The Last Treasure (3 page)

She shakes her head and looks away. “It's a long time to leave him.”

Whit groans. “For Christ's sake, you're not
leaving
him—you're going away for a few weeks. For work. Besides, he won't even know you're gone.”

She closes her eyes, the reminder terribly painful though she knows Whit doesn't mean to hurt her.

“Baby, he has people there to take care of him.” His tone has turned tender, all reproach gone.

But still she can't relent. “People,” she says. “Not his daughter.”

“At some point, you're going to have to let yourself off this cross, you know.” He reaches out to stroke her cheek, but she turns away and rises. There's no point in this argument—it's always been so simple for him. But then Whit was the one who'd convinced her to move out of her father's house into the
dorms, when Sam had cautioned her to use patience, to live at home a while longer. Sam who promised her there would be a reward for propping up her overly dependent father—Whit who'd urged her to cast aside duty and spread her wings, to soar the way her mother never had the chance to do.

“I'm going in,” she says.

“Red.” Whit's call stops her at the edge of the boat. She turns back, seeing a flash of trepidation spark in his eyes. He levels a hard look at her, those silver-blue pools like two whitecapped seas, swirling and deep and blowing right through her. His appeal is a force of nature—as unyielding as the tide.

“She's still out there somewhere and we'll find her,” he says. “I intend to keep my promise.”

She blinks back tears as she turns for the house. “You always do.”

•   •   •

D
amn
.

Whit climbs back up to the flybridge and stares out at the canal. He never meant to finish the bottle. He never meant to start that fight in the bar—or lose them their PA.

He never means any of it.

Dueling points of pain pierce his temples. He squeezes his eyes shut.

Livy
.

She can look at him, flutter those long red lashes, and wreck him. Whit tells himself he's made her happy all these years and most days he believes it. Then there are nights like
this one, black nights so silent you have to remind yourself you're not underwater—and how do you know you're not? When you breathe, which sometimes you have to remind yourself to do too—and then you're full of doubt, fat and bloated with it like a tick.

He worries about her diving. The
Siren
is deep: nearly a hundred and fifty feet down—the deepest she's ever dared to go. But how can he forbid her now, when he was the one who'd convinced her to learn to dive in the first place, teaching her that weekend Sam was out of town and she'd nearly drowned in the process?

Jesus, he'd been so scared of losing her that day. And she hadn't even been his to lose yet.

If he weren't so drunk, Whit knows he could untangle his thoughts, but maybe it's best they stay all knotted up. He's not dumb—not even when he's drunk. Sometimes he thinks he might just be sharper this way. People get lazy when they know you're drunk, unguarded and loose, sure you won't remember their confessions or even hear them. He's learned a lot at the bottom of a bottle.

And now he has to ask Sam Felder to save his skin. And Sam will see that Whit hasn't kept his promise to Liv—the only one she ever really cared about: to find out what happened to the
Patriot
, and, more important, to Theodosia. Theo.

Maybe Liv's right—Sam never hung on to the past. Of course Sam's probably given up the mystery of the
Patriot
. Whit has nothing to prove—especially not to Sam Felder. Only to Liv. Only her. He just hopes she can forgive him one last time.

The light in their bedroom blinks out. Whit stares at the
dark rectangle of glass, imagining Livy lying in her usual pose: one leg long, the other bent. His flamingo. Just like the one he'd had tattooed on his shoulder three years ago after he lost their wreck claim in a poker game on Wes's boat. Still furious, she'd told him the tattoo looked like a mutant crawfish, but she'd kept them in bed until noon the next day, admiring it until she teared up.
“I thought flamingos were supposed to be pink,”
she said.
“Not mine,”
he told her.

Yes, maybe it's better that he's plastered, he thinks as he rolls his thumb over the screen to find Sam's number. Maybe numb like this, he can pretend he doesn't care. He's done it before.

Provincetown, Massachusetts

“Y
ours.”

Justine's voice purrs through the darkness, so effortlessly Sam thinks he dreams the word, but the chimes continue, growing louder.

He turns his head, disparate pieces of information coming together in sharp focus. His ring. His phone. He reaches across her naked body for his cell, squinting to read the screen. He doesn't recognize the number, so he lets the call go to voice mail, dropping the phone back on the shelf and blinking up into the watery blue-black, listening to the familiar sounds of the sea at rest all around him, the slap and suck of waves against the hull. The lullaby of the tide. He was dreaming of a coral reef, curtains of fish like stained glass, and he wants to get back there.

He throws an arm over his eyes and sleep returns.

•   •   •

J
ustine is already dressed when he gets to the galley to make coffee at six thirty.

Her blue eyes ice over. “I'm not sleeping here anymore. My back can't take it.”

She made the same ultimatum the last time he met her for dinner. After all, she argued, she has a beautiful town house with windows instead of portholes, and sheets that don't smell like salt and rust. She should have known him three years ago when he was still at the firm and living in a condo with a tenth-floor view of the Chicago River. She would have liked his digs just fine then.

He knocks the old grounds out and gives the basket a rough rinse.

“You could rent a real place, you know,” she says. “God knows you could afford it.” Her face softens slightly when she reaches out to touch his short beard. “The office gets new listings in every day. I could show you some.”

“This
is
a real place.”

“I mean a real place on the
ground
.”

He pops the top off the coffee can.

“So, who was that who called last night?” she asks. “And please don't tell me you're married.”

The phone. Sam walks back to the berth and picks up his cell, seeing the telltale envelope in the corner of the screen. He listens to the message as he returns to the galley. The man's voice is rough, tentative, familiar.

“Sam, it's Whit . . . Yeah,
that
Whit . . .”

After that he hears only pieces.

