Secrets from the Deep

by Linda Fairstein

  “Do you have anything that proves you have more of a right to this pirate booty than your distant cousin, Jenny Thaw?” I said. “She can trace her roots back to the same part of the Thaw family in Chilmark.”

  “No, no, I don’t have any such thing,” Thaw said, shifting around in his chair. “But I know they’re mine. I just know it.”

  “When did you dig up the doubloon we’re all here fussing about?” I said. “When did you do that?”

  “Why, why, it was just a week ago, I think. Maybe last Monday.”

  “Back up in Chilmark?” I said. “Even though you sold your farm a year ago? Even though that property no longer belongs to you?”

  Booker gave me two thumbs-up. I was pretty sure I had this thing nailed.

  Travis Thaw’s expression slowly changed from a sneer to a wide grin. “No, ma’am. I haven’t set foot in Chilmark in over a year.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I thought of my mother’s advice, which she said every lawyer learned in school. Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.

  I had just fallen into that trap. I had no idea where Travis Thaw found the doubloon, but I assumed it was on the old family farm.

  “But you found the coin on Martha’s Vineyard?” I asked, with no idea what his answer would be.

  “I know where!” Artie Constant shouted, as all heads turned to look at him. “Tell her where, Travis. Tell her where you dug.”

  “I didn’t think you could keep quiet about it, Artie,” Thaw said, pointing at his acquaintance. “You flap your mouth too much.”

  The town crier is what Becca had called the lighthouse keeper.

  “Where was the coin?” I asked again.

  “On the Vineyard, of course,” Thaw said. “On Telegraph Hill.”

  “Telegraph Hill,” I said, completely dumbfounded. “Where’s that?”

  Artie Constant was practically dancing a jig. “It’s where the East Chop Light is. It’s the land where the lighthouse sits.”

  36

  Captain Cutter had all he could do to keep order in the room. “Miss Quick, you’re doing fine,” he said. “Go on.”

  I was all twisted in knots now, because I didn’t know the answers to anything. I was nervous and not able to think fast enough to get the job done.

  “Help me, Booker,” I said.

  He got to his feet and put the fake glasses on the tip of his nose.

  “What is Telegraph Hill?” he asked.

  “That’s for me to answer,” Artie Constant said. “Back before there were lighthouses, people would pick the highest natural point on the land and build a tower or a station, so they could lay undersea cables and send wires—in our case, over to Cape Cod.”

  “And who owns that property the lighthouse sits on?” Booker asked. “The Thaw family?”

  “No way, no how. Never,” Artie Constant said. “The Coast Guard owns the lighthouse and the state owns the plot of land around it.”

  “Why did you go there to dig?” I asked.

  Thaw put his arms up in the air, like he was going to surrender to someone. “I might as well tell you,” he said. “It’s not like I didn’t get caught.”

  “By whom?” I said.

  “That woman you call my cousin,” he said. “By Jenny Thaw.”

  “How did that happen?” Booker asked.

  Travis Thaw started to tell the story. “Last year, when I sold the farm, Jenny came up to ask if there was any of Gertie’s stuff left around the place. Well, we found some old dresses and such up in the loft of the sheep barn, and while we were packing them up, a slip of paper fell out of the pocket of Gertie’s apron.”

  “With writing on it?” Booker asked. “With a treasure map?”

  Too much Robert Louis Stevenson, I thought to myself. Nobody drew a map to buried treasure in real life.

  “No map. Just a few words. All it said was ‘I’ll be back for you, girl. Meet me on Telegraph Hill,’” Thaw said.

  “Lemuel Kyd really did plan to return to see Gertie,” I said to Booker, practically losing myself in a swoon at the thought of it.

  “Skip the romance,” Booker said. “We have a mystery to solve.”

  “There I was just the other day,” Cole Bagby said, coming to life again, “trying to find my way around Menemsha Pond and your old farmhouse. It makes so much more sense that pirates would bury some of their treasure near a real harbor—like the one in Oak Bluffs—so it would be easy to get to on their way back to the southern seas.”

