I grabbed Booker and Zee and hugged them both at once.
“Your knowledge is power, Zee,” I said. “Don’t ever forget that.”
Zee high-fived me and started to skip away from the carousel. He had taken on one of his greatest fears and come out stronger than ever.
12
“Is that really true about Tarpaulin Cove?” I asked, trying to distract Zee until the bullies were out of sight.
“Yup,” Zee said. “‘Buccaneer Banks’ is what they used to call the caves and coves where pirates hid things. Sharks, they figured, would keep treasure hunters away.”
“Hey, buddy,” Booker said. “You rocked this just now. You made me so proud to be your cousin.”
Zee looked at Booker and smiled. “I could only do it because you and Dev were with me.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “I bet you’ve known all along that you could handle bullies.”
“Let’s go tell Becca,” Booker said. “Think how happy you’ll make her.”
“What’s your favorite ice-cream flavor?” I asked.
“Mint chocolate chip, of course,” Zee said, starting to sprint in the direction of the house.
“After dinner, we can walk to Mad Martha’s,” I said, “and I’ll treat you to a double scoop with sprinkles.”
“For being a shark expert?” he said, stopping to look back at me.
“For being brave,” I said.
He turned to put his head down and kept jogging along.
Booker was as relieved as I was. “Good idea you had about Zee’s superior shark sense,” he said. “I guess I won’t ever call you a skinny geek again.”
“Better not,” I said, laughing with him. “And how about an apology for all those jokes you made about me when my braces were on?”
“If I apologize for that, will you buy me an ice-cream cone, too?” Booker asked.
“Not yet. I’ve got to go through the whole list of things you’ve said to make fun of me. Twelve years’ worth. I’m not letting you off that easily.”
“Twelve years? Don’t be ridiculous. I couldn’t even talk for the first eighteen months of my life. And then you were a pretty cool toddler,” Booker said. “Before you grew up to be the way you are. Actually, it’s just been a year or two of me goofing on you.”
I ignored Booker and played back the video on my phone. “Look at this. I got the whole event on film. If these guys ever act nasty again, I’ve got ammunition to show their parents.”
When we arrived at Becca’s, Zee was waiting for us on the porch. He held the screen door open and we went inside.
“What’s for dinner, Becca?” Booker asked.
She called out from the kitchen. “I’m grilling up some striped bass, caught right in Vineyard Sound this morning,” she said. “Corn on the cob, grown on the island, and tomatoes from my backyard garden. Will you kids set the table?”
“Happy to,” I said.
“We’ve got dessert covered,” Booker said.
“What? You don’t like my blueberry pie all of a sudden?”
We were all in the kitchen now. Becca was seasoning the fish and watching over the pot of boiling water for the corn.
“Everybody loves your pie,” I said. “It’s just that I promised to take Zee out to Mad Martha’s tonight.”
“He’s a lucky kid, isn’t he?”
“C’mon, Zee, tell your grandmother what a great thing you just did.”
Zee stared at the fish.
“Zee?” Becca said. “C’mon, now.”
Zee told her about the carousel ride and the bullies. She bit her lip when he got to the part about the name-calling.
Then Zee pulled himself up and stood straight, repeating to his grandmother what he had said and done.
She wiped her hands on her apron and pulled the eight-year-old tight against her. She buried her face in the top of his head, and I could have sworn she was shedding a tear or two that she didn’t want Booker or me to see.
“You’ve got a strength in you that you didn’t even know you had,” she said, picking up her knife again. “Every one of us does, when we finally figure out how to use it.”
“It was Booker and Dev,” Zee started to say.
“It was entirely you, Ezekiel,” his big cousin said. “End of story.”
Zee grabbed the silverware and helped me place it on the kitchen table.
“Well, it sounds like you had a more productive hour than I did,” Becca said.
“Why?” Zee asked.
“Artie Constant came knocking on my door, on his break from the lighthouse tours. You just missed him by a few minutes.”
“Was he looking for me?” Zee asked, still anxious to show off our treasure.
“No, sir. Seems Artie’s still got a little spark in him yet,” she said, chuckling while she talked. “He wanted to know if I’d go to the Tabernacle with him for the sing tomorrow, for Illumination Night.”
Booker practically doubled over. “Artie asked you out on a date? That’s funny.”
Becca turned and picked up her wooden spoon, shaking it in Booker’s direction. “Don’t you be rude, Booker Dibble. I’d be a fine date—just maybe not for Artie.”
“Lulu has dates all the time,” I said. “She really thinks she’s the life of the party, Becca. And I mean every party.”
“Yeah, but that last guy who took Lulu to the opera dropped dead on her,” Booker said. “Don’t you remember that?”
“Yes,” I said. “But Lulu claimed it was the bad music that got him, not her company.”
“So what did you say to Artie?” Booker asked.
“I said no. The four of us are going together tomorrow night,” Becca said. “I told him it was a family event. I don’t have you all here for very long, and I don’t need to share you with Artie Constant.”
“That’s very nice of you,” I said.
“Besides,” Becca said, getting ready to go out back to grill our fish, “I’m not really sure if it’s me or your gold doubloon old Artie was aiming to see.”
