Artie Constant whistled and tapped the lens of the scope against the side of his head. “I took my chances as a kid, missy, but I never went up against old Travis Thaw.”
“What do you mean?” Booker asked. “How was Travis related to Gertie?”
“Gertie Thaw was one of six kids,” Constant said. “Boys, all of them, except for her. Travis was the grandson who inherited the old farm. The original farm, with the hay barn where Lemuel was supposed to have hidden.”
“You knew him?” Booker asked. “Did you ever talk to him about Lemuel Kyd?”
“You know how Travis Thaw talked?” Constant asked. “Only one way he communicated with anyone outside his family. He talked with his shotgun.”
Zee got the drift. “He didn’t want any of you coming on his land, did he? He didn’t want any of you digging for buried treasure.”
“Rumor had it Travis believed the stories about Lemuel,” Constant said. “He used to brag about things he had seen. Maybe what you mean by proof, missy.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like Lemuel’s initials carved into wooden beams in the barn.”
“Anyone could have done that,” I said, beginning to feel discouraged.
“And pieces of eight. Travis claimed to have pieces of eight.”
“What’s the difference between pieces of eight and a doubloon, Zee?” I asked.
“That’s easy,” he said. “Basic pirate factoid. Doubloons were usually made of solid gold, like ours is.”
I saw Artie Constant twitch when Zee said the words “like ours.”
“Pieces of eight were silver dollars,” Zee went on. “It took eight of them to equal the value of a doubloon.”
“Whatever became of Travis Thaw’s silver coins?” Booker asked. “Did anyone else ever see them?”
Artie Constant raised the telescope to his right eye and aimed it out the window.
“What’s this about a doubloon, Ezekiel? Are you holding out on me, matey?” he said, ignoring Booker’s question about the Thaw pieces of eight.
Before I could put my finger up to my lips, Zee answered. “We just found it this morning, Artie. In ten feet of water, right off the pier where the ferry docks.”
“Let’s have a look at it, laddie,” the old man said, holding out his free hand. This time he wasn’t laughing.
“We didn’t bring it with us,” he said. “Becca’s holding it for us.”
“Very smart of her,” Constant said as he leaned in toward the window even closer. “I’ll tell you something right up your alley, kids.”
“What?” Zee asked.
“Come stand beside me,” Constant said. “There’s a small boat headed for the marina, just up the road. Take a look through my spyglass.”
Zee grabbed the long telescope, stood back from the window, and took aim in the direction Artie Constant pointed him.
“See it, matey?”
Zee nodded.
“It’s a stinkpot,” Constant said.
“It smells?” Booker asked.
“No, my son. Boats with motors aren’t as elegant as sailboats. That’s just how they’re known by real sailors,” Constant said. “Twenty-eight-footer. Dark blue hull and white cabin. She’s called Revenge.”
“Named for Lemuel Kyd’s ship, isn’t she?” Zee asked, squinting his other eye.
“Well done. Indeed she might be,” Constant said. “Owned by a man from New York City who came up here looking for treasure, too.”
“Are you helping him?” Booker asked.
“He’s a little too slippery for my taste. I sent him over to Tarpaulin Cove on the Elizabeth Islands, seven miles across the Sound. He’ll find nothing but sheep over there,” Constant said, “or else he owes me a pretty penny for directing him. After all, I’ve looked over every rock on that deserted island over the years, too.”
Zee was following the boat into the harbor.
“Keep your eye on him, Ezekiel,” Constant said, winking at me. “Don’t want anybody getting our gold, do we? We’re partners in this.”
Zee was silent, but that didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t made an earlier plan with Artie Constant, weeks ago, if they were playing around with the idea of a treasure hunt.
“What’s his name?” I asked. “The man who owns the Revenge.”
My mom’s detectives could run a background check on him if he turned out to be up to no good. Maybe he had something to do with our coin.
“He’s Cole. Cole Bagby. Has a house in Chilmark but he likes to keep his boat down here in Oak Bluffs on account of the golf course is nearby.”
Zee lowered the telescope. “The Revenge entered the port, Artie. She’s out of sight.”
“You’re a good man,” Constant said. “Tell you what.”
Zee handed the scope back to the old caretaker.
“Why don’t you go home and get me that doubloon, son? Maybe I can help you to authenticate it. Maybe there’s an image of it in one of my pirate books.”
Zee looked over at Booker before he answered. “Sure thing, Artie.”
“Bring it back before sunset. Before the tourists pile in up here.”
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Constant,” I said. “Zee won’t get back here with it this afternoon, but we’ll try to bring it by tomorrow or Thursday.”
“But—?”
“Booker and I have some surprise outings planned for Zee. We’ll get it up to you just as soon as we can.”
“Sometimes those doubloons wind up in Davy Jones’s locker, if you’re not real careful with them,” Constant said. “And that would be a very bad thing now, wouldn’t it?”
Davy Jones’s locker. The bottom of the sea. I felt a chill run up and down my spine when Constant looked at Zee and spoke those words. I knew that Davy Jones was a made-up character who ruled over the evil spirit of the underwater world, the place of shipwrecks and people lost at sea.
