The Pirate Princess: Return to the Emerald Isle (2 page)

Margaret Grace Murphy woke up after a restless night. Even though it was her eleventh birthday she didn’t feel very festive and she had slept in a lot longer than she normally would have on her big day. She stood at the window while getting dressed to see if there was something in the daylight that would explain the crash she had heard in the night. From what she could see there was not a trace of anything that could have produced the incredibly loud knock on the old sea captain’s house she lived in. The sunlight felt warm through the glass. As Meg bent down to tie her shoes, the sun brought out the deep red tint in her auburn hair as it dangled in her face.

Finn
came over and looked out the window beside her. “I know, Finn…” Meg pointed to the ceiling, “Let’s go up to the captain’s walk to look around.” They walked down the hall to the door through which a steep, crooked stairway led to the attic. She rarely went up there nowadays because it was dusty and creepy, but that crash had rung in her head all night and she knew she would be able to see everything from the little window box on the top of their house.

A regular feature on old houses in seaside towns was a
cupola and platform on the roof. Meg knew her cupola was called a
captain’s walk
and she had to constantly correct the neighborhood kids who called it a
widow’s watch
. Some of the meaner kids who picked on her because she was short, liked to tell her that her house was haunted and that they could see the ghost of a widow on moonlit nights. Had the illiterate kids that roamed her street ever taken time out to read the historical plaque on the house, they would have known that the sea captain who built it lived there his entire life with his family and that his wife had died before him. But, in Meg’s head, the damage was done—just the thought of a ghostly widow kept her out of the attic regardless how uninformed the story was.

The attic was full of plastic storage bins
and miscellaneous pieces of furniture. Cobwebs hung from the rafters of the roof. They walked towards the center of the house where four wood beams surrounded an old wood ladder that was fixed from the floor to the roof box. Meg had to leave Finn behind as she climbed the ladder. Its rungs had been worn down as smooth as stone from a hundred years of use and barely creaked as she ascended.

Inside the cupola
there was a bench built into the wall for sitting on rainy days and a hatch that led outside to a small wrap-around porch. Meg crawled through the hatch and, as she stood up, she gazed out on a beautiful fall day. There was not a cloud in the sky and she could see for miles in every direction. The view, however, did not distract her from doing what she had come up to do; Meg carefully scanned the immediate area and could not find a single downed tree. The large oak and pine trees stood proudly beside the house as they had done seemingly forever. There was not a single thing on top of the house that could have made that noise. Meg thought she must have dreamed the whole crash the night before. She soaked up the beautiful scenery around her and breathed in the salty air.

The sunlight danced on the water of Long Island Sound
—
the Sound
, as they called it—and there were no boats to be seen. In the distance, like a gray wall, the whole of Long Island, New York protected the small body of water they lived on from the great Atlantic Ocean. Meg’s house was on an island in the Mystic River. She gazed on the water and, for just a moment, thought she saw some storm clouds just past Long Island, but they instantly disappeared into the blue sky, leaving nothing but a strange feeling in Meg’s stomach. A train horn blew from up the river breaking Meg’s trance. She looked back towards the town of Mystic and its drawbridge. The view of the town from her captain’s walk was almost as beautiful as the view of the water. Before the thoughts of ghosts had frightened her, she used to come up on sunny days to read and to look at the quintessential New England seaside village where she lived. The old buildings and houses that lined both sides of the Mystic River fueled her appetite for reading and history as much as did the tall ships in the famous seaport museum. She decided that next summer she would start coming back up here again with her e-reader and stop letting the imaginary ghosts of others keep her from such an amazing place where she could read and dream.

The drawbridge
in town was up. Meg was reminded of spending the day before in the village with her family, something they rarely did. Her parents had had business to attend to in town that morning. Afterwards, they had lunch at the famous Mystic Pizza shop where a Hollywood movie was filmed. They then stopped for ice cream and sat by the bridge to watch the tourists. It was a nice morning and the tourists were as crazy as usual, but it ended way too fast. They had to hurry back to Masons Island so Meg’s dad could go out and turn some trawls before nighttime.

Meg’s
father was a lobsterman. He captained a small boat in the waters of the sound. Where they lived, being a lobsterman was once a very profitable occupation, but there was a big die-off of lobsters in the late 90s that hurt the business. The die-off was blamed on a number of things, including pollution, low oxygen levels, and even a parasite, but no one was absolutely sure. Lobstermen went from ‘eating steaks to eating rice overnight,’ as they used to say, and many ended up getting out of the business. Not Meg’s dad. Mark Murphy kept at it and, just when the lobsters started to make a comeback and business started to get a little better for him, they died off again. This second time around there was a fear that spraying for mosquitoes to prevent West Nile Virus is what had killed them. Although he was not making the big bucks he had made in the past, Meg’s father kept on lobstering because it was all he had ever wanted to do.

“Meg!” She heard her mother’s voice calling out from downstairs.

Her family! She totally forgot about them.

Meg crawled back through the hatch
, down the ladder, and scurried downstairs with her dog in tow. Shay Murphy was at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her. “Here she is!” she called out, “our big eleven year old!” Although she was short, Shay was incredibly strong—she swam in fast currents—and easily lifted Meg up in the air, carrying her to the kitchen where her sister and brother were already having breakfast.

