“Mom! What’s wrong?”
They both looked up, startled.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. It’s nothing.” Mom wiped her eyes.
“It can’t be nothing. Can’t I help?”
“It’s nothing new. Not really. I’m just worried about Cousin Hepzibah. She’s pretty strong for ninety-one, but . . .”
I knew what she meant. Mom loved Cousin Hepzibah, but it wasn’t just her health she was worried about. “It’s us too, isn’t it?” I said. If something happened to our cousin, where would we go? “I’ll help you, Mom. I can do more.” I could sell that jewelry online. I could get Cousin Hepzibah to teach me how to make those lace barrettes and sell them at school. Lola and Amanda had liked them—I bet a lot of the girls would buy them. Or I could sell them online on that craft site.
Who was I kidding? I couldn’t support our family selling barrettes.
Dad said, “We’ll be okay, Sukie.”
Mom said, “You don’t need to worry. We’ll be fine. We’re building up our savings. We’ve saved a little even just in the time we’ve been here.”
A little would never be enough. I really needed to find that treasure.
• • •
I tossed and turned that night, falling at last into a long, muddled dream. I was at the bottom of a pit, which was really a chimney, with a clock ticking far away overhead, its pendulum swinging back and forth, sharp as a blade, getting lower and lower, only it wasn’t exactly a pendulum, it was the evil letter from the evil clasp. Darkness began to close in on me, pressing against my skin like dense, wet, choking wool until I felt I was being buried alive. Then the bottom dropped out beneath me. One by one all my arms and legs dropped away separately, as if I’d somehow come apart like a skeleton, and each bone went crashing down, down, down, each bone screaming for all the other bones that were no longer me, just scattered pieces of something that had once been somebody.
I choked on a scream, trying to catch my breath.
Then someone was holding me, rocking me. Andre, I thought, shaking with relief. He had promised not to drop me, and he hadn’t. “Hush now, my own one,” said a voice, a man. “Hush now, my Hepzibah. Japhet can’t hurt you now. I’ve got you safe.”
I opened my eyes and saw that it wasn’t Andre at all, but a familiar-looking stranger. His long, silky black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing sharply contoured cheekbones above a taut jaw. He was looking at me with storm-gray eyes full of anxiety and love. He pulled me closer, then kissed me.
The kiss was like nothing I’d ever imagined. It was cold, colder than the ocean in winter, and stronger and wilder too. The world spun and crashed, broke and foamed around that kiss like waves in a storm. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. The storm was tossing ships to their doom against rocks, sweeping barrels off deck and smashing them, but I wasn’t a sinking ship. I wasn’t a broken cask. I was the storm itself, wild and exultant—and somewhere deep in the center, cold and still.
Then a bell tolled—a church bell? A bell buoy?—and the kiss ended. He lifted my left hand. “Your ring! You’re not wearing your ring! Did you lose it? Did you leave it in the desk drawer again? You must wear it. Promise me you will.”
“I promise,” I whispered.
“I’ll come back to you, Windy,” said the man. “I promise too. Nothing will stop me. Not even death.” He took my hands in his cold hands and squeezed them. The bell stopped tolling, and he was gone.
I sat up in bed, shivering. What a dream! I rubbed my eyes.
My finger felt empty, the way it does when you’ve been wearing a ring for a few days and then you take it off. I got out of bed, wincing at the cold floor, and went over to the desk. What drawer? I opened them all in the moonlight, more and more frantically. My ring! I needed my ring! What ring? I thought with part of my mind, but some other part seemed to know. That was the part that found the false bottom in the left-hand drawer and pulled out a little leather box. A silver ring gleamed inside. I slipped it on and sighed.
• • •
I was chilled through and too freaked out to stay in my room, so I pulled on my bathrobe and crept downstairs, the bare wood floor cold and creaking under my feet.
