by Lauren Wolk
“It’s good he’s not too smart,” I said. “Now we can stop worrying about him.”
But Osh didn’t seem convinced. “They’ll need us, and the real bird keeper, to say it was him we saw on Penikese.”
“And here, too,” I said.
“No, not here.” Osh stood up, brushing the sand from his damp clothes. “They can’t know he got that jewelry from us.”
“But he would have hurt us!” I cried. “And he ruined your paintings. He should be punished for that.”
“I’ll paint new ones,” Osh said. “They’ll put him in jail for hurting Mr. Sloan. No need to tell them about the treasure.”
I could see the wisdom in that, but I expected Mr. Kendall would do the telling. “What will we do if he says he got those things from us?”
Osh led the way slowly toward the house. “Let him,” he said. “He can’t say a word without admitting that he stole them, on top of everything else.”
“But if he does tell them, won’t they want to know where we got the jewelry?”
“Then we tell them the truth,” Osh said. “Your mother left it to you when she died.”
“Except when they find out that my mother is buried on Penikese, they’ll know. They’ll say she found the treasure on state land. And then they’ll take it away, just like he did.”
“Maybe.” Osh paused in the doorway. “And then they’ll go away, too, and leave us alone.”
“But that’s wrong, Osh.”
He looked at me curiously. “Most of the treasure is still yours,” he said. “Worth more than any person could ever need. Why are you so concerned with those few small pieces?”
“Because some rich woman will end up with them and she’ll feel like a queen, even though they came from Penikese where she never would have stepped foot. Or sent peaches in the summer. Or figs in the winter. Or soft blankets. Or anything.”
Osh sighed. “Time to let that go now,” he said.
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s not right.”
Osh turned to go into the house. “Maybe not,” he said. “But I’ve said all I’ve got to say about it.” He paused. “Except this: Those lepers were out there for years while we were right here, just across the water. But we never sent peaches or figs or blankets. We never stepped foot out there, either.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Like my heart had a nail in it. “I know that, Osh,” I said, my throat aching.
And then I cried for a long time. And dried my eyes and breathed again and let some of that go.
We stayed in the mess and misery of the house only as long as we had to, trading our wet clothes for dry, finding our shoes, trying not to look at anything else.
I retrieved the cinnamon box from the sand outside my window—achingly grateful that I had that, still—and tucked it in the bottom of our driftwood bin for the time being, though I could not imagine that Mr. Kendall would ever come back.
Then we went to fetch Miss Maggie, who was a witness, too, and waited while she put Cinders and Clover out to graze and got herself ready for the trip.
“This is all very hard to believe,” she muttered as we hurried down the path toward the fish pier. “One day, I’m tending sheep. The next, I’m mixed up with a madman.”
At the gangway, Miss Maggie bought our tickets. “You can pay me back in lobsters,” she said, though Osh always sent some up to her regardless.
We were all three jittery and grim, just hours past a terrible night; but the day was fair, we were together, and Mr. Kendall was caught and jailed where he couldn’t hurt us.
Perhaps, as well, I would learn something about the Shearwater and whether she had come back to New Bedford or when she might return.
“I wish you could have seen Jason when I did,” I said as we stood at the rail and watched the mainland grow and grow. “He saw me just when I saw him. And he looked so much like me, it was amazing.”
“You were happy about that, weren’t you?” Osh said.
“What, that he looked like me?”
He nodded. The sun behind him made it difficult to see his face.
“Yes, I was happy about that. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, you should, I suppose,” he said, though he sounded doubtful. “But that’s just one thing: how he looked. Not enough to prove that he’s your brother.”
I realized what he was saying. “You don’t think he is, do you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe he is.”
I turned to Miss Maggie.
“I suppose he could be,” she said.
But I didn’t mind how unsure they seemed.
If it turned out that they were right, I would keep looking. I would find my brother, wherever he was. Mrs. Pelham would help with that.
In the meantime, I would think of that sailor the way I had since I first saw him. As Jason. As my brother. And hope that it was so.
Otherwise, I’d spent far too much time atop the Cuttyhunk drumlins looking for the wrong ship.
We asked a dockhand where the jail was, and he told us straight up Union. So straight up Union we went, block after block, watching for something that looked like a jail. We passed the turn for the hospital, and I was tempted to go back in search of Mrs. Pelham, who knew and loved Jason the way I meant to do. But we had different business that day, and it took us to a big brick building I recognized, immediately, as a jail.
It felt like one, even before we went inside. Strong. Stern. As serious as any building I’d ever seen.
The officer at the desk took us to a windowless room where we waited for a long time, far too hot, and I, for one, began to feel like a prisoner myself. Osh fell asleep, his chin on his chest, and Miss Maggie watched him while I tried not to be afraid of what would come next.
“You got here so quickly,” Officer Kelly said when he joined us.
Osh opened his eyes.
“You wrote ‘Soonest,’” Miss Maggie said. “This is soonest.”
“Well, I’m sorry you had to wait. We were rounding up men who look like Mr. Kendall. It wasn’t easy.”
