Blood, Ash, and Bone

CHAPTER Twenty-one

Trey had the right skill set for eating crabs—patient, with nimble fingers and singular focus. He’d dressed in clean workout clothes, storing his second set in a dry bag along with a change of clothes for me. Everything of his was fresh from the laundry despite my warning that clean clothes and blue crabs did not mix.

The evening lingered warm after the chilly morning, the sky purpled and rippled with fishtail clouds. The planked floors of the tiny waterside restaurant felt like a boat deck beneath my feet, and the breeze smelled of brine and pluff mud. We sat at a table near the marsh, pedestal fans keeping the sand gnats at bay, and watched the dock.

“Is she here?” Trey said.

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

I watched him work at the crustaceans, white shirt sleeves rolled up, juice running down his wrists. He’d taken his watch off.

I grinned at him. “You look positively bohemian. Almost—”

I bit back the word. Almost normal. It was disconcerting to remember that he wasn’t. I reached too quickly for my beer and knocked it over. Trey caught it in one deft move, then placed it upright on the table without spilling a single drop.

“What’s the name of Dee Lynn’s boat?” he said.

“Storm Season.”

He nodded toward the dock. The boat was pulling up, Dee Lynn at the wheel high above the deck. It was a thirty-foot sport fisher, an older craft tricked out with the latest in artifact hunting technology.

I stood. “Time to go, sailor. Our ride’s here.”

***

Dee Lynn steered us down the Wilmington River, the islands and hammocks passing on both sides. She kept her eyes straight ahead, her ponytail swinging almost to the waistband of her khakis.

“Right fine boyfriend you got there.”

I turned my face into the wind. “I know.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“I manage that just fine.”

She laughed. “He’s in there messing with the side-scan sonar, like a kid with a new toy.”

“I’m not surprised. Trey’s a city dude all the way, but he’s got a knack for graphics. Maps and charts, drawings and diagrams and blueprints.”

“Treasure maps?”

“Those too, I’ll bet.”

Dee Lynn’s eyes were bright. “I swear, Tai, if we pull Confederate gold out of the dirt—”

“We call the proper authorities.”

“Don’t spit the law at me, I know it backwards and forwards. I also know it’s pretty gray on this particular topic.”

“Don’t you go catching gold fever. We’re here because Trey called in a favor. I’m on my best behavior, and you’d better be too.”

She grinned and took the boat into a tight turn, sloshing up a wake. “Good behavior doesn’t run in our family, leastways not amongst the women. But I’ll do my best.”

***

Wassaw is a barrier island just southeast of Savannah, between Little Tybee and Ossabaw. We were headed for the spit of sand on the northeastern tip, where the trails started. When the wind blew or the current was high, it was a choppy passage, even in a boat the size of Dee Lynn’s.

But this night was easy. The next band of thunderstorms had yet to blow in, so the moon rose fat and almost full against a deepening indigo sky. The Blood Moon, it was called, the moon closest to Halloween, when the veil between the worlds is thinnest, they say. My ghost tour bookings had always gone up during the Blood Moon. But tonight it was as innocent as a pat of warm butter, and it would have been easy to dismiss the legends…except that we were following a dead man’s tracks.

Dee Lynn went down to double-check her equipment. She’d packed a kayak full of treasure-hunting gear for us to pull ashore, including a couple of pulse induction metal detectors, plus the more mundane tools of her trade—shovels, plastic bags, hand trowels. She’d let me take the wheel, and Trey stood beside me, scrutinizing every dial and console.

“You know the way?” he said.

“I grew up with a tiller in one hand. Dad loved the water.” I pointed to the left. “That’s Cabbage Island. Once we’re past this curve, you’ll see Tybee in the distance. Skidaway to the right. Soon we’ll be coming up on Dead Man Hammock.”

Trey gave me a look. I shook my head.

“Not making that up. There’s good fishing here, seatrout and redfish especially. Dad and I used to come here all the time.”

I suddenly missed it, all of it, with a deep tidal longing. I was an orphan in this land now. No anchor, no ties. What was I really doing out here on this beautiful night chasing a dead man’s fevered fantasy?

I turned my face into the wet rush of air. Beside me, Trey dropped his duffel bag and did the same.

“It’s very dark,” he said.

“You’ve gotten used to Atlanta. The dark comes solid and fast here. It can catch you off guard, especially when a storm’s on the way.”

“The weather looks clear.”

“Don’t be fooled. We only have a few hours before we have to turn back.”

He didn’t ask any more questions. I kept the silence too, until Dee Lynn returned from the deck and took the wheel.

She handed me a rope. “You still know how to tie a bowline?”

I made a noise. “Please.”

There are no docks on Wassaw. To get to the beach, we’d have to drop anchor and swim to shore, pulling our kayak full of tools behind us. For an unseasoned sailor, it was a perilous endeavor—too small a boat, too inexpert an anchoring, too weak a swimmer. It all added up to drowning far too often.

Dee Lynn surveyed the shoreline. “I don’t know, Tai. Drowning may have been the official cause of death, but it don’t make a lick of sense.”

“His boat got away from him, they say, and he tried to swim out to it. But he overestimated his ability, they say, and didn’t make it.”

“They say? You have doubts too?”

“They never found the boat. And his wife says he didn’t own one, didn’t know anything about them.”

“Mighty suspicious, that.” Dee Lynn shook her head. “Oh well. Back to business. Go get the main anchor. I’ll bring her ’round and set the second.”

***

With Storm Season firmly tethered, Dee Lynn dropped the kayak. Fifty yards away, the beach was flooded with light from the moon, which glowed phosphorescent through the trees. Trey was barefoot already, only a sweatshirt covering the t-shirt and shorts he’d worn for the swim. The rest was in dry bags, to change into when we hit the sand.

He pulled his sweatshirt over his head. I watched him, his skin white in the moonlight.

“You undress like a Chippendale dancer,” I said.

He stuffed the sweatshirt into the dry bag. “I do not.” He peered over the edge of the boat. “Are there alligators?”

“No gators.”

“Sharks?”

“I would never send you into dangerous shark-infested waters.”

He tried to read my face, but the dappled moonlight played across my features like a shifting mask. He stared at me for five seconds, hard. And then he climbed over the edge and slid into the water.

Dee Lynn watched him swim to the equipment-stuffed kayak, then leaned closer and lowered her voice. “You lied to that man.”

“Not a lie. It was what we call ‘technically true but deliberately evasive.’” I pulled my own shirt over my head and stuffed it in the bag. “The sharks won’t bother us unless we bother them. You know that.”

She chuckled and swung herself over the edge.