Blue Moon (29 page)

“Do you think that
mañana
is the day?” Manolo asked without looking at him.

“Why not? If not
mañana
, then
pasado mañana
,” Gabe answered. The day after tomorrow. “All I know is that we are close.”

“Not because of me,” the deckhand observed, his expression morose.

Gabe clapped his friend on the back. “Don't be so hard on yourself,
amigo
. I was hard enough on you for both of us.” He paused. Apologies never came easy. “And I'm sorry . . .
lo siento mucho
.”

“The boat, it was almost lost.”

“But it wasn't.”

“
Un miraglo
.” Manolo crossed himself and kissed the crucifix that hung around his neck. “When I see the coral on both sides of the boat . . . I do not know how the bottom escaped harm. I saw it everywhere.”

Gabe wondered the same thing. By all rights the
Angel
should be stranded on the reef, not rocking at anchor in its midst. And it had been grounded. All his props had been doing was churning water and hitting the rock-hard coral while the boat rocked and shuddered in place. Then, as if a pair of hands had picked it up, the
Angel
had risen on a large swell and washed away from the reef— out where he could maneuver it. It made his insides knot, just remembering. Like Manolo said, it was a miracle.

A flash of light drew Gabe from his introspection to the dark mound of island in the distance. “Did you see that?”

“
Qué
?” Manolo looked at the sky.

“No, there on the island. I could have sworn I just saw a beam of light.”

“But no one lives there . . .
solamente
the birds.”

Gabe scowled, not taking his attention from the spot where he saw the light . . . or where he
thought
he saw it. Maybe it had been some kind of reflection. The place was mostly mangrove, swampy with a fringe of sand on this west side. Better seen by boat than afoot.

“I see nothing . . .
nada
,” his companion ventured after a while.

Gabe chuckled, uncertain. “I'm so tired, I must be hallucinating. One thing for sure,” he said, shoving to his feet. “I won't need to be rocked to sleep tonight.”

“
Bueno
,” Manolo said. “But still I will make my
café con leche
, no?”

Manolo drank black Mexican coffee four times a day, enough to have Gabe scaling the bulkheads, but in the evenings, he prepared
café con leche
with so much cream that it was more like coffee-flavored milk. “It will be good, no?”

Four hours later, Manolo snored, content as a babe full of warm milk in one of the forward bunks, while Gabe lay on the ragged sofa on the bridge, staring through the window at the star-spangled sky. He wasn't wired; at least, it wasn't spare energy keeping him awake. His body yearned for rest, but his mind wouldn't cooperate. He kept feeling that sudden lift of boat off the reef, the frantic grab of the props pulling away from it. Echoes of
miracle, miraglo
bounced around in his mind. The seas hadn't been that high, nor had he seen a wave that big since. It was as if it had been sent to deliver the
Fallen Angel
from its peril . . . to give it a second chance.

A God thing.

Lord . . . if it's okay to call You that . . . all I can say is thanks.

Gabe checked himself, his body tensing. He was praying, something he hadn't done since he was child. He couldn't even say when he'd stopped believing, or rather, stopped relying on God and started philosophizing about alternative explanations to the wonders of creation.

But tonight, lying here, no more than a speck on an endless stretch of sea, it seemed foolhardy not to rely on the power that had created it . . . that gave him a second chance when Jeanne Madison walked into his life, filled with faith and hope enough for the both of them.

What would he do with it?

The unbidden question startled Gabe. His doctoral thesis came to mind. He saw himself robed and collared, receiving his diploma, with Jeanne sitting next to his parents in the auditorium, smiling. They'd love her. Who wouldn't? She'd become his inspiration, if that's what it could be called.

The more he was around her, the less content he'd become with his current lifestyle. There had to be something more meaningful than the self-indulgence he'd grown accustomed to. If taking out fishing tours made him so happy, why did he drown it away every night at the
cantina
? Half his clients didn't even keep the blasted fish. It was a waste, pretty much like his life.

Maybe that's why Primston's condescension bugged him so much. Primston was right: he
was
a quitter. His position no more comfortable than the thought, Gabe turned on his side, staring at the dog sleeping next to the sofa.

But what if he went back to it? Gabe recalled the feverish excitement he'd felt upon analyzing the results of two years' worth of laboratory testing. Not unlike the gold fever that had led him away from his purpose.

Could he could return to the research work he'd loved? Jeanne's little joy dance this afternoon came to mind. He could pluck the moon from the sky with her at his side. Granted, he'd not be raking in the dough, but they'd not want for anything.

A smile tugged at the corner of Gabe's mouth as his eyes fluttered shut.

Except maybe a cook.

The brilliant morning sun lit the water overhead as Jeanne allowed herself to drift down toward the work site below. Its filtered light gave her surroundings a larger-than-life appearance, like something from another world. Objects glittered with otherworldly color, the grays on the bottom taking on varied hues and the sand sparkling with ochre and mauve. A school of fish with yellow arrows on their flanks paraded in front of her, unconcerned by her approach, while a large snapper lazily inspected the work that had been done on the reef.

The laborious clearing of coral that Gabe, Nick, and Stuart had done made a remarkable difference in the appearance of the site. Now she could make out the faint lines of the stern section of the ship, a ghostly presence on the bottom. From now on, they'd use the airlift to remove the sand and debris covering it. The men were hooking it up, but Jeanne hadn't been able to wait any longer to see the site for herself.

A tap on her shoulder drew her attention away from the
Luna
Azul
. Ann motioned for her to swim ahead for some video footage. Jeanne waited until her friend gave her the go ahead and made for what appeared to be a small cannon like those used on the aft deck of ships of that era. Jeanne had seen Stuart uncovering it on yesterday's footage, which Ann had showed after supper last night. Jeanne ran her hand along the barrel like a fashion model showing off a new car and then swam toward a piece of planking, black and exposed on the sea floor.

