Now and then dc-1 Page 12

  I mean, there’s nothing I can do about it now, right?

  Nothing to do but close that chapter of my life and move on.

  Chapter 28

  THE LAND AROUND the little church was flat, the lot surrounded by pines. The church was two stories high, made entirely of flagstone, except for the corrugated red metal roofing, the wooden door, and the windows. There was a slate floor standing area in front of the church that was maybe twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. To the right of the church were two flagstone columns that stood about fifteen feet high. The columns were connected at the top by a limestone cap. A few inches below the cap an old, cast-iron bell hung from a wooden beam. The rope for the bell clapper was long enough to reach the ground, but was tied off to a cleat so children couldn’t reach it.

  We parked Beth’s car in the gravel area on the left side, and from that angle I could see a wooden balcony that extended from a small gable. Before exiting the car, Beth put her hand on my wrist, very gently. I looked down at it, and then raised my eyes to her face. She held my gaze a moment, then closed her eyes. I leaned over and lightly kissed her lips. She didn’t kiss me back.

  I kissed her again, and this time she opened her eyes and returned the kiss. I started moving closer, eager for more, but she said, “It’s not our time yet.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Because to me, it really feels like it’s our time.”

  She smiled and lifted her hand from my wrist, and placed it to my face. I’d never felt so much energy from a person’s touch before, not even Kathleen Chapman, who I almost married.

  “We’re meant to be, and it will happen, but it’s not our time yet.”

  “Can I have just fifteen minutes of it now with you, across the street, on the beach?”

  She did that adorable pouty thing she sometimes did with her mouth, then sighed and said, “I’m not ready yet, and you’re not ready. But when it’s our time, you won’t be disappointed. I promise.”

  “A rain check then.”

  “Let’s call it a heart check,” she said, placing her palm on my heart.

  I looked past her, through her window, thinking of that gorgeous, deserted beach a scant two minutes away. “How about a quick ten minutes now, and when we’re both ready, we can deduct it from eternity?”

  “You drive a hard bargain,” she said, “but no.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly put me off my game.” I kissed her hand and we climbed out of the car. The second floor balcony above us looked to be about two feet deep, was covered, and appeared to be decorative. But once inside the church, I saw that it was attached to a small, hidden gable about six feet wide and eight feet deep. You reach that little room by descending into a trap door about four feet below the ante way and then crawling some twenty feet under the chapel until you reach a wooden ladder. That twenty foot crawl behind Beth was the toughest of my life. Being that close to her backside would have killed a lesser man. When we got to the ladder we climbed fifteen feet to a landing. Beyond the thick, locked, wooden door, stood the little gable room where I met Libby Vail.

  Libby was thin, but appeared healthy. She was sitting on a window box, surrounded by stacks of old, moldy books and parchment.

  “Hey Beth!” she said, brightly.

  “Hi Libby. This is Donovan Creed.”

  Libby and Beth exchanged a knowing smile that was so obvious it almost embarrassed me. Beth blushed and lowered her eyes and cleared a small space on the window box and sat there. It happened to be the only place one could sit in the cramped little area.

  “Hello, Mr. Creed.”

  I cocked my head to one side. “I notice you’re missing a fingernail on your right index digit.”

  Libby laughed. “Do you always start conversations this way?”

  “I do. Always.”

  She turned to Beth. “See? I told you he’d be funny!” To me, she said, “Seriously, why do you ask?”

  “I found it in the picnic basket Beth brought you one day. I figured you broke it when you scratched your initials on the bottom of the basket.”

  Beth looked at her curiously. Libby thought a moment, then said, “Oh. I think that must have happened the night I was trying to channel Jack Hawley. I kept scratching my initials while saying my name.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me sheepishly. “I was hoping to somehow cross the space-time continuum, like they talk about in the movies. Maybe get him to send me a clue of some sort. Crazy, I know, but wow, you’re really good. I mean, to find a fingernail and scratch marks and put all this together? I’m impressed.”

  Impressed or not, I had to ask the question, in spite of Beth.

  “Are you being held here against your will?”

  Libby laughed, heartily. “No, of course not. If I were, I could just open the door to the balcony and call for help.”

  I gestured at the tiny room, “Then what are you doing? Your parents and friends have been mourning you for nearly a year. The FBI came down…”

  Libby held up a hand. “Please. Don’t make me feel guilty, I know all that. I’m just giving back. Some people join the Peace Corps, I hide in a church.”

  “Except that your loved ones would know if you were in the Peace Corps.”

  “I won’t be here much longer.”

  “You stay in this cramped room all the time?”

  “It’s more like a home base. I stay with different friends at different times. There’s a schedule, but yes, I sleep here sometimes, and this is where I conduct my research.”

  “What are you researching?”

