CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Pirate Toogood’s Treasure

I slept late Sunday morning, but I still woke up tired. My parents had driven to the Brooklyn flea market at dawn without me. So much for my offer to do more.

I helped Cousin Hepzibah get dressed and was making my dad’s cheesy-chive eggs, still half dreaming about that kiss, when someone knocked on the kitchen door, the one that led to the back porch. It was Cole Farley. For some reason, I was really embarrassed to see him.

“Cole!” I choked. “What’s up?”

“Can I come in? I have to talk to you,” he said. “It’s about that pirate.”

“Cole, dear, it’s nice to see you,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

I went back to the stove. “Want some eggs?”

“Sure—that smells good. Listen, you’re never going to believe this! That pirate, Phineas Toogood? He’s my ancestor!”

“Come here, child,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Closer.” He bent down, and she took his chin in her hand, tilting his head this way and that. “Yes, I can see it,” she said at last.

I could too. The cheekbones, the eyes—Cole’s were blue, the dream man’s gray, but the shape was the same. The same long black lashes. The same shining hair, if Cole’s had been longer and pulled back into a ponytail.

Had it all been just a dream after all? Had I dreamed about kissing Cole?

Why would I dream that?

I gave the egg pan an angry shake. My ring clinked on the handle. No, not just a dream—dreams don’t put real rings on your fingers.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I was asking my grandfather about pirates. His family’s been here for generations, so I thought if he’d heard any stories, that would give us a place to start looking for the treasure. And he told me one of our ancestors was a pirate! Not my great-great-great-whatever-grandfather, but one of his brothers. Grandpa tells great stories about our family, but I never heard that one before.”

“How do you know it was Phineas, though?” I spooned the eggs onto three plates.

“That’s the part you’re not going to believe,” Cole said. “Look!” He lifted his right hand. He was wearing a silver ring.

I raised my eyebrows.

He took the ring off and handed it to me. It felt cold, just like mine. “Read the inscription,” he said.

I squinted inside the ring. In scrolling letters it said H.T.T. to P.B.T. Your Heart is my Home.

“What?! This is incredible! Look!” I handed the ring to Cousin Hepzibah so she could read it.

“Where did you get this?” I asked Cole.

“That’s—well, that’s the crazy part. I had this dream last night . . .” Was he blushing? “About this lady. She looked just like Spooky—like Sukie, I mean—only she was in her twenties, maybe, and wearing these old-fashioned clothes. Really old-fashioned, not just grandma pants.”

I glanced down at my legs. He wasn’t being mean about my new old pants, was he? I thought Cousin Hepzibah had done a great job making them look normal.

Cole went on. “And she told me to wear my ring, and then she . . . well, then I woke up. And I went straight to the fireside cupboard in the old part of the house—our house is really old, like yours, only of course it’s way, way smaller than yours—and I found this ring sitting in a bowl. It had to have been there for ages—the bowl was covered in dust. It was like I knew exactly what I was looking for, even though I didn’t. I know that sounds crazy. You don’t have to believe me.”

Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “I believe you,” I told Cole. “I mean, it’s hard to believe, but I know you’re telling the truth.” I handed him my own ring. “See? Something similar happened to me.”

• • •

Cole took the news that we were both descended from ghosts way more calmly than I expected. “I always knew you were special, Spooky,” he said. “This just proves it. And of course I always knew I was special myself.” He gave that grin of his.

No, the person who freaked out was Kitty—enough to make her appear for the first time since our fight. She hovered beside me, glaring daggers at Cole.

Kitty still saw him as the obnoxious boy who’d teased me in school. She didn’t seem to care that he’d invited me to join his lab group, helped me make friends with Lola, and stuck by me at the risk of alienating his friends. She didn’t care that our zillion-greats-aunt had been married to Cole’s zillion-greats-uncle, or even that Cousin Hepzibah liked him. Cole Farley was not my friend, Kitty insisted. If I didn’t send him away, someone was going to get hurt.

I ducked into the pantry and hissed at Kitty. “Stop it, Kitty! I told you, you need to back off! I’m not a baby anymore, I can take care of myself, and you’re wrong about Cole!”

Kitty glared again and vanished with a snap, knocking over a plate.

Her rant made me realize how much I had changed my mind about Cole over the past few weeks. Sure, he could sometimes sound obnoxious and full of himself. But everything he actually did was pretty decent.

He even washed the cheesy-chive egg plates.

After that, the two of us went up to the library to hunt some more for treasure maps.