  “So you took the ferry back to the Vineyard last week, to dig for coins?” I asked Travis Thaw.

  “If there were any coins left on the island, I figured that Telegraph Hill was the likely place they’d be,” he said. “Our old farm was all dug out.”

  “When did you do the digging?” Booker asked.

  “Late at night,” Thaw said, “when I thought Artie would be off duty and no one would see me doing it.”

  “You didn’t figure how much I love it up at the tippy-top of that lighthouse, did you?” Artie said. “Plenty of nights I sleep up there, just looking for ships at sea. It’s not often I get a gold digger in my sights.”

  “What I didn’t figure was that you’d go spill the beans to Jenny,” Travis Thaw said. “At least, not so fast.”

  “You heard these kids,” Artie Constant said. “Jenny has every bit as much right to that gold as you seem to think you have. I felt I had to go tell her.”

  “You mean, Jenny knows what you did at the lighthouse last week?” I asked.

  “Knows?!” Travis Thaw roared. “Jenny got up there just about as soon as I found the coins. It was like Artie had lit a fire under her, she was so mad at me.”

  “Coins?” I said. “More than one coin?”

  “Do you know what a tea caddy is, Miss Quick?” Thaw asked.

  “They’re old wooden boxes,” I said, thinking of the one that Lulu has at home. “Small ones. It’s what English people used to keep their fancy tea in.”

  “Well,” Travis said, “I had a small garden shovel, and I was figuring there was a chance nobody else knew about the Telegraph Hill message from Kyd to Gertie. I dug holes all over the small park around the lighthouse.”

  “You sure did,” Artie Constant said. “I filled them in the next day, telling everybody they were made by chipmunks.”

  “All of a sudden, I hear this dull thud,” Thaw said.

  “Your shovel hit the tea caddy,” Booker said.

  “Exactly that.”

  “And inside were the gold coins,” Booker said. “Two of them? Three?”

  Travis Thaw stopped for a few moments. “I couldn’t believe it myself,” he said. “I lifted the dark wooden box out of the ground and opened it up. Inside, there was an old rag, all worn and weathered from rain that had seeped in over the years.”

  He paused again.

  “I unwrapped the rag, and there they were,” Thaw said. “Gold doubloons. Coins no one had seen in more than a century.”

  “How many?” Booker asked again.

  “Nine in all.”

  “Nine?” I said. There had only been one in our bucket of sand.

  “That’s when Jenny appeared,” Thaw said. “I was on my knees, counting doubloons. There was a full moon that night—a supermoon in fact—big and bright and orange.”

  “Did she take you by surprise?” I asked.

  “I nearly exploded from fright,” Thaw said. “I didn’t hear her coming up. She must have been watching me since Artie gave her the news. Jenny was standing over me, with a long broomstick in her hands, like she was about ready to lop off my head.”

  “But you knew it was Jenny?” I asked. “You knew it was Jenny Thaw?”

  “To tell you the truth, Miss Quick,” Travis Thaw said, “with a box of pirate booty and a shiny bri
ght orange moon overhead and a broomstick that could have knocked me off my knees—I thought I’d come face-to-face with a witch.”

  37

  “Did she hit you?” Booker asked.

  “Not a chance,” Thaw said. “I was on my feet and trying to bring her to her senses.”

  “About what?” I asked. “It seems to me Jenny had every reason in the world to be mad at you.”

  “She thought so, too,” Thaw said. “So I told her we’d better take the discussion back to her cottage, before someone heard us out by the lighthouse.”

  “But they’d hear you arguing from her house, too,” Booker said. “The neighbors can hear everything.”

  “There wasn’t much to argue about at that point,” Thaw said. “I pretty much realized I’d be lucky to get off the island with half of the gold.”

  “You split the pieces when you got to Jenny’s house?” I asked.

  “Even-steven,” Thaw said.

