Wrecked Read online

  In an instant, Ossie flew beyond the creek and all murkiness left the blue, blue water. Out beyond the barrier islands, the water’s color deepened to a strong aquamarine. If she focused her eyes in that direction, she could imagine that the hurricane had never happened at all.

  Just as Joe swung Ossie around one last time, she flew over their home, Joyeuse Island, separated from the green-black coastal swamps by a narrow channel. When the crisis was past, Faye would ask Joe to fly the drone over their island to see whether the hurricane had uncovered more of the old buildings her family had built back in the 1800s. She’d been exploring the archaeological traces left by her ancestors since she was a child, and those happy years digging for historical treasure had made her into the archaeologist she’d grown up to be.

  For now, she was happy to stand among her friends and watch the drone return to Joe. Hardly bigger than an unabridged dictionary and not nearly so heavy, Ossie settled herself at Faye’s husband’s feet like a faithful pet.

  The crowd applauded, and Joe said quietly, “Good girl, Ossie.”

  * * *

  Far away, much too far for Ossie to fly, a woman was running. With a single bag in one hand and a child’s hand in the other, she wondered whether it was even possible to disappear these days. Even her credit card would give her away. And everybody knew there were cameras everywhere.

  Chapter Two

  “Hey! He’s got a newspaper,” somebody called out, and Faye looked up from her sandwich. A crowd was forming around a man who’d just come back from a food-and-water run.

  Another man’s voice emanated from the cluster of people, calling out, “Joe, you’re a star.”

  A woman spoke up to argue with him. “Not Joe. Ossie’s the star.”

  Faye rushed over to see what they were talking about. There, dominating the front page and above the fold, was one of Ossie’s photos in full, glorious color. She didn’t know when Joe had found time to send it to the newspaper, but he must have done it from home or from his phone during a trip to town, because they certainly had no cell service where they were working at that moment. One of Joe’s fishing buddies, Nate Peterson, was credited with writing the story, which explained how the newspaper even knew Joe’s photos existed.

  Below the fold was an article memorializing the dead and the missing. Their photos haunted Faye. Her eyes were drawn to the school photo of an eighth-grade girl. They lingered on the cropped, blurry snapshot of a mother who’d been killed during the time of life when she was always the one taking the pictures. Mother and daughter had died together when a massive live oak toppled in front of the speeding car that was supposed to be taking them to an emergency shelter and safety.

  Another photo showed a smiling woman holding her five-year-old son. Both of them had been missing since the storm. It was printed beside a brief article asking for help in locating them. Faye knew that this request was optimistic. They’d gone missing at the height of the storm, when the hurricane had peeled the roof off their double-wide and toppled what was left of it. In all likelihood, floodwaters had washed their bodies into a swamp where they’d be found when the water finally receded.

  Faye couldn’t look at their faces any longer. She flipped the still-folded paper over and rested her eyes on Joe’s peaceful photo.

  “Is our street in the picture?” Emma asked. “People need to know how bad it is here.”

  Joe shook his head. “Nate wanted a big-picture shot, so I sent him one that I took east of here from pretty high up. He also said they’d been running pictures of torn-up houses all week and he wanted something that showed what the storm did to nature. So I got him a shot that shows the torn-up beaches down toward our house and all the downed trees in the swamp. Look. That sandy point that used to stick out into the water west of Joyeuse Island is just gone. And see those snags piled up in the shallows? People around here are boaters and they’re going to have to navigate around that stuff. Those things will get people’s attention.”

  “Well, I hope their attention strays a little farther inland,” Emma said tartly. “My house will be fine with a few tarps, but everybody wasn’t so lucky.”

  Faye raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Oh, okay. Sooner or later, I’ll need some carpenters and roofers, and maybe a plumber and a couple of electricians, but they’ll get the place livable again. The houses on both sides of mine? They’re gone. And all the people in the trailer park across the highway lost everything, too.”