“No need to be rude to Zee,” I said, grabbing the boy’s hand and leading him to the top of the winding staircase. “You’ll see the doubloon.”
“I’d never be rude to my mate, now would I, Ezekiel?” Artie Constant said, holding his belly as he laughed again, only this time it sounded sinister. “Zee said the doubloon came from out of these Vineyard waters. Well, maybe that’s where it belongs.”
I hadn’t given the first thought to the idea that my scientific experiment might have been causing some kind of disruption of calm island life. But Artie Constant’s tone was menacing.
The old man waved a gnarled finger at me to make his point. “Don’t put it past old Lemuel Kyd to place a curse on you for disturbing it.”
8
Zee scampered down the lighthouse steps, clearly unafraid of the great height from our landing to the floor below.
Booker stayed a step or two ahead of me, knowing that this kind of descent wasn’t my favorite part of the experience.
The idea that our buried treasure might come with a curse stopped me in my tracks, eight steps down and about 256 to go.
“What kind of curse are you talking about?” I called up to Artie Constant.
“Don’t pay any attention to that at all, missy. It was just something squiffy that popped out of my mouth,” Constant said. “I’ll keep an eye on you all. You won’t be having any trouble.”
“Much as I appreciate that, sir,” I said, “I don’t want to lead my friends into an adventure that’s tangled up in an ancient curse.”
“You might have thought of that before you started mining for gold,” he said.
“I didn’t have the least interest in gold,” I said. “It never occurred to me there was treasure on Inkwell Beach. I was just doing my science experiment.”
The winding loops of the wrought-iron railing made me dizzy as I stared down at them from my perch. I gripped t
he banister and closed my eyes. My feet seemed almost glued in place.
“Tell me the truth, Mr. Constant,” I called up to him. “Was anyone else cursed by Kyd?”
He paused for a minute. “It’s hard to know where to start, missy. There’s all those poor folk he robbed and wrecked on the high seas.”
“Yes, but that’s what pirates did. I mean, was anyone on the Vineyard cursed by his treasure, not just by his actions?” I reached out to grab Booker’s hand to steady myself, cracking one eye open to move closer down the steps to him.
“Gertie Thaw,” Constant said. “Island folks thought she was cursed all right. If she got anything valuable from Lemuel Kyd, she never shared it with anybody. She used to stand at the top of the Gayhead Cliffs on the coldest, wettest nights, letting the wind howl around her, hoping to see the Revenge round the bend and come back into her quiet harbor. Those silk hair ribbons he gave her were tattered to shreds.”
“What else?” I asked.
“You’d have to ask Gertie’s relatives about the rest,” Constant said. “Hard to separate the truth from the rumors.”
“How would I find them?” I asked, taking another dozen steps. “The relatives.”
“Still a couple of Thaws in Chilmark,” Constant said. “Then there’s Jenny. Has a little house over in the Campground, near the Tabernacle. Zee’s grandma knows where it’s at.”
“Where’s the Campground?” I asked Booker.
“Here in Oak Bluffs. We can walk to it from Becca’s, that’s how close it is. In fact tomorrow is Grand Illumination Night. We’ll be going there anyway,” Booker said.
“What’s Illumination Night?” I asked, speeding up my steps so I could keep a firm grasp of Booker’s hand as he made his way around and around and down.
“It’s an old tradition on the Vineyard,” Booker replied. “Like for more than a century. I’ll let Becca explain it to you.”
“Some even say that the people who bought the Thaws’ land carry the curse,” Constant said, his voice booming overhead.
Booker looked at me and mouthed the words instead of speaking them. “Don’t listen to him, Dev. Artie Constant’s just trying to scare you.”
“He’s doing a good job,” I said. The steps were getting wider on the lower half of the staircase and my footing felt steadier.
Zee was fidgeting below us, probably just anxious to get on his way. There were a number of barrels lined up against the wall next to the door, and he was opening their lids, peering into them.
“Leave them dirty old things be, mate,” Constant shouted out to him. “And you, missy, there was a guy who was walking along one of the Chilmark beaches carrying a metal detector all summer, maybe ten years back.”
“What do you mean by a metal detector?”
Booker answered. “You’ve seen people with them on the beach. They look like long sticks with a magnetized plate on the end that sucks up metal things from the sand. You know, like quarters and dimes and—”
“And every now and then a piece of buried treasure,” Constant called out. “Every once in a while a doubloon.”
“Really?” Booker asked. “People have found doubloons on Vineyard beaches?”
“This one old bloke claimed he did,” Constant said. “Next day, along came a hurricane, and he didn’t heed any of the warnings to get off the shore, greedy as he was to find more pirate treasure. Before anyone ever saw the fool’s piece of gold, the poor fellow got caught in a riptide and was swept out to sea.”
I pounded down the steps as fast as I could.
“I’d call that a curse, Devlin Quick,” Constant said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“We get your point,” Booker said. “We’ll be back to show you our doubloon.”
“Very sensible, laddie. I know pirate ways, and I can help you navigate around the trouble once we know exactly what your treasure is,” Constant said, leaning over the topmost railing to look at the three of us. “Now you, Ezekiel, you’re going to wind up a mess. What will your granny have to say?”
