It wasn’t enough.
She turned on MTV—music and videos. The two just might lull her to sleep.
She did fall asleep. And for a while, it was wonderful.
And then the dreams came again.
There was Georgia Dare’s head and sand.
Georgia’s lips were moving. She was talking.
“Oh, please! Listen. If you’ll just pay attention! You know now that I wasn’t being silly and hysterical and there were no jokes being played!”
One of Georgia’s disarticulated arms moved in the sand; she waved her well-manicured fingers in the air.
“Listen…pay attention, oh, please, Vanessa, you can do it!”
“Please!” Travis begged, his mouth moving. He moaned as his head rolled in the sand.
“There’s nothing I can do!” Vanessa protested.
She felt as if she were in a wind tunnel then, being sucked away from them. She was out on the sea, and then she was in the water, and she had a camera in her hand.
The figurehead appeared before her. It seemed that it, too, had arms, and that the head was real and the entire thing was an animate object—a person.
She saw the face on it that she had always seen.
That of Dona Isabella.
The figurehead was smiling and beckoning to her.
She protested, speaking, or telling the figurehead how she felt in her mind, she wasn’t even sure.
“No. I don’t want to find more bodies.”
“But you want the truth,” the figurehead said to her.
“There should be justice.”
Suddenly, the image of the face began to change. It morphed, and it seemed that its cheeks struggled to stay cheeks.
Brows became higher and more arched and changed again.
The nose and mouth went through transformations.
The figurehead had changed. It held a different face. But she knew that face, too.
She had seen it that afternoon. She had seen it on the woman who had tried to talk to her. The pirate woman who had been sitting at the table on the patio.
The woman who had disappeared.
“Stop, please, stop, you’re being led, you must take care, you don’t understand the innocent!” the figurehead told her.
Then she thought she heard a terrible laughter.
“I’m trying to help you! I have helped you. Listen…listen…listen…your friends have pleaded with you, you must listen. Once you didn’t pay heed.”
The face on the figurehead began to morph again.
Then she saw…
The horrible, mummified, darkened, distorted and decaying face of the woman they had found in the sunken chest.
10
“Here’s another one,” David said. He tapped on his computer screen. “Another incident that might prove that what happened to the film crew wasn’t so bizarre. Bring up the Herald, December twentieth, last year.”
Sean typed in the key words and waited for Google to bring up the paper and the date, and glanced over at David. They were working together at the Beckett mansion, computers at opposite ends of the table, maps and charts spread out between them.
“Any particular page?”
“Front page. You can’t miss it.”
David’s eyes quickly scanned the bold-type headline. “Modern-Day Pirates at Work? Islanders Claim Devil’s Play.”
“Ah, I see,” Sean said. He read the article aloud.
“On December tenth, a charter boat, the Delphi, captained by Tom Essling, an experienced seaman, USN, disappeared while on route to the Bahamas. Captain Essling left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December tenth with his first mate and wife of thirty years, Sharon Biddle Essling, and four passengers for a cruise down the Keys due south and southwest, with stops at Islamorada and Key West. As per plan, Captain Essling docked in Key West for a two-day stay, and began his journey east and across the Straits of Florida, an area that’s also known as the New Bahama Channel, the body of water that connects the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic and continues eastward, beginning the Gulf Stream and separating Florida and the Keys from the Bahamas, the Great Bahama and Little Bahama banks. The length of the straits extends for more than three hundred miles and enters through the region known as the Bermuda Triangle. The width is 60 miles in areas and approximately 100 in others. The greatest depth of the channel has been sounded at 6,000 feet.