A Spirited Gift

“He’s right.” Gramps shrugged. “You have to start thinking about your reputation if you’re going to run for reelection. You can’t just run around doing what you please and expect the people of Duck to look the other way.”

I wasn’t sure where all of this was coming from. Yes, Gramps had been sheriff for many years. Yes, he was a stickler for the rules. But now he was just being inflexible and judgmental. I didn’t like his tone—especially since it pertained to me.

“I’m not any different now than I was two years ago when the people of Duck voted me into office,” I reminded him. “I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is Kevin. I like him, but the two of you should cool your heels on this relationship some. At least until after the election next year. You keeping clothes over there—showing up at all hours—this is a family community, Dae. People aren’t going to want their mayor to be carrying on this way.”

“Are you saying this because Sandi was having an affair?” I glared at him, all thought of eating leftover stew out of my mind. “Because it’s not the same thing. Kevin isn’t married. Neither am I. It’s not like he’s sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night with his clothes off.”

“There’s no reason to take that tone with me, young lady.” Gramps cleared his throat and pointed his spoon at me. “If you want to be mayor and serve your community, it takes some sacrifice. It took some sacrifice to be sheriff all those years. It didn’t just happen. My family had to be above reproach. The community looks to its leaders to be examples of the best.”

I got to my feet and in a hot moment, I shouted, “Like you wouldn’t let my mother be with the man she loved? Is that the kind of sacrifice you expect me to make?”

“What are you saying, Dae O’Donnell?” he demanded, equally angry. “You know your mother’s boyfriend— your father—threw her out into the street.”

“Do I? Or was that another lie made up for me, like my father being dead? I’ve heard different, Gramps. I’ve heard that you ran my father out of Mom’s life because he wasn’t good enough to be Sheriff Horace O’Donnell’s son-in-law.”

His shoulders heaved beneath the blue plaid shirt he wore. “I don’t know who told you that—was it Mad Dog? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about—always meddling in other people’s affairs.”

I didn’t tell him it wasn’t Mad Dog who talked to me about my mother. I had cooled down a little and realized what I’d said. I didn’t want Gramps to know about Danny yet. “I’m not hungry. I’ll be up in my room.”

“Dae?” He called after me. “Whatever I’ve done, I’ve done to protect you and your mother. Your father was a good-for-nothing, drunken layabout. He’d been in and out of jail since he was seventeen. There was no future for you and your mother with him.”

I turned back. “Did you make that decision for her? Did my father really kick her out? Did he even know she was pregnant?”

Gramps’s hand shook as he wiped his mouth on his napkin. “Yes—he threw her out and left town—after I paid him one thousand dollars and threatened to serve the outstanding warrants against him. You can’t judge me on that, sweetheart. I did what was best—what I had to do.”

“I know. Good night, Gramps,” I said before I left him in the kitchen.

Chapter 22

There was a secret stairway from my room to the widow’s walk on the roof of the house. I liked spending time up there, looking out over Duck and the sound. On clear days, I could see the Atlantic on the other side of the island.

The widow’s walk was a common feature on local houses, especially the older ones. Women had waited and watched for their men’s ships to come home. Sometimes, women threw themselves from the walk when they learned those ships were never coming back.

It was strange being out there in the dark with no lights dotting the town around me. I could see lights farther down the coast toward Kitty Hawk. The lighthouses along the island were all still working, their powerful beams warning ships at sea of the danger presented by the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

“You were hard on the old man.” Rafe leaned against the wrought-iron rail beside me. “I expected better from a soft heart like yours.”

“He lied to me. He told me my father was dead.”

“No wonder! I’d lie about that sniveling worm too. What man takes pity from a woman like your father done? No wonder the old man ran him off. I would’ve ran him through.”

“You don’t understand. Go away.”

“Maybe you don’t understand, girl. That boyo ye be helping will never bring you anything but grief. I know the type—hell, I was the type for many a year. The old man was protecting you and your ma. I’m siding with him in this.”

“I don’t remember asking you.”

“Well, if ye don’t want my advice, get to looking for the magistrate’s ancestor and let’s put an end to this.”

“I don’t have any idea how to find the magistrate’s ancestor. I don’t know anyone by that title. I think this is just a waste of time. You should go back where you came from. I don’t think I can help you.”

Rafe nodded at the duck weather vane, and it spun around in the dead quiet of the evening. “That’s enough of your bellyaching, my girl. You’re blood, and you’re making me regret whoever the wench was who begat your line. Think on it, and I’ll look around for some evidence of your own problem. I’m not going anywhere until you’ve cleared my name.”

He disappeared, and I sat down to look up at the stars in the dark sky. They were much brighter without lights around me.

I thought about Rafe being my ancestor—he’d looked at the same October sky I was looking at more than three hundred years ago. I wanted to help him, in a way, because of that link. I wished the circumstances were different. There was so much going on in my life. I needed time to think—alone—and without ghostly pirate interference.

It did occur to me as I tried to untangle everything about my mother and father and Sandi’s murder that I could possibly access information about the magistrate from the Duck Historical Museum Web site. I’d been a member forever but had hardly ever used the knowledge compiled by countless Duck residents down through the years.

I tried not to think about Rafe or about my family’s past. Or about Sandi. But the more I pushed these thoughts away, the more they came back to me. Like Rafe himself. Maybe there was an easy answer to proving his innocence and I wasn’t taking advantage of it. I knew I couldn’t easily unravel the tangled events that had happened between my mother and father thirty-six years ago. I knew I couldn’t do much to help find Sandi’s killer. But maybe I could get rid of my ghostly visitor.

I went downstairs to get on the computer, before remembering there was no power and no Internet. It looked like it was back to the old way for me.

I located an old book Gramps had given me when I was a teenager. It was titled Pirates of the Outer Banks. The pages were well worn from my leafing through it.

There was enough information about the infamous scourge of our area to tantalize but not really to answer questions. There was a grisly wood carving of Rafe hanging from a tree. There were illustrations of his ship and drawings of him. There were paragraphs describing the terrible things he’d done.

But there was no magistrate mentioned. The book referred only to “the law” or “the people,” never to any specific person or officeholder in charge of administering that law. Whoever the magistrate was, he’d had the power to have Rafe arrested and hanged. There weren’t a lot of people like that in those days. The Outer Banks was a lawless area—the governor of Virginia had to send troops to kill Blackbeard.

I wrote down a few names to check out the next day when I could go to the museum. I had to find Mark to see what he knew. His words at the museum about Rafe’s death were tantalizing, but I needed more