Pieces of Hate (A Wendover House Mystery Book 4) (6 page)

“Miss MacKay.” He nodded once with great solemnity.

“Mister
Traynor
.”

We exchanged nods but didn’t shake hands or—heaven forbid—hug. People around
here didn’t as a rule and that was a relief.

Of course, I couldn’t actually smell death on him, but seeing
Traynor
in his quasi-religious garb and perpetually grim
face caused a certain low-level anxiety which I didn’t need, being full up on
things to be anxious about already. Hopefully coffee and Bryson’s calm presence
would override my imagination which insisted the cold odor of the mortuary was
condensing on the back of my neck as I walked away from the undertaker.

“Tess,” Bryson acknowledged as I joined him at his table which was
hovered over by
a fishing
net and an antique lobster
cage. The remains of a bowl of chowder sat in front of him. He looked pleased
but not especially surprised to see me.
Which he should have been,
since I don’t usually leave the island on Tuesdays and certainly not to go to
the chowder house for lunch.

“Mrs. Tudor?” I asked softly, jerking my head in
Traynor’s
direction.

Bryson nodded.

“Yes, she passed last night during the storm. Poor thing was delirious
with fever and raving about pirate ships.”

I shuddered at the unexpected words. Bryson saw this and raised a
brow.

“Poor thing,” I said. “Not an easy passing then. Was Father Hanlon
there?”

“No. The storm was too bad so she had no one there to keep the evil at
bay—except Reverend
Burnes
, of course, but the family
didn’t send for him.”

Burnes
or visions of pirates.
Talk about being caught between the
devil and the deep blue sea. Personally, I thought they had made the right
choice.

Bryson offered me the newspaper he was reading but I declined.
Anything except the local made the outside world sound like it was locked into
a death spiral. And maybe it was, but since there was nothing I could do about
it, I preferred blissful ignorance.

“I don’t blame you,” he said, folding it up and laying it aside. “It’s
all depressing. Frankly, I can’t believe you used to own a newspaper. It would
probably make me slit my wrists seeing all that bad news on my desk first thing
in the morning.”

I didn’t think his desk at the station could be covered in good news,
but said nothing about that.

“It wasn’t a very good newspaper. In fact, it had no news at all.
People preferred it that way.”

We had discussed this matter before. It seemed like our country had
been infected with some autoimmune disease (greed and fear) that first made the
government (lackeys of wealthy corporations) attack society and then society
attack itself. And none of us wanted to admit that the damned disease had
metastasized and was getting worse, so we lived on the surface and grew ever
more distant from each other even though every month we were offered more options
for our phones and internet. After all, though we ate the same breakfast
cereal, wore the same jeans, and listened to Nat King Cole at Christmas,
someone living in the heart of big-city urban blight wouldn’t have the same
kinds of thoughts and worries as a farmer facing drought in the Midwest. Some
people had to worry about gangbangers and drugs killing their children, others
worried about crop circles and alien invasions of the outer-space variety
killing their cows and corn. Hawaii isn’t Minnesota. New Mexico isn’t New
Hampshire. And none of them were a coastal island in Maine where people still
believed in sea monsters and pirates. Our experiment in national unity was
falling apart. The technologies of television and the internet that were supposed
to bring us together were instead pushing us apart with lies and mass hysteria.

Not that they were completely unified on every front here in the
islands. There are folks who eat and drink the usual racist swill and store it
up in the unventilated chambers of their narrow minds, but much more than skin
color or religion, the location and family of your birth are what matters. To
them, Catholics like Mr.
Traynor
and Mrs. Tudor would
always be outsiders though the families had been there a century and more.

“I did want to be nosy about something else though, if you have the
time.”

Bryson’s lips twitched.

“Go ahead and take a pew. I am always available to the public.”

I tucked myself in to the booth and thought about what to ask. I decided
not to lead with the storm and the creepy chest left on the beach. It tied in a
little too well with Mrs. Tudor’s delirium.

“What the heck is Mary doing that she has bright red paint in her hair
and needs a stud finder?”

Bryson chuckled. “I’m tempted to make up something here. The real
answer is kind of mundane.”

“If you make it up it’ll have to be good because I already have placed
her in an S&M parlor with one of those sex swings.”

“Mary Cory in a sex swing?
Your
imagination is better than mine. And speaking of imagination, Tess….”

He wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

“Yes, it was a freaky storm,” I said.
“Two freaky
storms.
No, I didn’t cause them—didn’t even know they were coming. Yes,
there was a box on the beach and it might have belonged to a pirate. No, I
don’t have it. Ben’s taken it to a maritime museum to make sure it isn’t a
fake.”

Bryson frowned at me.

“In another era—”

“They’d hang me for a witch,” I finished. We had both been thinking of
Miss
Marple
and
The
Murder at the Vicarage
, but since I had an ancestor who had been hanged for
a witch, the reference was ill-chosen. “Is there anything you want to tell me,
any colorful stories about the pirate who married into the family that Harris
might have forgotten to mention and Ben hasn’t dug up yet?”

Bryson hesitated.

“Was he a pirate? I’ve always wondered if the stories were true.
Kind of hoped they weren’t, given some of the legends.”

That wasn’t promising.

“Ben sure thinks they’re true. He has me pouring through the attic’s
boxes of books and papers looking for proof that Nicholas Wendover was some
pirate called
Halfbeard
.”

Bryson shook his head.

