Berried to the Hilt Read Online Free Page A

rooms.”
    “I knew they’d find out about this,” Carl said, radiating anger.
    Molly laid a hand on his arm. “Calm down, Carl. They weren’t the ones who found it, and we don’t even know how many miles offshore it is. Don’t jump to conclusions.”
    “If they manage to pillage this one …”
    “We’ll do everything we can,” she said, soothingly.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    Molly sighed again. “We’ve had dealings with Iliad before. There was a shipwreck—a Spanish galleon from the 1600s—and they took over the entire thing. We didn’t even get a chance to map it, and then all of the artifacts …” She snapped her fingers. “Gone. Sold for profit.”
    “That’s terrible,” I said. “How can they do that?”
    “It all depends on who finds the ship—and where it is,” Molly told me. “If it’s within Maine territorial waters, then it may be under the state’s jurisdiction. If not, well … the law can be fluid.”
    “Too fluid, if you ask me,” Carl said, and I could hear the passion in his gravelly voice. “They’re destroying our cultural heritage! These shipwrecks—they’re snapshots of another time, preserved under the waves for centuries … and then, in a period of a few weeks, some guy who’s out for a quick buck can take the whole thing apart and sell it for profit.” He smiled grimly. “Every age has its pirates,” he said.
    “Do you think it’s a pirate ship, then?” I asked.
    “It could be,” Molly said. “The location is right; records indicate the Black Marguerite was along the coast when it disappeared. There’s long been speculation that Davey Blue had a lady friend in this neck of the woods.”
    “How long ago was it?” I asked.
    “Mid-seventeenth century,” Molly said. “It would be an amazing find. The biggest since the Whydah .”
    “What’s the Whydah ?” I asked.
    “It was originally a slave ship out of England, but it was attacked by the pirate ‘Black Sam’ Bellamy and became his flagship. It went down off Cape Cod in 1717—he was actually headed toward Maine when it sank—and was only recovered about twenty-five years ago.”
    “I had no idea Maine was such a pirate destination,” I said.
    “Even pirates need vacations,” joked Molly.
    “There was another captain whose ship disappeared,” I said. “He used to own this house, in fact—he built it for his wife. His name was Jonah Selfridge. One of his descendants, Murray Selfridge, lives on the island.”
    Jonah Selfridge had built a beautiful house, but I’d learned last fall the he wasn’t exactly a nice guy. The room was still haunted by one of his victims.
    “Do you know what his ship was called?”
    I shrugged. “No idea, unfortunately.”
    “What was the time period?”
    “Somewhere in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds, if I remember correctly. Matilda Jenkins is the town historian—she could tell you tons more than I could.”
    Carl looked at Molly. “Could be good news. Not as old, but at least there might be less profit in it, so we wouldn’t have to fight Iliad as much.”
    “Depends on the cargo,” Molly said. She turned back to me. “Do you know what he was trading?”
    “Again, you’ll have to ask Matilda,” I said. “How can you tell which ship is which, anyway?”
    “It’s not easy,” she admitted. “Sometimes, if we can find an old image or the specifications of the ship we suspect it is, we can identify it by size and shape, or by something unique to the ship—like a figurehead, if it’s been preserved.” She took a bite of Emmeline’s streusel cake before continuing. It did look delicious; I had to restrain myself from grabbing a slice too. “It also depends on how broken up it is,” Molly said after she’d finished her bite. “Sometimes, they are almost intact, and sometimes, they’re in pieces.”
    “What do you do if you don’t have an image to go by?”
    “We look at the artifacts. There are often features—the ship’s size,