13
“What have we got here?” the town clerk in the public records office said to us as we stood in front of his counter at eight thirty on Wednesday, the next morning. “Early birds trying to snatch the worm? I’m just opening up for the day.”
Booker introduced the three of us and told the clerk that he and Zee were Becca’s grandsons. Her name seemed to unlock every door on the island.
“I’m Harry Mason,” the clerk said. “What is it you’re looking for?”
“Do the property records come with maps?” I asked.
“Some do.” Harry scratched his head. “Early ones mostly, because there were a lot of people who couldn’t write very well, but could draw the boundaries of their property.”
“We’d like to look at some of the old deeds from up in Chilmark,” Booker said, giving the man his most sincere Dibble-dazzle smile. “Kind of trace one family’s history as it came down on the island.”
“Ah, yes,” Harry said. “There are some assignments you just can’t do on the Internet. It’s probably what keeps me in business. Any family in particular?”
I tried to be casual about my interest. We didn’t need anyone else to think the three of us were looking for buried treasure. “People who’ve been here a really long time,” I said. “Like the Thaws. Becca says there aren’t so many families left.”
“Thaws it is,” Harry said. “That will be twenty dollars.”
“Twenty dollars?” I said. It never occurred to me we’d have to pay to see public records. “Is there a discount for law enforcement?”
Harry laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re the new sheriff in town?”
Zee giggled, too. He was waiting for us near the door.
I was tempted to tell Mr. Mason about
my blue and gold detective shield from the NYPD, our reward for the case Booker and I had worked on in June, but my mother made me leave it at home in the city.
“No, sir,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve got a relative who works for the police.”
“I’m sure you’re very proud of him,” Harry said, “but—”
“Her. I’m very proud of her.”
“Understood,” he said, holding out his hand. “It will still be twenty dollars.”
Booker pulled me aside. “I’ve got the money for the bus passes that Becca gave me, and twenty more for the rest of the day. What have you got?”
“Fifteen, all together. How about we skip lunch?”
“We can all share one lobster roll,” Booker said, returning to the counter to hand Mr. Mason his twenty.
Harry opened his drawer to put the money in. “Do you want to start in the seventeen hundreds?”
“The eighteen hundreds will be fine,” I said. That was the time of Lemuel Kyd’s visit.
“Sit yourselves down at that big table and I’ll be back with the record book.”
I took out my pencil and notepad. Sam Cody made it clear to me ages ago that detectives always have a notepad handy. It was dangerous to trust important details to one’s memory.
Harry returned with a gigantic book, a volume the size of my school desktop bound in red leather that had started to crack and fade.
“Town of Chilmark, 1800–1899,” he said, placing it on the table between Booker and me. “Happy hunting. Lucky for you, this end of the island was mostly fishermen and merchants. Chilmark was the farming area, so there were much larger parcels of land with fewer houses on them and even less property transfers.”
“Where do you think we should start our search?” Booker asked.
“The original big Thaw homestead was way out past Beetlebung Corner,” Harry said.
Some of the place names on this island really made me laugh. Beetlebung, Booker had told me, was a mix of two old English words—beetle, or the mallet that was used to hammer wood in the old days, and bung, for the pieces of wood that were pounded together to make barrels to hold oil onboard whaling ships. The two main roads in Chilmark crossed each other at Beetlebung Corner.
“Look for references to the Thaws on the south side of Menemsha Pond,” Harry went on.
“Me-nem-sha?” I repeated. “Is that a Wampanoag word?”
“Exactly so, and it means ‘still waters,’” Harry said. “It’s a nice calm pond that feeds out into Vineyard Sound.”
“Is the pond away from the ocean?” I asked.
“Yes, indeed,” Harry said, walking back to the counter and leaving the three of us to our search.
“Did you hear what he said?” I whispered to Booker and Zee. “A pond on the Thaw farm! It sounds exactly like the right place for Lemuel Kyd to have pulled in from the Vineyard Sound to avoid the British sailors who were after him. I’m already thinking about more doubloons!”
“Exactly,” Booker said. “You’re a faster reader than I am, Dev. Why don’t you start turning pages?”
“How about me?” Zee asked.
I pushed my pad and pencil over to him. “Take notes, okay? That’s really key. And here’s my phone, so you can snap some photos of the pages.”
Original records and land deeds had been bound into this enormous book. The pages were yellowed with age, but thick and sturdy.
I started turning pages and reading family names aloud. “So far we’ve got Davis and Solon and O’Hayer properties,” I said. “Each one has hundreds of acres.”
“They were really huge farms in those days,” Booker said. “Some of them are still pretty large.”
“Thaw!” I said, stabbing the page with my finger. “Here’s one. Jared Thaw.”
Booker leaned in and Zee poised the pencil to start writing.
“Wrong guy,” Booker said. “Our Thaws lived on the pond, not on the Atlantic side of the state road. You can see the piece of land on the map.”
The next few pages were different views of the same property, drawn by hand, with the names of the farmers who bordered the large parcel.
