“I don’t remember asking you.”
“Well, if ye don’t want my advice, get to looking for the magistrate’s ancestor and let’s put an end to this.”
“I don’t have any idea how to find the magistrate’s ancestor. I don’t know anyone by that title. I think this is just a waste of time. You should go back where you came from. I don’t think I can help you.”
Rafe nodded at the duck weather vane, and it spun around in the dead quiet of the evening. “That’s enough of your bellyaching, my girl. You’re blood, and you’re making me regret whoever the wench was who begat your line. Think on it, and I’ll look around for some evidence of your own problem. I’m not going anywhere until you’ve cleared my name.”
He disappeared, and I sat down to look up at the stars in the dark sky. They were much brighter without lights around me.
I thought about Rafe being my ancestor—he’d looked at the same October sky I was looking at more than three hundred years ago. I wanted to help him, in a way, because of that link. I wished the circumstances were different. There was so much going on in my life. I needed time to think—alone—and without ghostly pirate interference.
It did occur to me as I tried to untangle everything about my mother and father and Sandi’s murder that I could possibly access information about the magistrate from the Duck Historical Museum Web site. I’d been a member forever but had hardly ever used the knowledge compiled by countless Duck residents down through the years.
I tried not to think about Rafe or about my family’s past. Or about Sandi. But the more I pushed these thoughts away, the more they came back to me. Like Rafe himself. Maybe there was an easy answer to proving his innocence and I wasn’t taking advantage of it. I knew I couldn’t easily unravel the tangled events that had happened between my mother and father thirty-six years ago. I knew I couldn’t do much to help find Sandi’s killer. But maybe I could get rid of my ghostly visitor.
I went downstairs to get on the computer, before remembering there was no power and no Internet. It looked like it was back to the old way for me.
I located an old book Gramps had given me when I was a teenager. It was titled Pirates of the Outer Banks. The pages were well worn from my leafing through it.
There was enough information about the infamous scourge of our area to tantalize but not really to answer questions. There was a grisly wood carving of Rafe hanging from a tree. There were illustrations of his ship and drawings of him. There were paragraphs describing the terrible things he’d done.
But there was no magistrate mentioned. The book referred only to “the law” or “the people,” never to any specific person or officeholder in charge of administering that law. Whoever the magistrate was, he’d had the power to have Rafe arrested and hanged. There weren’t a lot of people like that in those days. The Outer Banks was a lawless area—the governor of Virginia had to send troops to kill Blackbeard.
I wrote down a few names to check out the next day when I could go to the museum. I had to find Mark to see what he knew. His words at the museum about Rafe’s death were tantalizing, but I needed more information.
I tried calling Rafe a few times but got no response. I wanted him to hear the names I’d found in the book and see if any of them sounded familiar. Of course, since I wanted him to come, he didn’t show up.
After midnight, I closed the book and tried not to think about anything else. I needed some sleep. Tomorrow would look better if I was well rested. I finally drifted off and found myself on an old ship that was flying the Jolly Roger. I was dressed in pants and a loose shirt. My boots were full of sand and had slits up the sides. I couldn’t see my face to know whether I looked like myself or some poor mate who was unfortunate enough to be on a pirate ship.
“Look alive there, boy.” Rafe answered my question. “I’ll not have any of my crew lollygagging on deck while we look for a place to hide my treasure.”
“Aye, sir!” my dream persona said, saluting smartly. “How will we know where the treasure will be safe, Cap’n?”
“I’ll know when we get there. Enough questions. Get to work trimming those sails.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. The sails I’d been raised around were nothing like these billowing monsters. Gramps had a boat—the Eleanore, named for my grandmother—but it had a motor. He never trusted sails.
But while I didn’t know what to do, the boy whose body I was currently inhabiting did. He climbed the mast like a monkey until he was high above the deck.
“Sails, Cap’n!” he called out. “British frigates!”
He looked across the gray water toward the horizon. Two ships were heading toward us, sails unfurled. Their colors proclaimed them as British. He yelled down another warning. It wouldn’t do to hide treasure when they had to get away from the authorities.
But Rafe wouldn’t be deterred, telling the men his ship was lighter and faster and could outrun the frigates. They’d have plenty of time to escape. “You there—load the chest into a longboat. We’ll row to the island. The rest of them can get away and come back for us.”
Two burly men, the cabin boy (me) and Rafe left the pirate ship with the treasure chest stashed in the stern of the longboat.
The rest of the men stayed on the ship, making preparations to get out of the cove where they would be trapped if the frigates caught them there. The sails were unfurled. We could hear the voices of the sailors yelling orders as they struggled to turn and head out to sea.
But long before they could reach the freedom of the open waters, the British ships were on them. The battle was fierce but short as the ships traded cannon fire. In the end, the single pirate ship was no match for the British ships. The sky seemed to be on fire—smoke filling the air as the pirate ship broke apart and sank into the Atlantic.
“Get to work, ye scurvy bilge rats,” Rafe said gruffly, everyone jumping at the sound of his voice. “What’s past is past. Start digging. Let’s be done with it and get out of this godforsaken place.”
The sailors nodded and put their backs into shoveling sand at the base of a rocky outcropping near the water’s edge. The chest was deep and wide. It took them hours to get a hole deep enough for it using the flimsy tools they had.
When the chest was completely covered in sand, Rafe paced off the location from an odd-looking rock that resembled a duck head (a sign of the town that would be here someday?).
He made marks on the handle of his pistol to remember the number of paces to the place where the chest was buried. Then he grunted—a satisfied sound—and without warning, shot both the crewmen who’d buried the chest. They lay bleeding to death on the shore, waves lapping at their feet.
The young cabin boy was terrified. He didn’t know what to do. Should he run? Was there any way to escape Rafe?
“Drag ’em into the water and be quick about it,” Rafe instructed him. “I don’t want their bones giving away where the treasure is buried.”
“You’ll just kill me when I’m done,” the spunky boy protested.
“I’ll kill ye now if you don’t,” Rafe promised, waving his saber at him.
The boy knew the pistols were finished—they couldn’t be used again until they were reloaded. He knew he was fast but had also seen a pirate trick of throwing a saber or knife a good distance into a runner’s back.