The Poe Estate

by Polly Shulman

  “So Japhet sought out the infamous Captain Tempest of the Pretty Polly, the most notorious pirate on the coast, and offered him a hundred pounds in gold to kill Windy’s husband, Phineas, and bring his head back as proof.

  “Red Tom Tempest readily agreed. ‘A proposition worthy of the Polly,’ laughed Red Tom, showing off his three gold teeth. They sealed their bargain with rum.”

  I objected. “Wait, hang on! What’s this Red Tom Tempest person doing in the story? I thought Phinny was supposed to be the pirate!”

  Cousin Hepzibah patted my hand. “I’m getting there, dear.”

  “There can be more than one pirate, silly,” said Cole. “Me hearties,” he added as an afterthought.

  Cousin Hepzibah continued, “The storms were strong that year, and many a fortune was smashed into driftwood up and down the coast. News came that the Oracle had gone down with all hands. Phineas Toogood was no more.

  “Japhet went to his cousin and asked her again to marry him. ‘A widow needs a protector and a boy needs a father,’ he said. But Windy refused to believe her husband was really dead. ‘My boy has a father,’ she told Japhet.

  “Then word came—from a trader who had heard a story in a tavern on Jamaica—that what had sunk the Oracle was not a storm, but pirates.

  “Windy maintained that no pirates would kill such a fine sailor. They must have taken him prisoner to help sail their ship, she insisted. Phinny would escape and come home to her.

  “When Japhet heard this he waited eagerly for Red Tom Tempest to deliver on his promise and bring him Phinny’s head. But when the pirate captain finally came, he brought bad news. Though wounded, Phineas had escaped on the Oracle’s lifeboat. ‘But I did bring you this,’ said Red Tom, handing Japhet a small brandy cask.”

  “What was in it?” asked Cole, bouncing in his chair and spilling a little tea into his saucer.

  “I’m just getting to that,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Japhet brought the cask to Windy. He told her, ‘I’m afraid I have some painful news. A sailor of my acquaintance has a brother who is cook aboard the Pretty Polly. He saw your husband fall in the fight, mortally wounded. It grieves me to tell you that the pirates threw him overboard and the cook saw a pair of sharks fighting over his body. Nothing remains of him but this.’ He handed Windy the cask. ‘I deeply regret the pain this must be causing you, but I know that unless you see it with your own eyes, you will persist in your unfortunate refusal to accept your husband’s demise.’

  “Windy opened the cask, shrieked, and fell back in a swoon. Inside the cask was Phinny’s left hand, pickled in brandy. She couldn’t mistake it—it was wearing the wedding ring that she had given him.”

  Cole and I spoke at once.

  “Cool!” he said.

  “Eww!” I said.

  “What did Windy do then?” I asked.

  “At last she believed Japhet that Phinny was dead. She buried his hand in the little graveyard at the top of the hill—you can still see the gravestone, the one with the rose climbing on it. She fell into a decline. The only thing that would bring her out of herself was little Jack, who had grown into a fine, strong child.

  “Now that Phinny was out of the way, Japhet hoped she would be persuaded to marry him. It was what her father had wanted, after all. But little Jack still stood between him and the Thorne property. So he waited until one day, when old Cousin Annabel, who was watching the little boy, had nodded into a doze. The little boy was never seen again after that day. Japhet told Windy little Jack had wandered off and fallen from the cliff into the sea. ‘I saw him at the edge, and then I saw him slip. I ran, but I was too late to catch him,’ he told Windy.

  “That’s horrible!” I said.

  “Then what happened?” Cole asked.

  “Beedie tried to comfort her sister, but it was no use. Windy spent her days and nights on the widow’s walk, pale as a ghost, staring at the sea, as if she hoped to see her husband’s sails come up over the horizon. Then, one morning, they found her body under the widow’s walk, her neck broken.”

  “Did she throw herself off? Did Japhet push her?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows how she fell. They called it an accident and buried her in the little graveyard beside her husband’s hand. After Beedie had mourned for three years, Japhet convinced her to marry him. So he got the Thorne property after all.”

