Without a Grave Read online

  Recent Titles by Marcia Talley

  The Hannah Ives Mysteries Series

  SING IT TO HER BONES

  UNBREATHED MEMORIES

  OCCASION OF REVENGE

  IN DEATH’S SHADOW

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  THROUGH THE DARKNESS

  DEAD MAN DANCING *

  WITHOUT A GRAVE *

  * available from Severn House

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2009

  in Great Britain and 2010 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2009 by Marcia Talley.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Talley, Marcia Dutton, 1943–

  Without a Grave

  1. Ives, Hannah (Fictitious character) – Fiction 2. Resorts –

  Environmental aspects – Bahamas – Fiction 3. Sabotage – Fiction 4. Hurricanes – Bahamas – Fiction 5. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  813.6[F]

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-029-6 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6760-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-145-4 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being

  described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this

  publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons

  is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To the most critically endangered horses in the world, the Abaco Barbs.

  May you always run free.

  www.arkwild.org

  Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

  Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

  Man marks the earth with ruin – his control

  Stops with the shore.

  He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

  Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

  Lord George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 178–179

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to:

  My husband, Barry, whose love of sailing first took us to the Bahamas where I fell in love all over again.

  Pattie Toler, who invented the Cruisers’ Net, on the air in Abaco every day, rain or shine, for eighteen years. She graciously stepped aside to allow Hannah to fill in as moderator, and cheerfully answered my endless questions.

  Milanne ‘Mimi’ Rehor, whose love and unqualified dedication to the Abaco Barbs has brought them back from the brink of extinction.

  To Brent Morris for Paul’s project.

  To Ben Stavis, captain of Astarte, a Rhodes Reliant 41, for Wanderer.

  And to Chris Parker, for the weather.

  To the Annapolis Writers’ Group – Ray Flynt, Lynda Hill, MaryEllen Hughes, Debbi Mack, Sherriel Mattingly and Bonnie Settle – for tough love.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The islands of Hawksbill Cay and Bonefish Cay are not on the charts. I have taken the very great liberty of sandwiching them between Scotland Cay to the north and Man-O-War Cay to the south while pushing Fowl Cay a bit further out into the Atlantic Ocean. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this will cause, especially to cruising sailors.

  In the Bahamas, Cay is pronounced ‘Key,’ never ‘Kay.’

  It would be impossible to set a book anywhere in the tiny out-island chain known collectively as the Abacos without including local personalities like Pattie Toler, Mimi Rehor, Troy Albury and Vernon Malone. While these people actually exist, I have written a work of fiction. Their roles in this book, and the words and deeds attributed to them, are entirely figments of my imagination and should in no way be construed as fact.

  The Abaco Wild Horse Preserve and Conservation Area is located on the island of Great Abaco in the area of Treasure Cay, but if you try to follow my directions, you will not find it. For the protection of the horses I have left my descriptions purposely vague. If you’d like to visit the Preserve, Mimi Rehor will happily be your guide. Contact Mimi at: http://www.arkwild.org/visitbarbs/visit.html

  And while you’re there, give a buck for the Barbs!

  ONE

  AT TWO HOURS AFTER MIDNIGHT APPEARED THE LAND, AT A DISTANCE OF 2 LEAGUES. THEY HANDED ALL SAILS AND SET THE TREO, WHICH IS THE MAINSAIL WITHOUT BONNETS, AND LAY-TO WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT FRIDAY, WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT AN ISLAND OF THE BAHAMAS THAT WAS CALLED IN THE INDIANS’ TONGUE GUANAHANI.

  Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage,

  October 12, 1492

  We’d lived on Bonefish Cay for a week before it occurred to me. Take your clothes off, Hannah. Swim nude.

