It’s A Plunderful Life Page 14

  I sighed. This is what divorce does to you—one minute you’re crying in your candy and the next you’re getting all hot and bothered over a ghost.

  His gaze flicked to my lips, and I had the weirdest—and obviously most incorrect—feeling that he wanted to kiss me.

  Because, really, that would have been the height of impropriety. Also, impossible.

  Because he was a ghost.

  Someone cleared their throat in the doorway. I spun around to find Kurt standing there, his eyes big and owlish behind his glasses. “Ichabod? I have a new book to read.” Then his eyes shifted to me. “Hello. You’re very pretty.”

  Maybe it was because I was overheated from whatever exchange we’d had a moment ago. But I could have sworn I heard Ichabod, Mr. Cover Your Limbs himself, murmur under his breath, “Yes. She is.” And then he was floating away, Kurt following behind, neither of them sparing a glance for me.

  20

  The next afternoon, after serving as a metaphorical punching bag for my very grouchy sister, I decided a walk into town might be a good idea. I hadn’t seen Viv since the morning Diana bit into the apple and all hell broke loose, and I thought we could grab that cup of coffee, or even an early dinner if she could get away from the shop for an hour or so.

  But when I got to Main Street, I found Viv just locking up. “Hey,” I called. “Closing early?”

  She whipped around to look at me, one hand flying to her chest. “Oh, Cass,” she said. “You scared me.”

  I strolled past the candy shop, which looked practically deserted, and made a mental note to stop in and save those macarons in the window from going to waste.

  Hey, it was for the environment!

  “I guess it’s been a slow day,” I said as I reached Yesterday’s Treasures. I remembered what Vivian had said about how dependent the town was on the park. It looked like she was right. With the park closed—due to a frightening incident, no less—the flow of tourists had dried up to a trickle.

  For a small business owner like Viv, a couple bad days were hard enough to weather. If the park was closed down for much longer, the loss of business could prove fatal.

  “I’ve had better.” Viv finished locking the door, then dropped her keys into her purse. “How’s everything at home? Everyone’s heard what happened. Poor Diana.”

  “We just want Diana to get better. That’s our priority at the moment.”

  “Of course, of course.” A kid on a bicycle, his legs pumping like mad, flew past us. It was just another example of how few people were on the street—on a beautiful day like today, the street should have been so packed with people it wouldn’t have been safe to ride that fast. “Well—”

  “Since you’re closing anyway, do you want to grab some coffee? Maybe something to eat? I’ve got the evening free.”

  She hesitated. “I wish I could, but I’m just not feeling well tonight.”

  “Oh, of course.” I knew I would feel sick to my stomach if, when I had the boutique, we’d been forced to close early due to loss of traffic. “If you need anything, just let me know.”

  She smiled. “I will. And tell Evelyn that I’m so sorry this is happening.”

  I watched her walk down the street, then turn down an alley that led to one of the public parking areas. Well, now I had no idea what to do with myself. I really didn’t want to go home and suffer through another meal with Toni griping at me, so I headed for In the Rushes. Just because Viv wasn’t up for an evening out didn’t mean I couldn’t grab a nice dinner.

  Sure, I felt a little awkward telling the hostess that I needed a table for one, but that was something I was just going to have to get over.

  I was going to get me some crab cakes, dammit.

  In the Rushes was housed in one of the oldest buildings in Gallows Bay, but instead of highlighting the history of the place, the management had instead elected for aggressively modern décor. Everything was sleek and cool, lots of gleaming chrome and sharp angles and matte black finishes.

  I was seated at a table by the window, which made me feel a little like I’d been put on display—See? We’re still open. Come in and get some food like this lonely lady. But I was pretty sure the margarita and crab cakes I ordered would help.

  “Cass?”

  I glanced up to find Mr. Mancuso standing by my table. “Mr. Mancuso,” I said, getting to my feet. “How are you?”

  He held up a glass of something I assumed wasn’t water. “Probably about as well as your mother is.”