  “Wait! What are you saying?” I asked, horrified. “You mean Japhet is our great-great-whatever-great-grandfather? That murderer?”

  “That’s right,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “And that’s when our family started losing children. Japhet’s son, Japhet Junior, was the first to die of the Thorne blood disease. They say it’s a punishment for his crimes.”

  “But that’s not fair!” I said. “Why should my sister die because of him? Kitty didn’t murder anyone!”

  Cousin Hepzibah squeezed my hand. “I know. It isn’t fair,” she said.

  After an awkward pause, Cole asked, “But what happened to Phineas? You said he was a pirate?”

  Cousin Hepzibah sighed. “He and his shipmates washed up on an island, where they were taken in by a colony of Africans who had survived the wreck of a slave ship.”

  “This story is getting very complicated,” I said. It reminded me of one of those long, winding Laetitia Flint ghost stories I’d been reading on the bus. Cousin Hepzibah liked those books too—and it crossed my mind that maybe some of the details had found their way into her story. Or maybe she was right, and our family had inspired old writers.

  “Of course. Nothing about our family is ever simple,” said Cousin Hepzibah. She continued, “After Phinny’s arm had healed, he determined to return home to Windy. But when sailors brought word of her death, he decided to avenge himself on Red Tom Tempest. With the help of his old shipmates and his new friends, he captured the Pretty Polly, made Captain Tempest walk the plank, and turned his hand to piracy himself. He and his friends were picky about which ships they stopped, though—they preyed only on slavers. They would pocket the valuables and set the cargo free.”

  “How did he capture the Polly? And how do you know all this?” I asked.

  “Family lore,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “And there’s a lot written about it in the family papers.”

  “But if Phinny was still alive, why didn’t he inherit the Thorne Mansion?” I asked. “Why did it go to Beedie and Japhet?”

  “Japhet had connections. He got his magistrate friend to declare Phinny dead on the strength of the hand and Tom Tempest’s account. Besides, Phinny was a pirate, an outlaw. If he ever did come home, he never showed his face.”

  “What happened to his treasure?” asked Cole.

  “Nobody knows anything for sure,” said my cousin. “Just rumors.”

  “What’s the treasure supposed to be? Jewels? Pieces of eight?”

  She shrugged. “All I know is the story: There’s supposed to be hidden treasure,” said my cousin. “Maybe even a map. Nobody’s ever found either one, though.”

  “Can we look?” Cole flashed his magic smile at Cousin Hepzibah.

  “Please do—I hope you find it. Sukie, dear, why don’t you show Cole around?”

  “Right now? It’s almost dinnertime, and I have a lot of homework,” I said.

  “Next time, then,” said my cousin, holding out her hand to Cole. “It was lovely to meet you, child. Come again soon.”

  “Thanks, I will. I can’t wait to see more of this house. I always knew it would be cool in here, but I had no idea how cool.”

  “I’ll show you out,” I said.

  • • •

  “What are you doing here really, Cole?” I asked as soon as we were out of the room. “Are you after Cousin Hepzibah’s treasure?”

  “Depends what you mean by after. You said your family needed money. If we find it, you could get a phone and we could text eac
h other like normal people. Maybe you could even buy back your old house.”

  The thought made me ache with longing, as if someone was squeezing formaldehyde through my own heart. “Except it’s Cousin Hepzibah’s treasure, if it even exists.”

  “I bet she would use it to help you, though. She seems really nice. You sure we don’t have time for a little look around before I go?”

  “Sorry.”

  “All right, see you in the morning, then. Oh, wait.” He dug in his book bag and pulled out my lab notebook. “Better take care of this. Ms. Pitch would kill us if we lose all that data—we only get one heart.”

  • • •

  “I like your friend,” said Cousin Hepzibah when I came back. “What a thoughtful young man. Handsome, too, and so fond of you.”

  “Fond of me?”

