Having heard enough, Justin took the phone from me. “You’re on speakerphone, Aaron. This is Justin. Pop and your Aunt Miller are here, too. What danger are you talking about.”
“I’m not talking about the storm, Justin.” He swallowed some more of whatever he drank, and by the sound of it, he’d reached the bottom of the glass. “I’m talking about this mess that I’ve gotten us into. You all must get in the car and go—”
It sounded like he hiccupped, and he never finished the sentence.
“Aaron?” We all said at once.
“Aaron!” Justin raised his voice. “Are you there? Talk to me.”
We heard a gurgle, or perhaps a choking sound and then nothing. The line went dead. Millie gasped. Justin immediately dialed Aaron back but the phone immediately went to voicemail.
I grabbed Justin’s arm. I wanted to apologize about asking Aaron if Justin had been involved, but he held up a hand to stop me. “Don’t worry about it. I’d be questioning everything too, if I were you. We have more important things to deal with.”
We convened at the kitchen table, where poker chips and cards were still spread out. We didn’t know if Aaron had hung up on us or simply passed out drunk. Since he’d called from his personal cell phone, we also weren’t sure where he was. Justin made some rapid fire phone calls, ending with a call to cop who agreed to do a drive-by at Aaron’s house in Atlanta.
Since we had no idea what type of danger Aaron was referring to, we unanimously decided to stay put. We could only guess it had to do with Lester and his associates, but couldn’t figure out what they wanted with us. Other than maybe revenge. But Lester’s revenge should have been directed at Aaron, not me or Pop.
Nobody had seen Lester since the governor ordered a mandatory evacuation and we assumed that he’d headed inland to weather the storm. Even though they were supposed to leave immediately, Justin said, old-timers often waited until the last minute – or didn’t leave at all. But apparently, Lester booked out of town without bothering to tell anyone goodbye. Some leader.
Pop called the police chief, and after apologizing about waking him up, told him about Aaron’s strange phone call. He explained Lester’s involvement in something shady and told the chief that Riley had most likely been murdered. Pop let him know that we’d all be at the house, and we’d call with any further developments.
Pop and Justin rechecked the locks and did an outside walk around the property, Flush at their heels. Nobody went back to bed, as sleep would be as evasive as Bandit when she didn’t want to be found. An hour later, Pop’s phone rang and it was the cop asking for Justin.
Aaron had been found in a chaise lounge on the back deck of his house, unconscious. A near-empty bottle of scotch sat on the table next to him along with his wife’s prescription bottle of Valium. But nothing was amiss, and the house appeared secure. They’d pumped out his stomach in the hospital and were running tests to rule out something like a stroke. The doctors figured that he’d simply taken too many pills and drank too much alcohol, and if the paramedics hadn’t found him when they did, he would have been dead within hours. The unspoken concern was that Aaron may have intentionally tried to kill himself. They couldn’t ask him, though, because he was still unconscious and they couldn’t question his wife because she was out of town.
After conveying the horrible news to us, Justin called the hospital to learn that Aaron was stable, but not yet awake. Next, he dialed one of Shine’s partners at home, and without relaying details or apologizing for the late hour, explained that Aaron was in the hospital. That done, I called Sheila, knowing she wouldn’t mind being awakened. I didn’t want her to find out that our boss may have tried to kill himself through the grapevine, on Monday.
Not knowing what else to do, we drank the glasses of milk Millie served and went back to bed, Pop toting the shotgun and Justin carrying the .45 automatic he’d retrieved from Pop’s hiding place. We felt sure that the information Aaron discovered, the real reason Lester sought Rumton real estate, had something to do with why Aaron called to tell us that we were in danger.
Chapter 22
We awoke Sunday morning to news that Hailey, still on her same course, had progressed to a category five storm. The biggest ranking there is. One of the most powerful hurricanes in history, she moved fast and steady at twenty-two knots, which Pop said was almost twenty-five miles an hour. Forecasters said Hailey was even stronger than Hurricane Hazel, which hit the North Carolina/South Carolina border in 1954.
