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

box might have bought it somewhere in their travels. It’s at least worth finding out. It’s in pretty good shape and could be worth a fortune itself.”
    “Why would they put it inside a tree?” the Judge asked.
    “You said the tree was a huge mangrove,” Bob replied. “The chest might have been placed in the branches of a small tree to protect it from the water and the tree grew around it. What year did you say Quincy found it?”
    “His son, George, was two years old, so it would have been around 1804.”
    Bob let out a low whistle. “If the date’s right, the chest was in that tree for almost two hundred and forty years. I know mangroves live over two hundred years sometimes, so it’s possible.”
    “You’ve already figured out a part of this mystery nobody else has,” the Judge said, smiling. “I’ve no doubt you’ll be the one to finally solve it.”
    A horn sounded from outside the house and Abbey shouted, “The moving van is here.”
    Within a few hours, the movers had everything loaded on the truck and had left for the coast. Bob and Nikki, along with her parents, stood outside the old house as Frank and Abbey said their goodbyes to the neighbors, some of whom Frank had known all his life.
    “You sure you won’t reconsider?” Abbey asked Nikki.
    “About the house?”
    “Yes, it’s been in your father’s family since they moved down here from Charleston during the War of 1812.”
    “We like it in the Keys, Mom,” Nikki said. “It’s where our roots will be planted.”
    Frank and Abbey took one last look at the old house, with its stately oaks dripping with Spanish moss, before handing the keys to the real estate agent who had just arrived. With that last formality, they each hugged their daughter and son-in-law, got in Frank’s big Mercury and drove away.
    The day before, Nikki had arranged a small van to pick up the few things she wanted to keep and had them shipped to their home on Stock Island. Bob had strapped the chest to the small luggage rack on the back of the motorcycle after first stuffing it with padding that one of the movers had given him to keep the coconut from bouncing around inside. The ride back home was uneventful and they arrived in Marathon just before sunset.

Chapter Two
    “Shouldn’t they be here already?” Rusty asked. I rolled my eyes at my old friend. He’d asked the same question about every fifteen minutes since I got here. Deuce had called me at 0600 to say they were passing Alligator Reef, and I’d come down to the Rusty Anchor in my skiff from my island in the Content Keys.
    “Dammit, Rusty!” I said a bit too excitedly, causing Pescador to lift his shaggy black head from the floor. “They’ll be here when they get here. It’s a sailboat, not a Donzi. The wind’s light, so they’re probably under power.” Pescador is my dog. I found him a year ago, stranded on a sandbar after a hurricane, catching fish. He was catching the fish, not me. Turns out that even though I’m a licensed offshore fishing charter boat Captain, my dog was the better fisherman—hence his name, Spanish for fisherman. He’s been living with me ever since.
    My relationship with the short, three-hundred-pound, bald, bearded man on the other side of the bar went back much further, nearly three decades. We first met on a Greyhound bus headed to Parris Island in the early summer of 1979. We were in the same platoon in Boot Camp and were stationed together a couple of times before he left the Marine Corps. I was his best man when he married his high school sweetheart in 1981 and sat next to him at her funeral, just two years later. She died giving birth to their only child, Julie, named for her mother, Juliet.
    We’d stayed in touch over the years since he’d returned home to the Keys to take care of his daughter. I’d visited from time to time, staying at his home in Marathon. Seven years ago last June, I retired from the Corps after twenty years of service and moved down