  She gestured to the books and parchment paper. “The local churches and library have opened all their books to me. I’ve spent the past year filling in the details of my heritage. When I’m not reading, when the church is locked, I wander around the building. And when my friends come to visit, we go for walks. Beth and some of the day ladies drive me to parks or deserted parts of the beach. It’s easy not to be recognized if I’m wearing a wig and trying to blend in. Sometimes a group of us go fishing.” She pointed to a laptop. “Plus, I’ve got all the modern conveniences, iPod, iTouch, computer, TV…”

  “I’ve heard some bullshit in my day,” I said, “but this takes the cake.”

  She eyed me, curiously. “You don’t believe I’m here for historical reasons?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I picked up one of the maps. “This is a terrain map.” I gestured to some sheets she’d tacked to the wall. “And those look a lot like geological surveys.”

  “So?”

  “So you might be researching your family history, but there’s more to it. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to keep your presence quiet.”

  She said nothing.

  Beth watched me with a tender light in her eyes that made me feel particularly good.

  And then it hit me.

  “You’re searching for treasure!”

  She seemed about to protest, then saw my smug smile and gave up. She offered a smile of her own and said, “Wouldn’t you search for treasure if you were me? If you thought you could find it?”

  “I would indeed.” I paused a moment. Then asked, “So, did you find it?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Nope. All this effort, and not so much as a doubloon. We gave up months ago. We thought that by traveling around the island I might be able to sense Jack’s presence. But either I never got to the right place, or we were wrong.”

  “We?”

  “The original descendants and me.”

  “No one kidnapped you?”

  “Nope.”

  “The eighty descendants have been hiding you, driving you around, trying to help you find pirate treasure?”

  “At first.”

  “No treasure?”

  “Not a scrap.”

  “Then why stick around?”

  “Because the people around here have become my friends, and they need me. Every day different people, d
escendants of the original settlers, drove me around the island while I tried to pick up some sort of cosmic connection to Jack Hawley. The closest I ever came to getting a feeling was right here, in this old church.” She absently touched the necklace around her neck. “But Jack couldn’t have buried anything here. It was a highly visible location in his era, and the church wasn’t built until ten years after his death.”

  “That’s interesting, but you haven’t answered my question.”

  “Why am I still here if there’s no treasure?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Libby shrugged her shoulders and gave me a “you’re not going to believe me” sort of smile. She said, “You’re not going to believe me, but whenever I’d be somewhere more than an hour, people started showing up. They said being near me made them feel better. So I love the area, love the people, and they need me. I go to the hospital every night, and the nursing home, and walk through the halls. If someone is particularly ill I go in and sit with them a few minutes.”

  I thought about how I tried to find her at the church that morning before dawn, and how I’d felt the power near the hospital, before it faded away.

  “Can I ask where you were just before dawn this morning?”

  “I went to the hospital to visit Jimbo Pimm’s grandfather.”

  “Because?”

  “He’s a cancer patient. He’d been at Savannah Memorial, but they sent him home to die last week. He took a turn for the worse in the middle of the night and Jimbo brought him to the hospital. While they worked on him, Jimbo came and asked if I might be able to help.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I go? Yes, Jimbo drove me.”

  “Did it help?”

  “No. I mean, I can’t cure people, but he said I took away his pain. I hear that a lot, and do what I can, but it doesn’t last. I told him I’d sit with him again tonight, for an hour.”

  I didn’t believe for a minute she had healing powers, but I couldn’t dispute the fact that something was going on. I’d seen what happened to the old people in the church yard. And there was no question that my mood elevated when I was around her. The room we were in was only five feet tall and I’d been stooping long enough to know my back should be stiff, and yet I felt not the slightest pain. I decided Libby must have something about her that altered people’s perception of pain when they were physically near her. I didn’t want to feel any pain later on, so I sat on the floor.

  “Why can’t you go public?” I said. “If this gift is real, you could help millions of people.”

  “I have empathy for everyone in pain. But if word got out about me, my life would be a mess. I mean, would you want half the world coming to your door and the other half trying to perform experiments on you?”

  She had a point, but who doesn’t? As far as I was concerned, this thing was wrapped up. Normally I would have climbed back down the ladder by now and gone home. A shot of bourbon might have been in order. But here I sat. I knew why, I just didn’t want to admit it. See, I don’t believe in healers, and yet I knew the only reason I kept sitting there was because I felt so damned good sitting there. I had no aches or pains and my mind was soaring. I felt better than I had since I was a kid, running over the grass in my bare feet, a light breeze on my forehead, lots of friends…

  “I bet you could get laid anytime you want,” I said, in my semi-dream state.

  “Excuse me?”

  Beth and Libby were staring at me.

  “What I meant to say was how long do you intend to stay here?”

  She looked at Beth and shrugged. “I promised I’d do a year. But I can’t very well pop out on the exact anniversary, can I? So I’ll probably hang out a few more months.”

  I gestured toward the clutter that surrounded her. “Find anything interesting in those old church records?”

  “Oh, yes indeed.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, for one thing, there was a midwife who gave birth in 1711 to a little girl named Libby Vail.”

  “Spelled the same way?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Now there’s a coincidence! Who were the parents?”

  “Henry and Johanna Ames.”

