The Treasure Man. Pamela Browning
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with me, Chloe. We’ll check out the latest nests.”
Zephyr had always liked company on her morning nest-hunting expeditions. Tayloe was usually willing to oblige; Gwynne, too.
“I’d love to,” Chloe told her, nudging Butch back inside with her foot.
“Get a hat. You don’t want to have a sunstroke. Is your cat coming with us?
“No, he doesn’t much like the beach.”
“That’s just as well. No telling what trouble he could get into out there.”
Chloe found a hat on the rack inside the door and skipped down the steps with a kind of heady anticipation. In her girlhood, she had listened with fascination to Zephyr’s explanation of the habits of loggerhead turtles. During their summer breeding season, female turtles lumbered onto land to lay eggs in a shallow nest in the sand. Then they returned to the ocean, never to see their own offspring, which hatched in a matter of weeks and clambered down the beach to the ocean, subject to predators and often so confused by the lights on land that they headed the wrong way. Zephyr considered it her mission in life to make sure the babies found the sea, and she sent them off with a little blessing and prayer for their safety.
Due to the nearby coral reefs being constantly ground to bits by wave action, the sand on this beach was famously pink. The ocean at this hour was still a deep cerulean blue, but as the day progressed and the sun climbed higher, its color would change to a cool, inviting turquoise. An onshore breeze, picking up now, fluttered the brim of Chloe’s hat and ruffled her hair. As they walked, Zephyr cast inquisitive glances at her from under the parasol.
“You used to be a redhead,” Zephyr stated. “What happened?”
“Uh, well, magenta and bronze and green and a color called Desert Dream, which I’ve settled on, finally. I want to look like a normal person for a change.” She wore her hair in a straight bob slightly longer than chin length, having dispensed with the spiky style she’d tried last year.
“You always were kind of different,” Zephyr ventured. “Gwynne was predictable, Naomi was sedate, but you were always turning cartwheels down the beach or ripping off all your clothes and jumping in the water.”
Chloe laughed. “I doubt if I’ll be doing any nude swimming around here now. There are lots more people on the beach these days.”
“We have the new wilderness preserve to thank for that,” Zephyr told her. “Lost Galleons Park, they call it, after the 1715 Spanish fleet that wrecked on the reefs while transporting gold and silver from the New World to Spain. Strange juxtaposition if you ask me—galleons in the New World and space launches right up the coast trying to find other new worlds. We’re going to have a space-shuttle launch later this summer. You going to be around?”
“I’m sure I will. I like the name Lost Galleons Park.”
“Ha! It’s a descriptive name, but I wish they’d named the park after the turtles. Someone at the state capitol must have decided treasure is more important than loggerheads, though I don’t see how.”
“So much of the economy around here derives from the search for treasure,” Chloe said. “Sanluca owes a lot to those sunken ships.”
“Oh, it’s ‘treasure this and treasure that,’” Zephyr agreed. “Since I was knee-high to a sandpiper, those old ships have been the sole local industry.”
“Gwynne told me the Frangipani Inn will become part of the park complex eventually.”
“The house and its land will be absorbed into the system once Gwynne and her mother die. That’s the way Tayloe wanted it. Can’t say if it’s a good idea of not. Bunch of tourists browsing through that grand old house! The park people intend to use it for a museum or some such.”
“That’s better than tearing it down and building a condominium,” Chloe said with conviction. She regretted that concrete-and-glass condo buildings had sprung up along much of the Florida coastline. The tall towers blocked the very thing that people had moved here to enjoy—abundant sunshine.
“Ben, now, he’d agree with us about condos,” Zephyr said.
Chloe kept planting one foot in front of the other. “You’ve seen him lately, I take it.”
“I ran into him on the beach last night before the storm. First met him years ago when he first came to Sanluca from a little town in the Glades. I already knew his mama and daddy from a time when I lived out there. I hadn’t seen him in a long while. Hardly had a chance to talk with him before the wind and rain came up. Bad storm, that. Knocked a bunch of mangoes off the tree at my house. Look over there now and you’ll see the latest turtle clutch.”
Chloe shaded her eyes from the sun when she spied the orange flag signaling a turtle nest. Zephyr gestured at the mesh net, about two feet high, that she’d placed around the nest to keep raccoons, possums and other land predators from disturbing the eggs. “Last night, I was watching the mama turtle and waiting for her to finish when Ben came along with his metal detector,” Zephyr said. “The man startled me, I’ll grant him that. I was paying attention to the eggs dropping into the sand when up walks someone I didn’t recognize at first. Never saw Ben Derrick with a beard before.”
“It’s not quite a beard, only the beginning of one.”
“You ask me, he’s going for the whole megillah. You should talk him out of it.”
“Like he’d pay any attention,” Chloe retorted as they headed back toward the inn. “I hardly know him.” She wished her friend would talk more about Ben, but she was disappointed when instead, Zephyr changed the subject.
“Say, about that cat of yours. You’ll need to put a bell on him if he’s to run loose. Prevent him from sneaking up on the shore birds,” she said.
“He’ll have enough to do with keeping the mice at bay in the inn.”
“Never saw a cat that didn’t stalk birds.”
“Butch is different.” She decided against telling Zephyr that Butch was toilet trained. Zephyr probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.
They started up the boardwalk, which meant that if Chloe was going to learn anything more about Ben, she’d better get Zephyr talking. “Ben’s been away from Sanluca a long time, I guess,” she prodded.
“Couple of years. Had to leave after he got fired from Sea Search. Not that I pay much attention to what people say, when all’s said and done. People say too much. That’s why I like animals a lot more.”
Keeping Zephyr on the topic was hard. “Ben was fired?” Chloe asked. This was electrifying information; she’d had no idea.
“That’s all I’ll mention, though he’s lucky to be alive after that accident.”
“What accident?”
“Not on that motorcycle of his, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“He drives a Jeep now.”
“It was a diving accident. He surfaced from one of the shipwreck sites too fast. They get the bends, divers do, if they don’t take time to decompress on the way up.”
“They can die,” Chloe said, remembering how Gwynne had explained it to her one summer, complete with facial grimaces and elaborate descriptions of how a diver’s blood could boil and their hearts could burst. Now that she was grown-up, Chloe suspected that Gwynne had embellished her story for effect, but the bends—or DCS, which stood for decompression sickness—was still nothing to fool with.
“Dumb thing, that,” Zephyr said. “Ben not taking care of himself, I mean. Losing his job. By the way, I’ve got some of those windfall mangoes in my car. Thought you might like a few to eat. I’ll get them for you.”
“Great,” Chloe said with little enthusiasm as Zephyr left her to go to the parking lot. She wondered why Ben had surfaced too