Nobody had slept well and we were all up at sunrise. After a breakfast of toast and coffee, we headed to Devil’s Tail. Even though there was nothing to be done, something drew us to the shipwreck site. It may have been the thought of what might have been, if we’d dug out the wreckage days ago. Or perhaps we just needed something to do, since all our storm preparations were finished and it was now a matter of waiting for the inevitable.
We piled in my Range Rover and went as far as we could without getting stuck. Millie stayed in the vehicle, but the rest of us put on bulky hip waders and worked our way to the spot. Tranquil, almost surreal, an outline of the ship’s hull just barely stuck out of the sand, as though skillfully painted into the landscape. It was a lovely morning and the sky was nearly cloudless. The current weather certainly didn’t indicate that a massive storm steadily approached.
“So this is where the inlet used to be. I can almost see the boats going in and out, winding their way to Rum Towne,” I said.
“Like Avery discovered from the satellite photos, it’s shifted a bit from the original inlet, or outlet to be technically correct.” Justin explained that water always flowed towards the ocean. In the case of Devil’s Tail, the stretch was fed by Skirr Creek, which in turn was fed by the Intracoastal Waterway. Our problem was that the flow of water through Devil’s Tail was a mere trickle, instead of a deep water canal.
Encapsulated by our rubber waders, we stood together and breathed the heady marsh scent and pondered Rumton’s past. Suddenly, I felt a tickle, as though a breeze had caressed my face. Only it was an uncharacteristically still morning, and the air wasn’t moving. In fact, no breeze blew at all.
“Do you guys feel that?” I whispered. “Remember how Brent and Tom joked about a ghost? I just felt an energy, or something. Maybe I’m imagining things.”
Justin closed his eyes, aimed his face at the sky, and breathed deep. After a moment, he let the breath out. “No, you aren’t imagining things. I feel it, too.”
“Aye,” Pop said. “It’s Aldora, I think. Same woman in the dream, who whispered in my ear. And your ear, too.”
I laughed. “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts?”
Pop shrugged. “Aldora was cheated out of the happiness she would’ve ‘ad with Emerald Eye. She might’ve lived her whole life heartbroken, waiting for him, haunted by love lost.”
Something in me tingled at possibilities of the unknown.
Justin paced in place, his feet sticking in the muck with a sucking sound. “I hate to think of the damage and possible death toll from this storm,” Justin said. “But wouldn’t it be amazing if she did open up Devil’s Tail?”
“Aye. We’d have our ocean access back. Be like a bird dog getting set free, after being kenneled ‘is whole life.”
A thought made me shiver. “Or like a buried shipwreck being uncovered, to set free the romantic pirate who died when it went down.”
“Huh,” Pop and Justin said.
My feet sank into the silt, and I shifted my weight to keep them from going deeper. “I wish we had a week to get your ship out of here, Pop, instead of just a day. We might could have done it.”
Justin pointed. “We might still can.”
A rumbling of diesel engines flowed across the marsh and some sort of big tractor with a boom moved toward us, leading a parade of trucks and smaller tractors.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Pop said under his breath.
I jumped up and down, and almost fell when my foot stuc
k. “People are coming to help! I bet Bull spread the word about Avery’s call!” I almost fell again and Justin righted me.
As the lead tractor got closer, I saw that Elwood sat in the cab surrounded by a bunch of controls and joysticks. The machine dwarfed his lanky, eighty-two-year-old frame. “What is that thing?”
“It’s an old dragline, used for dredging and excavating,” Justin explained. “See that long arm? It swings the clamshell bucket out and plunges it into the sand or debris to be removed. Cables pull the bucket back and forth, to and from the machine. The whole thing rotates on its base.”
“Elwood’s the only man knows how to use it,” Pop said. “He used to work for a heavy equipment company before he retired.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Been parked behind Duckies for years and years. Belonged to Walter’s pappy, I think.”
The parade stopped near my Range Rover and we started the process of trudging back across the span of marsh. “Speaking of heavy, how will they get it out here? It’ll sink in this sludge.”