  I looked around. “Are you here with someone?”

  “No. I was over at the bar.” He wiggled the glass. “Not really here for the food.”

  I gestured at the table. “I’m by myself for the night, too. Care to join me? I could use the company.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll make good company, but I’d love to.” We settled in as the waiter brought my margarita.

  We sat in silence for several minutes, watching the occasional passerby meander down the street. “I’m glad the museum is still open,” I said finally. At least people had something to see in Gallows Bay. But thinking of the Wild Rose just made me think of Ichabod, and my mother’s concern over his appearance here. I studied Mr. Mancuso, who I had once believed knew everything. “My mother and I have actually been reading about Captain Frowd lately,” I said.

  Mr. Mancuso lifted his glass and took a sip. “Really?”

  “Why do you sound surprised? He’s a local hero.”

  He shrugged. “Yes, but when it comes to pirates, it’s usually the villains people are interested in.”

  The waiter appeared, and I sat back while he placed the plate in front of me. Then I unfolded my napkin and draped it over my lap. “You’re right. I should do some reading about pirates, especially the ones that have connections to the Carolinas.”

  Mr. Mancuso set his glass down with a clunk, and I barely suppressed a smile. The man could not resist a chance to tell his stories. “A lot of pirates spent some time along the coast of the Carolina colony,” he said, flexing his fingers as if he were warming up for a piano recital. “Calico Jack and Anne Bonny—Bonny lived in Charleston when she was young. And Stede Bonnet was executed there. And of course Blackbeard knew this coastline well.” He leaned closer. “But the pirate most connected with our little town is Christopher Durus.”

  This was all stuff I already knew. “Right. Because he was executed here.”

  To my surprise, Mr. Mancuso shook his head. “No, not for that reason. Because of the Sea Witch.”

  “The Sea Witch?” It sounded familiar, something I remembered from childhood. Hadn’t we played a game called Sea Witch at school, taking turns closing our eyes and chasing after each other, our arms outstretched, the person playing the Sea Witch herself “sucking out the souls” of those she caught?

  Or, really, tickling them until they begged for mercy.

  But that was a silly story kids told each other. Lost your favorite toy? The Sea Witch took it. Tree branch fell on your swing set? You must have angered the Sea Witch.

  She didn’t have anything to do with the pirate stories we’d learned in school.

  Mr. Mancuso, however, was in his element. He wrapped both hands around his glass, his elbows on the table. “Once, long ago, a lovely young woman worked at her brother’s tavern, serving the sailors that came in from the harbor. And one evening, she met a man with a charming smile and the blackest eyes you’ve ever seen.”

  I paused in the middle of dredging a bite of crab cake through my remoulade sauce. I was a sucker for a good love story.

  “She fell in love with this man, but when he asked to marry her, her father refused to allow her to marry a penniless sailor. The young sailor vowed to make his fortune and return for her.”

  I could see where this was going. “That sailor—it was Christopher Durus?”

  Mr. Mancuso laughed a little, a sound like dry leaves blowing across a sidewalk. “You’re ruining the story a little, but yes, it was Christopher Duru
s.”

  “So he became a pirate.”

  “There weren’t many ways for a poor man to make decent money back then. If he was going to make enough money to win over his lady’s father, he would have to take it from those who had more than he did.”

  “So did it work? Did he come back with his pockets full of stolen gold?”

  He shook his head. “You’re jumping ahead, young lady. First, you have to hear about the pirate Christopher Durus became. Because pirates were thieves, always, but they weren’t always killers. But Durus, he was vicious. Far more vicious than he needed to be to make a name for himself. They called him the Butcher of Carolina for a reason. He was so feared that, when his sails were spotted on the horizon, sailors would leap overboard, preferring to take their chances with the sharks than with Durus.” He lowered his voice. “They said he was even more merciless than the sea.”

  I tried to imagine being a young, gently bred woman, three hundred years ago, waiting for the love of my life to return. She must have heard who he had become. Did it frighten her? Or was she so in love she imagined the stories were exaggerated?

