"You stay in this cramped room all the time?"
"It's more like a home base. I stay with different friends at different times. There's a schedule, but yes, I sleep here sometimes, and this is where I conduct my research."
"What are you researching?"
She gestured to the books and parchment paper. "The local churches and library have opened all their books to me. I've spent the past year filling in the details of my heritage. When I'm not reading, when the church is locked, I wander around the building. And when my friends come to visit, we go for walks. Beth and some of the day ladies drive me to parks or deserted parts of the beach. It's easy not to be recognized if I'm wearing a wig and trying to blend in. Sometimes a group of us go fishing." She pointed to a laptop. "Plus, I've got all the modern conveniences, iPod, iTouch, computer, TV…"
"I've heard some bullshit in my day," I said, "but this takes the cake."
She eyed me, curiously. "You don't believe I'm here for historical reasons?"
"Absolutely not."
"Why's that?"
I picked up one of the maps. "This is a terrain map." I gestured to some sheets she'd tacked to the wall. "And those look a lot like geological surveys."
"So?"
"So you might be researching your family history, but there's more to it. Otherwise you wouldn't need to keep your presence quiet."
She said nothing.
Beth watched me with a tender light in her eyes that made me feel particularly good.
And then it hit me.
"You're searching for treasure!"
She seemed about to protest, then saw my smug smile and gave up. She offered a smile of her own and said, "Wouldn't you search for treasure if you were me? If you thought you could find it?"
"I would indeed." I paused a moment. Then asked, "So, did you find it?"
She shook her head sadly. "Nope. All this effort, and not so much as a doubloon. We gave up months ago. We thought that by traveling around the island I might be able to sense Jack's presence. But either I never got to the right place, or we were wrong."
"We?"
"The original descendants and me."
"No one kidnapped you?"
"Nope."
"The eighty descendants have been hiding you, driving you around, trying to help you find pirate treasure?"
"At first."
"No treasure?"
"Not a scrap."
"Then why stick around?"
"Because the people around here have become my friends, and they need me. Every day different people, descendants of the original settlers, drove me around the island while I tried to pick up some sort of cosmic connection to Jack Hawley. The closest I ever came to getting a feeling was right here, in this old church." She absently touched the necklace around her neck. "But Jack couldn't have buried anything here. It was a highly visible location in his era, and the church wasn't built until ten years after his death."
"That's interesting, but you haven't answered my question."
"Why am I still here if there's no treasure?"
"That's the one."
Libby shrugged her shoulders and gave me a "you're not going to believe me" sort of smile. She said, "You're not going to believe me, but whenever I'd be somewhere more than an hour, people started showing up. They said being near me made them feel better. So I love the area, love the people, and they need me. I go to the hospital every night, and the nursing home, and walk through the halls. If someone is particularly ill I go in and sit with them a few minutes."
I thought about how I tried to find her at the church that morning before dawn, and how I'd felt the power near the hospital, before it faded away.
"Can I ask where you were just before dawn this morning?"
"I went to the hospital to visit Jimbo Pimm's grandfather."
"Because?"
"He's a cancer patient. He'd been at Savannah Memorial, but they sent him home to die last week. He took a turn for the worse in the middle of the night and Jimbo brought him to the hospital. While they worked on him, Jimbo came and asked if I might be able to help."
"Did you?"
"Did I go? Yes, Jimbo drove me."
"Did it help?"
"No. I mean, I can't cure people, but he said I took away his pain. I hear that a lot, and do what I can, but it doesn't last. I told him I'd sit with him again tonight, for an hour."
I didn't believe for a minute she had healing powers, but I couldn't dispute the fact that something was going on. I'd seen what happened to the old people in the church yard. And there was no question that my mood elevated when I was around her. The room we were in was only five feet tall and I'd been stooping long enough to know my back should be stiff, and yet I felt not the slightest pain. I decided Libby must have something about her that altered people's perception of pain when they were physically near her. I didn't want to feel any pain later on, so I sat on the floor.
"Why can't you go public?" I said. "If this gift is real, you could help millions of people."
"I have empathy for everyone in pain. But if word got out about me, my life would be a mess. I mean, would you want half the world coming to your door and the other half trying to perform experiments on you?"
She had a point, but who doesn't? As far as I was concerned, this thing was wrapped up. Normally I would have climbed back down the ladder by now and gone home. A shot of bourbon might have been in order. But here I sat. I knew why, I just didn't want to admit it. See, I don't believe in healers, and yet I knew the only reason I kept sitting there was because I felt so damned good sitting there. I had no aches or pains and my mind was soaring. I felt better than I had since I was a kid, running over the grass in my bare feet, a light breeze on my forehead, lots of friends…
"I bet you could get laid anytime you want," I said, in my semi-dream state.
"Excuse me?"
Beth and Libby were staring at me.
"What I meant to say was how long do you intend to stay here?"
She looked at Beth and shrugged. "I promised I'd do a year. But I can't very well pop out on the exact anniversary, can I? So I'll probably hang out a few more months."
I gestured toward the clutter that surrounded her. "Find anything interesting in those old church records?"
"Oh, yes indeed."
"Such as?"
"Well, for one thing, there was a midwife who gave birth in 1711 to a little girl named Libby Vail."
"Spelled the same way?"
"Uh huh."
"Now there's a coincidence! Who were the parents?"
"Henry and Johanna Ames."
"Oh, too bad. I suppose Libby Vail must have been a popular name back in those days."
She looked at me and smiled. "Right."
"I mean, even today there's probably, what, five thousand Libby Vails walking around?"
"Try four."
"Four?"
She fidgeted with her necklace again and said, "I did an internet search. There are exactly four of us in the whole United States."
The thin gold chain around Libby's neck looked new. The pendant attached to it was an old circular piece of metal with what appeared to be ancient etching.
"Tell me about the necklace," I said.
"I found it when digging in the crawlspace my first day here. I went right to it, was drawn to it the minute we turned the corner. It's quite old, but there's no connection to Jack Hawley. Unless he loved playing rugby!"
She removed the necklace and handed it to me. On one side someone had scratched the words, "I Love." On the other: "Rugby."
"How old is this?"
"It's old, at least two hundred years. But it couldn't date to Jack Hawley's time. I know, because I researched the sport and no one called it Rugby before 1750."
"Whatever happened to Hawley?"
"He was captured and hanged on March 25, 1711."
"You're positive?"
"One hundred percent."
I thought about how I had faked my death a couple of times, and said, "How can you be so sure?"