  “Of course. Didn’t he come out of his way to return your notebook? He says he’s been making better grades in science since you became his lab partner.”

  “He told you that? I don’t know, Cousin Hepzibah. I’m not sure I trust him. He and his friends used to call me names and throw food at me in the cafeteria. They didn’t stop until Kitty gave them food poisoning. She really doesn’t like him.”

  Cousin Hepzibah shrugged. “Well, that’s ghosts. They can’t change, so they don’t understand when the living do.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Thorne Mansion Library

  I spent the next few afternoons after school searching the Thorne Mansion library for clues to Hepzibah Toogood’s treasure.

  The library was a large, dark room that was lined floor to ceiling with bookcases. Ladders rolled along a railing so you could reach the upper shelves. A pair of old armchairs covered in cracked green leather flanked the fireplace, and inlaid cabinets guarded the windows, making deep nooks for window seats. With a few more lamps and a lot less dust, I thought, I could make it into a very inviting room.

  I found a pair of table lamps made from Chinese vases in the attic and brought them downstairs. They threw cozy circles of light.

  My Thorne ancestors loved to read everything, apparently: sermons, essays, and poetry, but especially fiction. They favored American writers. Their shelves were crammed with multivolume sets of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Washington Irving and Laetitia Flint, James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe, bound in leather or faded crimson cloth. Some looked old enough to be first editions. I checked to see if any of the authors had signed them—if Cousin Hepzibah was right and they wrote some of their stories about our family, maybe they were friends of our ancestors. A signature might make a book even more valuable. But I didn’t find any signed copies.

  I did find something much more exciting, though: One whole bookcase held diaries! The Thorne ladies had filled volume after volume with their faded, spidery descriptions of apple harvests and new bonnets, steamship jaunts to Providence, toothaches, baby nieces, and recipes for arrack punch. Reading the diaries gave me a strange thrill—it was like traveling back in time and talking to my own ancestors!

  I pulled volumes off the shelves and opened them at random, getting lost in the stories. Theodosia Thorne, the lady who presided over the expansion of the outbuildings in the 1830s, had strong opinions about horses: Her favorite mare was Scheherazade, a white Arabian, and her favorite carriage horses were called Twilight and Novalis. I remembered seeing a painting of a white horse in the gun room—I wondered if that could be Scheherazade.

  But Windy had lived long before the 1830s. I combed the shelves for older volumes. In the 1790s, Miss Mary Thorne accompanied her brother John on a trip to the Far East, where she greatly admired the shape of the pagoda roofs and brought back a set of porcelain from Canton—maybe the very teacups we’d just been drinking from.

  Even the 1790s was too late for Windy, though. I made myself put down Miss Mary’s account of a typhoon east of Japan to search the rest of the room.

  I couldn’t find any diaries by Windy or Beedie, so I opened the fancy secretary desk beside the door. I found a bundle of family papers there, and a lot more in the cabinets by the windows: wills and deeds and account ledgers and endless bundles of letters tied up with cloth tape. It was overwhelming. Where would I even begin?

  Notes in the big leather-bound Bible and a calligraphic family tree drawn by some 1880s Thorne confirmed the outlines of Cousin Hepzibah’s story. Squinting at the doves and curlicues and trumpet-blaring cherubs, I read that Obadiah Thorne and his wife—Patience, née Cloyse—had had two daughters, Hepzibah and Obedience; Hepzibah had married Phineas Toogood and Obedience had married her second cousin, Japhet Thorne; Hepzibah Toogood and her young son, John, had died within a month of each other, not long after Phineas; and Thornes in every subsequent generation died young. The Bible and the family tree had nothing to say about murders or buried treasure, however.

  • • •

  I brought a few volumes of diaries upstairs that night to read in bed. Miss Mary had started keeping hers when she was just a girl, only nine, and the way she took care of John, her little brother, reminded me of Kitty. She wrote about him impatiently, complaining about how he pushed through the bushes to get to the blackberries and tore his new “frock,” the one she had just finished sewing. “He made me eat all the Ripest fruit, pushing them between my Lips. He stained my Collar with juice. He is a Naughty, Naughty little Love, and I am very Vex’t with him.”

