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  "Landon Beach's debut novel The Wreck is a modern-day Treasure Island that keeps the reader turning pages."

  - Steve Alten, NY Times & international best-selling author of The MEG and The Loch

  “For a fun, exciting twist on the greatest mystery in Great Lakes maritime history, The Wreck by Landon Beach is an excellent summer read! Beach has crafted a story full of colorful characters; the bad guys are really bad and the good guys are really great. The Michigan summer cottage experience is perfectly captured, and then enhanced by a gripping adventure aboard boats, on shore, and best of all, underwater. Because the tension builds unbearably, the reader will not be able to turn away from the book and should take care when reading on the beach because of the danger of forgetting to re-apply sunscreen! We’re looking forward to more terrific Landon Beach Great Lakes novels!”

  - Cris Kohl and Joan Forsberg, well-known maritime historians, founders of Seawolf Communications, Inc., and authors of numerous diving and shipwreck books including The Wreck of the Griffon: The Greatest Mystery of the Great Lakes

  The Wreck

  A Novel

  Landon Beach

  The Wreck Copyright © 2018 by Landon Beach. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Pro_Ebookcovers

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Landon Beach

  Visit my website at landonbeachbooks.com

  For Meri. You have made all of this possible and have done it with love, generosity, and a sense of humor. The book’s flaws are mine; your contributions are flawless.

  PROLOGUE

  LAKE HURON, MICHIGAN: SUMMER 2007

  The Hunter 49’s motor cut, and the luxury yacht glided with no running lights on. Cloud cover hid the moon and stars; the water looked black. A man in a full wetsuit moved forward in the cockpit and after verifying the latitude and longitude, pushed the GPS monitor’s “off” button. The LCD color display vanished.

  Waves beat against the hull, heavier seas than had been predicted. He would have to be efficient or he’d need to reposition the boat over the scuttle site again. The chronometer above the navigation station read 0030. This should have been finished 30 minutes ago. Not only had the boat been in the wrong slip, forcing him to search the marina in the dark, the owner—details apparently escaped that arrogant prick—had not filled the fuel tank.

  He headed below and opened the aft stateroom door. The woman’s naked corpse lay strapped to the berth, the nipples of her large breasts pointing at the overhead. A careful lift of the port-side bench revealed black wiring connecting a series of three explosive charges. After similar checks of the wiring and charges in the gutted-out galley and v-berth, he smiled to himself and went topside with a pair of night vision goggles.

  A scan of the horizon. Nothing.

  He closed and locked the aft hatch cover. Moving swiftly—but never rushing—he donned a mask and fins, then pulled a remote detonation device from the pocket of his wetsuit. Two of the four buttons were for the explosives he had attached to the outside of the hull underwater, which would sink the boat. The bottom two were for the explosives he had just checked on the interior.

  He looked back at the cockpit and for a moment rubbed his left hand on the smooth fiberglass hull. What a waste of a beautiful boat. How much had the owner paid for it? Three...Four-hundred thousand? Some people did live differently. With the night vision goggles hanging on his neck and the remote for the explosives in his right hand, he slipped into the water and began to kick.

  Fifty yards away he began to tread water and looked back at the yacht. It listed to starboard, then to port, as whitecaps pushed against the hull. He pressed the top two buttons on the remote. The yacht lifted and then began to lower into the water; the heaving sea had less and less effect as more of the boat submerged. In under a minute, the yacht was gone. He held his fingers on the bottom two buttons but did not push them. The water was deep, and it would take three to four minutes for the boat to reach the lake bed.

  At four minutes, he pushed the bottom two buttons, shut the remote, and zipped it back into his wetsuit pocket. He treaded water for half an hour. Nothing surfaced.

  He swam for five minutes, stopped, scanned the area with his night vision goggles, and swam again.

  After an hour of this, he pulled the goggles over his head and let them sink to the bottom. He continued his long swim to shore.

  1

  HAMPSTEAD, MICHIGAN: SUMMER 2008

  The sand felt cool under Nate Martin’s feet as he walked hand-in-hand with his wife down to the water. A bonfire crackled away on their beach behind them—the sun had set 30 minutes ago and an orange glow still hung on the horizon. The Martins’ boat, Speculation, bobbed gently in her mooring about twenty yards offshore.

  They parted hands and Nate stopped to pick up a piece of driftwood and toss it back toward the fire. Brooke Martin continued on and dipped her right foot into the water, the wind brushing her auburn hair against her cheek.

  “Too cold for me,” she said.

  Nate took a gulp of beer before walking ankle deep into the water beside her.

  “Not bad, but colder than when I put the boat in,” Nate said.

  “Glad I didn’t have to help,” Brooke said and then took a sip from her plastic cup of wine.

  “Not up for a swim?” Nate joked.

  “No way,” Brooke said.

  They started to walk parallel to the water, with Nate’s feet still in and Brooke’s squishing into the wet sand just out of reach of the lapping waves.

