can't deny: the lines in his forehead, the fine threads of silver in his short beard.

The backs of her legs are damp with sweat—she shifts to let the air at them.

She feels like a ripe piece of fruit that needs peeling.

“You've definitely changed,” he says. “You're more . . .” He squints quickly at her. “
Unbridled
. It's like you've let go of things. Things that used to matter to you.”

“Like what?”

“Don't get defensive; I didn't mean it as a criticism.” He smiles. “I like it.”

She turns her gaze back to the road, but his description of her lingers in the quiet. Unbridled. Like a wild horse. And
here they are, driving toward the Outer Banks and the famous wild horses of Currituck. He's right. Their lives together were so ordered—a structure she'd understood. She moved from her father's rules to Sam's, folded herself gently into his safe routines; then she lived alone for a year and discovered that maybe she didn't need so many rules after all. Then Whit had come back into her life, blown in the way he always did, and for the first time she understood that home could be a person, not a place. Living with Whit has forced her to surface from that fearful sea, to shake off years of dreading the slightest crack in a wall, in a plan. Whit's whole world is a collection of chipped dishes, of chairs with loose legs, forever in danger of collapsing. It occurs to her how much of their marriage she has spent being the glue.

She wonders again if Sam is probing, trying to unbutton her heart enough that he can see inside, or hold out his hand in case something should happen to fall out.

As they cross the New River, the breeze picks up, stirring the silence, blowing hard enough that she hopes the subject will exit with it, but then Sam says, “I don't know about Beth, but I am, by the way.”

“You are what?”

He glances over at her. “Single.”

She's not entirely sure what she's supposed to say, but when she turns her face back to the wind and closes her eyes, a ripple of possibility charges through her, then a flash of remorse.

The sandwiches she made so carefully. She forgot them in the fridge.

•   •   •

W
hit wished he could follow the Jeep driver who had flashed his lights a half mile back; he'd buy him a beer and maybe even dinner for saving him a speeding ticket. Otherwise Whit would never have noticed the cruiser wedged in the thicket of bay trees off the highway and would have sailed past at eighty-five miles an hour. The same speed he's probably clocked since he left Topsail. But how else is he supposed to get to Little River in less than two hours?

Now he's ten minutes from the yacht club. He knows they won't let him in wearing shorts and a ratty T-shirt. As if he was going to waste time changing? He hasn't driven all this way to sip an overpriced, watered-down gin and tonic in the Officers' Club. He's here to find Warner and get him to sign off on this deal. Officially. The way Whit knows he should have done in the first place.

It's too late, Whit.

Liv's face flashes back at him whenever he blinks, the look of heartbreak he swore never to cause her again.

I'm not talking about the project . . .

He doesn't blame her for being angry—he's angry too. Angry that he trusted Warner to keep his word. Now instead of being on the water bringing up treasure, he's flying down 133 in his board shorts, damp as a wet dog. When he swings into the club, he pulls over as close as he can to the marina, not caring it's a loading zone and that he'll probably return to find a ticket stuck under his wiper. Put it on his tab. As much money
as he's pissing away on this mission, a parking ticket is a drop in the bucket. He scans the collection of floating docks. So many boats—he forgot how big this marina was. How the hell will he find Warner's? He stops the first person he sees, a kid in a Southport Marina polo shirt, and the young man points him to the harbormaster's office, but Whit won't need him. Beyond the young man's buzz-top head, Whit spots Chowder Lewis slinging towlines into his boat and a flash of hope, fleeting but welcome, settles his racing heart. After twenty years on these waters, Whit knows someone in every port.

Chowder waves him down to the slip and Whit sprints the whole way there, thinking his luck might finally be turning. Chowder crewed for Harold Warner for years. He'll know where he's at.

“Whit Crosby—holy shit!” Chowder is forty-one, just two years older than Whit, but you'd never guess it. Sun, sea, and two packs a day have aged Chowder so much he could pass for twice his age. His shaved head is still as shiny as a newly painted buoy and Whit swears he could kiss it like the damn Blarney Stone, he's so relieved right now. “Don't tell me you're docked here?”

“I'm looking for Warner, Chowdy. Do know you where he is?”

“What do you want with that asshole?”

“You don't want to know.” Whit scans the marina. “Is he here?”

Chowder nods to the water. “You just missed him. He took off early this morning with his girlfriend, the lucky old bastard. Headed down to the Caymans, I think.”

The fat, beautiful balloon of relief Whit has been floating on pops. He rakes both hands through his salt-crusted hair and stares hard at the horizon, willing a new plan to arrive, but nothing comes.

Chowder puts a hand on his arm. “Why are you looking for him?”

“He promised me dibs on a steamer he claimed but never excavated off Topsail.”

“You don't mean the
Siren
? I heard he tried to dig her up a few months ago but didn't find squat and gave up. You must be talking about another ship?”

“Nope, that's her.” Whit blows out a weary breath. Hell, he might as well confess it all. “Warner said if I could pull together a crew, that I could excavate her, and that whatever we brought up, I could keep half. He said she was loaded. He'd taken some scans, but he swore he hadn't touched the site so the crew wouldn't have to know it wasn't all ours, but I got down there this morning and there was a grid line, holes, the whole thing. My crew went nuts.”

“Can you blame 'em?” Chowder's green eyes pool with sympathy. “You know you can't trust that jerk.”

“I figured it was a sure thing. I was going to do all the work and all he had to do was collect!”