Deep Blue Read Free

locked door.
    Jackie blew out a breath as she pulled it open to let Hope in. “You weren’t kidding when you said this place was trashed.”
    “I guess that was a bit of an understatement.”
    “No kidding.” She grinned. “At least the CD player still works and most of your disks are okay.” Bernie Williams, one of Hope’s favorites, played soft jazz in the background. “Take your coat off, girl, and let’s get to work.”
    Cleaning up was even harder than Hope had imagined. It was an exhausting, depressing job, but by the end of the following day, her apartment was back in order and at least passably livable again. She didn’t have time to replace the items that had been broken, but she could handle that when she got back home.
    The clothes hanging in her closet—thank you, God—had been left untouched. She still had most of the loose pants and sundresses she had bought for her first trip to the islands, but she stopped by Bloomies and bought a new two-piece purple swimsuit, one that was less revealing than her yellow flowered bikini, though she tossed that one in for good measure.
    By Friday morning, she was heading to the airport, a ticket on Air Jamaica in her hand. A private plane would carry her the rest of the way to Pleasure Island, about ninety-five miles off the coast.
    If she hadn’t felt guilty for abandoning poor old Buddy Newton, she would have been excited. As it was, she was mostly just resentful she had lost what might have been a really great story to that slug, Randy Hicks.
     
    Conner Reese knocked on the door to the office Professor Archibald Marlin had been assigned during his stay in Jamaica. The seventy-three-year-old professor was doing a series of lectures at a small, private college on the outskirts of Port Antonio, a beautiful old harbor that was once a banana shipping port. The professor had accepted the invitation to speak because he enjoyed talking about the subject he loved—the Spanish treasure fleets—and because it put him in close proximity to the expedition going on just ninety-five miles from the island.
    Dr. Marlin opened the door. “Right on time, as usual. Good to see you, Conner, my boy.”
    “You, too, Doc. Looks like island life agrees with you.”
    The professor smiled. “Perfect weather. Views of the sea that go on forever. Except for missing Mary, how could it not?”
    “How’s she doing?”
    A cloud passed over the professor’s face. He was as tall as Conn, a little over six-foot-two, but bone-thin and pale-skinned with a leonine mane of thick gray hair. His pant legs were always perfectly creased but so loose over his thin legs that when he walked, Conn always got an image of Abraham Lincoln.
    “I’m afraid Mary’s pretty much the same. My daughter is staying with her. They may come for a visit while I’m here.” Mary Marlin, the professor’s wife of nearly fifty years, was a victim of Alzheimer’s. It was a hard, hopeless disease that took its toll on everyone it touched.
    “I’ve spread the map out,” Dr. Marlin said, changing to a less painful subject. “Come over and have a look.”
    Conn paused long enough to pour himself a cup of coffee from the half-full pot on the hot plate of the machine against the wall. Then he walked over to where a map of the Caribbean lay open on the table, this one plotting the location of shipwreck sites as far south as Trinidad, as far north as the Florida coast.
    Though the office was nicely furnished, with a desk, a table, four wooden chairs, and big windows looking over the distant harbor, the professor had cluttered the place up. Old maps and drawings, stacks of reference books, and endless sea charts made it look like his office back in South Florida, where Conn had first met him.
    The professor looked down at the map. “If you recall, it was January when the seven galleons of the 1605 Terra Firma Fleet left Cartagena.”
    “That’s right. And each ship in the line was heavily loaded with gold and silver