Berried to the Hilt Read Online Free PDF Page B

envied. I was getting the hang of my own skiff, the Little Marian , which Eleazer had found for me not long after I moved to the island, but I would never handle her with Eli’s skill.
    “You’ll get it, lass,” he said when I told him how much I envied his boatmanship. “Just takes practice, that’s all.”
    I turned to watch the island as we pulled away. The gray-shingled inn nestled into the hillside, its mullioned windows gleaming in the sun. A few orange and gold chrysanthemums bloomed in the window boxes, not yet felled by the frost; behind the inn, tall pine trees stood on the gentle rise of the hill, as they had for hundreds of years.
    The inn receded as we moved farther out, and I turned my gaze to the lighthouse out on Cranberry Point. It had recently been renovated, and its fresh white paint was bright and clean against the weathered granite. A gust of wind blew over us, and I shivered, remembering the body that had been found in a hidden subterranean room during the renovation; the bones had moldered there undiscovered for over a hundred years. And now we were going out to see the remains of a ship that had lain hidden under the waves for centuries. How many more secrets did the island hold? I wondered. And how many ghosts?
    “Haven’t heard a word about the ghost ship in years,” Eleazer told me, speaking loudly to be heard over the thrum of the engine and the rush of the wind. The skin on my arms prickled at the coincidence.
    “I didn’t know there was one.”
    “Ghosts all over the place in this part of the world,” he went on. “Out at your inn, the old lighthouse … even the store.”
    “That’s one I haven’t heard about!”
    “Hasn’t done much since Nelda moved on.” Nelda was Charlene’s great aunt, and it was from her that Charlene had taken over the store several years ago. “I think Nelda just stacked the shelves wrong; cans of tuna kept falling down all over the place.”
    “I can’t believe Charlene never told me about it!” I said. I’d have to grill her on it when I got back. “She didn’t tell me about the ghost ship, either. This place sure has a lot of spooks!”
    “Most places that have been around a while do,” he said. “The story of the ghost ship’s been around for years and years. My granddaddy used to tell me it was the ghost of Davey Blue, looking for his lady love and his lost treasure.”
    “That’s the pirate who disappeared a couple of hundred years ago, right?”
    “One of New England’s first pirates,” he said. “Round about the 1630s, give or take a few years.”
    “Was he from Maine?”
    “Ayuh,” Eleazer said, steering the little skiff out of the path of a lobster boat. He waved at the sternman and waited until they had passed the boat to continue his story. “Davy started out an honest man—a fur trapper, earning a decent living. He didn’t go bad until a bunch of French pirates cleaned him out. Stole everything he had.”
    “What did he do then?”
    Eleazer grinned. “Why, he stole a boat and turned pirate himself.”
    I grinned back. “If you can’t beat ’em …”
    “Exactly,” Eleazer said. “Turned out he had a talent for it. They sent almost half a dozen ships after him over the years, and he slipped away from every one of them. Built up a fortune, before he disappeared.”
    “What happened?”
    “Some say he went back to England, and some say he died in a sword fight.” He patted the cutlass at his hip. “This cutlass used to belong to him—at least that’s what the story is.”
    “How did you come by it?”
    “I don’t know, but it’s been in the family as long as I can remember,” he said. “When I die, it’ll go to the museum. I’m hoping to ask the archaeologists to take a look at it, see if it really did belong to the old pirate. Legend has it that Cranberry Island was one of his favorite places—lots of folks think Smuggler’s Cove is where he hid his booty—so it may be my granddad was