I looked closely at the coin in the palm of my hand. Max would certainly miss it if it was gone when the museum closed. He might even come to me since I’d been Duck’s unofficial finder of lost things since I was a child.
At one time, when I was a teenager, I had big dreams of saving the world using my special abilities. When I was alone, I even dared to call them my powers. There were things I could do that other people couldn’t do. I was very impressed with myself.
But time had given me better perspective and honed the abilities I was born with. I might not ever save the world by finding everyone’s many sets of lost keys and misplaced TV remotes, but I helped the people I cared about—the same reason I had become mayor of Duck.
I slipped the gold coin into the pocket of my jeans. I didn’t want to interrupt Max’s enjoyment of talking to the children. I wasn’t surprised to see the coin out of place. How many times had I visited the museum to find cannonballs where they didn’t belong or an old ship’s compass taken apart on a table? Max was a good curator, but he was far from neat.
Around the cupcakes and apple juice, the talk was still of Theo Burr and other ghosts that inhabited the Outer Banks. Max was juggling questions between bites of Agnes’s delicious cupcakes and glances at his watch.
“Hot date?” I asked when I could get close to him.
“What?” He pushed his glasses back against his face and smiled as he understood the humor in my words. “You might say so. You won’t believe what’s happened, Dae. I think I finally have a real lead on someone in Duck who’s related to Theo Burr.”
“That’s wonderful!” I gave him my full attention, which wasn’t easy since the cupcake in my hand was really good. “I know you’ve been looking for proof that Theo lived here rather than died as soon as she washed up on shore.”
“All of my life,” he agreed with a seriousness only dedicated historians can muster. “If I’m right, it will rock the historical world. Not to mention my intense joy at flaunting it in Sam Meacham’s face!”
I knew how much that meant to him. Sam Meacham was the curator of the Corolla Historical Museum. He believed Theo Burr had died when she reached shore, in the arms of one of the Bankers who’d stolen her personal possessions once she was dead. His proof was a portrait that was widely recognized by historians as Theo. It was found at a Banker woman’s home in Nags Head in 1869. While the painting was never definitively identified as being a portrait of Theo Burr, most historians agreed with Sam.
But not Max. “I’m trying to convince a man who claims to be a relative of hers to give me a sample of his DNA. He’s meeting me here in a little while. If his DNA matches the DNA from Theodosia’s hair samples, it will be the first real proof of what happened to Theodosia Burr in the winter of 1812. Don’t forget, her husband never sent a search party here to look for her. He and Aaron Burr looked everywhere but the Outer Banks. She was here all the time, not knowing who she was or where she belonged. A tragedy, to be sure.”
I knew Max’s strong feelings on the subject. There weren’t many who agreed with him. I also knew he might never find out the truth. But it made him happy to tell the story. I loved Duck history. I hoped Theo Burr survived the pirates and the terrible gale. It would be another feather in the Duck historical annals to say that she spent her last years here.
“Be sure to let me know what happens.” I smiled and ate more of my cupcake. “The kids always love your stories.”
“We both know they’re so much more than stories,” he said with another glance at his watch. “They keep the history of Duck alive, Dae. Without our past, we have no future.”
One of the teachers saved me from an intense lecture on the importance of Duck history by coming over and thanking Max for his program. She was a newcomer to Duck, one of many who came for a vacation one summer and decided to stay. They added to our increased population of almost six hundred full-time residents.
It may sound small, but for a scrap of land hemmed in by water that could rise up at anytime and wash us all away, it was a lot. It was the largest population Duck had ever known. The town was becoming more popular as a tourist destination every year. We didn’t have the wild horses of Corolla or the lighthouse at Hatteras, but we were sandwiched in between on the one-hundred-mile stretch of land, brought together by a narrow ribbon of road.
Some people liked the growth. Others were unhappy about it and wanted things to stay the same. The one thing I’d learned in my thirty-six years was that nothing ever stayed the same.
It was almost time for the story adventure to be over. The teachers gathered the kids together and thanked Max for his time. They were equally enthusiastic in their thanks to Agnes for her cupcakes. I knew Agnes enjoyed these moments as much as Max. Their daughters still lived in Duck, but neither of them were married yet. No grandchildren.
As the teachers took the kids to the bathroom before leaving to walk back to Duck Elementary School, I helped Agnes throw away the cupcake wrappers and empty juice boxes.
Max paced the floor, continually looking at his watch. He was obviously nervous about meeting what could be an ancestor of Aaron Burr. It would either validate his life’s work or turn into another joke that Sam Meacham could throw at him in the bar at night. I supposed that would be enough to make anyone nervous.
“He’s got everything riding on this DNA,” Agnes told me when we walked out to the trash cans. “Damn fool went ahead and told Sam about the whole thing, of course. He’ll crash and burn for sure if it isn’t true.”
“Let’s hope it works out then.” I took the lid off the trash can. “He and Sam really like to argue about Theo Burr, don’t they?”
“And everything else.” She stuffed the trash in the can. “They argue about which town was settled first, Duck or Corolla. Which museum has the oldest artifacts. Honestly, they act like little kids with their toys.”
Before I put the lid back on the trash can, I bent down and picked up a scrap of paper from the ground. It was one of the coffee cards they punched at the Coffee House and Book Store. It seemed odd to me because Max and Agnes didn’t drink coffee. As I tossed it into the can and put on the lid, I decided it was probably something a visitor had left.
As Agnes and I walked back around the front of the plain little building that had been donated to the Duck Historical Society, I recalled the old store that had been here, a place where we used to buy chips and soft drinks. Someday no one would remember that little store. Agnes was right. Everything was changing too quickly.
Near the front door of the building, a large statue of a duck that had been used to promote tourism stood beside a statue of a horse. Both had become animal icons in this area. There were two rusted cannons legend said had washed up on Duck’s shore back in the 1700s. Several cannonballs were stuck in concrete around them.
The old museum was cool and musty smelling when we went back inside. The light was too dim to really see everything the historical society had managed to piece together through the years. But I was proud of this little place anyway. It represented the heritage of everyone who’d been born here. From pirates to wild horses, all of it was part of our past.
The teachers were getting the kids lined up to go outside. Agnes kissed Max good-bye and told him they were having his favorite, tacos, for supper. She reminded him not to dawdle after his meeting and come right home.
I smiled, seeing them together. I hoped someday there would be someone who looked at me that way. Right now, I was kind of stuck waiting for that person, wondering if he would ever blow into town on the right breeze and decide to stay. I’d given up on the indigenous male population.