A Spirited Gift

by Joyce Lavene

  He smiled and put his arms around me. “You’re so much like your mother. She wanted to save the world too. I’m sorry she’s dead. I always thought I’d see her one more time.”

  I felt tears welling in my eyes and blinked them back before they could roll down my cheeks. “I’m sorry she’s not here too.” I changed the subject to something less emotional, pointing out the hot plate—if the power came back on during the night—the Sterno if it didn’t. I showed him where the extra key was over the door and where to find the spare blanket and pillow. I always kept one in back in case I decided to spend the night.

  “That should do it,” I said, fastening a smile on my face and holding on to it despite the dangerous emotional undertow this man represented for me. “If you need to get in touch with me, here’s my cell phone number.”

  “I’d say thank you, but it wouldn’t really cover it. I’ve never met anyone like you and your mother, who always see the best in everyone. I hope I can do something for you sometime when you need it.”

  Again, I was ready to cry. I hugged him, then got out of there before I started blubbering and told him I was his daughter. It wasn’t the right time yet. I didn’t know when the right time would be, but it wasn’t now.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he called out the door while I ran down the boardwalk as if Davy Jones himself were after me.

  As I was running down the stairs into the parking lot, Rafe joined me again. “What a sniveling worm of a man that is! I can’t believe ye let him stay in your shop knowing the blackguard stole from you! What kind of man does that?”

  “You’re a pirate. Or at least you were. Figure it out.” Once I reached Duck Road, I slowed my frantic pace. It was getting dark, but I figured Tim could stop me and tell me the curfew was in force if he wanted to. I wasn’t running all the way home. I needed a little time to take a few deep breaths and think about what Danny had said about him and my mother.

  “Aye, at least I never pretended to be anything else,” Rafe continued. “That boyo is just waiting for the right moment to steal you blind. I can’t believe any relation of mine would be fooled by all that mucky sentiment.”

  “And maybe you’re not as smart as you think,” I yelled back at him. “That man is my father.”

  “Maybe so—but don’t trust him. He’s a scallywag, mark my words.”

  I kept walking down the deserted road. There were no streetlights, no lights from stores or houses. Only the glow of candles and lanterns, from living room and kitchen windows, showed anything was out in the dark at all.

  “Have you given any thought to who the ancestor of the magistrate could be?” he asked before we reached the house.

  “I’ve been a little busy,” I replied. “And it’s going to take some research. Have you given any thought to who killed Sandi Foxx?”

  He grunted at me and scratched his head. “Keeping up with you has been a job, girl. I haven’t worked so hard since I started my career at sea as a boson’s mate.”

  “Then I guess we both have work to do.”

  Chapter 21

  I went inside where Gramps was waiting with supper at the candlelit table in the kitchen. “I’ve been wondering where you were,” he said, serving up stew that had been in the freezer. “There’s a curfew, you know. The mayor isn’t above the law and needs to set an example.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve been at Missing Pieces, haven’t you? You always lose track of time when you’re there.”

  “Yep.” I wished I could say more. It was a strain holding back the things I really wanted to ask him. But I needed time to sort through everything and figure out what to say to him.

  “I suppose you heard that the ME has ruled Mayor Foxx’s death a murder,” he continued.

  “Yeah. That’s going to be a mess.”

  “It’ll be bad for Kevin, since it means all those people coming back again on his dime.”

  I stopped pushing the stew around on my plate. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the county won’t want to pay for them to be at the Blue Whale, and it will likely take a while for Ronnie to question all of them. Big group.”

  “Maybe the town can help. Kevin is too good-hearted to complain about it. I’m sure it will seem like another civic duty to him. But that’s not fair.”

  “Good luck getting that past the town council.”

  “We have an emergency fund,” I reminded him. “This seems like an emergency to me.”

  “That will be depleted after the storm,” he said. “Besides, how will it look for the mayor to advocate giving money to her boyfriend?”

  “You sound like Mad Dog.” I told him about what the mayor wannabe had said.

  “He’s right.” Gramps shrugged. “You have to start thinking about your reputation if you’re going to run for reelection. You can’t just run around doing what you please and expect the people of Duck to look the other way.”

  I wasn’t sure where all of this was coming from. Yes, Gramps had been sheriff for many years. Yes, he was a stickler for the rules. But now he was just being inflexible and judgmental. I didn’t like his tone—especially since it pertained to me.

  “I’m not any different now than I was two years ago when the people of Duck voted me into office,” I reminded him. “I don’t see the problem.”

  “The problem is Kevin. I like him, but the two of you should cool your heels on this relationship some. At least until after the election next year. You keeping clothes over there—showing up at all hours—this is a family community, Dae. People aren’t going to want their mayor to be carrying on this way.”

  “Are you saying this because Sandi was having an affair?” I glared at him, all thought of eating leftover stew out of my mind. “Because it’s not the same thing. Kevin isn’t married. Neither am I. It’s not like he’s sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night with his clothes off.”

