Pirates (38 page)

“We’ll open this in our room,” he told her, tucking the dusty little chest under his flowered shirt with a pirate’s
deftness. “If the new tenants get wind of it, they’ll probably use it to wreak still more havoc on my house.”

Phoebe let the possessive pronoun pass unchallenged. Duncan was an intelligent man, and he knew the mansion no longer belonged to him. He had probably already figured out, too, that he was a ghost of sorts; technically, he didn’t exist because there was a grave somewhere with his name on it. For that matter, Phoebe hadn’t legally lived in 1780, either, because she hadn’t been born until 1969.

It was all so damn confusing.

“You’re the boss,” she agreed wearily. It wasn’t entirely true, of course; in Phoebe’s mind, she and Duncan were equals, but, after all he’d been through, she figured she could forego semantics for a little while.

When, behind the locked door of Room 73, he opened the box, wielding the same butter knife he’d used to dislodge the stone in the cellar wall, Phoebe drew in a sharp breath. The thing was brimming with thick gold coins, their glow undimmed by the passage of time.

“Duncan,” Phoebe whispered, “that’s a small fortune!”

He smiled. “A wise man,” he replied, “is prepared for the unexpected.”

Phoebe lifted a gold piece from the box and held it up for a closer look. The coin was large and heavy and stamped with the image of a lion. The average collector would probably pay far more than face value for specimens like diese, she reasoned, but there was no sense in being greedy. “We’ll have to be discreet,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of these floating around, and there’ll be questions if we try to pass them at McDonald’s or the supermarket.”

A glance at Duncan’s puzzled face reminded Phoebe that they hadn’t gotten to American Consumerism 101.

“Leave everything to me,” she said.

Duncan rolled his eyes.

The next day, Phoebe and Duncan left the island on a small propeller-driven aircraft. Fortunately, passports would not be required, since Paradise Island was an American possession, rather like Puerto Rico, and money was no longer a problem.

Soon, they landed at an airfield outside Orlando.

Duncan had not said a word since takeoff, and he was white as a Bing Crosby Christmas. When the plane touched down and bounced along the runway, engines roaring in reverse thrust, he gave Phoebe a look that would have curdled yogurt. Translation:
Don’t ever ask me to do this again
.

She began to wonder how he would react to her surprise. Scratch Space Mountain and Star Tours, she thought with some regret.

They checked into a room, then caught a cab to a shopping mall, and Phoebe used her ATM card again, this time to replace the cash she’d spent on their airline tickets. Later, she would find a pawnshop in a bad neighborhood and hock one of Duncan’ s gold coins, just to get a feel for their value. In the meantime, the pirate in her life needed a change of clothes—she still had the rumpled contents of the suitcase she’d brought from Seattle—so she outfitted him in jeans, athletic shoes, and a blue cotton shirt.

“Ummm,” she said, admiring him.

Duncan, overwhelmed all over again by the mall and the crowds of scantily dressed shoppers, was starting to turn testy. Phoebe took his hand and dragged him out onto the concourse and into the food court, where she purchased double-bacon cheeseburgers, french fries, and milk shakes.

“This is a distinct improvement,” Duncan said, brightening, “over that swill we had at the hospital.”

Phoebe smiled. “Don’t get too used to it. Good as this stuff tastes, a steady diet of it would
put
you in the hospital.”

Duncan had finished his fries and started in on Phoebe’s. There was color in his face again, and an evil glint in his eyes. “Do you presume, woman,” he said, pretending to ferocity, “to dictate what I will and will not eat?”

“Of course,” Phoebe answered blithely. “I’m your wife.”

He sighed. “I suppose that means you won’t buy me another of these”—he turned to consult the sign over the counter at the fast-food franchise—“Belly-busters?”

“That’s exactly what it means,” Phoebe said. “Do you
want to die of clogged arteries before you turn two hundred and fifty?”

Duncan laughed. “I shall be two hundred and forty-five on my next birthday,” he said, and a woman pushing a stroller between the tables of the food court paused to stare.

That afternoon, they visited one of Orlando’s major tourist attractions.

“We did not revere mice in quite the same way, in my time,” Duncan confided behind his hand, as a giant and very cheerful rodent skipped by on two legs. “Nasty little creatures, for the most part.”

