When they were halfway to his dad, Jeremy ran back down, dragged the boat into the water, and started rowing.
Karl jumped the first tentacle that shot out of the ground. He was caught by the second, and as the sand swirled, he yelled encouragement to his son. He stuck up his fist. In his mind, this was his way of showing his son that he fought until the end.
Jeremy pulled hard on the oars. He couldn’t tell how far he had gotten. The Caribbean was kicking up a fuss around him. Either the tentacled monster had found him or a storm was brewing. Either way, he continued to row as hard and fast as he could. He ran the boat aground in the retreating tide. He was stuck out on the sandbar. The boat leaned to the side as the water rushed away.
The crescent moon gave him a beggar’s portion of light. He saw the island, and he saw the sea. The island was certain death. The sea still gave him a chance. The boat was useless, but he took an oar with him and ran away towards the deeper water. With luck, he could float with the oar out into a shipping lane or over to one of the smaller islands. He had to try.
He made it past the reef. Jeremy felt giddy with relief. And when the sharks took him, his last thought was, “At least I escaped that goddamn island.”
Chapter One
Sabine looked at the island from the safety of the sport yacht Azure’s fly bridge. She tucked the long tendrils of her shiny white hair into the sports cap and adjusted the bill to reduce the glare of the sunshine reflecting off the water. Sabine watched the Zodiac bouncing over the waves as it carried the three men towards the shore.
The two Callen brothers were so similar physically that it was hard to tell them apart at this distance. Their naturally lean bodies hid the strength both had to draw upon should they need it. Their brown hair had lightened in the short time they were at sea. It was only the younger brother Mason’s penchant for wearing his stretched-out, discolored, lucky t-shirt that set them apart. Patrick had assimilated to the yacht culture quickly by wearing the traditional expensive polo shirt and shorts. His eyewear was a gift from Sabine. She had Ted Martin incorporate his ghost-viewing technology into the lenses housed in the Wayfarers. Both men resembled the PEEPs ghost Stephen Murphy, of whom they were distant relatives by way of the ghost’s paternal grandmother. They had the same chiseled chin. Mason’s face was a mirror image of Murphy’s when the young man smiled. They had a similar twinkle of mischief in their steely gray-blue eyes.
The yacht tender, Bob Morris, piloted the boat over the waves with a practiced hand. The weathered professional seaman promised to stay with the craft until the Callens returned from their scouting mission.
Sabine had declined the first trip ashore to the small island. Even before they dropped anchor, her sensitivity caught a series of echoes wafting over the water. None of them were without screams of terror attached.
The people of the region had called this island Lanfè – Hell.
“It’s true,” she had said, grabbing hold of Patrick’s arm. “This is part of Hell.”
Patrick and Mason looked at Sabine skeptically. All they saw was an island with a beautiful sandy beach on the southernmost side and craggy cliffs where waterfalls fell dramatically into the beautiful turquoise Caribbean on the north side. The sand and the rocky cliffs protected the rainforest interior – a place where even the most daring of the locals would not tread. The few who had ventured on the island, and had returned, told them to avoid the sandy beaches. If you had to venture on Lanfè, they recommended that you put your feet on rock and only rock.
The international wheeler-dealer and financier of Father Santos’s professional ghost-hunting group, Gerald Shem, had made the Couach 3700 luxury sport yacht available to the small team of explorers. He approved of the trip wholeheartedly and commented to Sabine that this little vacation without her girls would do her good. It would stretch her social skills while honing the talents she had let fall into disuse. Her mother, Beverly Cooper, a noted sensitive and a colleague of Gerald’s, was enjoying a great influx of cash with the offering of her skills in the United Kingdom. He wanted to get Sabine, who was a powerful sensitive in her own right, back into the ghost-detection business. Sabine didn’t need the money, but it couldn’t hurt to put some away for the futures of her triplets.
This treasure hunt was being financed mostly by Gerald who cashed in quite a few favors to give Sabine, whom he thought of as his daughter, the comfort he appreciated himself. The two other financiers, Pavel Matveev and Bea White, preferred to let the small team of Sabine and the Callens do most of the legwork. The trio of treasure hunters mentioned that they would be taking with them other help but assured Gerald that the two would not need accommodations.
Lanfè was not the team’s original destination. They had set out to search an area of Guadeloupe, looking for any reference to a large amount of valuables being stored in the area. Unfortunately, the Santa Rosa area, which all the clues seemed to point to, had experienced a major earthquake. The rebuilding of the area all but obliterated any structures that would have stood in 1788-89, when Olympe de Gouges’s agent would have arrived with the Wall loot.
Patrick had expected this and sought out other avenues of information. He sent Mason, who had a working knowledge of French, to a private maritime museum to check the manifest of
