Looking for a Hero

by Patti Berg

  Perhaps time travel was possible, after all.

  “Watch it, mister,” a red-faced, overfed man barked, when Morgan bumped into him head on.

  “My apologies, sir.” Morgan stared directly into the man’s eyes, wondering if the human anatomy might also have changed over the years, but he saw nothing new or different. What he did see was anger.

  “Do you mind moving out of my way?” the man bellowed.

  “Could you answer one question for me first?” Morgan asked, only to be met with the roll of the man’s eyes.

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “This will take but a moment, sir. Tell me, please…what year are we living in?”

  “Is this a joke or something?” the man asked, laughter making his ample belly bounce beneath the thin shirt he wore close to his skin. “Am I on Candid Camera?”

  “I do not know what you speak of, sir. I merely need to know the year.”

  The man shrugged. “Nineteen ninety-eight. Now, do I get a prize or something?”

  Morgan could only stare as he repeated the year over and over in his head.

  Nineteen ninety-eight.

  “Are you okay?” the man asked.

  Morgan met the man’s concerned eyes. “I am not quite sure. But I thank you for your assistance, sir.”

  In a fog of thought, Morgan walked up the street, the man’s words, the date, swirling through his mind.

  Nineteen ninety-eight.

  He stepped out of the throng of people, walked to the middle of an empty street, and looked at all the amazing things around him.

  He couldn’t help but smile at what he saw, what he felt.

  Bloody hell! It was nearly three hundred years since he’d been knocked over the side of Satan’s Revenge. He did not know how it had happened or why; all he knew was that he needed to share this miraculous occurrence with someone, and the only two people he knew were Kate and her daughter.

  The woman had thought he was mad before. ’Twould be more than a bit interesting to see and hear her reaction when he told her he’d traveled through time.

  Chapter 6

  He had (if ’twere not nature’s boon) an art

  Of fixing memory on another’s heart:

  It was not love perchance—nor hate—nor aught

  That words can image to express the thought;

  But they who saw him did not see in vain,

  And once beheld, would ask of him again…

  LORD BYRON, LARA: CANTO I

  “Oh, my precious ones. I’ve been worried half out of my mind about you.”

  Kate and Casey flew into Evalena’s ample arms and the elderly woman nearly smothered them in her girth, pressing kisses to cheeks and eyes and hair, anything she could reach.

  “My goodness gracious, where on earth have you been? You can’t imagine how many people asked me about you at church this morning, and there was absolutely nothing I could say to them. It’s just so unlike you, Katharine, not to tell me what you’re up to.”

  “I’m sorry, Evie,” Kate offered. “We went to the island.”

  “Treasure hunting?” Evalena asked, eyebrows raised exceedingly high, even for her.

  “Just a picnic,” Kate fibbed, hoping to avoid Evalena’s criticism. “And then we got hit by a hurricane. If we’d known there was going to be a storm we never would have gone, but it came up all of a sudden, out of nowhere.”

  Evalena pushed Kate out to arm’s length and inspected her eyes.

  “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

  “Of course not. What makes you think that?”

  “There’s been no hurricane, and I’ve heard nothing about one on the news. Peaceful and quiet it’s been here.”

  “Well, it was anything but peaceful and quiet on the island, or on the trip home. God, we never should have gone.”

  “It was a big storm, Aunt Evie,” Casey added. “Biggest one I’ve ever seen. Trees were flying everywhere. Even our sailboat flew—right onto the beach. If it hadn’t been for my pirate, we might never have gotten home.”

  Evalena’s eyes narrowed as she looked from Kate to Casey then back again. “I suppose I can accept a hurricane out on that island of yours, although for the life of me, I don’t know why I haven’t heard about it. But a pirate?”

  “He was big and ugly,” Casey answered.

  “Oh, dear, we can’t have that now, can we?” Evalena asked, aiding Kate, eyeing her up and down.

  “Mommy doesn’t like him,” Casey said, following behind her aunt.

  Evalena stopped directly in front of Kate and raised both white eyebrows. “I’m waiting for an explanation, Katharine.”

  Kate wove the fingers of both hands through her hair, wishing she’d gone straight home instead of going to Evie’s. She was tired, dirty, and hungry, and in no mood for one of Evalena’s interrogations. She loved the woman dearly, but Evie made it a point of knowing everything that was going on in the lives of both family and friends, and if nothing was happening, she made an attempt to set something in motion.

  “It was nothing. Honest,” Kate said, crossing the elaborate Victorian drawing room and collapsing in a red and gold brocade loveseat. The blue lovebirds in the cage next to her squawked, ruffled their feathers in unison to let her know they didn’t appreciate the disturbance, then tucked their heads together and ignored the rest of the world. Kate wanted to do exactly the same thing right now, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  When Evalena lifted Casey on to her hip and ambled across the room, Kate knew what was coming. It wasn’t the first time she’d been through her matchmaking aunt’s routine.

  “You know how much I despise being told nothing’s the matter, or nothing’s up, or having anyone use a phrase with the word ‘nothing’ in it. There’s always something, and if you really did meet a pirate, I want all the details.”