“Wow! So this is where you get all those weird old books,” said Cole, pulling down a copy of The Water-Witch by James Fenimore Cooper and flipping through it. “Have you read this one?”

“No,” I said. “But can you help me look through these papers?”

“In a minute. Where are the books you’ve been reading?”

I pointed to the shelf of Laetitia Flint novels. He pulled one down and began leafing through it.

“Come on, Cole! The map’s not going to be in a book.”

“It could be. There’s a map in this one. Look.”

It was Flint’s A Lady’s Travels through the Apennines, with Additional Views of the Tuscan Hills. He was pointing to a map of Italy. “That’s not a pirate map,” I objected. “It’s not even of America. And why would a pirate’s treasure map get printed in a book?”

“Maybe it’s not printed—maybe somebody stuck it in between the pages. I always hide things in books,” he said. “Nobody ever looks there.”

“Maybe.” I sighed. “This is feeling kind of pointless anyway. I already looked through most of the papers, and I didn’t find anything. I doubt it’s even here at all. Wouldn’t your family have it, not mine? Maybe in the old part of your house, where you found Phinny’s ring? He died after Windy did, and her family hated him. He could have sent the map back to his own family, couldn’t he? If there even is a map.”

But Cole wasn’t listening. “Look at this, Spooky!” he said. “This book—it’s about them!”

“Them who?”

“Phinny and Windy! Our ancestors!”

“Let me see that!” It was Flint’s Last Works: Being a Collection of Unpublished Stories, Poems, and Meditations by Miss Laetitia Flint, Along with Her Last Novel, Pirate Toogood’s Treasure, Left Unfinished at Her Death.

“Look at that last part, Pirate Toogood’s Treasure,” he said. “It’s about them!”

“Are you serious? That’s incredible! Where? Show me!”

He flipped to it and handed me the book. The novel began in Flint’s distinctive overwrought style. “A fierce wind tore at the trim bonnet and tidy skirts of Miss Hepzibah Thorne,” I read, “as she leaned precariously against the railing of the lookout atop the Thorne Mansion, a structure termed by our quaint New England ancestors so poetically—and here, so ominously!—a Widow’s Walk. She shaded her eyes and peered anxiously at the horizon, seeking in vain the sails of her betrothed: honest Phineas Toogood.”

Cole and I stared at each other.

“What are they doing in a novel?” said Cole. “I could understand if it was a history book or something, but this is supposed to be fiction!”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “But I think I know someone who does.”

• • •

I rang the little silver bell that Andre had given me. Almost immediately the library phone—the old candlestick style that gangsters use in Prohibition movies—let out a startling trill. I held the cone-shaped earpiece to my ear and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Hello?”

“Sukie? Is that you?” Andre’s vowels boomed and his consonants buzzed, but I could understand his words clearly enough.

“Yes, it’s me. Wow, you called me back fast!”

“Yes, I’m using the John Murray phone. It’s from a ghost story where the dead guy doesn’t need a standard telephone connection to make calls.”

“Oh, I see. So you’re in the repository. Are you with Elizabeth?”

“No, I’m home in Harlem. I borrowed the Murray phone in case you rang. What’s up? How’ve you been?”

Where to begin? “You know the author Laetitia Flint?”

“Sure,” Andre said. “She wrote the story that house you found for us is from, remember?”

“Right. Does the repository have any more of her things?”

“Uh-huh, lots. She was one prolific lady.”

“Anything from her last novel, the one she didn’t finish?”

“That’s the one with the pirates, right? I’m pretty sure we’ve got the pirate’s compass. Maybe other stuff too—I can check. Why? You didn’t find the house, did you? If you did, Libbet’s going to freak!”

“It’s not just the house. It’s me! I think I’m descended from the characters!”

Andre whistled. “That is crazy! Why do you think so?”

“Because I live in the house! The Thorne Mansion!” I told him Cousin Hepzibah’s story about Windy and Phinny and how Cole found them in the Flint book. “You believe me, right? I swear, Cousin Hepzibah isn’t confusing the family history with the story in the book. She’s pretty old, but her memory’s fine. And besides, I’ve seen their ghosts myself. And so has Cole!”

“Are you home? Stay there. We’re on our way.”

• • •

Andre and Elizabeth arrived almost before I had time to explain them to Cole—and definitely before he had time to accept the concept of a library full of haunted houses. “If the houses are from books, how do they get out of the books?” he wanted to know.

“I have no idea. Same way we did, maybe? Apparently we’re from a book too. I know, this sounds totally insane, but I swear, it’s true. You’ll see when you meet them.”