  On a jagged limestone bank behind me, Windswept Cottage hunkered down in clumps of sea grape and towering palms, their fronds rattling softly in a brisk, offshore breeze. Our landlords, a pair of crackerjack attorneys from New York City, had bought up the property – a cottage and two outbuildings – as well as the vacant lots on either side to ‘help out’ a client in the wake of an ugly, divorce-spawned foreclosure. Barring curious fishermen with binoculars, or a bored passenger on the occasional passing cruise ship, there was no one to see me as I shook off my flip-flops, eased my cut-offs down to my ankles and stepped out of them on to the sand. With a swift, cross-armed motion, I hauled my T-shirt over my head, exposing my body, not exactly as Mother Nature intended – there’d been too many surgeries for that – but in all its post-op, what-you-see-is-what-you-get glory.

  I stood for a moment on the narrow strip of beach, eyes closed, face to the sky, wiggling my toes deeper into the sand. The sun had been up for only an hour, but it had already taken the night’s damp chill out of the pink, sugar-fine grains. It warmed my eyelids, my cheeks, too, as I surrendered to its rays and to the kiss of the wind as it lifted my curls and caressed my body gently, like a lover. Not for the first time, I was thanking whatever gods had led Paul and me to this tiny Bahamian island, an unpolished gem in the Abaco chain just one hundred and fifty miles – as the seagull flies – off the coast of Florida.

  Not the gods, exactly, I corrected as I stepped into the curling surf and waded in up to my knees, but the chair of the Naval Academy math department and the Academic Dean who’d granted my husband a six-month sabbatical at full pay. Paul was writing a textbook that would revolutionize the way geometry is taught in high schools, the perfect text that would open the door to advanced calculus for thousands and thousands of college students. He’ll explain it to you, if you ask, but prepare yourself for folding three-dimensional paper figures that don’t hold up very well in the humidity. The price one pays for working in paradise!

  That the property became available was another miracle wrought not by the gods, but by our family attorney, Jim Cheevers, who represented the occasional investment banker with a second home and a three-count conviction. Jim had once engineered our getaway to a secluded cabin on Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, but if anyone ever ran a vacation rental sweepstakes, Windswept would be first prize.

 
I turned my back to the sea and studied our home-away-from-home, a pale-aqua board-and-batten octagon cantilevered over the Sea of Abaco. Wooden windows all around afforded a three hundred and sixty degree view. We kept the windows flung open to the trade winds, flipped up and hooked to the underside of a generous roof that extended at least ten feet over the wrap-around porch. With typical Bahamian efficiency, the roof collected every drop of rain that fell from the tropical sky, carrying it through a series of gutters and pipeways into a concrete cistern, our only source of fresh water.

  I’d left Paul on the porch with his laptop on his knees, happily Skyping with his buddy, Brent, back in Maryland about their hero, mathematician Andrew Gleason. Paul took full advantage of the on-again, off-again unprotected wireless signal drifting our way from some good Samaritan in the settlement across the channel on Hawksbill Cay.

  Hawksbill settlement: year-round home to two hundred souls, serviced by a marina, two boat yards, three churches of unaffiliated (but competing) denominations, a tiny branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, a hardware store, the Cruise Inn and Conch Out restaurant, and Harbour Market, the grocery store where we bought most of our supplies. Rush hour on Hawksbill Cay was two golf carts passing on the six-foot wide ribbon of concrete grandly named The Queen’s Highway.

  On Bonefish Cay, where we lived, there were no roads.

  Parking my swim mask on top of my head and leaving my snorkel to dangle loosely by my right ear, I turned and waded out in the direction of Hawksbill Cay, toward a white scar on the otherwise verdant shore less than a half-mile away where construction had already begun on a controversial resort. The offending slash was a runway, built to accommodate the Piper props of the poodle and pedicure crowd. From its denuded banks silt bled into the sea, an almond-colored cloud that flowed toward Hawksbill reef slowly but relentlessly, like lava, threatening to smother it. I prayed wind and tide would keep it well away from our little corner of paradise, pristine Bonefish Cay.

