When she was seven or eight, her dad had bought her a book about pirates a few weeks before their summer excursion to Cape Cod. Julie had been instantly captivated. That was just Julie’s way: when she read about sharks she wanted to be the female Jacques Cousteau. Her dad had taken her to the New England Aquarium in Boston to learn more. When she read The Swiss Family Robinson, she made her dad build her a tree house. That year, it was pirates.
They arrived late Saturday afternoon in Falmouth after sitting in endless traffic, her dad keeping a nervous eye on the car’s temperature gauge. They settled in the cramped cottage, took a walk on the beach, went out later for ice cream. Julie spent a restless first night; the heat robbed her of sleep while visions of walking the plank owned her dreams.
The next day, despite her sleepless night, Julie was up early. She stumbled into the small kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Her mother was cracking eggs into a mixing bowl. “Can we go to the beach, Mommy?”
“Good morning to you too, honey. It’s seven o’clock in the morning. Your dad went for coffee and Billy is still sleeping. After breakfast, the beach it is.”
“Did you know that a ship captured by Black Sam Bellamy, called the Whydah, might have wrecked somewhere near Cape Cod? Daddy thinks we might find treasure!”
“Your dad has a great imagination, honey.”
“But Mom, the ship went down in 1717 near here in a bad storm. The next day, over a hundred pirate bodies washed up on shore!”
“Oh honey, I’m not sure you should be reading that.”
“Daddy picked it out for me at the library. He said it’s educational and full of local history.”
Her mother shook her head. “That sounds about right. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much about finding treasure. Some people search years without finding so much as a single gold coin.”
“They’re call doubloons. And Daddy said we might get lucky because the Cummings family goes waaay back, and we might have a little pirate blood in us!”
“Oh, Julie…”
Just then Joe Cummings appeared with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a twinkle in his eye. “Well shiver me timbers, if it ain’t little Julie Cummings!” he growled in his best pirate voice (which really wasn’t very good at all). To Julie it was Black Sam himself, bigger than life. She ran over and hugged his legs, not noticing how sandy they were. He scooped her up in his free arm and gave her a kiss. “Ready for a little treasure hunt?”
It wasn’t the best beach day of the year, hot enough to swim but overcast with threatening skies in the distance. Her dad had already set up chairs and towels on his way back from the coffee shop. Staking a claim early turned out to be unnecessary with the gloomy weather, but it made getting there that much easier.
After the usual battles of slathering the kids with Coppertone, Billy started filling buckets with sand and making roads for his Matchbox cars. Immediately, Julie began asking her dad to dig for treasure.
“Slow down, Julie, let’s do this right. There’s a lot of beach here and we don’t want to waste our time digging in the wrong spot.” Joe ignored the skeptical look his wife gave him and pulled Julie’s pirate book out of the beach bag. “Sit with me and let’s take another look through this book before we start.”
Julie sat patiently while her dad pored over each page. Suddenly, he got up and walked to the edge of the water. He made a production of walking a few paces back toward the chairs, changing direction after looking up at the hazy brightness where the sun hid. He pointed up, then traced a line with his outstretched hand back to the water and then toward the street. Finally, he walked back to within a few feet of the chairs, and called for Julie to get the shovel.
Julie attacked the sand like the Tasmanian Devil on Bugs Bunny cartoons. Sand flew everywhere despite Joe’s urges for her to slow down. She had a decent hole going and sweat was beginning to drip down her head. Tina was looking curiously over the top of her book and even Billy had stopped construction on his Matchbox metropolis to watch Julie. She grunted with effort as her muscles began to tire, but the fierce determination on her face made Joe smile.
On one of her violent thrusts of the shovel, there was a sharp clink as metal met metal. Julie’s eyes widened and she looked up at her dad with an expression of wonder and excitement that was possible only in a child. With renewed vigor she began to dig. Moments later she was in the hole brushing sand off an old, dented metal box. She looked up again at Joe and swallowed hard.
“Julie, you did it! Come on, climb out of there and let’s see it!” He reached down for her hand. She hesitated for a second, afraid to let go of the box at all. Then she slowly reached up and let Joe pull her out of the sand. They both fell to their knees as Julie placed the box between them and her eyes widened again when she heard the contents rattle around. Tina Cummings joined them and Bill squirmed over to complete the circle.
“Daddy, do you think…”
“Only one way to find out, kid. Go ahead and open it.”
With her hands shaking from exhaustion and excitement, she pulled on the lid. It resisted for a minute then flew open, scattering gold jewelry, coins, and pearls on the sand. Julie looked up again. “Daddy, can we keep it?”
“There’s a law older than the pirates even. It says ‘finders, keepers.’ It’s all yours, honey.”
Julie picked up each piece of jewelry and each coin and examined it carefully before putting it back in the box. Billy quickly got bored and went back to his cars. Tina walked over to where Joe stood, placed her hand on his cheek, mouthed “I love you” and went back to her book.
Julie stood shaking, tears rolling down her face. She could remember nothing else about that week’s vacation. Years later when she figured out her dad had set the whole thing up, the memory had become even more special. How could she have forgotten what a great dad he’d been? What a great dad he still was? She cursed her stupidity and made a solemn vow to herself to make it up to him. With frightening tenacity, she continued on to Greymore’s house.
(67)
Dale Crawford was pissed, and that meant someone was going to get hurt. He had pulled himself together before Buddy and Costa got back. He played it that he’d told Julie to find her own way home because she was being a bitch. He told them he’d get her later. “She’ll be walking bowlegged for a week when I get through with her.” This had been met with nervous chuckles from the others. “Tonight, we take care of Greymore. And he might not be walking at all when we’re through.” He didn’t see the look that passed between Tony and Buddy. It was the same look Chuck Brantley had when Dale had put his knife to Denny’s face. When they got to the parking lot and Crawford saw the flat tires, he went apeshit.
“That fucking little cocktease did this! She is going to pay!”
Buddy and Tony tried to calm him down but he was in a booze-fueled nuclear rage. Pain and destruction were the only things that would calm him down. He took the tire iron out of the trunk and began smashing the windows and lights on the other cars in the lot, all the time screaming about Julie. When he was too exhausted to swing the tire iron any more, he slumped down against his own car, looking around to find that Tony and Buddy had bailed. “Fucking pussies,” he slurred. He threw the tire iron back in the trunk and slammed it shut, then began walking home.
He contemplated walking to Julie’s before realizing she would have called Mommy for a ride back to Malden. Greymore was first on the list, he’d told the boys, and decided that’s where he would go. Halfway across town, as he began to sober up a bit, the thought of facing Greymore alone began to sound like a bad idea. He had snuck one of his father’s guns out of the house but had left it in the useless Mustang. No way he was going over there unarmed, he told himself, no telling what kind of weapons he might have at his house. “I’m not scared of him,” he muttered. But he couldn’t shake the thought of their first meeting at the gas station.