Plundered Christmas

by Susan Lyttek

  Our villain cursed as he fell, but the Coast Guard officers, not threatened in the least by a foul mouth, were on him and had him subdued in a matter of seconds.

  I hadn’t realized how much stress I was still under. Had I just fainted a little while prior? I fell to my knees, breathing hard, but praising my Lord.

  I heard scuffling on the cellar stairs and rested my hands in the sandy soil to give me the strength to lift my head and look over.

  James and Aimee led out an angry looking Juliana. Someone had wrapped James’ leg with white cloths of some sort to stop the bleeding, but it couldn’t be too bad because he was walking right for me. Aimee and Juliana vaporized into the background as my knight in shining armor reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet. I fell into his hug and held on for all I was worth.

  I probably could have stayed in James’ arms for hours as emotionally drained as I felt. He was whole and safe. But a man I had known for much longer cried out.

  “Aimee!” I could hear Frank’s heart breaking in the way he said her name. My poor baby brother.

  Not letting go of James, I leaned into his shoulder, ostensibly to help him walk, but just as much as to have him help me.

  Aimee dragged her sister over to Lieutenant Owen. His officers had her dad cuffed. Juliana was restrained shortly thereafter. Aimee held her arms out in front of her, waiting for cuffs of her own.

  Frank’s would-be fiancée looked over her shoulder at my brother. “I’m sorry.”

  “Aimee, why?”

  She looked at him so intensely, I felt like I was intruding by simply being nearby. “He’s my dad, Frank. For right or wrong, he’s my dad.” She looked over at Professor Beauregard. “I just never expected him to go so far.”

  Frank ran over to her side. “One minute, Lieutenant? Please?”

  The officer pondered this a moment. He seemed to assess the situation and make certain everything was under control. Satisfied, he nodded. “One minute, Mr. Jensen.”

  Even dying to know, I could not strain my ears enough to make out what Frank and Aimee spoke about. They both looked as if the conversation caused them great pain.

  At the end, Aimee asked something to the Lieutenant, who nodded and reached for something in her shirt pocket which he looked over and then handed to Frank.

  “Thank you, folks, for your cooperation.” Lieutenant Owen signaled to his officers, and they led the three around the house and towards the dock.

  I imagined the cutter he had requested when the chopper first made it to the island had probably arrived.

  We watched them for a moment until the profile of the house blocked them from view.

  Then James and I moved over to my brother. “Frank?”

  He shook his head. “Not now, Jeanine. Not now. I need to walk for a while.” He took off.

  I noticed it was exactly in the opposite direction from where the Coast Guard had taken Aimee.

  14

  I started to go after Frank, but James kept a hold of me.

  “Let him go, Neenie. He needs to walk it out of his system.” He tugged me in closer to him. I could still smell traces of his aftershave from that morning. “Besides, I have a feeling he and Aimee will work things out in the long run.”

  I was torn between running after my emotionally wounded brother or staying with my physically wounded husband and discovering the secrets he knew. I looked down at James’s leg, wrapped with unraveling white bandaging, rust-stained from the dried blood. I stayed.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Later,” he mouthed just before an energetic little body crashed into us.

  Josie clung to him like she did when he had to deploy for work. “Are you hurt badly, Daddy?”

  An echo followed. “Are you OK, Dad?”

  Our two offspring huddled close to us.

  Justin surprised me by actually holding onto his dad longer than thirty seconds.

  James actually looked embarrassed. “I’m fine, kids. Juliana’s bullet nicked me, and it hurt and bled a lot, but it didn’t go into my leg.” He kicked his leg up a little so we all could see better. “And Aimee did an excellent job of bandaging it, as you see.”

  At the mention of her “Aunt” Aimee, Josie frowned. “Will I see her again?”

  James ruffled her hair. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

  Never one to stay in a huddle, Justin broke free. “OK, OK.” He jumped around as if he had one of his precious soccer balls between his feet. “But what do we do now?” He put quite a bit of emphasis on the ‘now’.