Zee had been peeking inside the large barrels. He withdrew his arm from the barrel closest to the door and I could see he was covered in bright white paint up to his elbow.
It didn’t seem to bother Zee at all, but Booker ran the rest of the way down, picked up a cloth from the floor, and wiped off Zee’s arm.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Constant. We didn’t mean to disturb anything,” I said.
“Not a worry, missy. It’s just time for me to repaint the old lighthouse.”
I had turned my head to talk to him and wound up stumbling off the remaining steps to the lighthouse floor, bumping against the last barrel in the row. It teetered and splattered my T-shirt with red paint before it stopped rocking and leveled off.
“Are you all right, missy?” Constant asked, chuckling this time. “Just save me enough of that fire engine red color to put a coat or two on the front door.”
“Let’s go, Booker,” I said, twisting the heavy doorknob and opening the door. “I’m covered in paint now, too, just like Zee. You’d think old Artie Constant put a curse on each of us.”
I didn’t realize how our voices echoed through the empty lighthouse, all the way up to the platform from which Artie watched us.
“That paint will wash right out, Devlin,” he said. “Curses last forever.”
9
“I hope that’s not blood all over you,” Becca said as we marched up the steps to her porch. “You’re really a sight, Devlin Quick. I’ll need some smelling salts before I call your mother to tell her about this.”
“I’m so sorry to give you a fright—it’s just paint,” I said. “I was so clumsy I tripped over a barrel of the stuff.”
“Do you still have your bathing suit on underneath?”
“I do.”
“Then strip off that T-shirt and shorts right here so I can run the laundry,” she said, opening the screen door. “I’ll bring you some clean clothes.”
“Thanks, Becca,” I called after her.
The three of us sat down in rocking chairs, drawn into a circle.
“We need a plan,” I said.
“Why?” Zee asked.
“Detectives always have a plan,” I said. “That’s how they solve mysteries. They do things in logical order and put the clues together.”
“First we take our treasure to Artie Constant,” Zee said. “That’s a plan.”
Booker looked at me over Zee’s head. “But not the first step, pal.”
“Why?”
“Nothing against your friend Artie,” I said. “We’re just better off gathering as much information as we can before we present it to him.”
I wanted to stay as far away from Artie’s curses as possible. No need to rouse up any old evil spirits that still lurked around on the Vineyard.
“Why?”
Just twenty-four hours with Zee and I knew that was his favorite question. Maybe it’s the reason he knew so much.
“I’m thinking that tomorrow the three of us take a ride up to Chilmark to explore the old Thaw farm property,” I said.
Sam Cody always told me that getting the lay of the land was an important piece of understanding a mystery.
“That’s a long bike ride,” Zee said. “The hills get really steep out there, and the bike paths stop before that.”
“There’s a public bus,” Booker said. “We could get passes and ride out early, poke around, and still be back by early afternoon. But why?”
“I’m really curious to see where Gertie Thaw lived,” I said, “and to check out the harbor where Lemuel Kyd hid his ship from the British sailors.”
“Dev’s so good at digging that she and our friend Katie even found dinosaur fossils in Montana last month,” Booker said. “Who knows what she’ll turn up on Thaw land?”
“Real fossil
s?” Zee asked.
“Totally real. Seventy million years old,” I said. “I’ll show them to you when you come back to New York after the summer.”
“Deal.”
“So we agree on step two of the plan,” I said.
“Slow down,” Booker said. “What happened to step one?”
“The plan is obviously a work in progress,” I said, tapping the side of my head. “Step one should be a trip to the courthouse before we head up to Chilmark. We can check the land deeds to see how the Thaw property was split up, and maybe that will lead us to the owner of the doubloon. We should find out who inherited the barn where Lemuel Kyd hid out.”
“Cool,” Zee said. “Is that allowed?”
“Public records,” I said. “First thing tomorrow morning. We don’t even need a subpoena, although my mom could probably get us one through Sergeant Wright.”
“You’re on fire,” Booker said.
“Then, in the evening, Becca can show us where Jenny Thaw lives, in the Campground.”
Booker swallowed hard. “Lulu is a great co-conspirator for you, but Becca goes by the book. She’s not such a free spirit.”
“Aw, she’ll introduce us,” I said. “Becca is so into history and family genealogy she’ll be happy to put us together with one of Gertie’s relatives.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“When do we take our doubloon to show it to Artie?” Zee asked.
“How about the day after tomorrow?” I asked. “Isn’t that a good plan?”
Becca pushed open the screen door. She had my clean clothes and some napkins tucked under her arm and was carrying a fresh pitcher of lemonade.
“Plan for what?” she asked. “Booker, go in and fetch the sandwiches I made from the kitchen table. Y’all must be hungry by now.”
“To show our treasure to Artie,” Zee said.
Becca laughed as she sponged some paint off my nose and forehead with one of the napkins she had brought out. “You know what a town crier is?”
Zee wrinkled his nose. “Like a kid who cries all the time?”
“Nothing like that,” I said. “Back in colonial times, before there was the Internet—”
Secrets from the Deep Page 5
