Cradle (22 page)

Carol was lost. She could see that the rocks on one reef structure were all chartreuse
and that the opposite reef was yellow. But it didn’t mean anything to her. She shook
her head. She needed more explanation.

‘Don’t you understand?’ Dale said with a final dramatic flourish. ‘If this data is
right, then we have found something else of great importance. Either there is some
source
inside
one of the reef structures that is making its surface uniformly warmer, or, and I
admit this sounds truly incredible, one of the two is
not a reef at all
and is something else masquerading as a reef.’

It was almost always impossible to find a parking place in the middle of the working
day near Amanda Winchester’s house in Key West. The Hemingway Marina had revitalized
the old part of the city where she lived, but as usual everyone had underestimated
the need for parking. All the repainted and renovated nineteenth-century mansions
along Eaton and Caroline Streets had signs on the street saying such things as
DON
’
T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE IF YOU
’
RE NOT A RESIDENT
, but it was no use. People who worked in the retail shops around the marina parked
where it was convenient for them and avoided the heavy parking fee at the marina.

After searching fruitlessly for a parking place for fifteen minutes, Nick Williams
decided to park outside a convenience store and walk the block or so to Amanda’s house.
He was strangely anxious. Part of his nervousness was due to his excitement, but he
was also feeling guilty. Amanda had been the major sponsor of the original
Santa Rosa
expedition and Nick had spent considerable time with her after they had found the
treasure. Amanda and Nick and Jake Lewis had all three believed that Homer Ashford
and his
ménage à trois
had somehow hidden part of the treasure and then cheated them out of their proper
shares. Nick and Amanda worked together trying to find evidence that Homer had stolen
from them, but they were never able to prove anything conclusively.

During this period Amanda and Nick had become quite close. They had seen each other
virtually every week and for a while he had thought of her as an aunt or grandmother.
But after a year or so, Nick had stopped going to visit her. He hadn’t understood
it at the time, but the real reason he began to avoid her was that Amanda was too
intense for him. And she was always too personal. She asked him too many hard questions
about what he was doing with his life.

On this particular morning he had no real options. Amanda was widely recognized as
the
expert on sunken treasure in the Keys. There were two components in her life, treasure
and the theatre, and her knowledge of each was encyclopedic. Nick had not called first
because he didn’t want to discuss the trident unless she was willing to see him. So
it was with some trepidation that he rang the doorbell on the front porch of her magnificent
home.

A young woman in her early twenties came to the door and opened it just a bit. ‘Yes?’
she said, her face wedging into the crack, her expression wary.

‘My name’s Nick Williams,’ he said. ‘I would like to see Mrs. Winchester if possible.
Is she in?’ There was a pause. ‘I’m an old—’

‘My grandmother is very busy this morning,’ the girl curtly interrupted him. ‘Perhaps
you can call and make an appointment.’ She started to close the door and leave Nick
standing on the porch next to his exercise bag. Then Nick heard another voice, a muffled
exchange, and the door swung open.

‘Well, for goodness’ sake,’ Amanda said, with her arms outstretched, ‘I have a young
gentleman caller. Come here, Nikki, and give me a kiss.’ Nick was embarrassed. He
walked forward and gave the elderly woman a perfunctory hug.

As he withdrew from the embrace, he started to apologize. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been
by to see you. I meant to, but somehow my schedule—’

‘It’s all right, Nikki, I understand.’ Amanda interrupted him pleasantly. Her eyes
were so sharp they belied her age. ‘Come in and tell me what you’ve been up to. I
haven’t seen you since, goodness, has it been a couple of years already since we shared
that cognac after
Streetcar
?’ She led him into a combination study and living room and sat him down next to her
on the sofa. ‘You know, Nikki, I thought your comments about the actress playing Blanche
DuBois were the most observant ones I heard during the entire run. You were right
about her. She couldn’t have played Blanche except as a total mental case. The woman
simply had no concept of a feminine sexual appetite.’

