Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 02 - Riptide by Michaela Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

company or go anywhere except school and church.
    Scooter had sat down on the floor. He looked up at Harry, his eyes narrowed. “How long will she be here?”
    Harry raised his shoulders.
    “Great,” Scooter said.
    Pretty soon, Harry knew, Scooter would work it out to be Harry’s fault. Harry said, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t invite her.” He wanted to be rid of her at least as much as Scooter did. More.
    “She could screw us up, Harry.” Scooter’s tone was casual, but Harry wasn’t fooled.
    “Not unless we let her. And we aren’t going to let her.” Harry was not about to let Isabel Anders mess him up again.
    “I could take care of her. Easy.”
    “Sure you could.”
    “I could. No problem.”
    Harry caught the challenging look Scooter gave him. He ignored it and walked to the bedroom door. It opened on the landing, which was ringed with closed doors. Harry went to the door at the head of the stairs, which was the bathroom. He opened it a crack and peered in. “Did you feed Sis?” he called softly to Scooter.
    “Yesterday. Frogs.”
    Harry peered at the big tub. Through the chicken-wire screen over the top, he could see part of the water pan and a curve of Sis’s greenish brown coils. She seemed quiet, drowsing. She got active sometimes, slithering up and down the length of the tub. That mostly happened when she got hungry.
    Scooter and Harry had trapped Sis, a cottonmouth moccasin, out back near the slough and carried her to the house in the extra ice chest. It had been a crazy thing to do, which fit in with Harry’s recent mood. He watched a minute longer, then closed the door. When he returned to the bedroom, Scooter had opened the tackle box and was crouched on his knees in front of it, fingering the coins.
    It made Harry uncomfortable to see Scooter doing that. He didn’t like the sight of Scooter’s long fingers moving over those gleaming surfaces. He averted his eyes and said, “I heard the forecast. Rain.”
    Scooter’s expression was remote. He didn’t answer.
    Rain was good news. Bad weather meant no dive parties. It also meant Harry and Scooter could go out to the wreck with less chance of snoopers spotting them and wondering what they were up to. There was a trade-off, though. In bad weather, visibility was terrible. There was more chance of getting tangled up in the lines, and the water was rough and you had to fight the surge. You were likely to get thrown into things if you weren’t careful, and you could get scraped badly. None of it was what you’d call fun.
    Still— Harry crossed the room and picked up the enamel dishpan from the shelf. He took it back to the window and knelt down where the most light came in.
    The dishpan was half full of fragments of blue-and-white porcelain. Some of the pieces were big enough to reveal a pattern of flowering branches and birds in flight.
    Harry picked up a rounded piece of a bowl. He remembered finding this one, thinking it might be whole, and fanning the sand away gently while his breath rattled through the tube. It was only half a bowl, though— broken, like the rest.
    Chinese porcelain. Who would imagine Harry knowing about porcelain? But he had gotten interested.
    K’ang-hsi, this kind was called. K’ang-hsi was the Chinese emperor when this porcelain was made and shipped out from Canton and finally came to rest on the shoals off Cape St. Elmo. Around the early 1700s, it would have been.
    Canton to Manila, they sailed. Manila to Acapulco, then overland to Veracruz. The plan would have been to sail from Veracruz to Havana and then on to Spain. But a storm blew them off course, more than likely, and the Cape St. Elmo shoals finished them, and all the pretty porcelain ended up in the drink.
    There it lay for more than two centuries, it and all the rest, at the mercy of salt water and sand.
    Harry wished, God how he wished, he had found the wreck himself. Harry wasn’t a treasure hunter. Not then. Harry was a dive captain, trying to