Authors: Heather Graham
“You found Georgia and Travis?” David asked.
She nodded gravely.
“You found the bodies?” Sean asked.
“I did,” Vanessa said. “Lew and Jay came quickly down to the beach, then the others…and then the Bahamian authorities.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight, though,” Sean said. “Georgia and Travis were found dead. Georgia had been running down the beach. Where was Travis?”
“No one knew,” Vanessa said.
“Then why didn’t you look for him?” Sean asked.
“Frankly, we thought he was part of a huge prank being pulled on Georgia. Jay was aggravated with him. We did go down the beach—Lew, Jay and I—and there was nothing there. Except—”
“Except?” Liam asked.
“The sand where we later found the two had been churned up. It looked as if maybe there had been something stuck in the sand.”
“And that didn’t bother you?” Sean asked.
“We were filming a horror movie. We thought that someone was playing an elaborate prank, and, as I said, that Travis was involved in the prank. I’m afraid that a lot of pranks are carried out on film sets,” Vanessa said evenly. She took a deep breath. “Anyway, Georgia was in terror—she wasn’t going to stay on the island. She was having an absolute fit, so Carlos said that he could take her into Miami and head back first thing in the morning. We all thought it was best. But Georgia and Travis were found on the beach, and Carlos and the boat disappeared.”
“I’m not sure there’s much of a mystery there,” Sean said. “Apparently, Carlos stole the boat after he killed the two.”
“I don’t believe it, not for a minute,” Vanessa said. “The police, the Coast Guard, the FBI—every known agency looked for the boat and Carlos, but it was as if they had vanished. What you don’t understand is that Carlos Roca wasn’t capable of doing something so horrible. He was one of the most gentle people I’ve ever met.”
“I wasn’t in on the investigation, but I do remember it,” Liam said. “And I’m sorry to tell you this, but most of those law-enforcement agencies believe that Carlos Roca did murder the two young people and steal the boat.”
“I don’t care what they believe!” Vanessa said.
She was surprised when Sean said, “Of course,
there’s another scenario. Someone else hijacked the boat, someone who might have already taken Travis. That person either killed Carlos first to take control of Georgia or had Carlos knocked out somewhere. Then did the grisly deed on the island and dumped Carlos in the Atlantic.”
David leaned forward. “Okay, here’s the curious part—where was Travis? Had he been killed and his body hidden? And was it possible for someone to have killed him, hidden his body and managed to go after Carlos and Georgia in the boat, get back to the island without being seen, find the one body, stage the gruesome death scene, and then get rid of Carlos? And how, with the alarm that must have gone out, could they have gotten away with the boat? Everyone in the Bahamas, South Florida and all of the Caribbean would have been on the alert.”
“Well, stealing the boat, gassing it up, changing it—that seems the easiest part of it,” Sean said.
“I agree with you—where Travis was when the whole thing started would be a nice piece of the riddle.”
“Dead,” Vanessa said softly.
“Probably dead, but where? And how was he killed, and then not found until later?” Sean mused.
“These are the questions everyone has asked time and time again, and they haven’t found the answers. But they aren’t people who know the legends, know the area—”
“Snacks and beer!” Katie announced cheerfully from the hallway.
She set nachos with steaming cheese and other in
gredients on the coffee table and passed around the tray she carried with ice-cold beer bottles.
Vanessa accepted a beer with a gaze that said both “Thanks” and “How could you have left me alone in here?”
Katie smiled. “I know you all,” Katie said, sitting, “and there isn’t a better mystery out there!”
“I have a lot of work to do now,” Liam said. “And it’s a bad time, a very bad time, at the station.”
“Nothing has been decided,” Sean said.
“We’ve all agreed to talk about it. We’ve talked about focusing on a number of mysteries and legends, but we haven’t decided what our focus is going to be,” David said. “It’s Sean’s decision. I am gung-ho on the idea of pooling our resources and working locally, but Sean’s been doing the budget, mapping and research, so it’s his decision.”
