Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  “Why would he do that?” asked Eve.

  “Why would he keep it at the bottom of a chest if he wasn’t hiding it?” added Antonine.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe that just happened to be where it ended up.”

  “Hiding it or not,” said Eve, “there is a reason why he would hang on to something like this. I know my man. Jackson wasn’t a pack rat. You likely noticed how tidy things were in his shed.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Antonine.

  “I’m saying I believe my husband and both of you. Old Man Gallant must be wrong. Maybe there is an old ship—a single ship, a special one—that he knows nothing about. This piece of wood came from that ghost ship. You just have to prove it.”

  “Oh, that’ll be easy!” I snapped. Wow, I had actually done the id thing with Mrs. Clay.

  She laughed. “You’ve got that right.”

  The other problem we had, of course, was that we were running out of time. Mom, Dad, and I were heading home tomorrow.

  We stopped at Antonine’s house so we could get the wood out of the car and back into the shed and Eve could drop off her groceries. It seemed strange, in a way, to be keeping a piece of burnt wood, but the thought of throwing it out never crossed our minds, nor was there even the slightest inclination to toss it outside somewhere in the backyard. We maneuvered it out of the seats and carried it across the lawn as if it were a vase of Ming china, or a coffin.

  When we got it back into the shed, we set in on Mr. Clay’s workbench and examined it closely for a while, our eyes about six inches from its surface, looking it up and down and turning it over several times. I think we were hoping to find obscured initials or a date or something like that, but we found nothing for a long while. Antonine started running her hands along its surface, just feeling for a clue, I suppose.

  “Here!” she suddenly exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “There’s a hole here and another one here, both at the end of the board. Feel it.”

  She took my hand. I’m not sure she had to do that in order for me to discover what she was getting at, but I didn’t mind, let me tell you. I just loved the feel of her hands, so much so that for a few seconds I didn’t even notice what she was pressing my fingers down onto.

  “Can you feel it?”

  “Eh?”

  “Can you feel it?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Two holes, right?”

  “Yeah,” I finally said, getting my hand to feel the board instead of her hand.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nail holes.”

  “Right. Someone nailed this board to something.”

  “But these holes are awfully small. This is from a big, ocean-going pirate ship from hundreds of years ago and it has two tiny nail holes in it? Monsieur Gallant must be right.”

  “Maybe they used smaller nails then?”

  “I doubt it. From what I know from history class, nails were bigger in the old days, if anything, usually thick and square at the head. They would leave a large, square indentation. Also, if someone were just using little nails, you’d think he or she would use a whole bunch of them to keep this craft together on the ocean waves.”

  Antonine just nodded her head, deep in thought.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” she finally said, “none of it does.” She sighed. “There isn’t a single thing that we’ve discovered that means anything or connects to anything else, or fits my father’s story or the legend! Nothing! Not from him hiding a burnt piece of wood in the shed, to it being a weird kind of wood, to Monsieur Gallant saying it never could have been used for a ship, to these tiny friggin’ little nail holes!”

  Her voice had risen in frustration. She shoved the board and it flew off the work table and crashed down onto the floor. I could see tears welling in her eyes. This was a connection to her dad—maybe her last one—a connection that meant a great deal to her, and had to do with something she and he did together a long time ago. It was something that he had felt bad about, that had haunted him, something that made him seem like he was out of his mind, and here she was, getting nowhere with it. It was slipping from her grasp just the way he had…the way Bomb had from me.

  I put my arm around her.

  Wow, that was unbelievable. I do not understand how I was able to summon what I needed to actually do that—put my arm around a girl, and this girl.

  Then something else happened that just about blew my mind. She turned and hugged me. Now, I know she did that the other time, on the beach, when we were cold. This, however, had nothing to do with being cold. It was precisely the opposite. She felt different this time, smaller and more fragile, pressing in to me as if she needed me. It made me feel like a guy…not that I am not a guy, but it made me feel that way. I have never felt anything like that before in my life.

  “Antonine!” Eve was calling from the house. “I’ve made a snack!”

  Wow, now there was a tough choice. Food…or Antonine.

  “We better go,” she said quietly.

  16

  The Big House on the Beach

  A snack. That was what Antonine’s mom had said. As we exited the shed, though, I had visions of grandeur. From what I had seen of her previous work, Eve Clay’s idea of a snack was more like a smorgasbord of delights to my nearly-sixteen-year-old-boy brain. Not that I was entirely forgetting about what I had left behind—Antonine in my arms—but I headed toward the house nicely focused on the task before me: the destruction of the so-called snack. I actually beat Antonine to the back door. I think I was in the kitchen before she even hit the hallway. And there it was: some kind of drink in two tall tumblers and two plates with big sandwiches on them that looked like BLTs, and another plate with what appeared to me to be homemade chocolate chip cookies.

  Then Antonine said something absolutely bizarre.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I can’t eat anything right now.”

  “You can’t?” I glanced at the food. “Really?”

