It’s A Plunderful Life Read online

  23

  “You sure are spending a lot of time getting ready for something that’s not a date.” Toni sat on the edge of the bathtub, her arms folded across her chest.

  “It’s called self-care. I always like to stop and do a facial mask at—” I checked my phone “—11:47 on a Thursday.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “You don’t have to watch, you know.”

  “And miss the Skincare Queen getting ready? I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  I sighed. Toni had smirked when I brought out my mask supplies, which included a special handmade bowl and a fancy brush that let me paint the mask onto my skin. My blueberry tansy mask came as a powder, and I mixed it with water in the bowl. For the longest time, I’d just used an old coffee mug, one stained blue and red and brown inside from years of my daughter’s craft projects. Why did I need a special bowl when the mug would do?

  And then I’d spotted that bowl at a local artist’s fair, and it was so beautiful and affordable, and I decided that having something beautiful, something that I loved, was worth the twenty dollars.

  Sometimes it’s those tiny little luxuries that make the biggest difference.

  “Well, there’s not going to be much to watch in a few minutes. Once it’s on, then I just sit around until it’s dry. Pretty dull stuff.”

  She blinked at me. “Are you kidding? Your face is bright blue. I am going to soak in every moment of this.”

  I stopped and brandished my brush at her. “No pictures,” I warned.

  She crossed her heart and held up her hand. “Only of the mental variety.” Then she whispered, “Click-click,” miming snapping a photo with a camera.

  I turned back to the mirror, where my face did indeed look ridiculously blue. “I take it all back,” I said. “I don’t want a sister anymore.”

  “You’d miss me.”

  “I would not. I would push those two twin beds together and then sleep like a starfish across both of them.”

  Finishing the mask application, I did my best to relax in my room with a good book, a task made much more difficult because, true to her word, Toni didn’t seem to want to leave me alone. “How long until it’s dry?” she asked.

  I didn’t look up from my book. “About a half hour.”

  “Whoa. That’s, like, forever.”

  With a sigh, I set the book down. “It’s my forced relaxation time,” I said. “When I still ran the company and Margot was at home, I desperately needed something to remind me to take a few minutes for myself, even if it was just once a week.” I smiled. “I actually tinkered with the formula to make it slow drying for that very purpose. I offered a quicker mask for people who genuinely didn’t have—or want to spend—the time, but you’d be surprised at how much space people give you when your face is blue. Brad could walk in desperate to know where his clean socks were, and he’d see this on my face and back out of the room. It was magic.”

  Toni stretched out on her bed, her arms folded behind her head. “You know how I protect my personal time?” she asked. “I didn’t get married and have a kid.”

  I tossed my book in her general direction, being careful not to come close to hitting her. “Show off,” I said.

  Thirty minutes later, I washed off the mask, then went through a routine that had Toni both riveted and rolling her eyes. “This is exhausting,” she said as I patted on my second serum.

  “It’s not something I do every day.”

  “Nope. Just something you do when you’re going on a date.”

  Which I was not.

  Still, I did want to look nice. For myself, thank you very much. And that meant standing in front of my limited wardrobe, mentally trying on and discarding various outfits. I didn’t want to look like I was trying too hard—I could just hear Toni’s teasing if I walked out in my little black dress.

  Also, I had to consider that I was going to be spending time with Ichabod. A twenty-first-century man might not think my red dress, with its mid-thigh-length skirt and short, fitted sleeves, was all that risqué, but Ichabod was scandalized by the sight of a woman’s elbows.

  I just had so little that an eighteenth-century man would find both appealing and suitable. And while I didn’t normally believe in changing how I dressed for a man, Ichabod had missed three hundred years of fashion evolution and women’s liberation. I didn’t want to shock him by exposing too much clavicle, too soon.

  Finally, I decided to go with pants, settling on a pair of white linen trousers with a high waist, a white silk sleeveless blouse, and a lightweight aquamarine cardigan. It looked casual but still pulled together, and all my antiquated sexy parts—including elbows—were decently covered.