Cousin Hepzibah was sitting by the kitchen hearth. She had her lap full of the grandmother pants I’d gotten from the woman at the house sale.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d see if I could alter these for you. I noticed your own trousers were getting a little short,” she said.
“Thank you, Cousin Hepzibah! You’re the best.”
“Well, I like to sew. It’s soothing. Here, hold these up to your waist. Yes, that looks about right. You couldn’t sleep either?”
I shook my head. “Crazy dreams.”
“Warm milk?” She started to get up.
“Thanks, I can get it.” I reached down a mug and poured some milk from the saucepan on the stove. “Want more?”
“Yes, please.”
I took her mug and refilled it. As I handed it back to her, she touched the ring.
“This looks antique. May I take a closer look?” she asked. I slipped the ring off my finger. She looked it over and read the inscription inside it: “P.B.T. to H.T.T. Your Heart is my Home.”
“Why, that must be Phineas and Windy! It’s their initials,” she said. “Where did you find it?”
“That’s the weird thing. I just knew where it was—in a secret compartment in the desk drawer. Phineas Toogood was in my dream—if it was a dream. He . . . he kissed me.” I stood still, my fingers to my lips, remembering the kiss.
Cousin Hepzibah shook her head. “Be careful, Sukie,” she said. “It’s dangerous to get too close to a ghost.”
Thinking about Kitty, I knew she was right.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Pirate Toogood’s Treasure
I slept late Sunday morning, but I still woke up tired. My parents had driven to the Brooklyn flea market at dawn without me. So much for my offer to do more.
I helped Cousin Hepzibah get dressed and was making my dad’s cheesy-chive eggs, still half dreaming about that kiss, when someone knocked on the kitchen door, the one that led to the back porch. It was Cole Farley. For some reason, I was really embarrassed to see him.
“Cole!” I choked. “What’s up?”
“Can I come in? I have to talk to you,” he said. “It’s about that pirate.”
“Cole, dear, it’s nice to see you,” said Cousin Hepzibah.
I went back to the stove. “Want some eggs?”
“Sure—that smells good. Listen, you’re never going to believe this! That pirate, Phineas Toogood? He’s my ancestor!”
“Come here, child,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Closer.” He bent down, and she took his chin in her hand, tilting his head this way and that. “Yes, I can see it,” she said at last.
I could too. The cheekbones, the eyes—Cole’s were blue, the dream man’s gray, but the shape was the same. The same long black lashes. The same shining hair, if Cole’s had been longer and pulled back into a ponytail.
Had it all been just a dream after all? Had I dreamed about kissing Cole?
Why would I dream that?
I gave the egg pan an angry shake. My ring clinked on the handle. No, not just a dream—dreams don’t put real rings on your fingers.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I was asking my grandfather about pirates. His family’s been here for generations, so I thought if he’d heard any stories, that would give us a place to start looking for the treasure. And he told me one of our ancestors was a pirate! Not my great-great-great-whatever-grandfather, but one of his brothers. Grandpa tells great stories about our family, but I never heard that one before.”
“How do you know it was Phineas, though?” I spooned the eggs onto three plates.
“That�
�s the part you’re not going to believe,” Cole said. “Look!” He lifted his right hand. He was wearing a silver ring.
I raised my eyebrows.
He took the ring off and handed it to me. It felt cold, just like mine. “Read the inscription,” he said.
I squinted inside the ring. In scrolling letters it said H.T.T. to P.B.T. Your Heart is my Home.
“What?! This is incredible! Look!” I handed the ring to Cousin Hepzibah so she could read it.
“Where did you get this?” I asked Cole.
“That’s—well, that’s the crazy part. I had this dream last night . . .” Was he blushing? “About this lady. She looked just like Spooky—like Sukie, I mean—only she was in her twenties, maybe, and wearing these old-fashioned clothes. Really old-fashioned, not just grandma pants.”
I glanced down at my legs. He wasn’t being mean about my new old pants, was he? I thought Cousin Hepzibah had done a great job making them look normal.
