It’s A Plunderful Life Read online

  (He used a photo we took after I’d given birth to Margot, so I was all sweaty and puffy and I didn’t even recognize myself right away. That was not a face I ever wanted to see again, let alone when my husband was trying to make a move.)

  If I could survive those Cass boxers, I could handle whatever was in that cave.

  Or at least that’s what I told myself to get my feet moving. I also might have assured myself there was no one in the cave. There couldn’t be—I hadn’t seen the flashlight beam since I left the cat feeding station. It was as if I were chasing a ghost.

  My feet stopped in their tracks. That might have been the wrong thing to think.

  I was just inside the cave, edging carefully along the path as I didn’t want to light up my cell phone. I could hear the water lapping against the metal hull of the replica ship, but other than that, the cave was completely silent. My shirt clung to my back from the walk down here, but the cave’s cool air quickly raised goosebumps along my arms.

  Just as I had suspected. There was no one there.

  I brushed my sweaty hair back from my face and woke up my cell phone. At least I’d have light on the way out—

  The sound of something shattering came from somewhere deeper in the cave. I jerked around to see what it was only to catch a dark form rushing toward me accompanied by a steady pounding. Footsteps, I realized a moment too late. Whatever it was hit me, hard, sending me crashing to the rocky ground. I landed on my hip, rolling onto my back even as I registered the pain. In my mind, I leapt to my feet, bringing my phone up to blind my attacker while I prepared to unleash two years of self-defense classes on them.

  In reality, I floundered around on the ground, gasping like a landed fish and regretting every life choice that had brought me to this moment.

  So it appeared walking into a dark cave with a crazed intruder on the loose was dumber than Brad’s stupid boxers after all.

  The sound of footsteps grew fainter. Whoever it was, they were escaping. Given how totally unprepared I was to do anything remotely badass at the moment, that was a huge relief.

  My phone had been knocked out of my hand when I fell, and it took several minutes of running my hands over the floor of the cave to find it. Pushing the Home button, I felt a surge of gratitude as the thin blue-white light washed over me. The screen was cracked, but at least I wasn’t going to have to stumble all the way back to the golf cart in total darkness.

  My body seemed to be in similar shape. A little battered, a little the worse for wear, but still functional. I shifted my hip, wincing at the pain but glad it had taken the brunt of the fall. It had a little more padding than, say, my face. I wasn’t going to feel great tomorrow, but it didn’t seem like anything was broken.

  Dragging myself to my feet, I held up my phone and limped deeper into the cave, keeping my eyes on the ground. It didn’t take me long to discover the source of the sound I’d heard. Shards of splintered glass glittered in the weak light from my phone. And mixed in with the broken glass were soft, milky-colored pieces of sea glass.

  It was one of the jars of sea glass I’d hidden when I was a kid.

  I pointed my phone around the cave, looking for anything else out of place, but nothing jumped out at me. Still, the broken jar made one thing clear: Someone had been searching the cave for something.

  But…what?

  And, more importantly, had they found what they were looking for?

  Mom was asleep by the time I made it back to the house, which was understandable. She’d been spending long hours at the hospital. I headed straight for the bathroom, where I took a hot shower, grumbling over the angry red mark on my hip that promised to turn into an impressive bruise.

  I was surprised to find that Toni wasn’t in our room by the time I was ready for bed. I hadn’t seen her downstairs.

  Toni wasn’t home?

  I crawled into bed, turning that question over in my mind. If Toni wasn’t here, where was she? She couldn’t have been the person who’d knocked me over in the cave.

  Could she?

  I told myself it wasn’t possible. Why would Toni be down in the cave? If she wanted to look for something, she could easily do it on one of the nights when she fed the cats. She would even have been able to turn the lights on and search at her leisure.

  Besides, whoever had been in that cave had gotten a decent head start on me. If it had been Toni, why wouldn’t she just head back to the house so she beat me back here?

  A flash of light caught my eye, and I rolled onto my knees, peering out the window. Someone was walking along the path between the park and the house. Someone with strawberry-blond hair and an old-fashioned dress. And a flashlight.

  Toni.

  I felt sick. Was she really capable of scaring me the way she had, of bowling me over just so she could get out of the cave without me seeing her? It didn’t seem possible. She didn’t like me, sure, but she wouldn’t actually hurt me, would she?

  I laid back down, listening to her soft footsteps on the stairs. I heard the water run in the bathroom as she brushed her teeth. By the time she came into the room, she’d changed into silk pajamas in a deep rose pink. It was hard to believe that someone who had just assaulted me in a pirate’s cave would come home and put on silk pajamas like nothing had happened.

  I waited until she was in bed before I spoke. “What were you doing in the park?” I asked.

  Her yelp of surprise was gratifying. “I thought you were asleep,” she gasped, sitting up with one hand pressed over her heart. “You scared me to death.”

  “Oh? Like you weren’t trying to scare me earlier in the cave?”

  Her eyes, silver in the scant moonlight, narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw you down at Pirate’s Cove.”

  She frowned. “I wasn’t at Pirate’s Cove.”

  I sat up then. “Toni, I just watched you leave the park.”

