Pieces of Hate (A Wendover House Mystery Book 4) Read online

  Pieces of Hate

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.1 – August, 2012

  Published by Brian Jackson at KDP

  Copyright © 2012 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at www.melaniejackson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Prologue

  My eyes opened, looking for danger before my conscious mind knew I was alarmed. There was a moment of disorientation before I realized that I was in my great-grandfather’s colonial bed with only the light from my watch and the wind for company.

  The fire I had lit before bed had burned down, leaving only the faint smell of soot. The moon was near full, but still obscured by clouds so there was no more than a faint glow to show me where the windows were.

  I listened. I looked at the shades of black. Nothing was there. Nothing at all. Whatever I had thought I heard or felt, it wasn’t real.

  A flash at the corner of my eye. I rolled my head. Light on the window—strobing, distant. The lighthouse of Goose Haven, I realized. Could that be what had awakened me?

  I got out of bed. I didn’t tiptoe but I walked softly. My socks were still on and they helped muffle my steps when I left the rug beside the bed. Down the stairs I went, cellphone in one hand and lamp in the other. I walked to one side of the steps, hoping it would minimize creaking. No one was there, of course. But still I wanted to be silent.

  Step. Listen. Step. Listen. I stopped on the landing and held my breath. But there wasn’t the smallest sound beyond the wind razoring through the garden and the last violent spatters of rain at the uncurtained window and the thudding of my heart. The house and I held our breath and shuddered at the brief assault, but nothing else happened.

  Ghosts, I thought again, but banished the word immediately. I was ashamed it even crossed my mind, and the violence with which I rejected the possibility showed me how frightened I really was.

  Down the steps I went on tiptoe until I reached the bottom. Then I smelled it. Felt it. Saw it in the lamp’s brief, wavering light. Fresh air, a small drought creeping over the floor and then up my body as it encountered the obstacle of my legs and decided to explore my trembling body.

  It was coming from the kitchen.

  My eyes finally opened and I wondered groggily why I had been dreaming of my first night in Wendover House and what had woken me.

  Nature answered with a violent flash of light which left a steady, luminescent glow in my window that was obvious even in the rain.

  Which had not been predicted. We were supposed to be enjoying clear skies all week.

  “What the devil is that? Kelvin?” I whispered, looking for my cat. As expected, he was gone. Barney whined from the depths of his doggie bed. He didn’t like thunder.

  Sighing, I got to my feet and went to the window to see how bad the storm was and what was causing the weird greenish glow. The storm was strong and heavy with rain, though the wind wasn’t all that forceful. Perhaps my heavy-headed hydrangeas would survive.

  There was indeed a strange grayish-green glow coming from the beach, which was bright even though it was raining like something from the Old Testament.

  “What do you think?”

  Storms in the islands mean something—and not just that the weatherman has goofed again. Storms are omens and harbingers. On an island, evil and good fortune both arrive by sea. I pay special attention to bad weather. It rarely brings the kind of messages that come with candy and flowers.

  It seemed an appropriate moment, so I said a quick prayer of thanks that the house now had electricity. The situation was uncanny enough without creeping around by candlelight.

  I didn’t dress, but the bathrobe was ignored in favor of a raincoat. Slippers were traded for rain boots. Armed with a flashlight, I headed for the bedroom door. Barney galloped after me, less as a gallant protector than as one seeking protection.

  “Kelvin!” I called and was not surprised to hear a meow coming from the front door.

  The house is old, its doors and windows heavy. The hinges didn’t shriek as I pulled the door open, but it felt like they should have.

  Barney doesn’t like storms but when Kelvin darted out, Barney followed. The one with the flashlight and bad eyesight brought up the rear.

  Rot and ozone. The smell of damnation.

  I’m agnostic about a lot of things but have always believed in statistics. The average freak factor for the “impossible” on the island was ten for ten. Something was happening down on the beach.

  I had hoped to see a light at either of the two cottages below, indicating that someone else was awake. Ben or even Mary would be very welcome just then. But both houses were dark, so the three of us were left to make our way to the beach.

  The glow began to fade just as I passed Ben’s cottage. It was hardly evident when I finally reached the stony beach. All that was left to mark the spot was a small chest—about the size of a large jewelry box—encrusted with barnacles. And as I knelt, the unseasonably cold water drumming on my head in a painful manner, the last of the green light died.

  The box was filthy and I didn’t want to touch it. Because it was filthy. And because I just didn’t want to touch it.

  But if I left it to fetch some rags to wrap it in, would the tide haul it away again?

  As I said, storms in the islands mean something. They are harbingers and omens. Ignore them at your peril.

  Muttering under my breath, I pulled off my coat and wrapped the box in it. I had to wrestle with the strange seaweed trailing out of the surf that clung to it like a stubborn octopus. By the time it was free, my nightgown was giving a great impression of being my second skin, huddling as close as it could to my shivering body as the rain attacked it.

