“So, you can read, eh?”
“Tar and feathers and comeuppance.”
The burned stink of hot tar stung her nostrils.
“We’ll make it boil, so it covers good.” He let a glob fall onto the table and spread out before her.
One of the others stirred the tar until it fell smoothly back into the bucket. “Ready.”
Another one dropped an old feather pillow onto the table. “Let’s
do
her.”
“Did you tell your wife where you’d be tonight?” said Serenity. “Or do you wear that hood ’cause you’re too ugly to find a woman who’ll look at you?”
“I ain’t ugly,” said the one with the pillow.
Another one brought over the tar. “She won’t be so feisty after this.”
“Shut up,” snapped the man in black. Then he turned his hood at Serenity.
She tried to see his eye color and gauge his measurements. She would remember their gaits, their clothes, the shoes they were wearing. But she would never forget the voice of the one in black.
“There is one way you can avoid the tar, woman.”
“I’ll recant nothin’.”
“Tell us where to find the so-called book of history.”
And she grinned. “You’re a
Bigelow.”
For a moment, the black hood was motionless, soundless. But the nervous, chicken-head twitching of the others told her she was right.
“I’m anyone who’s heard about the book,” said the black hood.
“You’re a Bigelow.”
“The book of
comeuppance
, woman. Tell us where it is and escape the tar. Refuse and suffer like Widow Nabby.”
“Then
you
don’t have it?” She had wondered for decades if her brother had sold the log to the Bigelows. Now she knew. He had taken it with him, wherever he went.
The man in the hood stared at her for a moment. Then he took a spatula covered with tar and brought it toward her. “We’ll start with the hair first. Like Nabby.”
Serenity looked at the others. “This ain’t about Tories and Whigs. This is about Hilyards and Bigelows. Do this for politics, if you want, but don’t let this Bigelow bastard do it for what he wants from me.”
“Where is the book?” demanded the man in black.
“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw as the boiling tar burned a patch of her scalp.
“Where is it?”
“Get out, Solomon Bigelow. Or are you Benjamin? Which coward are you?”
“I’m a Tory, sunk like the Sons of Liberty to frightenin’ old crones.” He took more tar and poured it onto her head. It was so hot that it soaked through her hair and burned through her skin and set her brain on fire.
“Where is it?”
“Get out!” she screamed. “Get out.”
The man in black ordered one of the others to sprinkle feathers on Serenity’s head, and they fell like gentle snowfall on a burning bed of ash.
“Now strip her,” he commanded.
“No one stripped the widow Nabby,” said Serenity.
“Then the book? Where is it?”
“I don’t know. It disappeared. Sixty years ago.”
“Who would expect the truth from one who has lied so often on foolscap?” He tore the top of her dress away.
“We’re Tories, man, not
monsters,”
protested one of the others.
But the man in black tore off her shift. “There. Nothing but a hag.”
Serenity’s head felt as if it were covered with a burning hat. Her breasts shriveled in the cold air. But she would fight with every last fiber, because it was bred into her, in her backbone and her blood. She aimed a kick to his groin and nearly lifted him off his feet.
He struck her face and screamed, “Bitch!”
She kicked like a trapped deer, at everything in sight. She struck a shin, then another groin.
And the man in black grabbed the tar bucket from the fireplace hook. A tarring might go no further than a few cold daubs on the hair, for a little chiding. Or it could threaten a victim with burning and suffocation. The man in black may have planned on the first but was giving the second, dumping the tar over Serenity’s shoulders and breasts like a bath of fire.
Her flesh seared and blistered, and the smell of her own death burned into her head. But still she would not surrender anything, and if she screamed, it would be with the same voice of defiance she had brought to the beach on that night almost six decades before. “Damn you! Damn you all for bloody night-ridin’ cowards!”
“This is what happens to old crones who stand against good men of the Crown.” And he dumped more tar onto her back.
She screamed and damned them again.
Then the feathers flew around her head and up her nose, and she nearly passed out from pain and fury.
The man in black tore into the chest of drawers by the fireplace and the box of broadsides on the table.
“The book’s not here,” she said. “You’ll never find it.”
