Sean passed Katie near the doorway. “Hey, sis,” he said, kissed her cheek, and kept on going.
They’d all just survived near death. They had dealt with total insanity.
He would have to be insane himself to get into something like this again.
“Mr. O’Hara!”
She had followed him out. The lithe and dignified Miss Loren had come rushing out, and now she stood on the sidewalk, staring after him.
Despite himself, he paused.
She walked to him, her chin high. “I never meant to play anyone,” she said. “I’m just desperate for help. You don’t understand,” she said.
“I think I do,” he told her.
“No, no, you don’t. I have reason to believe that someone must find out what happened, not just for those who were killed, but…”
“But what?”
“Other things have happened. Bad things. Not involved with filming, but with other boaters who disappeared near Haunt Island.”
“The sea can be huge and merciless, Miss Loren. And sadly, throughout history, many a boat and ship have disappeared without a trace.”
“There’s more to it. I know there’s more to it, and I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I’m afraid that if the truth isn’t discovered, more people will die. That there will be blood and death…a massacre again, and maybe this time, here, in Key West.”
2
Vanessa walked back into O’Hara’s, trying to feel as if she hadn’t just been crushed in a major defeat.
Katie was sitting at the bar, talking to her uncle. She watched Vanessa as she came up and took the stool next to her. Vanessa had known Katie forever, or so it seemed. They’d met when Katie’s school had brought a group of Key West students up to dive the springs and Vanessa’s school had been hosting the week of camp. She wasn’t sure if she’d liked her at first, being ten and wary of kids who came from cool places like Key West. But she’d been paired with Katie, who had an exceptional voice, for the talent show, and Vanessa had been her harmony and backup act, and they’d won the grand prize—two new regulators for their scuba equipment. That had begun the friendship. Of course, they’d been kids living almost four hundred miles away from one another even if it was the same state, but they’d kept up as much as possible, visiting one another at their respective colleges and meeting whenever they could.
By the time they had been able to get together in Key West, or anywhere in the Keys, Sean had been gone most of the time, so it really wasn’t that strange that she’d never had a chance to meet him before.
It seemed odd that the O’Haras could so clearly resemble one another and yet look so different. When she’d asked Jamie O’Hara what Sean looked like, he told her that Katie was Sean in a dress. That wasn’t true at all. Sean was very tall, three or four inches over six feet, with a linebacker’s shoulders. Katie was slim and willowy. While Katie had auburn hair, Sean’s was lighter, though with the same streaks of red. Katie’s eyes were a hazel green while Sean’s were more of a golden color. He had almost classic features, just like Katie, but he looked like a man who had braved the wind many a time, and his jaw leaned toward the square side.
Maybe that had just been because he’d been talking to her—and she sensed that she’d irritated him.
“Maybe I should have mentioned first that I knew you both,” Vanessa said dryly to Katie.
Katie smiled and swirled a stirrer in her coffee cup. “Ha-ha. Perhaps he’s feeling as if we’re ganging up on him! Oh, well, Sean is just being—Sean. He’ll get over it. Really, I think the lure of the mystery will get to him, once he thinks it all out. I think.” She looked at Vanessa with concern. “But…are you sure you should be doing this? Maybe you should just leave it all alone.”
“You know I can’t do that—you know you couldn’t do that! Hey, I’ve talked to people around here. You plunged headfirst into finding out what had happened in David’s past, a pretty dangerous occupation, so I heard,” Vanessa said.
“Yes, but I didn’t realize at the beginning that there were going to be more bodies,” Katie murmured. “And David was determined.”
“All right, then, let me put it this way—could you just forget about it? Katie, I saw that poor girl the night she disappeared—and wound up dead. She was terrified. There was something on that beach. Other people go over there still, despite what happened.”
Katie frowned. “But nothing has happened since, right?”
“Not on Haunt Island,” Vanessa said.
“What happened otherwise?” Katie asked.
“In two years’ time? I don’t know everything, but I’m suspicious every time I hear about any bad things happening. I know about one boat that disappeared in that area. A charter boat on its way to Bimini about a year ago. Disappeared, as in vanished.”
