Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

condo.
    “Looks old,” Nikki said. “I don’t remember ever seeing it before. Anything in it?”
    “Like everything else around here.” Bob gave the chest a quick shake and something large rattled inside. “Should we open it?”
    “The house is a hundred years old—of course everything in it’s old. Better set it aside and let Dad open it. It might be personal.”
    He placed it by the ladder leading down to the second floor. They were nearly finished with the attic and after moving a few other items to the ladder, Nikki went down so her husband could hand the things down to her.
    It seemed a shame that her parents were moving out of the old house. It was where she’d grown up and where her father had grown up before her. The home had been in the family for several generations. Her father had offered it to her, but neither she nor Bob wanted to leave the Keys. So for the first time in nearly a hundred years, the old house would be owned by someone unrelated.
    They carried the things from the attic down to the kitchen, where her mother was sorting what was to be kept. The upper floor had already been cleared out and everything given away or sold off. Only her parents’ bedroom furniture and the furniture in her father’s study remained. That would go to the new condo in Satellite Beach, some fifty miles away on the east coast.
    Bob gently placed the old chest on the table. Abbey Godsey, Nikki’s mom, looked at it with disdain. “Carry that into the study, please, Bob. Frank will have to decide what to do with it.”
    Bob picked up the chest and carried it through the kitchen and across the hall to his father-in-law’s study. Frank Godsey was a retired Orange County Judge and although he liked the man, Bob sensed the Judge was skeptical about Bob’s chosen profession. Bob was the First Mate of a combination fishing and diving charter boat out of Marathon.
    “Hey, Judge,” Bob said from the doorway to the man’s inner sanctum, addressing him by his former title out of respect. “Your wife said to bring this to you.” Placing the small chest on a table in front of the older man, Bob thought he saw a glimmer in the man’s eye.
    “Ah, the chest,” Frank said and looked up at Bob with a grin. “I’ve tried to solve the mystery of that thing since I was a kid. My dad gave it to me when Abbey and I married, and his father gave it to him on his wedding day. Story is, that chest has been handed down from father to first son for over two centuries and not a one of us has ever figured out the mystery.”
    His face changed, a look of melancholy replacing the glimmer of fun that had been there. “Have a seat, Bob, and I’ll tell you the story.” When Bob sat down across from the older man, he noticed another facial change, to an expression of resolve.
    “I have no son to give this chest to,” he finally said. “Nikki’s my only child, so this thing’s yours now.”
    He proceeded to tell Bob about his early family history. The Judge’s fifth great-grandfather, Quincy Godsey, had been a seafaring man. He’d been born in Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Revolution and went to sea at an early age. At twenty-five, two years after the birth of his first son in 1802, his ship ran aground off the island of Elbow Cay in the northern Bahamas. At the time, it had only recently been settled by colonial Loyalists who had left Charleston after the war. The situation with the British on the islands and the former colonists was tenuous at best. As it turned out, one of the first settlers on the island knew Quincy’s mother, Elizabeth. Quincy was by that time the First Mate of the merchant ship Gloria and was able to negotiate a price with the local wreckers to help pull the ship off of a sandbar, with the help of Winston Malone, the son of his mother’s friend.
    While waiting for the tide to rise the following day, young Quincy went exploring on the northern shore of the island. A recent hurricane had