Once I learned differently though, it wasn't something I ever talked about. People
already felt sorry enough for me because of my dad.
You see, in the middle of my kindergarten year, he died.
Or, at least, everyone thought he was dead.
We lived in Chicago. Near the lake. He went sailing in his small boat one day and disappeared in a storm. The boat was found, and his life jacket washed up onshore. But no sign of him.
My mom almost went crazy, she was so sad. Me too, but I didn't really understand what had happened. All I can remember was that I'd fall asleep crying every night because my daddy had not come home. When he was finally declared legally dead, she cried for another couple of months. Me too.
A few years later, someone from the life insurance company stopped by the house. He asked if my mom knew that my dad was still alive. And asked her what she had done with the life insurance money.
She said it wasn't true. And that she hadn't collected any money.
Then they showed her a photo of my dad with another woman. He was married to someone else. He had a different name. I never saw him again, but I learned to hate him anyway. I was glad he went to jail, but I never visited him.
It turned out that he had faked his death and found a way to intercept the life insurance that should have been going into their joint account. After that, Mom really changed. Sad. Quiet. Never talked to people. Hardly even to me. It was like she was going through the motions of living.
She sent me to Key West every summer. It's almost like Uncle Gord raised me instead of her. Except Uncle Gord was more like an army sergeant than a father. I sure wasn't going to tell him how weird I was. Tasting blackberries when I saw Sherri. Seeing bright red when something touched my left elbow. Stuff like that.
So I just concentrated on what I loved best. Diving.
As I sat in the recompression chamber, I wondered when I'd be able to dive next. Because if the broken valve wasn't an accident, what would happen next?
The next morning, I was in the back room of Uncle Gord's dive shop. Not dead. Not blind. Not bent over in pain. I had spent seven hours in the chamber, and the doctors had sent me on my way.
“Your guess was right, Ian,” Uncle Gord said. “The broken valve wasn't an accident.”
Like my mother, Uncle Gord has hair that turned gray early. He has a bushy mustache that is still as dark as the rest of
his hair used to be. Like my mother, he's not real big. But he's in great shape from diving all the time. He's in his forties, but I doubt many people would want to mess with him in a fight.
“Look at this,” he said.
Gord's Dive Shop has four rooms. There is the sales floor with scuba diving gear. Masks. Flippers. Wet suits. Spearguns. Tanks. Books on the sport. Everything.
On one side is a doorway leading to a long and narrow room. This is the training room. It has a long table where up to twelve people can sit. At the front end is a chalk board. Uncle Gord uses this room when he gives dry-land lessons on scuba diving.
There is also a back room with a work bench. It's where we fill the scuba diving tanks with air and do repairs.
The fourth room is Uncle Gord's office. It is tiny. Hardly larger than his messy desk. He always keeps the door locked so that customers don't wander in.
He was standing at the work bench. Tools were scattered across the top of it.
The valve parts of my scuba tank were in front of him.
I moved beside him to look at the tank.
“See,” he said, pointing. “Look at where the spring broke apart.”
The spring was from the valve. It was strong enough to keep the valve partly closed against the air pressure inside the tank. Except it had broken into two pieces.
“Yes?” I wasn't sure what he meant.
“Use the magnifying glass.”
I did. As I looked at it up close, he kept talking.
“It's like a tree you cut with a saw,” he said. Uncle Gord loved using examples. “The cut is smooth most of the way through. But when the tree falls, the last little bit breaks away and leaves a jagged edge.”
He was right. On one side of the broken spring, it was shiny, as if it had been snipped halfway through. The other side was jagged, like it had been ripped apart.
“I don't get it,” I said.
“I do,” he told me. He frowned. “And I don't like it.”
I waited.
“You know all about water pressure,” he said.
I nodded yes. It had just about killed me the day earlier.
“Someone took this valve apart and cut most of the way through the spring. Then he put it back together. The spring was still strong enough to hold in shallow water. But in deeper water, it would only be a matter of time until the pressure blew it apart.”
“In other words,” I said, “someone wanted this accident to happen in deep water.”
“Exactly. What if you had been deep inside the shipwreck when this happened instead of near the opening?”
I gulped. Sometimes it takes ten minutes just to swim out of a wreck.
“I'd be dead,” I told him.
Uncle Gord stared at me for nearly a minute. He has light blue eyes. They didn't blink as he thought about it.
“I already know a lot of the story,” he finally said. “You dove instead of Judd.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Even though I had told you I wanted you on the surface in the boat.”
“I've dived lots,” I said. “I'm certified. You taught me to be careful. I didn't think you'd mind.”
“What I mind is him not doing what I paid him for. He was supposed to go down into the wreck. Not you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Uncle Gord stared at me for another minute. I remembered some stories I'd heard about him getting into fights when he was younger. I'd heard he was tougher than most guys twice his size. By the cold look in his eyes, I was able to believe it.
“Tell me,” he said. “Did you ask Judd if you could make the dive? Or did he ask you?”
My body suddenly felt as cold as Uncle Gord's eyes. I understood his question. If Judd had asked me to go down, maybe
he knew about the valve and that it would bust in deep water.
“I asked to dive,” I said. “Honest. It was my idea. I was bored and wanted something to do. It was my fault this happened.”
Uncle Gord slammed the work bench so hard that a wrench jumped and fell to the floor.
“It wasn't your fault,” he said, his face angry. “It was the fault of whoever wrecked the valve spring.”
He hit the table again. “I'm going to find out who did this.”
Uncle Gord took a deep breath. He waited until he was calm.
“Ian,” he said, “you and I are going to keep this a secret. That way, the person who did it won't know we're looking for him.”
“What about the police?” I asked. “Shouldn't they know?”
