Riley wiped her eyes. “It’s ridiculous to drink coffee at two in the morning.”

“Not really,” Theo said. “Captain, we need to be gone by sunrise. Remember?”

Cole nodded, his laughter subsiding at last.

“Where will you go?” Riley asked.

“Well, let’s see.” Cole reached into the lockbox at the edge of the table and pulled out a small coin. “You want to call it?”

“How am I supposed to know where you want to go?”

“Just call it, Magee.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “Heads.”

Cole flipped the coin high into the air and caught it in his right hand. He slapped it onto the table.

“Heads it is,” he announced when he lifted his hand.

Riley stared at the coin, her mouth open. He had taken the coin out of his lockbox. “You said your father sent that coin to you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They aren’t all that rare, but I hang on to it anyway. It’s a 1915 Indian Head nickel. Cool, huh?” He leaned over the table and pulled the box toward him. “There’s another one in here he sent me when I was a kid.” He dug around in the box. “This one’s a Kennedy half-dollar.” He held it up. “This was the first coin he ever sent me.”

“And so this one was the second.” She stared at the image of the Indian with a braid flowing down his shoulder and the feathers in his hair. She whispered, “Not a nickel to my name.”

Cole waved the half-dollar in front of her eyes. “Riley?” he asked. “What’s going in in that head of yours?”

She looked at Theo who was leaning against the counter waiting for the kettle to whistle. “Forget the coffee, Theo,” she said. “Can you find us a chart of Dominica?”

Theo stepped over and looked down at the coin on the table, then he nodded and chuckled to himself. As he walked into the wheelhouse, he said over his shoulder, “You know, Cole, I like her.”

Cole looked at Riley. “I don’t get it. What is it?”

She picked up the nickel. “This,” she said, waving it at him and bouncing on her seat.  “This is what 322 takes you to.” She grabbed the pencil and one of the pieces of scratch paper on the table. Turning the paper over, she began to write. “Look,” she said and she wrote out the figures 3+2=5. “Three plus two equals five. Five cents is a nickel. That takes care of the first two digits.” Then she wrote the number 2 followed by a small nd. “And the last digit 2 signifies second. Like Skull and Bones was the second chapter? This is the second coin your father sent you. This one,” she said holding the French Angel coin on the flat palm of her left hand, “is the key that takes us to this one.” She opened her fist to display the Indian Head nickel. “Remember your father’s last journal entry? He wrote he didn’t have a nickel to his name. That’s because he had sent it to you.”

“So what?  What does that old nickel tell us?”

Theo appeared then with a large chart and after sweeping the rest of their debris to the far end of the table, he spread the new chart out on top of the marked-up one. It was a chart of the large, nearly oval-shaped island of Dominica.

“Captain,” Theo said, “it’s an Indian Head nickel.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Dominica, mon, it’s my home. And the number one most photographed spot on the island, the place where Johnny Depp came and played Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean II, the place on every tourist’s itinerary is none other than—” He stabbed his finger on the chart. “The Indian River.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

From Bonefish to Shadow Chaser

March 27, 2008

2:15 a.m.

Cole paced the foredeck of Riley’s sailboat, while she packed her rain gear, set a second anchor, and locked up all the hatches and ports. He couldn’t sit or hold his body still now. He couldn’t wait to get underway, but she had insisted on coming over here to secure her boat. He understood that, but they were so close. This might be it — after all the months of searching, Riley had come up with what looked like their best solution yet.

But she wasn’t telling him everything. She was holding back. She knew more about this connection to Skull and Bones, and she recognized something in that photo on Theo’s camera. Was it the boat? The man? He didn’t know and worse, he was afraid to ask. He watched her rigging a second anchor light in her cockpit. She was so damned methodical, and he feared that pushing her to talk to him might wind up pushing her away. He’d just have to wait until she was ready.

She clicked closed the padlocks on the two seat lockers in the cockpit. Yeah, he admired her diligence and the super fastidious condition of her boat, but he wanted to be out of sight — over the horizon — by the time the Brewsters came looking for them. He wished she’d hurry up. Her attention to detail was borderline obsessive, and it was making him a little crazy. If her boat was a bunk, you’d be able to bounce a quarter on it.

Riley had only agreed to accompany them to Dominica after Cole had assured her that the twenty mile crossing would be no more than a three-hour trip in the big trawler, and they would be back by nightfall. He repeated several times that her sailboat would be fine, and he promised they would dash back even if the weather just hinted that it might turn sour on them.

He stopped pacing and watched her as she climbed out of the cockpit and started toward him. Even in the dim starlight, he admired the confident, fluid way she moved about her boat. Again, he thought of a dancer. He’d promised her that he would see to it that she and her boat were safe — because he needed her. He blinked his eyes and looked away. He needed her to help him find the Surcouf.

“You ready?” he asked when she joined him.

She gave a curt nod. “We’ve still got a couple of hours before dawn.”

“I hope to be long gone by then.”

The noise of the outboard prevented conversation on the dinghy trip back to his boat. When they arrived back alongside Shadow Chaser, the aft crane was ready, and Theo had fashioned a lifting harness for Riley’s inflatable. They’d decided to take her dinghy with the outboard engine instead of attempting to paddle ashore in Cole’s rubber ducky. Riley helped him get the boat on deck while Theo lounged in the wheelhouse doorway and raised the anchor with his tablet computer. Fifteen minutes later, they had cleared the headland and were beginning to feel the slow rise and fall of the open ocean swell.

Cole secured the pilothouse house door behind him, removed his yellow oilskin jacket and hung it on a bulkhead peg. Theo sat in the helmsman’s chair, his bare feet propped up on the dash, his tablet on his lap. Cole rested his arm on the back of Theo’s seat and stood still, checking the glowing red instruments, and admiring the dark sea visible though the wheelhouse windows. The big six-cylinder Cummins purred along as she always did under Theo’s care.

 “Can you take the con for a while?” Cole asked.

“Sure, Cap’n. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

He glanced back through the bulkhead door into the galley. Riley sat on the dinette bench, her head bowed over the chart, her hair hanging forward shielding half her face. She’d ducked back into the galley as soon as everything on deck was secure. Now, she was poring over the chart, trying to narrow the search area. Cole watched her slide the tip of her forefinger in a quick half circle, tucking the hair behind her ear. He saw a flash of white where her teeth pressed into her lower lip.

Without turning to face his first mate, he said, “I don’t think I could fall asleep right now.”

On the periphery of his vision, he saw Theo twist around and glance aft.

“Yeah,” Theo said. “Sure has improved the scenery around here.” He made a couple of loud sniffing noises. “And the smell.”

Cole lifted his arm in a panic and pulled the fabric of his T-shirt to his nose.