“Liar!”
Two of the others ran in a long painted pole with a gilded finial, the liberty pole from Barnstable, cut down again and brought to Billingsgate. They raised Serenity, kicking and cursing, though every move caused the cooling tar to pull on her flesh and lift more skin from her burned back.
They were losing their taste for this. They had started willingly enough, but the old woman’s pain seemed to be draining them of their hatred. If they rode her on the rail, they would do it simply because it was the final act of a miserable little dumb show that had been played out in every one of the thirteen colonies.
“Enough,” said one of them. “She’s had enough.”
“She’s the chief rabble-rouser on the Cape,” said another. “She’s the cause of all our troubles.”
“Rail her and run her,” cried the leader, “like they did to my aunt.”
“Bigelow!” screamed Serenity, finding the last reservoir of fury. “I damn you. I damn you Solomon Bigelow. I go to my grave with the knowledge of your comeuppance.”
“Take your own comeuppance!”
He pulled her whale oil lamps from the table and smashed them, one on the floor, the other against the wall. The flames bit hungrily into the dried old boards. “If comeuppance is here, it’ll soon be gone.”
Outside, young Sam woke face down in the cold sand. He heard his grandmother’s wail. Then he saw her riding out of her own cottage like some figure of myth, half human, half-feathered, borne aloft by a group of hooded retainers.
“I damn you all! I damn Loyalists and Tories and all… all… all!”
Flames began to jump in the house, and a hooded figure appeared in the doorway, screaming like a scavenging gull, “Comeuppance! Take the comeuppance you have threatened so long!”
Then a living fireball burst from the door—Lucinda the Tenth, her back in flames, streaking across the dune and disappearing into the sea….
The northwest wind that fed the flames drove the Tory boat back across the bay. By the time the other islanders reached the house, it was a tower of fire that lit the sky from Provincetown to Plymouth.
They found Sam first, and he led them to his grandmother. She lay face down in the rising tide that each day carried a little more sand away from Billingsgate Island. Nature changed the face of the world over centuries. Men and women had much less time. Serenity had used hers well.
And young Sam Hilyard resolved that someone would pay.
July 13
“She must have died near here,” said Geoff.
“Tarred her and feathered her and set fire to her cat.” In the bow seat, George applied zinc oxide to his nose. “This is going to be
fun.”
“Fun… yeah,” said Jimmy.
Geoff ran the boat right into the heat waves rising from the remains of Billingsgate Island. Twice a day, this sandbar rose from the sea, drawing clam diggers, scavengers, gulls that came to pick over the dogfish carcasses, and guys like George, with their metal detectors.
“C’mon,” Jimmy was sitting in one of the fighting chairs, stripped to the waist, ready for a fight. “This is our day to fish. Every boat on Wellfleet Harbor is up by the eight-can.”
“We’re fishing for history.” George jumped into ankle-deep sand and then took something that looked like a minesweeper off the bow.
“Playing treasure hunt on a ghost island won’t bring back Rake Hilyard,” said Jimmy.
“Maybe Serenity’s death holds the key to Rake’s,” answered Geoff.
“The key to Rake’s death was the one in his ignition. A ninety-year-old man shouldn’t have been on Suicide Six on a foggy night.”
“The cops claim he swerved to avoid hitting an animal.” Geoff put on his sunglasses and jumped down. “He wouldn’t have swerved to avoid hitting
me.”
Jimmy shook his head and snapped a pencil-popper onto his steel leader.
“She’s here,” said George. He had the look he got whenever he saw great art or a great menu in a restaurant window.
“You won’t find her with a metal detector, George.”
“Humor me, Geoff. The broadsides say she knew about a book of history. That’s why Rake wanted you to read them.”
It had been sixty years since Billingsgate had been above water at high tide. The sea had spread the island south and east into an enormous mutton-chop of a shoal, leaving piles of red-brick rubble scattered across the sand like the gravestones of a vanished settlement.
“They call this Cape Cod’s Atlantis.”
“Except this was no myth.” Geoff felt almost reverent, in spite of the ridiculous image that George cut in white ducks, Panama, and metal detector.