  Four zigzagging jet skis sliced through the water off the Martins’ beach. Two were driven by women in bikinis and the other two by men. They weren’t wearing life jackets, which usually meant these were summer folk who spent June, July, and August in one of the beach castles smoking weed in mass quantities. These four were probably already baked.

  One girl cut a turn too close and flew off.

  “Crazies,” Nate said.

  She resurfaced and climbed back aboard. Her bikini bottom was really a thong and her butt cheeks slapped against the rubber seat as the jet ski started and took off.

  “Should they be riding those things this late?” Brooke asked.

  “No,” said Nate, “but who is going to stop them?”

  They continued to walk as the sound of the jet skis faded. A quarter mile later, they reached the stretch where the larger homes began. The floodlights on the estates’ back decks illuminated the beach like a stage. The Martins turned around.

  When they arrived at their beach, Nate placed a new log on the fire and sat down in his lawn chair. Brooke sat down but then rose, moving her chair a few feet further away from the heat.

  “What are your plans for tomorrow?” Nate said.

  “I think I’ll lay out. I looked at the weather report and we’re in for a few good days until rain arrives,” Brooke said, “then I’ll probably go to the bookstore.” Her voice trailed off. She gathered her thoughts for a moment. “We need to make love the next four nights.”

  “Okay,” Nate said.

  “You could work up a little enthusiasm,” Brooke said.

  He had sounded matter-of-fact. “Sorry. It’s just that scheduled sex sometimes takes the excitement out of it. We’re on vacation. We should just let it happen.”

  “So, yo
u get to have your strict workout regime everyday, but when I mention a specific time that we need to make love in order to give us the best chance at conceiving, it’s suddenly ‘We’re on vacation’?”

  She had a point. He thought about trying to angle in with a comment about her obsessive need to clean the house the moment they had arrived earlier today, but as he thought of it the vision of his freshly cut and edged grass entered his mind. If they really were on vacation, as he had put it, then the lawn being manicured wouldn’t be so important to him. Damn.

  “What is your plan for tomorrow?” She said.

  A switch of topics, but he knew she was circling. “I’m going to get up, take my run, and then hit the hardware store for a new lock for the boat.”

  “What happened to the lock you keep in the garage?”

  “It broke today,” Nate shrugged.

  “How does a lock break?”

  “I put the key in, and when I turned it, it broke off in the lock.”

  “You mean our boat is moored out there right now without a lock?” Brooke asked, while shifting her gaze to the white hull reflecting the growing moonlight.

  “Yep.”

  “Do you think someone would steal it?”

  “Nah. The keys are in the house. If someone wanted to steal a boat worth anything, they’d go down to Shelby’s Marina and try and take Shaw’s Triumph.” Leonard Shaw was a Baltimore businessman who had grown up in Michigan and now summered in the largest beach mansion in Hampstead. Once his two-hundred foot custom-built yacht was completed, he’d hired a dredging crew to carve out a separate berth in the marina to dock the boat. With the dredging crew working mostly at night, locals and vacationers complained of the noise and threatened to pull their boats out of Shelby’s. Nate was glad he had avoided the hassle by keeping Speculation moored off of his beach.

  Brooke swiveled her eyes between Nate and the boat. “Why didn’t you get a new lock today?”

  He moved behind her and started to kiss the back of her neck. We’re on vacation, relax, baby. “Is that a hint? Do you want me to swim out and sleep on board tonight?”

  “Of course not,” Brooke whispered back, enjoying the foreplay. “Are you trying to get a head start on tomorrow night?”

  “No. Just trying to enjoy tonight,” Nate said. “Can we concentrate on that?”

  She leaned her head back and he kissed her lips.

  Ten minutes later, the fire started to die with two empty lawn chairs sitting in front of it.

  2

  Sun rays peeked around the edges of the horizontal blinds in the Martins’ bedroom window. Nate opened his eyes and looked at his watch, eight o’clock. He was normally up by six. Brooke was snoring, and he eased out of bed and lifted one strip of the blinds. Speculation was in her mooring. He smiled and dropped the blind back into place.

  After putting on a pair of shorts and a tank top, he grabbed a pair of socks and his running shoes and exited the bedroom. The hallway was dark as he made his way to the kitchen. He pressed “start” on the coffee pot, and the coffee he had prepared the night before began to brew as he put on his shoes.

  The past year had been a revolving door of pain, uncertainty, and disappointment. They had been trying to conceive for six months when his father died. Only last month had it felt right to try again. He hadn’t been himself in the classroom either. His ninth grade physical science lessons at W. M. Breech High School had wandered aimlessly, his tests were rote memorization, and the usual passion he brought to each day had been missing; his students let him know they knew it.

  His mother had lasted in the beach house until Christmas. The original plan had been for Nate and his older sister, Marie, to share ownership when their parents were unable to handle the upkeep, but Nate had bought Marie’s half and the house was now his and Brooke’s. His mother had left in January to move in with his sister in St. Petersburg.

  He pushed the brass button on the doorknob and closed the door behind him. After wiggling the knob to make sure it was locked, he hopped off the small porch onto the stone walkway, went past the garage, and followed the dirt driveway until he was parallel with their mailbox. After stretching, he looked at his watch and started to jog down Sandyhook Road.