“What for?” I imagined a room full of big, ugly, angry men.
“The show-up,” he said. “You’ll look at a number of men and pick out the one you saw on Penikese.”
Osh stood up, Miss Maggie with him, and I said, “Will he have to see us?”
“Ah.” Officer Kelly smiled. “Every witness would like to be anonymous. But he already knows you saw him. He’s already said some things about you, young lady. And you,” he said, tipping his head at Osh and Miss Maggie. “But he won’t be able to hurt you. I promise.”
“Where’s Mr. Sloan?” I asked. “Why can’t he do this part?”
“In Maine,” he said. “Back home, after what happened to him on Penikese. He’ll be along soon enough. His word alone won’t be as strong, though, as his and yours both.”
Before he took us for the show-up, Officer Kelly stopped in the doorway and said, “You were in the Penikese graveyard last time we saw you.”
Miss Maggie nodded. “Tending the graves.”
“So you said, but I’ve been curious about that ever since. Why would you tend those graves?”
“Because they needed tending,” she said. “Why else?”
“But why those graves? Why sail all the way to Penikese to tend the graves of people you never knew?”
“My parents are buried there,” I said before Miss Maggie could say another word. I would not lie about this.
Officer Kelly almost smiled. “I wondered,” he said. “We went back again, Officer Reardon and I. Making sure Kendall wasn’t hiding out there. And we found one of the graves all dug up, and a little trunk lying open and empty. We figured he had been there, all right, still looking for the treasure. And had found it. We just can’t understand why he had so little loot with him when the
trunk was big enough to hold much more.”
We said nothing. Osh kept his eyes on the floor.
“Of course, he denies having anything besides what he took to the pawnshop. He claims the jewelry belonged to his grandmother. ‘Nothing wrong with pawning what’s mine,’ he said. But we have our doubts.” He looked at each of us in turn. “You wouldn’t know anything about all that, would you?”
“Why would anyone dig up a grave?” I said. “Especially where lepers are buried?”
“That’s exactly what we asked him,” Officer Kelly said. “But he wouldn’t say.”
They could have showed us a thousand big, flat-faced men, and we would have known Mr. Kendall in a trice.
It was how he looked, yes, but it was also how he looked at us. As if his eyes alone could do us harm.
And they did.
I felt them on me and shivered. This was not a reasonable man. This was not someone who could be made to see sense.
When we all three pointed at him and said “five” for the number pinned to his chest, he lunged at us, screaming, “You’ll be sorry!” And it took three officers to hold him back.
“Where’s the rest of it?” he screamed as they took him away in handcuffs. “It’s mine, and I’ll have it! I’ll have what’s mine!”
Osh stepped in front of Miss Maggie and me. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He shepherded us into the corridor and away to where we could no longer hear Mr. Kendall screaming.
We’d already given our statement, back on the island. We’d done what we’d come to do.
So we signed some papers, Osh with an X, and said our good-byes.
“I hope we never see you again,” Osh said to Officer Kelly, who unexpectedly smiled. “I hear that a lot,” he said. “And I hope so, too. Though you’ll have to come to court eventually, to say under oath what you know.”
We were mostly quiet on the walk back to the waterfront, the jail and Mr. Kendall behind us, receding.
We considered stopping for a sandwich or a visit to one of the things the islands lacked: a museum, a theater, a library that held ten thousand books. But all we really wanted was to be on the Elizabeths again, even if that meant facing the wreck of our home.
When we reached the waterfront, I saw the old dockmaster coming along toward us, the smoke from his pipe trailing behind him like a dirty veil, and I hurried ahead to meet him.
“Excuse me, but can you tell me if the Shearwater is in port?” I asked.
He squinted at me, his long beard quivering as he slowed to a stop, huffing like a steam engine.
“That I can,” he said. “And the answer is no, she’s not. Nor has been for weeks, stuck in dry dock in Portland after a run-in with a shoal. But home soon, I expect.” He craned his neck to look back down the dock and then again along the waterfront. “One of her cabin boys was here just a few days ago, come back on another ship, but he wouldn’t have more to tell you than I have.”
So. Not here but home soon. And through the Graveyard she’d come. And I’d be watching.
“Come along, Crow,” Miss Maggie said, nodding to the dockmaster as we continued on toward the ferry that was tied up and napping, waiting to be let off her leash again.
And I believe we were all three content as we boarded for the return trip, our duty done, not knowing what was to come next.
Chapter 35
"Storm,” Osh said, nearly to himself, as the ferry pulled up to the Cuttyhunk fish pier.
He was looking out across the southern sky as if at a lion creeping closer; but I saw nothing except blue, a few mare’s tails on the horizon, though the wind had picked up during the crossing, and the flag on the ferry snapped and strained on its halyard.
“When?” I asked.
He closed his eyes. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe late tonight, but by tomorrow for sure.”
I took Osh at his word and hoped that the Shearwater was not on its way home now after waiting so long to be fit for the sea again.
