Pieces of Hate (A Wendover House Mystery Book 4) (2 page)

I stared at my phone for a moment and then turned it off. I was hoping
that he didn’t really expect Davy Jones’ locker.

Since I had no more coffee, I went to make some tea. Fortunately, I
had some scones from the day before. One needed to feed the help as they
labored or they sometimes stopped and went away.

Ben arrived before the water boiled or even got properly hot. His
presence woke Kelvin and Barney. Kelvin was mostly indifferent to his arrival but
Barney was excited to see him.

“Where is it?” Ben asked, barely stopping to pet Barney, which left my
dog baffled. What could be more important than petting him?

“In the kitchen.”

Ben didn’t wait for me to finish but strode toward the back of the
house. He was breathing hard but that might be because he had run uphill. The
island is a sort of tilted slab and the houses built like the old-style
motte
and bailey—with my house being the
motte
and the ocean being the really big moat that
protected us.

Ben took the slimy box over to the
sink,
and
ignoring the rubber gloves and more forceful of the tools I had laid out for
him, began using a putty knife on the bulging corner. Handling the small chest
did not seem to bother him. I found it to be repellant. It was filthy, leaking
black ichor, and unnaturally warm. My stained coat was soaking in the bathtub.
If it didn’t come clean I planned to throw it away. I might throw it out
anyway. It felt contaminated with some kind of psychic miasma.

“So what do you think it is?” I asked him.
“A map
box?
A gun locker?”

Ben’s grunt could indicate anything, but after a moment of silence he
looked up briefly. His eyes were shining and I began to feel trepidation. Ben
gets excited about things that are almost always troublesome for me.

“I’ve been doing some research on your seafaring ancestors and I have
some pretty high hopes,” he said. I knew he had been heavily involved in
research the last month or so, but not that it involved my family.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been looking at both Abercrombie, who died when the
Terminar
went
down, and his son-in-law, Nicholas Robert Wendover. I haven’t got definitive
proof yet, but I believe Nicholas was really Robert Johnson, a.k.a. Robert
Halfbeard
, so called because an accident with some
gunpowder left him unable to grow hair on half his face. He was wanted for
robbery and criminal violence on the sea for the short time he sailed with
Black Bart’s flotilla. I think he was guilty of other crimes as well.”

If the man had been a pirate, that went without saying. The idea was
not a new one. Harris had mentioned a brigand in the family on our first visit
to the island.

“That must have been a unique look.” I didn’t ask about Black Bart. I
knew the story would be forthcoming if the box didn’t open quickly. Ben liked
to lecture and stories grew rapidly when they took root in the
midden
of Ben’s devious mind.

“He abandoned his remaining facial hair almost immediately but the
name stuck,” Ben answered, putting down the knife, which hadn’t been of much
use, and picking up an upholstery hammer began tapping the shells away with
more patience than I had imagined him capable of showing. “I haven’t found out
much about his early life, but his ship, the
Calmare
, came to a bad end right
after he gave up his captaincy.”

“What happened?” I pulled the plate of scones closer to me and tried
to remember where the first aid box was. Ben was already dripping blood from
his knuckles and fingertips. So far none had gotten on the box but I was afraid
it eventually would. That seemed like a bad thing, though the chances of this
box actually belonging to someone on the ship seemed slim.

“The ship went down in rough water with all hands aboard just off the Massachusetts
coast. There were no known survivors and no wreckage was ever found. She wasn’t
huge, a single-masted sloop with fourteen guns, but she wasn’t a small fishing
boat either. There should have been some sign of her if the ship was destroyed.”

I shivered.

“If there were no survivors then how do we know the waters were rough?
Or that it even sank?” I asked.

“The captain of the
Acabar
logged seeing the
Calmare
the day previously so we
know she was in the general area. Captain Darby—the former first mate—had
stated to Nicholas Johnson when they laid on supplies his intention to sail for
Boston on September ninth, so there is little chance that they were too far off
the coast. They never made it to Boston—and records for other ships and those on
land do not mention any storms except off the coast where New Hampshire butts
up against Massachusetts. Sometime either on the night of the ninth or the morning
of the tenth, the ship disappeared and was never seen again.”

“Hm. Okay. I guess I’ll swallow that. Could it have been an accident
or sabotage? Some drunken cook or an insane crewmember
who
was flogged once too often and set the thing on fire out of revenge?”

“Maybe, but no one on shore saw a fire and they should have, even with
rain. I mean, it would have been one hell of a bonfire and pretty close to
shore. But no one saw a thing.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“I don’t think it was sabotage and of course they didn’t deliberately
fire the ship with everyone still aboard. If they were still aboard,” he added
to himself. “And they must have been. There are no records of the crew being
seen again.”

“So what then?”

“There aren’t a lot of accounts outside of legal documents accusing
Halfbeard
of piracy, of course, but
Halfbeard
seems to have been a decent captain if a reprehensible human being. Very
egalitarian and fair with splitting up the shares. Not particularly fond of the
lash. He let the men drink. He also lacked imagination so unlike a lot of his
contemporaries, he was not frightened by tall tales of sea monsters and ghost
ships. It kept the crew calm.”

“And so?”
I wondered if he would ever get to the
point and then asked myself if I really wanted him to. Sometimes, when I dine
on the wrong kind of information, it gives me indigestion in the form of
nightmares.

“Darby was another matter. He tended to drink and when inebriated, he
claimed to have
the sight
.”

