As it is Written
Chapter
Twenty-Six
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| Chapter Twenty-Six |
Bright piercing sunlight bit
through his sand encrusted eyelids. Painful warmth, heated from the afternoon
sun, flooded his cheek smashed into the beach sands. Jack groaned and tried
once more to open his eyes, the glare reflecting from the tidal flats blaring
white-hot into his head. He tried to move from his face down, sprawled position
but found it nearly impossible to do so. His limbs were heavy with fatigue. His
numb brain refused to control any movement of his body.
At least for the time being.
It seemed he’d lain there for
hours, his breathing labored, the lids of his eyes occasionally lifting. Once a
sand crab sidled by close to his nose. He couldn’t muster up enough energy to
even flick it away. He simply watched it through veiled eyes. His lips were
parched and dry, the afternoon sun and the salt mist saw to that. He tried to
rake his tongue over them, but it didn’t help. The inside of his mouth was as
dry as his lips. They hurt. He hurt. And he couldn’t for the life of him
remember why or how he’d gotten himself into this predicament.
The rum. Ah, ‘twas it, wasn’t it?
The rum. Then it would take
only a few hours more to escape it. Thank the Lord, it would be over soon. Just
a few hours more, after the sun went down and the cool breezes blew in off the
ocean, then he could gather up enough strength to drag himself back to his
cabin. Back to his lonely, empty cabin. So he could forget the nightmare
induced by his drunken stupor.
The bloody nightmare that tore
his heart out.
He opened his eyes again, more
easily this time, and the cool darkness bit back at him. Must have slept. Arching
one eyebrow and raising one lid as far as he could, he stared out at the
distant dusk settling over the buoyant sea.
Black. Black as the back of his
eyelids. No stars. No moon.
I’ve got to get home.
Pushing his knees under him, he
attempted to rise from the cold sand. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally, he
pushed far enough to roll his entire body over onto his back. Moaning a low
guttural curse, Jack realized that the switch in positions really wasn’t much
help, just a change of scenery, and a relief to his tender stomach. Now he wasn’t
staring at the horizon, he was staring full-scale at the heavens, too weak and
dehydrated, he suspected, to try to move anymore.
At his back, he felt the smooth
hard planes of something firm and solid, unlike the soft shifting sands. Odd,
he thought as a twinkling of remembrance nagged at him from somewhere deep in
his skull.
Grimacing, he rolled up on one
elbow and shifted his weight to lay a hand in front of him. Puzzled, he then
stroked his fingertips along the cool surface of a flat, gray stone.
****
For three days Claire stared at
the little house with the picket fence in the village, living out of her car,
praying every time she had to go to the bathroom that Rick wouldn’t leave. She’d
changed her disguise so many times she felt she’d lost her own identity. The
first day she’d parked down the street, watching his comings and goings. The
second day she’d parked a street over and used her papa’s twenty-year-old
binoculars to spy on him. She’d seen him come and go at least once a day. Chuck
DeHart joined him the day after he’d arrived and then the goons who had tried
to help Rick kidnap her the first time. She wasn’t positive but also thought
she recognized the scruffy man from the Blackbeard’s Treasure shop she’d
visited months earlier.
Something smelly was definitely
in the air.
And it wasn’t fish.
The third day she dressed in
the brunette wig again, donned the sunglasses, her Nikes and a long, flowing
jumper under which she’d stuffed a small pillow, and walked up and down the
street two or three times, trying to steal a glimpse of Rick in the house.
Lingering a little too long at
one pass, Claire jumped when the door flew open and Chuck burst out. “Yeah,” he
called back over his shoulder. “Ten o’clock. I’ll be here.” A broad grin
stretched across his face as he tripped down the steps and landed square in
front of Claire.
It had been quite a few years,
but she would have been able to pick him out of a crowd easily enough. The Texas Troubadour. Would he recognize
her, even under her disguise?
“Excuse me,” Claire brushed
past.
“Hey!” he shouted after her,
his hand brushing her elbow. “You been walking up and down the street all
afternoon, lady. What are you doing?”