“Yes, but if you’re thinking about the story, I ought to be on the trip,” Liam said. He looked at Vanessa. “It hasn’t occurred to you to be afraid? The killer or killers were never caught. They might still be out there,” he said.
“Afraid?” she asked softly. “I still have nightmares. I see Georgia alive and screaming, and I see the heads and the arms sticking out of the sand. I remember being terrified of the dark for nearly a year. And then I got very angry, and I finally figured out that I’d probably have nightmares for the rest of my life if I didn’t do something to discover the truth. I think the killer is a coward—he worked in the dark, at night. I think there has to be a way to stand against him. That starts with finding him—and when he’s found, I don’t care if they
give him life or the death penalty, just so long as he can never do anything so horrible to anyone else, ever again.”
She stood up. They were going to agree, or they weren’t.
“I’ll let you all talk,” she said. “Katie knows where to find me. Thank you for your time.”
Afraid? Yes, she’d been so afraid….
Her only fear now was that they would say no.
The
Happy-Me
sat off the coast of Bimini in shallow water. Jenny and Mark Houghton and their friends Gabby and Dale Johnson had planned on camping on the beach, but they had gotten lazy. They hadn’t tied up at the dock because they’d kept the boat in the shallow water, and talked so late that the sun had gone down.
Both retired, the couples motored the short distance to Haunt Island several times a year.
Gabby and Dale had gone to bed, Mark was still topside and Jenny was humming as she put away the last of the dishes. They’d dined on spaghetti and meatballs, heated up in the microwave.
She was startled to hear her husband call her name. “Jenny!”
She nearly dropped the dish in her hand, it had been so quiet. She set it on the counter and hurried up the ladder to the deck. For a moment, it struck her that they might as well be alone in the world. Entirely alone. There were a few stars in a black-velvet sky, and it seemed that there was no horizon, the sea melded with the sky. The lights of the
Happy-Me
were colorful and brave against the night—and pitiful, as well.
“Hand me the grapple pole there, quickly, Jenny,” Mark said, leaning over the hull and staring into the water.
“What?”
She was concerned. Mark had been given a clean bill of health after having suffered a heart attack on his seventieth birthday, but he thought himself a young man still, at times. And he was acting like a crazy one now.
“That one,” he said, spinning around. There was a grappling hook on a long pole set in its place in metal brackets against the wall of the cabin.
“But, Mark—”
“Please, Jenny, please—there’s someone in the water!”
She heard it then: a gasped and garbled plea for help.
While Mark continued to stare into the water, Jenny reached for the hook, almost ripping it from the wall to bring to Mark.
He stuck it out into the water, calling out, “Here, here, take this, we’ll get you aboard!
“Ah!” he murmured. Jenny saw that someone had the pole and that Mark was managing to pull the person closer to the boat.
“The flashlight, get a flashlight!” Mark said.
Jenny turned to do so. As she did, she heard another gasping sound, and within it a little cry of terror.
She spun around.
The sound was coming from Mark. Because someone…
something
…was rising from the sea.
It couldn’t be. It was a bony pirate, half-eaten, so it appeared, in rags. Bones and rags, and it was laughing….
“No!” Jenny gasped herself.
The
thing
reached out and grabbed Mark around the neck. It lifted him and tossed him overboard. Jenny started to scream in protest, horrified for Mark, her companion, friend, lover, husband for all of her life.
And then…
In terror herself. For her own life.
Because now the
thing
pulled a sword. A fat sword. Maybe it wasn’t a sword. Maybe it was a machete. Maybe it was…
Her last conscious thought was,
What the hell does it matter what it is?
It swung in the night.
She never managed to scream. Her windpipe was severed before she could do so. She dropped to the deck, her head dangling from the remnants of her neck.
“Quickly,” said the one to the other, joining him on board. “Quickly. The other two, before they wake up!”
The deck was drenched as they walked across it and down the ladder to the cabin below.
Gabby and Dale never woke up.
For a while, the
Happy-Me
rolled in the gentle waves of the night, beneath the velvet darkness of the sky.
Then it sank to a shallow grave.