  Kate rested her head on the back of the loveseat, looked up at the intricately carved ceiling, and began to count the plaster cupids that circled the room.

  From the corner of her eye, she could see her aunt wiggle into the other half of the S-shaped sofa, and with Casey still in her arms, she leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling, too.

  “There are still twenty-two cupids, twenty-two bows, and twenty-two arrows,” Evalena reminded her. “I long ago grew wise to your attempts to ignore my questions.”

  “I’m not ignoring you, Evie, I’m counting.”

  “That’s what she does when she’s mad about something,” Casey added.

  “Oh, I know full well about her counting. Your mother has a temper, and she’s stubborn as well. She certainly didn’t get that from me. But as I was saying, Katharine, I want to know more about this pirate.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “It’s high time you start talking about someone. I imagine a pirate’s just as good as any other man, especially when you’ve been without one for two and a half years.”

  Kate continued to stare at the cupids, and each one was beginning to look like Evalena. “I’m not interested in settling down again, and I’m definitely not interested in Morgan Farrell.”

  “Ah, a good Irish name.”

  “Irish…English, it doesn’t really matter.” She finally turned to face her aunt’s inquisitive stare. “Would you believe the man actually had a hoop in each ear, a scar down his face, and wore a patch over one eye?”

  “How very intriguing. When are you going to see him again?”

  “Never,” Casey stated. “She told him to drop dead.”

  Evalena’s eyes narrowed. “That’s the same thing you said to that nice Mr. Andrews who asked you out on New Year’s Eve, and remember what happened to him? Died in his sleep that very same night. You’ve got to be careful who you tell to drop dead, Katharine.”

  Kate faced the cupids again, counted the first ten, then turned back to her aunt. “Mr. Andrews was eighty-three years old. On top of that, he didn’t ask me out, he asked himself in, then pulled a
handful of condoms out of his pocket.”

  “What’s a condom, Mommy?”

  “One of those things you’re not ready to know about. Why don’t you go outside and play.”

  “I’d rather listen to you and Aunt Evie.”

  Evalena pushed herself up in the chair, and Casey slid off her lap. “You know, sweetie, you’re the best PB and J maker in the entire city of St. Augustine, and I’m dying for a double. Why don’t you scoot on into the kitchen and make one for each of us?”

  “Okay,” Casey chirped, always eager to please her aunt. “But don’t talk about anything good while I’m gone.”

  When Casey disappeared from the drawing room, Kate moved from the loveseat to the window that faced her home across the street, the rundown Queen Anne she loved, the home she’d shared with Joe.

  She heard Evalena’s slippered feet crossing the hardwood floor, and felt a light, comforting hand on her shoulder. “Joe’s been gone for over two years,” she said softly. “Casey needs a father and you need a husband.”

  “We’re doing fine on our own.”

  “You’re in debt up to your ears.”

  “It won’t last forever.”

  “You should sell some of Joseph’s things, especially that island. He was a saint, bless his soul, but he was much too frivolous with his money, and now you’re suffering. Give some of it up, Katharine.”

  “I can’t. There’s a little bit of Joe in that island, and in everything in the house. If I sell something, I’d feel like I was getting rid of part of him.”

  “He’s tucked away in your heart, right where he ought to be,” Evalena said. “No matter what you do now, that’s not going to change. You’re alive, Katharine. Joseph isn’t, and he’s never going to be ever again. That’s why it’s high time you let him go and find another man.”

  Kate turned, lovingly brushing a hint of confectioner’s sugar from Evalena’s cheek, as she allowed a faint smile to touch her face. “I’m not in the mood for another man and I doubt I ever will be. But if the mood strikes, I want to find him all on my own.”

  “Okay, so what did you like about this pirate? Was he tall, dark, and handsome like Errol Flynn, or did he look more like Blackbeard, with lighted candles sticking out of a mangy growth on his face? What about his voice? Was it sensuous or dull?”

  Kate laughed. Evalena would never give up where the love lives of men and women were concerned. Draping an arm around her aunt’s shoulders, she leaned close and whispered in her ear. “He had only one eye, but it was the color of a cloudless sky, and…and I didn’t see him without his shirt, but I’m absolutely positive his entire body rippled with muscle.”

  “Oh, my.” Evalena clapped a hand to her chest. “You have got to find this pirate of yours and take back every word you said about dying.”

  “I didn’t tell you everything,” Kate added. “He may have the body of Michelangelo’s David, but he prefaces most every sentence with ‘Bloody hell!’”

  “And you use ‘damn,’” Evalena quickly reminded her. “Go on, what other qualities do the two of you share?”

  “None that I know of.” Kate plopped down in the loveseat again. “He’s not my type, Evie.”

  “Well, when you decide to go looking for a hero, Katharine, you’ll have to open your heart to all possibilities.”

