41
Lana sat by stacks of books on the floor of the mansion's library, sorting keepers from those to donate to the county library. Cade sat nearby, carefully wrapping a stained-glass Tiffany lamp in strips of newspaper. Across the room, Haven taped a padding of thick cardboard over the glass of a framed photo of her maternal grandparents.
"You said Grandma Elaine was really nice," Haven said.
"She was. She was sweet, like you."
"I don't believe it."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because. How does a person who is so nice come from such a cruel family?"
"Good question," Cade said. He carefully packed the chrysanthemum-shaped lamp shade in a cardboard box filled with plastic peanuts. "How did Mom come from out of that clan? Or should I say, 'Klan,' with a capital K?"
"I don't know," Lana said. "To be honest, I've been wondering the very same thing these past few weeks. It's so admirable. I'd like to think it had to do with Dad. True love. She was a modern Juliet."
"Boy, that would make a romance novel, huh?"
She gave a wistful smile. "I won't be an innkeeper anymore. Maybe I'll try my hand at writing it."
"I hate Weston," Haven said. "I hate his guts. I really do."
Lana looked over at her niece. "How do you feel when you hate someone?"
"Like I want to wring his old neck."
"No, I mean, how do you feel, your body feel? Right now."
Haven sighed and thought a moment. "All hot inside. Like, kind of sick to my stomach. It makes me feel rotten."
"Exactly," Lana said. "See, when we hate people, even people who seem to deserve it, it makes us suffer. You're not hurting Weston right now by hating him. Not one bit. He's probably out playing golf with his buddies. While you feel rotten."
Haven's eyes brimmed with tears. "That's not fair. He's having fun, and he's hurting me."
"No, baby, you're the one who's hurting you. Your hate for Weston, it's disturbing your body. Can you feel what I mean?"
Haven nodded slowly.
"So you have to make a choice. We can feel angry at people who've wronged us. We should stand up for our rights. Always. But to hate...that does something ugly in our souls. It poisons our happiness." Lana smiled. "Let it go."
"Aunt Lana, I don't know how."
"Sure you do. Come over here and give me a hug. Love sweeps out hate every time." Lana rose to her knees and met Haven face to face as they embraced. "I've got you, and you've got me. Let's forget about Old Man Weston and do what we have to do."
"Yeah. Let's not bother ourselves over him," Haven smiled and wiped at a tear.
"Over who?" Lana said.
Haven laughed. "I can't remember."
"Deal," Lana said, and they shook on it. "Why don't you take a break from packing? Jimi's down at the boat. He told me you're a great helper. I'll bet he'll let you go out with him again to record dolphin talk." Haven was dashing out of the room before she finished the suggestion. "Get Jimi to call us from the cell phone," Lana yelled, "so we know what's up."
Cade stared at his sister. "Lana, you're amazing. You just explained to Haven what took me, oh, a dozen years to figure out on my own."
"Ha. I'm no sage." She smiled crookedly. "Reminds me of a story I read about Gandhi." She rubbed a kink in her neck. "A woman came to Gandhi with her son and asked the mahatma to tell the little boy to stop eating sugar. Gandhi told her to come back in a week. She did, and he told the boy to stop eating sugar. The mother asked Gandhi why he'd made her come back later. He said, 'Because a week ago, I was eating sugar.'"
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying I was sitting over here stewing in my own juices, loathing Weston. But when I saw the pain in Haven's face, I realized we were making a bad time worse. So I threw away my hatred, too. Just now."
"Damn. Wish it was that easy for me," he said. "Weston. Eberhard. I'm so pissed off it's burning a hole through my gut." He knelt beside the cardboard carton and sealed it with packing tape. "Ouch," he said quietly, and glanced down at his hand.
"Paper cut?" Lana said.
"Teeth on the tape dispenser nicked me." He held up a fingertip with a fat drop of blood. "Now that Gen's gone, I don't heal fast."
Their eyes met. "You need a hug, too, big guy?" Lana opened her arms.
"Yes. I really do."
She stood and they embraced in the center of the room and held each other tight.
"God, I miss her," he said with a trembling voice. "You don't know how much."
"I do know, Cade. I do know how much."
* * *
By mid-day, Lana and Cade had nearly finished packing books and objets d'art from the library. The stuff from most of the inn's other rooms already filled boxes waiting for the moving van. Three rooms to go, she noted grimly. Cool Bay Inn had one week left to live. On the first day of August, Weston's demolition crews would flatten it and then level Stanton Hill.
Tall stacks of cardboard cartons sprawled through the mansion like building blocks leftover from the Great Wall. Most of the boxes and the furniture would go off-island to a storage facility in Apalachicola while she and Cade figured out the best way to sell the stuff-much of it valuable antiques. Plus there was still the little matter of choosing where they were all going to live.