V
anessa had the dreams again that night.
They had started the night on the island when Georgia had talked about the monsters, left the island with Carlos—and wound up murdered with her head on the sand.
For the first weeks after the incident, they’d come frequently. They would start with her being Isabella, rising from the sea in her period gown, covered with seaweed.
Vanessa had agreed to play the small role of Isabella, and the day when they had filmed her in the costume had turned out to be fun—after she’d calmed down from being aggravated. There she had been in that gown, floating—a corpse that had come to the surface, about to open its long-dead eyes—and they were supposed to have been filming from beneath her. But in the middle of the shoot, they’d gotten distracted by a school of barracuda, and she’d looked up at last to see that the boat was far away and there was no sign of the others. She was a good swimmer, but the seas were beginning to rise and the gown was heavy. She lay there
cursing them, then called out, hoping someone on the boat would hear her.
The boat had come around at last with Jay and the others on board. They’d been thrilled with their footage of the barracuda—which usually left people alone, unless they had something on them that sparkled and attracted the attention of the predators. Incredulous, she’d asked if they’d gotten the shots of her, floating in the water. Oh, yes, they’d done so. Then, seeing her face, Jay had been entirely contrite, and everyone had tripped over themselves trying to appease her for the afternoon.
But in her dreams, she didn’t see Isabella as herself. She saw her dead, murdered, empty sockets where her eyes should be, yet seeming to see, face skeletal and pocked with the ravages of the sea, bits of bone and skull peeking through decomposing flesh. The woman stared at her as if she were the enemy, and all around her, huge black shadows seemed to form, and they were made of seaweed and
evil.
Then she was alone on the beach at Haunt Island, and they were coming after her, and she didn’t run because there was nowhere to go to escape the darkness and evil, she simply stood there, staring at them, as they seemed to grow larger and larger and come closer and closer, and she could smell the rot of flesh and a stagnant sea and she could almost feel the salt spray of the ocean.
Right before they embraced her, she awoke with a start.
For a moment she was disoriented in the darkness of her room. Then she heard a whistle from below her window, the wheels of a late-night taxi going somewhere
and the laughter of the few drunken revelers still on the street, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She was in her little studio room atop the bathing suit and T-shirt shop on Duval Street. A glance at the faceplate of her phone told her that it was just about 2:00 a.m.
She stared at the ceiling for a while, angry with herself. She wasn’t afraid of ghosts or sea monsters. Someone real and alive had happened upon the island. A real person had killed her friends—and she just couldn’t believe it was Carlos. Carlos was probably dead. She hated the fact that everyone
assumed
that he’d been the killer, when he probably died trying to protect Georgia from whatever sick maniac had come upon them. It was chilling to think that the killer had to have been on the island with them when Georgia had first screamed, when they had all thought that Travis was fine somewhere, laughing at the cruel joke he had played on Georgia. They should have looked harder for Travis that night.
And yet, who would have really suspected anything? They were a large enough group. They’d been enjoying the shoot, and even the pristine isolation of Haunt Island.
She probably lay there for hours, and then drifted off.
Vanessa’s phone rang at 8:00 a.m. She knew, because the jarring sound caused her to bolt up, and she saw the time immediately. She fumbled to retrieve it from the stand next to the bed and answered breathlessly.
“Yes?”
“Vanessa?”
She felt as if her heart stood still for a moment. The voice sounded like that of Sean O’Hara.
“Yes?”
“Are you awake? Sorry if I woke you.”
He wasn’t one bit sorry, she thought.
“I was awake,” she said. So she was lying. She wasn’t sure what she had said or done exactly that had seemed to raise a barrier of hostility within him—other than that she did want him to take his project and turn it to her purpose.
“Ready to let me see your stuff?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“Diving, filming,” he said. Was there a touch of mockery in his tone? Was he amused that she might have thought that he meant something else?
“Of course. Anytime. Does this mean that—”
“It means I want to see if you’re as good as your credentials,” he said flatly.
“Of course. Where do you want me, when, and with what equipment?”
