Carnelian Bay

Mike Reeves just wants to locate Taylor Wells, a girl he thinks he’s in love with. The memory of their last encounter got him through the tough spots in his tour in Iraq, a tour that left him with visitors at night that he tries to forget with a bottle of scotch and solitude at the end of his family’s pier at Lake Tahoe.

His love of snorkeling at the big granite boulders on the lake’s north shore complicates his life further when he finds a small metal identity tag screwed to a sunken wooden hull. Mike learns that the tag, from a life boat, is the only trace of the Emerald Bay, an eighty-foot steamship that disappeared in the winter of 1906. The ship belonged to the Wells logging empire and was on a necessary but risky sail when it was lost in a storm. The interest in the identity plate would have ended there, except the steamship carried $160,000 in gold coins, payroll for the Wells operation from Brockway to Virginia City.

Mike discovers that Taylor, a great-granddaughter of the patriarch of the Wells empire, is more interested in the gold than in him, so interested she will use whatever she has to get it. That includes her boyfriend, a lawyer with a .44 magnum revolver and the moral compass of an alley cat.

Watch your six, Mike—advice he chooses to ignore, from his friend and business partner, DeRay. Bad dreams, female problems, and now a trigger-happy lawyer. There’s always alcohol to get you over the rough spots. The good thing about alcohol is it deadens all your senses. The bad thing about alcohol is it deadens all your senses.