The Pirate's Coin

by Marianne Malone

  Ruthie asked, “But isn’t the ledger enough proof?”

  “I don’t know anything about this ledger,” Isabelle answered. “In fact, I’ve never seen it before.”

  Ruthie was stunned. “What do you mean? You didn’t shrink this?”

  Isabelle shook her head.

  Ruthie and Jack shared a look of disbelief. Once again, more questions than answers had just sprung up.

  Isabelle continued. “No doubt your classmate’s family will be happy to have it. But the will would prove beyond doubt that ownership of the formulas lay with Phoebe’s heirs. It was the most important item, because it was notarized.”

  “What does that mean?” Ruthie asked.

  “It means it was signed and dated by a legal witness,” Isabelle explained. She stroked the ledger. “Please, tell me everything you know.”

  Ruthie took the beaded handbag from her messenger bag. As soon as she did, Isabelle leaned forward. A look of recognition spread across her face.

  “That came from Eugene’s mother. He had lent it to Narcissa to copy the patterns on the needlepoint rug of the South Carolina room! I worked on that rug.”

  “Did you shrink the handbag?” Ruthie asked.

  “No. That wasn’t me either.”

  “We noticed the patterns were the same, and we found your name in a file about that room in the archives,” Ruthie said. “But we also found something hidden inside the lining.” She nodded to Jack, who took the slave tag from his other pocket and handed it to Isabelle. Ruthie thought the tag looked quieter than it had on Sunday, but it still glowed oddly, capturing and refracting the light of the chandelier.

  “I don’t know what this is,” Isabelle said. She looked at the worn square in her palm.

  Ruthie explained that the piece of metal was a slave tag and that slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, had to wear them around their necks when they were hired to work for someone other than their owners. She told Isabelle how they had found it in the beaded handbag and learned that it had belonged to Phoebe Monroe. Last, Ruthie recounted how Mrs. McVittie’s sister had most likely taken the bag when they were girls and visited the rooms in 1940.

  “By way of magic? They had the key?” Isabelle wanted to know.

  “Yes. They found the key when the rooms were shown in Boston,” Ruthie answered.

  “I wonder how that happened! If only we could have found the key!”

  “But, Isabelle,” Jack jumped in, “objects that have been shrunk grow back to full size when they get far enough away from the rooms. Why didn’t you just take them out small?”

  Isabelle stared at Jack for a few long seconds. After a while she spoke. “You mean to tell me … you didn’t need to use the key to make objects like the globe—and the ledger—big again?”

  “No,” Ruthie said simply, knowing how this truth would sting.

  “I had no idea.…” Isabelle buried her face in her hand momentarily. “Of course we took the documents out of the cabinet to see if we could make them full-sized again, but never very far from the room. We finally left them in a miniature book, thinking that they would be safest there. And then the rooms went on tour. How tragic. I remember the awful newspaper headlines and how it broke Eugene’s spirit. He felt responsible and couldn’t undo what we’d done. Imagine the humiliation that poor family suffered! Everyone was so frightened and intimidated by the mob bosses who stole Eugenia’s business. Eugene died during the trial. He thought he had been helping by asking me to hide everything.”

  “What happened next?” Jack asked.

  “Nothing, really.” She gazed out the window. “Mrs. Thorne had completed the rooms and they toured the country for several years—we didn’t know that they would even return to Chicago. I went to live in Europe for a long time and tried to put it out of my mind. And for the most part I did. And then you two came along.” She sighed. “It’s as if all that time gone by has vanished. The rooms do a funny thing with time, don’t they?”

  “We think so,” Ruthie agreed. She looked at the expressions that danced across Isabelle’s face, trying to read them. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s all somewhat overwhelming,” Isabelle said, slowly passing the ledger back to Ruthie. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you understand how this ended up in the rooms.”

  “You’ve helped us,” Jack said. “We know a lot more than we knew before.”