It worried her that as soon as she left the inn, the local islanders were going to discover her miraculous legs, and her family was going to find itself at the bulls-eye of a terrible media blitz. Maybe it would be best to go into hiding for awhile. On the other hand, that would only postpone the inevitable crush of attention.
She was grateful Gen had gotten away to safety. Even if old Hank Townsend blurted everything he'd seen, not many would believe a drunk. Besides, although he saw Gen dive into the bay, he certainly didn't know she'd turned into a dolphin. He would probably guess she swam out to one of the sailing yachts anchored offshore at The Palms. A mile swim, but certainly not impossible.
Not a day went by that she didn't remember Gen with gratitude. She missed her. Haven was missing her, too. Cade was pining away; he'd lost weight.
Jimi seemed too busy to think about Gen. In a week he'd completed the prototype of an underwater audio system, built from a Kurzweil music synthesizer, laptop computer, guitar amp, digital recorder, and underwater speaker and microphone. He was determined to record the dolphin language, teach himself to understand it, and "speak" it through his keyboard. He spent his days out on the gulf digitally capturing dolphin chatter. He spent his nights writing software to analyze the phonemes and patterns of speech, and then programming the synthesizer to replicate the sounds.
Which had temporarily reduced the frequency of their lovemaking from Hot-and-Heavy Honeymoon to Happy Tenth Anniversary. But that's what you get when you fall in love with a genius.
She carefully wrapped a bronze art deco statue of the huntress, Artemis, and two greyhounds; the foot-tall nude figurine stood with a double-curved bow drawn back, arrow nocked in an invisible string. Jimi had told Lana she resembled the huntress, long and tall and elegant. She smiled. For an egghead, the guy could be very romantic. She placed the bubble-wrapped figurine inside a box of foam chips, taped the lid shut.
Something puzzled her, had been nagging at her for the last few weeks. Her grandfather had obviously waited until the last minute to deliver their eviction notice. But why? He could have told them a few months in advance; a year in advance. What difference did it make to him? It was his land. He had no need to worry about their knowing it.
Did he do it merely out of meanness? To hurt them as much as he could? Hard to believe. She'd only seen the man a couple dozen times in her life, and always from a distance; flashing by in his Maserati, out on a golf green, on the deck of his sailing yacht. They'd never exchanged a word. Their relationship was icy, not fiery with resentment.
So why the secrecy, the deception? Pretending for a couple years to want to buy the land, making a series of offers, knowing she and Cade would feel secure in their refusal to sell.
Weston was hiding something.
She stopped in the middle of stacking leather-bound books in a box. Suddenly, it seemed to stand out plainly, like a watermark when held up to a lamp. He was hiding something. Weston was guarding his ass, but from...what?
"Hey, Cade."
"Yeah?" His baritone voice resounded from inside a mahogany cabinet.
"What could we have done to stop Weston if we had known earlier that he owned the land?"
He pulled his head out of the cabinet and looked at her. A powdery smudge of dust angled across his forehead. "Still bugging you, huh? We've been over this half a dozen times."
"Humor me again."
He sighed. "We couldn't have done squat. I saw the lease registered at the courthouse. I read the Florida statutes that cover kicking tenants off your property. Legally, Weston's perfectly within his rights as landowner."
"But...could there be something, any little detail, that we're missing here, simply because we've got no time to look into it?"
He stared at the cardboard boxes and debris strewn around the Persian carpet like flotsam from a shipwreck. "He definitely didn't cut us any spare time. One week to go, and look at all this shit."
"Exactly. And why did he leave us with no time?"
"Because he's an asshole?"
She shook her head. "Not that. He's a manipulator, a chess master. He doesn't make a move without a strategy."
He regarded her from across the room. "What are you getting at?"
"Not sure," she said. "Let's think about what we could do if we had more time."
"Hmm. If we had more time..."
"We could do some research into the history of the land ownership."
He shook his head. "I told you, I saw a copy of the lease at the courthouse. Whitmore Fairchild leased this land to George Stanton for one hundred years." He drew a forearm across his sweaty brow. "And before Whitmore, a whole string of Fairchilds owned this island, going back to 1760."
"And before the Fairchilds?"
"Indians, I guess. Caloosas. Appalachees."
"Okay. The Civil War. They built a Confederate saltworks here. Turned out tons of salt daily from the sea. Then Yankee Marines, raiding from a warship attacked the saltworks. They burned down the saltworks, ran off the plantation bosses, liberated the slaves."
"Everybody knows this stuff, Lana. It's no secret. Hell, it's stamped in brass on the historic markers."
She spent a moment digesting the facts. "After the Yankee forces occupied the island, it would be incorrect to say it still belonged to the Fairchilds, right?"
"So? They got it back, right after the war ended. New Ireland Plantation started up again. Daddy's ancestors were sharecroppers-still slaves in all but name."
