Windswept (19 page)

“Why do you do this to me, Jacob?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. You know. It’s as if you live in this great mansion, and you allow me entry into the foyer, and you say nice things to me. You’re glad I’ve come. And yet you never invite me into the parlor. I can reach the door but go no farther. And tonight I thought…I thought you would let me inside.”

He stared at the water. The moon had slipped behind a cloud leaving the ocean as black as the coal in his heart. “There is nothing to come inside for, Nora,” he said. “Inside my house there is only emptiness.”

“I don’t believe that, Jacob. I’ve seen a side to you…”

He laughed bitterly. “And you’re still here? You should be running through those trees back to your father and your worthy suitor, Nora. Back to Hadley.”

He thought he heard her sob and wanted to put his hands over his ears. He didn’t want to hear her cry and know he was the cause. Lights glimmered on the horizon, out to sea. They gave him a place to focus his sight, away from her face. He pointed to the lights. “See that, Nora? It’s a ship, probably going around the island to New Orleans or Texas.”

“Why are you showing me that ship,” she cried. “What do I care for a ship?”

“Only that it’s a possibility. There are many possibilities off this island you know. And one day you will go away and find them. As you should.”

From behind him, her voice was a choking whisper. “I want to hate you, Jacob. I want to, but I can’t.”

He almost turned to her. Almost took her in his arms and comforted her. His body had started the motion that would have taken him to her side. But a noise up the beach stopped him.

“What’s that?” She’d noticed it, too.

He heard the muffled crunch of footsteps on shells before he saw shapes appear out of the night shadows. A combination of man and animal moved down the shore toward them. He grabbed Nora’s arm and pulled her under the tree with the sweeping trunk. “Stay down,” he warned.

Four men leading two mules walked along the water’s edge. The mules were at least a hundred feet apart. A rope was strung taut between them, and hanging from the rope were several lanterns, their chambers glowing eerily in the dark. Jacob swore under his breath as the strange company passed a few yards in front of the palm tree. “A mule line!”

He looked out to sea. The lights from the ship veered toward them. It was too late to stop the vessel. It would soon be upon the reef.

As soon as the men and mules passed, Jacob pulled Nora from under the tree. Keeping low to the ground he ran with her back to the tree line ignoring her questions. At the entrance to Southard Street, he left her. “Go home, Nora. There will be trouble tonight.”

Then he ran to the harbor to ready the
Dover Cloud
. It would not be long until he knew he would hear the cry, “Wreck ashore!”

Tears stung the backs of her eyes and blurred the few lights still burning in the houses along Southard Street. But Nora was determined not to cry. She’d cried enough over Jacob Proctor. She blinked hard and her vision cleared. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of your tears,” she said, too angry to give in completely to the hurt he’d caused her again. What did her heart know of mule lines and ships in the night? It only knew that the man who filled her thoughts from morning to night had scorned her once more.

When she reached the fence surrounding the back property of her house, she stopped and drew a deep breath. She felt like stomping her feet, banging doors and throwing pieces of glassware. But she had to remember that she’d sneaked out of the house to meet Jacob, and she had to be just as quiet going back in.

The gate made barely a sound when Nora opened it. She slipped inside the yard and closed the latch. Reckless stirred on his straw mat and jumped to his feet. Straining against his rope to get to Nora, he emitted a rolling chortle of greeting.
“Baaahh…”

“Hush, silly goat,” she said, going over to give him a pat on his head. “You’ll wake Armand and Hubert and they’ll yap the rest of the household to attention. I’ll take you off your lead and play with you tomorrow.”

She led him back to his mat and he settled down. Then she crossed stealthily to the back door. She was just reaching for the handle when the door burst open from the inside and her father stomped onto the service porch.

“Confound it to hell!” he swore. “If it’s not one thing it’s another on this blasted island.”

His ample waistline connected with Nora’s shoulder as she stood on the bottom step and almost sent her sprawling to the ground. Clutching the short stair rail for balance, she croaked, “Father!”

