A Touch of Gold (2 page)

“Dae, maybe you could take this question.” Max smiled at me.

It was unusual for him to step out of his tale. Max was a master storyteller and loved the tales of the Outer Banks’ dark past—pirates, marauders and gold—better than anyone else I knew.

“Miss Dae is the mayor of Duck, North Carolina, our hometown,” Max continued, probably trying to prompt a response from me.

I was fairly sure the kids knew who I was since this was Walk to Story Time with the Mayor Wednesday, but I played along.

Twenty pairs of eyes all turned and stared at me as though they’d never seen me before. I smiled back (my big, friendly mayor smile) and jumped right into it. “Well, kids, we all know the terrible things that can happen at sea.”

“Pirates!” one little boy blurted out, grinning despite his teacher’s reprimand for speaking out of turn.

“Hurricanes!” another little girl (I recognized her as the granddaughter of Vergie Smith, the Duck postmaster) yelled out, causing a loud rash of talking.

Both teachers that had accompanied me to the Duck Historical Museum stepped in at that point to calm the group. When the kids were quiet again, they nodded at me to continue.

“In this case, Theo Burr wasn’t killed by the pirates who attacked her ship or by the terrible gale that came up that January.” I glanced at Max to see if he wanted me to go any further.

All the kids had already turned back, owl-eyed, to face Max again. The two teachers with me were probably as anxious to hear the tale continue as the children. Even as adults, we never tired of the story.

Those of us who grew up in Duck know about how our Banker (our term for the people who lived here) ancestors survived by picking up cargo from ships that went down close to the Outer Banks. Be it pirates or storms, they didn’t call this area of the world the Graveyard of the Atlantic for nothing.

Max began his tale again. His curly brown hair and cheerful red face that matched his red suspenders seemed unlikely for a man who could impart such gloom and doom. He’d been the curator of the museum for as long as there had been a museum. He knew every ship’s relic, barnacle and cannonball better than most people knew what was in their closet at home.

“It’s true. Theo Burr wasn’t killed by the pirates who captured her ship. But she was forced to walk the plank, and the pirates thought she was dead just like the rest of the
Patriot
’s crew.”

The voice and inflection were perfect. The children were wrapped up in the story just as I had been at their age—and was now. I could remember sitting on this floor listening as Max told his tales of woe and privateering with style and sufficient substance to cause fear to creep into my heart.

For other children of this age, this might seem too frightening, but Duck children knew the terrible truth of the past. They respected it and learned to live with it.

“But you said Theo Burr wasn’t dead,” the first little girl said accusingly.

“Aye, and she wasn’t,” Max confirmed with a squinted left eye. “Old Frank Burdick, the pirate, confessed on his deathbed that he had held the plank for Theo Burr. He said the crew and passengers of the
Patriot
were all murdered. The pirates plundered the ship, then abandoned her under full sail.”

“But what about Theo Burr?” the little girl demanded. “Was she dead or not?”

“People tell different tales. But an old Banker story says that Theo made it to shore around Nags Head. She was picked up by a family who made their living salvaging from wrecked ships. They say she couldn’t tell them who she was but that she carried a small portrait that was later identified as one Theo Burr had painted for her father.”

“But did she die?” a little boy asked in a shaky voice. “My dad says her ghost walks the beaches looking for her dead baby. She has to be dead to be a ghost, right?”

Max laughed and pulled at his suspenders like he always did. “That’s right, young man. But that was a long time ago. No matter what, Theo Burr would be dead by now. But there are plenty of people who believe she lived the rest of her life on the Outer Banks. They say she couldn’t remember who she was and started a new family with a man from Duck.”

“So she
is
a ghost and walks around looking for her dead baby,” Vergie’s granddaughter said in awe. “What about the pirate gold?”

“She didn’t have any pirate gold,” Max replied with infinite patience. “But the real treasure is finding out if Theo Burr really lived here the rest of her life. If she did, one of
you
might be related to her. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

The kids looked around at each other. One little boy stuck his fingers in his ears and shook his head. “Tell us about the curse of the pirate captain,” he pleaded. “Talk about his ghost coming back to look for his hidden pirate treasure.”

