Circle of Bones (24 page)

From the corner of his eye, he noticed movement back down by the wharf. Something moving fast. When he swung his head that way to look, there was no one there. What was it that had attracted his attention? He hollered into the shop that he would be right back and headed down to the corner to take a look at the boat.

The
Fish n’ Chicks
was docked about fifty feet up the pier, and though there weren’t many lights in the area, he saw the outline of a man on deck. Keeping to the shadows, he edged closer to the boat. The figure stepped around the cabin headed for the afterdeck and Spyder recognized him. It was just Thor, and now he was climbing up to the fly bridge. What the fuck was he doing? Guy didn’t know squat about boats. He watched as the man settled into the helmsman’s seat. Had Thor been talking to somebody? Was that what he’d seen? He closed his eyes and tried to pull up a clearer image of what had attracted him. Yeah, it had been somebody hauling ass off the wharf. It wasn’t a woman, he was sure of that. A man, then, walking fast. Too fast.

Spyder returned to the main street, then entered the alley that led up the side of the hill between the dark cottages. This was definitely the direction the shadow man had gone. Spyder stepped softly, listening for footsteps, ducking overhanging branches heavy with sickly sweet flowers. The windows he passed were all dark and dull like the eyes of old blind men.  After about fifty yards, he came to another cross street that ran parallel to the little shopping and restaurant district below. The houses on the back street were larger, fancier, with second story wrought iron balconies and whitewashed brick walls surrounding front courtyards. A narrow concrete sidewalk ran alongside the cobblestone street beneath the high branches of the poinciana trees. He turned right and started to circle the block when he felt a hand fall on his shoulder.

He spun around fast, spilling beer down the front of his shirt from the can he had forgotten was still in his hand. “Shit, Pinky! I almost crapped my pants. What are you creeping around here for?”

“Just walkin’.” 

“You seen anybody come by here?”

“Just a dog. That’s all.”

Maybe it was just a dog. But he didn’t trust Thor, that was for sure, and if they were going to make out on this deal, he’d have to watch him.

“I found where the woman’s sailboat went to.”

“You seen it?”

Pinky nodded. “Just where that dude’s GPS thing said it would be.”

“Yeah?”

“Unh-huh.” He pointed down the street that led out of town. “Off that way. There’s another boat there too. Can’t make it out, though. Too far out. I just seen the white anchor light.”

Spyder chugged down the last of the beer and burped loudly. He was trying to think. He knew that knowing stuff was always worth something. Now Pinky’d seen the chick’s boat and they had that. But what they didn’t know was who had been running away from their boat? Had the dude got rid of him and his brother just so he could meet with somebody?

“Spyder, you don’t look so good.”

“Shut up, bro. I’m trying to think.”

Pinky chuckled and scratched at a scab on his cheek.

“I said shut up, man.” Spyder hated it when his brother laughed at him. “Fuck this. Come on. Let’s go get the asshole’s food and get back to the boat. I don’t like leaving him alone with our shit. Who knows what he’s doing.  He might be going through our drawers and shit. We got our own secrets, right bro?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Aboard the Shadow Chaser

March 26, 2008

10:55 p.m.

Riley leaned over the stern bulwark and peered across the water towards her boat lying at anchor farther inside the bay. Above her loomed the cables and dark shadows of the former shrimper’s outriggers. Though she knew sailboats, she was unaccustomed to work boats, and she felt like a foreigner aboard this one. 

Where was Theo? With her dinghy gone, she had no way, aside from swimming, to get back to her distant anchor light. But at that moment, she wanted more than anything else to get off this conspiracy nut’s boat. Her father made more sense than this guy.

“Mikey, what was I thinking?” she whispered to the wind.

Closing her eyes, she reached out to her brother. She needed that connection to him. A sudden thought popped into her mind, and she opened her eyes. “You agree with him?”

Though she hadn’t heard anything, she felt his presence behind her. He exhaled a long breath.  

“Mikey?” she started to turn.