  I had a feeling I knew what he was getting at, but since I really didn’t want any more adventure, I played dumb. “Maybe eat lunch?”

  “Mom!” Justin howled and Josie echoed.

  “After all,” protested my daughter, “Frau Schmidt could make sandwiches to take with us.”

  “With us?” I was going to milk my idiocy as long as possible.

  James had had enough though. “Neenie. We have to look to find the last letter, at least. Who knows what else might be buried in the graveyard?”

  “Bodies, maybe?” I mumbled, knowing I was on the losing side of this discussion.

  “You’d think, Mom,” said Justin. “By now you should be used to a few nearby corpses. We’ve lived next to a whole slew of them for over a year.”

  Yeah, yeah, I thought. But those were my ghosts, stories and legends. Not these.

  “What about Christmas?”

  “Don’t you remember your dream on the boat, Mom? We’ll still have Christmas when we get home.”

  I looked down at the improvised bandages on James’ leg. He saw the glance and read its meaning.

  “I’d be a pretty poor officer if I couldn’t tolerate this minor wound while walking around a relatively flat island.”

  What could I do? I’d been beaten.

  “After all,” explained Josie. “We’ve saved your favorite for last.”

  Irony from my little girl. How was I training these kids?

  James gave her a high five. Traitor. “Lead on, detectives,” I conceded.

  “Wait!” shouted Justin. He ran in the kitchen and came out moments later with our slobbering bulldog’s leash in one hand and a cloth shopping bag in the other. “Our last adventure on the island has to be the whole family.” He held up the bag. “And Mrs. Smith read our minds.” As the bag neared his nose, he smiled. “Whatever it is smells yummy!”

  ****

  From a heavenly perspective, we had to look like an odd and rag-tag bunch making our way to the southeast corner of the island.

  In spite of his protests, James did limp.

  Jelly, usually the perfect dog, refused to heel and kept tugging Justin along on the leash.

  In spite of Justin’s protests, I had commandeered the bag of food and drink. Fortunately for me, the power outage had caused most things I’d wrinkle my nose at to spoil. We had a pile of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Frau Schmidt’s wonderful homemade bread. In addition, she’d thrown in a bag of cookies, some water bottles, and a thermos. She was such a dear woman; I knew the thermos had to contain some of her fantastic coffee.

  Since we were all hungry, I doled out sandwiches as we walked. It didn’t take long before we passed the general location of our ‘wilderness’ star. Into the distance in front of us, I could see the glints of purple that indicated the marsh. I wondered how Dr. Beauregard had found that one—especially in light of all the rain we’d had. I would have thought that would make it too treacherous. But he had said he had found a little metal box with two documents in it. Based on the others, I thought it probably had one or two pieces of eight as well, but he didn’t want to mention that.

  Long before I wanted to, I saw the small Banet graveyard. According to the gravestones, the plots only held about a dozen ancestors.

  “Where do we start?” I asked my detectives. I leaned against a nearby tree, hanging the bag from a limb so as not to tempt the pooch with the remaining people food. Of
course, I had rescued the thermos from it first. I handed James a bottle of water and made sure the tree could accommodate him, too.

  If it wasn’t for the graves, I’d think this a peaceful spot. It was greener than most of the island and actually had grass that looked happy and content to be there. Though it was near the island’s coast, jutting rocks along its cliff-side protected it from the wind and the wave far below. Most of the trees here looked decidedly normal, meaning they had leaves that looked like leaves, not the palm branches or pine needles that were so prevalent.

  While I took in the scenery, the kids had already plunged into the graveyard with their dog. They let him sniff, and they read the stones.

  “Look!” Josie exclaimed. “Here’s a really old grave. The letters are worn and hard to read.” She took a tissue from her pocket and wiped the stone. She squinted and angled her head, but obviously, she still couldn’t read it. “Can I have one of the bottles of water, Mom?”

  I checked in the bag. Jostling things around, I could tell by the weight, or lack thereof, that we had emptied them. “We don’t have any,” I conceded. “We must have been thirsty.”