  Walking downstairs, I found Toni watching some baking show in the family room. She looked up when I came in and raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t have much else to say.

  I held my arms out to the side. “Is this okay?”

  “For your not-a-date? Sure.” She turned back to the TV, but I could tell she was suppressing a smile.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” When I didn’t say anything, she sighed and clicked the TV off. “Fine. You look…happy, that’s all. You’ve been so gloomy since you got here.”

  “I have not!”

  “You’ve been moping around for days. It’s just nice to see you looking more like your old self.”

  I wasn’t about to examine exactly why that was. I was going on a walk to an old museum with a ghost—it wasn’t like I was going on an actual date with a real-life human man.

  But maybe this was like a baby step? First a fun-to-talk-to ghost, then eventually a real date with someone who was alive?

  I wasn’t quite ready for a live date yet, but I supposed if I looked at it that way, it was okay that it made me feel a little better.

  And then Toni’s attention shifted to something behind me, her eyes growing wide and her lips pressed together so hard they went bloodless. I turned around.

  O.M.G.

  It was a date.

  24

  Captain Ichabod Frowd stood in the doorway of the family room. At least, I thought it was Ichabod, but it was hard to tell. The man I knew, in his breeches and rough-spun shirt and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, had been replaced by a very…fancy man.

  He wore a mustard-colored suit, the trousers cinched at the knee with long ties, his calves swallowed completely by thin white stockings. The frock—it might be called a coat, but it was impossible not to think of it as a frock—was covered with filigreed patches of embroidery in a lighter gold, and equally fancy splotches of velvet in a darker gold. Three tiers of white lace spilled over his collar, and his hands were half hidden by white lace shirt cuffs. Everything was edged in gold braid.

  And that wasn’t even the best part. The best part was the wig. It was quite the confection, all powdered and puffed at the crown of his head, with a stack of horizontal sausage curls on either side and long, gorgeous white ringlets cascading down his back, all gathered into a single ponytail. I imagined in his day it would have been quite impressive.

  I mean, it was still impressive. Just not for the same reasons.

  “Mistress Cass,” he said, bowing low.

  Oh, my. His shoes. Black leather heels with over-sized gold buckles. I was pretty sure I had a very similar pair once back in the late nineties.

  “Wow,” Toni breathed behind me.

  “Shut up,” I hissed back, trying to keep my voice low enough that Ichabod wouldn’t hear me.

  “I have been looking forward to this evening,” Ichabod continued. “You look lovely.”

  “And you look…” Come on, think of something, I ordered myself. “Incredible.”

  “Aw, he wore his best wig and everything,” Toni said under her breath.

  But then the man before me straightened up, and his eyes were Ichabod’s eyes, and that grim mouth was Ichabod’s mouth, and I suddenly felt like this was exactly where I was meant to be. When he offered
me his arm, I reached out for it, forgetting for a moment that he had no physical form. For just a moment, I could almost feel his body heat, the comforting presence of a real arm through all that mustard linen and velvet. And then the warmth was gone, and he was translucent ectoplasm once more.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  I nodded. “Don’t wait up,” I called back to Toni, more to tease her than anything else. The museum closed at seven, and it wasn’t like Ichabod and I could head up to Makeout Point afterward.

  Although, frankly, that was kind of a disappointment, if only because I would have loved to see how all those clothes came off. I imagined there were a lot of buckles.

  We walked down the driveway in silence. A noise in the brush made my pulse race, but when I looked it was just a calico cat, drifting through the grass like a tricolored ghost.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “I know you don’t want to go back to the ship.”

  A wry smile played over his lips. “I do not look forward to it, no. But we do things in life—and apparently in death—that we do not wish to because they are things we must do.”

  “Where, um, did you get that outfit?”

  “Do you like it?” he asked, the twisted smile replaced by a genuine one. “I never got to wear it when I was alive. It was something I’d ordered, but it was not finished before my final voyage.”