“Things don’t really disappear in the Bermuda Triangle,” Katie said. “It was just that for years, we didn’t know what had happened. But they found the planes that went down years ago, after World War II. They finally found them. No one knows why they went down, but they certainly have educated theories. So a charter boat didn’t really disappear—it’s out there somewhere.”
“Well, one of Jay’s boats disappeared,” Vanessa said flatly. “It disappeared—and Travis and Georgia were found dead on the beach.”
Katie looked at her sympathetically. “The Bahamian authorities, Florida State authorities, and even the FBI got in on the investigation, Vanessa. There’s a problem with the ocean—when things go down, they may go down miles. There are storms, there are currents. There were no clues on the island.” She cleared her throat. “They, um, never found the rest of the bodies, right?”
Vanessa shook her head. “I’d say they actively investigated for months…maybe even a year. The torsos, hips and legs were never found. God, I can’t even believe I’m saying that!”
“But there was a suspect, right? Carlos…someone?”
“Carlos Roca,” Vanessa told her. “But he was a good guy. A friend.”
“Okay, so, no matter how you might think that he was a good guy, and even if he was a friend, you have to admit, Vanessa, it does appear as if Carlos had already killed Travis, and that when he said he’d take Georgia back to Miami, he was lying. What he did was kill her, get the boat down the beach, find where he’d stashed Travis’s body, and stage the heads and arms. Then he stole the boat and dumped the rest of the bodies into the ocean. Oh, Vanessa, I know you don’t want to believe that. But there’s no other explanation.”
“Carlos would have popped up somewhere. And the boat would have been found.”
Katie let out a long sigh. “Nessa, the boat could have gotten into trouble—and it might have sunk. And Carlos might have gone down with it. God knows where he might have tried to go from Haunt Island. But that boat’s out there somewhere. I don’t know about the bodies anymore—fish are ravenous little creatures, really—and not so little, often. Time, salt water…”
“Isn’t David’s cousin, Liam, a detective now? Could he know something?” Vanessa asked.
“Yes, I talked to him after you called me. He was never in on that investigation. He’d heard about it, of course, but he didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Jamie O’Hara strode down the bar to where the two of them were sitting. “Don’t you be worrying, Miss Loren. If I know my nephew, and I think I do, he’ll come around.”
Katie arched a brow at Jamie. “Uncle Jamie, don’t go getting her hopes up, hmm?”
Jamie winked at Vanessa.
“You think he’ll come around, too, don’t you, Katie?”
Katie frowned. Then she sighed. “Yes, I started on David this morning, so…well, we’ll see. But, Vanessa, I don’t want you to be so—obsessed. I know my brother and David, and I know that they’re fascinated by mysteries like this, but…you have to understand,” she added quietly. “David came home determined to discover the truth behind a ten-year-old murder case because he had been accused of murder.”
“Yes, I know,” Vanessa said. She’d read all about the insanity that had first driven David Beckett out of Key West, and then home. Naturally. She had been friends with Katie O’Hara for years. She had read every word in the papers when the case had been solved, and that had brought her back here. Key West had two of its own native conchs—David Beckett and Sean O’Hara—about to embark on a film project that would bring to light many of the mysteries that surrounded the area throughout the decades and even centuries. David Beckett had a military background, and Sean O’Hara had filmed in many dangerous places, had received a great deal of defensive training and certainly knew how to take care of himself. Beckett also had a cousin who was a detective with the Key West police. They were the right people to at least explore the waters, and the story, and make her feel at the very least as if she were doing all that she could to find out just what had happened to Georgia, Travis—and Carlos Roca.
“Oh, I mean, David’s a great person!” Katie said, quickly defending the love of her life. “You have to understand, it’s not that he wouldn’t care, or that he wouldn’t be horrified—but he’s not FBI, a cop or any other kind of law enforcement.” She brightened suddenly. “Hey, I’ll set up a meeting with Liam. I mean, if Liam gets into it, maybe he could help us out.”
“That would be great—thanks, Katie. I’d like to meet him and hear what he thinks, because I’m sure he had to have heard about it, at least when it was all taking place.”
“Well,” Jamie said, “well and good. Now you can’t sit here in the bar, moping about all day. Go enjoy the fall. Beautiful days we’ve got going here now. Days that are the kind that bring people south. Get—get out of bar, go and do something.”