Page 43 of In the Pursuit of Haven
Wasn’t Matthew’s death an accident? She’d written in Drake’s death date, which was almost two weeks after his brother’s. Clearly Haven hadn’t been able to get any more information out of Matthew’s brother before he’d perished in that fire. If she had, what would Drake have told her?
Haven had scrawled something below the article detailing the man’s death in the island’s fire.“No mention of how he died. No investigation?”
Say what? The way Haven wrote, she seemed to suspect more foul play than a curse in these brothers’ deaths. This was all starting to sound very sinister.“Oh, Haven, I really wish you were here to explain what was going on.”
I stopped skimming through the pinned clues when I got to Matthew’s photograph, seeing him kissing Haven in it. Wow, even if I’d missed her love letters, there was all the evidence I needed to know what was going on. Next to that was a drawing of the famous locket given to the family by Old Pirate Crabb himself. According to this, it was about the size of my palm, although she’d only drawn the front of the locket. An “S” curled around the pendant’s edges. She’d written“Nine.”And then circled five rubies on the pendant.“Are there four more on the back?”she’d asked.“Does that make the nine or does nine mean something else?”
Next, she’d scribbled:“Is this ‘S’ symbolic of a snake?”
Haven had then pinned the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake next to Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” pamphlet. I was familiar with that story. The snake had been chopped up into pieces to signify the divided colonies that must unify against Britain, despite thehugereligious and cultural differences that kept them apart.
Haven could be right that the loopy “S” against Crabb’s locket was a snake. The symbolism had been alive and well a century-and-a-half earlier when the colonists first stepped onto New World soil and got their boots caught in the fangs of a new species, called rattlesnakes.
Since that time, “Don’t Tread on Me” became a popular phrase to use against the British forces trying to throw their weight around and getting their heels snapped off.
Throw in the Native American lore that a chopped up rattlesnake could fuse back together overnight if left to its own devices, and the figurehead of the Revolution was born.
Could Crabb have been a type of early American revolutionary? His lifespan was just after the first overthrow of the British monarchy.
There was just so much information on Haven’s mystery board to take in, and yet, despite everything I saw, I could see that Haven was no closer to finding this treasure than I was, but was she really looking for it?
Crazy thought, I knew, but this whole setup made it seem like following the clues to Crabb’s legendary pirate loot was only a necessary evil for rooting out her beloved’s murderer.
This was personal.
I picked up one of her notebooks, seeing that she was trying to figure out the identity of the witch who’d shared a prison cell with the pirate, Crabb. She’d written:“Daughter of a gentleman of high standing who was against the witch trials. She was likely a Puritan, unmarried, in her late twenties to early thirties, possibly faced persecution after the trials.”
Suddenly aware that the whole house was drowned in silence—the kind that sounded suspicious—I glanced behind me, half expecting one of those thugs from the pub to be watching me from the shadows.
My heart raced; my every sense on overdrive. I’d been so lost in these discoveries that I’d completely forgotten time and space or my worries consuming me earlier, so that now I was struggling to reorient myself, like I’d awakened with a start after a deep sleep.
“Hello?” I whispered. The echo of my voice intruding the darkness almost scared me more than the stillness, as I remembered exactly why I shouldn’t bring attention to myself.
Jessie! My fears over keeping him safe crashed through me. He couldn’t find Haven’s secret room, not until I figured out what I was dealing with.
I snatched up the notebook and took it with me down the ladder into Haven’s cozy room below. Finn let out a relieved bark when he saw me.
“Shh.” I put my finger to my lips.
Maybe Jessie was asleep; maybe he wasn’t, but no way was I giving him more ammunition to kill himself with. Haven was wrong. He wasnotthe next to die!
Carefully guiding the ladder back up the hole, I let it spring back into place to cover the attic’s entrance. Then I replaced the shelf, the bar rack, the clothes, and finally the box of books that had fallen to the ground.
By the time I was through, I was sweating and hopped up on adrenaline. I plopped onto Haven’s bed. According to her old-school alarm clock from the ’80s, it was one o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t pull another all-nighter, but reading through some of Haven’s notes wouldn’t kill me.
After skimming through the first half of her journal, I could see that her favorite suspect was none other than the accused witch, Ann Dolliver.
The sweet woman’s story had always broken my heart.
Her father was a Puritan minister. That fit some of Crabb’s account about the captive witch… at least according to the stories passed on to Jessie. He was a gentleman of high standing.
I’d always figured that poor Ann had been freed from prison because of her connections, but then again, that might’ve been the reason she’d been arrested in the first place. Her father, Reverend Higginson, likely angered the magistrates by refusing to be caught up in the fervor of the witch hunt—he actually had the nerve to express concern for the four-year-old Dorothy Goody still wasting away in prison after her mother’s hanging.
He should’ve known the witch hunters would come after him next. No one was safe. Another Puritan minister had been hung for witchcraft, too, and Higginson’s daughter, Ann had also been an easy target. She’d returned to live with her father after her good-for-nothing husband left her with three children to care for on her own.
Goodness! What would’ve happened to my own mother had she lived in those times?
Yes, Ann had admitted to keeping poppets in the walls, but everyone had done that for luck. They were a superstitious lot, and they’d imprisoned her for their same failings.
