“Yeah, me either. I’d rather my name was B. Eergut.”
It took me a beat to figure it out. “That’s gross,” I said.
Diesel grinned and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, his touch giving me a rush that went from my ear to my doodah.
“Want me to try again?” Diesel asked.
“No. I want you to finish telling me about the treasure.”
“Ammon managed to get hold of the map that Palgrave Bellows fashioned. It was discovered during a ship restoration project. Ammon tucked the map under his arm, and he still has it.”
“So now Ammon has the diary and the map.”
“Yep. Problem is, the directions to the treasure are in code, and the code can’t be read without the special coin. Ammon hired a team of cryptographers, but they weren’t able to crack the code without it. So all attention turned to finding the coin.”
“How long have they been looking for the coin?”
“Years. Ammon’s had a private investigator on the case.”
“Looking for the coin?”
“Yes, but eventually looking for Peg Leg. After interviewing a lot of people, the PI discovered that the coin and the diary were originally found together, but because McCoy and Peg Leg didn’t completely trust each other, McCoy took the diary and Peg Leg took the coin. Shortly after that, Peg Leg disappeared and was never seen again. It was thought he was shot over a keg of rum, but it never went beyond rumor. Last week the Pirate Museum hung the prisoner cage, and it caught the attention of the detective. The cadaver had been dressed in pirate rags, but the peg leg had clearly been made in more modern times.”
“I didn’t notice,” I said. “It just looked like a wooden peg leg to me. And you know all this how?”
“The organization that employs me has had a man watching Ammon’s detective.”
Diesel is a sort of cop. At least that’s what he tells me. He works for a loosely organized hierarchy of People with Special Abilities. His primary job was to keep his peers on the straight and narrow. When he was assigned the task of finding the seven SALIGIA Stones, the cop part of his job became secondary.
“I was being brought back to Salem to get you into the museum when you took matters into your own hands,” Diesel said.
“It wasn’t intentional. I was just on a tour with Glo’s new boyfriend. How does Wulf know about this?”
“Wulf has his own underground and his own agenda. Hard to say how Wulf knows things sometimes…he just does.”
“So the idea now is that the coin is somehow attached to the pirate skeleton?”
“Maybe. Or maybe the history of the skeleton will lead to the coin.”
“When I touched the cage I felt a vibration just before it broke loose and fell to the floor. It wasn’t especially strong, and I thought it was probably just my imagination.”
“Honey, your imagination isn’t that good.”
“I happen to have an excellent imagination. Sometimes I imagine my life is normal.”
“Yeah, that’s a stretch,” Diesel said. “So maybe the coin was in the cage.”
“If it was, it had to be hidden somewhere. I didn’t see a coin.”
“Who had access to him?”
“The only one who actually touched the skeleton while I was there was Nergal. I’m sure the EMTs had their hands on him, but I left before they zipped him up and carted him off.”
Diesel unlocked my car and opened the driver’s side door for me. “I have stuff to do,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
—
My house looks like it was sprinkled out with a lot of other houses from the big house saltshaker sometime in the 1700s. The neighborhood is a mix of small houses built by cod fishermen, shoemakers, carpenters, and mariners, and a few larger houses that were owned by merchants and ship captains. Most of the houses still have a wooden sculpture of a golden cod above their doorways, a symbol of good luck. My golden cod was getting a little worn around the fins, and I’d had “paint your fish” in my mental to-do list for a while.
I was later getting home than usual, and Cat was waiting at the door. I snatched my mail from the mailbox, said hello to Cat, and went straight to the kitchen. I poured some kitty crunchies into Cat’s bowl, adding a slice of cantaloupe as apology for his delayed dinner. I browsed through my mail while Cat ate.
Bills, junk mail, more junk mail…Uh-oh. Letter from a publisher. A while back I’d had an idea for a cookbook, Hot Guys Cooking for Hungry Women. I packaged up my ideas and recipes, and my manuscript was making the rounds of New York agents and publishers. Unfortunately, no one wanted it, and I’d come to dread opening the letters that were inevitably rejections.
“What do you think, Cat?” I asked. “Should I open it? Do you have a good feeling about this one?”
Cat was sinking his fangs into the cantaloupe and didn’t appear to care a lot about the letter.
“Okay,” I said to Cat. “Wish me luck.”