  “There’s no reason to take that tone with me, young lady.” Gramps cleared his throat and pointed his spoon at me. “If you want to be mayor and serve your community, it takes some sacrifice. It took some sacrifice to be sheriff all those years. It didn’t just happen. My family had to be above reproach. The community looks to its leaders to be examples of the best.”

  I got to my feet and in a hot moment, I shouted, “Like you wouldn’t let my mother be with the man she loved? Is that the kind of sacrifice you expect me to make?”

  “What are you saying, Dae O’Donnell?” he demanded, equally angry. “You know your mother’s boyfriend—your father—threw her out into the street.”

  “Do I? Or was that another lie made up for me, like my father being dead? I’ve heard different, Gramps. I’ve heard that you ran my father out of Mom’s life because he wasn’t good enough to be Sheriff Horace O’Donnell’s son-in-law.”

  His shoulders heaved beneath the blue plaid shirt he wore. “I don’t know who told you that—was it Mad Dog? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about—always meddling in other people’s affairs.”

  I didn’t tell him it wasn’t Mad Dog who talked to me about my mother. I had cooled down a little and realized what I’d said. I didn’t want Gramps to know about Danny yet. “I’m not hungry. I’ll be up in my room.”

  “Dae?” He called after me. “Whatever I’ve done, I’ve done to protect you and your mother. Your father was a good-for-nothing, drunken layabout. He’d been in and out of jail since he was seventeen. There was no future for you and your mother with him.”

  I turned back. “Did you make that decision for her? Did my father really kick her out? Did he even know she was pregnant?”

  Gramps’s hand shook as he wiped his mouth on his napkin. “Yes—he threw her out and left town—after I paid him one thousand dollars and threatened to serve the outstanding warrants against him. You can’t judge me on that, sweetheart. I did what was best—what I had to do.”

  “I know. Good night, Gramps,” I said before I left him in the kitchen.
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  Chapter 22

  There was a secret stairway from my room to the widow’s walk on the roof of the house. I liked spending time up there, looking out over Duck and the sound. On clear days, I could see the Atlantic on the other side of the island.

  The widow’s walk was a common feature on local houses, especially the older ones. Women had waited and watched for their men’s ships to come home. Sometimes, women threw themselves from the walk when they learned those ships were never coming back.

  It was strange being out there in the dark with no lights dotting the town around me. I could see lights farther down the coast toward Kitty Hawk. The lighthouses along the island were all still working, their powerful beams warning ships at sea of the danger presented by the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

  “You were hard on the old man.” Rafe leaned against the wrought-iron rail beside me. “I expected better from a soft heart like yours.”

  “He lied to me. He told me my father was dead.”

  “No wonder! I’d lie about that sniveling worm too. What man takes pity from a woman like your father done? No wonder the old man ran him off. I would’ve ran him through.”

  “You don’t understand. Go away.”

  “Maybe you don’t understand, girl. That boyo ye be helping will never bring you anything but grief. I know the type—hell, I was the type for many a year. The old man was protecting you and your ma. I’m siding with him in this.”

  “I don’t remember asking you.”

  “Well, if ye don’t want my advice, get to looking for the magistrate’s ancestor and let’s put an end to this.”

  “I don’t have any idea how to find the magistrate’s ancestor. I don’t know anyone by that title. I think this is just a waste of time. You should go back where you came from. I don’t think I can help you.”

  Rafe nodded at the duck weather vane, and it spun around in the dead quiet of the evening. “That’s enough of your bellyaching, my girl. You’re blood, and you’re making me regret whoever the wench was who begat your line. Think on it, and I’ll look around for some evidence of your own problem. I’m not going anywhere until you’ve cleared my name.”

  He disappeared, and I sat down to look up at the stars in the dark sky. They were much brighter without lights around me.

  I thought about Rafe being my ancestor—he’d looked at the same October sky I was looking at more than three hundred years ago. I wanted to help him, in a way, because of that link. I wished the circumstances were different. There was so much going on in my life. I needed time to think—alone—and without ghostly pirate interference.

  It did occur to me as I tried to untangle everything about my mother and father and Sandi’s murder that I could possibly access information about the magistrate from the Duck Historical Museum Web site. I’d been a member forever but had hardly ever used the knowledge compiled by countless Duck residents down through the years.

  I tried not to think about Rafe or about my family’s past. Or about Sandi. But the more I pushed these thoughts away, the more they came back to me. Like Rafe himself. Maybe there was an easy answer to proving his innocence and I wasn’t taking advantage of it. I knew I couldn’t easily unravel the tangled events that had happened between my mother and father thirty-six years ago. I knew I couldn’t do much to help find Sandi’s killer. But maybe I could get rid of my ghostly visitor.

  I went downstairs to get on the computer, before remembering there was no power and no Internet. It looked like it was back to the old way for me.

  I located an old book Gramps had given me when I was a teenager. It was titled Pirates of the Outer Banks. The pages were well worn from my leafing through it.

  There was enough information about the infamous scourge of our area to tantalize but not really to answer questions. There was a grisly wood carving of Rafe hanging from a tree. There were illustrations of his ship and drawings of him. There were paragraphs describing the terrible things he’d done.

