Marcia Talley - Without a Grave

‘How’d they fare up at the school?’ I asked.

She paused in mid-sweep. ‘Trying to make it.’

I turned to Gator for a translation. He waggled his hand. ‘Means so-so.’

‘Anybody hurt?’ I asked Winnie.

‘No, praise the Lord.’

A few yards down the road, Tropical Treats hadn’t fared so well. Hurricane Helen had hurled a generator through its roof. It landed smack-dab on the ice cream freezer where crushed tubs of ice cream oozed and dripped, forming multicolored puddles of ice cream soup. ‘And I was going to buy you a rum raisin cone,’ Paul teased.

I poked him in the ribs. ‘Rain check.’

The marina was worse than I feared. As it came into view, Gator grunted. His dive shack had disappeared, tie-downs and all. The dock had twisted and heaved, planks were torn away leaving gaps, like missing teeth. Some floated loose below, knocking against the pilings.

Paul, Molly and I picked our way carefully down the dock while Gator stayed behind, kicking desultorily through the debris that had been his place of business.

One sailboat had sunk. Three others were still afloat, but all had parted company with their masts. One mast leaned crookedly against a piling; another had been hurled through the window of the marina office. I stuck my head inside. File cabinets had toppled, their drawers yawned open. Papers, magazines and books lay in a sodden, pulp-like mass on the linoleum.

I worried about Gator’s boat, Deep Magic . When I’d last seen her, she’d been tied into a slip, held off the finger piers by a web of lines strung from port to starboard, like a giant cat’s cradle. Three anchors had been set off her bow. I headed in that direction, calling to Paul and Molly over my shoulder, ‘I’m going to check on Deep Magic !’

I saw Gator was already aboard his boat, grinning hugely.

I ran down the dock, cheering wildly. ‘She’s OK! She’s OK!’

Gator patted Deep Magic ’s console. ‘Good old gal. Never let me down yet.’

‘Can you give us a ride back to Pro Bono? ’

‘Dunno. Depends on the engine starting.’ He twisted the key and the engine sputtered, rumbled and then growled to life.

‘Where’s your dinghy?’ Paul asked, coming up behind me.

I glanced at Deep Magic’s stern, embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed. The davits were twisted and bent where they’d tried to hold on to Gator’s dinghy, but lost it in a tug of war with Helen.

Gator shrugged. ‘It’ll turn up. They always do.’

I tugged on Paul’s sleeve. ‘Do we have time to check on Wanderer ?’

Gator nodded. ‘Go ahead. Things I need to do.’

‘Want to come?’ I asked Molly.

She’d plopped herself down at the end of the dock, legs dangling over the water. ‘I think I’ll stay with Gator, Sugar. I’m absolutely beat.’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ I teased.

Poor Mr Pinder! His boatyard was a disaster. One powerboat had been blown off its jacks, toppled into the next, which fell against the next… over and over they had tipped and toppled, like a giant game of dominoes. ‘This breaks my heart,’ Paul said, surveying the damage.

‘ Wanderer’s not here, thank goodness,’ I told him. ‘Last time I saw her, she was in dry dock. C’mon.’ I grabbed Paul’s hand and together we managed to climb over the debris that separated the boatyard from the marine railway. The space that Wanderer had once occupied stood empty.

‘Where’s Alice in Wonderland ?’ I asked one of the yard hands who was bent over, picking up wood and other debris and adding it to a big pile near a dumpster.

He straightened. ‘Jaime Mueller thought she’d be safer tied up to a mooring ball.’

‘Where?’

The yard hand pointed, but I didn’t see anything in the harbor but empty water.

The yard hand shaded his eyes and squinted. ‘Ooops. So much for safety. Doesn’t look like she made it, does it?’

Five minutes later, we boarded Deep Magic .

Gator eased his boat into the harbor, proceeding slowly, steering a careful path through the floating debris. As we cleared the marina I stood up. ‘Over there!’

Gator spun the wheel. ‘What? Where?’

‘That mast sticking out of the water. I think it’s Wanderer . I recognize the radar dome.’

As we neared the obstacle, Gator cut the throttle, drifting as close as he dared. I held on to the gunwale and peered over the side, my eyes following along the length of the mast all the way to the bottom where Wanderer indeed lay. She appeared peaceful, undamaged, as if she’d simply turned over on her side and fallen asleep. A parrot fish pecked at the transom where it said, Alice in Wonderland .

Molly leaned on the gunwale next to me, chin resting on her hands. ‘The End,’ she said, wistfully, capitalizing each word.

Gazing at the sunken boat where we’d spent so many happy hours, I said, ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

I crossed the deck and stood behind Gator as he shifted into reverse and backed Deep Magic away from Wanderer . ‘What about the mini-sub?’ I asked him.

‘What mini-sub?’ Paul wanted to know.

I explained about the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mystery vessel. ‘Sometimes I put two and two together and come up with five, but this time I think I’m right. As weird as it seems, I think Jaime Mueller was using that submarine to run drugs. Nothing else makes sense.’

‘Something funny was definitely going on at that beach,’ Molly added. ‘You’d think it was a top-secret military base the way Mueller guarded it.’

Gator motored past the settlement dumpsters that had disgorged their contents into the harbor, picking his way carefully through floating garbage as he rounded the headland at Poinciana Point. Miraculously, Henry’s airplane seemed to have survived the blow, if you discounted the broken wing. It had been sheltered from the worst of Helen’s wrath by the trees of Poinciana Point.

‘I’m having flashbacks,’ Paul said as we neared the plane. He shivered.

I took his hand and squeezed three times: I. Love. You.

With Gator at the controls, Deep Magic nosed in, eased out, nosed in as we searched the water around the Savage Cub for the blue mini-sub.

‘Gone,’ I said at last. ‘Do you think it’s been swept out to sea by the storm?’

Gator shook his head. ‘Not if that plane wasn’t. That mini-sub’s gone, someone drove it out of here.’

‘Well, lookey-lookey!’ Molly caroled in my ear.

I followed her gaze. Whatever had been in the Kelchner’s cottage had disappeared, too. Nothing but a cinderblock foundation remained. Everything else was gone, gone with the wind.

We were heading back to find Pro Bono when I noticed something floating off Poinciana Point. At first I thought it was a tree limb, or a piling. I blinked, refocused, but still couldn’t turn it into a piling. ‘Paul, what’s that?’

‘Part of the airplane?’ He shrugged. ‘There could be anything floating out here about now. Even a body.’

Paul was joking, but as Gator edged closer, I saw that it was a body, floating face down, arms splayed.

Gator noticed it about the same time I did. ‘Bite your tongue, Ives.’ He guided Deep Magic closer, cut the engine, and coaxed the boat sideways until the body lay along the starboard side. ‘I’ll need a boat hook.’

Paul pulled a boat hook from the rack and handed it over.

I watched as Gator used it to hook the victim by the belt. ‘Help me, Paul.’

‘You want to lift him into the boat?’

‘No. I want to turn him over.’

Leaning carefully over the side, the two men tugged and pushed until the body rolled slowly over. Looking up into the sky with sightless eyes was what was left of Jaime Mueller.