  Emma Everett was past seventy now. Her deep brown skin was starting to wrinkle and her cap of tight short curls was more gray than black, but she still funded college scholarships for poor Micco County teenagers, and she still spent her Saturdays tutoring them for their college admissions tests. Her late husband, Douglass, had remembered what it was like to be poor. He would have been proud to see how Emma was using her time and their money.

  “Your pictures are beautiful, son, and this one reminds people that it’s not going to be so much fun to fish or go to the beach for a while, but that’s not enough,” Emma said. “You need to tell that Peterson man to come out here himself and interview my neighbors.” She swept out an arm that encompassed a bunch of people who hadn’t bathed in days. “They’re hurting.”

  Joe said, “Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell him.”

  Mollified, Emma gave him a big hug and said, “I’m proud of you.” She pulled Faye in close, so that the three of them could look at Joe’s photo together.

  Newspaper images are low-resolution by nature. The photo’s blurred haziness made the damaged coastline look better than it did in real life, like an aging Hollywood actress who had trusted her face to a photographer who knew how to use lighting and filters.

  The picture was oriented with north facing up, so the coastline ran along the top edge and water dominated the rest of the photo. Faye’s eyes went straight to her home, Joyeuse Island, hugging the coast in the top right corner and extending off the right side of the photo. The tin roof of their house shone silver through trees that had survived the big fire. A lot of other trees were on the ground. From this altitude, her island looked like a giant had dropped a box of matches on it.

  The water just below Joyeuse Island was dotted with a handful of small pleasure boats and a…well, she couldn’t say, but it made her archaeologist’s heart sing for joy. It made her desperate to see the image at full resolution. Her brown eyes found Joe’s green ones, and she tapped her forefinger hard on the photo.

  “What’s that dark blotch in the water southwest of our house?”

  Joe’s shrug said he didn’t know what the blotch was, either, but he was grinning. He could see how excited she was.

  Faye hadn’t seen it in any of Ossie’s photos taken before the storm. It was slightly smaller than the boats floating nearby. That meant it was probably too small to be that holy grail of underwater archaeology, a shipwreck.

  Faye supposed it could be a shipwreck that was still mostly hidden under the sand, but she doubted it. She snorkeled in that area all the time, and she’d never seen anything like a debris trail on the seabed that screamed “Shipwreck!”

  She had, however, found two chipped stone points lying on the sand, as if they were pointing toward something truly ancient. Maybe the hurricane had uncovered a dugout canoe to go with them, hundreds or thousands of years old. Maybe it had exposed a midden made of the piled-up shells of oysters eaten by long-ago people. Or maybe that dark blotch was just an old tractor tire.

  Joe asked, “Is that The Cold Spot?”

  Faye nodded. “I’m pretty sure.”

  Their family spent a good chunk of every August swimming at The Cold Spot, an area where the water felt chillier than the surrounding Gulf. Faye had always thought that The Cold Spot must mark a submarine spring dumping cold groundwater into the Gulf.

  Maybe Joe’s photo was evidence that The Cold Spot looked totally different n
ow. Maybe the hurricane had scoured centuries of sand and debris out of a spring vent, revealing it to Ossie’s all-seeing camera. Faye sure hoped so.

  At times in ancient history, Faye’s island would have been on dry land, and so would The Cold Spot. A spring there would have been a water source for thirsty animals…and thirsty people. She knew that archaeologists had found Paleolithic tools at Wakulla Springs. They’d even found mastodon bones there. The Cold Spot might have looked a lot like Wakulla Springs, back in the day.

  What could be cooler than mastodon bones and Paleolithic tools? Well, a 13,000-year-old hearth where people had once sat around a fire would be cooler, to Faye’s way of thinking. And maybe it was waiting for her, right off the coast of her very own island.

  “Joe,” she said, trying to be nonchalant while she nearly poked a hole in the newspaper with her forefinger, “want to go wading out to The Cold Spot, once we get our friends comfortable?”