“I don’t blame you for wanting to bolt,” Cole said.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Who did you think it would be?”

She turned back to the rail and stared out at her boat’s distant anchor light. “Nobody.”

He rested his forearms on the bulwark next to hers, and he didn’t say anything for several long minutes. His voice was soft when he began to speak. “I talk to myself all the time, too, Magee.”

She wasn’t about to correct him – to tell him that she wasn’t talking to herself. 

“I know how all this must sound to you.”

She thought for a moment before speaking. She had to phrase this right. “Cole, I grew up in embassies. My father was a career diplomat. After that, I spent nine years as a Marine, six as an MSG stationed in Cairo, Honduras, Lima. I grant you, in all that time, I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff from our government. But they’re not even organized enough to get the right units assigned to the proper stations, much less to pull off any big conspiracies. I don’t see how you can believe that.”

“I was a skeptic, too, at the beginning. After I outgrew the whole hero worship thing, I decided my old man didn’t have both oars in the water. But then it happened. I came to believe.”

She shook her head, but he continued. 

“A little over five years ago, my father sent me an autographed copy of his latest book. It was about a submarine. The book was called,
Surcouf: The Disappearance of the Greatest Submarine in the World.
I never wrote him a thank-you note. The package arrived when I was still teaching at ECU, trying to fit into that world. It was some tiny publisher – more like a vanity press. But it got reviewed and people in my field knew about him. I was ashamed of him. Early on in my career, I discovered that a mere mention my relation to James Thatcher made people look at me like I was a crackpot.”

When she turned to look at him, she saw his profile in the moonlight. His chin was up, his eyes on the stars, and his soft words were getting swallowed by the dense marine air. She leaned forward, trying to hear him better. For some reason she didn’t understand, his stories seemed both to repulse and attract her.

“It was after he sent the book that his letters dried up. I’d stopped writing back. We had no communication at all the last three years of his life.  The last message I got from him was a birthday present when I turned thirty.” Cole lifted the coin on its chain to his chin and looked down at it. “This. I didn’t bother to save the card. He’d written a message in it saying something to the effect that this coin was a key.”  

He ran his thumb over the face of the coin as she’d seen him do that first day.

“What did he mean? A key to what?”

“I didn’t know back then,” he said.

“And now?”

He nodded. “It’s why they killed him.”

She brushed her hair off her forehead and rested her palm against her brow. Oh Mikey, she thought. I know what that is like to have suspicions but not be able to prove anything. The sense of déjà vu was making her feel nauseous. Cole’s words were making her head hurt. “What makes you so sure he was murdered?”

Cole took a deep breath. “Will you come back inside? There’s something else I want to show you.” 

“Nobody contacted me at first when he died,” he said after they had both slid back onto the benches of the dining booth. “It was several months after his death
when this package arrived in the mail from Bodwin, England.” He opened the box, lifted the journals out, then retrieved the yellowed clipping from the bottom of the box. “Inside were these old leather-bound books,” he said tapping the journals. “There was also a note from my father’s solicitors saying the old man had specified in his will that he wanted his son in America to receive these. Tucked inside one of the volumes, I found this article from the
London Times
about his death.”

 He unfolded the newspaper clipping and placed it front of her. She began to read.

“Bodwin, Cornwall. Late Thursday morning, James Thatcher was found hanging from a skylight in his loft at his house in Cornwall. When the body was discovered by a housekeeper, Thatcher was dressed in a green hazmat suit for use in nuclear, biological or chemical warfare, green overalls, a black plastic mackintosh and thick rubber gloves. His face was covered by a gas mask and he was also wearing a sou’wester. His body was suspended from two ropes, attached to shackles that had been fastened to a piece of wood, and he was surrounded by pornographic photos of women in bondage. According to consultant pathologist Dr. Jonathon Yates, Thatcher died from asphyxia in what is now called auto-erotic asphyxiation.”

She opened her mouth to say something, and then she closed it again. She didn’t know what to say. What did he want from her? Why was he sharing all this? Where the hell was Theo with her dinghy?