Cole went on. “And she told me to wear my ring, and then she . . . well, then I woke up. And I went straight to the fireside cupboard in the old part of the house—our house is really old, like yours, only of course it’s way, way smaller than yours—and I found this ring sitting in a bowl. It had to have been there for ages—the bowl was covered in dust. It was like I knew exactly what I was looking for, even though I didn’t. I know that sounds crazy. You don’t have to believe me.”
Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “I believe you,” I told Cole. “I mean, it’s hard to believe, but I know you’re telling the truth.” I handed him my own ring. “See? Something similar happened to me.”
• • •
Cole took the news that we were both descended from ghosts way more calmly than I expected. “I always knew you were special, Spooky,” he said. “This just proves it. And of course I always knew I was special myself.” He gave that grin of his.
No, the person who freaked out was Kitty—enough to make her appear for the first time since our fight. She hovered beside me, glaring daggers at Cole.
Kitty still saw him as the obnoxious boy who’d teased me in school. She didn’t seem to care that he’d invited me to join his lab group, helped me make friends with Lola, and stuck by me at the risk of alienating his friends. She didn’t care that our zillion-greats-aunt had been married to Cole’s zillion-greats-uncle, or even that Cousin Hepzibah liked him. Cole Farley was not my friend, Kitty insisted. If I didn’t send him away, someone was going to get hurt.
I ducked into the pantry and hissed at Kitty. “Stop it, Kitty! I told you, you need to back off! I’m not a baby anymore, I can take care of myself, and you’re wrong about Cole!”
Kitty glared again and vanished with a snap, knocking over a plate.
Her rant made me realize how much I had changed my mind about Cole over the past few weeks. Sure, he could sometimes sound obnoxious and full of himself. But everything he actually did was pretty decent.
He even washed the cheesy-chive egg plates.
After that, the two of us went up to the library to hunt some more for treasure maps.
“Wow! So this is where you get all those weird old books,” said Cole, pulling down a copy of The Water-Witch by James Fenimore Cooper and flipping through it. “Have you read this one?”
“No,” I said. “But can you help me look through these papers?”
“In a minute. Where are the books you’ve been reading?”
I pointed to the shelf of Laetitia Flint novels. He pulled one down and began leafing through it.
“Come on, Cole! The map’s not going to be in a book.”
“It could be. There’s a map in this one. Look.”
It was Flint’s A Lady’s Travels through the Apennines, with Additional Views of the Tuscan Hills. He was pointing to a map of Italy. “That’s not a pirate map,” I objected. “It’s not even of America. And why would a pirate’s treasure map get printed in a book?”
“Maybe it’s not printed—maybe somebody stuck it in between the pages. I always hide things in books,” he said. “Nobody ever looks there.”
“Maybe.” I sighed. “This is feeling kind of pointless anyway. I already looked through most of the papers, and I didn’t find anything. I doubt it’s even here at all. Wouldn’t your family have it, not mine? Maybe in the old part of your house, where you found Phinny’s ring? He died after Windy did, and her family hated him. He could have sent the map back to his own family, couldn’t he? If there even is a map.”
But Cole wasn’t listening. “Look at this, Spooky!” he said. “This book—it’s about them!”
“Them who?”
“Phinny and Windy! Our ancestors!”
“Let me see that!” It was Flint’s Last Works: Being a Collection of Unpublished Stories, Poems, and Meditations by Miss Laetitia Flint, Along with Her Last Novel, Pirate Toogood’s Treasure, Left Unfinished at Her Death.
“Look at that last part, Pirate Toogood’s Treasure,” he said. “It’s about them!”
“Are you serious? That’s incredible! Where? Show me!”