  “No, I’m kind of depressed. I’d rather go to the beach or something, go for a walk, talk about all of this some more.”

  “Talk?” I said.

  “Oh, honey,” said Eve and took Antonine into her arms.

  Okay, so now I wasn’t going to get anything to eat and her mother was hugging her, not me. That seemed like a sort of lose-lose situation. What was this, a girl thing? You don’t want to eat and you opt for talking instead? A stroll on the beach? Feelings?

  Then Eve, a smart woman who seemed to know what guys were all about, came to the rescue.

  “I’ll take you two to the beach, and I’ll wrap up a sandwich for you, Dylan, and throw in a couple of cookies too.”

  “Going to the beach is an excellent idea,” I said. “We indeed need to talk about this. Let’s go.”

  Antonine gave me a bit of a look.

  She didn’t take any food with her, which really blew me away, and she actually didn’t talk much, at least for the first little while we were there. Since it was a Sunday, there were mobs of people on Youghall Beach. Eve dropped us off in the parking lot and we hit the busiest area first, and then started to walk along the water in the direction of Bill and Bonnie’s place, and the bigger houses. When we were about halfway there, Antonine sat down on a large rock near the grass and I sat with her. She was looking out over the bay again, just as she was doing when I first met her. We could barely see the little island out there, to our left, up the coast a bit, the one that Jackson Clay said he and his little daughter were near as the burning ghost ship of Chaleur Bay really began to rage. I wasn’t looking at Antonine, but I could see, with my amazing peripheral vision, that she was deep in thought.

  “If we are going to take this board seriously as evidence of a ghost ship, then sho
uldn’t the part of it that isn’t burned be in worse shape than it is?” she finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If it’s a few centuries old, shouldn’t it be deteriorating more?”

  An image of the board lying there on the work table back in Jackson Clay’s shed came into my mind. I examined the surface again. She was right. It looked old, but not really old. I thought again of the tiny nail holes. Something about all of it, when considered together, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  “What if it really is from the ghost ship…and it’s new?” I said. “At least, a relatively new piece of wood.”

  We looked at each other. I could see in her eyes that this possibility meant something to her too.

  “How could that be?” she said in a whisper.

  I almost didn’t want to say the next thing that occurred to me, but we were trying to get to the truth about this, so I just blurted it out.

  “Your father would have known that. He would have known it was new. He would have known it immediately.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That would have freaked him out. He pulled a fresh piece of wood off an ancient ghost ship?”

  “This is freaking me out.”

  “Maybe that was another reason he was not investigating things. He knew this was beyond strange. Something wasn’t right about it even for a ghost ship. Maybe he felt guilty that—” I stopped.

  “—he did nothing about it,” finished Antonine. “He was closer to the ship than anyone had ever been, he saw a young woman on fire, he had a piece of timber that had come right out of time as if it were just cut from a tree, and he said and did nothing about any of it!”

  She got up and started walking briskly along the beach. I struggled to keep up. We were nearing Bill and Bonnie’s house.

  “You have to put yourself in his shoes,” I said to her, breathless. “It was like you said, he was a black man and he didn’t want to seem like a lunatic, he couldn’t afford that. It wasn’t his fault; it was the fault of every person who made him feel that way. It is the fault of everyone who has ever made anyone feel that way. He couldn’t do a single thing about this. He really couldn’t. You and I wouldn’t have done any different. Antonine, he protected your reputation.”

  “I think about him so often, Dylan. All the time.” She sounded like she was crying.

  “I think about Bomb, too.”

  She slowed down. We were within sight of the big back deck at Bill and Bonnie’s place. I could see four people sitting out there on the lawn chairs—our hosts and my parents. They weren’t facing our direction. I could see Bill popping one of his pairs of glasses on and then the other, glancing up and down at an article he was reading and talking to Dad about. I looked at the sand and just kept walking. Antonine didn’t seem to realize exactly where we were.

  “Dylan?” I heard Mom call out.

  How does she do that? She’d had her back to me for God’s sake! Talk about peripheral vision. Mothers are awesome in that department. I bet they would be able to spot a teammate in the open on the ice better than Connor McDavid. Although, the player in the open would have to be one of their kids.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said and kept walking. Mother? I had never called her that in my life. She looked at me as if I were a Klingon or something and just watched the two of us as we walked past the house and on up the beach toward the even bigger and fancier houses.

  “I think your mom is calling you,” said Antonine, wiping her eyes.

  “Yeah, I know. Just keep walking.”

  I lifted my chin and looked straight ahead. As I did, I noticed something in the distance. There was a crowd gathering up there. That was strange because the beach got very narrow in that direction and there wasn’t much room for many people, usually they formed a thin line of humanity near the water. Now, however, they were bunching up. It was hard to know why. Something had gotten their attention. My first thought was that the ghost ship had reappeared, though this was not really the right time of day or the right sort of weather, hot and sunny as it was. No one was turned toward the water, either; instead, they were in groups facing inward, as if something or someone moving along the beach was of great interest.