  The night was quiet except for the soft brush of palm fronds on the shingles and the voice of Perry Como seeping through the open window in Aunt Evalena’s bedroom across the street. From where she sat on the second-floor balcony, Kate could almost hear Evalena’s rhythmic snores, keeping time with the music she loved. She’d gone to bed with Perry Como every night since her husband had gone off to war in 1943. Harry Beecher had never returned from the shores of Iwo Jima, and Perry had become Evie’s constant companion. Oh, there’d been other men. How could a practicing matchmaker insist that others marry if she herself stayed single?

  There’d been three more husbands: Lou, Jim, and Bill, and according to Evalena, if they didn’t love Perry, they didn’t get to love her. So Como had played on the old hi-fi every night, and Evalena, so she said, wore Lou out, then Jim, then Bill. But Perry never wore out. Like her, he just grew better and better with time.

  Kate wished she’d found it so simple to shift her love from Joe to another man. She’d idolized him as a child, as a teenager, as a young woman. In her eyes he could do nothing wrong. She’d wanted to marry him—and she had, not too long after graduating from high school. She’d never dated anyone else. She’d never wanted to.

  Now she wondered if her love for Joe might have faded with time. It didn’t seem possible, but she’d grown up a lot in the last few years, and she wanted more from life than a constant treasure hunt. She wanted stability, and although she wasn’t the least bit interested in marrying again, she knew if she did, she’d want someone more interested in chasing her than in chasing dreams.

  The warm summer breeze wove through her hair as she listened to Perry’s slow, sultry voice. Closing her eyes, she began to hum with the music, to lyrics about being alone, about being lured on by a smile, and the words wrapped around her like strong, warm arms.

  Damn it, she was lonely…desperately lonely, and Joe’s memory wasn’t the best of company any longer. She hardly remembered the sound of his voice, his laughing eyes, his gentle smile. It was wrong to forget him, wrong to allow someone else into her thoughts.

  Like a one-eyed pirate.

  A man as different from Joe as night and day.

  But temptation, just like the title of Perry’s song, was leading her on. She was lonely and vulnerable, and Casey’s pirate intrigued her.

  He definitely hadn’t lied when he’d said he wasn’t an easy man to forget.

  How could she dismiss him from her mind when he’d looked at her with that one powerful azure eye that had nearly burned a hole through her? How could she concentrate on important matters when all evening long his unforgettable, seductive smile kept creeping into her mind, when every enticing word he’d spoken in that lush English accent rang through her ears?

  Forget about him, she told herself. Just forget him.

  “Good evening, madam.”

  Oh, God!

  Kate leaned forward in the old wicker rocker and peered over the balcony to the lawn below. Morgan Farrell rested a shoulder casually against a palm, arms folded, as always. His now familiar smile softened the hardness of his face. But she wasn’t falling for his attempt at charm.

  “Go away.”

  “I cannot do that. I have walked all over your fair city looking for you. I am tired, I am hungry, and although I hate to admit it, I’m too weak to look for shelter or sustenance elsewhere. It was my fondest hope that—”

  “Hell would have to freeze over before I’d allow you into my home.”

  The laugh she’d grown accustomed to on their journey home from the island rang out. “You have a frozen heart, madam. I would gladly accept that as the closest thing to hell freezing over.”

  “Go away!”

  “That is an impossibility. ’Tis only the palm that supports me, and were I to leave, I daresay I would fall. Is it….” His words trailed off, and his shoulder slipped across the palm before he grabbed onto the prickly trunk. “Is it your wish to have a dead man on your lawn?”

  One leg collapsed beneath him, but again he steadied himself. Slowly he looked up, his face as pale as the moon. “I am much in need of food, madam.” With a shaky hand he drew his cutlass from its scabbard and dropped it to the ground. His pistol and dagger followed. “The jewels on the cutlass are worth at least two fortunes. They are yours, Kate. All I ask….” He drew in a deep breath, swayed dizzily, and rested his cheek against the palm.

  Damn! She didn’t want to help him. She didn’t want him any closer than he was right now.

  Again he looked up at her. The smile was gone from his face, and she could almost hear his silent prayer for help.

  Oh, hell!

  “Don’t move
,” she hollered.

  Pushing through the French doors, she ran across her bedroom and down the hall, and took the stairs two at a time in her rush to get to him. She threw open the etched glass front door, jumped off the edge of the porch, and wrapped her arms around his waist as his body inched its way down to the ground.

  “If you’re going to pass out,” she said, struggling to keep him on his feet, “could you wait and do it inside?”

  A touch of laughter rushed from Casey’s pirate in a pain-filled gasp. Kate could tell he was trying to smile. She could also tell he was suffering as she ducked under his arm to give him support. God, but he was heavy. Still, she maneuvered him across the lawn and up the stairs, and somehow led him to the couch—and dropped him.

  His breathing was raspy, his skin hot and dry, and his one azure eye was now a cloudy blue, ringed with red. She couldn’t just dump him on the sofa, then sit on the stairs with the cutlass held between them until he got better. Someone needed to take care of him, and she didn’t see any volunteers lining up for the job.

  She let out a deep sigh, knowing what she had to do. “I hate to tell you this, Mr. Farrell, but you need to be in bed, not on the sofa.”

  Again he smiled, very faintly. “You are most generous, madam.”