Carried Away (The Swept Away Saga, Book Two) Page 3

  All in all, they were nice people. The man helped care for the animals while the wife assisted in making dinner. They were quite put off by the ship in the bay, though.

  Oh, the ship! I forgot to tell you about the ship. I didn’t think it important until I saw how nervous it made them. I also suspect that the men who anchored here are pirates, and I did not wish to write too much about them, should they indeed turn out to be of a vicious nature.

  It was some weeks ago when the galleon arrived out of nowhere. I confess, up until I saw it in the water, I did not know the bay was deep enough for a craft so large to come in so far.

  Now that I think of it, I wonder if the couple were also of a pirate’s mind? Why else would they have been so put off and so secretive about any information they had on it? All they would say was that it would have been better if we’d never set eyes on the thing.

  To continue with my narrative—the ship came into harbor and dropped anchor. A long boat appeared almost immediately, full to the brim of men who looked as if they’d just experienced the worst time of their lives. We fed them, even though we had very little, and inquired as to what brought them so far north.

  (Some of them were French, I am certain. They didn’t ask after any settlements by their people, though.)

  It became clear that they wanted to leave their ship anchored for some time, however, they wouldn’t say how long. It was all very secretive. They paid a handsome sum and we entered it into the logbook.

  I do wish to mention here that the ship had no name and the men refused to tell us what they called her. They also refused to give any of their own names, which was alarming to say the least. We didn’t dare refuse them at that point, not when we were so obviously working with evil men. However, I would listen when they weren’t paying attention, and believe I managed to hear their captain’s name.

  Thomas Randall. He was a very fierce man, though not as menacing in appearance. His hair was long, black, greasy, and the only thing that really made him look like a man who should be left alone when it hung in his face. Still, I remember the ring he wore on his finger; gold, with a cross etched into it. In the middle of the cross was a black dot. It seemed out of place on his person, but strangely his at the same time.

  I digress. The O’Rourke’s only stayed the one night, thanking us warmly for the accommodation. We tried to warn them of the natives and traveling on alone as they wanted, but they wouldn’t listen. One can only hope that they will find their friend and make it home alive.

  “The rest is just stuff about the natives. I guess it was exciting for him.” Joe shrugged, closing the book and frowning. “There’s nothing that ties the ship we’ve found to this one, other than the fact that we don’t have a name for it.”

  “Have you ever heard of this Thomas Randall, Mark?” Hal stared at me expectantly, like I would suddenly spout out the man’s birthday, home, and every other fact about him.

  “I have no idea who he is,” I confessed, rubbing a hand over my face. “But I might be able to find some information on him. If we can tie him to something we salvage from the ship, then we’ll have it identified for sure. Otherwise it will all be guesswork.”

  “Where do you plan on going to look? Surely not anywhere around here.” Joe was still frowning. I knew how he felt; here was the evidence we needed, but it was maddeningly out of reach.

  “Probably the New York City Public Library. They have a really extensive naval history section there.” Except that New York City was much closer to Maine and the Treasure Pit than I wanted to be. Scott had been trying to reach me for months. If he found out I was nearby . . .

  “I say take as much time as you need,” Hal said, agreeing with me. “Turn over every rock until you find him.”

  “We’ll get started on the diving here, so we have something to match him to when you get back.” Joe stood then, shaking his head. “We’ll solve it. I know we will.”

  Disappointed about missing the dive, I nodded, knowing I needed to go find something out. This was just like Oak Isle; every answered question spouted fifty more unanswered ones. Thinking over the entry, I hedged, coming across something I didn’t understand.

  “Why would he mention the ring?” I was talking mostly to myself, but the other two men stopped to listen, watching me expectantly. “I mean, it’s not important. Why would a missionary feel he needed to describe the ring the man was wearing?”

  “Because it’s important?” Hal guessed. “Maybe you can find him with that information.”

  “Ask Stephens,” Joe said suddenly, laughing slightly.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s got the same symbol on his ring. I should have recognized the description earlier, but I was too involved in trying to find something about the boat. I bet he can tell you what it is. He treats that thing like it’s his baby. Remember that time he took it off and almost lost it in the sea, Hal?”

  “Oh, yeah! He acted like he was going to die without it. Big baby.” He chuckled with Joe at the memory. “I suppose it’s the same symbol, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll ask him before I leave.” Smiling tightly, I exited the room. Something about Stephens made me uncomfortable, but I still hadn’t been able to put my finger on it. What were the odds he would magically have the same kind of ring as our pirate captain? It all sounded very fishy to me. “I’m going to turn in for the night, guys,” I said, glancing back from the doorway.

  Leaving the two of them behind, I made my way through the Mission and into the tents outside, lost in my own thoughts about the journal entry as I trudged through the sand. It was all very strange.

  An Irishman? The Spanish were the only ones in this area at that time. What was he doing here, and with his wife nonetheless? Why hadn’t more questions been asked about the mysterious ship and her crew? What did the symbol on the ring mean? Why was it so important that it was recorded in a journal? Did the priest just really like the trinket, or did it hold a higher meaning?