  Ruthie didn’t say anything more but it was becoming evident to her how the ledger had appeared in—had come to exist in—the South Carolina room.

  “Tell me, what will you do with it?” Isabelle asked.

  “We’ll give it to Kendra and her family,” Ruthie answered. “But we have to figure out what to say to them first. We can’t exactly tell them we found it in one of the Thorne Rooms, can we?”

  They left Isabelle’s early in the afternoon. On the bus Ruthie mentally sorted and organized as best she could. “Jack,” she began, trying to put into words the idea formulating in her mind, “there was no ledger until we went back in time. After we gave Phoebe the pencils and paper and she practiced her writing. Before that, she passed the formulas on orally, like Isabelle said.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing. It must have appeared in the cabinet right after we met her. So they couldn’t have used it during the trial. That’s pretty wild.”

  More perplexing still was Isabelle’s description of the other items she had hidden—a will and a letter. Documents that would prove beyond doubt the family’s claim on their heritage. The question loomed in Ruthie’s head like an echo: Where are they?

  15

  GOOSE BUMPS

  “HERE WE ARE.” JACK NUDGED her at the bus stop in front of the museum. She hadn’t even noticed.

  They bounded up the front steps, taking two at a time.

  “Let’s go to the Cape Cod room first when we come down the chain. You know it makes sense to stop there first,” Jack suggested. “Besides, today we’ve got plenty of time to do both.”

  “Okay,” Ruthie agreed.

  Downstairs, they rounded the corner into Gallery 11. Jack stopped, nodded his head and said simply, “Warming.”

  “The coin or the tag?”

  “Mostly the coin.” He looked around to make sure no one would see as he took the slave tag from a pocket and the coin from the other. The glow from both was steady and strong.

  They went to the alcove and stood next to the access door. Jack was about to hand the key to Ruthie when a guard came strolling by and they had to step away from the door and look casual.

  They paused in front of room E8, an English bedroom from the late eighteenth century. It was one of the doorless rooms, and if Ruthie hadn’t felt the press of accomplishing something today, she might have explored and tried to find out why it had none. But her desire to search for the missing documents for Kendra—and for Phoebe—outweighed this curiosity.

  “Hey, I just thought of something,” Jack said, slipping his hand into his pocket. “We’ve never checked to see if the coin can make us shrink.”

  “I guess we never had a reason to,” Ruthie responded. “Should we try now?”

  “Why not? It would be good to know,” he answered.

  As soon as the opportunity came, Jack grabbed Ruthie’s hand and plunked the coin between their two palms. She sensed the heavy warmth increase to real heat. But this magic was slightly different—rather than a breeze flowing through her hair, moist air surrounded Ruthie. And something else—as she felt herself shrinking, she smelled the unmistakable scent of salty sea air around her. But it vanished as soon as the process came to a halt and they stood five inches tall. She and Jack let go of each other’s hands and safely scooted under the door and into the corridor.

  “Wow! I can’t believe my coin has the shrinking magic! Do you feel okay?”

  “Yeah. It was different but smooth; I think I smelled salt water, but now it’s gone. Did you smell it?”

  “Not really. But cool!” Jack was thrilled
with this added dimension contained in his family heirloom.

  “Just think—it’s been in your family for generations. And nobody knew!”

  “Let’s get the climbing chain set up so we can find out where this magic came from,” Jack said, eager to move on.

  To grow back to full size, Ruthie dropped the coin, which also grew right in front of Jack. He stood there as his tiny self, looking at the surface of what to him was now a dinner-plate-sized coin, the date etched in numbers nearly a quarter inch deep and as long as his fingers. While he marveled at these giant details, Ruthie put the climbing chain in place. Then she picked up the piece of eight and reshrank to join him in the climb.

  Ruthie and Jack proceeded quickly up to the vent and through the duct, running all the way to the end to make their descent into the American corridor.

  Nearing the ledge, Ruthie asked, “How’s it feeling?”

  “It’s heating up. Fast!”

