Page 84 of In the Pursuit of Haven
Life had torn everything he’d ever cared about from his fingers.
“Your aunt’s no better!” Peter snarled.
I startled, seeing Jessie’s dad had pushed his head from the cushions to glare up at me. Why was he blaming Haven for all this?
“All right,” Jessie tried to shush him. “Enough of that.”
His dad flushed, growing more obstinate under Jessie’s scolding. “You think I’m going to keep quiet a second more?” he raged. “She covered up what happened on that island!” Pete’s hand balled into a fist. “She wouldn’t stop going off onpoor Felicity… aw, boo hoo… said her cousin loved Robert. Meh! You call that love? Felicity knewexactlywhat Robert was. That jade ran off to Europe the second he landed in prison. It wasn’t love keeping any of them quiet.”
Jessie shot to his feet, his hand going to my shoulders. Apparently, if he couldn’t turn off his father’s fast-flowing faucet of words, he’d get me out of there so I couldn’t hear another thing. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Jessie said.
“Haven and I struck up a deal—I stay quiet if she stays away from me and mine.” Pete punched the side of the couch and lurched up like he was going to fight again. His feet were surprisingly steady as he came for me. “That didn’t go so well, now did it?”
I jumped back, even as I heard Abby let out a sharp cry.
Jessie shoved between us before Pete could reach me. “Dad!” he shouted out warningly.
Pete thrust his finger at me, jabbing it threateningly through the air. “Well, guess it’s my turn to break my promise, huh? Haven knew more than anybody, and you better believe nothing would get her to talk! Robert gets onlyonecount of murder and again, she won’t talk! Drake thought he had it all figured out after one conversation with her. One! He went to that reverend’s gravestone, and that was the last we saw of him before he left for Gerry to die. Robert went with him and she knows the rest! That fire can’t cover up our secrets.”
I stumbled back.
“Dad,” Abby called out. “Hey, you’ve said your piece, okay. We hear you, now let’s all get some rest.” She took a wary step forward, holding out her hands. “It’s been a long night. Right? How about we turn in, so we can talk more about this in the morning?”
When he was good and hung over and couldn’t remember a thing from the night before.I was sure the siblings were banking on that by the way they were exchanging glances.
Pete allowed Abby to drag him back to the couch. Poor Abby! She was good with him, but this definitely wasn’t good for her.
Jessie draped an arm around my shoulders, kissing the side of my head. The romantic mood from earlier had gone completely down the drain after his father’s startling revelations.
If Haven had been looking for Matthew’s murderer, then she wouldn’t cover up what had happened—not for Felicity or Robert or anybody—so why had she really struck up this deal with Pete?
I needed to go back to Cheever’s gravestone and figure out what Drake had found. “Tonight,” I whispered into Jessie’s ear. “We’re going to that cemetery tonight.”
He took a deep breath and nodded. Who needed sleep anyway?
Retreating back into the kitchen while Abby tried to make her father more comfortable against the couch, we pulled out the relic that we’d found in the metal sculpture yard.
It was a sheet of tin with holes punched into a pattern that made no sense to me. On one side, we had something that resembled a map—nothing looked like it was around Salem, however. Flipping the tin over, I found the snake. A letter “D” was embossed into the right hand corner. A hinge at the end of the sheet held another piece of tin, though those sides were jagged and rough.
I didn’t know what we had.
“We need to find the other relics,” I said, “before we’ll know what to do with it.”
Jessie picked up the thin piece, bending it slightly like he was checking to see if it was a tool of some sort. “We’ll take my boat to check The Old Burying Hill in Marblehead, but we’ll need to start finding a safe spot to put all these things. Maybe the lighthouse. Hunter’s going to keep coming after us.”
“If he was smart, he’d wait for you to get everything first and then steal them,” Abby said next to his elbow.
He swung around to her, his brow going up. She’d followed us around the island into the kitchen. Smirking slightly, she set our cellphones on the counter.
My spirits lifted at our sudden luck. “You found them?”
Abby smiled. “Just sitting there next to the gravestones. The Old Burying Point Cemetery on Charter Street is pretty deserted this time of year… I mean, if you don’t count the workers trying to repair the damage against the retaining wall.”
Jessie reached gingerly for his phone, almost like he was afraid it would sting him, but when he touched the sleek metal, his lips firmed. “You got these at the cemetery?”
His sister nodded. “Uh huh.”
“You know what?” He looked over at me. “I need to make a call and then we’ll go.”
