The Reef

side for more ammunition.
    It was a messy battle, ripe with ambush and retaliation. Since Marla threw herself into the war with an enthusiasm Matthew hadn’t anticipated, he found himself outgunned and outmaneuvered.
    He did the manly thing. He dived overboard.
    “Good aim, Mom,” Tate managed before she collapsed weakly against the rail.
    “Well.” Marla fluffed a hand over her tangled hair. “I did what had to be done.” She’d lost her hat somewhere during combat, and her crisp blouse and shorts were limpand running with water. Still, she was all gracious Southern hospitality as she peered over to where Matthew was warily treading water. “You give up, Yankee?”
    “Yes, ma’am. I know when I’m licked.”
    “Then haul yourself aboard, honey. I was about to fix up some nice beer-battered shrimp when I was interrupted.”
    He swam toward the ladder, but shot Tate a cautious look. “Truce?”
    “Truce,” she agreed and held out a hand. When their hands locked, she slitted her eyes. “Don’t even think about it, Lassiter.”
    He had. The idea of toppling her into the water had its merits. But it wasn’t nearly as much fun since she was on to him. Revenge could wait. He dropped lightly on deck, slicked his hair out of his eyes.
    “That cooled us off, anyway.”
    “I never thought you’d blast Mom.”
    He grinned, settled on a boat cushion. “Sometimes the innocent have to suffer. She’s terrific, you know. You’re lucky.”
    “Yeah.” Tate settled beside him, stretched out her legs. She couldn’t remember ever being more content. “You’ve never mentioned your own mother.”
    “I don’t remember her much. She took off when I was a kid.”
    “Took off?”
    “Lost interest,” he said with a shrug. “We were based in Florida then, and my father and Buck were doing some boatbuilding and repair on the side. Things were pretty lean. I remember them fighting a lot. One day she sent me over to the neighbors. Said she had errands to run and didn’t want me underfoot. She never came back.”
    “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
    “We got by.” And after so many years, the hurt had healed over with only the occasional unexpected throb. “After my father died, I found divorce papers and a letter from a lawyer dated a couple of years after she’d left. She didn’t want custody or visitation rights. She just wanted her freedom. She got it.”
    “You haven’t seen her?” It was incomprehensible toTate that a mother, any mother, could walk so carelessly away from a child she had carried and held and watched grow. “Never once since then?”
    “Nope. She had her life, we had ours. We moved around a lot. Up the coast, California, the islands. We did okay. Better than okay, now and then. We got work doing straight salvage up in Maine, and my father hooked up with VanDyke.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “Silas VanDyke. The man who murdered him.”
    “But—” She sat up, her face pale and tense. “If you know who . . .”
    “I know,” Matthew said quietly. “They were partners for about a year. Well, maybe not partners so much as my father worked for him. VanDyke picked up diving as a hobby, and got interested in treasure-hunting along the way, I guess. He’s one of these business tycoons who figures he can buy anything he wants. That’s the way he looked at treasure. Something to buy. He was looking for a necklace. An amulet. He thought he’d traced it to a ship that went down on the Great Barrier Reef. He wasn’t much of a diver, but he had money, pots of money.”
    “So he hired your father?” Tate prompted.
    “The Lassiters still had a rep back then. He was the best and VanDyke wanted the best. My father trained him, taught him everything, and got caught up in the legend. Angelique’s Curse.”
    “What does that mean?” she demanded. “Buck was talking about that.”
    “It’s the necklace.” Matthew rose to go to the ice chest, fished out two cans of Pepsi. “Supposedly it belonged to a witch who was executed in the fifteen hundreds somewhere in France. Gold, rubies, diamonds. Priceless. But it’s the power it’s said to hold that caught VanDyke’s interest. He even claimed he had some sort of family connection way back to the witch.”
    He sat again, passed her a chilled can. “Bullshit, of course, but men kill for less.”
    “What kind of power?”
    “Magic,” he said with a sneer. “There’s a spell on it.Whoever has it, and can control it, will have