Phoebe elbowed him gently, mindful of his sword wound and general debilitation. “You speak sacrilege,” she warned, with a smile in her eyes. “Come with me, Captain Rourke—there is something I want to show you.”

Duncan seemed shaken when they came out of the ride—Phoebe’s personal favorite—featuring pirates, skeletons, heaps of treasure, and a convincing battle between ship and shore. “You might have warned me,” he said, a muscle flexing once in his jaw, “that there would be gunplay!”

Phoebe laughed. “I told you it would be realistic,” she said. “How do you feel about ghosts?”

He didn’t reply.

Later that night in their hotel room, when they were both immersed to their necks in the Jacuzzi, Phoebe asked, “Well, Mr. Rourke? What do you think of modern America?”

Duncan pondered his answer, taking his wineglass from the tiled edge of the tub and sipping from it. “That,” he countered dryly, at considerable length, “was modern America?”

Phoebe splashed him for being so pompous. Still, she had to concede he had a point. “One facet of it, yes,” she admitted, when his wine had been swamped with bathwater and his hair drenched. She went to him, slipped her arms around his lean, bare waist, and laid her head against his good shoulder. “Tell me what you thought,” she urged. She really wanted to know.

Duncan hesitated, then allowed his hands to rest on the
small of her back. “The pirates were amusing,” he said, and the sorrowful mischief in his eyes was unsettlingly reminiscent of his father, “though I confess I almost threw you to the floor of the boat once or twice, to save you from stray musket balls. The haunted house, however, was nearly my undoing.”

She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “But you don’t like it here.”

He paused again. Then he smoothed her hair and said, with touching reluctance, “No, Phoebe. I don’t belong.”

Phoebe bit her lower lip as tears threatened. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I gave you the impression that the whole place is one big amusement park, and that’s not true. The country you and your friends fought to establish is so much more, Duncan—”

He quieted her with a brief, light kiss. “I know,” he assured her hoarsely, pulling her close to him. “We’re together, Phoebe. That’s the important thing.”

She sniffled. “Yes,” she agreed. “But you know what? For all its trials and hardships, I think I like your world better, too. It was more graceful, somehow, and everything seemed more substantial. More real.”

Duncan curved a finger under her chin and lifted. “But it will be better for you here,” he said. “Better for our baby.”

Phoebe nodded. They’d watched a PBS special on pregnancy and childbirth earlier in the evening, and Duncan had been captivated. “I’ll see a doctor tomorrow,” she promised, seeing the concern in his eyes, “just to make sure everything’s all right. And then I’ll show you another side of America.”

“I love you,” he said softly. He had told her before when in the throes of passion, but this was different. A milestone, somehow, a decree that what they shared together was permanent. Even eternal.

She stared at him in wonder and joy, because, for all Duncan’s tenderness, all his protectiveness and his passion, he had never said those words in quite that way. And she had yearned to hear them, in just that context, the way a desert flower longs for the cool mist of morning.

“And I love you,” she replied. “In this world or any other.”

Duncan kissed her again, very deeply and very thoroughly, and then brought her out of the water. They dried each other with soft hotel towels and took their time making love.

Phoebe saw an obstetrician the next day and came out of the exam room smiling, with a prescription for prenatal vitamins in her hand. The examination had gone well, and the baby’s heartbeat was strong and steady. Duncan was in the waiting room when she emerged, staring in the direction of the sea.

She saw the forlorn expression on his face before he’d had time to replace it with one of those knee-smiling grins of his.

“Come along, Mr. Rourke,” Phoebe said tenderly, taking his hand and brushing her lips across his knuckles. “There is something else I want you to see.”

A little over an hour later, they were on the freeway, in a rented car, headed for Cape Kennedy.

“It’s time we talked about islands and oceans and supernatural elevators,” Phoebe announced, keeping her eyes on the road.

Beside her, in the passenger seat, Duncan frowned. “What about the baby? You haven’t told me what the doctor said.”

“Our child is fine,” she assured him, her throat thick with emotion. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

They had hamburgers, Duncan’s favorite food, at a fastfood place near the base. Then Phoebe took her eighteenth-century husband through the space museum, explaining moon shots and other modern wonders as best she could.

