Page 109 of In the Pursuit of Haven
Hannah had made the right choice marrying him… though she’d have no use for all those fine frills in her dowry by taking on the life of a Quaker.
Poor thing.
Her husband died in 1748 and was buried in an unmarked grave… as was Quaker custom, because all were equal in death as well as in life, though Hannah’s gravestone matching this ring was pretty fantastic.
And where to go from here?
“Let’s follow the deed to their farm,” Jessie suggested. “I imagine the ‘blue glass’ would go to whoever inherited all their worldly goods.”
“Sure, sure.” I took a deep breath, trying to contain the thrill of the chase now that it depended on my online stalker skills. The deed to this Quaker family’s property moved from his son Zerubbabel (yeah, the guywasa saint to name one of his kids after his reprobate father-in-law) then to Zerub’s son, Stephen, then to Caleb, followed by another Hannah in 1754 and from there, the land was sold to a stranger.
I pulled up this last inheritor’s name on a genealogy app and looked through her children’s data, and then her grandchildren’s. I wasn’t sure who could’ve gotten the Shepherd’s Relic, except I saw one of the death dates. The one belonging to Marcus Woolsten was 1808.
“1808,” I said. Thatwas the same date etched into Cormorant Rock. “Do you think?”
“Do I think what?” Jessie asked.
I was already pulling up the man’s death details. Marcus Woolsten went down as a passenger on a ship bound from the Caribbean to Boston.
His last effects were recorded in the harbormaster’s log as follows: one brass pocket watch, six Spanish dollars, and a blue glass family heirloom…
No! I fell back against Jessie’s chest, almost colliding with his jaw. How ironic that Hunter and his crew had spent months searching for a Shepherd’s Relic that had been lost in the wreckage of a ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
“It sank!” I turned the screen over so Jessie could read the terrible news for himself.
He took a deep breath, his fingers pressing into his phone. “That’s…” He lifted the screen over his mouth, muttering things into his palm I was pretty sure I wasn’t meant to hear.
I was desperate to make this all better. “How about we just—we just, uh… we’ll get all the other Relics and see if we can’t work around this… like a missing puzzle piece. You can usually see the shape of what’s missing in the end.”
And then what?He took deep breaths, like his brain couldn’t register my vain efforts to cheer him up. NowIwas depressed at the futility of what I was saying.
Sighing, I inched away from him… well, I tried to. He held onto me desperately, like he was still trying to figure out what was happening. “Roxy?”
I met his dark eyes. “Yeah?”
“You’re right. We’ve got this. You’re the smartest woman I know. We’ll find a way.”
My mouth dropped open.
Before I could think about how sweet that was to say at a time like this, Jessie’s phone vibrated again. He put his sister’s call on speakerphone and cleared his throat. “Hey, what did you find?”
“Um… Ruth is a beast!” Abby shrilled. “She scored a job at the Hawthorne museum. Can you believe it? She’s the worst!”
The tour guide business had become a family enterprise, it seemed. “What did that pink-haired harpy do?” I asked.
Jessie’s hands tightened on me and I felt a breath of a laugh against my neck.
“She hounded my every step when I went through those seven gables,” Abby said. “You think her father’s bad? He’s nothing to her. I had to duck her the entire time!” Abby huffed out angrily. “Oh, and by the way, they have a secret staircase, not that I found anything there, but if I were a Shepherd, I’d definitely stuff the Relic behind the bricks. Anyway, I’ll keep looking into it,” she continued. “Did you find anything at Children’s?”
I huffed out angrily.
Jessie squeezed me. “Not exactly.”
“I feel your pain.” Abby let out a groan. “Are you going to Tinker’s next?”
I glanced up at the sky. That brewing storm looked nasty.
“We’re going,” Jessie said stubbornly. After hitting our dead end here, we needed a win.