  No wonder he wanted to wear it.

  Ichabod was thoughtful on the walk. He didn’t even spare a second glance for the pedestrian light at the crosswalk, and soon we had reached Main Street. It was a grim sight. The candy shop. Viv’s antique shop. The yarn shop. All closed for the day. In the Rushes was open, but I didn’t see any diners through the window as we walked by. The pianos sat silent. Even Jack and Jill looked lonely, their faces turned to keep watch over an all-but-empty street.

  As we turned onto Harbor Street, Ichabod pressed closer to me and I think he would have grabbed my arm had he been able to. He really did not want to do this, and I almost suggested that we abandon our mission and head back. Did any of this really matter?

  But my mother was sure all of this was connected, and I owed it to the people of Gallows Bay to figure out what was going on if I could.

  I bought a ticket for the museum, then headed up the gangplank, Ichabod drifting along beside me. His eyes went immediately to the section of deck where we had stood before, but then he carefully turned his head away, focusing instead on an area beyond the mast.

  “I loved this ship,” he said as he drifted toward the railing. “I do not know how fast your steamships are, but this ship was among the fastest of her time.”

  “I don’t believe steamships are built for speed,” I said, leaning against the rail, the wind toying with my hair as I gazed over the grayish water of the harbor. A gull dipped down from the sky, its feet grazing the water before it flapped its wings hard and rose again.

  He nodded. “It was necessary to have a swift ship. The ship I was chasing was…very fast.”

  I turned toward him, my hip against the rail, my arm lying along the top. “I’m sorry this is a hard memory for you.”

  His face tightened, and he looked away, the curls of that ridiculous wig obscuring his face. I wondered idly if he’d worn a wig as captain of the ship or if he’d merely tied his own hair back the way he normally wore it.

  When he glanced back at me, he opened his mouth to speak. But then his gaze dipped lower, to the tops of my breasts, and he went very still.

  I just barely managed to keep myself from rolling my eyes. Were all men—living and dead—the same?

  “Where did you get that?” he breathed.

  For a moment I thought he was talking about my breasts. “They’re real, thank you very much,” I said. But then I lifted one hand to my throat and realized that the coin I’d been wearing around my neck had slipped out from under my blouse. I wrapped my hand around it. “Wait—this?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I have seen that before.” He had gone pale, his skin taking on a grayish hue. “She was wearing it that night at the tavern. It’s how I knew…” He trailed off, then he looked at me sharply, once again all business. “It’s an unusual coin. Do you know where it came from?”

  “I found it. When I was a kid. It was in a little box in a sea cave.”

  “It came from the plunder of the Golden Hound, a British privateer ship.” He paused. “I suppose I should say it came from the Spanish first. But the Hound relieved the Spanish of their treasure, as allowed by Her Royal Majesty. And, in turn, the Hound was relieved of her treasure—as well as the lives of her crew—by the pirate Christopher Durus.”

  As he spoke, the coin in my hand seemed to heat up, until I released it suddenly, my palm tingling with a phantom burn.

  Ichabod continued. “The treasure disappeared. Perhaps some of Durus’s crew spent their share, and perhaps there is a simple explanation for how that coin came here, to the Carolina colony. But when I saw that coin around her neck that night, I knew that she was the key to finding him. And I was right.”

  I shook my head, trying to keep up. I sensed that the memories were coming to him quickly now, all jumbled up so that even he was having trouble putting them in order. “Who?” I asked. “Who was the key?”

  His face looked pained. “Eugenia Denholm.” He reached out with one hand as if to touch the coin around my neck, then shook his head. “It belonged to him, Mistress Cass. To Christopher Durus. I fear just touching it would connect me with him all over again.”

  A wave of nausea washed over me. Had wearing the coin somehow connected me with Durus? But if so, in what way?

  His eyes widened. “Eugenia. The astrolabe. I have no idea what became of it.”

