The Reef

another month.”
    “If my mind’s all I can get on sex, then it’s going to stay there,” LaRue called out as Matthew stalked away. Chuckling to himself, he took out his precious tobacco pouch to roll one of his favored fat, foul-smelling cigarettes. The boy needed guidance, the wisdom of an older man, and a good fuck.
    What Matthew wanted were warm clothes and another shot of coffee. He found the first in his cabin. After he’d tugged on a sweater and jeans, he poked through the envelopes braced under a rock on the small table that served as his desk.
    Bills, of course. Medical, the rent on Buck’s apartment in Florida, the lawyer Matthew had hired to square things when Buck had wrecked a bar in Fort Lauderdale, the last statement from the last rehabilitation center he’d hauled Buck into in hopes of drying out his uncle.
    They wouldn’t break him, he mused. But they sure as hell weren’t going to leave him a lot to play with. The single letter gave him some pleasure.
    Ray and Marla, he thought as he sat down with the rest of his coffee to enjoy it. They never failed. Once a month, rain or shine, wherever he happened to be, they’d get a letter to him.
    Not once in eight years had they let him down.
    As usual it was a chatty letter of several pages. Marla’s looping, feminine handwriting was offset by Ray’s quick scrawl in notes and messages in the margins. Nearly five years earlier, they’d moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and built a cottage on the sound side of Hatteras Island. Marla would pepper the letters with descriptions of Ray’s puttering around the house, her luck, good or bad, with her garden. Woven through were details of their adventures at sea. Their trips to Greece, Mexico, the Red Sea, their impulsive dives along the coast of the Carolinas.
    And of course, they wrote of Tate.
    Matthew knew she was nearing thirty, working on herPh.D., joining varying expeditions. Yet he still saw her as she’d been that long-ago summer. Young and fresh and full of promise. Over the years when he thought of her, it was with a vaguely pleasant nostalgic tug. In his mind, she and those days they’d spent together had taken on a burnished golden hue. Almost too perfect for reality.
    He’d long ago stopped dreaming of her.
    There were debts to be paid, and plans, still in the dim future, to be settled.
    Matthew savored each word on each page. The expected invitation for him to visit touched a chord, making him both wistful and bitter. Three years before, he’d browbeaten Buck into making the trip. The four-day visit had been anything but a success.
    Still, he could remember how quietly at home he felt, looking at the serene waters of the sound through the fan of pines and bay trees, smelling Marla’s cooking, listening to Ray talk of the next wreck and the next shot at gold. Until Buck had managed to hitch a ride over to Ocracoke on the ferry and get himself stinking drunk.
    There wasn’t any point in going back, Matthew thought. Humiliating himself, putting the Beaumonts in that miserable position. The letters were enough.
    When he shuffled the last page to the front, Ray’s crablike handwriting shot Tate, and that summer in the West Indies, into sharp and painful focus.
Matthew, I’ve got some concerns I haven’t shared with Marla. I will, but I wanted to get your thoughts first. You know Tate is in the Pacific, working for SeaSearch. She’s thrilled with the assignment. We all were. But a few days ago, I was researching some stocks for an old client. I had an impulse to invest in SeaSearch myself, a kind of personal tribute to Tate’s success. I discovered that the company is an arm of Trident, which in turn is a part of The VanDyke Corporation. Our VanDyke. Obviously this concerns me. I don’t know if Tate is aware. I strongly doubt it. There’s probably no need for me to worry. I can’t imagine Silas VanDyke would take a personal interest in one of his marine archeologists. It’s doubtful he even remembers her, or would care. And yet, I’m uncomfortable knowing she’s so far away and even remotely associated with him. I haven’t decided if I should contact Tate and let her know what I’ve learned, or leave well enough alone. I’d very much like your thoughts on this.
    Matthew, I’d like them in person, if you can find a way to come to Hatteras. There’s something more I want very much to discuss with you. I made an incredible find only a few weeks ago—something I’ve