  “Come on, guys,” I said, turning to go back up the hill. “I’m getting soaked here.”

  As though only just noticing his wet fur, Kelvin streaked for the house. Barney doesn’t streak so he trotted beside me as I jogged up the trail to the shelter of the family home. In my arms, the box felt warm and smelled unpleasantly of dead things.

  “What the hell are you?” I asked it.

  Chapter 1

  I prospered in love and found the perfect wyfe. Tales of the family and island are queer and abundant, but the protection they offer suits. And she is a comely woman for all her strangeness and styll young enough to bear children yet so it may be that I shall have a son.

  —from the unbound journal of Halfbeard

  To stave off feelings of uselessness, I had started writing a blog that spring about island life—wildlife, regional stories, seafaring songs, and legends. It was unedited by a third party so people were getting me without any grammatical intervention. A couple of historical groups had picked me up anyway and I had gained a nice following of loyal readers. Voluntary donations weren’t making me rich but they paid for blueberry pie and coffee. Once in a while someone would contact me about writing a freelance piece for some online magazine or periodical. Things were working out.

  Except I hadn’t written a word all that week.

  It was to be hoped that when the encrustations were scraped away there would be something interesting underneath the living muck—a cache of ammunition from a warship, a map box, maybe some kind of top secret dispatch left over from the war. Or a … an anything
that I could turn into a story because I was running on creative fumes and coffee, and the java had just given out and the ferry didn’t come until Tuesday.

  It wasn’t that there were no more stories to tell about Little Goose, but good taste and a continuing desire for privacy for myself and my neighbors had kept me from delving too deeply into my family’s private experiences, especially the occult ones, though they were by far the most colorful, even lurid, subject I could imagine. However, telling their stories would bring out the kooks—the paranormal investigators and treasure hunters. Worse, any talk about a sea monster could bring marine biologists, legitimate scientists that could attract legitimate and popular media. So I was down to migrating puffins and porpoises and cranberry bogs, none of which interested me particularly.

  A smart woman wouldn’t have brought the box home. Except…. Well, I just couldn’t have left it behind. It could have anything in it and who could resist such a mystery? Still, I didn’t want to touch the box myself. It was somehow sinister and personally threatening. Even if it had arrived on a silver salver carried by a butler straight off the Queen Mary, I wouldn’t have liked it. Fortunately other people aren’t as squeamish.

  As soon as it was a decent hour I would call my neighbor, Ben Livingston. He was a thriller writer and this sort of thing was his meat and potatoes. He would probably be enthusiastic about scraping the disgusting barnacles off the box and seeing what was inside. Ben wasn’t plagued by intuition.

  To entertain myself while I waited, I got out my digital camera and took some pictures of the box. To add drama I propped a damask pillow up behind the box where it sat dripping on the kitchen counter.

  6:02.

  Finally I went back to the library and pretended to dust the bookshelves.

  The hands of the library clock finally worked themselves around to the seven and I felt that I could finally summon my neighbor who was usually an early riser. Barney and Kelvin had finished breakfast and were having a nap—I fear that Kelvin’s sleeping habits have rubbed off on the dog—but Kelvin’s ears twitched when I picked up the phone, telling me that he was at least in part still tuned in to the waking world.

  “Hi, Ben.”

  “Good morning. Quite a storm last night.” His voice was scratchy with disuse, but he seemed alert and not freaked out by seeing weird lights.

  People in the islands have embraced a sort of fatalism about the unpredictable weather even when it conflicts with other, more widely held ideologies of science and reason. Stuff just happens here.

  Or maybe he had slept through the greenish glowing stuff.

  “Yes, it was. And it washed up something strange on the beach.”

  “Not a body, I trust.” He wasn’t joking. There had been a body last January.

  “Nope. Some kind of small chest all crusted over with barnacles and things. I thought, since it could be Davy Jones’ locker or something, that maybe you would want to be here when I open it.” That was supposed to be a joke but I knew the moment the words left my mouth that Ben wouldn’t take it that way.

  “Absolutely. I’m on my wa—” The line went dead before he finished speaking. No time to ask him to bring coffee.

  I stared at my phone for a moment and then turned it off. I was hoping that he didn’t really expect Davy Jones’ locker.

  Since I had no more coffee, I went to make some tea. Fortunately, I had some scones from the day before. One needed to feed the help as they labored or they sometimes stopped and went away.

  Ben arrived before the water boiled or even got properly hot. His presence woke Kelvin and Barney. Kelvin was mostly indifferent to his arrival but Barney was excited to see him.

  “Where is it?” Ben asked, barely stopping to pet Barney, which left my dog baffled. What could be more important than petting him?

  “In the kitchen.”

  Ben didn’t wait for me to finish but strode toward the back of the house. He was breathing hard but that might be because he had run uphill. The island is a sort of tilted slab and the houses built like the old-style motte and bailey—with my house being the motte and the ocean being the really big moat that protected us.