“What are you going to do about the box?
If it’s
real?”

“Need I do anything about it?” I asked. “Why not just keep it?”

Bryson raised a brow.

I wanted to stare him down but he was right, something would have to
be done eventually if the thing was the genuine article. I couldn’t stand the
creepy feeling I had when the sun went down and the wind began to blow, which I
feared it would keep doing as long as the box was around. And the box itself
was made of some concentrated repellant. “First I need to find out what is
really going on with the damned thing because it just doesn’t feel like a
regular old box to me. Did Kelvin know about the thing?”
And
the pieces of hate within it?

“Well….” Bryson hesitated, glancing around the restaurant. A man in
law enforcement, wearing a gun, should not look that nervous.

My brain began leaping to conclusions. This box thing had probably
happened before. Like when my grandmother still lived here? Had it been part of
the reason that my grandmother fled the island? I didn’t know the exact date
she
left,
only that it was at the end of September.
The timing was suspicious though I suppose she might just have wanted to beat
the winter so her escape would not be dogged with weather disasters.

And Kelvin?
Had he faked
his death and fled for the same reason? Had he feared this anniversary enough
to flee it? I had thought that I had his disappearing act figured out, but
maybe not.

“I think he knew, though he never said anything directly. I think
whenever it washed up—every decade or so—he just chucked it back again and then
he’d go on a three-day drunk.” I stared at Bryson, trying to recall what I’d
asked.
The box—right.
Had Kelvin known about it?

“But it keeps coming back?” I asked unhappily.

“Yes.
Apparently so.”

“Did he open it? Did he say what was inside?”

“He never said anything to me.
Or Everett.
That I know of. I’ll talk to my brother tonight. He was closer to your
great-grandfather than I was and maybe Everett had the truth out of him.”

“
Hmph
.”

There was an awful lot that my great-grandfather hadn’t said about all
kinds of things I really needed to know. And as for the truth, especially the
old truths, it was usually not that obvious or easily found. Around here it was
an elusive commodity, hiding itself in shadowy nooks and crannies where it was
hard to find.

I would be surprised to hear that Kelvin had confided anything in
Everett Sands though. Bryson’s brother was utterly amoral in the service of his
own desires and interests and my great-grandfather knew this. In fact, I had to
wonder if Bryson actually liked his brother.

“So, from this we could conclude that either the box wants to be on
land, or the return offerings Kelvin made weren’t being accepted.” I paused,
thinking. “Because something was wrong with the way he did it, or with him.
Maybe he wasn’t the right person to deal with the box.” Bryson waited for me to
go on. “Or something is wrong with the box itself, or with what’s in it. Or
because there’s some ritual for box-chucking that I don’t know about, but which
must be followed.” The list was getting long and I felt frustrated.

“
Ayuh
.
You or anyone else.”

“I sure hope it isn’t a case of needing to track down all the coins
the crew spent after they robbed that ship, because it can’t be done. Not after
all this time.”

“Coins?”

But even as I said this, I wondered if that were true. Ben said that the
ship had only let crew ashore once before it made it to Maine and that was for
the sailors taken to the hospital in Charleston. Indigent ones, Ben
said,
who had no coins to pay for their medicine and ended
up in pauper’s graves. Had all the rest of the treasure still been aboard the
Calmare
when it
went down? Or thrown overboard before then, if the crew came to believe that the
coins and they were cursed?

“I can see thoughts spinning like tops in your head,” Bryson said.
“It’s attractive in a weird way but rather scares me too.”

“Who me?
I never think.
About
tops anyway.”

“Just be careful, Tess, and call me if you get nervous being alone out
there. I have a spare room you can use anytime.”

I have noticed, when trouble comes around to visit, a distinct lack of
inclination from the men in my life to offer services any more emphatic in nature
than the opportunity to sleep in their spare bedroom or to recommend a good
electrician, etc. Not there is much they can do under the strange circumstances
that trouble usually manifests itself, but every now and again I forget that I
like being a strong, independent woman and wish that some man would take me in
his arms and say
there, there, little
lady. Let me take care of this for you
. After all, nothing in my previous
life had prepared me for dealing with possibly cursed treasure.

“Thanks. But I don’t think that I’m in any danger. Not since Ben and
his friend have the box somewhere else.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Tess. Seems to me your
great-grandfather was plenty scared when that thing turned up and Kelvin knew a
lot more about what was going on than anyone else.”

Actually, I wasn’t all that sure I was safe. Hadn’t I been near panic
the whole trip to Great Goose? What if part of the treasure was still in the
house and
the whatever
it was wanted it back? How on
earth would I find a small coin or coins if they were hidden? Truth wasn’t the
only elusive thing on the island. A lot of concealed rooms and compartments had
been found when I had the electrical wiring done, but there were probably a lot
more forgotten secrets hidden in Wendover House.

Mike finally wandered over and we ordered blueberry pie and coffee.

“Mike, I think you need a swordfish for the wall. I’ll bring you one.”

He grinned. His deeply trenched face was working on some new smile
lines.

“No thanks. Kelvin left it here for a while but I had to send it back.
People were complaining about the smell. Put them right off their suppers, it
did.”

So much for that idea.

“Need a ride home?” Bryson asked. He was smiling again. “The ferry is
long gone by now.”

“Yes.
If you don’t mind my stopping at the store first.
I need some coffee and tennis balls. Poor Barney is so desperate for things to
play with that he has taken to chasing barnacles.”