  “Find anything interesting?”

  Jumping, I turned and forced a smile for Stephens. He was sitting at a desk, examining an old vase with what appeared to be gold inlay. The cautious feeling I’d always had around him grew with force.

  “No Name still has no name, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to look at the books before Ashley let you at them. I was simply curious as to what they said.” He smiled nicely, folding his hands on the tabletop, the vase put aside for the moment. I could clearly see the symbol on his ring, matching exactly the description of the one Thomas Randall had been wearing. All of my intuition was saying that something was wrong.

  “Cool ring,” I said nonchalantly, nodding in his general direction. “What’s the symbol mean?”

  “Oh, this? It’s nothing. I picked it up at a pawnshop in Florida. Thought it was cool.”

  He’s lying, the voice in the back of my mind said. You can see it in his eyes.

  “You should have it checked out.” My mouth was going dry for some reason, my heart hammering in my chest. I knew I shouldn’t say anything else, but he would most certainly look at the books and find out later. “It matches a ring the journal described. It could be worth a lot of money.”

  “I see.” His eyes seemed to darken some at my comment, a slight shield appearing to fall over them.

  In an instant, I suddenly felt like I was being pulled into a trap. I needed to escape, and now.

  “Anyway,” I continued, trying to act as normal as possible as I faked a yawn, stretching dramatically. “I’m going to hit the hay. I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

  “Sleep well,” he replied cordially, going back to his examination of the vase.

  Turning on my heel, I left the encampment as quickly as possible, all the while cursing myself for being so jumpy. What was it about this project that had me so keyed up?

  Once I was in the rental car I’d driven over that morning, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed the n
umber to the airport.

  “Yeah, I need a flight to New York City, as soon as possible. Return date?” Glancing out the window, I saw Stephens again, his form moving slowly toward the parking lot, the glow of his own phone lighting up his face as he raised it to his ear.

  “No return date,” I told the woman on the other line. “I don’t know if I’ll be coming back.”

  You are crazy. Running off like a kid in trouble! And over what? Some ring? Stephens literally did nothing to warrant you flying across the country right this second.

  “Yeah. I’ll call if I find anything. Talk to you later, Joe.” Sighing, I hung up the phone and ran a hand through my hair. I’d told him I couldn’t sleep, so I’d flown to the city instead. He’d said to take all the time I needed.

  I didn’t think he believed me.

  All around me, the metropolis was bursting with life and action, people hurrying in the various directions they wanted to go. As I stood outside the library, taking it all in, I felt another wave of sadness. Had Sam ever seen a place like this?

  She was haunting me. Why, I didn’t know, but the alternative was that I was insane. What was she trying to tell me from the other side? Why did I feel so awful about my latest job?

  These questions, and many more, had prompted me to call Scott myself and tell him I was coming to New York. He’d wanted to meet up, as I’d suspected, and would be here the day after tomorrow.

  Guilt flooded through me as I thought of how I’d dodged him for the better part of a year. The older, balding man had been one of my best friends as well, working as hard as everyone else to solve the Treasure Pit, and feeling as traumatized by the deaths that occurred there.

  “Don’t think about it now,” I muttered to myself, startling a young woman as she passed by. “Sorry!” I waved apologetically and turned to go inside the building, face burning.

  I was losing it.

  There was a lot to go through in the library. Starting online, I spent the better part of the day reading through old logs, both computerized and not, until my eyes felt like they were going to roll out of my head from exhaustion. After an early dinner break, I hit the books, turning through volumes that hadn’t been touched in decades, it seemed.

  And there was nothing. No mention of a pirate named Thomas Randall, no gallant exhibitions by a ship with no name and a mystery crew, and no galleon that sailed into the Gulf of Mexico and never returned.

  “Sir, we’re closing now.” One of the workers kindly tapped me on the shoulder and smiled as she spoke, an armful of novels balanced in her grasp. “Did you find what you were looking for today?”

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t.” My breath was short and frustrated from a day of work with nothing to show for it. Now I would have to remember every volume I’d been through, so I didn’t repeat the process tomorrow.

  “Can you tell me what you were researching? I can see if we have anything that can help.”

  “I’m searching for a man named Thomas Randall who was alive in sixteen ninety-seven, or right around there. He was supposedly a pirate, which is what I’m trying to verify.” Smiling tightly, I glanced at the woman again, taking in her curly black hair and dark skin. Her grin was as genuine as any I’d seen of late and I instantly felt calmed for some reason.

  “Will you be coming back tomorrow?” She set the stack in her arms on the table and pulled a pad of sticky notes out of her pocket, grabbing the red pen that was tucked behind her ear at the same time.

  “Yes.”

  She wrote down everything I said, nodding her head as she did so, a contemplative expression covering her features. “I’ll see what I can find. It might be nothing, but we have a few books that we rotate in and out of the collection. I’ll do a search and leave anything I find right here for you in the morning. Sound good?”

  “That sounds wonderful! Thank you so much for your help, really.” For the first time in weeks, I felt genuine relief flood through me at the thought of someone helping out. All of my crazy imaginings and thinking about the past had really wound me up.