  “That’s pretty hard to do with nine doubloons,” I said.

  Artie Constant couldn’t hold still. “That’s ’cause Travis here told her there were only eight pieces of gold.”

  “You lied to your cousin?” I said. “Even then?”

  “I was just so nervous I think I got the count wrong,” Thaw said. “Are you planning to tell the Oak Bluffs police about me, too?”

  I was thinking this was more like a matter for the NYPD, because of all the resources they have. I didn’t know how far back their files went, but they have a pretty amazing cold case squad for really old crimes that were never solved. They could certainly help Sergeant Wright.

  “I’m not sure what to do about any of this yet,” I said. “’Cause I can’t figure out how nail polish got onto the coin we found, and whose coin it is after all.”

  Travis Thaw must have thought I was going soft on him. “Oh, the nail polish thing,” he said, smiling a bit. “I told you about that when you were standing at my booth, inside the coin show.”

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Well, Jenny and I had a bit of time to kill after we got to her cottage,” Thaw said. “I gave her the tea caddy and told her she could keep it.”

  “I saw it on her porch on Illumination Night,” I said, looking at Booker and thinking that she probably had her treasure right there under her hand that very night, in the old battered box, with nowhere to hide it but in plain sight.

  “Then I counted out the coins,” Thaw said. “Most of them anyway. Four for each of us. One must have gotten stuck in my pocket.”

  “Wouldn’t you just hate that, Booker?” I asked, turning away from Travis Thaw to roll my eyes. “If some nasty old piece of gold got stuck in your pocket?”

  “Bummer,” Booker said. “Real bummer.”

  “Anyway, Jenny told me she’d been following me on Facebook,” Thaw said, “and she asked me what the red dots on my coins meant.”

  “So you told her it meant they were real, right?” I said.

  “I did,” Thaw said. “I mean, she was going to want to sell them to make some money, and there’s no way these coins had been out of the ground since the eighteen thirties.”

  “Why did you have a bottle of nail polish with you?” Booker asked.

  “Oh, son. I put that red mark on a coin the minute I know I’ve got a real one,” Thaw said, practically pounding his fist on his knee. “I carry a bottle wherever I go. Say I got stopped speeding and the police searched me. The red dot could prove it’s mine. I got one right at my counter over at the show today.”

  I wasn’t sure that Travis Thaw’s thinking would hold water in a courtroom if the property wasn’t his to begin with.

  “Did you leave the bottle of polish with Jenny?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Thaw said. “But I told her she could walk over to the drugstore and get herself a bottle of ‘Scarlet,’ just like I did all those years I lived on the island. Wouldn’t have bothered me if she wanted to sell her gold, too.”

  “She did that,” Artie Constant said, looking at Thaw. “The very next day, after you left on the ferry. She used it on Illumination Night to put red marks on my doubloons. I figured if you did it to yours, people would believe mine were real, too.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Zee’s museum replicas. The ones you took from Becca’s while we were out for dinner.”

  “But they’re fakes, Artie,” Booker said to him.

  “Nobody will know that now,” Artie Constant said, grinning at Booker. “They’ve got red dots on them.”

  No wonder there was still scarlet polish dripping in the sink when Booker and I went inside Jenny Thaw’s cottage. She must have accidentally knocked the little bottle over when company started to arrive. Now it would take an expert to sort out the real coins from the fakes, that’s for sure.

  Artie Constant was holding Travis Thaw’s toes to the fire. “But you didn’t get off the island without a fight,” he said. “A fight with Jenny.”

  Travis Thaw looked just about defeated. He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  “It was on the dock at Oak Bluffs, just minutes before I was about to board the ferry,” Thaw said. “On the foot passenger line, ticketed and ready to go.”

  “What happened?” Booker asked.

  “Jenny insisted on walking with me until I got on the boat,” Thaw said. “She didn’t want me to have a chance to do any more digging—at least, not without her supervision.”

  “Can’t say I blame her,” Artie Constant said.

