Pieces of Hate (A Wendover House Mystery Book 4) Page 4

  My knees were stiff as I got to my feet and crossed the room to the window where the rain tapped with impatient fingers. The curtains were heavy and resisted drawing back as if they didn’t want me looking out at the night. I insisted and eventually stared out of the narrow opening in the fabric and saw that the wind was rearranging my yard, decorating it with loose leaves and twigs and pulling the seed heads off dying shrubs. Almost the instant I drew the curtain aside, the wind began attacking the glass from different directions as though trying to find a way inside and when thwarted, punishing me by cutting off my line of sight with blown leaves and debris. I told myself that this was like watching a horror movie with really high production values. The thought didn’t make me feel any better.

  The house shivered, as though it were aware of outside danger and quaking on its foundations.

  Locals think that I control the weather, but I don’t.

  I let the curtain fall shut and turned back to my four-legged friends.

  “Let’s read,” I said to Kelvin, who didn’t bother to look away from the door though Barney wagged his tail hopefully. He likes when I talk to him.

  I knew what Kelvin wanted. He likes to roam the house at night, but this was one of the times when I wanted my door closed and locked against the dark and storm.

  Chapter 3

  In our hearts we knew tempest impended and the crew grew gloomy in mynd. Every nyght when evening came and the storm grew even darker, a strange cloud of mist would form about the ship. It affrighted me and the men and we always made to outrun it. We kept watch at all tymes, burning the oil for the lamps most recklessly because we feared the dark.

  —from the unbound journal of Halfbeard

  Ben was just back from the mainland at first light and excited enough to call. The joy was because his friend was doing tests to confirm that the box, the bones, and the gold were all what they thought they were.

  I tried for an encouraging tone but it was hard when I had no coffee, and I was aware that in my distraction over the box I had forgotten to call and add it to the grocery order that was being delivered. Ben finally admitted that he hadn’t slept and could use a nap, so we wrapped things up and I went to make some tea.

  Hearing the ferry only a short time later and being recalled to the present reality of an empty larder, I grabbed my purse and hurried for the dock. I wasn’t really pulled together, but we don’t have a lot of fashion plates in the islands and all the basic grooming was covered.

  Barney was following closely as he always does, so I detoured by Ben’s, hoping he wasn’t asleep already.

  I climbed up Ben’s path and stuck my head in the open door and called to him, asking if Barney could stay while I made a coffee run.

  A bleary-eyed Ben agreed but then asked, “Isn’t that the ferry now?”

  “Yes, and I forgot to add coffee to my order. I’ve got to catch a ride now. If you are sure Barney won’t keep you up.”

  “Oh well, in an emergency I can make do, right, dog? Anyway, he looks like he needs a nap.” He smiled at Barney who thumped his tail.

  “Thanks!”

  Barney, who is used to staying with Ben, didn’t follow me to the docks.

  I groped for my sunglasses. The morning sky was low and a bit hard on the eyes. The directionless haze glared painfully as the sun slowly gnawed its way through the obstinate clouds. I thought it looked like a migraine headache.

  I was also repelled by the strange-looking seaweed that was draped along the path. The storm had to have brought it ashore, but how hard did a wind have to blow to force rotting vegetation up a stony path?

  “Captain Sibley,” I said, managing a smile for him though I knew none would be returned. “Just leave the parcels on the dock. We’ll get them later. I need a ride into Goose Haven, if you’ll have me.”

  “Ayuh? Come aboard then.”

  Our conversations always scintillated.

  I had a few bad moments on the ride to Goose Haven and admit that I wouldn’t have been surprised if a kraken had risen up from the deep and attacked us, but of course nothing happened. My subconscious was certain though that some tide had shifted. And not for the better. For the first time since I had come to the islands I was afraid, not just cautious, of the ocean. Samuel Johnston came to mind. It was his opinion that being on a ship was like being in jail only with the added hazard of drowning.