  “Oh, too bad. I suppose Libby Vail must have been a popular name back in those days.”

  She looked at me and smiled. “Right.”

  “I mean, even today there’s probably, what, five thousand Libby Vails walking around?”

  “Try four.”

  “Four?”

  She fidgeted with her necklace again and said, “I did an internet search. There are exactly four of us in the whole United States.”

  The thin gold chain around Libby’s neck looked new. The pendant attached to it was an old circular piece of metal with what appeared to be ancient etching.

  “Tell me about the necklace,” I said.

  “I found it when digging in the crawlspace my first day here. I went right to it, was drawn to it the minute we turned the corner. It’s quite old, but there’s no connection to Jack Hawley. Unless he loved playing rugby!”

  She removed the necklace and handed it to me. On one side someone had scratched the words, “I Love.” On the other: “Rugby.”

  “How old is this?”

  “It’s old, at least two hundred years. But it couldn’t date to Jack Hawley’s time. I know, because I researched the sport and no one called it Rugby before 1750.”

  “Whatever happened to Hawley?”

  “He was captured and hanged on March 25, 1711.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  I thought about how I had faked my death a couple of times, and said, “How can you be so sure?”

  “Two sailors joined Hawley’s crew when they were on shore leave in Charleston, South Carolina. They turned Jack in to the authorities after watching him command the ship for an entire month.”

  “How do you know he didn’t bury his treasure in Charleston?”

  “Because, according to the traitors, he never left the ship in Charleston. They captured him in St. Alban’s, trying to buy produce for a voyage to Jamaica.”

  “Any witnesses at the trial?”

  “His best friends, George and Marie Stout, were forced to testify. Under protest, they identified Jack and admitted he used to paddle up the Little River and dock at their place. Their kids said Jack spent a lot of time there.”

  “And you searched that area?”

  “Every square inch. I thought I had it made when I discovered an old well on the actual tract that belonged to the Stouts. But I got nothing in the way of a vibe.”

  We sat silently for a few minutes. Then I said, “How do you plan to explain your disappearance?”

  “When I’m ready to rejoin society I’ll have someone drive me halfway across the country and drop me off in the woods near a city. I’ll wander into town and say I’ve been kidnapped, blindfolded, and moved around so much I don’t know where I’ve been all this time. They’ll ask loads of questions, and I’ll get a few things mixed up, but if I didn’t, it wouldn’t make sense, right?”

  “The deputy said you were kidnapped.”

  “Figuratively, not literally. When the descendants came and talked to me I thought they were crazy, but I promised to think about it. That night, alone in my dorm room, I started whispering my name while thinking about Hawley. And something happened. I know this will sound crazy to you, but I felt him speak my name. Over the next few months it happened several times.”

  “You’re right, it does sound crazy.”

  “Told you.”

  “Any history of insanity in your family?”

  “None that I’ve found, and believe me, I’ve looked!”

  “So it started as a treasure hunt, and now you’re helping people. If you want the big bucks, why not do a reality show on TV and make millions?”

  “As I said, I don’t want my life to be a circus. Plus, I’m deep into my research, and things I’v
e dismissed before are starting to make sense to me.”

  “Like what?”

  She seemed to glow, caught up in the moment. “I think I’m onto something even more valuable than money.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The secret of my heritage.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We’re all a product of our heritage, Mr. Creed.”

  “And why is that so important?”

  She smiled. “Well, I’m descended from a famous pirate.”

  “Jack Hawley.”

  “Yes, Gentleman Jack, as he liked to be called. And about three hundred years ago-”

  It was my turn to hold up a hand. “I know the story.”

  Libby’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, no you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “Sorry, but you don’t.”

  “Maybe not every detail,” I conceded, “but I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on it.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “You have no idea.”

  “I think I do,” I said, stubbornly.

  She flashed a mischievous grin. “Do you?” she said. A little giggle escaped from her throat. “Do you?” she said, louder, and as she said it her giggle grew until it burst through the tiny room and echoed off the walls.

  Part Two

  THEN

  Chapter 1

  THE YEAR OF Our Lord, 1710…

  The ship was huge.

  With three masts, twenty-eight guns, and a crew of fifty-seven men, it carried a cargo of sugar cane, medicine, wild pigs, and Jamaican Rum. Though it pushed more than three hundred tons, it fairly flew through the water. And such water it was! Pure and clean with a light green hue, and when the bow slapped down, sending a light spray over the deck, it stung the eye and tasted warm and salty on the lips.

  The ship was surrounded on all sides by sparkling emerald seas, far as the eye could see. Astern, a dozen porpoises frolicked in the wake, performing wild acrobatic jumps and gyrations to the amusement of the twenty-two hardened crewmen currently off duty. While sailors around the world considered it good luck to share their rations with the sleek sea creatures, it was a rare event to do so, since rations were typically meager and meant to last. But for this particular crew, these were bountiful times. With the ship’s hold freshly restocked the day before, the men could finally afford to toss the last of their weevil-infested biscuits overboard.