  “You’re right, there was nothing Dad could have done about it,” said Antonine, “but maybe we can do something. Something stinks about this. That board just isn’t right. It isn’t from around here and it isn’t from the past. Was that ship slipping through some sort of hole in time, or was that board—”

  “What’s going on up there?” I interrupted.

  She looked along the beach in front of us. We could both now see that indeed someone had nearly everyone’s attention up there. I could tell it was a man. He was wearing a suit, too, which struck me as rather strange beach attire. He was shaking hands with people and they seemed anxious to greet him.

  We moved closer.

  “It’s Jim Fiat,” said Antonine. “He lives just over there.” She pointed to a huge house about four or five houses away. It towered over the two on each side of it. “I remember the Fiats building it when I was a kid.”

  Ah, yes, I thought, Bill’s wonderful “man of the people,” his “enemy of the elites,” come down from his castle to move among the little folks…in his suit, now.

  “Mom told me a story once,” continued Antonine, “about Fiat’s father letting him be a supervisor of some sort during the construction of the house, even though he was only in his late teens. Getting him ready for a business career, I guess.”

  “I want to meet him this time,” I said, and made a beeline for a hive of his well-wishers. “I’ve got some questions for him.”

  As I approached, I got a better view of Jim Fiat than I had at the historic village. He was a heavy-set man, with blond (almost orange) hair that looked dyed to me, a deep perfect tan, and his black suit and bright yellow tie glistened in the sun, obviously purchased somewhere far from this little town in New Brunswick. He was handing out something.

  “My personal cellphone number is on these cards!” I heard him say. “You can call me anytime, on my direct line. I will not be living in an ivory tower after you elect me and I get to Ottawa. You can drop by and see me any time!”

  I forced my way farther through the crowd and heard some comments from onlookers.

  “Go get ‘em, Jim!” shouted one man.

  “Speak for us,” said another lady.

  “Run ’er like a business!” cried someone else. “Don’t waste our money!”

  I wondered who “us” was. Most of these folks were white middle-class or higher-than-that people who didn’t really look like they needed anyone speaking for them.

  “Glad to represent you,” said Jim in a loud voice. “Remember to get out to vote on the thirteenth. Let’s put the elites where they are meant to be: on the sidelines!”

  There was actually a round of applause.

  “I will get jobs for our own folks,” continued Fiat, “not people coming in from all over the place, not people who will do any old job and grab up what is available. I do not have anything against outsiders, let me be clear, but we have to look after our own first.”

  There was another smattering of applause.

  “Mr. Fiat!” I called.

  Antonine somehow made her way through the crowd, too, and was right next to me. I could feel her shoulder touching mine.

  “Yes?” he said and took my hand the instant I spoke. I hadn’t really offered my own hand, I’d just brought it up instinctively and he’d seized it. He gripped it as if he were my long-lost friend. Then he looked at me. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m almost sixteen.”

  He dropped my hand.

  “Are you from around here?” he asked.

  “No, I’m from Toronto.”

  He smirked. “Ah, we have
a man from Bay Street among us! Where the elites make the decisions that affect all of us,” he said loudly.

  “I’m…a kid.”

  “No offense, my friend, but I’d rather talk to the real people.”

  A few spectators cheered and he glanced at Antonine, looked her up and down and at her face, and quickly moved on past us, glad-handing others who approached him, making his way up the beach like the lead goose with his flock following. A few people did not join in, though they still gawked at his entourage with interest.

  “You’re not real,” said Antonine to me with a smile.

  “Yeah, I’m a ghost, I guess.”

  I hadn’t asked Fiat a single question. How did he do that? He somehow shook my hand, made a point at my expense to gain more praise for himself, and then was gone before I could even say anything of substance. People cheered him for it.

  “You see all these houses here,” Antonine said, pointing toward the homes lining the beach near us. Every one of them was relatively new or at least renovated, and as large, or larger, than Bill and Bonnie’s. “Almost every person who lives in these homes isn’t from around here. It is outside money.”

  We were just a couple of properties from Fiat’s place now. I glanced farther up the beach and it appeared to me that his might be the biggest home of them all. Antonine nodded at it.

  “He lives among his enemies, I guess.”

  “Let’s get closer.”

  “I’ll bet he has a fence and security.”

  Sure enough, he did.

  We weren’t able to get within fifty metres of the Fiats’ back door. Even Bill and Bonnie’s deck wasn’t like that—you could walk right up to theirs and sit down with them and have a brew or two.

  We stood there staring at Jim Fiat’s house. It was three storeys high and the first-floor wall facing the water looked like it was entirely made of glass.

  “When his father was the Member of Parliament here,” said Antonine, “people said he resented the fact that he was never made a cabinet minister. He left the area in a bit of a huff after he lost his last election, leaving this house behind as a sort of summer place. Jim and his wife live there now, most of the time. Old Man Fiat is made of millions, and the rumour is that he is rarely even in his Halifax home these days. Apparently he’s more often at his place in Toronto, or the one in L.A.”