  He grinned. “Might be a few weeks before we’re home much in the daylight. And we’ll have to go when the tide is right, but our chance will come. We’ll get out there and see what the storm uncovered.”

  Chapter Three

  Faye was behind the wheel of Joe’s car, a white Chevy Cavalier that was ancient but utterly reliable. Getting supplies to the cleanup workers was Priority One, but she had a second mission that was more selfish. She wanted more information on the mysterious dark blotch on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, and she was pretty sure she knew where to get it.

  People with cash or functioning credit cards had pooled their resources for this trip to civilization. Faye had used those dollars to fill the Cavalier’s trunk and back seat full of bottled water, energy bars, baby formula, diapers, and wet wipes. Since Faye was good at making cash go a long way, she had stretched the budget enough to fill the passenger seat with practical luxuries. Handing out things like apples, oranges, peanuts, deodorant, and dry shampoo was going to feel like playing Santa Claus.

  It was sheer luck that there were open stores in Crawfordville, close enough for her to make a round trip in a single afternoon with time to spare. If that weren’t true, people would be a lot hungrier and a lot thirstier. Those in the storm’s path had been lucky in some ways, if one is willing to call being walloped by a Category 3 hurricane lucky.

  First of all, at least the storm hadn’t been a Category 5. It had pulverized the lightly populated Micco County coastline, but it had spared the beach resorts to the west and the popular fishing areas to the east.

  Second, there had been luck in the storm’s small size. Like the Category 5 Hurricane Camille, one of the most powerful of all time, its eyewall had been a fierce but small circle of wind and rain. Hurricane force winds had extended barely sixty miles from the eye, so the counties to either side of the storm’s center were windblown but functional. This meant that the Wakulla County towns of Panacea, Crawfordville, and Sopchoppy were open for business. When Faye and Joe had first ventured out after the storm, they’d been shocked to find that the marina where they kept their boats was barely touched.

  It was as if God had pointed at Micco County and said, “Here’s a good place to try out my new wind tunnel.” Faye didn’t want to think about what would have happened if the thing had been the size of fellow Cat 3 Hurricane Katrina.

  Unfortunately, mere Cat 3 storms don’t get a lot of media attention, unless they’re Katrina, so the news cycle had moved on. Government-sponsored help was falling into place, but it was inadequate. Insurance money hadn’t started flowing. In short, people were largely on their own.

  The small size of the devastated area meant that its residents were within reach of the trappings of civilization. Faye and Joe had access to gasoline at the marina, so they fetched the fuel that kept people’s cars and chain saws running, and they did a lot of driving themselves. Today, it was Faye’s turn to make the afternoon supply run.

  As she drove away from the grocery store, she detoured to her friend Captain Eubank’s house. If anybody could help her identify the dark blotch off the coast of Joyeuse Island, he could.

  She turned her car into his driveway, parking near the freestanding garage behind his house. The captain leaned out his side door before she’d even put the car in park. He was a slim, gray-haired man with gray eyes that surveyed the world with a sharp intelligence. The captain was past retirement age, but he still carried himself with a military bearing.

  “Come in, come in. It’s always so good to see you, Faye.”

  He lived in a white wood-frame house built shortly after World War II. It was surrounded by a neat green yard, front and back, and a white picket fence. The house looked freshly painted, but then it always looked freshly painted. If the hurricane had dropped a single twig on its grassy lawn, it was gone now.

  The captain seated her at a table smack in the middle of a 1950s fantasy kitchen. “Have a seat in here while I fix us some tea.”

  His sink was shiny white porcelain, his refrigerator was shiny white enameled steel, and his counters were shiny red laminate. Faye didn’t know you could still buy kitchen wax. Maybe Captain Eubank had a lifetime supply stashed in his garage.

