their heads and mumbling their support for whatever Simon intended to do. The town had prospered since the Mallorys relinquished the land to them. None of them wanted to lose any of the advantages they had gained from such transfer of title.
* * * *
Noah Brewster wasn’t worried about Vanessa making trouble. He reached for his pipe and stuck it between his teeth. His bright, handsome eyes danced as the flame of the match touched the tobacco bowl. He sucked in his fat cheeks as he puffed the pipe to life. “Old Simon must be fit to be tied,” he chuckled.
“Do you think he knows Vanessa is back?” his wife asked as she closed the door that connected the children’s room and the kitchen.
Noah chuckled again. “Simon knows all right,” he said. “Old Simon don’t miss a trick.” He sat back down on the stool and put an elbow to a knee and leaned toward the fire.
Zeb Brewster suddenly got to his feet and started pacing. “It’s all well and good for you to think lightly of all this, Noah,” Zeb said. “You ain’t got no interest in the land. You’re a fisherman. Your boats and tack is all you care about. But what about me and Jonah here? We work our lands and we’ve been doing pretty good since old Simon’s been running things.”
Jonah Black and his wife, Rachel, sat at the large, square kitchen table that had been pulled up close to the hearth. “Yes,” Jonah agreed. “Zeb’s and my property are two of the biggest farms in these parts. Since title changed hands, we find ourselves a lot better off.”
“Simon don’t give us any trouble at all,” Rachel put in.
“Not yet, he won’t,” Noah said as he continued to puff leisurely on his pipe. “You just wait, Rachel. Old Simon will tighten the reins on you before long.”
“How can he? The property isn’t solely his. It belongs to the town...to all of us,” Caroline Brewster said.
Noah glanced at her. “Now, Caroline, you know Simon better’n that. Once he and those highfalutin friends of his gets control of something, they’ll figure out some way of running the whole shebang. Oh, they’ll do it all right and legal and proper like, but in the end they’ll wind up owning everything and you’ll all be right back where you started.”
Zeb jumped to his feet. His wife put a hand on his arm but he shook it off. “I don’t agree with you, Noah,” he said angrily. “Simon Caldwell and his crowd don’t have no claim on my farm now.”
“Don’t he?” Noah asked sagely, narrowing his eyes to give his question the proper degree of seriousness he meant to convey. “Do you have sole claim to your farm, Zeb?”
Zeb floundered. “Well, no,” he stammered. “It ain’t mine and Caroline’s outright. But it ain’t Simon Caldwell’s neither.”
Noah sucked smoke into his mouth. The howling storm was the only sound in the room. Finally Noah glanced up at Zeb. “Jeremiah Mallory deeded your farm and all the rest of his property over to Skull Point,” he said. “Skull Point is run by Simon Caldwell. You and me and everybody else is run by Simon Caldwell.”
“But what about the council? We have a town council,” Caroline argued. Caroline Brewster was a big woman and her voice matched her size.
“And who, may I ask, is on that town council, Caroline? I’ll tell you,” Noah answered. “Simon Caldwell, Sam Hastings, Will Wilkins, and four or five other close, intimate chums of old Simon’s...all of whom, I might add, are deeply in Simon’s personal debt.”
Rachel Black leaned across the table. “Well, we’re not in Simon’s personal debt.”
Noah merely smiled. “You’re not on the council, neither,” he said. He put his pipe back between his teeth and bit into the stem. The whipping, screeching wind and rain lashed against the house. A sudden, appalling crash made everyone stand up. The noise cut through the room like the blade of an ax.
“Glory be,” Caroline groaned, making the sign of the cross. Her husband went toward the window. He couldn’t possibly have seen out through the heavy wooden shutters. He just stood there staring at the boarded window.
“A tree,” he said softly, nervously. “I guess it was just another tree.”
From beyond the closed door a child started to cry. The women glanced toward the sleeping room beyond. Ruth started toward it.
“No, Ruth,” Rachel Black said. “I’ll go see.”
Ruth went to stand in front of the fire. She rubbed her hands nervously, bringing circulation back into her chilled fingers. “There won’t be no land to worry about if this storm don’t let up,” she said. Her lips were thin and white, her face pale and drawn. Her nervousness and fright were responsible for her turning sharply on her husband. “It’s bad enough for us to be upset about this storm without you upsetting us with other problems.”
Caroline Brewster was suddenly as jumpy as the others. “Why do you say ‘problem,’ Ruth?” she wanted to know. “The deeding of the land to the town was no problem until you and Noah here made it into one.”
Noah leaned back and tried to look as calm as possible. “It’s Simon Caldwell who will create the problem.” He bit hard on the stem of the pipe and wished he’d given a little more forethought to his remark. Everybody was becoming more and more unnerved.
* * * *
The men and women in Simon Caldwell’s kitchen were as composed as a group of spectators at a music recital. Simon Caldwell’s long, bony face, however, was screwed into a frown. He was thinking about the land, but it wasn’t the deed to the lands that troubled him. Vanessa Mallory’s presence in Skull Point was his problem. What did she want?
Sam Hastings echoed his question. “I wonder why Vanessa came back here to the Point?”
Simon shrugged. “Where else would she go, Sam? This is her home.”
“But she left it to run off after that sea captain, or whatever he was.”
His wife gave an admonishing huff. “Wild! That’s the only word to describe Vanessa Mallory. Just like her granddaddy. Wild!”
Simon rubbed his bristled chin. “Maybe so, Jenny. But something happened inside Bloodstone these five years ago, something that we don’t know about. Jeremiah and Hester would never say what it was, but I know something happened there. Vanessa didn’t run off into that storm for no reason.”
“There was that sea captain,” Martha Wilkins reminded him.
“No, there was something else. I just know there was,” he said.
Simon’s craggy old face caught the reflection of the fire. To the others he looked exactly like what the children of the town called him: Mr. Skull Point—not because of his position in the town, but because at times like this Simon Caldwell looked more like a bleached skull than anything else. The cheeks were sunken, the eyes deep set and ringed with dark, grayish circles.
Simon was an oddity to look at and to add to his oddity he had no wife—never had one—which made him seem more queer, especially to the children of the town. The older folk—those close to Simon—knew there had been a woman in his life at one time. Simon had loved her more than life itself, but