“They’re going to lay planks to make a track,” Pop said, more to himself than to me. “I’ll be damned.”
Draglines typically floated on a barge to do a dredging job, but we didn’t have that luxury, Pop told me, and laying the track would be exhausting work. We got back to the staging area to find even more people arriving. Bull brought thermoses of coffee and bags of biscuits to feed people. Billy and Walter organized the troops and divvied up duties. Several grandchildren of some locals drove in to help. And three of the town’s preachers had come, deciding that removing the wreckage was more important than delivering a sermon.
“I wonder if this is legal,” I said, watching all the activity.
“Of course not,” Pop said, his green eye flashing mischief. “But then pirates ne’er were ones to follow the rules.”
* * *
After collaborating with Pop, the men decided to pile all the debris in a clearing, off to one side. If Hailey didn’t carry it off, they’d let it dry out and the town would have a bonfire in commemoration of The Aldora and its captain, Emerald Eye. The first order of business was to get the dragline in position, and doing so took hours. The track had to be laid in front of it, and as the giant piece of heavy equipment moved forward, the track behind it was rotated to the front. A group of men, utilizing a system of ropes and pulleys and a four wheel drive ATV, did the labor intensive work without complaining. While that project was in progress, others formed a human chain to the site and passed back what they could dig out and lift by hand. Another group, led by the judge, found the giant anchor and secured it with ropes. Once the dragline was in place, its clamshell bucket would dislodge the anchor, at which point trucks parked by my Range Rover would pull the thing inland. A trailer hitched to a farm tractor stood by to tow it to Pop’s house.
“That’s one piece of the ship that won’t go anywhere with the storm,” I said to Pop, handing him a bottle of Gatorade. I’d been passing out bottles of water and sports drinks. “It would be cool to use that in the museum, if the grant goes through. If the town would even want a museum, that is.”
In a symphony of coordinated effort, everyone did their part, as though they dug out shipwrecks every day. Gertrude delivered a box load of supplies from her drugstore and Millie and I set up a makeshift first aid station complete with folding chairs and a canopy tent.
By early afternoon, the day grew sweltering hot. Sweaty, muddy and exhausted, nobody stopped working. When the last of the wreckage had been removed, a cheer went up, but there was still more to do. Track had to be laid again, in reverse, and the dragline moved back to dry land.
Clouds started rolling in and the wind picked up by the time we finished, but nobody hurried to get home. A spattering of fat raindrops suddenly fell but quickly passed, and in the distance, scattered bands of clouds melded into a solid mass. Resting on tailgates and folding lawn chairs, muddy people told stories and watched the sky darken. They’d swapped their bottles of water and Gatorade for cans of beer, or gin and juice, compliments of Duckies. Pop moved from person to person to thank them.
“Ain’t no need to thank us, Pop,” the judge said. “It was your boat down there, but we all want our canal opened up. Mother Nature took it away. Now, maybe she’ll give it back.”
“Right,” Gertrude shouted, louder than normal. She’d dropped her hearing aid battery into the marsh while attempting to change it out, and didn’t have a spare. “Besides, Jaxie is the one ought to be thanked.”
The declaration caught me by surprise. “I am?”
“Weren’t for you, Avery wouldn’t have found Devil’s Tail, or The Aldora!”
Gladys patted me on the back. “And if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t know the truth about Lester Spear.”
Councilman Rusty, one of Lester’s biggest supporters, spoke up. “A person says he’s interested in the welfare of this town and wants to be our leader, seems like he’d be here, pitching in. Or be with the chief at the movie house, helping out. But ain’t nobody seen hide nor hair of the man.”
“I’ll Bet Lester took off, like a scared jackrabbit,” Gertrude yelled.
A consensus of agreement made me smile. Those who’d given Lester the benefit of the doubt, even after my disclosure at the council meeting, had now snatched it back.
Justin found my dirty hand with his dirtier one, and squeezed. The townspeople had accomplished something huge, and being a part of it felt great.
Strong wind gusts and another sudden spattering of rain announced Hailey’s arrival, like a warm up band preparing an audience for the real show. It was time to head to our respective homes for a shower and a meal, the last hot water and cooked food we might have for a while. But before we did, everyone joined hands and said a prayer.