Nick looked around him. The room had hardly changed in the eight years since he had
last visited it. The ceiling was very high, maybe fifteen feet. The walls were lined
with bookcases whose full shelves extended all the way to the ceiling. Opposite the
door a huge canvas painting of Amanda and her husband standing outside their home
on Cape Cod dominated the room. A new 1955 Ford was partially visible in the background
of the painting. She was radiantly beautiful in the picture, in her early thirties,
dressed in a white evening gown with daring red trim both around the wrists and along
the collar of the neck. Her husband was in black evening dress. He was mostly bald,
with short fair hair greying at the temples. His eyes were warm and kindly.

Amanda asked Nick if he wanted tea and he nodded. The granddaughter, Jennifer, disappeared
into the hallway. Amanda turned and took Nick’s hands in hers. ‘I am glad you came,
Nikki, I have missed you. From time to time I hear a snippet here or there about you
or your boat, but often second-hand information is altogether wrong. What have you
been doing? Still reading all the time? Do you have a girlfriend?’

Nick laughed. Amanda had not changed. She had never been one for small talk. ‘No girlfriend,’
Nick said. ‘Same problem as always. The ones that are intelligent turn out to be either
arrogant or emotionally inept or both; the ones that are sensitive and affectionate
have never read a book.’ For some reason Carol Dawson jumped into Nick’s mind and
he almost said, without thinking, ‘except for,
maybe
’, but he stopped himself. ‘What I need,’ he said instead, ‘is someone like you.’

‘No, Nikki,’ Amanda replied, suddenly serious. She folded her hands in her lap and
stared momentarily across the room. ‘No,’ she repeated softly, her voice then gathering
intensity as she turned back to look at him, ‘even I am not perfect enough for you.
I remember well all your fantasy visions of gracious young goddesses. Somehow you
had mixed the best parts of all the women in your favourite novels together with your
teenage dreams. It always seemed to me that you had put women up on a pedestal; they
had to be queens or princesses. But in the girls you actually dated, you looked for
weaknesses, signs of ordinariness, and indications of common behaviour. It was almost
as if you were hoping to find them imperfect, to detect chinks in their armour so
that you could justify your lack of interest.’

Jennifer arrived with the tea. Nick was uncomfortable. He had forgotten what it was
like to talk to Amanda. Her emotional probing and her unsolicited observations were
both extremely disquieting to him this morning. Nick had not come to see her to dissect
his attitude toward women. He changed the subject.

‘Speaking of treasure,’ he said, bending down to pick up his bag, ‘I found something
very interesting yesterday while I was out diving. I thought maybe you might have
seen something like it before.’ He pulled the trident out and handed it to Amanda.
She almost dropped it because she was not prepared for its weight.

‘Goodness,’ she said, her skinny arm trembling under the strain of holding the golden
trident out in front of her. ‘What could it possibly be made from? It’s too heavy
to be gold!’

Nick leaned forward and took the object. He held it for her as she ran her fingers
over its exceptionally smooth exterior. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, Nikki.
I don’t need to get out all the books and the photographs for comparison. The smoothness
of the finish is inconsistent with the processing techniques in Europe during or after
the galleon days. This must be modern. But I can’t tell you anything else. Where in
the world did you find it?’

He told her just the outline of the story, careful as always not to give away key
bits of information. It was not just the agreement he had made with Carol and Troy;
treasure hunters never really trust anybody. But he did share with Amanda his idea
that perhaps someone had cached this particular piece, as well as some others, for
later retrieval. Nick insisted that this was a perfectly plausible explanation for
the tracks on the ocean floor.

‘Your scenario seems very unlikely to me,’ Amanda said, ‘although I must admit that
I’m baffled and have no better explanation. Maybe Miss Dawson has some sources that
can shed some light on the origin of this thing. But there is almost no chance that
I am mistaken. I have personally seen or viewed close-up photographs of every significant
piece of treasure recovered from the Keys in the past century. You could show me a
new piece today and I could probably tell you in what European country it was made
and in what decade. If this object comes from a sunken ship, it is a modern ship,
almost certainly after World War II. Beyond that I can’t help you.’