She cleared her throat and
glanced away. “I—I, uh.” Then she clutched her stomach and pitched her voice
higher, trying to disguise it. “I’m…I’m having labor pains. My doctor told me
to walk. Make the baby come quicker.”
Chuck stared at her. Her eyes
widened behind the sunglasses.
He knows.
Then she clutched her abdomen
again and moaned, loudly. “I think it’s working. I better go.” She backed up
several steps.
He simply nodded at her, his
eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Yeah. You better go. Maybe you better get to the
hospital.”
She raised a hand for a small
wave and smiled. “Yes.” Then she turned her back to him and lumbered off. He was a jerk in college, and
apparently, he was still a jerk today.
She breathed a long sigh of relief that he hadn’t recognized her.
She listened as he started his
jeep and revved up the engine. She walked on, stifling the urge to look back,
but his jeep rushed past as he slanted a lingering glance her way.
She rounded the corner to the
next street and sat in her car. Ten o’clock. Chuck said he’d be back at ten o’clock.
She thought for a minute, chewing on her lip. She’d be back at ten o’clock
also, and she’d be there with bells on.
****
At nine-thirty, Claire parked
her car two streets over and walked slowly toward the alley behind the small
house. The one-lane alley split the properties on either side, so she cut
through a side yard full of trees two houses down, slipped up the alley to a
garage behind the house, and settled in until the time drew a little closer to
ten. At five of ten, all the lights in the house went off.
She edged closer through a
grove of pines. A car pulled up in front. Three men walked toward the porch. Claire
stole a little closer and stood perfectly still behind a tree. One man was
dressed like any other young man in the area, the other two looked surprisingly
like they just stepped off Blackbeard’s ship—baggy pants, scarves across their
foreheads, earrings, dirty, scruffy. Rick’s buddies. Claire shivered.
They approached the front door.
One of the pirates rapped fiercely on it. Claire stifled a gasp when the door
opened and Rick stepped through the threshold, dressed exactly as she’d seen
him on Blackbeard’s ship.
One of the men mumbled
something to Rick, and he let him pass. She couldn’t quite make out the words
and crept forward just a little. The second man mumbled, and Claire dropped
lower to sneak closer to the porch and hid behind some shrubbery. The third, now
within earshot, spoke a little louder. He uttered the words. She heard them
clearly.
The rumble of an engine sprang
forth in the night. Panning the street, she watched Chuck’s jeep pull in behind
the other car. She sank deeper into a bush and listened as the heels of Chuck’s
boots dug into the wooden porch. She chuckled as he uttered the password and
entered the house.
The door slapped shut behind
him.
Claire let the night’s silence
envelop her for a few minutes. Then she rose.
Stepping away from the porch,
she sleuthed around the house to the left, brushing twigs away from her coat, and
then crept along its side and stepped onto the sidewalk. Her cowboy boots
clunked along the concrete, breaking the night’s hush. As she continued, she
jerked her cowboy hat low over her eyes, re-tucked her hair up under the short
gray wig, checked the contents of the duster’s pockets, dabbed at the fake
mustache under her nose. Thank God Vicki and Jeremiah had come through and
packed all these disguises.
Stopping at the edge of the
porch, she took a deep, cleansing breath and exhaled.
Bowing her legs out, she
stomped up the steps and directly across the porch to the door. She pounded on
it with a force only a man could muster. She hoped.
Cautiously, the door swung
open.
Claire peered into the dark
room. Rick stepped into the doorframe.
He stood there, not saying a
word. She assumed the rest was up to her.
“Death to Spotswood,” she
muttered low and deep and then waited. Rick stared at her for a moment, the
skin around his eyes crinkling as he narrowed them at her. Her gaze connected
with his and held for a hell of a long time, and then she panicked.
Eyes.
His eyes, she would know them
anywhere.
Would he know hers the same?
All her disguises could fly to
the wind if he recognized her eyes. She squinted.
Sucking in a quick breath, she
tried to stop her knees from knocking together. She’d heard of shaking in her
boots before, but this was ridiculous. Then just as she was about to turn and
run, he stepped back, giving her access to the room.