  Ben took the slimy box over to the sink, and ignoring the rubber gloves and more forceful of the tools I had laid out for him, began using a putty knife on the bulging corner. Handling the small chest did not seem to bother him. I found it to be repellant. It was filthy, leaking black ichor, and unnaturally warm. My stained coat was soaking in the bathtub. If it didn’t come clean I planned to throw it away. I might throw it out anyway. It felt contaminated with some kind of psychic miasma.

  “So what do you think it is?” I asked him. “A map box? A gun locker?”

  Ben’s grunt could indicate anything, but after a moment of silence he looked up briefly. His eyes were shining and I began to feel trepidation. Ben gets excited about things that are almost always troublesome for me.

  “I’ve been doing some research on your seafaring ancestors and I have some pretty high hopes,” he said. I knew he had been heavily involved in research the last month or so, but not that it involved my family.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been looking at both Abercrombie, who died when the Terminar went down, and his son-in-law, Nicholas Robert Wendover. I haven’t got definitive proof yet, but I believe Nicholas was really Robert Johnson, a.k.a. Robert Halfbeard, so called because an accident with some gunpowder left him unable to grow hair on half his face. He was wanted for robbery and criminal violence on the sea for the short time he sailed with Black Bart’s flotilla. I think he was guilty of other crimes as well.”

  If the man had been a pirate, that went without saying. The idea was not a new one. Harris had mentioned a brigand in the family on our first visit to the island.

  “That must have been a unique look.” I didn’t ask about Black Bart. I knew the story would be forthcoming if the box didn’t open quickly. Ben liked to lecture and stories grew rapidly when they took root in the midden of Ben’s devious mind.

  “He abandoned his remaining facial hair almost immediately but the name stuck,” Ben answered, putting down the knife, which hadn’t been of much use, and picking up an upholstery hammer began tapping the shells away with more patience than I had imagined him capable of showing. “I haven’t found out much about his early life, but his ship, the Calmare, came to a bad end right after he gave up his captaincy.”

  “What happened?” I pulled the plate of scones closer to me and tried to remember where the first aid box was. Ben was already dripping blood from his knuckles and fingertips. So far none had gotten on the box but I was afraid it eventually would. That seemed like a bad thing, though the chances of this box actually belonging to someone on the ship seemed slim.

  “The ship went down in rough water with all hands aboard just off the Massachusetts coast. There were no known survivors and no wreckage was ever found. She wasn’t huge, a single-masted sloop with fourteen guns, but she wasn’t a small fishing boat either. There should have been some sign of her if the ship was destroyed.”

  I shivered.

  “If there were no survivors then how do we know the waters were rough? Or that it even sank?” I asked.

  “The captain of the Acabar logged seeing the Calmare the day previously so we know she was in the general area. Captain Darby—the former first mate—had stated to Nicholas Johnson when they laid on supplies his intention to sail for Boston on September ninth, so there is little chance that they were too far off the coast. They never made it to Boston—and records for other ships and those on land do not mention any storms except off the coast where New Hampshire butts up against Massachusetts. Sometime either on the night of the ninth or the morning of the tenth, the ship disappeared and was never seen again.”

  “Hm. Okay. I guess I’ll swallow that. Could it have been an accident or sabotage? Some drunken cook or an insane crewmember who was flogged once too often and set the thing on fire out of revenge?”

  “Maybe
, but no one on shore saw a fire and they should have, even with rain. I mean, it would have been one hell of a bonfire and pretty close to shore. But no one saw a thing.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t think it was sabotage and of course they didn’t deliberately fire the ship with everyone still aboard. If they were still aboard,” he added to himself. “And they must have been. There are no records of the crew being seen again.”

  “So what then?”

  “There aren’t a lot of accounts outside of legal documents accusing Halfbeard of piracy, of course, but Halfbeard seems to have been a decent captain if a reprehensible human being. Very egalitarian and fair with splitting up the shares. Not particularly fond of the lash. He let the men drink. He also lacked imagination so unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he was not frightened by tall tales of sea monsters and ghost ships. It kept the crew calm.”

  “And so?” I wondered if he would ever get to the point and then asked myself if I really wanted him to. Sometimes, when I dine on the wrong kind of information, it gives me indigestion in the form of nightmares.

  “Darby was another matter. He tended to drink and when inebriated, he claimed to have the sight.”

  “How stupid of him to admit it, if it was true. And even if it wasn’t. Sailors were a superstitious lot.” Even I knew this much.

  “And by that point they already had reason to be fearful.”

  One by one the barnacles were surrendering their hold. I hoped that Ben would be willing to take them out to the back garden and throw them over the wall. I was sure that they were unwholesome.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Ben said with satisfaction. The box was wood, plain with iron hasps that had not rusted. The wood would indicate that the box was old, but the lack of rust was disappointing. If the hinges were stainless steel then it was modern.

  “Why were they frightened? Beyond the obvious dangers of drowning, hanging, and fatal diseases?”