“When we broke off the crustaceans, you’ll never guess what we found,” Olivia said.
“Not in a million years,” LT added.
“Not in abazillionyears!” Olivia crowed.
“For chrissakes! Whatwasit?” Alex demanded.
“The hilt of a cutlass!” LT boasted, whipping the artifact from where he’d hidden it behind his back.
For a couple of seconds no one moved, no one dared breathe. Then it was like someone had pressed an ejector button. Bran, Mason, and Alex all scrambled to get a look at the relic balanced in the center of LT’s open palm. The thing was black with corrosion, but its shape and markings were unmistakable.
“Stop shoving, you big lummox!” Alex complained when Mason jostled her. The first two words held just a hint of a lisp, which Bran had noticed grew more prevalent when Alex became agitated.
“Mmmph,” Mason said, bending forward to inspect the hilt.
“Mmmph,” Alex parroted again, rolling her eyes.
“Cut the shit, you two,” LT said. “And while you’re at it, Mason, fire up a kerosene lantern. I want to get some good light on this thing. Alex, you run upstairs and grab the translation of theSanta Cristina’s manifest. Let’s see if I’m lucky or just good.”
Despite the excitement of the find, Bran felt his eyes pulled over to the laptop as if by some invisible force.
Maddy Powers…
Well, at least now he had a valid excuse to forgo a sail to the Dry Tortugas.
More like an excuse to be a lousy, no good fraidycat, an annoying voice whispered. To which he promptly repliedOh, go suck a bag of dicks, why doncha?
Chapter 2
6:21 p.m.…
“Hi!” Maddy waved to the park ranger waiting to greet her as she trudged up the steep beach of Garden Key, the main land mass among the batch of remote islets in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico that made up Dry Tortugas National Park.Tortugameant “tortoise,” a name given to the islands by Ponce de Leon in the fifteen hundreds. A couple of centuries later, the U.S. tried to make Garden Key useful by building a fort there, but faulty engineering, illness, and the Civil War thwarted that effort, and the structure was abandoned before its completion.
Garden Key was the only place in the Dry Tortugas that was inhabited. If you considered the lonely park ranger who lived in the little cottage on the edge of the beach an “inhabitant.” From what Maddy had read, the park rangers assigned to the island only did three-month stints to ensure the isolation and loneliness didn’t get to them.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Brrr. The things one learned from the movies.
“Hello!” the ranger called, ripping Maddy’s mind away from the scene inThe Shining. “Welcome to beautiful Garden Key and the Dry Tortugas!”
As Maddy extended her hand to the young park ranger—the operative word here wasyoung; if the ranger was much more than twenty years old, she’d eat her snorkel gear for dinner—she let her eyes roam over the facade of the unfinished garrison known as Fort Jefferson. Its red bricks stood out in harsh contrast to the aqua waters surrounding it, and the little lighthouse, painted black and perched atop one corner of the hexagonal curtain wall, brought to mind an old sentry, battered by the wind and rain but still standing tall. She couldn’t wait to give the scholarship girls a grand tour tomorrow after breakfast. She’d studied up and knew all the good stories sure to inspire awe in the imaginations of her charges. But for now…
“I’m Maddy Powers,” she said, giving the ranger’s hand a firm shake before turning to watch the three teenagers trudge toward her, carrying the sleeping bags and pup tents the pilot of the floatplane had passed to them from the aircraft’s small cargo hold. “Looks like we’ll be your company for the night.”
“Glad to have you, ma’am.” The ranger nodded, grinning and flashing a killer set of dimples.
Maddy faked an exaggerated wince. “Oh, please call me Maddy. I’ve been travelin’ with seventeen-year-olds all day, so I already feel older than dirt.”
The young man made a face, and the tips of his ears lit up like the Fourth of July.Lordy, would you look at that?“I’m s-sorry,” he stammered. “I meant no disrespect, ma’am, and I can promise you th-that…”
He trailed off when he realized he’d “ma’am-ed” her again, which might have something to do with the stink eye she pinned on him. He suddenly found the sand at his feet immensely interesting and starting digging for some mysterious object with the toe of his hiking boot.
Maddy chuckled and resisted the urge to brush his hair out of his eyes and tell him he should give up trying to grow that scraggly excuse for a beard. Instead she nudged him with her elbow—Maddy met a lot of strangers but her natural amiability meant they rarely stayed that way for long. “No,I’msorry. I have four older brothers, so takin’ folks with dangly bits to task is pretty much all in a day’s work for me. And then when I’m forced to get up before the butt crack of dawn—that’s four a.m., in case you were wonderin’—and pick up teenage girls who conspired to create an evilmorning person”—she made quote marks with her fingers—“trifecta, I tend be evenmorepersnickety.”
Her momma told her she had a gift for gab, and when she paired it with her friendly smile—like she was doing now—she was pretty good at putting folks at ease. Then again, it wasn’t ease she saw on the young ranger’s face when he blinked at her.
Are those some of his IQ points I see floatin’ out of his ears?