  The theme of my thoughts was insistently recurrent. Certainly these were not waters I wanted to go swimming in, so I stayed back from the rail and hummed Bach under my breath.

  The humming helped, but the unease never quite left me and it was a relief to get land under my legs again. I headed for Mike’s chowder house with enthusiasm. I was looking for Bryson and knew that since it was Tuesday he was likely there for lunch. They get their blueberry pies on Monday afternoon and it is better after it has had a chance to set overnight.

  I was also in luck because Mike had just taken his various barbecued sea bugs off the menu and the seafood and charcoal smog that surrounded the chowder house in August had abated. You didn’t have to like shellfish to live here, but to avoid eating it was seen as shirking one’s civic duty. Now all I had to avoid was the breakfast special of fishcakes and hot donuts. If worse came to worst, there was always cabbage soup, the most exotic thing on the menu year round and sometimes the only thing without fish.

  Tuesday isn’t a popular day for lunching out so the chowder house wasn’t busy. In fact, it was about as lively as a funeral parlor, I thought, and then almost tripped over my own feet when I saw who was dining there. Other than Bryson the only other customer was Jonas Traynor who runs a mortuary on the mainland. He looks very New England—lean, standing straight as a church steeple and pointing the way to heaven. There is another undertaker in the islands but the Catholics prefer to use Jonas. That he was on Great Goose instead of in his parlor likely meant that someone of that faith had died.

  I cast my mind back to the latest gossip and recalled that old Mrs. Tudor had been sick with pneumonia. I knew her slightly, mostly because of her volunteer work at the museum and intense menthol smell that always followed her. No one else was ill and I had heard nothing of any accidents, so it probably was Elmira Tudor who had departed this vale of Vicks VapoRub.

  “Miss MacKay.” He nodded once with great solemnity.

  “Mister Traynor.”

  We exchanged nods but didn’t shake hands or—heaven forbid—hug. People around here didn’t as a rule and that was a relief.

  Of course, I couldn’t actually smell death on him, but seeing Traynor in his quasi-religious garb and perpetually grim face caused a certain low-level anxiety which I didn’t need, being full up on things to be anxious about already. Hopefully coffee and Bryson’s calm presence would override my imagination which insisted the cold odor of the mortuary was condensing on the back of my neck as I walked away from the undertaker.

  “Tess,” Bryson acknowledged as I joined him at his table which was hovered over by a fishing net and an antique lobster cage. The remains of a bowl of chowder sat in front of him. He looked pleased but not especially surprised to see me. Which he should have been, since I don’t usually leave the island on Tuesdays and certainly not to go to the chowder house for lunch.

  “Mrs. Tudor?” I asked softly, jerking my head in Traynor’s direction.

  Bryson nodded.

  “Yes, she passed last night during the storm. Poor thing was delirious with fever and raving about pirate ships.”

  I shuddered at the unexpected words. Bryson saw this and raised a brow.

  “Poor thing,” I said. “Not an easy passing then. Was Father Hanlon there?”

  “No. The storm was too bad so she had no one there to keep the evil at bay—except Reverend Burnes, of course, but the family didn’t send for him.”

  Burnes or visions of pirates. Talk about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Personally, I thought they had made the right choice.

  Bryson
offered me the newspaper he was reading but I declined. Anything except the local made the outside world sound like it was locked into a death spiral. And maybe it was, but since there was nothing I could do about it, I preferred blissful ignorance.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, folding it up and laying it aside. “It’s all depressing. Frankly, I can’t believe you used to own a newspaper. It would probably make me slit my wrists seeing all that bad news on my desk first thing in the morning.”

  I didn’t think his desk at the station could be covered in good news, but said nothing about that.

  “It wasn’t a very good newspaper. In fact, it had no news at all. People preferred it that way.”

