Page 1 of Nyall

Chapter One

May’s noon sun veiled Caroline Parish in bright heat as she watched the waves lapping at the charter boat’s hull. For the last nine years she’d worked as a salvage diver, and even jokingly referred to the sea as her office. Working in the intense light, crisp, salty air and the boundless sapphire waters off the coast of Florida usually brought her a sense of peace. She sometimes wondered if she would ever be as happy on land.

This is the last place I want to be today.

Her work came with significant risks; performing a tethered site inspection thirty miles from land without two backup divers could only be called spectacularly stupid. Everyone in the diving community back in St. Augustine would have tried to talk her out of it. Yet while hunting for a notorious wreck with her partner she’d done it a dozen times, and even allowed herself to be persuaded to make one final dive.

After this I can walk away with a clean conscience.

“I know you can only compare the scan to what you see,” Richard Ellis said as he strapped the emergency air supply tank onto her back. Tall, lean and tanned to a deep bronze that matched his shaggy hair, he had a handsome surfer’s face and soulful brown eyes. “But the reef is only a hundred and forty feet down, right? If you could find just one coin, that will help us prove our claim to the wreck.”

Caroline didn’t reply as she finished checking her gear. Because of his asthma her partner had never been able to dive, so he had no idea of how dangerous her work could be. Out here the bottom was more likely two hundred feet down, and Rich’s need for proof didn’t outweigh her need to keep breathing. If she went too deep she risked developing nitrogen narcosis. More than anything, if she saw that greedy gleam in his puppy dog eyes again, she knew she’d call it quits, just as she’d done with their relationship last month after she’d caught Rich cheating.

I never should have gotten involved with a booty junkie.

While her partner liked the ladies a little too much, his real passion had always been hunting sunken treasure. Since boyhood he’d made himself an expert on the 1715 Plate Fleet, twelve ill-fated Spanish ships that had set out four centuries ago from Havana. Unaware that a major hurricane would overtake them, the fleet had been loaded with treasure destined for Spain. Off the coast of Florida the powerful storm had caused eleven of the twelve vessels to sink, killing over two thousand sailors.

Centuries later an ex-chicken farmer from Indiana had found one of the ships, and while he’d ultimately recovered only half of its cargo, it had been worth over four hundred and fifty million dollars. That find had ignited Rich’s treasure fever; ever since he’d been researching and hunting for the ships from the fleet that had yet to be found.

I know something about the San Miguel that no one else does, babe.

Last year her partner had somehow gotten his hands on a translation of an obscure medieval journal, one written by a French priest who claimed to have been a passenger on the only ship to survive the storm. That had provided what Rich believed to be important clues as to the fate of the San Miguel, a carrack that had been the fastest vessel in the fleet. The consensus was that the ship had tried to outrun the storm and gone down off the coast near Jacksonville. Yet according to the priest’s journal, the San Miguel had suddenly changed course and sailed into the hurricane, trying to plow through it rather than outrun it.

By estimating the position of the observer’s ship, the time he’d seen the other vessel, and the speed it had likely been traveling, Rich had determined that the San Miguel had sunk thirty miles off the coast of St. Augustine, some seventy-five miles south of the area everyone else believed the ship had gone down.

No one has found the ship because they’ve been looking in the wrong place.

Caroline had never had any interest in looting what to her were underwater graveyards. Rich had pointed out that if they were able to find the wreck, she’d become part of history. He’d also offered to make her a full partner and give her fifty percent of the profits from whatever they found, and had even signed a contract guaranteeing that. Wanting to open her own salvage business finally got her to agree; she could use finding the ship as marketing basically forever. Who wouldn’t want to hire the diver who’d located and salvaged the San Miguel?

That was before Rich had screwed around on her, of course. Now she just wanted him and his shipwreck fever out of her life.

Caroline’s only other problem was knowing that when she bailed on her partner she’d leave him in a very tight spot. He’d put his charter boat business on hold last year to focus on the search. To outfit her with the right gear he’d spent the last of his savings, so she had been paying for their fuel and food every trip. Even if he got a loan, he’d have a very hard time convincing another diver to work alone. He’d grown too paranoid about keeping the wreck location secret to hire a proper crew. Yet if Rich was right about the scans they’d taken, and if the state agreed to give them salvage rights, then they might end up very rich.

All dependent on two ifs, a might, and this one last dive, of course.

“After this trip, we’re done,” she told him once she’d finished re-checking her gear. “I’ve accepted a job down in the Keys, and I’m leaving next week.” As he started to protest, she finally regarded him. “Please don’t tell me again how much you love me. I know you’ve been screwing every beach bunny in town since Christmas.”

Rich made a blustering sound. “Babe, if you ended things because of that blonde you saw me drinking with at the Pelican–”

“Was she the one who left the black lace thong in the laundry hamper, or the fake diamond earring by the phone?” Shutting him up didn’t give Caroline a sense of triumph; the whole mess disgusted her. “Look, Rich, we’re not married, so it’s fine. Like you always say, no blame, no shame. If the wreck is down there, as soon as you get the green light from the state every diver in town will be lining up to work the site. You can just send me a check.”

“Of course, I will, babe.” He clipped a yellow rope to her harness, and then went over to raise her red and white stripe diver down flag, which signaled to anyone passing that she was in the water. “Be careful, okay?”

She pulled on her helmet, locked it down and breathed in as air started flowing in through the tether. The final test was the flip-down binocular display, which projected an electronic map of the bottom to help her locate the anomaly Rich had found on the pass-over scan he’d done last week. Finally ready, she bowed her head and laced her fingers over the back of her collar ring, silently offering up her usual prayer to the only angel she believed in.

Help me have a good dive, Mama. Make sure my equipment protects me, and my experience guides me, so I can return alive.

Rather than flipping off the side of the charter in a back roll, Caroline stepped over onto the tender platform and dropped into the water to keep her anchor line and tether from tangling. Starting her descent this way also set the tone for the job. As the sea closed over her helmet, Rich, the boat and everything else above the surface stopped mattering to her.

Here, gradually dropping into the deep blue, was her heaven on earth.

The sea seemed bathwater-warm now, but once she passed the thermocline the water temp would drop to frigid. She was glad she’d insisted on Rich providing her with a top-quality heated wet suit along with her deep dive equipment. She planned to leave everything behind for the next diver he’d use to work the site.

“Com check, check, check,” Rich said suddenly over her earpiece. “Come back, babe.”

“Copy.” She frowned, wondering why he was bothering when all she had to do was make one pass and surface. Then she heard the familiar click and whirr of the voice recorder he carried around and used for his endless theories about the wreck. “Are you recording this?”

“We want it to be official for the history books, right?” The false heartiness in his voice sounded odd. “Halfway there yet?”