“Nora? What are you doing out here?”

Before she could answer, her mother’s voice came from the kitchen accompanied by a chorus of discordant yelps. “Thurston, what are you doing? Why are you up? Where are you going?”

She screamed and Armand and Hubert shot out the kitchen door. Hubert ran circles around Thurston, jumping and nipping at his trousers. Armand leapt at Nora’s waist and she caught him in her arms. Reckless bounded up from his mat and added his own high pitched yodeling to the confusion.

Wiggling one leg ineffectually at Hubert, Thurston hollered at his wife. “Sidonia, for the love of God, can’t you keep these beasts at bay!”

Sidonia’s mass of thick dark hair had shifted to the side under her night cap, and the whole frilly thing had gone completely askew. Pushing ruffles out of her eyes with one hand and lifting the voluminous skirt of her nightgown with the other, she headed straight for her boy, the furry one. “Don’t yell, Thurston,” she cried. “Hubert is so sensitive. He won’t eat a bite all tomorrow because you’ve been cross with him.”

She picked up the poodle whose deep sensitivity was masked by a decidedly feral snarl at Thurston. Seeing Armand safely in Nora’s arms, Sidonia sighed with relief and said, “Thank you, Eleanor, for catching him.” Then her eyes widened in alarm and her hand flew to her chest. “Eleanor? What in heaven’s name are you doing out here? I thought you were ill.” Turning to her husband, she said, “Thurston, what is Eleanor doing? What are you doing? Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Calm down, Sid,” he said. “Piney Beade from the jail just knocked at the front door. Seems there’s activity on the beach. Those damn blasted wreckers are at it again with something called a mule line.”

Sidonia gasped. “A mule line? Oh, no!” She paused. “What’s that?”

“I haven’t got time to go into it now, Sid. Suffice it to say it’s a way of luring ships to the reef. And I know who’s behind it, too. Beade went to Proctor’s warehouse and cottage, and even Jimmy Teague’s. The scoundrel’s nowhere to be seen. Not surprising since for my money, he’s down at the shore pulling a mule! I’ll catch him red-handed this time.”

“How ghastly. Oh, do be careful, Thurston.”

He nodded and headed for the gate. Before leaving however, he turned to look at his daughter. “By the way, Nora, you never told me…what are you doing out at this hour? And with evening clothes on?”

She avoided his eyes since she knew she was going to lie and settled her gaze on the top of Armand’s head. “I never undressed, Father,” she said. “Just fell asleep on my bed. And then I heard Piney knock. Curiosity brought me down here, that’s all.”

“Well stay inside. There’s trouble brewing tonight, and I don’t want you to have any part in it. I’ve got to go. I’m going to see to it that Proctor has orchestrated the last wreck on the shores of this island.”

“Of course, Father.” She watched him go in the direction from which she had just come. She could have told him that Jacob had nothing to do with the mule line, that she’d seen it all with her own eyes. She could have told him he was wasting his time going after the wrong man. But the hurt was too fresh, the pain too deep.

Her father was convinced Jacob was at the root of the wrecking problems, and tonight if Jacob suffered the sting of Seabrook justice, that suited her just fine. Let him simmer in hot water for a while. It served him right, and it was nothing compared to what he’d done to her…again! Besides, he might very well be guilty of crimes unrelated to the mule line.

Picturing Jacob Proctor as prime beef in the judge’s stew was a small victory however. And the little smile that had crept its way onto Nora’s face was erased the instant she heard the first cry from one of the island cupolas.

“Wreck ashore!”

Chapter Twelve

On an island the size of Key West, gossip affects all citizens from the youngest to the oldest. Monday morning, in the Island School for Reading, the children talked of nothing but the wreck of the
Marguerite Gray
. Nora decided the best way to deal with the weekend excitement was to give her students the first ten minutes of class time to say everything that sat on the tips of their tongues.