  The crochet chain hung directly between room A12, the Cape Cod living room, and room A13, a New England bedroom (with another great canopy bed). Jack reached the ledge first and hopped onto it. He went toward A12. Ruthie was right behind him.

  “It’s really hot now!”

  He pulled the coin out. It pulsed with light, radiating in all directions.

  “What do you feel besides heat?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like something’s tugging me. From in there.” He pointed to the back of the room installation.

  “Let’s go,” Ruthie said, letting Jack lead so she could keep an eye on him.

  They found their way to the entrance, which put them at the top of a stairway that descended into the room.

  “Really odd!” Jack said. He held up his forearm for Ruthie to see. The hair on his arms was standing up—like after you’ve rubbed a balloon against your skin and static electricity is created.

  From the stairs they peeked down into the room. They saw a humble living room with a low ceiling, yellow wallpaper, wooden furniture and a braided rug. A grown-up’s tea set was on a table near the window. There was a small porcelain doll on a child-sized chair next to a three-legged stool with an even smaller china tea set resting on it. Ruthie pointed it out to Jack.

  “The catalogue said that tray it’s on is made out of a penny!” They walked down the steps and into the room to take a closer look.

  “You can kind of see Lincoln, even though it’s been flattened.” Jack bent down, inspecting it. The penny-turned-tray was just about as big as his head.

  The coin still flashed in Jack’s hand. “Look at that,” he said, his attention fixed on a tiny model ship in a bottle on the fireplace mantel. It was underneath a painting of a ship at sea. “This must be the one I read about in the archive. It’s so much smaller than the Mayflower model from A1.”

  Ruthie took a closer look. “I seriously doubt a full-sized hand could have made that. Didn’t you read that Mrs. Thorne called it ‘animated’?”

  “Yeah, and ‘rare,’ ” Jack answered. “It came with that desk.” He nodded toward the desk that stood near the door to the outside.

  Jack reached for the delicate bottle to get a closer look at it but voices approaching in the gallery stopped him. The door to the outside was open and they dashed through it.

  They found themselves standing on a small entry porch looking out at a living world. The sun shone midsummer bright and warm. Lush hydrangeas and tall spikes of multicolored hollyhocks bloomed along the white fence surrounding the small garden outside of room A12. Off to the right and down the road, a large flock of sheep grazed in a meadow, protected by a low stone wall. To the left they saw houses and shops clad in weathered gray shingles with white trim. The deep blue of the ocean met the lighter blue of the sky at the horizon.

  People were out and about. The clothes the women wore looked similar to what Lucy had been wearing: long gowns with wide necklines, tight bodices and lace-edged sleeves that stopped at the elbows. Most of the women had either a small square of lace covering the top of their head or a loose bonnet. Ruthie and Jack saw men in long jackets, mainly blue or gray, and tight pants meeting white stockings at the knee. Many sported three-cornered hats, and some had white wigs with long curls. The children looked like miniature adults, although the young boys had their natural hair pulled back in ponytails.

  The air carried the wet and salty scent of the nearby ocean. Ruthie took a deep breath.

  “This is what I smelled when we shrank!”

  Jack surveyed the scene. He took a few steps off the porch but stayed well within the white picket fence that enclosed the yard. “I wish I knew what made me want to come into this room.”

  “Can I look at your coin again?” Ruthie asked.

  Jack dropped it into her palm.

  They watched it dim.

  “Interesting,” Ruthie said. “The coin feels warm. But I don’t feel goose bumps. How about you?”

  Jack held up his arm. Ruthie could see the hair still standing up.

  She turned the coin over in her hand and studied it. “It’s dated 1743. The catalogue gave only an approximate time period for the room from 1750 on.” She stopped to see if Jack was following.

  “Jack Norfleet’s ship sank around that time. We don’t know the exact date.” Jack looked at the ocean and then at the coin again. The road in front of the house led down to a harbor town and his gaze caught sight of sailboats, their masts bobbing and sails gliding far beyond. “Let’s go down there.”

