Page 80 of In the Pursuit of Haven
“Thanks Bette Ann,” Jessie grumbled.
“I don’t want to hear it, Jessie. Haven might not be around, but I’ve got my eye on you. You’d better be treating my little girl right.”
He straightened, almost hitting his head against the ceiling. “You’ve got my word on that.”
Bette Ann grunted out her disbelief, muttering as she heaved a heavy pot of fake flowers over us. That definitely ensured we wouldn’t be getting back up there.
Her dog barked out his farewell.
I grabbed at the cylinder. My fingers ran into Jessie’s as I tried to get a better look at it. “See? It really is a map.” I ran the flashlight over the symbols. “That moon shape was at the junction,” I said. “Let’s follow that until we find the next symbol and go from there.”
Jessie nodded and released the clue to me, tugging the flashlight from my grip to lead the way. “Why is Bette Ann keeping an eye on me?”
He caught that, did he? “She saw you with Divine and assumed…”Well, we’d all assumed.I fell silent.
I watched his shoulders tighten ahead of me. Divine might always be a sore spot with us, but at least I knew that the two were never a thing… not that the woman didn’t have an eye on my man. I’d never forget the way she’d pawed at him that night at the pub.
“It’s you,” he said, breaking the silence. “Always you. I’dneverlook at another woman that way. Just remember that, okay?”
I swallowed as relief washed over me. He’d just erased all doubts from my mind about how he felt. “Thank you,” I whispered. I couldn’t get out anything else.
When we reached the junction, I’d had enough time to recover. I pointed to the symbol at the top of the middle tunnel. It was a moon. “There!”
This one would take us under the street. We followed that while I clicked the cylinder over, so that it revealed another symbol. A star this time.
Once we reached a fork, we found the star too. This was taking us farther away from Derby Wharf, down the streets closer to the neighborhoods in the waterfront district. Three notches against the wall had us turning again, and we traveled for a long stretch until I was sure we were past Turner Street where the House of Seven Gables stood. That was where Bette Ann had told us to exit the tunnels without getting seen.
The more the reality struck me of what we were doing, the increasingly eerie these tunnels became. These deserted underground pathways were made for smuggling. Where were they taking us?
Our footsteps echoed through the long cold corridors until we reached the last symbol, a triangle above a brick archway.
I took a deep breath, seconds before Jessie plunged beneath it to go inside the entrance. The staircase ahead wasn’t as well kept as Bette Ann’s. Planks were missing on steps bathed in pale moonlight. Cold air blew through the shafts of a grate overgrown with grass above us.
Jessie’s first step on the stair sent the weathered wood collapsing beneath him in a pile of debris and decayed leaves and soil. Good thing he was so tall. He’d have to reach the grate without the steps. Brushing his fingertips against the bars, he found a good hold and clenching his teeth, shoved.
The grate groaned. Clearly, no one had used this entrance to the smuggling tunnels for a while… possibly for decades.
He muttered his frustration under his breath and I noticed a corroded bar near our feet and dragged it out of the dirt. “Try that!”
Hopefully it wasn’t as heavy as the grate. Hauling it up, Jessie dug it into the side of the metal and I listened to the groans and complaints—many of them coming from Jessie—as the bars lifted. Something heavy shifted and toppled to the ground on the other side of it.
Without the obstruction, the grate shrieked open.
I covered the flashlight, flinching. We might not be as lucky as to get a Bette Ann this time. Jessie waited a moment before clasping both sides of the opening. “Wait here,” he whispered.
He dragged himself up and over the hole.
It was hard not to feel like we’d reverted to being kids again with all this sneaking around.
After a moment, I heard Jessie whispering down to me, “It’s clear. Give me your hands.”
This would take some doing. I wasn’t as tall as my man. Standing on my tiptoes, I stretched out my fingertips. Jessie grabbed me by the forearms and dragged me out like I weighed no more than Finn.
I barely caught my breath before he was holding me close. “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” he muttered.
Staring around me at what might pass as a scrapyard, I knew exactly where we were when I saw the ironwork art and antique collectibles displayed over the lawn. The house was a brown shingled two story-style colonial home with a brick base remodeled with a deck and extended porch. The Salem Ferry was just down the way from us, though like everything else in January, it had limited hours for the season and the wharf stretching out from us was eerily deserted.
Turning, I saw our happy Salem resident had rendered his collection of maritime souvenirs into a metal sculpture yard comprised of the most fantastic outdoor museum I’d ever seen in my life.