  “Yeah, I was in the park. But I was down at Snow White’s Cottage. Why would I go down to Pirate’s Cove in the dark?”

  Exactly what I was wondering. Rolling out of bed, I turned on the light and studied Toni’s face. She didn’t look smug, didn’t look like she was gloating.

  She looked just as confused and concerned as I was.

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw someone with a flashlight heading down to Pirate’s Cove when I was at the last feeding station.” I debated telling her that I’d followed the person down there, but what had I learned from the experience? Nothing except that I have a serious lack of badassery.

  And I wasn’t about to hand more ammunition to my sister.

  Toni leaned forward, her hair swinging gently. “I thought I heard something. I figured it was you, but it was as I was leaving. And if you were already here, in bed, then you would have had to move very quickly to beat me back.”

  I shivered. I hated the thought of Toni pushing me and leaving me alone in that cave, but the alternative was even more sinister.

  Why would anyone be there?

  “Why were you down at Snow White’s Cottage?” I asked.

  Toni’s mouth snapped closed, and her shoulders went rigid. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “Fine.” I got back in bed and rolled onto my side, my back to her. “I’ll just tell Mom tomorrow.”

  There was a long, pained moment of silence. And then she sighed heavily. “Fine. I just wanted to…feel Diana.”

  I rolled back over. “What?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” She shoved her thumbnail in her mouth, her teeth working it. “She’s my friend, okay? I miss her. I just wanted to feel close to her, and it seems stupid to you, but sometimes we would go down there and just…talk.” She dropped her hand into her lap. “I know we’re not supposed to be down at the park, but it’s not like the cottage itself is a crime scene, right?”

  She ducked her head, and I realized she was on the verge of crying. “Hey,” I said. “She’s going to be okay.”<
br />
  “You don’t know that. It’s been days, Cass. Why don’t they know what’s wrong with her yet? Why won’t she wake up?”

  I knew I was probably the last person Toni wanted comforting from, but I was also a mother and it was impossible for me to watch her suffer without offering her what I could. Throwing off the blankets, I slipped out of my bed and padded over to hers, sitting beside her. She stiffened when I put my arm around her shoulders, but she didn’t push me away or attack me with her crocodile fern trap or anything, which I took as a good sign.

  We sat like that for a while, her not quite crying and me trying to let her know wordlessly that I was there for her.

  Finally, she pushed herself away from me. “I’m fine.”

  I studied her. “You don’t look it.” And then a little devil whispered on my shoulder. “In fact, you look awful.”

  Her eyes lit up, and she shot me a glare. “I do not.”

  “Oh, you do. I’ve seen clearly doctored ‘before’ pictures on shady anti-aging ads that look better than you right now.”

  “Shut up.”

  Clearly she was feeling a little better. I started to get up. But I couldn’t help myself. Examining a scrape on my right hand, I said what I should have said years ago. “I’m sorry about the bridesmaid’s dress.”

  She blew out a breath. “You really think that’s what I’m mad about?”

  I held up my hands. “That’s all you’ve ever told me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m not mad about a stupid dress, Cass. I was never mad about the dress.” When I just looked at her blankly, she shook her head. “It was you leaving all of this that bothered me.”

  I turned on the bed so I was facing her. “You’re pissed off because I got married?”

  “No.” She bent her head, poking at a loose thread on her coverlet. When she raised her head, her eyes were fierce and dry. “You had everything I wanted. Your mom—do you know how amazing Evelyn is?”

  I nodded, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. “My mom chose drugs over me,” she said. “You had a mother who adored you, and you had this wonderful place, and you had magic. Freaking magical powers, and you said, ‘Oh, no thank you. I’d rather have Brad.’”

  I couldn’t believe my stepsister had kept this to herself all those years. “I fell in love,” I said, as if that explained everything. To me, it did.

  To her, it didn’t.

  And no amount of explaining would bridge that gap.

  She snorted. “With Brad. That guy was so dull.”

  I had called him a lot worse in the weeks since he’d told me he wanted a divorce, but I hated hearing someone else criticize him. “He wasn’t dull,” I said. “He’s a good man. Hard-working.” I closed my eyes, remembering my life with Brad. How do you sum up almost thirty years of sleeping and working and raising a child with someone? How could I explain all the tiny little moments I had cherished? “On Sundays, he would go out and buy me a cherry scone from this bakery I loved. And he would check the air in my tires every few weeks. And he always sang showtunes in the shower.”

  Toni stared at me. Then her lips twitched. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a winner,” she said. “Showtunes in the shower. I hope he puts that in his internet dating profile.”

  “It was nice! I liked being woken up to a little Hamilton.” And I had. There was something about the acoustics of the shower that had bounced his off-key singing all over the house. It had horrified Margot whenever she heard it—Dad, seriously, stop, she would say when he was out of the shower and fully dressed, his wet hair neatly combed—but I wasn’t sure Brad even realized he was doing it. “He was so cheerful in the mornings.”

  “Well, he sounds amazing.”

  “He was,” I insisted, the memories flooding back to me. “He also used a fork and knife to eat French fries. And he could not fall asleep after he watched The Ring. Like, for three days. And after sex he always had to have a popsicle.”

