LuAnna sensed his approach, pressed. “Where?”
“I told you. Out by a rock I was working.”
“And you don’t think somebody’s looking for it?”
“Apparently you were.”
Ben was already done in by fatigue. Now LuAnna’s ramped-up suspicion made him viciously bad-tempered. He took a breath, and tried to mend his tone. “I found it off Fishbone Island.”
LuAnna took this in. “To the north from Fishbone? The west?”
Ben fumbled. “Easterly, I suppose. I was on a good rock of oysters Pap and Ellis used to work, and there it was.”
LuAnna shook her head. “A good rock? I thought the oystering was poorly. And this was just laying down there on the bottom.”
“That’s the smart of it. It sure wasn’t floating.” Ben tried to laugh, but the bogus mirth died young.
LuAnna glanced back at his saltbox. Soon to be their saltbox. “Does Knocker Ellis know about it?”
Ben said, “He was aboard when I brought it up.”
LuAnna pressed. “I see. So this is his salvage, too. It’s not something just for me, just from you. It’s from the both of you. And good old Ellis isn’t looking for a piece?”
Ben’s mind was a tangle of anger, guilt, grief, and confusion. He’d fought ruthless killers in his time, but there was no opponent in the world so fiercely combative as his own conscience. Or LuAnna when she had something difficult to grapple.
He mumbled, “I worked something out with him.”
She asked, “Okay. But what do you figure on doing with it?”
“It’s yours. Do with it as you please.”
LuAnna jabbed, “Maybe you could melt it down and cast a duck out of it. Probably all it’s good for, unless you want a doorstop worth more than the whole house.”
“I told you before we talked the rapture off it. It was going to be an engagement present for you.”
“You said wedding present.”
“What I said was, ‘present for you’! And now you’ve jumped ugly on me, which I think is unappreciative.”
LuAnna hackled. “Run that by again?”
Jesus. Ben felt like a complete idiot. No wonder he never lied. He totally sucked at it. But honest as he was, the truth still felt too dangerous to share with LuAnna, especially when she was acting like this. Whipsawing emotions tore at his better nature.
He snapped out, “You heard me. Unappreciative of this, I don’t know — gift that’s come to us. Unappreciative of my giving you the best piece of good fortune in all my life. You picked a great time to put your skepticals on, woman.”
Woman? LuAnna surprised Ben, as well as herself, by hugging him. Speechless, it was all she could do.
Ben was wretched to have destroyed what should have been their most joyous moment together so far. He was sorrier still to lie. For Ben, it was a morning full of gold, and other cheerless happenings.
LuAnna kissed Ben on the cheek, then lightly on the lips. “You’re tired. You look awful. See to that gearbox later. Get to bed and don’t stir, okay? Leave those oysters alone for the day.”
“I will.” That was another lie to his fiancé. “I love you, LuAnna.” At least he knew this was the truth.
As she often did when they argued, she gave his wedding tackle a lewd caress to show all was well, if not yet perfect between them. Then she walked around the saltbox to the water side. She was already unmoored and starting the engines by the time Ben rounded the house. LuAnna backed the boat off the pier, spun the wheel, shifted, eased the throttles, and moved down the creek toward the bay. She uttered nothing more. Cast no fond farewell glance or wave over her shoulder before disappearing around the bend though she must have sensed he was watching. He always watched ’til she was out of sight. Ben waited there until her wake rippled in among the shoreline reeds and the creek ran smooth.
A scrappy old bantam waterman, Lorton Dyze, approached Ben before he reached his front door. “You two tiffin’?”
Ben said, “Just got engaged. I think.”
“Condolences. She’s a fine woman. Damn pity about that badge of her’n.”
Dyze was a throwback to the Island’s old days. He led the Smith Island Council, a loose gathering of weighty men who ran things in lieu of a formal elected body. Dyze had a face like a dried apple. On the rare occasions he removed his cap, his pale bald head was speckled with liver spots like the egg of a great flightless bird.
Ben knew only a matter of considerable import would lure Dyze down off his porch. Other than church on Sunday, and the occasional walk along the shore, he sat stationed in his rocker outside in all weather but a blizzard. Since retiring from crabbing eleven years back, Dyze had been convinced he was dying. To Dyze’s consternation, his life had stretched well into the new millennium, and showed no signs of ending.
Dyze held out some envelopes to Ben. “Stopped by the post office. Thought I’d save ye a trip to your box.”
With Dyze’s bum hip, this errand took him a long half-journey from his place on the other end of the island. Dyze never fetched for anybody. It was always the other way around.
“Thanks.” Ben accepted the envelopes. They promised little more than catalogues and bills he could not pay.
Dyze said, “Maybe ye’ll stop around later.”
Ben knew this was not an invitation. It was a summons. “Anything on your mind, Lorton?”
“That depends. Anything on your’n?”
Ben hedged. “Miss Dotsy’s gearbox’s is going like a champ. Ran her ashore.”
Dyze snorted softly, shook his head. Studied Ben for a second. “Her gearbox, is it? A gearbox? Who are ye, Benjamin Blackshaw?”
Ben thought this was oblique stuff, even for an old man who’d enjoyed the bully pulpit of the dying for better than a decade. Ben said nothing. Waited the old man out. He knew something, but was standing pat until Ben confided first. Lorton Dyze was a hunter, as patient as granite, but he was no sniper.
Beyond the reeds on the beach, Ben saw a familiar eleven-year-old boy, Kyle Brody. He was ditching school to skim the sand with a metal detector, sweeping it back and forth to see what Hurricane Odette had left him. Ben felt a kindred spirit with this kid. Innovating on the old ways. He hoped Kyle found something special as he progged around the shore.
No, Lorton Dyze could not outlast a hardened sniper. He gave up, hocked out a gobbet of green snot in disgust, turned, and limped down the path toward the beach. When his hip was not killing him, he too enjoyed a leisurely progue for flotsam, jetsam, peace, and quiet. Or whatever might wash up on the beach. Over his shoulder he said, “Say ye get curious. Come on around. Hear?”
“If I do.” Ben headed back toward the saltbox. The little old man hitched his way through the reeds.
Ben let him go without another word. Something weird and momentous was happening on Smith Island, but it still lay outside his understanding. His father’s appalling homecoming, Knocker Ellis’s secrets, the gold, the weapon, and Lorton Dyze’s meddlesome curiosity were signs of a great change at work all around him. Not to mention LuAnna and their child. Something on the island was stirring, quickening. And then there was this storm circling around everything; pure wrath of God stuff.
Ben had good reason to cast a jaundiced eye at Lorton Dyze. The residents of Smith and Tangier Islands had not always been God-fearing Methodists. Their ancestors had crossed the Atlantic hundreds of years before from Cornwall in England. Pirates of Penzance was not just the catchy title of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. The barren Cornish coast, including Fowey, St. Keverne, Helford, and of course, the eponymous Penzance, was known to harbor a particularly wicked brand of corsair. The western waters of England had been plagued by pirates since the fifteenth century.