  “Jenny was carrying the little tea caddy with her four coins,” Thaw said. “She had it inside a beach bag with long handles.”

  “Why did she do that?” I asked.

  “No locks on her cottage door,” he said. “No hiding place. Jenny hadn’t yet figured out how and where to keep her treasure, or whether to trust it to a local bank with a safe-deposit box.”

  Kind of like me, I guess, with the bag around my neck all this week.

  “I was about to get to the ticket taker,” Thaw said. “I reached in the pocket of my Windbreaker. When I pulled out the ferry ticket to hand it over, I accidentally grabbed a doubloon at the same time.”

  He went on. “Well, Jenny had been watching my every move. She reached out and rattled my pants pocket. That’s where she’d seen me put the coins after we marked them.”

  “And there were four?” I asked.

  “Jenny demanded that I empty my pocket, ’cause she thought this was another coin that I hadn’t told her about,” he said. “She reached up to grab it—”

  “It was actually the ninth doubloon,” Booker said.

  “That’s the one,” Thaw said, “but she knocked it out of my hand. Accidentally, of course. Next thing I know, it was rolling along the dock on its edge, headed straight for the water.”

  In my head, I could almost hear the plop when the coin landed in the waves.

  “You didn’t dive in after it?” Mr. Bagby asked. “Are you crazy?”

  “I had a choice to make, sir,” Thaw said. “I still had four doubloons in my pocket, and I had a good chance of losing them all by diving into the water.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that. The other four could have fallen out and been washed away.

  “I felt in my pocket to make sure the four of them were still there, and I marched myself onto the ferry,” Thaw said. “I never once looked back.”

  “But Jenny,” I asked, “why didn’t she dive into the water?”

  “I can answer that,” Artie Constant said. “Jenny Thaw don’t know how to swim.”

  “What?” I said. “She’s lived on an island surrounded by water all her life, but can’t swim?”

  “That girl never learned,” Artie said. “She was always afraid to get in over her waist. That’s how it is with some people.”

  I turned to look at Artie. “That’s wh
y you were so anxious to see our doubloon,” I said to him. “You were looking out for it—for Jenny Thaw. You knew it had fallen off the dock, you knew about the red dot on the face of it, you knew Jenny needed to claim it before anyone else did, even though it really doesn’t belong to her.”

  Artie Constant sat on the arm of the sofa. “I know all those things, missy,” he said, “and now you know them, too.”

  Suddenly, Captain Cutter moved toward the door that led to the gangplank. I looked up.

  There were two police officers in uniform, running toward the Twilight from the end of the marina.

  Cutter opened the door and the policewoman spoke first.

  “Have you got a Devlin Quick on board?” she asked, holding a walkie-talkie in her hand.

  “That’s me, Officer,” I said, stepping forward.

  “You okay, Miss Quick?” she asked me. She looked like she was ready to count my fingers and toes to double-check me.

  “I’m fine,” I said, throwing off the big towel so she could see I wasn’t injured at all. “I’m just great.”

  The officer beamed a big smile back at me and spoke into her walkie-talkie. “We got an all clear on Kid Blue,” she said. “Kid Blue is good to go.”

  38

  “If you were just a little bit older,” my grandmother said to Booker as we sat down to dinner, “I would offer you and Devlin some grog.”

  “Louella, please,” my mother said, “there’s no sense in that.”

  “That’s the kind of week they’ve had, Blaine,” Lulu said. “Every good pirate likes his grog, once they’re of legal age.”

  Booker and I had gone directly to Lulu’s apartment from the yacht. My mother met us there with dry clothes for me before two Major Case detectives debriefed us. She had also brought the doubloon, which I told her she’d find in Asta’s bed.

  My grandmother was fascinated with the gold coin, but even more fascinated with Booker’s iPhone photographs of the yacht.

  “Why don’t you have any pictures, darling?” she said to me.

  “My phone is gone,” I said. “It was in that awful pink bag I had around my neck.”