Wrecked Read online

  Also by Mary Anna Evans

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Mary Anna Evans

  Cover and internal design © by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by The BookDesigners

  Cover images © Lillac/Shutterstock, chrishudson/Shutterstock, FotoKina/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Evans, Mary Anna, author.

  Title: Wrecked / Mary Anna Evans.

  Description: Naperville : Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks,

  2020. | Series: A Faye Longchamp archaeological mystery

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020014718 (trade paperback)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3605.V369 W74 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc22

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014718

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Notes for the Incurably Curious

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my sister Suzanne

  Prologue

  The drone flew like a bird, cutting through sea breezes as if it could feel the joy of a living creature. Sometimes it flew high, though not so high as to lose sight of the Florida Panhandle’s battered coastline. Sometimes the drone dove like an eagle and its camera got a close look at colorful fish swimming in water as clear as air.

  The fish fluttered through the wrecks of newly sunken boats. Perhaps they remembered the hurricane as they swam below seacraft still able to float. Perhaps they didn’t. The drone didn’t care. It just snapped their picture and moved on.

  The drone’s camera captured everything in sight—clean water, broken trees, littered sand, swimming fish, flying birds, and shattered houses—because that is what cameras are made to do. They record everything they see. There is no hiding from them.

  When the drone was flying low, its camera caught the faces of exhausted people spreading blue tarpaulins over splintered roofs. It saw the sun-bleached hair of people on pleasure boats, rubbernecking at destruction. It saw the bobbing heads of swimmers brave enough to share the water with floating wreckage. The camera captured light reflected from the silvery backs of sharks and barracudas who swam wherever they pleased.

  When the drone was flying high, it captured the contours of the coastline and the fractured light of sun on floodwater and broken glass. It saw the enormity of what the hurricane had done.

  What is more, the camera’s images were stamped with a date and time and, over time, the images recorded the movements of each boat. A careful observer could look at the drone’s images and guess where all the boats and swimmers had been and where they might be going next.

  If the drone made multiple flights that day, and it did, all of its pictures together gave a sense of the passage of time. The drone knew when the highway running along the Gulf of Mexico had seen heavy traffic that day. It noticed that the same boat had sat here in the morning and there in the afternoon, moving someplace else in the evening before cruising home. With a drone and a bit of ingenuity, an enterprising person could find fishing spots that had been family secrets for generations.

  Almost everything captured by the camera was inconsequential, a series of instantaneous incidents that would be forgotten by morning, but not everything. The drone saw a place that had been the home of people long dead, generations of them. Barely visible, the stone outcropping marking its location had been exposed by the scouring waters of a hurricane after years and years under the seabed.

  But that wasn’t all. Someone was taking things that belonged to someone else, hoping to get rich. Someone was stealing something irreplaceable.

  The drone saw it all.

  Chapter One

  Chain saws roared. Voices chanted “One. Two. Three!” as clusters of people lifted chunks of trees too heavy for one person to lift alone. Neighbors cried “Thank you so much!” as one driveway after another was cleared.

  Short and skinny Faye Longchamp-Mantooth was struggling to do her part in carrying the big logs. She had friends who were sleeping in tents where their houses used to be, and she k
new how much they would suffer under the broiling July sun. She had begged them to come stay with her, but there were looters prowling Micco County, and they were terrified. They’d rather live outdoors with the mosquitoes than lose the very few possessions that the hurricane had left behind. She struggled to think of ways to help them—fill their ice chests, swap out their propane tanks, bring them food and water—but these things weren’t enough. Nothing was enough, not really.

  Faye recognized the peculiar clarity of the sunlight that shines in the aftermath of a hurricane, because she had seen it before. It was as if swirling winds had drawn the moisture right out of the air, leaving nothing but oxygen, nitrogen, and traces of the usual stray gases. She felt as if she could see forever through the clear air, or at least to the point where the Earth curved and hid itself. And everywhere she looked, she saw something that the hurricane had crushed or shredded or twisted beyond recognition.

