Windswept (43 page)

“Eleanor!” Her mother’s shriek pierced the air. “What in heaven’s name has gotten into you?” She wrapped long fingers around Nora’s shoulder. “Why are you defending that horrible man?”

Nora whirled on her mother. “Why, Mama? I’ll tell you why. Jacob protected me and cared for me. And loved me.”

Her mother’s eyes became round as teacups. A tiny squeak came from her pursed lips.

“Yes, Mama, loved me as I never dreamed any man would.”

“You’re irrational, Eleanor. The man’s done something to you. Island voodoo, I’d warrant. Come inside and I’ll get you a spot of sherry.” She took Nora’s arm and tried to coax her into the house, but Nora wouldn’t budge. “Theo loves you, Eleanor,” Sidonia argued. “Truly loves you, and I know before this horrible sea voyage, you had feelings for him. You’ll get them back. You’ll marry Theo…”

Nora jerked free and backed away from her mother. “Feelings for Theo? Mama, open your eyes! What do you see? A woman in love, yes, that’s true enough. But I love Jacob Proctor!” Ignoring her mother’s gasps, she continued. There was no stopping the flow of words now. “I love him with all my heart. Mama, Father…” She looked from one to the other. “Right now I may be carrying Jacob’s child… And all you can talk about is killing its father.”

“Oh, my God!” Theo appeared on the threshold and slumped against the door frame. “The woman I’m to marry may be carrying another man’s child? And that man is Jacob Proctor?” He dropped to a chair and placed a trembling hand on his forehead. “I know this wasn’t your doing, Nora, darling. I know you could never… But I must tell you, I find this difficult to forgive. I hope you fought him…”

Tears of fury nearly blinding her, Nora reached down and grabbed a handful of brilliant marigolds growing at the base of the porch. Raising the whole mess over her head, stems, roots and clods of moist, dark earth, she hurled her weapon at Theo. “See if you can forgive this, Theo!”

Sidonia teetered and let out a low wail. “And Mama,” Nora shouted at her. “If you’re going to faint, you’d better get to the kitchen for your own damn compress, because I’m leaving!”

That’s precisely what she did. She went in search of the one male in all of Key West who, she knew, would help her.

She tracked Felix to Jacob’s goat yard. He stood in the middle of a half dozen clambering billys, and tossed a handful of grain at their hooves. When the goats romped off to nibble something more rewarding than Felix’s shirt tail, he spotted Nora and ran over to the chicken wire fencing. “What’re you doin’ here?”

“Felix, we’ve got to talk.”

“Am I in trouble at school?”

“No, in fact I think I can guarantee you some extra credit points for answering a few questions, and the first one is, who in this town would most like to see Jacob swing from a hangman’s noose?”

Though the subject was grim, Felix beamed. “You can mark down those points, Miss Nora, ‘cause I got the answer. Moony Swain. He’s hated Cap’n J for years.”

“My opinion exactly,” she said. “Do you think it’s possible that Mr. Swain put those bank notes in Jacob’s warehouse?”

Felix thought, and then nodded once with conviction. “You saw those two go at it that day in the courtyard, Miss Nora. Moony has enough hatred for the captain to do most anything.”

At last, an ally
. “I want to find the rest of those bank notes, Felix. I believe there must be more, because if Moony were trying to frame Jacob, he wouldn’t have put all the notes in that hogshead. He’d have kept most of them for himself.” She reached for Felix’s hand. “I don’t want you to get in any trouble,” she said. “But I want to go inside Moony’s warehouse tonight, and I need someone to stay on the outside and be a lookout for me. Could you do that, Felix?”

His eyes shimmered with the spirit of adventure. She’d enticed Felix into the world he loved best. “I can do better than that, Miss Nora,” he announced. “I’ll go in with you.”

“No, no,” she said. “I don’t want you to go inside. It will be dark and could be dangerous.”

“I never noticed any danger before,” he answered with swaggering confidence. “Besides, I can show you where to look.”

“You’ve been in Mr. Swain’s warehouse?”