Nick put the trident back in the bag and started to leave. ‘Wait just a minute before
you go, Nikki,’ Amanda said as he stood up. ‘Come over here for a moment.’ She took
him by the arm and led him over to a spot just in front of the large painting. ‘You
would have liked Walter, Nikki. He was a dreamer too. He loved to look for treasure.
Every year we would spend a week or two in the Caribbean on a yacht, ostensibly looking
for treasure but just generally sharing each other’s dreams. From time to time we
would find objects on the bottom of the ocean that we couldn’t understand and we would
create fanciful conjectures to explain them. Almost always there was some prosaic
explanation that was inferior to our fantasies.’

Nick was standing beside her with his bag in his right hand. Amanda turned to him
and put her hand softly on his left forearm. ‘But it didn’t matter. It didn’t even
matter that most of the years we came up empty-handed altogether. For we always found
the real treasure, our love for each other. We always returned home renewed and laughing
and thankful that life had allowed us to share another week or ten days in which we
had imagined and fantasized and hunted for treasure together.’

Her eyes were soft and loving. Her voice was low but full of passion. ‘I do not know
when or if you will come again, Nikki, but there are some things that I have been
wanting to say to you for some time. If you like, you can dismiss them as the ravings
of a sententious old woman, but I may never have a chance to tell you these things
again. You have all the attributes I loved in Walter, intelligence, imagination, sensitivity.
But something is wrong. You are alone. By choice. Your dreams of treasure, your zest
for life—you do not share these things. It is very sad for me to see this.’ She stopped
for a second and looked back at the painting. Then she completed her thought, almost
as if she were talking to herself. ‘For when you are seventy years old and look back
at what your life has meant, you will not focus on your solo activities. What you
will remember are the incidents of touching, those times when your life was enriched
by a moment of sharing with a friend or loved one. It is our mutual awareness of this
miracle called life that allows us to accept our mortality.’

Nick had not been prepared for an emotional encounter with Amanda. He had thought
that he would stop by to see her for a few moments, ask her about the trident, and
then depart. In retrospect he realized that he had treated Amanda very callously over
the years. She had offered genuine friendship and he had spurned it, taking her out
of his life altogether when their interaction no longer suited him. He winced as he
recognized how selfish he had been.

As he walked slowly down the street, idly looking at the gracious old houses built
over a hundred years ago, Nick took a deep breath. He had experienced too many emotions
for one morning.
First Monique, then Amanda. And it looks as if the trident is not going to solve all
my problems. Funny how things always come in groups
.

He found himself musing that maybe there had been a lot of truth in what Amanda had
said. He acknowledged that he had been feeling lonely lately. And he wondered if the
vague loneliness was indeed coupled to a creeping awareness of his own mortality,
to the passage of that phase of life enshrined by Thomas Wolfe with the phrase, ‘For
we were young, and we knew that we could never die.’ Nick was feeling very tired when
he came to the end of the sidewalk and turned into the convenience store car park.

He saw her before she saw him. She was standing next to the driver’s side of her brand-new
red Mercedes sports coupé. She had a small brown paper bag in her arm and was looking
in the window of the car next to hers, Nick’s 1990 Pontiac. Nick felt a quick rush
of adrenaline followed by anger and distrust. She finally saw him just as he started
to speak. ‘Why, Greta, what a surprise! I guess we just happened to be in this part
of Key West today at exactly the same time.’

‘Ya, Nick, I thought it was your car. How are you?’ Greta put the paper bag on the
hood of her car and approached him in a friendly manner. She had either missed or
was ignoring the sarcasm in his greeting. She was wearing a sleeveless yellow tank
top and a pair of tight blue shorts. Her blonde hair was pulled back in two short
pigtails.

‘Don’t play innocent with me, Fräulein, I know you didn’t come here to shop.’ He was
overreacting, nearly shouting. He used his free arm to accentuate his comments and
block Greta’s approach. ‘This is not one of the stops on your circuit. You came here
to find me. Now what do you want?’ Nick dropped his arm. A couple of passers-by had
stopped to watch the exchange.