“—need a new project archaeologist—

“—I screwed the pooch—

“—kind of last minute, I know—”

An interminable rambling minute later, Sam hangs up.

Justine studies him as he returns to the galley. “Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“Who was it?”

“Wrong number.”

He returns to the coffeemaker and frees the empty carafe. Justine slides in between him and the counter, blocking him, her eyes trying to hold his. Her fingers dance up his bare chest. “My first showing canceled,” she says. “Maybe we could give that awful bed of yours another try?”

Sam reaches around her to push the pot back onto the plate. It's almost seven. He doesn't have time for coffee—what was he thinking?

“I need to get the boat ready,” he says. “It's late.”

Justine steps aside. “Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bunk,
Captain
.” She sweeps up her purse and moves to the ladder.

Sam watches her exit the cabin, thinking he could stop her if he wanted, say something kind, but his thoughts are already a million miles, another lifetime, away.

•   •   •

T
oday's passengers are a bachelor party, three men from Boston, all in their late twenties. Cape Cod is loaded with wrecks, several of which are in the harbor and
easily accessible—others, such as the famous pirate ship
Whydah
, lay just outside park waters. Sam has chartered to those sites on occasion, but since today's tour members have requested an easier dive, he will take them to
Marisol
, a trawler not far from shore that sank in forty feet of water, her pilothouse still intact and covered in a colorful rug of anemones.

His first mate, a good kid named Pete, helps the men set up on the deck. Sam watches them carefully as they strap in. Often divers inflate their experience to be allowed down without a guide, and Sam fears these men have done just that. Two stumble with their gear—and though Sam can't know if it is the effect of too much partying the night before or a general lack of skill, it doesn't matter. Even an easy dive comes with risks, and he is not a betting man. Sam has dived and crewed with careless men and he knows the ripple effect of one poor decision when you're under.

He tells Pete to suit up and follow them down as a guide. The ringleader, a cocky, doughy-faced blond, is insulted and resistant, insisting the charter company assured them they could dive on their own, but Sam is feeling especially agitated this morning and he doesn't care. The guy can agree to a guide, or they can all go back to the marina. There are a few tense moments of indecision, but the man finally consents. Minutes later, the four take their giant strides off the swim platform and descend, leaving Sam on board to watch the water and the horizon. Bad weather can appear without warning and churn the sea in a heartbeat. Still it will be a good dive for them, he thinks as he walks the deck. Good visibility.

If it was a tougher dive, he might have considered joining
them. The water seems too quiet up top. Or maybe his thoughts are too loud.

•   •   •

A
n hour later, the group surfaces, and just in time too. Clouds have gathered and the sea is building a steady chop. Out of their gear, the men congregate on the benches and drain sodas.

The blond cowboy makes his way over to Sam at the bridge, wearing an admonished smile.

“Sorry about that earlier,” the younger man says. “I was thinking maybe we'd find ourselves a little luck down there. A few gold coins, you know?”

“Not likely on a fishing boat,” Sam reminds him.

“You ever find treasure around here?”

“Not here, no.”

The man's eyes brighten. “But somewhere, right?”

Sam shrugs, his patience thinning again. “Somewhere, yeah,” he says, turning his attention to the wheel.

•   •   •

B
ack at the marina, the men pile into their cars and head into town for their last night of debauchery. Sam tells Pete he can take off early, that he's more than paid his dues for the day, and the young man is grateful. More than anything, Sam just wants the boat to himself again.

Night arrives while he works, putting away gear, refilling tanks. Around him, the marina hums, the other charter boats winding down for the night too, last-minute maintenance and
cleaning, shouts between decks, a few muffled televisions. The village of water homes. Lives clocked by the tide, as easily untethered as their boats.

All day he's had distractions, reasons to keep his mind and hands off the ghost call from his past and the sneaking curiosities it brought with it, but now the night stretches out before him as vast and quiet as the sea.

Now when the question knocks again, he will have no choice but to answer.

Might as well let it in, he thinks as he slips belowdecks.

•   •   •

H
e has to move two file boxes out of the hanging locker beside the berth to get to it, but the map is right where he remembers.

He takes the roll to the table and uncurls the heavy paper, securing the corners to keep it flat—if the four ends can still be called corners, as speckled with tack holes as they are, reminding him of those target papers at shooting ranges. He's not sure there's even enough paper left to attach it to a wall anymore.

The haphazard scribbles of their years of notes swim over the yellowed map, Liv's handwriting and his. He finds himself reading them and smiles, remembering when they added each one, especially the first few: the labels Liv set down with feverish speed that night in Hatteras, spilling everything she knew about the
Patriot
's disappearance while she wrote, explaining that she wanted to know where the schooner sank so she could find out what happened to her most famous passenger,
Theodosia Burr Alston—an interest Sam marveled at, even if he didn't entirely understand Liv's passion at the time. How quickly and completely he'd found himself transfixed, watching her slide her pencil all over the coastline that night, the determined way she'd sucked on her lower lip. He'd wanted to suck on it too.

He's nearly thrown the chart away a dozen times. Life on a boat requires a maniacal degree of downsizing. Must-haves are priority: clothes, food, a modest library of only one's most treasured books. And yet he found room for the chart.

He still isn't entirely sure why he took it when he moved out of their apartment, knowing how much the map meant to Liv, knowing how many years of research she'd collected on its thick crackled surface—much of which they'd collected
together
, he reminds himself. It wasn't as if he didn't have a right to the chart—it had belonged to them equally, hadn't it? Had he taken it to punish her for not wanting to go to Chicago with him? Maybe. Or was it because he wanted to be the one to deliver her the answer to the mystery? He wonders if Liv even cares anymore about the
Patriot
, about Theodosia—Theo, as Liv had always called her, as if the lost woman was a dear friend.