Moseby’s eyes adjusted even further to the dim light. Annabelle said if it had been him instead of Jonah swallowed by the whale, Moseby wouldn’t have needed divine intervention to find his way out of its innards. He checked his watch. Plenty of time. Plenty of air. He passed over a small backyard, a line of laundry drooping but still standing. Shirts and pants and dresses, their colors faded, eaten through with time, ragged pennants rippling in the current. Another yard…the screen door thrown open, torn half off its hinges, and Moseby wondered if the family inside the house had made it out alive, had clung to a boat, a skiff, an inflatable swimming pool; he wondered if they had gotten lucky, awakened from a nightmare before dawn, and raced ahead of the raging floodwaters.
Annabelle said her uncle’s house had been large, with a high river-rock fence and white pillars; he had become a rich man down on his luck by then, his house the remnant of his fortune as the neighborhood sunk into squalor. She and her mother had never gone back after that first visit. Sweeny had taken offense at something her mother said…or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, her uncle and the house were a dim memory.
The marble bust of the woman…that was a different story. Annabelle remembered it vividly. The stone queen, that’s what she had called the statue. A beautiful woman with a head full of tight curls, her expression distant and dreamy, as though she had seen something that no one else had ever seen, and the sight had changed her. The world would never be quite fine enough for the woman now. Annabelle said she thought the stone queen must have looked into heaven and couldn’t wait to go there. Moseby knew better. He and Annabelle had sifted through photos on the Net until she narrowed down what she remembered. If she was right, the statue was Greek, probably early classical, in the style of Aphrodite of Melos. Priceless. Moseby was going to surprise Annabelle with it for their anniversary tonight. For weeks he had been searching for it, not even telling his daughter, Leanne.
A grove of trees had been flattened by the flood, thrown together in a tangle. Beyond the fallen trees, a huge banyan squatted in place, leaves long gone, its branches still sharp. A crumbling stone wall…Moseby angled lower, straining to see.
The wall was made from smooth river rock. Spiky, brightly colored sea anemones festooned the stones, completely covering the south wall where the offshore flow brought the densest stream of nutrients. He jerked back as a sea snake poked out from a hole in the crumbling wall, the creature tracking him with its tiny eyes, working its fangs as it undulated toward him. Yellow with red stripes, four feet long…five feet, six feet at least as it wiggled out of the wall. Moseby drew his knife as he watched the snake, playing with it now, the flat of the blade making lazy rotations around his index finger. The spinning blade gathered the faint light, flashed in the darkness, and the snake inched closer, attracted. Moseby kept the blade moving, calling it closer. Sea snake venom was more deadly than a cobra’s, that’s what the old-timers said. All Moseby knew was that three divers had died last month from snakebites, died ugly, puffed up until their skin split. Fifty years ago there hadn’t been sea snakes in the Gulf, none like this anyway, but the water was warmer now, the snakes migrating toward rich pickings…just like Moseby. The snake stopped, faced off with him, and then slowly retreated back to its grotto in the stone wall.
Moseby waited another minute, then slipped his knife back into its sheath, moved on to the house. He slipped gently through a picture window that had been blown out, scattering fish with his presence. The fish returned just as quickly. He switched his face mask lights to the lowest setting, bounced the beam off the ceiling. He saw well enough to navigate.
Tables and chairs were jumbled below, the carpet thick with mud, tiny crabs scuttling through the saw grass. Paintings on the wall hung askew, their surfaces occluded by a dull blue-gray fungus, gilt frames eaten by woodworms. Fish nosed around him, but Moseby ignored them. He lightly wiped a gloved hand across the surface of the largest painting…the paint rolled off in tiny droplets, spun lazily around him as the fish gobbled them down. He kicked on through the house, limpets dotting the walls and ceiling. Stingrays burrowed into the debris, hiding themselves.
He hovered in the doorway of the master bedroom. A huge bookcase had fallen, scattered volumes. Pages swollen, the books gaped on the carpet. The Greek bust lay among the books, toppled off its display stand. He moved inside, eager now; his movements stirred the top layer of mud, but he didn’t care. He wrenched the bust from the pile of books, sent the sodden pages fluttering around him, free of their rotten bindings. He cleared away the fine moss that covered the statue’s features, taking off his glove to feel the smooth marble, not satisfied until she was clean. Moseby looked into her face. She was everything that Annabelle had described: strong and beautiful, but most of all possessed of secrets that had cost her greatly. The wisdom of time. He ran a finger along her cheek. Even buoyed by the water, the bust was heavy, maybe a hundred pounds, but he tucked it under one arm, comforted by its heft. He swam for the window, his kicks powerful, leaving clouds of pages in his wake. All those lost words…
His wrist tracker guided him back to where his boat was anchored 1.3 miles away. He could have tagged the bust and returned for it when he got to the boat. Would have been easier, but the idea of putting aside the sculpture even for a few minutes, after all this time searching for it…Moseby couldn’t do it.
He swam on, shifting the sculpture from arm to arm, more excited than fatigued. By the time the bottom of the boat came into view, he just wanted to load up and be gone. He carefully placed the bust on the hydraulic shelf at the stern, the stone queen’s face gleaming in the sunlight after all those years underwater. Moseby tore himself away from her gaze, grabbed a handhold, and pulled himself quickly onto the boat. Pushed back his face mask. Trouble. He turned.
“Nice morning. A little hot maybe…”
Moseby stared at the man in shorts and a bright Hawaiian shirt leaning against the command console, cleaning his fingernails with Moseby’s boning knife. A muscular bruiser, sweating in the heat. Tufts of short red hair blossomed across his skull. Small, cruel eyes, made worse by the intelligence within, and large, flat, uneven teeth. An albino ape raped by a wild boar would birth something like this man…and then abandon it in disgust. Moseby stood on the deck, dripping water. “What are you doing on my boat?”
The man wandered over to check out the statue. Whistled. “You carried that thing by yourself? You’re a lot stronger than you look.” He grinned with those crooked teeth, idly adjusted the machine pistol slung around one shoulder. “I best watch my manners.”
“I asked you a question.”
“You know who I am?” the man said softly, working the curved tip of the boning knife deep under his thumbnail. Coarse red hairs on his knuckles waved in the breeze.
“Yeah.”
The man flicked something from under his nail with the knife, looked up at Moseby. “Then you know I don’t need to give you any explanations.”
Moseby had seen the man on video more than once, Gravenholtz…Lester Gravenholtz. He was usually standing behind the Colonel at news conferences, rarely acknowledged, but always there. The Colonel was a bona fide war hero, known as the savior of Knoxville for his tenacious defense of the city. “No retreat, no surrender, no prisoners” was his motto. At the height of the battle he had personally executed nineteen deserters, live-broadcasting the slayings to his troops. A local warlord now-plenty of those in the Bible Belt, where any central authority was always suspect-but the Colonel was the most powerful, a law unto himself. Lester Gravenholtz had been a late edition to the Colonel’s forces, showed up about ten years ago and made himself at home. The Colonel’s imp, hostile preachers had called him…until they disappeared. Two years ago, the president himself had signed a federal arrest warrant for Gravenholtz, citing multiple examples of rape, murder, and the sacking of the government armory in Vicksburg. The Colonel had sent home the federal prosecutor who attempted to arrest Gravenholtz, said he’d rein in Gravenholtz himself. The thirty members of the prosecutor’s armed detail had defected and become part of the Colonel’s private army.