She frowned. "Hmm."
"Hmm, what?"
"I don't know what it is, but we're overlooking something. It's right under our noses. Weston knows about it and he doesn't want us to find out. So he's distracting us with all this frantic packing, getting ready to move."
"Crap, Lana. I thought you were on to something."
"I am."
"Right." He turned back to the mahogany display cabinet, clearing the shelves of glass and porcelain and ivory art objects, wrapping each item and packing it in a box. "Man, there's so much junk." He held up a blown glass stallion that fit in his palm. "Maybe we should toss some of this stuff."
She laughed. "That little piece of 'junk' is a genuine Steuban, worth...oh, maybe five-thousand dollars."
He gave a low whistle. "Better let you wrap it." He humbly set the horse aside. "Did Mom ever tell you anything about this stuff?"
"The knick-knacks?"
"No, I'm still talking about the land. She was a Fairchild. Wonder what she knew?"
Lana shook her head. "Nothing, I'm sure. I remember she felt so proud of me when Lady Francis left me Stanton House. Never said a word about a land lease. And then the accident...that came, what?-just a couple weeks later? Before we'd even seen the paper work."
Cade nodded glumly and turned back to the display cabinet. The two of them worked in silence for a while, then Lana said, "You know, after Dad died, Mom was caught up in her own world. She was a different person; kind of obsessed."
"With what?" Cade said, his back to her.
"Well, it was weird. Dad died, and suddenly she was on a mission. She was all upset about the over-fishing of grouper."
"Really? I never heard this."
"Yeah. She was gung-ho on pushing for legislation against long-liners." Lana remembered the pamphlets arguing against boats trawling with two-mile-long fishing lines, covered with thousands of baited hooks. The long-liners were catching so many grouper that not enough breeding stock remained in the sea to reproduce in healthy numbers. "That's why we were driving to Tallahassee the day of the accident, she was going to do some more library research at the state archives, about commercial fishing. She had charts up all over her bedroom wall."
"Charts?"
"Navigational charts: coastlines, depths, reefs, currents."
Cade turned around to face her. "But that's...Lana, that makes no sense. There aren't any long-liners that operate out of Cool Bay. Never have been. Those boats come out of Tampa Bay, St. Pete, mostly," he said. "And what would she do with navigational charts?"
"They were Dad's charts. The ones he used for finding and registering his salvage claims."
"Those charts are all local," he said. "Long-liners fish halfway to Mexico and back, deep waters, they don't hug the coastline. Besides, she wouldn't need to study sea charts just to talk to people about banning long-liners."
They exchanged excited looks. "She had something else going on, Lana."
She stood up fast, toppling a stack of books. "This is it. The thing under our noses."
He maneuvered past an assortment of cartons to stand next to her. "Her involvement was a cover. But for what?"
"It gave her an excuse to go to Tallahassee often, for one thing," she said. "To snoop through the state archives."
"So what was she hunting?"
Lana rubbed the back of her neck. "Another question is, why was Mom hiding her real motives? Oh, Cade, this is giving me the creeps. I've got goosebumps."
He frowned, nodding. "She was afraid of somebody finding out."
Lana's mind sorted through the information. "Oh, my God!" A chill passed through her heart like an icy knife blade. "Oh, No!"
Cade reached out and grasped her shoulders. "What?"
"Dad used to go there, to the state archives, to hunt through Civil War naval records. He was searching for clues to the location of the wreck of the Yankee ship that had raided the saltworks here."
Cade pulled her into his arms. "You're trembling like a leaf."
She shivered against his warmth. "Dad and Mike died. An accident. A year later, Mom died. Another accident. Dad and Mom were both searching for the same thing, and Mom was scared to let anyone know she was looking for it."
"Aw, Jesus," Cade said. "Don't even think that way." Mike Garcia had been their father's crewmate and dive-handler since he graduated high school, and in his twenties, he became Lana's boyfriend. The two had seemed headed for marriage.
"Maybe they found something important enough to get themselves killed over it."
"Oh, come on," Cade said. "Stop it. That's too freaky."
"If he found the Yankee ship, what would be inside it?"
"He didn't find it."
"How do you know?"
"It was the Emancipator, an ironclad steamship. He never found it."
"You're sure of that?"
He twisted his mouth. "Well...he never told me he found it. We talked about the San Pedro, other wrecks. He never mentioned the Emancipator. He was always looking for it."
"I remember, Mom told me that Dad was going to change history, set things straight. That was right before he died."
"What's that supposed to mean? 'Change history'?"
Lana shook her head.
Cade glanced around the disarrayed room. "To hell with packing!" he said with sudden fury, and kicked at a half-filled box. "I'll leave a message for Jimi and Haven. We're going to the state archives."