  We had discussed this matter before. It seemed like our country had been infected with some autoimmune disease (greed and fear) that first made the government (lackeys of wealthy corporations) attack society and then society attack itself. And none of us wanted to admit that the damned disease had metastasized and was getting worse, so we lived on the surface and grew ever more distant from each other even though every month we were offered more options for our phones and internet. After all, though we ate the same breakfast cereal, wore the same jeans, and listened to Nat King Cole at Christmas, someone living in the heart of big-city urban blight wouldn’t have the same kinds of thoughts and worries as a farmer facing drought in the Midwest. Some people had to worry about gangbangers and drugs killing their children, others worried about crop circles and alien invasions of the outer-space variety killing their cows and corn. Hawaii isn’t Minnesota. New Mexico isn’t New Hampshire. And none of them were a coastal island in Maine where people still believed in sea monsters and pirates. Our experiment in national unity was falling apart. The technologies of television and the internet that were supposed to bring us together were instead pushing us apart with lies and mass hysteria.

  Not that they were completely unified on every front here in the islands. There are folks who eat and drink the usual racist swill and store it up in the unventilated chambers of their narrow minds, but much more than skin color or religion, the location and family of your birth are what matters. To them, Catholics like Mr. Traynor and Mrs. Tudor would always be outsiders though the families had been there a century and more.

  “I did want to be nosy about something else though, if you have the time.”

  Bryson’s lips twitched.

  “Go ahead and take a pew. I am always available to the public.”

  I tucked myself in to the booth and thought about what to ask. I decided not to lead with the storm and the creepy chest left on the beach. It tied in a little too well with Mrs. Tudor’s delirium.

  “What the heck is Mary doing that she has bright red paint in her hair and needs a stud finder?”

  Bryson chuckled. “I’m tempted to make up something here. The real answer is kind of mundane.”

  “If you make it up it’ll have to be good because I already have placed her in an S&M parlor with one of those sex swings.”

  “Mary Cory in a sex swing? Your imagination is better than mine. And speaking of imagination, Tess….”

  He wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

  “Yes, it was a freaky storm,” I said. “Two freaky storms. No, I didn’t cause them—didn’t even know they were coming. Yes, there was a box on the beach and it might have belonged to a pirate. No, I don’t have it. Ben’s taken it to a maritime museum to make sure it isn’t a fake.”

  Bryson frowned at me.

  “In another era—”

  “They’d hang me for a witch,” I finished. We had both been thinking of Miss Marple and The Murder at the Vicarage, but since I had an ancestor who had been hanged for a witch, the reference was ill-chosen. “Is there anything you want to tell me, any colorful stories about the pirate who married into the family that Harris might have forgotten to mention and Ben hasn’t dug up yet?”

  Bryson hesitated.

  “Was he a pirate? I’ve always wondered if the stories were true. Kind of hoped they weren’t, given some of the legends.”

  That wasn’t promising.

  “Ben sure thinks they’re true. He has me pouring through the attic’s boxes of books and papers looking for proof that Nicholas Wendover was some pirate called Halfbeard.”

  Bryson shook his head.

  “What are you going to do about the box? If it’s real?”

  “Need I do anything about it?” I asked. “Why not just keep it?”

  Bryson raised a brow.

  I wanted to stare him down but he was right, something would have to be done eventually if the thing was the genuine article. I couldn’t stand the creepy feeling I had when the sun went down and the wind began to blow, which I feared it would keep doing as long as the box was around. And the box itself was made of some concentrated repellant. “First I need to find out what is really going on with the damned thing because it just doesn’t feel like a regular old box to me. Did Kelvin know about the thing?” And the pieces of hate within it?

  “Well….” Bryson hesitated, glancing around the restaurant. A man in law enforcement, wearing a gun, should not look that nervous.

  My brain began leaping to conclusions. This box thing had probably happened before. Like when my grandmother still lived here? Had it been part of the reason that my grandmother fled the island? I didn’t know the exact date she left, only that it was at the end of September. The timing was suspicious though I suppose she might just have wanted to beat the winter so her escape would not be dogged with weather disasters.