Chapter 23
Hailey made landfall late Sunday night, as it neared midnight. Gaining momentum, she traveled at an astounding forward speed of twenty-six knots, or almost thirty miles an hour. Justin had boarded the remaining windows before rain began slamming against the house in sheets, and except for a few peepholes cut in the wood, we couldn’t see outside at all. We lined up our gallon jugs of water inside the house, to use for drinking and brushing our teeth, since the water supply might become contaminated. And then there was nothing to do but eat and drink and play cards. And hope we lived through it.
I lit a jar candle in the center of table so we’d have some light when the power failed, and looked at the people around me. Our little group made a strange and wonderful family. Pop and Millie, who hadn’t shared words in thirty years, but now gushed over each other like kids in love. Me and Justin, who’d worked together for years, but never bothered to get to know each other. And two cats, one dog and a raccoon. Were it not for the relentless, frightening noises made by ferocious wind, rain, and lightening, it would have been an enjoyable way to spend an evening. To take my mind off the storm, I studied the faint shadows flickering across Justin’s unshaven face. He looked good in candlelight. He would look good in any light, I decided. Especially without the ugly glasses hiding his eyes.
He caught my glance, and read my thoughts. “Lasik surgery, next month. It’s already scheduled. Since you’re so fascinated with Emerald Eye, I promise not to cancel the appointment this time. Then you can have an unobstructed view of my green eye, any time you wish.”
Pop chuckled. “I’m pretty fascinated with Emerald Eye, myself, Lass. ‘Oft wondered what it would have been like to live a life on the sea.”
Millie patted Pop’s knee. “Everybody’s fascinated by pirates. There’s something so…; romantic and dangerous and, well, downright sexy about them.”
Pop sat up a little straighter. Fanning his poker hand of cards in front of him, he might have flexed his biceps, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
I only had a pair of three’s, and knew Justin held a full house. I’d sneaked a look at his cards when he’d leaned over to kiss my cheek. I laid my cards
down to fold when it hit me. “Pirates! That’s it,” I said, floored by the obvious. “The avenue to revitalizing Rumton. The whole reason I was sent here to begin with! Even though it was a farce of an assignment, Rumton really does need some help.”
Following my train of thought, Justin smiled. He had a beautiful smile. Leaning over, I kissed him full on the lips, not caring that Pop and Millie watched.
“Eh?” Pop said.
“People would come here if we got word out that this was a pirate town! It’s all about the marketing,” I said, loudly, to be heard over Hailey’s furor. “The potential is huge.”
Bellows of thunder, deep enough to rattle the three-hundred-year-old house and vibrate our ribcages, rolled over us as the assault continued. One exploded directly overhead and Millie jumped from the menacing sound. Rattled, she fluffed her hair and drank some wine. “First thing we ought to do is change the name back to Rum Towne. Way it used to be, back when pirates traded here.”
Pop folded. Justin and Millie showed each other their cards. Justin won the hand. “That’s a great idea, Jax. I’d bet we could find a distributor to bottle a line of private label rums, just for Rum Towne.”
A campaign of ideas erupted in my head. “Exactly! Light and dark rums. And a coconut rum and a spiced rum. And we could have an artist come up with a rendition of Emerald Eye, to put on the label. He could be our town mascot.”
Pop chuckled and his green eye shone.
“What?” I said.
“Was just thinking, Lass. When you first came ‘ere, you couldn’t wait to get back to the city. You hated this place.” He swallowed a hefty slug of bourbon on ice, and leaning back, let out a deep belly laugh. “Now you’re calling it ‘our town’, like you’ve been here forever!”
Everyone slid quarters in to ante up and Justin dealt another round. “Jaxie is coming around nicely.”
Millie slapped the table. “I could make rum cakes to sell! And rum candy and cookies, too. Got some prized recipes that were my great-grandmothers. I’ll open me up a little bakery, right next to Pop’s B and B.”
Carolina Booty Page 22