Meg’s mother was beautiful, with jet black hair and slate blue eyes that were very calculating. She was also fisherman, but one of a different sort: Shay was a scallop diver. Using scuba gear, she dove down into the cold ocean and the nasty currents of “The Race,” an area of water which separates Long Island, New York from coastal Connecticut. There she handpicked the popular bivalve from the ocean floor. This method of fishing produced a scallop that was less gritty than those that were dredged from a boat. Her cleaner diver’s scallops allowed her to price them much higher than the commercial ones. Diving for them was also a very environmentally good way to fish because handpicking the scallops did not disturb the seabed as much as a giant dredge would, which was another strong selling point for Shay’s scallops.

Meg’s
big sister Eileen was eating waffles and watching their little brother Sean crumble a blueberry muffin on the tray in front of him and then throw it on the floor.

“Happy birthday
, Meg!” she said. Eileen was fourteen years old, tall and lean, with her blond hair up in its usual ponytail.

Sean was almost two
. He said something that sounded like “day-day,” and gave Meg a big smile while holding his hands up in the air to be rescued from his high chair.

“Thank you
,” Meg said to Eileen. She then patted her brother on his sandy-blond head and added, “Sorry, Sean. No escape yet.”

Meg’s
dad was sitting at the counter reading a newspaper and sipping on coffee. He looked up at her and said, “Come here and give me a big hug, my little midnight explorer.” She walked up to him and he squeezed her tightly, “I remember when you were born. You were so small I could hold you in my hands.” He held up his big, strong hands as if he was cradling an egg.

“I was not that small
, Daddy!”

“You were! You were
born five weeks early and the tiniest little thing. You just couldn’t wait to join our family, and rushed yourself out before you were done cooking.” He squeezed her again, “You were put in the newborn intensive care unit right after you were born, so your little lungs could finish developing. I know you don’t remember, but your sister spent every day staring into your incubator praying that we take her little sister home. And finally, two long weeks later, we did! ” Meg’s premature birth had left her always a little smaller than the other kids her age, and although perfectly healthy, she sometimes found herself a bit short of breath when doing strenuous activities.

Meg rolled her eyes and scoffed at the story she had heard a million times before saying
, “Yeah, yeah…But seriously, I can’t believe none of you heard that crash last night. It shook my bed and I swear I thought the roof was caved in by a tree.”

The blank stares of her family
were the only response she got back. Finally her mother said, “I’m sure you heard something, honey, but the rest of us are such heavy sleepers, we could probably sleep through a hurricane. Did you find anything outside on your little midnight adventure?”

“Nothing
. But I know I heard something,” frustrated, she looked at her family a moment more and then sat down for breakfast. Her mom had made her favorite, a bacon sandwich on white bread with home-fried potatoes on the side, which she ate happily while talking about the big crash with her sister and brother.

If it were
any other day, Meg’s father would have been long gone lobstering. He usually got on the boat a couple of hours before dawn to haul down to his boat the mackerel, bunker, or any other cheap fish that was being thrown away by other fisherman. He then stuffed bait bags with the rotting fish which were used to lure crustaceans into big wire traps. After filling the bait bags, he took a lonely cruise out to the sound where his trawls lay.

Trawls were a string of lobster traps all tied together, with a buoy at each end.
He would haul the trawls out of the water one at a time, unload the legal-sized lobsters into his tank, and throw any undersized or egg-carrying females back overboard, along with any other creature that was drawn to the decaying fish in the trap. It was a hard job for one man to do by himself. In the good old days he used to have a deck hand to help. But the number of good lobsters that he pulled out every day was not enough to sustain both him and a deck hand.

Meg looked up at her
father and smiled. She was happy to have him home for a whole day, as he rarely took that much time off. “The traps can’t bait themselves,” he always reminds them. Although Mark Murphy always managed to tweak his schedule to be at anything his kids were doing, birthdays were the rare treat. Five times a year they were lucky to have him to themselves all day long.

“So what’
s the schedule today, Daaad—?” She almost said
Daddy
, but was trying to be more adult lately.

“Finish your breakfast, and then we will do some chores before we load up your mom’s boat.”

“Chores!” said Meg, “But it’s my birthday!” She looked up at her dad with her best puppy dog eyes, but he didn’t flinch. “What do we have to do today?” she said. Chores around their house varied from simple house cleaning to mending lobster traps.

“I still haven’t changed all of the vents to the new size the DEP wants
,” Mark said, referring to the plastic escape vents attached to the traps.

Lobster traps
are metal cages with a string net on the inside in the shape of a funnel, called a
head
. On the big side of the head there are two open sides in the cage that allow the lobsters to crawl in and up through a small hole leading them into the
salon
in the back of the cage, where bait is held and where the lobsters are trapped. The escape vents are detachable, rectangular plastic holes on two sides of the salon that allow smaller animals to escape. The size of the vents were mandated by the Department of Environmental Protection—the DEP—and changed as the DEP changed the size of lobsters that could legally be caught. In trying to grow back the population of lobsters, the DEP had been making the vents bigger and bigger to allow ever older, larger lobsters to escape back to the waters to survive and multiply for longer periods of time.

“How many trawls?”
Eileen whined.

“Just two
. We should be done in a jiffy,” said Mark with a smile.

Each trawl had ten traps,
which meant they would have to switch out forty vents before they would be able to leave. With three of them working on it, however, it would not take long. Shay stayed behind in the house with Sean, while Meg, Eileen, and Mark went down to the dock to work.

There was nothing quite like being out on the dock in the morning. The water was like glass and the air was still crisp from the night
before. Nothing was on the sound but the seabirds. The sound of their footsteps on the wood pier caused an egret to take flight, its graceful image reflecting back on the still water as it flew out of sight. A flock of seagulls floating on the water cawed in the distance.