A Touch of Gold (9 page)

Was I reading too much into Kevin asking me to dinner by myself? He’d invited me to dinner and asked for my help looking for the wine again, but did that make it a romantic overture? I’d had dinner at the Blue Whale a dozen times since it opened.

But not alone with him.

That was true, although I felt silly even thinking it. Usually there was a crowd of us when we had dinner at the inn because Kevin wanted to try out some new dessert or sauce. He loved to cook.

I need something new to wear.

Okay. Maybe I didn’t
need
something new to wear, but I wanted something new. Was there anything wrong with hoping he might see
me
as a force of nature someday as he did Shayla?

It might take a new dress and shoes, and maybe something different with my hair. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to have him look at me in a new light.

I had hundreds of emails, of course. Most of them were well-wishers hoping I was recovering. Some were trash that I deleted. Some, like the one for the mayor’s conference we would be hosting in Duck right after the first of the year, had to be answered.

I could hear Kevin talking to Nancy at first. Then it grew quiet in the outer office. He probably had finished up and left. The knock on the door startled me, and my finger slipped over a key, causing T’s to go running across the page.

“See you later,” Kevin said with a smile. “I hope we can get those gloves off of you tonight.”

I swallowed hard and nodded. “See you later.”

Nancy’s face replaced his at the door, but all I could hear was his voice saying he wanted to get my gloves off. There was something sexy in the way he said it.

“. . . and the chief will be here later to talk to you,” Nancy said. “He’ll call first. Dae?”

“Hmm? Oh, right. He wants to talk about what I saw at the museum before it exploded.”

Nancy shut the door and sat down in one of the chairs that faced my desk. “What
did
you see?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. But he and Cailey and that new arson investigator from Manteo think there might be something important that I don’t realize I saw.”

“Did you”—she gulped—“did you see Max explode?”

Chapter 6

“N
o!
He was in the museum. I didn’t really even see the museum explode. It happened so fast. One minute I was at the door, the next there was a flash of light and I was in the street.”

“Oh, Dae. How
awful
!”

My throat felt tight and I knew if I said anything else about it, I’d start blubbering again. Instead, I looked around my little office that had once been a storage closet. It had a window overlooking the sound, and I had put all the sea paraphernalia I could find in it. I had a ship’s bell from a freighter that went down in the early 1800s and seashells I’d collected. I’d left my white oak desk the way I’d found it so that it looked a little banged up and unfinished.

Nancy came around the desk and hugged me. “It’s all gonna work out, sweetie. You’ll see.” There were tears in her brown eyes, but her smile and resolve didn’t waver.

“Thanks,” I whispered.

“I’ll make sure you aren’t disturbed for a few minutes.” She walked out and closed the door.

My mother’s face stared back at me from a barnacleencrusted picture frame. She’d been dead thirteen long years. Like Max, she was gone too soon. I’d lived with her death on my conscience every day since she’d gone off the bridge coming back from the mainland. Her body was never recovered.

It was my fault because I was a stupid, young, knowit-all in college. We’d argued when she came to see me. My last words to her were said in anger, carelessly flung like sharp stones, meant to wound.

I came home from college after she died and had prayed every night since then to see her ghost, to have a chance to say good-bye and tell her that I was sorry. But though I could find things with my special abilities, I couldn’t see spirits like Shayla could. She’d tried to help me contact my mother, but it hadn’t happened.

I looked out of the window at the sun-kissed, sparkling water. Sniffling, barely in control of my emotions, I knew I had to get out of there. I couldn’t dredge up all the old, bad memories again to heap on the new, bad memories. I had to do something constructive.

I waved to Nancy as I left town hall, not trusting myself to speak. I headed down the gray boardwalk to Missing Pieces. I wanted to recapture the excitement I’d felt about going to Kevin’s for dinner. It wasn’t easy.

Then I remembered a dress I’d taken in early September. I’d picked it up and admired it twice since buying it with a group of other clothes from a woman in Grandy. I’d even thought about keeping it for myself, but I couldn’t imagine where I’d wear it.

With the shop door open and the blinds pulled up on the sunny day, I walked to the back of the shop where I kept the clothes. There were only a few racks since clothes weren’t my principle sales. Customers came in and bought them randomly, so I purchased with care.

The dress was still there. It was a simple, elegant creation of blue silk with a knee-length skirt and a low neckline that would be perfect for my grandmother’s pearls. I tried it on and decided it looked nice with my blue eyes and sun-bleached brown hair. I still had my summer tan, and thankfully, my bathing suit top had extended low enough that my chest had no white areas—at least none that the dress would reveal.

I twirled around in front of the mirror, feeling pretty and a little fragile. I smiled at myself and messed around with my hair, holding it back from my face on one side and simpering, “Oh, Kevin. I love it when you look at me that way.”

Someone cleared their throat behind me, and I prayed with hastily closed eyes that it wasn’t Kevin.

“I have some packages for you,” Stan, the UPS driver, said, his voice a little choked.

“Thanks.” I scooted up to the front of the shop feeling stupid, my cheeks burning. But Stan was okay.