The doorbell sighed its melancholy chime.

“There they are now,” I said, hauling the window open and sticking my head out. “Hang on, I’m coming.”

Cousin Hepzibah was sitting by her usual window in the drawing room, tatting lace. “Wasn’t that the doorbell? Are you expecting guests?” she asked me.

“Yes, I’m about to go let them in. They want to talk to us about the house. I hope that’s okay.”

“Not more people trying to buy it!” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Do they want to tear it down too?”

“No, if anything they would want to preserve it. I think you’ll like them.”

“I’m sure I will, if you do. But I’m not selling the house.”

“That’s all right—they’re not here for that. They’re here to talk about our history and help us look for the treasure.”

“All right,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “You can show them in. Just give me a hand, will you, child?” Cole helped her out of her chair while I went to open the door.

Griffin was standing on the doormat. He licked my hand politely and wagged what would have been his tail, if he’d had one.

“Hi, Sukie!” Elizabeth was carrying her walking stick. She looked elegant in riding boots and a tweed skirt and jacket, her hair curling around her face in tendrils as if she’d been riding through mist and wind—which, I reflected, she probably had.

“Is that a Hawthorne stick?” I asked. “That witches ride on?”

“Good guess! Yes, this one’s from the short story ‘Young Goodman Brown.’”

Andre stepped out of nowhere a second later. He had on the seven-league boots. He kneeled to untie his boots. He was nearly my height that way; if I’d leaned forward, we could have touched noses. He looked up, saw me looking at him, and smiled slowly. “Hi, Sukie,” he said.

“Come in and meet Cousin Hepzibah,” I said quickly.

• • •

Griffin bounded up to Cousin Hepzibah and put his head in her lap as if she were his own long-lost cousin.

“Well, hello there! What big velvet ears you have! Mind if I keep this one? I could use it to reupholster my footstool.”

Griffin licked his nose and snorted.

“This is Andre Merritt, and that’s Dr. Rew,” I said.

“How do you do?” Cousin Hepzibah let go of the ear she was petting and shook hands with each of them.

“Please, call me Elizabeth.”

Cole stood up straight and said, “I’m Cole Farley.”

“What’s up, Cole?” Andre answered. “Is it true? Are you two really Laetitia Flint characters?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “At least, we’re not in the part I read. Maybe we show up later. I didn’t have a chance to finish it yet.”

“Huh. Neither did Laetitia Flint,” said Andre.

“Actually, Andre, I know you’re joking, but you kind of have a point,” said Elizabeth. “Flint wrote about the nineteenth-century descendants of the Thornes and the Toogoods. She didn’t put any twenty-first-century kids in the book. But she never finished it—maybe if she’d kept going, she would have invented these two.”

“Me, maybe,” said Cole. “Nobody could invent Spooky.”

“Uh, thanks,” I said. “Cousin Hepzibah, did you know about this book—Laetitia Flint’s unfinished novel, the one with Windy and Phinny in it?”

“Of course, dear. How else would I know about their story?”

Cole and I looked at each other. I could see we were thinking the same thing: Was it all just a mistake, then? Maybe Windy and Phinny weren’t our ancestors—maybe they weren’t real people at all, just characters Cousin Hepzibah had read about in a book. That made way more sense than being descended from fictional characters.

But then I saw another thought seem to pass behind Cole’s eyes, just as it was hitting me too. The ghosts—the ghosts and the rings. I’d seen Phinny, and we’d both seen Windy. We had their rings on our fingers. That had really happened. It was proof.

Then another thought occurred to me. “How do we know Windy and Phinny were fictional?” I asked. “Maybe Laetitia Flint just wrote a story based on real people who happened to be our ancestors.”

“Yes, that’s the way I always assumed it happened,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“It’s a plausible theory,” said Elizabeth, “but I can tell you from my years and years of experience with fictional-material houses, we’re in one now. This is the real deal. I can smell it. Did Flint invent your ancestors out of whole cloth, or did she base her characters on your real ancestors? I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, and I bet the answer is both. Or somewhere in between.”

Andre walked over to a window and brushed the glass with his fingertips. “Check it out, Libbet!” he said excitedly. “This window glass is all wavy and green, like Flint describes in the book. It feels real. I bet they’re the original panes!”

Elizabeth took a copy of Flint’s Last Works from her shoulder bag and handed it to him. “Show me,” she said.

He thumbed through it and read, “‘Looking out the window, Obedience saw her sister as if through a wave of the deep, transfigured by the minute ripples and bubbles of the glass into something rich and strange.’”