  I waited several beats, but Mr. Mancuso didn’t continue. “So? Did he come back?”

  “The legend says he did not. And shortly after he left the young woman found herself in trouble.” I must have looked confused because he clarified that with a smile. “She was pregnant.”

  “Ah. I’m sure her father regretted his decision not to allow her to get married after that.”

  “Probably. They say the poor woman went mad, missing her lover and burdened with this shame. There’s no mention of the baby in any of the stories—in those days, so many babies died that we can assume her little one did not survive long, if at all. But this young woman had no such luck. She was doomed to roam the dunes, waiting for her sailor to return to her.”

  Isn’t that how those stories always turned out? The woman was just a plot device in the man’s story, a set piece, a prop. Christopher Durus got a name and a legend, and the poor woman, without the animating device of her lover, was reduced to female cliches: the fallen woman, the crazy witch.

  I hoped in reality she lived to a great old age and had a loving family and never thought of her time with Christopher Durus the terribly wicked pirate ever again.

  “It’s a sad story,” I said, picking up where I left off with the remoulade sauce.

  “It is, yes. But, Cass, I think the legends are wrong.”

  The fork slipped from my hand. “What?”

  “Here’s what tells me there’s more to the story, far more. Captain Frowd stopped here in Gallows Bay before setting out to capture Durus. And where did he bring the pirate once he’d captured him? To Charleston? No. He brought the most fearsome villain of his time here, to this small town. Why?”

  I waved one hand. “Wasn’t Gallows Bay where they usually executed criminals? Isn’t that why they called it that?”

  “The name was changed to Gallows Bay because of the execution of Durus.”

  Oh. That I hadn’t known. “Maybe Gallows Bay was closer?” When he just looked at me, I shrugged. “Can’t it be a coincidence?”

  Mr. Mancuso took one more sip from his glass. “Cass, in stories like these, there is no such thing as a coincidence.”

  21

  With most of the staff unable to come to work because of the park closure, the task of filling the food bowls for the park’s numerous feral cats had fallen to Mom, Toni, and me. And it was my turn.

  Let me tell you how thrilled I was to venture out into the darkness, lugging a giant bag of dry cat food, stopping at the many feeding stations hidden in the brush just off the trails. With that many cats, there were a lot of feeding stations.

  As I puttered along in the golf cart, the food shifting in the bag on the seat beside me, I wished, not for the first time, that I’d thought to ask someone to come with me. Wilder would have been nice.

  Hell, I would even have taken Toni’s bristly company if it meant I wasn’t driving alone into the dark, the tiny headlight affixed to the golf cart doing little to illuminate the trail. Anything could have been lurking in the trees and bushes along the path.

  Like a vengeful pirate come to reclaim his lover.

  This is what I got for listening to stupid local legends. In all the years I’d lived at the park, I’d never once been afraid of being out alone after dark. Listen to a story about one creepy pirate, and suddenly I was spookier than…Ichabod.

  Of course, Ichabod proved that ghosts didn’t have to be scary. In fact, they could be downright sexy.

  Thinking of dour, judgy Ichabod Frowd as sexy made me grin as I guided the golf cart to a stop near the next feeding station. If he could turn out to be kind of a hunk, maybe Christopher Durus’s ghost would be even hotter. I’d never been the kind of woman who went for bad boys—the most daring thing Brad ever did was set our garbage can out an hour earlier than the HOA allowed two weeks in a row—but then again, I’d never thought of myself as the kind of woman who went for ghosts, either.

  Not that I was “going for” a ghost. I just thought he was cute.

  Or, rather, compelling. Cute was for puppies and boys who hadn’t grown into their feet. Ichabod was a man, with all the wisdom and experience that came with that. A dead man, sure, but definitely not some kid.

  Fortified by these thoughts, I cut the engine of the golf cart and carried the bag through the brush. Around me, cats materialized from the bushes, well used to the feeding schedule my mother had established. Some of them purred, rubbing up against my legs. Others circled uneasily, waiting for me to head out before approaching the food bowls.