On the way back to their motel in Orlando, Phoebe made a few comparisons of her own. There were things she liked about the twentieth century, of course, but she knew she didn’t belong there, any more than Duncan did. Quietly, in the most private part of her heart, she said good-bye to the 1990s.

“We’re going back,” Phoebe proclaimed.

“Back?” Duncan echoed. He’d been deep in thought since they’d left the museum. Little wonder. “How?” he asked in a distracted tone.

“We’ll start by flying—okay, we’ll take a boat—back to Paradise Island. Then we’ll check into the hotel, there to wait and watch and hope to high heaven that the magic elevator takes us back to 1780.”

Duncan’s smile was rueful—and sad in a way that hurt Phoebe’s heart. “That would be a miracle,” he said.

“Maybe it would,” Phoebe agreed, reaching over the gearshift to squeeze his hand. “But it isn’t as if it hasn’t already happened twice. Could be that the third time, as they say, is the charm.”

He sighed. “Even if it were possible—what about the baby?”

“What about him? He was conceived in the eighteenth century. Maybe he’s supposed to be born there.”

Duncan seemed unconvinced, but they sold a pile of gold coins to a shop owner that afternoon, and by evening they were aboard a chartered yacht, speeding toward Paradise island. Standing in the wheelhouse with the skipper, listening to an in-depth lecture on how the instruments worked, Duncan looked truly happy for the first time in days.

The Eden Hotel was as depressing as before, but Phoebe knew in her heart that returning had been the right thing to do. They settled in, Mr. and Mrs. Duncan Rourke, and spent their days reading and exploring and talking, and their evenings making love. Phoebe was perfectly content and could have gone on living in that aimless way forever, but she sensed a restlessness in Duncan, an impatient longing for the world he knew.

Phoebe searched high and low for Professor Benning’s book about Duncan’s life, without saying anything to her husband, but she turned up exactly nothing. Probably some tourist had found the little volume and taken it home. Calls to the island library and to a book search service on the mainland were fruitless, and Phoebe reluctantly gave up on finding out how her story, and Duncan’s, would end.

Perhaps, she reasoned, it was for the best.

Phoebe’s pregnancy was starting to show, and the proceeds from the coins were running out, when Duncan developed insomnia. She often awakened in the night, with a start, and found him gone, and she was always terrified by the discovery.

Usually, she found him on one of the terraces, or sitting at the piano in the bar, running his hands tentatively over the keys, as if afraid to unleash the music inside him. On occasion, he walked the beach, and later described the constellations he’d seen in wistful tones, as though the stars he’d looked up at were not the same ones he’d always known.

Although he loved her, and said so often and eloquently, with words as well as with his body, Phoebe began to fear that she was losing Duncan, that he was slowly slipping away from her. She wanted to cling to him, keep him at her side night and day, but she loved him too much and too well to make herself his jailer.

And so Phoebe waited and watched the ever-changing temperament of the sea, and beneath her heart, the baby grew.

Duncan got out of bed slowly, in the depths of that still and sultry night, some three months after their return to the hotel on Paradise Island, taking care not to awaken Phoebe. He’d gotten to know the bartender, an affable black man who called himself Snowball, and sometimes he was still behind the bar when Duncan came downstairs, polishing glasses or wiping tables.

The television set, an apparatus Duncan had come to despise after an initial and very brief period of fascination, was tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel when he entered the lounge.

“Duncan, old buddy,” Snowball greeted him, flashing that broad ivory smile. He called everybody “old buddy,” but Duncan didn’t mind because the term made him feel welcome. As much as he loved Phoebe—enough, he sometimes thought, to sacrifice his soul for her—he missed the companionship of like-minded males, like Alex and Beedle
and his brother, Lucas. When he let himself consider the fact that they were all long dead, these men who had been his friends, the grief was hard to bear.

“Hello,” he said, glancing at the clock on the wall behind the bar. Still an hour until closing time, he thought. As usual, the place was empty, except for the two of them.

“Hey, do me a favor, will you?” Snowball asked. “I got half a case of Grand Marnier down in the cellar, in that little room at the bottom of the stairs. You mind gettin’ it for me, so I don’t get in Dutch for leavin’ before my shift’s over? Soon as I step out of this place, somebody’ll be in here wantin’ a maitai, and the night manager will have my ass.”