“You’re right,” said Elizabeth. She went to the window and sniffed at the glass, peering through it.

Andre pointed out the window. “And those could be the ‘crows that foretell change,’ up there on the oak.”

As if they had heard him, the three birds squawked in unison and took off from the tree.

Elizabeth turned back from the window. “Your house is astonishing, Ms. Thorne,” she said. “I’ve never seen a better preserved example of literary-material architecture.”

Cousin Hepzibah shook her head. “Hardly well preserved. The entire roof needs replacing.”

“Even so, the spirit here is as strong as anything I’ve ever encountered. You’ve kept it safe. You have a treasure here.”

“Thank you. Would you like to see the rest of it?”

“Oh, yes! Could we?”

As Cousin Hepzibah led us all through the ground floor, Elizabeth and Andre kept stopping to exclaim over details they recognized from Flint’s unfinished novel. They identified old Obadiah’s easy chair, the little sitting room where Windy turned down Japhet’s proposal, and the desk where he opened the cask containing Phinny’s hand. Cousin Hepzibah’s music room turned bedroom—part of a nineteenth-century addition to the mansion—was where that generation’s Hepzibah Thorne played duets with Robert Toogood, a descendant of one of Phinny’s brothers. It had a plaster frieze of harps and flutes running around the walls just under the ceiling.

“Robert Toogood must have been my great-great-great-something-grandfather,” said Cole.

“I wish I could show you upstairs, but my arthritis is pretty bad today,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“I could carry you,” suggested Andre.

“No, let me,” said Cole quickly.

“Why don’t you do it together?” said Elizabeth.

“Well . . . all right. Thank you,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

Cole and Andre made a chair with their arms—Andre had to lean down a little awkwardly to keep it even.

“It’s been years since I’ve been up here,” said Cousin Hepzibah when they set her down in the attic. “The leaks look worse than I remembered.”

Elizabeth pointed out Beedie’s rag doll and a small piano—she called it a spinet—that might have been the one the sisters learned to play on.

Cole and Andre even carried Cousin Hepzibah up to my tower room. I wished I’d made my bed that morning, but at least the bed had curtains. I pulled them hastily shut.

“It’s so clean up here now,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Well done, Sukie.”

“This was Windy’s room, wasn’t it?” asked Elizabeth. “In the book, she has the tower room under the widow’s walk.”

“Yes. It’s still her room,” I said. “At least, this is where she tends to appear.”

Elizabeth’s eyes lit up. “Can you call her forth? I would love to meet her!”

I shook my head. “The only ghost I can call forth is my sister.”

Cole apparently found that harder to take than the idea that our ancestors were characters in books. “Your sister is a ghost? A real, live ghost? I mean a real, dead ghost? Your dead sister?”

I nodded.

“Wow, that explains a lot!” said Cole. “I want to see her. Call her, okay?”

“No, that’s not a good idea.”

“Why not? Come on, Spooky—a real ghost! I need to meet her!”

“No,” I said again. “We’re not really getting along right now, me and Kitty. She disapproves of the whole treasure hunt—she thinks it’s dangerous. And I’m afraid she’s not so crazy about you, Cole.”

“Me? Why would anybody not like me?”

Andre snorted. “Are you ready to go back downstairs, Ms. Thorne?” he asked. “Come on, Cole.”

“Thank you again for showing us your amazing house,” said Elizabeth, once we were all in the drawing room again.

“It’s a pleasure—I’m happy you appreciate it,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Most people just want to tear it down and build some monstrosity instead.”

“Oh, no! You’re not considering selling it, are you?”

“Not so far. But I don’t know how long we’ll be able to afford it. It needs a lot of very expensive repairs.”

“That’s why we have to find the treasure,” I said.

“If you ever do decide to sell, will you call us first?” said Elizabeth. “We would keep your house perfectly intact, ghosts and all.”

“How would that work?” asked Cousin Hepzibah.

“We have an annex, where we keep our literary-material structures. If you don’t mind a little trip to Manhattan, I can show you.”

“I’d like that, but I don’t travel so well these days,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Cars don’t really agree with me, and I’m far too old for broomsticks.”

“Next time, then,” said Andre. “We can bring transport. Meanwhile, though, the repository does have Pirate Toogood’s compass—I checked. Maybe it’ll help us find your treasure.”

“That repository sounds awesome! So does a pirate’s compass! Let’s go now!” said Cole.

He looked so eager, I had to laugh. “I’m ready whenever you are. You’ll like it, Cole,” I said. “It’s totally your kind of thing.”