“How stupid of him to admit it, if it was
true.
And even if it wasn’t.
Sailors were a
superstitious lot.” Even I knew this much.

“And by that point they already had reason to be fearful.”

One by one the barnacles were surrendering their hold. I hoped that Ben
would be willing to take them out to the back garden and throw them over the
wall. I was sure that they were unwholesome.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Ben said with satisfaction. The box was
wood, plain with iron hasps that had not rusted. The wood would indicate that
the box was old, but the lack of rust was disappointing. If the hinges were
stainless steel then it was modern.

“Why were they frightened?
Beyond the obvious
dangers of drowning, hanging, and fatal diseases?”

“Why indeed. Well, here the story gets wild. You have to keep an open
mind.”

“I’m open.”
Boy,
was I! Ben had no idea. Little
by little I had been alienated from my earlier beliefs and concepts about how
the world worked. I still wanted natural, rational explanations for the strange
things that happened around me, but was coming to accept that usually none
would be forthcoming.
At least none that could be shared with
the outside world.
“And I heard that wild is great for selling books.”

“It’s good for me, yes. Others around here may not like it.”

That didn’t sound good.

“Lay it on me anyway.”

And he did. Ben began unpacking his mental suitcase of carefully
researched information, laying out facts and inferred conclusions in a clear
and attractive order. As a writer, I could appreciate his technique. As the
holder of the creepy box I was less than thrilled with what he was saying. I
could hear my grandmother saying,
no
matter how you slice it, it’s still just bologna
. But I couldn’t dismiss it
as nonsense, as much as I would have liked to, because of how the box had
arrived.

“Rumor has it that the
Calmare
attacked the Spanish ship,
Concepcion.
Halfbeard
did it for the
cargo, but also because of race hate. He was very anti-Catholic.” When I stared
at him, he added,
“Remember that the
Reformation rocked Europe back on its religious heels, and the ongoing holy
hatred followed the sailors into the New World and lingered there long after treaties
were signed by the inbred kings and popes back in the old one.
Halfbeard
would have believed that killing Catholic
Spaniards was practically his duty.”

I nodded.

“The document trail is scanty but fairly clear in spite of the missing
pieces.
Halfbeard
began following the
Concepcion
outside Hispaniola. Other
ships saw him but kept back. He had a bad reputation. He’d been resting up in Tortuga
de Mar when he saw her sail past and recalled the crew. A cabin boy was left
behind and that’s how we know where he was.
Concepcion
wasn’t a large ship, but she was headed for Spain, which meant she had gold, and
she was an enemy so he decided to attack her as soon as she was away from
possible aid.”

“What did he get for his troubles?”

“There is no surviving manifest of what the
Concepcion
carried, but there were rumors in Mexico of a cursed
treasure.”

I felt my eyes get big.

“A cursed treasure?”

“Yes. Mind you, according to legend a lot of treasures were cursed and
that never stopped anyone from attacking ships. Maybe it kept the slaves from
stealing things. Anyhow,
Halfbeard
didn’t know about
the curse and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did. As I said, he was
unimaginative. Showing both cunning and patience, he waited until the Spanish
ship reached Florida and then continued sailing into the Atlantic. He was
following his prey at a distance, hanging well back and doing nothing
aggressive that would alarm them and make them put into port.

“It seemed to work. The
Concepcion
did not put into port, which was unusual but convenient. She did not show any
alarm or even awareness at being followed, but that may be because
Halfbeard
was clever and used some old tricks like dragging
mattresses or anchors behind the
Calmare
to slow his ship down and make it look like she was
just a small, heavily laden merchant vessel. He might well have kept the swivel
guns shrouded as well. Still, I think the crew of the
Concepcion
may not have reacted to his presence for another
reason.”

“What reason?”

Ben shrugged. This didn’t mean that he didn’t know, just that he
wasn’t ready to lay his theory out for inspection. That meant it was something alarming
and he probably wanted to talk me into letting him have the run of my records
before I got upset.

The thought of all the letters and journals in my attic had Ben
smacking his lips, but I was adamant about looking through things in my own
time before turning anything over. This stubbornness made Harris Ladd happy.
Ben was, after all, still an outsider and a writer, and therefore did not need
to be privy to family secrets.

“This part of the story is especially sketchy. There are just a few
notes made by a doctor who treated some sailors from the
Calmare
about a week later. I
would really like to get some confirmation here.”

“It’s okay. I want to hear it.”

“All right.
Here is what
I think happened. The crew of the
Concepcion
surrendered immediately when
Halfbeard
hoisted the Jolly
Roger. Not a single shot was fired. One can’t help but wonder if this was
because they feared their cargo and wanted to be rid of it. Certainly they were
very sick with something they called
Lepra
de Mono
.
Roughly translated it is
monkey leprosy
.
I think it was these combined woes of the treasure and illness which distracted
them and made them happy to give over their prize without a fight.”

“But what was it?
Golden idols?
Water from the Fountain of Youth?
What?”

Ben shook his head.

“I don’t think so. The treasure, whatever it was, was divided among
the crew of the
Calmare
and they sailed north. The
Concepcion
was not found until decades later when she washed up on a beach in South
America. At least, we believe it was the
Concepcion
.
There was no one onboard—no bodies at any rate. But there was still food and
drink in barrels and rotting clothing. When the crew left, if they left, they
didn’t take their possessions or provisions with them. Wood-eating shipworms
had been at work without hindrance for many years and the anchor was gone as
well as the prow of the ship. It was kind of like the
Mary Celeste
, if you know that story.”