  But there was no magistrate mentioned. The book referred only to “the law” or “the people,” never to any specific person or officeholder in charge of administering that law. Whoever the magistrate was, he’d had the power to have Rafe arrested and hanged. There weren’t a lot of people like that in those days. The Outer Banks was a lawless area—the governor of Virginia had to send troops to kill Blackbeard.

  I wrote down a few names to check out the next day when I could go to the museum. I had to find Mark to see what he knew. His words at the museum about Rafe’s death were tantalizing, but I needed more information.

  I tried calling Rafe a few times but got no response. I wanted him to hear the names I’d found in the book and see if any of them sounded familiar. Of course, since I wanted him to come, he didn’t show up.

  After midnight, I closed the book and tried not to think about anything else. I needed some sleep. Tomorrow would look better if I was well rested. I finally drifted off and found myself on an old ship that was flying the Jolly Roger. I was dressed in pants and a loose shirt. My boots were full of sand and had slits up the sides. I couldn’t see my face to know whether I looked like myself or some poor mate who was unfortunate enough to be on a pirate ship.

  “Look alive there, boy.” Rafe answered my question. “I’ll not have any of my crew lollygagging on deck while we look for a place to hide my treasure.”

  “Aye, sir!” my dream persona said, saluting smartly. “How will we know where the treasure will be safe, Cap’n?”

  “I’ll know when we get there. Enough questions. Get to work trimming those sails.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. The sails I’d been raised around were nothing like these billowing monsters. Gramps had a boat—the Eleanore, named for my grandmother—but it had a motor. He never trusted sails.

  But while I didn’t know what to do, the boy whose body I was currently inhabiting did. He climbed the mast like a monkey until he was high above the deck.

  “Sails, Cap’n!” he called out. “British frigates!”

  He looked across the gray water toward the horizon. Two ships were heading toward us, sails unfurled. Their colors proclaimed them as British. He yelled down another warning. It wouldn’t do to hide treasure when they had to get away from the authorities.

  But Rafe wouldn’t be deterred, telling the men his ship was lighter and faster and could outrun the frigates. They’d have plenty of time to escape. “You there—load the chest into a longboat. We’ll row to the island. The rest of them can get away and come back for us.”

  Two burly men, the cabin boy (me) and Rafe left the pirate ship with the treasure chest stashed in the stern of the longboat.

  The rest of the men stayed on the ship, making preparations to get out of the cove where they would be trapped if the frigates caught them there. The sails were unfurled. We could hear the voices of the sailors yelling orders as they struggled to turn and head out to sea.

  But long before they could reach the freedom of the open waters, the British ships were on them. The battle was fierce but short as the ships traded cannon fire. In the end, the single pirate ship was no match for the British ships. The sky seemed to be on fire—smoke filling the air as the pirate ship broke apart and sank into the Atlantic.

  “Get to work, ye scurvy bilge rats,” Rafe said gruffly, everyone jumping at the sound of his voice. “What’s past is past. Start digging. Let’s be done with it and get out of this godforsaken place.”

  The sailors nodded and put their backs into shoveling sand at the base of a rocky outcropping near the water’s edge. The chest was deep and wide. It took them hours to get a hole deep enough for it using the flimsy tools they had.

  When the chest was completely covered in sand, Rafe paced off the location from an odd-looking rock that resembled a duck head (a sign of the town that would be here someday?).

  He made marks on the handle of his pistol to remember the number of paces to the place where the chest was buried. Then he grunted—a satisfied so
und—and without warning, shot both the crewmen who’d buried the chest. They lay bleeding to death on the shore, waves lapping at their feet.

  The young cabin boy was terrified. He didn’t know what to do. Should he run? Was there any way to escape Rafe?

  “Drag ’em into the water and be quick about it,” Rafe instructed him. “I don’t want their bones giving away where the treasure is buried.”

  “You’ll just kill me when I’m done,” the spunky boy protested.

  “I’ll kill ye now if you don’t,” Rafe promised, waving his saber at him.

  The boy knew the pistols were finished—they couldn’t be used again until they were reloaded. He knew he was fast but had also seen a pirate trick of throwing a saber or knife a good distance into a runner’s back.

  He finally did as he was told, though the task was hard for his young arms. He strained and gritted his teeth, determined to do the job, and hoped the pirate would show him mercy. As dawn began to break over the horizon, he could see a bloody trail where he’d dragged the bodies into the water.

  “What now, Cap’n?” the boy asked, praying for the first time in his life that he’d hear a different answer than the one he expected.

  Rafe laughed. “Now I give you a chance to live, my fine boyo. You swim, don’t you?”

  He gestured with the saber toward the open sea. The boy began to walk into the cold water. “Don’t turn around,” Rafe instructed. “And don’t be telling everyone about this if you make it to shore. I’ll know if ye do and come after you. I’ll slit you from throat to gullet.”

  The boy’s anxious eyes searched the horizon, hoping for some sign that the British ships were still out there. But the chances were that they thought Rafe had gone down with his men. They wouldn’t stay there to check the island. He was alone. There was nothing for it but to swim if he wanted to survive.