****
His feet were heavy as leaden
blocks, but he wouldn’t stop. He was near his cabin, almost home. And when he
was there, he would sink against the feather pillows Hannah had brought with
her from the mainland and forget. Forget the drunken nights, the nightmares,
the voices, the pain that streaked through his head. Forget the images that
floated behind his eyelids, just out of his reach, unable to grasp them and
pull them full into view. He simply wanted to forget.
But he needed to remember. Remember
what? A dull pain ached at the base of his skull. It was happening, he knew. Again,
it was happening. He treaded on. The glaze over his eyes grew thick, blurring
his vision, faltering his step.
Get to the cabin, Jack. Get
to the cabin where you can bury your face in Hannah’s clothing, still
fresh with her scent. Get back and sleep on the linens she slept on. Get
back and erase the pain. Try to forget. Try to remember.
****
Lit with only the faint yellow
glow of a candle, placed in the center of a large oak table, the darkened room
forebode ominousness. Claire stepped over the threshold and listened carefully
to the whispers of the men, hushing their words as she stepped closer. Silence
hung heavy. Each of the men sat around the table, their gazes pinned on her. All
present except for Rick.
She stepped up to the table
without a word. One of the pirate wannabes stepped up to her and thrust a Bible
before her.
“Place your hands on the Bible,”
his voice boomed.
She did so without lifting her
gaze to the man’s face.
“Under the penalty of death do
you solemnly swear that you will not reveal a solitary thing that happens this
night for at least forty-five years to come?”
Claire nodded, her cowboy hat
slipping, and said in a deep voice, “I swear.” Her hand quickly went to her
hat.
He motioned for her to sit.
Within an instant, she heard a
howl eerie enough to raise prickles on the back of her neck. Rick entered the
room with a flourish—dressed in his Blackbeard garb—long flowing beard, straw
hat, bandolier crossed over his chest, and smoke curling around his head.
And then she saw it.
The thing she was after.
The thing that would break the
curse.
In the palm of his hands, Rick
held a shallow silver cup that reflected the yellow light from the candle. Two
dips, Blackbeard’s eye sockets, cut into one side at the top. She closed her
own eyes and tipped the hat further down on her forehead. A shiver traveled up
her spine.
The cup seemed to float on Rick’s
palms as he lifted it above the table. He held it there, above his head, for
what seemed an eternity until he shouted, “Death to Spotswood!”
Claire jumped.
The others repeated the chant.
Then Rick lowered the cup to
his lips, drank from it, and passed it on to the next man. From hand to hand,
the cup moved around the table. Each time the chant repeated, “Death to
Spotswood! Death to Spotswood!”
With each pass, someone took a
long draught of the scarlet-tinted liquid, and then handed the grail off to
another, until at last it fell into Claire’s hands.
Almost reverently, she took the
cup. Hungry eyes gazed at the flicker of the candle reflected in the chalice’s
silver-plating. Licking her parched lips, she rose. As if savoring each
sensation of the feel and every second of the possession of the cup in her
hands, she lifted it high into the air, mimicking Rick.
As if holding the final revenge
for Hannah’s death in her hands, she quivered.
“Death to Spotswood!” she
shouted with a resonance unlike the others. “Death to Spotswood and to hell
with the likes you!”
With that, she threw the
contents of the cup into the candle flame. Immediately exploding on contact
with the alcohol, the flames licked high into the room’s darkness, illuminating
each surprised face, and then quickly jumping from the table to the clothing of
two men behind it and the drapes behind. Shouts and screams confused the
darkened room. In the midst of the disorder, with the men taken so off guard,
she slipped the cup in one of the deep pockets of her duster as she hurried for
the door.
Ignoring the screams of the
two, the other three men lunged for her. Claire quickly flipped the top off the
large can of pepper-gas spray in her pocket, lifted it, and emptied its
contents into the faces of the men charging after her, Rick’s included. She
didn’t wait around to witness the consequences of her actions.
As she ran down the sidewalk,
the only thing she heard was the hiss of the fire and an agonized scream.
One word wrenched from Rick’s
throat soared after her in the night…
“Claire!”
###
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