  He took off across the deck, heading for the captain’s quarters. “Ichabod, wait,” I called.

  A young woman in a black polo shirt emblazoned with the museum’s logo smiled at me. “Getting into the spirit of things?” she asked.

  I realized I must look a little crazy given that she couldn’t see Ichabod. “Something like that,” I said, trying to keep up with Ichabod, who had disappeared.

  I really, really hoped he stayed in the public areas of the ship. I had no idea what I would do if he slipped past one of the velvet ropes blocking off the areas meant for staff only.

  “Ichabod?” I hissed as I reached the officers’ cabins. I didn’t see him anywhere.

  Moving on instinct, I crept along the narrow passageway, feeling the ship rocking gently beneath my feet. I wasn’t a huge fan of small, tight spaces—what would it have been like to live aboard a ship like this for months at a time?

  Best not to think about it.

  I moved along to the captain’s quarters. A velvet rope kept visitors out of the room itself, but you could stand in the narrow doorway and look in at the tiny bed—how had Ichabod ever managed to sleep in that?—and the rolltop desk. With a sigh of relief I spotted Ichabod standing inside the room, staring at the surface of his desk. I tried to remember what I’d seen on the desk during those school field trips. His journal, I thought, or at least a replica of it. I could see the edge of a fluffy feather quill just beyond Ichabod’s form, and there were some instruments scattered about that I supposed I once knew the names of. Hadn’t we had to study those things in middle school? Maybe as part of English class?

  Regardless, I no longer had any idea what any of that was, which just went to show how useless half of my education was.

  Eighteenth-century navigational tools? Check.

  Square dancing? Yep.

  How to calculate and file your income taxes? Nope.

  Ichabod moved closer to the desk, placing his hands on the surface. Or, rather, putting his ghostly hands near the surface. He couldn’t actually touch anything. “Where is it?” he asked, turning to me. “Where’s the astrolabe that Eugenia gave me?”

  Now, I’m just going to say it—this was beginning to feel a lot less like a date. I mean, the wig and the fancy heeled shoes were definitely
promising, but it’s never a good date if the guy spends the whole time fretting over the location of something another woman gave him.

  Damn Toni for getting my hopes up.

  “Slow down, Ichabod. Who’s Eugenia, what’s an astrolabe, and why does it matter?”

  He shook his head, clearly frustrated with the rush of memories and my inability to keep up. “Eugenia was a woman who…” He paused, then started again. “She worked in a local tavern. The Bull in the Rushes.”

  I blinked. Could Ichabod’s tavern be our very own In the Rushes? I had known the seafood restaurant was very old, but I had no idea it had been around since before the United States was a thing.

  Ichabod swung around again, his gaze darting over every surface in the room. Then he scrubbed a hand over his face. “She was the one who told me where to find Christopher Durus. And she gave me the astrolabe. Only it wasn’t just a regular astrolabe.” He looked at me, his face serious. “It was magic.”

  I swallowed. “Okay. So this woman helped you find Durus and gave you a magic…What was it again?”

  “Astrolabe. We used them to determine latitude. They were quite common then. Not the magic ones, of course.”

  “Right. And now you don’t know where it is? Did you have it with you when you were wounded?”

  He nodded. “Yes, exactly. I was carrying it with me—she told me to. She said if I had it on my person when I encountered Durus that I would be able to defeat him.” He closed his eyes. “I was no hero, Mistress Cass. I was merely a vessel for Eugenia’s magic. Had she not given me that astrolabe, I would have died with naught accomplished, just as the men who went before me had. And now it is missing, and you have Durus’s coin around your neck, and…”

  The coin. I reached up to touch it again but remembered the warning heat and let my hand fall back to my side. Everything was spinning inside my brain, my thoughts churning. The coin…Christopher Durus…Ichabod…this astrolabe.

  They were all connected, I was certain of that. But what did that mean?

  “Mistress Cass, without that astrolabe, Durus can come back. And he can finish what he started. Without that, all is lost.”