They all agreed with that idea, and Max told the story about Rafe Masterson’s curse, which had been a legend in Duck for more than two hundred years.

I left the group to go over and help Agnes, Max’s wife, who owned the Beach Bakery. She always brought treats on story time days. She was unwrapping brownies and cupcakes while I took out all the tiny boxes of juice.

“He loves when the kids come,” she said with a smile at her husband. “He worries they’ll forget, you know? They don’t teach our history in school anymore.”

“I don’t think he has to worry about that. I’m sure everyone over the age of twelve can recite the tale of Theo Burr word for word. I know I can.”

“But things are different now with all the gaming and such.” Agnes sighed as the last of the cupcakes was laid out. “There might be a time when all of the legends are lost. I hate to think of it, but sometimes I can feel it sliding away.”

I agreed. With corporations fighting to see who could buy out more of the older homes in Duck for condominiums, I didn’t know if there was hope for the future or the past.

But not today. The Duck Historical Museum might be small, but you couldn’t stand here without feeling like you were in the heart of Duck, past and present.

I glanced down at the floor and saw a gold coin. Probably from the display in the glass case across the room, I thought. Agnes had already gone to tell the kids it was snack time. Max was still answering questions about ghosts and pirates.

I bent over, picked up the coin and flipped it over in my hand. It was a dull gold, burnished by sea and sand. Unlike the recovered treasure often shown in movies, none of the old gold that washed up here was ever shiny.

I knew the tale of how the Duck Museum came to have that pirate treasure as well as I knew the tale of Theo Burr. This one was closer to home. Max had found the gold early one morning. It was in an old wood chest that had washed up on the Atlantic side of the island. This was years before, when Max was a young man. He’d received a finder’s fee from the government and had donated the gold to the museum.

I looked closely at the coin in the palm of my hand. Max would certainly miss it if it was gone when the museum closed. He might even come to me since I’d been Duck’s unofficial finder of lost things since I was a child.

At one time, when I was a teenager, I had big dreams of saving the world using my special abilities. When I was alone, I even dared to call them my
powers
. There were things I could do that other people couldn’t do. I was very impressed with myself.

But time had given me better perspective and honed the abilities I was born with. I might not ever save the world by finding everyone’s many sets of lost keys and misplaced TV remotes, but I helped the people I cared about—the same reason I had become mayor of Duck.

I slipped the gold coin into the pocket of my jeans. I didn’t want to interrupt Max’s enjoyment of talking to the children. I wasn’t surprised to see the coin out of place. How many times had I visited the museum to find cannonballs where they didn’t belong or an old ship’s compass taken apart on a table? Max was a good curator, but he was far from neat.

Around the cupcakes and apple juice, the talk was still of Theo Burr and other ghosts that inhabited the Outer Banks. Max was juggling questions between bites of Agnes’s delicious cupcakes and glances at his watch.

“Hot date?” I asked when I could get close to him.

“What?” He pushed his glasses back against his face and smiled as he understood the humor in my words. “You might say so. You won’t believe what’s happened, Dae. I think I finally have a real lead on someone in Duck who’s related to Theo Burr.”

“That’s wonderful!” I gave him my full attention, which wasn’t easy since the cupcake in my hand was really good. “I know you’ve been looking for proof that Theo lived here rather than died as soon as she washed up on shore.”

“All of my life,” he agreed with a seriousness only dedicated historians can muster. “If I’m right, it will rock the historical world. Not to mention my intense joy at flaunting it in Sam Meacham’s face!”

I knew how much that meant to him. Sam Meacham was the curator of the Corolla Historical Museum. He believed Theo Burr had died when she reached shore, in the arms of one of the Bankers who’d stolen her personal possessions once she was dead. His proof was a portrait that was widely recognized by historians as Theo. It was found at a Banker woman’s home in Nags Head in 1869. While the painting was never definitively identified as being a portrait of Theo Burr, most historians agreed with Sam.