“You look good in that dress, Dae.” He smiled as I took the last of the packages from him and signed for them. “I don’t know who Kevin is, but he’s a lucky guy.”

Stan is married and has several children, so I got through it. More to the point, he lives in Whalebone and so was unlikely to run into Kevin. At least I hoped so.

He waved good-bye as I checked my packages. I’d become the only UPS dropoff last spring, and it had proven to be lucrative. It wasn’t a fortune, but every little bit helped pay the rent on Missing Pieces.

With Stan gone, I spun around in the blue dress again, a little more cautiously.

I never stocked shoes, but I thought Darcy at the Sunflower Fancy across the road might have something strappy and sexy for me. They would cost the earth, and I’d probably never wear them again, but I was in the right mood and ready to take my chances with Kevin.

I looked at myself again in the mirror. Gramps was right when he said I look like my mother. Her hair had been different—darker—but our faces were similar—heartshaped with wispy eyebrows and a slightly pointed nose.

I took off the dress and put it behind the counter as my first customer came in to look around. I’d forgotten to move the miniature I believed to be Theo Burr, but I went and got it before the woman noticed it. I wouldn’t part with it for anything, but I was glad I was still wearing the gloves when I touched it.

The woman, who said she was from Charlotte, was looking for antiques for her new house. She had a good eye. There was an old ship’s compass from the
Emulous
, one of the more famous Outer Banks wrecks. I’d had it a few years, but it didn’t work. Lots of hands had touched it and put it back down. It was too banged up for most people.

“I’ll take this,” she said when she came up to the counter with it.

“Do you know what it is?” I asked. Though sales were slow, I couldn’t let my true finds go without making sure the right person was getting them.

“I do!” She proceeded to tell me how she’d read about the wreck but had never dreamed she’d be so lucky to find something from it for her house. “How much?”

That was always another aspect of my prizes. They were expensive. Either people wanted them or they didn’t. It was part of the package. I named my price and she took out her wallet. “Do you take Visa?”

It was a good sale. I rang it up, boxed the old compass, and smiled. “Thanks for coming in.”

“Thanks for having this here,” she said enthusiastically. “I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it might drive up the price. My great-great grandfather was the captain of the
Emulous
. This is very dear to me.”

Actually, I probably would’ve charged her less, but I didn’t say so. I was almost too sentimental to have the shop when it came to things like that.

It was a good thing I made that one big sale because it was my only one that morning. I closed for lunch and went across Duck Road to Sunflower Fancy to look for shoes. Darcy found me a perfect pair that I could afford and thanked me for my business.

“Terrible thing about the museum,” she said as she boxed my shoes. “Everyone’s talking about it. I hear the police are looking for Sam Meacham. If anyone
human
killed Max, I suppose it was Sam. Those two were always going at it.”

I kind of agreed, especially since I knew Sam had been there earlier in the day before the explosion. I’d known Sam all of my life, just as I had Max, only we weren’t as close. I couldn’t imagine him killing anyone.

Then the word
human
filtered through my brain. “What do you mean, ‘human’?”

“Some people think it’s the old pirate curse,” Darcy continued.

“You mean they think a pirate’s ghost killed Max?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders, her lavender dress almost matching the highlights in her gray hair. “You’ve lived here your whole life, Dae O’Donnell. You know that Duck was cursed by Rafe Masterson. He swore he’d come back, and some of us think that’s
exactly
what’s happened.”

I
left Sunflower Fancy with more than a pair of shoes. I hadn’t thought about people believing that the pirate curse was on us again. I don’t know why not. There were still the occasional tales of finding a mermaid, and we had our share of ghost stories that everyone believed were true.

I remembered hearing about the pirate curse before I ever went to school. We repeated it over and over once we all gathered in school, especially around Halloween. Rafe Masterson was long dead, but his spirit lived on in Duck.

Rafe was one of the pirates who had been a scourge of the Graveyard of the Atlantic for many years in the late 1700s. He was finally captured by an old Banker trick of tying a lantern to a horse and leading it up and down the shore. Many rich merchant ships were lured to wreck on the coast this way, believing they saw safe port. This was primarily used before the advent of lighthouses.

Rafe believed it too, and his ship was wrecked. The other members of his crew, all scurrilous hellions, were killed as they washed up onshore. Rafe, however, was saved for a more grisly fate.

He was hanged, drawn and quartered, his remains put out on wrecked timbers embedded in the beach to dry, as a warning to other pirates. His last words before he was torn apart by four strong horses were a curse on the people who lived where Duck is today: “My ghost won’t rest until your village is destroyed. Look for me by moonlight with my bony skull laughing as you die.”

As curses went, it was a really good one. People were truly terrified for a very long time. Many fires and other catastrophes were blamed on the curse. Even as recently as twenty years ago, the fire that destroyed the original fire station was blamed on Rafe. It was easy to imagine that the museum filled with pirate paraphernalia could be one of his targets. Even easier once everyone found out that a cannonball had been fired into the museum.

“We have to call an emergency town meeting,” I told Nancy when I got back across the street. “How much notice do we have to give?”