  That sounded like Kitty complaining about me. She used to scrub my scraped knees with alcohol wipes. “Ow, Kitty! That stings!” I would wail, trying to twist away.

  “Stand still! You’re getting blood all over me. You’ll get an infection if I don’t clean that.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Well, I do. What if your legs fall off and I have to carry you everywhere? Stop crying! I was just kidding, your legs aren’t really going to fall off, because you’re going to stand still and let me finish. Anyway, I don’t really mind carrying you, as long as it’s not very far. If I sing you the nut tree song, will you stop howling?” And she would slap a Band-Aid on my knee, hug me impatiently and a little too hard, and sing my favorite nursery rhyme, the one about the nut tree and the princess and the golden pear.

  “Thorne girls take good care of their siblings,” I told the air. “Listen to this.” I read the passage about the frock and the blackberries out loud. Kitty wasn’t completely present right then—not present enough to understand the words—but I felt something, so I thought she might be nearby. She would probably get the gist.

  I could have summoned her with the whistle, but I almost never did that nowadays. She came too often as it was. I had a feeling that the more I used the whistle, the thinner I would make the barrier between her world and mine. What if it wore away to nothing?

  When I got to the later sections in Miss Mary’s diary, though—the parts when she wrote about sailing to China on grown-up John’s ship—I felt a presence much more sinister than Kitty’s or Windy’s. The back of my neck prickled. It felt more like that second presence from the other night, the hard, oppressive presence that had chased Windy off.

  “Who are you?” I asked the air.

  Nobody answered.

  “Go away, then!”

  Nobody answered again. But nobody left, either.

  “Okay, stay, then. Whatever. I’m a Thorne—you can’t scare me. I belong here.”

  I hoped it was true. It didn’t really feel true, whatever Cousin Hepzibah said.

  That night dreams chopped my sleep into a zillion pieces. I dreamed about severed hands and dead Thorne kids, about lost wills and storms at sea. That hard presence haunted all my dreams.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fashion Advice

  School lunch on Friday was Mystery Stew, which was bad enough. Becky and Hannah Lee made it worse by pointing at my ankles. Looking down, I saw that the gap between my jeans hem and my shoes had
widened to show way more sock than was considered proper in North Harbor society.

  These were the last clothes I had left from Kitty. I remembered how much I hated having to wear Kitty’s hand-me-downs when I was little. I wanted something new, something of my own, especially in colors that looked good on a pale blonde, not a rosy redhead. Then, after she died, her clothes were all I wanted to wear. They made me feel she was hugging me.

  Hugging me pretty tightly, these days. I was taller now than she’d ever been, and the waistband was starting to pinch. I knew I’d been growing, but I hadn’t realized it had gotten so bad. Spring might be on its way, but it was still far too cold out to just turn my jeans into cutoffs.

  It’s not that the snickering bothered me. But I worried what would happen if Becky and Hannah got Kitty riled up. She never liked it when people laughed at me, and I didn’t think she would react too well to having her jeans mocked, either.

  I was scanning the chaotic cafeteria for an empty seat far away from the snickerers when I heard my name. Dolores Pereira waved me over to the table where she was sitting with her cousin Amanda.

  “Ask her, Lola,” said Amanda, giggling.

  “No, you ask her,” said Lola. “You’re the one who wants to know.”

  “Ask me about what?”

  “Go on, Amanda!” said Lola.

  “You’ve been hanging out with Cole Farley, right?” said Amanda.

  “Uh, yeah. I guess,” I said.

  “What’s his family like? Is his brother as cute as he is?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t met his family,” I said.

  “See? I told you,” said Lola to her cousin. “What do you think of Cole, though?” she asked me.

  “He’s okay. When he’s not being obnoxious.”

  “How’s he obnoxious?” asked Amanda.

  “He’s always calling me names, for one thing.”