The Aurelia

3. Dead Ends and a Sprained Ankle

Angela arranged for her yacht to pick them up from their flight to the Bahamas, and Tim was so surprised by the private jet flights to the casual mention of a yacht, but he did not say anything to his new travel companions. Instead, he waited to drop his jaw until he was escorted to his bedroom on the large boat. After unpacking his small amount of belongings (he had no idea what to pack for this kind of adventure), he went onto the swim platform to find Lucy taking her shirt and shorts off to reveal a simple black swimsuit.

Tim didn't realize that he was staring, but Angela did.

"Alright, what's the plan?" Jackson asked, not noticing the way the other man's brain was short circuiting.

"I'm gonna dive with a metal detector and look around the less populated parts of Great Exuma Island, since this should be about where the Aurelia was shipwrecked," Lucy explained, then strapped on her oxygen tank to prepare for the dive.

Even though it took a second, Tim finally was able to process everything Lucy said and asked, "Do you have any more diving equipment?"

"We do! I'd be happy to help you learn how to dive if you'd like to join me."

He shook his head. "I know how to dive. I was a Marine," he stated and took his shirt off.

Jackson, Angela, and Lucy inspected his newly exposed tan skin, well-defined abs, and muscular arms.

"Well, thank you for your service," Jackson mumbled under his breath, and Lucy thought he had taken the words right out of her mouth.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Their long day of diving while waving a metal detector around yielded no results, but Lucy was not discouraged. Instead, she took notes about the day's failure and bits of ideas floating around her head.

"What's this book going to be about?" Tim asked as he approached her. It was late at night, and everyone else on the yacht was asleep except for Lucy, who he found scribbling in her notebook again.

She turned her head in his direction and flashed him a soft smile. With only moonlight illuminating the still evening, she looked ethereal. "I don't know yet. The story is just beginning."

"Why don't you write an actual historical account of your travels?"

"Who would care other than a few academics? I mean, doesn't it bother you that no one likes history? Don't you want people to get as excited as we do? That can only happen if it feels relatable, so I write stories that get people invested."

"People or one specific person?" Tim could tell by the sound of her voice that there was a deeper meaning to her explanation.

"You picked up on that, huh? It's actually two people. My parents. They wanted me to study business like they did, but I wanted to follow my passion. They never understood my love of history, and I thought they would if I told them how I made my first discovery, but they didn't care about the details of how I uncovered the City of Gold after it had been lost for generations. I decided if I made it an exciting retelling, like a love story, my parents would finally get it and maybe be proud of me. Jackson and Angela independently printed the book, and it blew up, but my parents never even finished it. We haven't spoken since. I still send them copies of every book, but it doesn't matter. They never read them. At least publishing those stories helps me make money since recovering all that history doesn't exactly pay the bills."

"You find all that gold and stuff, and you're broke?" He was confused.

"The rule is each of us only keep one thing per treasure and everything else gets donated to a museum."