Deadly Engagement. Elle James
And Emma is the most experienced diver. Can’t go wrong with her.”
“Good to know.” He didn’t really care as long as he had a boat to get him to where he needed to go. He didn’t necessarily need a local dive master to guide him in. Having received his training courtesy of the U.S. Navy SEALs, Creed could dive circles around most recreational divers. But to keep his cover, he’d go along with the locals and maybe learn something about who Phillip Macias was planning to meet with his Russian cargo.
The sooner the better. He had a feeling the yacht going down wasn’t part of the plan, and whoever was expecting it would be in a hurry to get his hands on whatever was on board. If that happened, it could initiate a chain of events that could potentially destroy the entire western coast of the United States.
* * *
They’re cancelling the Children’s Wing Project.
The words echoed in Emma Jenkins’s head as she shoved her duffel bag with her wet suit and regulator into the backseat of her Jeep. She slipped behind the wheel and headed for the marina, her chest hurting so badly she could barely breathe.
If she hadn’t scheduled the week off, she might have been tempted to call in sick to the hospital where she worked as a nurse. The same hospital her former fiancé had swindled out of the funds raised to build the new children’s wing eight months ago.
Laura Kurtz had called that morning with the news. “I wanted you to hear it from me first, and to assure you it’s not your fault and no one thinks that way.”
Yeah, right. If she hadn’t introduced Randy Walters to the board of directors, he wouldn’t have been offered the consultant position for raising funds for the new children’s wing.
“If you’re at fault,” Laura had said, “then so am I for not seeing through his lies.”
Emma had been so gullible, thinking Randy was trustworthy, loved her and really had planned to marry her in June. Her wedding dress still hung on her closet door, a painful reminder of the fool she’d been to trust a man.
“Take this week off as an opportunity to get yourself together, have some fun counting starfish or whatever it is you do on your dives, and come back refreshed. We need you here at Cape Churn Memorial. You’re the best nurse we have.”
At that point Emma had faked an incoming call, her voice choking on a sob she refused to release. Randy didn’t deserve a single tear. He’d hurt her, but worse, he’d hurt the children of Cape Churn and the surrounding seaside towns by absconding with the money meant for the addition.
Emma’s only hope at redemption lay in the sea. Call it a hunch, but today was the day her luck would change. She could feel it in her bones and flowing in her blood, the same blood that flowed through the long line of Cape Churn Jenkinses, who’d helped establish this little town on the coast of Oregon in the mid-eighteen hundreds. The sole surviving Jenkins, she had an obligation to redeem the family name.
As she turned her Jeep into the marina parking lot, her heartbeat slipped into an unsteady rhythm, her breath coming in shorter bursts as excitement mounted.
Today would be the day she found the wreck of the Anna Maria, a ship legend told of having sunk in the Devil’s Shroud in the late 1700s. She climbed out of her vehicle, grabbed her duffel and hurried toward destiny.
The boat that would get her there, the Reel Dive, rocked gently against its mooring. Dave Logsdon trotted along the dock carrying a cooler, probably filled with beer, his flip-flops making soft slapping sounds. He wore a worn U2 T-shirt and cargo shorts stained from fish guts and bait and frayed at the edges. An L.A. Dodgers baseball cap perched on his curly blond hair, tipped back so that he could see. “Some fog we had the past couple nights, wasn’t it?”
“Unfortunately.” Emma climbed aboard, unzipped her bag and slipped her diving mask and headlamp over her head. She adjusted the straps and removed it, laying it aside while she dug out the rest of her diving gear. “Had plenty of accident victims in the emergency room.”
Dave shook his head. “It was pretty bad out here. Must have been a disturbance farther out to sea. We had plenty of waves to go along with being socked in with the Devil’s Shroud.”
“Not a good night to be out on the water.” According to the legends and the written records, a similar night, over two hundred years ago, had led to the disappearance of the Spanish galleon, the Anna Maria.
Nothing penetrated the choking blanket of fog the locals had nicknamed the Devil’s Shroud. Ships caught in its deadly clutches ran aground in the deadly shallows of the reefs surrounding the jut of land called Cape Churn.
The Anna Maria had been spotted out to sea, nearing the Cape on its northern journey to the mouth of the Columbia River, navigating the jagged coastline between the rocky islands peppering the ocean floor. She’d been due to dock the next morning in the harbor town of Cape Churn, laden with gold coins and priceless china from the Far East. When the shroud descended, the ship and all aboard had perished.
Records kept by colonists placed the ship near the rocky shallows, but all efforts to locate the ship had come up empty.
Until now. Emma laid out her equipment, one piece at a time, going over her dive plan in her head. The dive that would fix everything in her life. Failure wasn’t an option. Her life, her reputation at the hospital and in the community, depended on her finding a treasure sufficient to cover the cost of the new wing.
A moment of doubt slipped beneath her forced bravado. Why did she think she had a chance to find the Anna Maria when no one else had? Any sane person would conclude she had the same chances of winning the lottery as finding the two-hundred-year-old wreck.
“Ready?” Dave asked, leaping aboard.
“Almost.” Emma shoved aside her misgivings and tested the flow of compressed air from the tank to the regulator, sucking in a deep breath and letting it out. She looked around at the equipment stacked on the deck. Buoyancy control device, or BCD, wrist dive computer with a built-in GPS, cylinder, regulator, booties, fins, wet suit, gloves, mask and diving knife. The most important item was the map she’d drawn of Cape Churn after researching her great-grandfather’s logbooks and journals that had been kept by the long since deceased lighthouse keeper from the late eighteen hundreds.
Emma straightened. “Do you have the location entered in your GPS?”
“Done.”
After a great deal of research and studying old letters and documents, she’d calculated a back azimuth from the locations reporting a sighting of the Anna Maria and determined the coordinates accordingly. Three years ago, she’d established a grid extending six hundred yards outward from that location, taking into account tide and ocean currents. Over the years, she’d dived the grid, meticulously ruling out one section after another until now. The final grid, her last hope to find the Anna Maria and keep alive the dream of a hospital addition benefiting the children.
A tentative thrill of anticipation shimmied across her skin.
Dave climbed the ladder to the helm and paused at the top, his back still to her as he faced the dock. “What’s with the police car?”
Emma glanced up, her gaze scanning the parking lot.
An SUV with Cape Churn Police written on the side pulled to a stop, and Officer Gabe McGregor got out.
Emma smiled and waved. Gabe and his fiancée, Kayla Davies, were friends of hers, though too often she felt like a pathetic odd man out to their loving family.
Another car pulled into the lot, parking next to Gabe’s SUV. A tall, dark-haired man unfolded himself from behind the wheel. Wearing sunglasses, a T-shirt, swim trunks and flip-flops, he strode toward them, carrying a large duffel bag, his broad chest and thick arms a testament of a firm regimen of weight lifting. Maybe even a little Native American ancestry, with those high cheekbones and square jaw. The stranger met the officer at the back of the vehicle. Gabe spoke and pointed toward the boat and Emma.
Emma’s