“I have equipment. You probably want your own regulator and mask.”
“Of course. What about cameras?”
“Mine are excellent quality.”
“So are mine.”
“Let’s see if you know my equipment, and my methods,” he said. “And if I hire you, it’s going to be as my assistant, remember? Hauling, toting. But…it won’t hurt to see what you can do with a camera. You never know when you may need some backup.”
“All right.”
“Meet me at the dock in half an hour. My dive boat is the
Conch Fritter.
I’ll be setting her up.”
“I’ll be there,” she promised.
For a moment she couldn’t afford to waste, she just sat there, staring at her phone. He hadn’t agreed.
But he hadn’t said no.
And in the water, she could prove herself.
She blinked, then shot out of bed. She had thirty minutes to shower, find a suit and run down the seven or so blocks to the boat docks.
And there had to be a cup of coffee somewhere along the way.
Vanessa Loren was all business when she arrived at the dock precisely on time. She was wearing a huge tank-type T-shirt over a bathing suit and carried a dive bag in one hand, a large paper cup of coffee in the other. Her hair was swept back in a band at her nape and she was wearing large dark sunglasses.
“Hand over the bag,” he said politely.
“I can manage,” she told him.
She could. Without needing a handhold of any kind for balance, she made the short leap from the dock to the deck with amazing dexterity, never in danger of losing so much as a drop of coffee—not that the company didn’t serve its coffee with A-one lids.
He shrugged as she landed. “Suit yourself. Want to grab that line aft?”
“Sure.”
Bartholomew leaned casually against the rail, arms crossed over his chest. “She’s got quite the physical prowess, and yet she’s light and sleek as a cat. I say, hire her on! Trust me, the women of my day were seldom adept at working on any ship. Ah, this is but a boat. There you go.”
Sean wanted to tell Bartholomew that there had been a number of famous and infamous women working upon pirate ships, but since Bartholomew was indignant at the term
pirate,
he’d deny it. And he knew that Bartholomew was going to goad him all afternoon.
He refrained from replying.
He went to the fore to release the front line and she scurried to release the one aft. He didn’t speak to her as he guided the
Conch Fritter
out of the harbor.
Bartholomew, however, kept up a running conversation.
“Ah, what a lovely day. Truly lovely day! Calm seas, a beautiful sky and just the tiniest kiss of autumn in the air. I do remember this reef—we forced a few Spaniards into her sharp tentacles, we did. Glorious sailing! Oh, and by the way—you do know that this is the area where Mad Miller supposedly attacked the
Santa Geneva
and kidnapped Dona Isabella. Alas, the ship upon which she sailed sank to the bottom of the sea with the nasty, evil creatures upon the pirate ship, Mad Miller’s flagship, slicing up many a man as he begged for mercy, cast into the water, drowning!”
Slicing them might have been a mercy, if they were drowning,
Sean thought, but he kept silent.
As he cleared the channel, Vanessa came and took the companion seat by the helm.
“Ah, but she looks lovely there!” Bartholomew commented.
She did. She was relaxed, enjoying the wind that whipped around them as they sped through the water. The
Conch Fritter
wasn’t new, but she was a thirty-eight-foot Sea Ray custom Sundancer, and Sean loved
her. She did twenty knots with amazing comfort—she wasn’t going to outrun a real powerboat by any means, but she could move. The cockpit was air-conditioned and equipped with two flat-screen TVs, and there were three small sleeping cabins, the captain’s cabin at the fore and two lining the port and starboard sides. There was a small galley and main cabin as well, and the helm sat midway through the sleek design with a fiberglass companion seat that offered plenty of storage. He’d had her outfitted with a helm opening and an aft boarding ladder with a broad platform, and portside and starboard safe holds for dive tanks.
“Yes, yes, you love your boat,” Bartholomew said, rolling his eyes. “And she is a thing of beauty! But then again, can anything rival the gold of that young woman’s hair, the sea and sky that combine in her eyes?” he asked with an exaggerated sigh. Sean thought,
I will not look at you, you scurvy spectral bastard.