  She noticed the thermos sitting by my feet. “Is that coffee?” She knew it was. I nodded reluctantly. “Can you pour me a cup, Mom?”

  “But you don’t like coffee!” And I didn’t want to share.

  “Not to drink.” Her tone told me that she thought I was a wee bit silly.

  James bent down and picked up the thermos and poured some into the cup that doubled as its top. “She needs to pour it over the letters on the stone. We saw it on a documentary. It’s a way to read faded gravestones.”

  He gingerly pushed himself off the tree with one hand and hobbled over to Josie, holding the cup out with the other.

  I thought it a waste of good coffee, but I wasn’t going to say that. They already knew me well enough.

  In fact, Justin came over and patted my shoulder to console me.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll ask Mrs. Smith to make you some more when we get back.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Carefully, Josie took the cup from her dad’s hand. She leaned it in close to the stone and poured over the area she had wiped. Chiseled words gradually revealed themselves. “I can’t see all of it.”

  Justin grabbed the thermos at my feet as he and Jelly ran toward Josie.

  “Traitor,” I said. It seemed to be a theme today.

  “Thanks,” she told her brother absently as she poured straight from the thermos over the hidden words.

  Satisfied, a couple of moments later, she stopped and set the thermos down.

  “I can read it now. And I was right. This is one of the first graves, one of Anne Bonny’s sons.” She pulled a small notebook, her detective gear, from a pocket of her jeans. It had a built in pen so that she could be prepared as the need hit. Her Uncle Frank had given it to her as an early Christmas present. “It reads ‘Mark Banet, nee Rackham. b. February 1720, d. August 1724. Forgotten first, died unknown, loved forever.” She paused from reading to write.

  The coffee dripped down the stone. Some of it reached the lower left corner. Barely above the soil, I could see the liquid trying to reveal something. I left my post at the tree and wandered over. Kneeling in the grass, I could just make out five marks. I picked up and shook the thermos. A little coffee still remained.

  “That desperate…” began James. Before he could comment more on my fondness for coffee and before I could talk myself out of it, I poured what remained over the corner of the marker. Slowly, the letters and an arrow came clear. HLEF. The arrow pointed just past the grave to a slightly sunken area west of it.

  “HLEF!” Shouted Justin, having looked over my shoulder.

  “And an arrow,” I said, not wanting my son to have all the credit of discovery. I stood and walked two steps to the spot indicated. “If only we had thought to bring a shovel.”

  Just then, the cavalry arrived in the form of my father, Miss Margo, and Mary.

  “We figured,” said Dad. “You tend to charge ahead without a plan, Jeanine dear.”

  “And,” said Mary. “I don’t think you have enough fingernails left at this point.” She had two shovels, one in each hand. My dad was using his arms to escort Margo.

  “Should you be walking around, Miss Margo?” asked Josie.

  The older woman smiled down at my daughter. She looked tired, but better than I imagined after the attacks on her person. “This is my family you’re uncovering, Josie. I can’t just keep letting the Talbotts do all the work.” But she did not actually work, at this point, any more than I did.

  James and Dad took the shovels from Mary, asked me to show where the arrow pointed and began to dig. I was glad they had shovels because my nails would not have held up. It took a while.

  After they’d gone about a foot down, James handed his shovel to Justin and went to rest against our tree.

  My dad had slowed, but kept digging.

  Justin, fresh to the task, powered through spadeful after spadeful. He couldn’t have been digging more than five minutes when he plunged his shovel into the dirt and heard a hollow thud.

  At that, everyone gasped.

  Josie and Mary, having the same idea, dove in to brush the dirt away.

  “It’s a chest! An honest to goodness treasure chest!”

  15

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  Miss Margo’s breath sneaked back into her lungs so fast that it almost whistled. I looked over at her and saw why.

  Charlie had an arm gripping her waist and a knife to her throat.

  “Charlie?” I asked, confused.