“Riley, I may not have spent much time with my father, but I knew him well enough.” He shook his head and pointed his finger at the clipping. “I can’t buy that story. It’s not the lurid sex part of it. It’s too over the top. I mean, it’s not even practical if you think about it. Thick rubber gloves? And you know, there couldn’t have been a more effective or symbolic way to silence and discredit him. He wouldn’t write any more books or letters throwing scorn on the British Official Secrets Act. No more investigations into Britain’s World War II code breakers or the real reasons for the invasion of the Falklands or the secrets kept by the Royal Family. And the body of his life’s work, like the body dangling from those ropes, had been made a mockery.” 

“Cole, I’m sorry, but —”

“I didn’t communicate directly with my father the last three years of his life, but when I met Theo and decided to start my own exploration company to do underwater archeological work, we got a large anonymous donation that allowed us to buy
Shadow Chaser
and fit her out. That was our seed money. After he died, I discovered something. That anonymous donor was my father. He sent the money — not because he wanted to help me out. He wanted
me
to help
him
.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanted me to find
Surcouf
.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Aboard the Shadow Chaser

March 26, 2008

11:15 p.m.

Riley sat looking down at the hands folded on her lap and tried to digest everything he had told her over the last couple of hours. Far-fetched was the word that kept coming to mind. Cole Thatcher might be attractive, well-educated, funny, and a good boatman — but, and this was no small item —
the man was nuts.
He didn’t have so much as his big toe grounded in reality. She reached across the table, picked up the heavy gold coin, and turned it over in her hands.

“I know the answer to
Surcouf
’s location is on that coin,” Cole said, staring at the coin. “And that’s why the Brewsters are following me. I was stupid enough to tell them as much.” He glanced up, met her eyes. “Alcohol was involved.” He attempted a smile, his lips pressed together in thin lines.

“You must have been a pretty convincing drunk for them to follow you this far.”

“And an idiot.”

He stood up then and began pacing in the confined galley like a figure skater doing figure eights. He stopped and stabbed his finger in the air pointing at the chart. “It’s got to be there. Everything points to it. There’s something in the old man’s journal – a cipher or code – and that coin is the key!” Then he added, “I
know
it.”

She was about to respond, to shift the subject matter to something that made her a little less uncomfortable, when he spun on his heel, braced his hands on the door frame and leaned out into the night. 

“She’s out there.
Surcouf.
Close by. It’s like I can smell her.”

The deck breeze ruffled his shaggy hair and rippled his T-shirt where it hung from his arms. She was fascinated by the pent-up, almost manic energy in him.

“Why here? Why Guadaloupe?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Why was she encouraging him? Maybe she was nuts, too. But she had to admit she was curious about this code thing. She’d always enjoyed a good puzzle, and like her brother, she was pretty good at them.

He swung around to face her again. “In the last eighteen months of his life, my father flew down here twice, landed at Pointe-à-Pitre, stayed several weeks. It’s all in the journals here.” He picked up one of the volumes and began to thumb through the pages. “It was right after his second stay that Theo and I got the anonymous donation. He found something here. Maybe it was the actual wreck. I don’t know. There were only two more journal entries after that. But those two entries don’t read like the rest of the pages. The words don’t make sense; the sentences don’t connect, and sometimes the words aren’t even words. It’s got to be a code. Take a look.” 

He placed the open book in front of her. The handwriting on the page was uneven, almost chaotic. It leaned left in places and to the right in others. In some places, the letters were neat, and in others, the script was barely legible. Riley knew nothing of handwriting analysis, but it didn’t take an expert to see that this was the writing of a disturbed individual. On the final page, she read:

Dear son,

Wits end is where I am. Spent a bit of time there. Expect to be there til the end of days. Got to stop. Them. American president is part and parcel. What goes up must come down. Not a nickel to my name. It’s all yours now. Got to stop. Them. The Creoles sing a song in the islands. It’s called Fais pas do do. Like this.