“Where are we going?” Vanessa asked above the hum of the motor.
“Pirate Cut—it’s a close, easy dive,” Sean said.
“We don’t even need tanks,” she commented.
“Ah, she knows the reef!” Bartholomew said. “Frankly, it seems that everything this young woman has said to you is true.”
“If you want to stay down and film we need tanks and equipment,” Sean said pleasantly to Vanessa.
She flushed and looked away, but it was obvious that she knew the reef, and probably knew it fairly well.
She did. She knew exactly where they were going, and how long it was going to take to get there. When
they were still five minutes away, she stood and dug into her bag. She worked with a dive skin, not a suit, but a skin, light and not providing warmth. He actually liked a skin himself—a skin protected a diver against the tentacles of small and unseen jellyfish.
But he hadn’t brought one.
By the time he’d stopped the motor and dropped anchor, she had on her skin and dive booties. Dive booties could be good, too, he had to admit. He’d brought neither his skin nor booties, but he didn’t always wear them. She’d attached her regulator to a buoyancy-control vest and tank—the one next to the tank he’d prepared for himself. She wasted no time.
“What are we using?” she asked him.
He opened his storage container. He loved his equipment; he could spend hours perusing new camera equipment on the Internet.
He had many makes and models of video and still cameras, lighting systems and sound recorders, though often sound was added after shooting. He chose a Sony that day, with a Stingray Plus housing.
“Want help with your BCV and tank?” he asked.
“Nope, thank you.”
He’d worked on dive boats growing up; tanks were heavy, it was easy to go off balance with them. Most people didn’t mind help rising with them.
He let her go on her own.
She buckled into the vest and rose carefully, her mask on her head, her regulator ready. She proceeded carefully to the edge, slipped her regulator in her mouth and entered in a smooth backward flip. She had managed the weight on her slim body without any difficulty. All
right, so she was trying to be one of the guys, not a hindrance, not someone on a crew who couldn’t manage basic tasks.
She surfaced, and he handed her the camera equipment. She removed her regulator and asked him, “What am I filming?”
“Something artistic,” he told her. “And I’m right behind you.”
She nodded, but she wasn’t waiting around at the surface. She could handle the camera housing fine while releasing air from her BCV. She sank below the surface.
“What a woman!” Bartholomew said. “Why, if I were only flesh and blood…”
“But you’re not,” Sean told him.
He hurried into his own gear and followed in her wake.
Pirate’s Cut was a beautiful place to dive. The water was clear, and visibility was amazing. Staghorn coral rose and wafted in the movement of the water, while torch and pineapple coral in dazzling shades grew around it. Tiny fish darted here, there and everywhere, while a large grouper, at least three hundred pounds, decided to swim at her side.
It did make for beautiful filming. She shot the coral with the tiny fish and panned slowly around to the giant grouper.
There was a drop-off near the shallow area of the reef, and she followed it down; she knew that the ocean went to no more than a hundred feet at the drop-off. She eased down about another twenty feet, aware that Sean was near her then, watching her. He came to her,
motioning for the camera. She frowned behind her mask but handed it to him. He indicated her side, and she saw that the giant grouper was still following her, like a pet dog. She shrugged and swam slowly alongside the fish while Sean took footage. She reached out and stroked the side of the fish. He circled her—hoping for a handout, she was certain. Divers must have recently come to the reef with food to encourage the creature to come near. It was amazing that he hadn’t wound up on a dinner plate himself.
He lingered a little while longer, and then swam off.
Sean returned the camera to her. She decided to go to the bones of the old sunken ship that was assumed to be the
Santa Geneva.
She’d been a wooden-hulled ship and had broken up, however it was that she’d gone down. She was really nothing but wooden bones now, since the sea had caused the disintegration of most of the hull. Vanessa still loved the wreck. It was possible to imagine the size of the ship, where the masts had been, the hold, the cabins, the quarters.
She looked through the camera as she neared a section of the remains.
She almost choked, and started in the water.
Through the lens, she saw a figurehead.