Of course Nora was tired of hearing about the wreck and thinking about anything that had to do with the night it happened. For two days her father had vacillated between ranting because “that despicable Proctor” had escaped his clutches again, and chortling with glee that the wicked captain’s machinations had yielded nothing but a hold full of smelly fish!

Fortunately no lives were lost, and all eight crew men on the ill-fated ship had been rescued by Moony Swain and Jacob Proctor whose ships arrived first at the site. A rumor circulated that a confrontation between Swain and Proctor as to whose vessel arrived first forced the skipper of the
Marguerite Gray
to proclaim them co-wrecking masters in charge of the salvage. It was an honor that proved quite dubious in the end.

The
Marguerite Gray
herself had suffered little damage. A rend in her hull had been patched in two days, and she set sail early this morning on a strong westerly wind. Unfortunately the buyers of her cargo in Gulfport, Mississippi, who anticipated a shipment of New England cod would be disappointed. The entire load had to be sacrificed to tug the old scow off the reef and haul her into Key West.

The story of the
Marguerite Gray
was made even more humorous to Nora’s students when Felix Obalu added the enticing tidbit that the wreck was caused by some pigeon head who had rigged a mule line to lure the ship. “It took a lot of work to haul those ol’ mules up and down the shore,” Felix said, “just to make it look like it was another ship sailing well away from the reefs. I guess the sorry plan worked, though.” Felix hooted with laughter. “The
Marguerite Gray
crashed on the reef just like the pigeon head wanted. Too bad her cargo was tossed into the sea.”

“All right, children,” Nora said. “That’s quite enough talk of the
Marguerite Gray
. I’m sure you all know the important thing is that no lives were lost.”

“Yeah,” Felix said. “The only creatures that drowned were already dead!”

It was an amusing end to the harrowing tale, Nora had to admit, though she truly had had quite enough of remembering that night. She found nothing else about the incident the least bit humorous. She’d hardly eaten a bite and had slept very little because the details of her meeting with Jacob Proctor kept repeating in her mind.

The intuitive Fanny knew something had gone dreadfully wrong, and used every opportunity to get Nora to talk. But Nora hadn’t said a word, even to her. Sidonia suspected something was wrong, too, and tried to fix whatever it was by shoving food under Nora’s nose.

“You must eat something, Eleanor, or you’ll make yourself ill,” she’d said countless times. “Please, for Mama?”

Making up excuses and hiding from the females in her family was only part of the reason it had been such a tedious weekend.

Nora’s father wouldn’t stop talking about “the one that got away.” Of course he had no way of knowing that Nora’s wounded heart suffered another pang of anguish every time she heard Jacob’s name.

The judge had questioned the suspect for two hours on Saturday and had come home cranky and disgruntled because he still had no solid evidence to put the captain away. One Key West citizen had seen Jacob leaving the beach about the time the mule line was spotted. When Thurston questioned Jacob about this, Proctor had merely thrust his hands out before him as if daring the judge to fix a pair of shackles to his wrists and snapped back, “So arrest me, Your Honor, if suddenly it’s a crime to take a walk on this island at night!”

“He’s belligerent and uncooperative,” Thurston had railed to the women in his family when he related the tale. “And guilty as hell! The man’s become a festering thorn in my hide. He’s slippery as an eel and crooked as the devil’s staff.”

Nora recalled her father’s assessment of Jacob as she walked among the benches in her classroom and examined her students’ work. I don’t know about the crooked part, Father, she thought to herself, but he is definitely slippery and thorny. She glanced out the window toward Jacob’s warehouse.
So why is it so impossible for either of us to put this man out of our minds for so much as a day?

Jacob Proctor stood by the front entrance of his warehouse with a clipboard in his hand. As each crate, barrel or canvas sack was carried outside to his ship, he checked the contents off on a list. Then he waved to Willy Turpin who stood near the gangway of the
Dover Cloud
to tell him the item was accounted for.