  And Kelvin? Had he faked his death and fled for the same reason? Had he feared this anniversary enough to flee it? I had thought that I had his disappearing act figured out, but maybe not.

  “I think he knew, though he never said anything directly. I think whenever it washed up—every decade or so—he just chucked it back again and then he’d go on a three-day drunk.” I stared at Bryson, trying to recall what I’d asked. The box—right. Had Kelvin known about it?

  “But it keeps coming back?” I asked unhappily.

  “Yes. Apparently so.”

  “Did he open it? Did he say what was inside?”

  “He never said anything to me. Or Everett. That I know of. I’ll talk to my brother tonight. He was closer to your great-grandfather than I was and maybe Everett had the truth out of him.”

  “Hmph.”

  There was an awful lot that my great-grandfather hadn’t said about all kinds of things I really needed to know. And as for the truth, especially the old truths, it was usually not that obvious or easily found. Around here it was an elusive commodity, hiding itself in shadowy nooks and crannies where it was hard to find.

  I would be surprised to hear that Kelvin had confided anything in Everett Sands though. Bryson’s brother was utterly amoral in the service of his own desires and interests and my great-grandfather knew this. In fact, I had to wonder if Bryson actually liked his brother.

  “So, from this we could conclude that either the box wants to be on land, or the return offerings Kelvin made weren’t being accepted.” I paused, thinking. “Because something was wrong with the way he did it, or with him. Maybe he wasn’t the right person to deal with the box.” Bryson waited for me to go on. “Or something is wrong with the box itself, or with what’s in it. Or because there’s some ritual for box-chucking that I don’t know about, but which must be followed.” The list was getting long and I felt frustrated.

  “Ayuh. You or anyone else.”

  “I sure hope it isn’t a case of needing to track down all the coins the crew spent after they robbed that ship, because it can’t be done. Not after all this time.”

  “Coins?”

  But even as I said this, I wondered if that were true. Ben said that the ship had only let crew ashore once before it made it to Maine and that was for the sailors taken to the hospital in Charleston. Indigent ones, Ben said, who had no coins to pay for their medicine and ended up in pauper’s graves. Had all the rest of the
treasure still been aboard the Calmare when it went down? Or thrown overboard before then, if the crew came to believe that the coins and they were cursed?

  “I can see thoughts spinning like tops in your head,” Bryson said. “It’s attractive in a weird way but rather scares me too.”

  “Who me? I never think. About tops anyway.”

  “Just be careful, Tess, and call me if you get nervous being alone out there. I have a spare room you can use anytime.”

  I have noticed, when trouble comes around to visit, a distinct lack of inclination from the men in my life to offer services any more emphatic in nature than the opportunity to sleep in their spare bedroom or to recommend a good electrician, etc. Not there is much they can do under the strange circumstances that trouble usually manifests itself, but every now and again I forget that I like being a strong, independent woman and wish that some man would take me in his arms and say there, there, little lady. Let me take care of this for you. After all, nothing in my previous life had prepared me for dealing with possibly cursed treasure.

  “Thanks. But I don’t think that I’m in any danger. Not since Ben and his friend have the box somewhere else.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Tess. Seems to me your great-grandfather was plenty scared when that thing turned up and Kelvin knew a lot more about what was going on than anyone else.”

  Actually, I wasn’t all that sure I was safe. Hadn’t I been near panic the whole trip to Great Goose? What if part of the treasure was still in the house and the whatever it was wanted it back? How on earth would I find a small coin or coins if they were hidden? Truth wasn’t the only elusive thing on the island. A lot of concealed rooms and compartments had been found when I had the electrical wiring done, but there were probably a lot more forgotten secrets hidden in Wendover House.

  Mike finally wandered over and we ordered blueberry pie and coffee.

  “Mike, I think you need a swordfish for the wall. I’ll bring you one.”