  “Please tell me that’s not some weird euphemism.”

  I laughed, something uncoiling inside me. “No, like an actual popsicle. He liked the kind you buy for kids, the ones that come in red, orange, and purple. You know? We eventually put a minifridge in our bedroom so he wouldn’t have to go down to the kitchen to get one every time.”

  I thought back over all his little foibles, and all the little foibles he’d accepted of mine. That was marriage, learning all the ways in which the person you loved was also incredibly stupid and wrong, and loving them still.

  It broke my heart to think about never having that again.

  But Toni was chuckling over Brad’s popsicle requirements, and it suddenly struck me that there was, indeed, room for humor in heartbreak. That I could grieve my failed marriage and laugh at how Brad once insisted the best way for us to save money was for me to repair all of his socks when they got holes in them.

  Spoiler alert: He got blisters.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Toni said, staring across the room at my empty bed. “I did miss you.”

  “No one to blame stuff on?” I asked.

  “Of course.” She turned to me, no longer laughing. “You’re the only sister I have.”

  I thought back to when I first met her, a few years after my dad had died, and my mom told me that she wanted me to meet someone who had become special to her, and that this man had a little girl about my age.

  She hadn’t even been close, but I’d liked Toni right from the start, this rebellious kid with a chip on her shoulder a mile wide. She’d gotten ahold of some makeup and had made herself up to look like an angry clown. “I don’t share,” she’d announced that first day.

  I looked at the cozy room she was sharing with me now and smiled. We’d come a long way since then.

  “I wasn’t leaving you,” I said. “When I married Brad. I was moving toward something, the life I thought I wanted. That I did want at the time.” It had been a good life, and I missed it terribly. But that door had closed, and I realized I was glad to be back at the Enchanted Forest, helping my mother and reconnecting with my sister and learning that there was more to the world than met the eye.

  Much more.

  We sat in silence for a long time, not looking at each other but not moving either.

  And when I finally turned out the light and crawled back into my bed, it was with a sense of renewed purpose.

  Someone was threatening my family.

  I wasn’t going to let them hurt the people I loved any more than they already had.

  22

  “Mistress Cass, there you are.”

  I was pleased to see that Ichabod had waited for me downstairs rather than coming into my room to wake me up. It was almost like he was learning some ghostly manners.

  “Good morning, Ichabod. What’s up?”

  His smile tightened—he had made it clear he hated the phrase “What’s up?” but at least he now seemed to tolerate it. “I have many questions about bitcoin, and Kurt is unable to answer them.”

  Why did most conversations with Ichabod eventually feel like a high school test I hadn’t studied for? “I’m not sure I can be of much help there, I’m afraid,” I said. “But I do need to talk to you about something as well.”

  “Yes?” He clasped his hands behind his back, looking for all the world like my freshman year philosophy instructor in college.

  “I know this is hard for you…”

  His eyes took on a guarded look.

  “But do you remember the day you captured Christopher Durus?”

  He turned away from me, his gaze cast down at the floor. He seemed to be wrestling with something. Finally, he sighed. “My memories of that day are quite the jumble,” he said. “I found my time aboard my ship did the most to bring my memories back to me. Perhaps repeating that experience would help.”

  “Are you saying you want to go back to the Wild Rose?”

  “I would not say that I want to go back, no.” His mouth compressed into a firm li
ne. “But if you have questions about that day, then I feel certain the answers are best found there.”

  I nodded and checked the time. “They don’t open for a couple hours. We could head over this afternoon.”

  He hesitated, then said quickly, “Perhaps we could make an evening of it. We could walk along the water as the day ends.” His smile was faint. “It would be nice to turn an unpleasant task into an enjoyable outing.”

  “Oh. Of course. Sure.”

  He nodded at me, then gave me a shallow bow. “Until this evening then, Mistress Cass.” And with that he drifted up the stairs to Kurt’s study.

  “Um, are you going on a date with Captain Ichabod Frowd?”

  I spun around to find Toni standing at the end of the hallway. She had clearly just come in through the back door, although I hadn’t heard her.

  I scoffed, walking to the kitchen. “Of course not.”

  “Sure sounded like a date to me,” she said as she trailed after me.

  “It’s not a date.”

  “Look, Cass, maybe it’s just been so long since anyone asked you out that you don’t recognize it, but this is definitely a date.” She grinned. “Talk about a dead love life.”

  “Stop it. We’re just going down to his ship to see what he can remember about the capture of Christopher Durus.” I busied myself with straightening up the table, lining up the salt and pepper shakers and sliding the napkin holder a fraction of an inch to make sure it was in the precise center of the table.

  “Ooh, he’s taking you back to his ship. Plus, you’re going to walk along the harbor? Dude, that’s more romantic than my last five dates combined.”

  I tried to think of the last time I’d been on a date, and the memory of that disastrous flash mob rose up in my mind unbidden.

  Nope, not a date. It can’t possibly count as one if it ends in divorce.

  “Well, whatever you think, Ichabod and I are just friends.”

  Toni gave me a knowing look. “Fine. We’ll see.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m right.”