  Through the gin-clear water at my waist, I noticed a starfish, tangerine-red and the size of a dinner plate, ghosting along the bottom on little tube feet. I held my breath, bent down and picked it up. The starfish felt hard and spiky under my fingertips as I turned it gently, admiring the intricate lines and dots that both delineated and decorated its five, perfectly symmetrical arms. Paul tells me that if enough of the central disk is included, a whole new starfish can be regenerated from each severed arm. Very cool. Too bad the same thing doesn’t apply to women, and breasts.

  The drone of an engine shattered the silence. Wouldn’t you know it? The first time I decide to do something even remotely risqué, a plane flies by. I scrunched down, heart pounding, hoping the pilot was too far away to notice that I was naked. As I cowered in the water, the little Cessna strafed the palms on nearby Beulah Point, then skimmed the Sea of Abaco like a red and white dragonfly before alighting on the unfinished runway across the way. Danger past, I stood up, then laughed out loud when I realized I still held the starfish in front of me like Gipsy Rose Lee performing at Minksy’s. I released the remarkable creature and watched it drift to the bottom where it could get on with its work.

  Fish, I understand. Starfish, I admire.

  I adjusted my face mask over my eyes and nose, wrapped my lips around the mouthpiece of my snorkel and swam out, stroking steadily, toward Barracuda Reef. Beneath me, the sand gradually became a meadow of undulating sea grass. Above me, at the water’s surface, a ghostly school of trumpetfish parted politely to let me pass, then regrouped and continued on their way.

  Before long, the reef came into view; a grey-blue mound at first, then a yellow splash of brain coral emerged, a red tree sponge, a purple fan. I trod water for a moment, gently bobbing, then kicked hard and swam off in a clockwise direction. I preferred to approach the reef from the east where a splendid rack of elkhorn coral arched, forming a natural gateway to the wonderland beyond. Carried by the tide, I drifted through.

  Sun and clouds above, light and shadow below. I smiled inside my mask. It was like living inside the Monterey Aquarium, only a thousand times better. I floated over the secret underwater world until its inhabitants began to take me for granted.

  Ink-black sea cucumbers waved at me from their crevices. Yellowtail damselfish frisked about, their electric-blue spots twinkling like jewels. A bright-orange squirrelfish, his eye a black-ringed target, pecked at something in the sand.

  But I was looking for my friend, Big Daddy.

  He was hard to miss, Big Daddy, a two hundred and fifty pound grouper as big as a college linebacker. I swam on, checking behind an outcropping of brain coral, peering down into ragged holes that damaging storms had torn into a delicate organism already bleached out and weakened by global warming. Corals grow slowly, painfully slowly, some no more than the width of a dime in a year. If something isn’t done . . .

  I shook away the thought as a splash of green caught my eye. A moray eel gaped at me from his hidey-hole like a malevolent snake, displaying an impressive set of needle-like teeth. I gave the eel a wide berth, and swam on, still looking for Big Daddy.

  I found him a few minutes later, lurking territorially behind a purple fan coral. He floated there soberly, considering me with large, lugubrious eyes, mouth turned down in a perpetual frown, like Winston Churchill after the Blitz, but without the cigar.

  A school of yellow jacks flashed by; Big Daddy ignored them. He ignored a pair of stoplight parrotfish, too, as they nibbled away on the coral – algae for breakfast! – with an audible click-click-clicking sound. Suddenly Big Daddy shied away, ducking, squeezing his enormous body – unsuccessfully – under an overhanging coral shelf.

  I barely had time to wonder what had spooked the big fellow when something flashed in the periphery of my vision. A dark shadow was speeding in my direction, sleek as a dolphin, fast as a shark.

  I froze, heart pounding, wishing I had worn my swim fins so I could paddle out of there in a hurry.

  False alarm! No need to panic. The newcomer was my husband, wearing only a mask, flippers and a weight belt, and carrying a Bahamian sling, the slingshot-like speargun locals used for fishing.

  When Paul surfaced next to me, I yanked the snorkel out of my mouth so I could say, ‘I thought you were working.’