  “Not a problem. What was your name?”

  “Mark,” I replied, watching as she wrote it down.

  “Okay, Mark. I will hopefully have something here for you in the morning.” Picking her stack up again, she smiled once more and left, leaving me slightly less keyed up than I’d been moments before.

  That night, I dreamed of Sam again, floating in the ocean, but she didn’t speak to me. Instead, she remained lifeless, the bottom of a large ship passing through the water above her. It was a galleon, huge and menacing. As its shadow overtook us, the cannons started firing into the water, barely missing me. Fear encapsulated me, my muscles screaming for relief as I continually tried to flee the attack. Covered in sweat, I finally woke, feeling as if my life had truly been on the line.

  With tired eyes and aching bones, I made my way back to the library, halfheartedly hoping that something would have turned up in one of the books the librarian had mentioned.

  Thomas Randall was starting to feel like a figment of my imagination. It didn’t help that the missionary could have recorded the wrong name, either. What if it was something completely different, and the reason I’d found nothing was because no pirate by that title had existed in that time?

  As I walked through the front doors, I sighed, adjusting the strap of the backpack on my shoulder. The bag was filled with the few notes I’d taken yesterday, as well as some information Joe had emailed me about the ship. The table I’d sat at before still had some of the books I’d gone through earlier still sitting in their stack. Next to them, though, was a single volume with a sticky note on top.

  “There were a few men by that name in here, some not in the right period, though,” I read out loud, my heart instantly speeding to the same pace as a galloping horse. Pulling the memo off, I examined the volume. It looked like a copy of a logbook. Flipping through the pages, I could see that it was full of ship manifests, listing the names of all the crews and passengers that had sailed from one particular port in Spain. Glancing back at the message, I went to the first page number listed.

  Thomas Randall, aged forty-five, surgeon. However, the entry for this ship was too old, more than fifty years before the man described in the journal back at Texas.

  There were six entries total, two of which I thought could be the man I wanted. One had been employed on a fishing boat, the other on a merchant ship called Adelina. Both were young—in their late twenties— and both had been riggers. The year of enlistment was sixteen ninety-two and ninety-four, which meant that it could be either of them.

  Stumped, I sat down and tried to think of how I would pick the right one. I could research them both, but that would waste more time than I had. There was no telling what Scott wanted or how long I would be tied up with him tomorrow. No, I needed to pick one and hope it was our man.

  Pursing my lips, I looked over the two manifests again, hoping that something would stand out to me and—

  As my eyes landed on another name among the Adelina’s crew, I felt an electric shock shoot through me.

  Tristan O’Rourke, aged twenty-three, quartermaster.

  It was as if I could hear Joe’s voice again, detailing the Irishman who had come to the Mission, the one who had been put off by the ship in the harbor. His name was O’Rourke.

  “Got him!” Laughing, I slammed the book closed, leaning back in the chair and clapping a hand to the top of my head.

  “Shhh!”

  The woman who hushed me glared furiously, but I couldn’t even care at that moment. I’d found our pirate! Even better, I’d found another person who was tied into history with him. If I couldn’t find anything about Randall, I’d hopefully be able to learn more about O’Rourke. For all I knew, the ship lying on the bottom of the ocean could be the Adelina herself.

  At that thought, I left the table and claimed another computer, doing a quick search for the ship. It took some digging, but I finally found her mentione
d offhandedly in another log book. She had sailed from a port—yes, one known to have been used by many pirates—and been burned in battle before sinking.

  “Where did she sink? Where did she sink?” It felt like I was flying through the documents catalogued, but there was no more information to find. It seemed that the only reason she had been listed was because the harbormaster had expected her back soon.

  Another wave of intuition hit me and I returned to the Caribbean log, checking to see who the captain of the vessel had been.

  Tristan O’Rourke.

  The grin that was plastered across my face only grew. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened. O’Rourke had staged a mutiny and taken over the merchant ship, turning her bad and becoming the captain himself. But when did Randall take charge?

  I was missing something. The log still had the Irishman as the leader when she burned and sank, yet the missionaries had been certain that Randall was at the head of the men. Was there another ship I had lost in the writing?

  For several hours, I went back and forth between everything available to me, hoping to catch the moment where Randall had stepped into the position of authority, but, like I’d struggled with before, there was almost no mention of him. As far as the records were concerned, he was nobody. O’Rourke was the star of the show.

  Stretching my mind to max capacity, I tried to think of other ways the two men could be connected. “Childhood friends?” I muttered, bringing up an ancestry page and typing in O’Rourke’s information.

  Very little came up; it appeared that no one else was really looking for more details on the man, other than what was already known about his pirating. There was one extra thing recorded that I hadn’t seen yet, though—a type of marriage certificate. It looked to be signed by a priest and was very official for so early, which suggested that the man had something even more important than just a boat to his name.

  Could Randall have been related to the wife? Who was she? She had been included in the journal; she didn’t like the ship. Would a relative have been upset to see her kin’s belongings?