But not Max. “I’m trying to convince a man who claims to be a relative of hers to give me a sample of his DNA. He’s meeting me here in a little while. If his DNA matches the DNA from Theodosia’s hair samples, it will be the first real proof of what happened to Theodosia Burr in the winter of 1812. Don’t forget, her husband never sent a search party here to look for her. He and Aaron Burr looked everywhere but the Outer Banks. She was here all the time, not knowing who she was or where she belonged. A tragedy, to be sure.”

I knew Max’s strong feelings on the subject. There weren’t many who agreed with him. I also knew he might never find out the truth. But it made him happy to tell the story. I loved Duck history. I hoped Theo Burr survived the pirates and the terrible gale. It would be another feather in the Duck historical annals to say that she spent her last years here.

“Be sure to let me know what happens.” I smiled and ate more of my cupcake. “The kids always love your stories.”

“We both know they’re so much more than stories,” he said with another glance at his watch. “They keep the history of Duck alive, Dae. Without our past, we have no future.”

One of the teachers saved me from an intense lecture on the importance of Duck history by coming over and thanking Max for his program. She was a newcomer to Duck, one of many who came for a vacation one summer and decided to stay. They added to our increased population of almost six hundred full-time residents.

It may sound small, but for a scrap of land hemmed in by water that could rise up at anytime and wash us all away, it was a lot. It was the largest population Duck had ever known. The town was becoming more popular as a tourist destination every year. We didn’t have the wild horses of Corolla or the lighthouse at Hatteras, but we were sandwiched in between on the one-hundred-mile stretch of land, brought together by a narrow ribbon of road.

Some people liked the growth. Others were unhappy about it and wanted things to stay the same. The one thing I’d learned in my thirty-six years was that nothing ever stayed the same.

It was almost time for the story adventure to be over. The teachers gathered the kids together and thanked Max for his time. They were equally enthusiastic in their thanks to Agnes for her cupcakes. I knew Agnes enjoyed these moments as much as Max. Their daughters still lived in Duck, but neither of them were married yet. No grandchildren.

As the teachers took the kids to the bathroom before leaving to walk back to Duck Elementary School, I helped Agnes throw away the cupcake wrappers and empty juice boxes.

Max paced the floor, continually looking at his watch. He was obviously nervous about meeting what could be an ancestor of Aaron Burr. It would either validate his life’s work or turn into another joke that Sam Meacham could throw at him in the bar at night. I supposed that would be enough to make anyone nervous.

“He’s got everything riding on this DNA,” Agnes told me when we walked out to the trash cans. “Damn fool went ahead and told Sam about the whole thing, of course. He’ll crash and burn for sure if it isn’t true.”

“Let’s hope it works out then.” I took the lid off the trash can. “He and Sam really like to argue about Theo Burr, don’t they?”

“And everything else.” She stuffed the trash in the can. “They argue about which town was settled first, Duck or Corolla. Which museum has the oldest artifacts. Honestly, they act like little kids with their toys.”

Before I put the lid back on the trash can, I bent down and picked up a scrap of paper from the ground. It was one of the coffee cards they punched at the Coffee House and Book Store. It seemed odd to me because Max and Agnes didn’t drink coffee. As I tossed it into the can and put on the lid, I decided it was probably something a visitor had left.

As Agnes and I walked back around the front of the plain little building that had been donated to the Duck Historical Society, I recalled the old store that had been here, a place where we used to buy chips and soft drinks. Someday no one would remember that little store. Agnes was right. Everything was changing too quickly.

Near the front door of the building, a large statue of a duck that had been used to promote tourism stood beside a statue of a horse. Both had become animal icons in this area. There were two rusted cannons legend said had washed up on Duck’s shore back in the 1700s. Several cannonballs were stuck in concrete around them.

The old museum was cool and musty smelling when we went back inside. The light was too dim to really see everything the historical society had managed to piece together through the years. But I was proud of this little place anyway. It represented the heritage of everyone who’d been born here. From pirates to wild horses, all of it was part of our past.