Harry Mason must have heard us talking. “I’m sure I can help you. I’ve been through these books dozens of times.”
“That would be great,” Booker said.
Harry came over to our table and used his forefinger to guide us across the road, to the Travis Thaw property.
“It’s pretty simple,” Harry said. “Travis Thaw, Jr., had a brother named Jared. Once Travis had a wife and three kids in his house, he needed to move Jared out. Sold all this land across the road to Jared for the sum of fifty dollars.”
I was practically crawling into the big book to follow Harry’s story as he flipped through the deeds and maps.
“Eighteen fourteen. It doesn’t look like Travis Thaw bought any more land, but he must have had another child,” Harry said. “He’s adding a name to the rightful heirs, this says. And he built a new structure on the property.”
“Travis Thaw, Junior, and Madeline Thaw—and their issue,” I read, over Harry’s shoulder.
“What issue?” Zee asked.
“It’s a legal word that means kids, Zee. I’ve heard my mom use it.”
Booker was reading along with me, and Zee was listing the names on my pad. “Travis the Third, Zachary, Franklin, Bartholomew, and Gertrude. Two more kids than they had when they sold the piece to Jared.”
“And then a new baby a month earlier,” Harry said, “named Benjamin.”
The second page showed that the Thaw farm was bounded on the north by the shore of Menemsha Pond, on the west—separated by a stone wall—by a farm owned by the Denman family, on the south by the old highway now known as State Road, and on the east by a small inlet called Lovey’s Cove. One set of neighbors, and three natural boundaries.
“Lovey’s Cove?” Booker asked. “That’s an odd name, too.”
My eyes were scanning the page. “Aunt Lovey—looks like that’s her actual name—was one of the Thaw’s ancestors.”
“She got a cove named for her,” Booker said. “More than Gertie got.”
“Gertie got a shark,” Zee said. “I’d rather have a shark with my name than a piece of dirt.”
“A cove,” I said. “A cove in a corner of a very calm pond, which happens to be out of sight of the ocean—safe from British sailors and the fury of a hurricane.”
“Could be the place where Gertie met the pirates,” Booker said.
I turned and curtsied to him. “Lemuel Kyd, I’d like you to meet Gertie Thaw.”
“I doubt you curtsy to a pirate.”
“I bet my Gertie would use all her skills to get Lemuel to hang out in her neighborhood for a while, gold doubloons or not,” I said. “Must have been pretty bleak out there with five brothers and not many other people around.”
“I guess you’re right about that,” Booker said. “Let’s put our heads together and see if we can Thaw this out.” Zee and I laughed.
We thanked Harry for his help, and then Zee walked to the opposite side of the table, leaning over to look at the drawings on the second page of the Thaw property records.
Booker and I were shoulder to shoulder. “There’s room for you, Zee. You don’t have to try to figure this out upside down. That’s so much harder.”
“I like it this way. I’m good upside down.”
Booker put his finger on the large building that was closest to us. It was the biggest structure on the huge spread of land.
“This is the farmhouse,” he said. “It’s closest to the main road.”
“How can you tell?” Zee asked.
“That’s how they built in those days. So they had easy access to the roads.”
“Then there are these paths that go to the bodies of water,” I said. �
��This wide one leads downhill to Menemsha Pond, and this narrow one goes from the main house down to the side here, to Lovey’s Cove.
“The wide one is kind of exposed,” I said, drawing an imaginary circle around the large pond. “Anyone living on this pond could see pirates coming and going.”
Zee had the perspective from the far side of the pond. “But if Lemuel Kyd tucked his boat from Vineyard Sound through the pond and into that little cove at the far end of the pond, just below the side of the house, why he’d practically be out of sight to most of the neighbors.”
“Now you’re thinking,” Booker said.
“What are these structures?” I asked.
“There’s a barn next to the house,” Booker said. “It’s marked ‘Wagon.’”
“What’s that big thing?” I asked, squinting to try to see the drawing.
“The cow barn,” he said. “That’s how it’s marked. ‘Cows.’”
“Looks practically as big as the house,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”
“The Thaws were farmers, Dev. They had a herd of cows.”
“There’s another building behind the cow barn,” I said. “Half as big as the barn, but I can’t read the words.”
“I can,” Zee said, even though the tiny lettering was upside down. “It says ‘camp.’ But why would the Thaws have a camp?”
“That’s another one of those things that happens to language over time,” Booker said. “Camps were kind of temporary housing structures, not places for kids to go in the summertime, Zee. Soldiers put up camps, and Becca told me a lot of farmers used to build makeshift camps so extra workmen had places to sleep when they were hired to help with raising animals.”
My excitement was growing. “Maybe it was a pirate camp.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dev,” Booker said. “Sam always tells you to follow the facts, not to drag them along the way you want them to go. Neither Becca nor Artie Constant mentioned anything about Lemuel Kyd hiding out in a camp on the Thaw property. They talked about the cow barn.”
He dragged his finger to the large structure on his left that was clearly marked for cows.
“Sort of weird,” I said. “That cow barn is too far away from the water, where Kyd’s boat would have been anchored.”
Secrets from the Deep Page 7