  “Wait, Jack. Our clothes—remember? That’s probably the eighteenth century.”

  “Oh, right.” He stood looking out at the ocean. His mood had changed and Ruthie thought something like sadness had crept up on him. “I’ve never been to Cape Cod.”

  “Me neither,” Ruthie said, although she sensed he meant something else. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. It’s just … you know, my dad was from here.”

  Ruthie was stunned. “I didn’t know. You never told me that.”

  “Yeah. That’s why he became a marine biologist, because he grew up near the ocean. He worked around here somewhere. After he died, my mom said she couldn’t look at the ocean anymore. It’s the reason she moved to Chicago—to be near her family and not be reminded every time she saw the ocean.”

  The few times Jack had ever spoken about his dad, he’d explained he had died in a car accident before Jack was born. But he’d never given any details. Ruthie felt an ache in her throat and tried to swallow it away.

  “I’m glad she moved to Chicago, then,” she offered. “We would never have met if she hadn’t. We would never have done this!”

  And then, as quickly as it had come, Jack’s dark mood lifted and he smiled. “Maybe we can find some old clothes and go exploring!”

  Back on the porch, just outside the room, they listened to the steady stream of twenty-first-century people on the museum side who looked through the viewing window. Once the last person had moved on, they reentered the room.

  “I bet this is a closet,” Ruthie said, lifting the latch on a door to the right of the stairway.

  “Better hurry! I hear voices,” Jack urged.

  “Quick! Get in!” Ruthie said.

  They popped into the small, dark space and closed the door just in time. Jack used his cell phone light again to illuminate the space enough to see that it was, in fact, a clothes closet. This was not the first time they’d found garments, and Ruthie wondered why Mrs. Thorne had gone to the trouble of including items that could not be seen by museum visitors. Had she known they might someday come in handy?

  “Good guess!” Jack said approvingly. “Do you think any of this will fit?”

  Ruthie inspected the several articles hanging on wall hooks. “I think so.” She pulled down a light yellow dress, full length, with a broad flowered shawl around the scooped neck. It laced up the front to tighten it. She looked down at her feet. “It’s a little long. But that’s okay; it hides my sneakers.”

  “This guy’s o
utfit isn’t as fancy as the French one I wore when we met Sophie.” Jack was looking at canvas-colored pants, a long-sleeved shirt patterned with tiny blue-and-white checks and a brown vest of coarse linen.

  Knocking and bumping into each other in the tight space, they slipped the clothes on over their own. On separate hooks hung a woman’s hat—shaped like a lacy shower cap, Ruthie thought—that matched the shawl, and a three-cornered hat for Jack.

  “Not bad,” Jack said, putting the coin in a front pocket of the vest. “Except for the shoes.” His sneakers were showing. But there were no shoes to be found.

  “We look older,” Ruthie noticed. “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  Ruthie cracked the door.

  “Did you see that?” the voice of a girl said from the other side of the glass. “That door just opened!”

  Ruthie froze, leaving the door ajar.

  “I didn’t see anything. You’re imagining it!” another girl’s voice replied.

  “I swear, I saw it!” the first girl protested.

  “C’mon,” the voice said, beginning to recede. “Look at the canopy bed in this room.”

  When she was sure they had moved on to the next room, Ruthie opened the door. She was headed to the outside world when Jack said, “Wait a sec.”

  He reached for the minuscule ship in the bottle that rested on the mantel. His curiosity had taken hold of him. Jack examined the exquisite treasure, which was incredibly small even to his five-inch self.

  “Ruthie!” he suddenly exclaimed. “You’re not going to believe this!”

  She rushed over to him. “What?”

  He pointed to the base of the model ship. A brass plaque not only held the name of the ship, Avenger, but also was engraved with the maker’s name: Jack Norfleet.

  16

  THE CLEMENTINE

  “DO YOU THINK HE’S OUT here?” Jack wondered, looking out from the porch.