Uncle Gord put his hands on my shoulders. He looked right into my eyes. “You know that business has not been great this year. What's going happen if people hear
about this? They'll think we don't run safe dives. They might not buy equipment from us.”
“Butâ”
“No buts. I think I know why someone would have done this,” he said. “I'm going to tell you another secret. It's the real reason why I take the dive boat out on Friday and Saturday nights.”
I asked Uncle Gord a simple question. “Does any of this have anything to do with a sunken pirate ship and a ton of gold?”
Uncle Gord's square jaw fell. For a second, with his eyes bugged out and his jaw open wide, he looked like a fish just pulled from water.
“How did you know about that?” he said.
“I don't think it's much of a secret,” I said. “This is a small town.”
“Tell me what you know. Tell me
how
you know.”
I shrugged. “I heard the rumor two weeks ago. When I was with Judd. We were at the dock, putting gas in the dive boat. One of the guys there asked me if it was true you were looking for a pirate ship.”
“And?” Uncle Gord seemed worried.
“I told the guy I didn't know. Which was true. But I've been wondering. Along with a lot of other people in town. Everyone knows you go out every week with those three lawyers from Miami. No one believes that you are just a spear-fishing guide.”
They had hired Uncle Gord every weekend since the beginning of May. Each Friday and Saturday night, Uncle Gord left at sunset with the three of them and didn't return until dawn.
“Spear fishing is what we've wanted people to believe,” Uncle Gord finally said. “But once you heard the rumors, why didn't you ask me about it?”
“It isn't my business,” I said. “I figured you'd tell me if you ever wanted to.”
Uncle Gord let out a deep breath. “I was afraid of this. That's why I don't like what
happened to the valve on your scuba tank. If our secret is out, maybe someone wants to stop us.”
“Will you tell me about it now?” I asked. “Is it really true what people are saying?”
He looked around, as if he were afraid someone might be listening. But there were no customers in the front or the back of the shop.
Sherri wasn't there either. I knew her schedule. She didn't work until the afternoon.
“Let's go down to the coffee shop,” Uncle Gord said. “I'll tell you what I can.”
We walked. Thelma's Diner was just down the road from the dive shop. It was late afternoon, and the sun was still strong and hot. When we got inside, Thelma came over to our table.
“What will it be, boys?” She had five kids and ran the diner by herself. She always looked tired.
“Same as always,” Uncle Gord said. “A couple of iced teas. A couple of orders of fries.”
“Sure.” She wiped our table with a rag. A minute later she brought the iced tea. When she left, she went into the kitchen. There was no one else in the diner. Uncle Gord and I could talk and not worry that someone would hear.
“I'm waiting,” I said.
Uncle Gord drank half his glass of iced tea before he spoke. “I'll make the story as short as I can. It started in the spring when the three lawyers came down here from Miami. They told me a story of their own.”
I added sugar to my iced tea and stirred as I listened.
“A few years ago, some guy was scuba diving a couple of miles from here. He found some gold coins in water about thirty feet deep. They looked very old and valuable. He hired the law firm to find out more about the coins.”
“Why a law firm?” I asked.
“Because lawyers have to keep client confidentiality. He knew if the lawyers talked, he could sue them. He also wanted
to hire them to help him keep the rest of the treasure once he found it.”
“It doesn't seem like the lawyers kept it much of a secret,” I said.
“You're right. But the guy died just after hiring them. He didn't have a family or anything. No will. Once he died, these three lawyers figured they might as well look for the treasure themselves.”
“Treasure,” I said. “Real treasure. Not like the toy treasure I hid in the wreck for you yesterday.”
“Real treasure. Big, big treasure. Because when the lawyers found out more about the coins...”
Uncle Gord leaned across the table. His voice became a whisper. “Ian, they had a professor look at the coins. They're from a Spanish ship that came here in the 1700s. It was delivering gold from the king of Spain. Pirates hit the ship and took everything. A week later, the pirate ship went down in a hurricane off the coast of Florida. The coins today would be worth over ten million dollars.”
It took me a second to realize I was sucking air through my straw. I had been listening so closely, I had drunk all my iced tea without knowing it.
“You know this for sure?” I asked.
“For sure,” he said. “The lawyers paid for careful research in libraries and museums. These coins were made for a special occasion. The birth of the king's daughter. They could have only come from one ship.”
“But how did the guy find the coins when he was scuba diving? Didn't he find the ship too?”
“The last hurricane,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You know, the biggest storm to hit Florida in two hundred years. These lawyers figure the storm moved some sand around in shallow water. The same sand that was covering the pirate ship. Their guess is that the storm caused the coins to spread out from the ship.”
Uncle Gord took a paper napkin. With a pencil from his pants pocket, he began to
draw the different islands around Key West. He also drew some arrows going south to north.
“Here's the Gulf Stream,” he said, pointing at the arrows. “You know how strong it is.”
I did. All divers did. The stream was caused by water heating in the south and flowing north toward the poles of the earth, where the water cooled again.
“These lawyers had weather scientists make charts,” Uncle Gord continued. “The charts showed the currents and the storm movement of the hurricane. The charts showed how strong the current was during the storm and how fast it moved. From those charts and from where the coins were found, they tried to track how far the coins would have moved.”
I became excited. “Because if they can track the coins, they can track them backward to where they came from.”
Uncle Gord grinned. “Now you know why I agreed to help them. They have narrowed the search to an area twenty miles
long and half a mile wide. Right where the Gulf Stream is the strongest.”
His grin became a frown. “But twenty miles long and half a mile wide is still ten square miles. That's a lot of ocean floor to explore. The four of us have been doing it on weekends. We look around and mark off the area on our map so that we don't go back to it again. We figure it might take a year or two to search all of it.”