“Her spirit’s here.”
“We aren’t going to find it with that thing.”
“I once found a piece of eight washed in from the
Whydah
. Serenity might have buried the log in some kind of metal box sealed with wax. If she buried it four or five feet down, you’d find it right at the surface now.” George’s sweeper made a little beep. He dug with his toe and turned up a pop top.
Geoff stood in the center of the shoal and pivoted slowly to absorb the view that Serenity would have seen—the bluffs of Great Island, Wellfleet Harbor, the Eastham shoreline running south, the blue bay glimmering in the sun. The contours had not changed since she had been here. He could almost feel her.
And just as she had been stalked by Tories, it seemed they were being stalked by a big Chris-Craft anchored down at the point. One guy was fishing, another was looking north through a pair of binoculars. He could have been looking at anything, but since Rake’s death, Geoff had begun to suspect everything.
Now the sound of the big Chris-Craft engine came thrumming across the shoal, sending Geoff back to his boat and his binoculars.
“Looking for more connections?” Jimmy was casting into a few feet of water.
“Those guys in the Chris-Craft connected with us about ten minutes after we left Pamet. They’ve been around us ever since.”
“Jeez,” said Jimmy, “maybe they’re
following
us.”
“We know why
we’re
here. Why would anybody else be, when all the fish are hitting at the eight-can?” Geoff pushed his sunglasses up on his head and focused on the transom, but the high-sun shadow and the big wake rolling out made it impossible to read. “Did they catch anything?”
“The one with the rod just pulled in three blues on three casts.”
Geoff lowered the binoculars. “Only one guy fishes, and as soon as he starts to get some action, they leave?”
Jimmy shook his head, as though losing patience with all this. “So maybe they have to get to work.”
“Who worries about work when the blues are hitting?”
“So go after ’em.”
Geoff checked the depth of the water. “We won’t lift off for another ten minutes.”
George came up to the boat with the metal detector slung over his shoulder. “Maybe they thought we made ’em.”
“
Made
’em.” Jimmy laughed and cast his plug over a tide rip. “You sound like an amateur. You both do. Amateur troublemakers and intriguers. Stick to your own jobs.”
There should have been an argument over that, but the first bluefish of the summer hit Jimmy’s plug and tore off a hundred yards of line. And boys would be boys when the bluefish hit. Geoff grabbed the gaff. George grabbed another rod.
The fish burst from the water in a perfect arc of blue muscle. It seemed to hang in midair until it heard the shouts of excitement echoing across the flats. Then it shook itself violently, slammed into the water, and began to run.
There was a feeding frenzy coming. It had begun down near the tip of the shoal, where the mystery boat had been. Now it was working its way north. Thousands of hungry bluefish, churning up the water, chopping up the baitfish, biting at anything from Castmasters to slow swimmers to the foil gum wrappers that the man with the binoculars had left floating on the water.
ii.
“Hi, Janice. Phyllis Baxter here.” Janice scribbled the name on the notepad in front of her. Maybe if she saw the words, she could remember the face.
“How’re you, Jan?”
Someone should tell her she talked too loud on the phone. Of course, not many people were calling the offices of Bigelow Development these days, so
any
voice was welcome.
“I’m fine.” Janice sketched a round face, short hair, a big ear-to-ear smile, and said, “Glad to be back.”
“I always say the good ones can smell a turnaround. They get in when everyone else is getting out.”
Jewelry
. Janice drew a pair of orange earrings the size of honey-dipped doughnuts. “I’m in for better or worse.”
“Don’t worry, dearie. It can’t
get
any worse.” After Phyllis complimented someone, she reminded them she had been doing this for thirty years. She was no blue-haired dabbler augmenting her Social Security, no mommy showing houses when the kids were off at school—and by inference most of the other female brokers were. Phyllis knew what was
really
happening in the wild world of Cape Cod real estate.
And what was really happening this week: “A divorced mother of two—who wore sunglasses on a cloudy day, which may mean she’s a battered wife—was sent by a friend. She’s moving from New York to get away from her ex-husband, which
definitely
means she’s battered. She’s got a buck and a quarter to spend—”