He flipped to it and handed me the book. The novel began in Flint’s distinctive overwrought style. “A fierce wind tore at the trim bonnet and tidy skirts of Miss Hepzibah Thorne,” I read, “as she leaned precariously against the railing of the lookout atop the Thorne Mansion, a structure termed by our quaint New England ancestors so poetically—and here, so ominously!—a Widow’s Walk. She shaded her eyes and peered anxiously at the horizon, seeking in vain the sails of her betrothed: honest Phineas Toogood.”
Cole and I stared at each other.
“What are they doing in a novel?” said Cole. “I could understand if it was a history book or something, but this is supposed to be fiction!”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “But I think I know someone who does.”
• • •
I rang the little silver bell that Andre had given me. Almost immediately the library phone—the old candlestick style that gangsters use in Prohibition movies—let out a startling trill. I held the cone-shaped earpiece to my ear and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Hello?”
“Sukie? Is that you?” Andre’s vowels boomed and his consonants buzzed, but I could understand his words clearly enough.
“Yes, it’s me. Wow, you called me back fast!”
“Yes, I’m using the John Murray phone. It’s from a ghost story where the dead guy doesn’t need a standard telephone connection to make calls.”
“Oh, I see. So you’re in the repository. Are you with Elizabeth?”
“No, I’m home in Harlem. I borrowed the Murray phone in case you rang. What’s up? How’ve you been?”
Where to begin? “You know the author Laetitia Flint?”
“Sure,” Andre said. “She wrote the story that house you found for us is from, remember?”
“Right. Does the repository have any more of her things?”
“Uh-huh, lots. She was one prolific lady.”
“Anything from her last novel, the one she didn’t finish?”
“That’s the one with the pirates, right? I’m pretty sure we’ve got the pirate’s compass. Maybe other stuff too—I can check. Why? You didn’t find the house, did you? If you did, Libbet’s going to freak!”
“It’s not just the house. It’s me! I think I’m descended from the characters!”
Andre whistled. “That is crazy! Why do you think so?”
“Because I live in the house! The Thorne Mansion!” I told him Cousin Hepzibah’s story about Windy and Phinny and how Cole found them in the Flint book. “You believe me, right? I swear, Cousin Hepzibah isn’t confusing the family history with the story in the book. She’s pretty old, but her memory’s fine. And besides, I’ve seen their ghosts myself. And so has Cole!”
“Are you home? Stay there. We’re on our way.”
• • •
Andre and Elizabeth arrived almost before I had time to explain them to Cole—and definitely before he had time to accept the concept of a library full of haunted houses. “If the houses are from books, how do they get out of the books?” he wanted to know.
“I have no idea. Same way we did, maybe? Apparently we’re from a book too. I know, this sounds totally insane, but I swear, it’s true. You’ll see when you meet them.”
The doorbell sighed its melancholy chime.
“There they are now,” I said, hauling the window open and sticking my head out. “Hang on, I’m coming.”
Cousin Hepzibah was sitting by her usual window in the drawing room, tatting lace. “Wasn’t that the doorbell? Are you expecting guests?” she asked me.
“Yes, I’m about to go let them in. They want to talk to us about the house. I hope that’s okay.”
“Not more people trying to buy it!” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Do they want to tear it down too?”
“No, if anything they would want to preserve it. I think you’ll like them.”
“I’m sure I will, if you do. But I’m not selling the house.”
“That’s all right—they’re not here for that. They’re here to talk about our history and help us look for the treasure.”
“All right,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “You can show them in. Just give me a hand, will you, child?” Cole helped her out of her chair while I went to open the door.
Griffin was standing on the doormat. He licked my hand politely and wagged what would have been his tail, if he’d had one.
“Hi, Sukie!” Elizabeth was carrying her walking stick. She looked elegant in riding boots and a tweed skirt and jacket, her hair curling around her face in tendrils as if she’d been riding through mist and wind—which, I reflected, she probably had.
“Is that a Hawthorne stick?” I asked. “That witches ride on?”
“Good guess! Yes, this one’s from the short story ‘Young Goodman Brown.’”
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