  Faye and her husband, Joe Wolf Mantooth, had been lucky. The hurricane had dealt their home on Joyeuse Island a glancing blow on its way to pummeling Micco County. Eventually, they would need to sweep the roof and replace some missing shutters, but those chores could wait. Whole towns were without electricity and water. Cell phone service was spotty, even for people who had electricity to charge their phones.

  The sheriff’s department was stretched thin, because the disaster had rubbed the veneer of civilization right off of some people. Faye had heard about a knife fight over bottled water, right in the middle of a suburban grocery store. With her own eyes, she’d seen three men brandishing handguns as they robbed a convenience store, led by three men brandishing handguns. She thought that Sheriff Rainey had done an excellent job of restoring order. He’d arrested some key players and put his entire staff on overtime. His deputies were constantly visible, prowling rural roads and patrolling Micco County’s tiny towns. Faye felt safer, but she didn’t feel safe.

  Hospitals and nursing homes were running on generators, staffed by doctors and nurses who were running on no sleep. Shelters were full and they, too, were running on generators. Micco County wasn’t a wealthy place, so a lot of people had already been living on the edge before they got flattened by nature. Faye and Joe were losing money every day that they did no archaeological work for their clients, but they’d find a way to make their bank accounts last until the crisis passed. People needed their help.

  Faye and Joe had strong arms and backs, and they had functional cars that they could use to get supplies to people. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Amande, had found her own way to help as she drove loads of donated food and water to people too old or sick to get to the distribution points.

  Faye had argued against Amande’s plan to make these delivery runs. She’d said, “Your father and I are helping people get back on their feet. If you stay at home to take care of Michael so we can do that, you’ll be helping, too.”

  Faye hadn’t said I feel safer when the two of you are at home. I’d wrap you both in bubble wrap if I could, but it was the truth.

  Amande had out-argued her, which was the downside of having assertive and intelligent children. “I’ll take Michael to hang out at Sheriff Mike and Magda’s every morning. He’ll be as safe as he is at home. Maybe safer, since Sheriff Mike will stop packing heat on the day they put him in the ground.”

  Faye knew that this was true. She also knew how strict Mike was about safety when it came to kids and guns. She trusted him to keep everyone around him safe.

  Amande was still making her case. “I’ll be in a car that you and Dad make sure is perfectly safe, just like I am on any normal day. I’ll only be traveling on roads that have been cleared. Deputies are keeping the roads hot with all their patrolling. Michael and I will be out of your hair, so you and Dad can focus on what you need to do. I really want to do this, Mom.”

  And so, with her imagination conjuring danger at every turn, Faye had watched her daughter drive away every morning for a solid week. More, actually. She’d mostly lost track of how much time had passed since the storm, but somehow she knew that today was Monday. She mostly knew this because it felt like a Monday.

  For days now, Faye had watched little Michael sitting behind Amande in his car seat, and Joe had watched Faye watch them. Every morning, he’d said what she was thinking, and it sounded so ridiculous when he said it out loud that it made her laugh every single time.

  “There go all our eggs in one basket.”

  And each time, their laughter calmed her. It made her able to wave good-bye to her children and get to work helping her friends.

  The hurricane had taken a human toll—two people had been killed when their car slammed into a fallen tree and two people were still missing—but it could have been much worse. Still, months—years, probably—would pass before life in Micco County was anything like normal again.

  Faye and Joe were helping their substitute mother, Emma Everett, and her neighbors clear the downed trees blocking access to their homes. By lunchtime, they’d made visible progress, but Faye’s muscles—biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, glutes, all of them—were trembling. It was time to sit down, drink a lukewarm bottle of water, and eat a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, because peanut butter doesn’t have to be refrigerated and neither does honey.

  Joe’s muscles didn’t seem to need rest. He was loping down the street, his long, straight black ponytail swinging like a pendulum. Faye’s own black hair, short but just as straight, was stuck to her brown cheeks with sweat. She was a little jealous of Joe’s energy after the morning’s hard work. She figured that it helped a lot to be made of six-and-a-half rawboned feet of muscle. Five-foot-tall Faye wouldn’t know. And also, he was nine years her junior. Those years might have something to do with the fact that she wanted a nap and Joe looked almost perky.