  And there were others I only knew were there when I caught a glimpse of eyeshine close to the ground.

  Not unsettling at all.

  I had just filled up the bowls and stepped back onto the trail when I saw it—a light, bobbing along in the distance. It moved unevenly, sometimes disappearing before coming into view again.

  Not a firefly. Not another golf cart out on the trail.

  It looked for all the world like a flashlight being carried through the woods.

  I swallowed hard, frozen in place. If I turned on the golf cart, what would whoever was carrying the flashlight do? Would the sudden sound of the motor scare them off? Or would it just attract their attention to me?

  All alone, in the dark.

  It had to be someone allowed to be there, I reasoned. An employee, maybe even Wilder. But the park was closed, and no one was supposed to be on the grounds except family. My mother had had to get permission for us even to be out there feeding the cats.

  Maybe it was someone with the police, checking something out?

  But why so far from the castle? Unless the police had decided to investigate something down closer to the ocean, there was no reason for them to be headed in that direction.

  The ocean.

  I closed my eyes, wishing I hadn’t seen that light. Why did it have to be the ocean? It couldn’t have been the Toadstool Garden or the Fairy Village or Three Bears Cottage or anywhere else I could be certain Christopher Durus wouldn’t be interested in?

  Nope. It all came back to the ocean, and I didn’t like it at all.

  But that light hadn’t belonged to a ghost. It wasn’t like the Butcher of Carolina himself had come back to life and was walking the grounds of the Enchanted Forest with a flashlight. Besides, what would he want with us?

  The light disappeared, swallowed up by the trees closer to Pirate’s Cove. I waited several minutes, hoping it would come back this way so I could see who was behind it. And hoping it wouldn’t so I could make my escape without being noticed.

  When nothing else happened, I got back into the golf cart, listening to the whisper of brush as a shy cat crept toward the bowls behind me. Maybe I’d imagined that bouncing beam of light. Maybe my brain was making fun of me, making me see things that weren’t actually there.

  “Turn around, idiot,” I mumbled to myself even as
I hopped out of the golf cart. Wasn’t that what I always said as I watched the characters do really dumb stuff in horror movies? Don’t go down into the basement with a serial killer on the loose! Don’t check out the spooky attic when the power is down!

  Don’t try to catch an intruder all by your lonesome, at night, knowing a savage pirate ghost might be out there!

  Ah, well. It turned out that leaving things alone wasn’t my strong suit. I just hoped I wasn’t about to become the first idiot to die in this particular horror movie.

  It would be quicker and easier to drive down to the cove, but the sound of the cart’s wheels crunching over the trail could warn whoever was down there that I was coming. I took off on foot, using what little light my phone gave off to see where I was going. The last thing I needed was to trip over a tree root or something and twist my ankle.

  The trees grew farther apart as I got closer to the cove, finally giving way entirely to feathery cordgrass. I hesitated by the last tree on the path, reluctant to give up what little cover it offered. And, no, I wasn’t about to army crawl the rest of the way to the cove so I could sneak through the grass.

  There are several reasons the military doesn’t recruit heavily among the forty-five-plus crowd, and army crawling is at the top of that list.

  If there was someone else moving around, I couldn’t hear them over the constant wash of the tide against the rocks outside the cave. I didn’t see the light, though, so I finally felt brave enough to slip away from the dubious safety of my little tree. Keeping my phone low, I hurried toward Pirate’s Cove.

  Getting to the water was one thing. Actually going into the cave itself was quite another. The great, dark maw of the cave yawned before me, and all I could think about was how stupid someone would have to be to walk in there, armed with nothing besides a phone and righteous anger.

  Seriously, I could not think of anything dumber than walking into that cave.

  Okay, that’s not true. Brad once surprised me by coming to bed in a pair of boxer briefs personalized with a photo of my face right on the crotch. That was dumber.