The undercurrent in the shallow water made it difficult for her to hold her footing, even with weights on. No wonder Stuart and Nick had hit the sack right after supper. Cutting and putting chunks of coral into the mesh tray for examination and struggling with the current had taken its toll. Even the lights on the
Margarita
were out when Jeanne had returned from her shower, indicating that Tex and his crew had turned in early as well.

Movement in the water over her head drew Jeanne's attention to where Nick and Gabe descended with a section of pipe connected to a long flexible section that looked like a giant sea serpent. Her pulse thrummed with anticipation. The lift would suck up many times the amount of sand that could be moved by hand in less time. And time was money.

Within twenty minutes, she and Gabe held the vacuum over the outline of the ship, watching a slurry of sand disappear to reveal a large wooden box lying amid a scattering of ballast stones. A missing section revealed its content—clay pipes. Hardly treasure of the spending sort, Jeanne thought, but one for the museums. After Ann signaled that she'd shot it, Nick and Stuart wrapped it in a fishnet to move it onto one of the mesh trays for transport to the top.

Beneath it was a layer of ballast, or at least that's what it appeared to be at first sighting. But as the sand was sucked into the lift, Jeanne saw that some of the stones were brick-shaped and black. The inklike cloud that lifted from them revealed a pile of silver ingots, tumbled like a stack of cordwood in the same haphazard way that the sinking ship had deposited them.

By the time they'd been moved to the rack, she and Gabe had dug out more sand, revealing black splinters of the wreck, long buried and protected from the worms. The suction of the lift and working of the current buried Jeanne's feet in the sand, while nearly a foot of it was moved away. As she pulled them out of the sand, Gabe gave her an urgent tap and pointed to where she'd just stood. Even at twenty-five feet, the glitter of gold was unmistakable.

Thank you, Jesus.
Jeanne leaned over the find, pressing her mask to Gabe's and giving him two thumbs up. Elation transcended the glass and water that separated them. Elation and more. The separation of glass between them seemed to disappear as Jeanne felt drawn into Gabe's eyes, embraced by them, and kissed so thoroughly that she forgot to breathe. She remained motionless, floating over their find, until her need for air overrode the heady stupor.

How Jeanne managed to resume breathing and drift to her knees when her heart kept leaping in the opposite direction was beyond her. While Gabe used the lift to clear the swirling sand away from the ingots—a clump of them, held in place for years by wood that was no longer there—she took one up in her hands. It was hard to tell in the water, but she guessed it to weigh ten pounds. Aware that she was being filmed, she held up the ingot for Ann.

Of course, the area around the stack would have to be cleared of sand, the stack itself documented on film and its location recorded on the map. By the time this was done and the gold was lifted to the
Angel
's deck, it would be the end of her shift. But dive tables could not be ignored, no matter how much she wanted to continue the excavation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Lunch was manic. Food was an aside.
Gold
was the word of the day—gold bricks of all shapes and gold coins that had been vacuumed up and separated from the debris through a steel mesh tray. True to his word, Pablo, usually more reserved, did a hat dance around the mesh tray used to bring up the treasure.

“Anyone see the irony here?” Nick said, sifting his fingers through coins as pristine as the day they'd sunk to the sea bottom. There were doubloons, ducats, coins of denominations even Remy hadn't seen before. “It hardly seems right to store gold in plastic buckets.”

“The cost of progress,” Remy observed, in voice only—he couldn't pull himself away from inspecting a long length of gold chain adorned with a flying mythological creature. “Extraordinary.”

“That must have been made for a princess or noblewoman.” Mara fingered the intricately designed creature. “Probably an ornate belt . . . definitely a museum piece.”

“
En garde
.” Stuart brandished a gilded sword hilt embedded with precious stones, swashbuckling with an unseen enemy.

“Since we seem to be sittin' on the mother lode, how's about we put all our manpower on salvagin' what we can.”

Remy's head shot up at Tex's terminology. “
Excavate
, my dear man. Excavate. One piece at a time, taking meticulous records.”

Tex grimaced. “Tell you what, Prim. You write; I'll
excavate
.”

Jeanne looked up from sorting through the debris in the mesh tray. “Remy is right, Tex. We have to do this scientifically. Even if it takes longer.”

Tex pointed to the compressor that ran the airlift, now blessedly quiet. While Jeanne did her turn on deck, she thought she'd go deaf. “That thing don't know science from shinola.”

“Granted, it indiscriminately picks up the loose items on the sea floor, but what won't fit in the hose needs to be documented,” she insisted.

“Keep him straight, sweet.”

Jeanne started as Gabe planted a quick kiss on the back of her neck in front of everyone. He'd been in rare form all morning, playful and joking, even with Remy.

“Whoa,” Stuart remarked, nothing less than worship on his sun-pinkened face. “Talk about brass.”

“Checking for fever,” Gabe answered smoothly.

“Hah,” Tex snorted. “If that's the case, you might as well pucker up to all of us.”

“Now, that would be something for Ann's documentary,” Jeanne piped up, eager to escape being the center of attention. She hadn't had a fever—until now. “But I think Tex has a good point.” She tossed a gold finger-sized bar with Roman numerals into a nearby bucket. “Maybe we should spend the rest of this week working continuous shifts until this site is cleared and completely covered.”

“I agree,” Gabe said. “We can't keep this under wraps forever. The best we can hope for is to finish out the week. I say get this site worked now. Artifacts don't interest treasure hunters as much . . . and they will come in droves once the word is out.”