  When had he come up and why was he acting like this?

  “I can’t let you do that,” he said again. “You cover that chest right back up. Leave it buried where it should be. Let the dead stay dead.” His voice took on an edge I hadn’t heard before.

  “Charles,” said Margo. “You’re hurting me.”

  The old man didn’t seem to notice her words at all. He kept his arm around her and used just his hand to gesture to the hole. “I said, cover it up.”

  My dad looked up at Margo in anguish. There was nothing he could do to help her. “Come on, Justin. You heard the man. Let’s cover it up.”

  They had worked so hard to get to this point. But they dug into the dirt they had cleared began to recover the chest.

  “But why, Charlie?” Margo face had gone pale. Truthfully, I was surprised she was still standing.

  “You were so nice, Margo. So nice. But then this island got into you. I could tell the first time you visited that you had some Banet blood in you, but growing up in Carolina had softened it.” The man wasn’t right. Something had twisted in him. “This new Carolina man might have saved you, but no, you had to bring him here. Mark believed me. That’s why he let the treasures stay buried, keep the pirates dead. William used to believe me, too. ” A tear ran down his cheek. “Such a nice boy. But that learning he did, and that uncle of his changed him. I couldn’t save him no more.” His arms squeezed tighter on Margo, and the hand holding the knife pressed in just enough to raise a red line across her neck. “I would have saved you, too, but you wouldn’t let me. I’ve just been Charlie. Always there Charlie.”

  I was scared. Again. I could see some truth in what Charlie said. Some. But it wasn’t all truth. Just a hint of truth could make people believe lies so deeply that they’d change the core of who God made them. Not knowing what else to do but listen to the repeated movements of the shovels and stare at poor Margo, I prayed silently.

  Father God, give me the words to reveal Your truth in this darkness. Or Dad. Or James. Or the kids. So many of us know You. Help us show Your light.

  I heard a branch crack. Charlie heard it, too. He turned his head, just enough to glance behind him, and Frank ran up from the other side of the tree. He had a thick branch with which he struck Charlie across the back of his skull.

  The old man crumpled.r />
  Frank dropped the branch and bent down to check on the fallen with a finger to his neck. “He‘s still breathing.”

  Margo began to crumple as well, but Dad dropped his shovel and leapt to her side. She fell into his shoulder, sobbing. “I had no idea.”

  “Shhh,” said Dad, smoothing her hair. “No one could have guessed.”

  “Aimee did,” said Frank. “She said her dad didn’t kill William. He sneaked around bullying people and trying to dig up treasure, but he didn’t kill anyone.”

  Was it my imagination or did I detect a hint of pride in his voice?

  “That was what she had Lieutenant Owen hand to me. A piece of paper that told me she really and truly loved me and to follow Charlie. Once I got off my tantrum and read it, I did what she said. As soon as Margo and Mary left, he was trying to open the safe, I’m guessing to get out the documents and destroy them based on his other ramblings. When he couldn’t, he stole a knife from the kitchen and followed your trail out here.”

  He rubbed his head self-consciously. “But I’m a lot like my sister and didn’t think first. I just went right after him, keeping back enough so that he didn’t see me. But I didn’t get a weapon or anything. When I saw him with Miss Margo, I used my cell to call the Coast Guard, first. Then I scoured the ground for the thickest branch I could find. The rest, you know.”

  Margo knelt beside her attacker and gently touched his face. “Poor Charlie. I never knew.”

  Once James made sure Charlie was restrained and safe until the officials came, we resumed the dig. It didn’t take long, probably because the adrenaline was flowing. They pulled an honest-to-goodness treasure chest out of the hole.

  “It seems a bit light,” said Justin. “Isn’t gold supposed to be heavy?”

  We concurred, but that didn’t stop us from opening it.

  Inside, we saw a parchment and an official-looking leather book on top. We opened the leather bound document first.

  I couldn’t read it. I could make out the date, sort of. It was obviously in another language, but not German. It looked like December 1781, but they had spelled December wrong.