“Then you’ll help me round up the sheep, Crow, will you?” Miss Maggie said, not really asking, sure that I would go with her to bring the sheep into the barn.
“First the sheep, and then the lobsters,” Osh said, “and off the water before the wind gets any worse. There’s just time for both.”
I remembered what he said about not leaving the lobsters in their traps longer than we had to. “Okay,” I said. “I hope this won’t be a nor’easter.”
I rather liked the storms that came rumbling up the coast, but the biggest of the nor’easters were frightening, and we always spent them with Miss Maggie, hunkered down.
“The word from New York is to expect big wind and surf late tonight,” Mr. Johnson said when we stopped in at the post office so Miss Maggie could collect her mail. “Lots of rain if it keeps the track it’s on. Less if it heads out to sea. But wind either way.”
As we walked down the lane toward Miss Maggie’s, Osh looked again at the southern skies, his hair blowing away from his face, and said, “The lobsters may have to stay where they are for a bit. Though the storm may take them for a ride.”
Sometimes, after a big storm, we sailed out to find that our pots had dragged a good distance. Other times, the buoys broke away altogether, leaving us to dive for the pots on the ocean floor. Or the traps, buoys and all, washed ashore in a broken tangle. But there was nothing we could do about it, short of hauling them all up and in, which we were not about to do.
“If we can’t get them today, we’ll go out as soon as the storm’s past,” Osh said.
“Will you come help us bring in the sheep, too, then?” Miss Maggie asked him.
“I don’t think they’ll come to harm if you leave them out,” he said, “but I’ll help bring them in if that’s what you want.”
“My sheep would do the same for you,” she said.
And we three spent the rest of the afternoon rounding up the flock from across the moors, Miss Maggie on Clover, until we had herded them all into their pen where they could take shelter in the barn when the time came.
By then we were dirty and sweaty and worn out from the long, strange day.
Osh and I waited at the table under the hornbeam tree in Miss Maggie’s yard while she fetched some cold chicken and a pitcher of cucumber water from the icebox, a pan of cornbread, some white cheese.
We sat and ate together as the wind rose and the clouds came up from the south until the sky and sea were both gray and the hornbeam tree began to sway in earnest, the young crows that had nested there long flown by now.
“No lobstering, then,” Osh said. “But it’s time we went home.” He looked at Miss Maggie. “You haven’t seen what he did to the house.”
“Let me help you set it right,” she said.
But he shook his head no. “Bad enough we two have to see it,” he said. “You’ll just get in a lather.”
“I won’t!” she said.
But then I saw Mr. Johnson, running down the lane toward the bass stands, and I yelled out to him, waving, which brought him up short and then back around toward us, calling, “He got away! He got away!” as he ran.
Which made me feel like I was the one who’d been running.
“He got away?” Miss Maggie said. “How could he get away?”
“That man Kendall,” Mr. Johnson said as he pulled up and stopped, panting. “He got away.” He held out a telegram. “Choked a guard almost to death and escaped.”
I read it myself. “The police are worried he might come back here.”
“Here?” Miss Maggie snorted. “He’d have to be a lot more than stupid to do that.”
“He’d have to be crazy,” Osh said.
“More than crazy,” she said, “with the police after him and a storm coming on.”
“But we’ve thought that before,” Osh said
. “And we were wrong before.”
“I’m off to tell the others to lock up tonight,” Mr. Johnson said, and off he went.
“We’ll stay here,” Osh said. “Just in case.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Miss Maggie said. “I’ll lock myself in and be just fine. You need to go take care of your poor house. But you come right back here if the storm starts to get too bad.”
“We will,” Osh said. “If it does. But if you hear anyone knocking, don’t open the door until you’re sure who it is.”
She said she would, and we helped her clean up and put away anything in the yard that might be swept away in the storm. Then we went on our way, glad to find the tide low enough to cross easily and enough light left in the day to set the house to rights, the broken bits swept into a bin, the furniture set back on its legs.
The lanterns hanging from their hooks were unbroken, and I lit them as the day drew down.
“We’ll get to the paint tomorrow,” Osh said. All around us, the room was splattered and streaked with red, yellow, and blue. If Osh himself had done it, I might have liked the feeling that I was part of a painting. But Mr. Kendall had done it, in anger, and I wanted to scrub it all away.
“I don’t mind doing it now,” I said, wetting a rag.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We need to get some sleep now, before the storm comes.”
After we had tied the skiff high above the wrack line, we took Mouse inside with us and locked the door and all the windows but the one next to Osh’s bed.
“I’ll know if he tries to come through there,” Osh said. “But I don’t expect him back here. Certainly not tonight. And not in this weather.”
I lay in my bed, the wind pouring like a river through the room, and tried to sleep.
I knew it was the wind rattling the door against its lock, and not Mr. Kendall, but it kept me awake nonetheless until the sound of Osh softly snoring soothed me into my own sleep. And I didn’t wake until I heard the lighthouse siren singing in the distance and saw the flash of a rocket shot off from Lookout Station, and knew a ship was going down.