  The captain was a big tea drinker, so the teakettle on his stove was permanently hot. He made a pot of tea and poured Faye a cup, then he dropped in a sugar cube and a splash of milk, because people who operated at his level of efficiency never forgot how their friends liked their tea.

  Picking up his own cup, a celadon-green antique that suited the captain’s love of the past, he said, “Now that we’ve got our tea, do you want to sit in the library? It’s more fun in there, because that’s where the books are.”

  Faye never passed up a chance to soak in the ambiance of the captain’s fabulous library. “Absolutely.”

  Captain Eubank’s body might live in Crawfordville now, but his heart had never left Micco County. It was where he had lived the first sixty years of his life. His passion for Micco County history knew no bounds, and his book collection showed it. His personal library held documents so rare that they brought historians to him.

  He lived for those historians’ visits, which gave him opportunities to ply them with tea and pick their brains. His door was just as open to people researching their family trees, Civil War re-enactors trying to get their uniforms just right, and school kids working on history projects.

  Faye wasn’t sure what branch of the military the captain had served in, or when. She’d never wanted to ask him, maybe because she wasn’t convinced that he’d actually served. She’d always harbored a private suspicion that “Captain” was his first name, until she’d read the inscription on the plaque that had pride of place on his library wall. It read:

  In Recognition of Long and Faithful Service to the Citizens of Micco County, Florida, Captain Edward Eubank is Hereby Awarded the Title of Honorary County Historian.

  For a time, she’d thought that this inscription had finally answered her question. Then she’d decided that the inscription didn’t actually clear things up. Yeah, the captain had another name and it was Edward, but Captain could still be his first name. The mystery remained, and Faye decided that she liked it that way.

  The plaque adorned a room that most people who weren’t Captain Eubank would have called the living room. He had filled it full of books. Then he’d filled the dining room full of old maps. And he had crammed two of the house’s three bedrooms full of old newspapers and ephemera. If the captain didn’t stop collecting stuff, he would need to move out of his bedroom and sleep on the couch.

  His books were labeled and shelved just as they would be in a public library. The captain had told Faye on more than one occasion, with some vehemence and more than a little passion, that he favored the Library of Congress system over the Dewey Decimal system. He’d never specified his reasons but she did not doubt that he had them.

  Since the captain had lived most of his seventy-ish years w
ithout computers, he still maintained a physical card catalog made possible when the Micco County Public Library went digital and gave him their card cabinets. They had also given him their old stamp-and-ink book checkout equipment. These things had brought his system into the 1970s. The metallic smell of library ink pervaded his home, and it took Faye back to her childhood bookmobile visits. She always left Captain Eubank’s house with a daffy smile that made her look like she’d been sniffing glue.

  Faye and the captain sat down at a reading table in the center of the living room library, and he said, “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

  “Well, I mainly wanted to be sure you made it through the storm okay. From the looks of things, you certainly did. Your yard looks like we never even had a hurricane, so I’m guessing that you spearheaded efforts to make every other yard on the street look just as good.”

  The captain grinned, but he didn’t say no. “We’re all fine. It wasn’t near as bad here in Crawfordville as it was over in Micco County.”

  “What about your sister? She lives in Micco County. Do I remember that Jeanine has been ill?”

  “I don’t know that Jeanine’s ill, really. Maybe old age is just creeping up on her, but she doesn’t get around like she used to. Her legs don’t want to go, and her breathing’s not too good. I’ve been beside myself worrying about her. You know how far she lives from town. Her phone wasn’t working—still isn’t—and I can’t get a call through. Haven’t been able to get through by car, either. And, believe me, I’ve tried. Every day since the storm, I’ve tried. Can’t even get halfway there. Still too many darned trees in the road.”

  “I bet you have.”

  “Every morning, I’m in my car, trying to find a way to get to Jeanine. Every afternoon, I’m working with my neighbors to get this town cleaned up. I’m so happy you caught me here when you stopped by.”