  Paul grinned, his cheeks creasing handsomely around his face mask. ‘I got bored.’

  ‘You? Bored? With your buddy, good old Andy Whatshisname?’

  With his free hand, Paul caught my arm and pulled me gently toward him. ‘It might have had something to do with looking out the window and seeing a naked woman on the beach.’

  He planted his lips firmly on mine and drew me under the water. When we came up for air, I said, ‘What will Big Daddy think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘Let’s try it again and see.’

  I waved him off, indicating the speargun. ‘What’s that for then?’

  ‘Dinner.’

  I splashed water in his face. ‘As tired as I am of frozen, oddly shaped cuts of could-be-pork, could-be-lamb, if you shoot any of my friends . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Paul said. ‘Until I get the hang of this gizmo, your friends are perfectly safe from me.’

  An hour later as I was standing in the outdoor shower, rinsing off salt and sand under a jet of warm water, Paul called to me from the other side of the latticework screen that separated me from the outside world, in the unlikely event that peeping Toms were lurking in the mangroves.

  ‘Mutton snapper!’ he crowed.

  I rinsed shampoo out of my hair and reached over the door, groping blindly for the towel I’d left draped over a hook on the dry side of the screen. ‘Mutton?’ I asked, thinking I hadn’t heard him correctly. Eventually, my hand made contact with the towel and I was able to drag it into the enclosure with me.

  ‘It’s a beauty,’ he said. ‘Come see.’

  I toweled off vigorously, wrapped the towel around my body and tucked the loose end under my arm to secure it. When I step
ped out on to the concrete apron surrounding the shower stall, Paul was standing so close that I nearly ran into the catch of the day. He held the fish by a gloved finger hooked into its open mouth and was turning the creature slowly, giving me time to admire its size, and the way the sun glistened on its iridescent, peachy-gold scales. ‘Ten pounds if it’s an ounce, Hannah. Dinner enough for four.’

  ‘You, me and who else?’ I wondered.

  ‘Someone’s home at Southern Exposure,’ Paul said. ‘Must have arrived on the ten o’clock ferry.’

  We’d met only a few of our neighbors, the island being largely deserted during hurricane season, but I knew from the printout our landlords left tacked to the wall next to the telephone, that a family named Weston owned Southern Exposure, and that they came from somewhere in North Carolina.

  I squinted eastward over the mangroves and fringes of casuarina that separated our compound from the Weston’s and noticed the Bahamian flag – turquoise, yellow and black – flying from what had been a bare pole that morning. As a courtesy to the host country, it was customary to fly the Bahamian flag any time one was in residence. A similar flag was beating itself to a frenzy on our flagpole at that very moment.

  An odd custom, I’d thought, when we first arrived on the island. Why announce to potential thieves, once the flag was pulled down, ‘Hey, fellas, we’re gone! Come help yourselves.’ Good thing crime was practically unheard of in the islands. Hawksbill Cay had a constable, though, uniform and all. I’d seen him. He ferried over from Marsh Harbour, the capital of the Abacos, every Wednesday from ten to two, the only hours in the week that the bank was open.

  Nevertheless, it paid to be careful. That’s why homes owned by foreigners had caretakers, a hereditary position often handed down from father to son.

  The caretaker for Windswept was Forbes Albury; his family had lived in the settlement at Hawksbill Cay ever since 1780 when great-great-great-something grandfather Albury was shipwrecked on South Man-O-War reef during deadly hurricane San Calisto. Mr Forbes (as everyone called him) took a proprietary interest in the property, not surprisingly, since his father, Mardell Albury, had constructed it for a Canadian horticulturist, nail-by-nail and board-by-board, back in the mid-sixties. Mr Mardell and his father before him, Mr Bertram, were legendary shipbuilders. Mr Forbes was married to Mrs Ruth; Mr Ted, who owned the grocery, to Mrs Winnie – on an island where more than half the phone book was taken up by Alburys, what was the point of a last name?