  Joe was on a mission, and it was a mission that Faye would never have imagined for him. Who would have thought of Joe as the passionate pilot of his very own drone? He was beside himself over this chance to make his fanciful hobby useful.

  Faye had assumed that Magda and Mike were wasting their money when they’d bought Joe a flying, picture-taking robot for Christmas. She’d figured that it would get about as much use as the food processor she’d been foolish enough to buy him. He’d given her a sweet thank you, then tucked it deep into a cabinet so he could go back to making cole slaw with a sharp knife and patience.

  Faye fervently loved her solar panels and the air conditioning they made possible. Joe? Not so much.

  He tried to live as close to the traditional ways of his Muscogee Creek ancestors as he could. If it had been practical for people living on their remote island to get along without boats that had motors, Joe would have chucked everything they owned that didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution. Yet he had bonded to his twenty-first-century flying gadget so completely that he’d given it a name.

  And maybe that name, Osprey—Ossie for short—explained Joe’s fascination with his new hobby. Faye thought that Joe loved Ossie because he himself moved easily on earth and sea, but he would never be able to take to the air.

  Ossie could fly. The little drone gave Joe a new way to see the natural world that he loved so much. It was probably no coincidence that their son’s middle name, chosen by Joe, was Hawk.

  Today, Ossie would be hard at work doing something useful. She—and, yes, Joe had gifted his inanimate flying sidekick with a gender—would be taking aerial photos that would come in handy when their friends needed to do battle with their insurance companies. Since people who live in hurricane zones rarely have much trust in the companies that collect their insurance premiums, everybody wanted Ossie to get pictures of their shredded roofs and totaled cars.

  They called out “Hey, Ossie! Take my picture!” whenever she zoomed by.

  A crowd gathered around Joe, cheering as he sent Ossie skyward. She was white, like a living osprey’s breast and head, but she had
four white rotors instead of two glossy brown wings. Her four slender legs were as white as her namesake bird’s legs, without the black talons.

  As she rose above their heads, the camera attached to her underside looked back at them. Joe expertly manipulated the levers on Ossie’s controller to guide her as she paused over each house to get images of the hurricane damage. Then, just to make them all smile, he sent Ossie roaring away at top speed to get video of the Florida Panhandle’s coastline, still gloriously beautiful under unending piles of debris.

  Ossie sped down the coast to the west as far as they could see before Joe steered her out over the Gulf of Mexico and flew her back their way. As she swooped over their heads, the cheers grew louder. Joe was focused on the drone’s controls and on the drone’s-eye view scene on his phone’s display, but not so focused that he didn’t crack a smile.

  Faye leaned over his shoulder to watch the images on his phone, which was attached to the drone’s controller so that he could see to steer. It seemed like Ossie’s onboard camera could see forever. Beaches the color of confectioner’s sugar stretched out ahead as she flew far above them. They were strewn with chocolate-colored seaweed and the wood from obliterated boat docks.

  To the drone’s left, beyond the damaged beach houses, the phone’s screen showed tall trees, some snapped in half with their topmost branches dragging the ground. Even broken, the pines and cypress trees appealed to the eye, but it was the luminescent water to Ossie’s right that held Faye’s attention.

  She had lived on an island for a long time, but she hadn’t gotten used to the beauty of the Gulf of Mexico yet. She hoped she never did.

  In the shallows, where long docks and piers had collapsed under punishing waves, the water went from emerald green to spring green, shading quickly to a pure turquoise so clear that she could see objects on the white sand beneath it. An area of murkier water marked the mouth of a broad, deep creek. It also marked the location of the marina that Faye’s family depended on to switch from their boats to their cars, and vice versa, making their island life possible. She enjoyed seeing it from the sky, admiring the stark geometry of the rectangular buildings and straight docks against the softness of nature.