  Each lakeside house had some sort of identifying marker next to its mailbox. A red and white striped lighthouse carved out of wood. A miniature of the house painted on a three foot by three foot board. A post. A bench. Something with the owner’s name and the year the house had been built on the marker. This five miles of beach, once sparsely populated with neighbors in similarly sized residences, was now dominated by beach mansions that looked more like hotels than houses. The lots were owned by lawyers, congressmen, real-estate tycoons, government contractors, Detroit businessmen (of the few businesses that remained), and a few others who had money. Some were migrants from the already overcrowded western shore of Michigan. White collar Chicago money had run north and was moving around the Great Lakes shoreline like a child connecting the dots to make a picture of a left-handed mitten.

  The sun flickered in and out of Nate’s face as he ran under the oak trees spanning the road. He thought of the advice his father had given him when he was searching for his first teaching job: “Make sure that you buy a house east of the school so that when you go into work you’ll be driving west, and when you come home from work you’ll be driving east. That way, you’ll never be driving into the sun. Just a simple stress reliever that most people don’t take into consideration—that is, until they rear-end someone for the first time.” As with all of Nate’s father’s advice, it had sounded too simple but ended up being right. Last June his father had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Three months later, on an overcast September day, Nate had buried him.

  ✽✽✽

  Brooke heard the back door close and rose from bed. She turned off their box fan and opened the bedroom blinds. The entire beach was motionless, and their boat was still moored, surrounded by flat water. The aroma of coffee drifted into the bedroom as she put on her robe.

  By the time she reached the kitchen, Nate had already filled his mug and was headed down to the water. She poured herself a cup and started a bacon and eggs breakfast.

  ✽✽✽

  The sand parted with each step as Nate walked toward the water. Bordering both sides of the Martins’ property was a wooden fence; the spindles were flat, painted red, and held together by wire with a metal rod driven into the ground every fifteen feet or so. The fence was not only a “beachy” way to mark property lines but served its primary purpose of trapping sand. Nate took off his shoes and set his mug down by the end of the northern fence line. He began to walk south.

  The water ran over his ankles and then receded. It was cool and felt good on his tired feet. The beach looked abandoned. No more than twenty yards from where he started, Nate stepped down with his right foot and felt something sharp. He stood, balancing on his left leg as he inspected the bottom of his right foot. No apparent cut. No bleeding. He rubbed in circles and the pain went away. As he stepped back down onto the wet sand, he saw something sparkle in the place he had stepped before. Glass? A toy left behind by some toddler? As Nate picked the object up, he saw that it was neither. He submerged the object, wiping the wet sand off it, and then dried it with the bottom of his tank top. He held the object a foot in front of his face and studied it. In his hand was a gold coin.

  ✽✽✽

  Brooke saw Nate returning from the water. Assuming that he was coming in to complete his morning routine of running three miles, taking a walk to the water with his coffee, and now eating breakfast and reading the newspaper, she rose to unlock the sliding glass door from the deck. However, he walked right by the deck and headed for the garage. She unlocked the door anyway and refilled her cup. She took a seat at the worn kitchen table, which she wanted to replace but didn’t as it had been in the family since Nate was a child. She had plans to redo many parts of the house, but Nate was adamant that the table rema
ined and that the bedroom he stayed in as a boy not be changed. When his father was alive, Nate would have coffee with him in the morning and read the paper at this table. Brooke would still be sleeping and his mother would be cooking breakfast. He had remarked to her that at times he still felt like a visitor, expecting his father to pull up a chair and start a conversation with him about the old days and family stories he’d heard over and over again.

  Brooke finished the paper, breakfast, and her cup of coffee and Nate had not come in yet. What was he doing? His bacon, eggs, and toast were cold. She grabbed the coffee pot and headed to the garage.

  ✽✽✽

  Nate heard the garage door open as he stared at the coin through a magnifying glass, mesmerized by it.

  His wooden writing desk sat in the middle of black carpeting that covered one-quarter of the garage’s concrete floor. Two bookcases that he had constructed from odds-and-ends left over from the addition that his parents had done a few years ago rested against the wall behind the desk. Favorite authors had taken up permanent residence on the top two shelves of the first bookcase, and the remaining three shelves were full of paperbacks, read according to his mood at the time he had purchased them. On the top shelf of the second bookcase rested a pair of fins and a mask that he used when cleaning off the bottom of his boat. His father’s dive knife was next to the mask.

  The shelf below the diving gear contained books that Nate had almost worn the covers off: a Marine Biology desk reference set, half-a-dozen books by Dr. Robert D. Ballard from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a few by Jacques Cousteau, and five years’ worth of magazines from his National Geographic subscription.

  The bottom shelves contained books about Great Lakes ports, navigation rules and aids, and boating regulations. Next to one of the rows of books were rolled up charts and a navigation kit. Nate had taught himself how to navigate and routinely took Speculation out overnight.