Page 69 of In the Pursuit of Haven
I wordlessly pressed a sticky note on Children’s Island. In big block letters, I wrote, “Jessie stole a clue from Hunter.”
My fingers shook. This wasn’t some game. Hunter was dangerous, especially whoever was moving his strings because the fact was that both of Jessie’s uncles had died for this.
How did I get that through Jessie’s hard head?And mine?My hands weren’t shaking from fear—no, this was rage. Hunter and whoever was moving his strings had almost torn apart my marriage with their greed. A big part of me wanted to make them all pay.
I slapped a sticky note on Gerry Island, i.e. Maverick. I scrawled Cheever’s gravestone on the note with a question mark. “Whatever your uncle found on that gravestone brought him to Gerry.”
And someone had killed Drake there—the same one who’d given Jessie and Hunter this insider information. I was sure of it.
Was that Robert Corwin? Was he behind all of this? If so, Haven had been trying to hunt him down too.
“We’re pinning him to the wall with what we find. This is for you, Haven!”
“Which island belongs to Corwin?” I asked Jessie.
“Not sure.” He joined me at the table, though his eyes were uneasy on me, “but it should be easy to find out… with a good internet connection.”
Haven’s dial-up was going to slow us down, but we could always use our phones… and those were lying somewhere in the cemetery, so no. My fingers clenched to the pen. “Our phones are gone.”
Jessie let out a heavy breath. Dinosaur dial-up it was.
It was the final insult! Hunter had preyed on Abby’s foolishness and blackmailed my husband, pure and simple! He’d tried to drag me into this too and had no intention of letting us go! The second he got out of jail, I’d punch him in the face. Wedidhave to beat these jerks.
I wrote“Corwin’s family silver-handle cane”on the spiral notebook in bold black print. “Robert said he had information for me,” I said.
Jessie was already shaking his head. “I don’t trust him.”
That’s why we had to work around him. “I took a picture of the cane at the Witch Museum. Matthew said in a letter to Haven that it’s one of the Relics, but yeah, those pics are in my phone”In the cemetery somewhere.“Anyway, when I turned the handle over, it said, La Concepcion. That’s why Matthew knew to go to the Caribbean to get answers.”
It was how he’d found out all this information that Jessie was regurgitating back to me.
The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was of Robert’s hand in this. He’d just gotten out of prison for murder, and that was around the time some mysterious backer paid Hunter to lure Abby into the treasure hunting business.
“Are we okay?” Jessie asked me. His attention was not on the map anymore.
“Great!” I said tightly. I wrote“Crabb’s Heart Locket”on the spiral notebook below Corwin’s cane. “We need to figure out what island he lived on.”
“Ram,” Jessie said. “Our family has history on that island.”
“Perfect.” I crossed out“Crabb’s Heart Locket”from the notebook and put a sticky note on Ram, writing down“Locket”there instead. That was all I had. Out of the nine Relics, we knew of three, and we had leads on three more islands.
I smiled, unable to contain the dark satisfaction fueled by my rage. We were miles ahead from where we were this morning.
“Haven has info on Crabb’s friends at the time of his death,” I said. “Maybe we can find something about who lived on which island.”
Aware that Jessie was warily watching my every move like I’d suddenly transformed into a bird of prey, I swung away from him and sprinted upstairs to get Haven’s notebooks. Flipping through them as I came back down the stairs, I randomly came across Captain John Turner.
His home, of course, inspired a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne and was presently a museum near the wharf—the House of the Seven Gables!
Remembering that his family had bought out the tomb we’d so recently escaped and that I’d sat only inches from Susanna Ingersoll’s windowed casket, I paid special attention.
Such a small world now!
When I returned downstairs, Jessie was already setting up Haven’s old-school computer in the bare living room so we could have access to her dial-up internet. I added a pile of blankets and pillows to Haven’s notebooks, setting up a nest for us on the couch.
It had been more than a month since we’d spent a night together. Sure, this slumber party had a different purpose than mending our hearts; however the significance of tearing down our barriers in order to work together wasn’t lost on me.
I sat on the edge of the couch to get closer to Jessie at the computer. “Put ‘John Turner’ into the search engine, along with uh… ‘Misery Island,’ and see what comes up.”
