A Spirited Gift

I opened my eyes to find him staring at me. “I think I see it.” I glanced around the room again. The box was hidden under a tobacco humidor. “You used to smoke before you had your stroke. I think you left it over here.”

The box and humidor were both near the window where the sunshine was flooding in from the beautiful day outside. I lifted the humidor with one hand and pulled out the box with the other.

On the outside of the box, still intact after so many generations, was the Forester crest. I recognized it from the makeup case William Astor had made for his adopted mother, Suzanne. My dreams seemed to have been right about this. I could hardly wait to see if the magistrate had chronicled his near death at Rafe’s hands—and the revenge he’d taken on the pirate.

I sat down again near Joe. He smiled at me as I opened the box. I pulled out the worn, leather-bound diary. In an instant, emotions from the diary flooded through me.

Wild Johnny Simpson had rummaged through Joe Endy’s parents’home looking for anything he could hold until Joe paid him back the money he owed him. He’d heard Joe talk about the old diary. Johnny laughed as he took it back to the Blue Whale.

He wasn’t laughing as Joe shot him and took what belonged to him before leaving Johnny there to die.

Chapter 46

I came back to myself, slumped in my chair, the diary still in my lap. Joe was staring at me with a horrified expression on his face. I could tell he wasn’t sure what to do.

“Are you okay?” he asked finally.

“I’m fine.” I smiled and opened the diary again—Rafe prodding me to hurry.

“Go to the middle or so,” Rafe demanded. “Find where that bastard murdered me.”

But there was so much more. I could’ve gotten lost in it for days. No wonder the historical society wanted it. The rich history of the area was well chronicled by the urchin saved from death by Lady Suzanne Forester on the beach centuries ago.

She’d educated him—treated him as her son. She had no children of her own and never married. William and his surrogate mother were very close.

She’d died in a fall from a horse. William had been away at the time and though she’d left him a fortune, he never forgave himself.

He never carried her name—her family had forbidden it. But he’d been raised with privileges he’d never dreamed existed when he was surviving on a pirate ship.

After Suzanne’s death in England, William had come back to North Carolina and the Outer Banks where he’d grown up. “Imagine my amazement,” he wrote in the diary, “to find that blackguard Rafe Masterson still alive and married to a fetching wench! He has children, no less. My mind is reeling with possibilities.”

It became William’s obsession to kill the man who’d once tried to kill him. With his money, power and background, it was simple to become a sworn magistrate of the law.

But as such, he had to find a way to get his revenge without stepping beyond the bounds of what he thought of as justice.

He finally gave up on that idea when he realized no one else knew that Rafe was the same pirate who’d pillaged ships along the coast twenty years before. To everyone else, the big, gruff man was a simple trader. William hired two men to set Rafe up as a smuggler, then revealed that he’d also been a pirate.

He’d wanted to torture Rafe but had fallen in love with Mary Masterson. That emotion hadn’t stopped the cruel magistrate from exacting punishment from her in exchange for Rafe’s quick death on the noose.

William detailed every event in his life—his children, failures and successes. He died a very wealthy man with lands and holdings in both Carolinas. Though there had been a seed of evil in him regarding Rafe, he’d lived a good, long life.

“And there it is!” Rafe breathed a sigh near my ear that made me shiver. “There it is in his own bloody hand. I was not guilty of any crime when he hanged me. As my blood relation, I expect you to chronicle this event, girl. Tell that little man who is writing my glorious life story that he was right. I am vindicated.”

I looked up in time to see the pirate begin fading away for what might be the last time. In a moment, there were only rays of sunshine where he’d been.

His trauma was over. I hoped he was reunited with Mary and their children.

But in the meantime, I was sitting across from the man who’d murdered Johnny Simpson more than thirty years ago. There was no way for me to prove it—at least as far as I could tell. It would’ve been better if I’d found the .22 pistol with the diary. What was I supposed to do?