He leaned over the fence to be close to her ear. “Just between you and me, Miss Nora, it’s where I did most of my late night Christmas shoppin’ last year, and the selection wasn’t too bad either.”

Laughter threatened to destroy Nora’s stern exterior. “Shame on you, Felix,” she said with a grin in her voice. “That’s a terribly naughty thing to do, but it does make me reconsider about you going inside with me tonight. Will your mother be angry if you’re out after dark?”

“Leave that to me. My Mama won’t be angry…”

If she doesn’t know you’re gone
, Nora interpreted. She repressed a sharp twinge of guilt that she was probably encouraging Felix to sneak out of his house. “Oh, dear, Felix, what am I doing? You must promise me that if we get into trouble you will run as far and as fast as you can.”

“Oh, Miss Nora…” He tried to wave away her concerns.

“Promise me, Felix or the deal is off.”

“I promise, but nothin’s gonna happen.”

“All right. Meet me at midnight in back of Jacob’s warehouse. You can show me the way to Moony’s from there.”

Hours later, Nora found her partner in the deep shadows behind Proctor’s Warehouse and Salvage. “What do you mean we’re not going to Moony’s warehouse?” she asked him.

Felix grinned. “You want to find the bank notes, right?” She nodded. “Well, then, believe me. They aren’t in the warehouse.”

“Then where?”

He folded his little arms across his chest in the same infuriatingly confident way Jacob had. “If Moony’s got them, they’re on his ship.”

“How do you know that?”

His grin broadened. “Because before I came here, I happened to pass by Jimmy Teague’s. It seems all of Moony’s men are in there right now, and they’re corked as swillbellys.”

“So? That’s the usual place for Moony and his men, isn’t it?”

Felix nodded. “Especially when they’re sailing out in a couple of hours.”

“Sailing out?”

“Yep. I heard Moony himself tellin’ one of his boys that they were meetin’ up with Toliver somewhere up the coast.”

“Who’s Toliver?”

Felix gave a look that said for a teacher, she didn’t know much. “Don’t you listen, Miss Nora? He’s the captain of the
Marguerite Gray
. The one who lost a hold full of stinkin’ codfish. Only now I don’t think he cried much over that cargo, ‘cause now I think him and Moony salvaged something a lot more valuable than anybody thought.”

“The bank notes.”

Felix clapped his hands once. “You got it, Miss Nora. While Cap’n J was savin’ the sorry butts of the
Gray’
s crew, Moony and Toliver were savin’ the bank notes. They prob’ly planned to divide them up when the judge wasn’t breathin’ down their necks.”

“And after some of them had been used to plant evidence against Jacob,” Nora added.

“Yep. And I’d bet a week’s worth of milkin’ money that those notes are on Moony’s ship right now ready to be split with Toliver.”

“Do you know where Moony’s ship is?”

“You bet I do. We’ll have to stay close to Cap’n J’s warehouse when we go by the harbor. Nobody’d notice me runnin’ out on the dock, but you, Miss Nora…” he gave her a quick once over and clucked his tongue disapprovingly. “At least you wore a
brown
dress.”

They came around the back of Jacob’s warehouse to step into a strong wind sweeping off the gulf. It was powerful enough to pull strands of hair from Nora’s neat chignon and whip them around her face. Following in Felix’s shadow, she bundled layers of skirt in her fists to keep her one layer of petticoats from billowing out and catching someone’s eye.

They reached the harbor without being detected. Dozens of crafts with masts soaring to the sky creaked and moaned at their pilings, looking like ominous sentinels of the sea. Nora shivered at the bulky shadows of wooden hulls and the eerie groans emanating from them. The harbor looked and sounded almost sinister in the dark hours of night.

“C’mon, Miss Nora,” Felix called to her. “We don’t know how long those boys’ll be over at Jimmy’s.”

His voice jolted her to awareness and she ran after him. In the dim light from a quarter moon, they crept aboard a three- masted schooner with the name
Raven’s Wing
burned into its bow. “Where to now?” Nora asked, grabbing hold of the deck rail to steady herself in a sudden gust of wind.

“We should check the hold first,” Felix said. “I figure we’re lookin’ for a strong box or somethin’ that size. As long as Moony’s men are at Jimmy’s we don’t need to keep a lookout. If we don’t find the bank notes there, we’ll search the captain’s quarters.”

Nora was grateful Felix was there. She didn’t want this evidence-gathering mission to end up like her last one had. She certainly wouldn’t want to sail anywhere with Moony Swain, but she knew from experience that anything could happen. “All right, but listen, Felix. If there’s any trouble, you remember your promise. Get off this ship, even if I don’t.”

He started to protest and she grabbed his shoulders. “I mean it, Felix. Promise me you’ll run and get help. It won’t do for both of us to get caught.”

He thought a moment and gave in reluctantly. “Okay, but don’t worry. We won’t get caught.”

The hold of the
Raven’s Wing
was nearly empty. Moony’s voyage was obviously not intended to be a cargo transport, and Nora put more faith in the theory that Moony was sailing to a nearby key solely to meet with the captain of the
Marguerite Gray
and divide the bank notes
.

“There’s nothin’ here but ballast and supplies,” Felix said.

Nora was relieved to follow Felix out of the hold. Even though they were tied to the dock, the ship pitched and rolled at its moorings, making the simple act of standing a difficult chore. She was glad when they climbed the ladder to open air.

The door to Moony’s cabin was unlocked and opened with a reluctant squeak. A small oil lamp burned over a simple desk, its flame dim behind a grimy chimney, but its pitiful light would have to suffice. The quarters were sparsely equipped and not as comfortable as Jacob’s more lavish cabin on the
Dover Cloud
. Clothes and papers were strewn about everywhere.

“Just dig in, Miss Nora,” Felix said.

She lifted the first bundle of clothes from the bed and felt around on the mattress. “Those bank notes could be anywhere in this mess.”

A half hour later, Nora centered her search on a seaman’s chest in a corner of Moony’s cabin. She lifted a removable tray and rummaged through moldy contents underneath. The stench from an old slicker and rubber boots that hadn’t been scraped of fish scales in years nearly made her forget her search and slam the lid closed again. But she was glad she didn’t when she encountered the hard, sharp texture of metal hinges.

She muffled a squeal of delight and called Felix over. They lifted a wood and iron box from the chest and set it on the floor. Her excitement gave way to despair when they found a sturdy padlock on the front. Felix scoffed as if it were a minor inconvenience. He pulled a ten inch crow bar from his pants and ran his fingers down its smooth surface as though it were made of gold. “Never go anywhere without this,” he said. “It gets me into some of the better places in town.”

Nora stared at him. “We’re going to have to talk about this,” she warned, and then gently nudged him in the ribs. “But for now, go ahead and open this blasted thing!”

He wedged the crowbar into the padlock and then jumped up and down on the protruding end until the lock gave way. Inside the box were hundreds of bank notes of varying denominations. And each one originated from the Bank of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A childish grin of pure delight sparkled at Nora in the low lamp light. “Looks like we found what we came for,” Felix said.

“Looks like it,” she agreed.

“I say we take the whole box.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, Felix.” She stuffed a few notes into her pocket. “We’ll take these to the authorities and tell them the box is on board. For now let’s put it back in the chest.” She stood up and looked around the cabin. “At least this room doesn’t look any worse than it did when we came in,” she said. “So if we put the box away, Moony will never know we’ve been here.”

Once the box was secured, Felix opened the door of Moony’s cabin and peeked out. Suddenly his hand waved frantically behind his back as a gust of wind caught the door and blew it open. He spun away from the entrance and flattened his thin body against an interior wall. “Get down, Miss Nora!” he hissed in terror.

There was no time. A burst of wind pushed Nora back from the door. Her heart skipped a beat and then slammed into her ribs. In the wash of moonlight peeking through gathering gray clouds, she stared at the menacing grin of Moony Swain.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Moony stepped across the threshold, forcing Nora further into the room. A brown-stained grin lifted the grizzled ends of an unkempt moustache to mock her. Moony’s tongue flicked out to push a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “Well, what have we here?” he snickered. “Looks like Jacob Proctor’s hen if my eyes aren’t deceivin’ me.”