you. Talk about bad timing. What does Knights Bridge have to do with him?”
“I’ve heard stories in treasure-hunting circles, but I don’t have all the details. Apparently Duncan was searching for information on his birth parents and ended up buying property in Knights Bridge. His son inherited it. Dylan. He’s now engaged to a woman from town.”
“Wait,” Isaac said. “You’re going there for revenge because Duncan fired you?”
“No. I’m not going for revenge.” Samantha took a breath, not knowing what to say to her cousin, especially with her uncle right next to her. She’d already told Caleb more than she’d meant to. She exhaled, her tone matter-of-fact as she continued, “I’m going to test a theory.”
Caleb grimaced next to her. “You’re stirring things up for no good reason.”
“Dylan McCaffrey doesn’t even have to know I’m there.”
“Sam...” There was a note of dread in Isaac’s voice. “Sam, please tell me this trip isn’t about pirates.”
She swiveled around to look at him. “What, you don’t like pirates, Isaac?”
“I got over pirates when I was twelve. Are you searching for the lost treasure of Captain Hook?”
“Show some respect, Isaac,” his father said. “Samantha’s an expert on East Coast privateers and pirates. Captain Hook is fictional. She’s only interested in real pirates and such. Right, Sam?”
Samantha ignored the skeptical note in his voice. “I’m researching Captain Benjamin Farraday, a Boston privateer-turned-pirate who disappeared before he could be hanged for his crimes.”
Isaac yawned as the Mercedes sped west on Storrow Drive, along the Charles River, which was dotted with small sailboats and Harvard rowers. “You think this Captain Farraday buried treasure in Knights Bridge?”
“It’s possible.”
Her cousin groaned. “Sam, nobody believes in buried treasure anymore.”
His father glanced sideways at her. “You see? His mother’s influence. He’s got both feet planted firmly on the ground.”
“He wants to go to Amherst College. That’s Grandpa’s alma mater.” Samantha winked at her cousin in the backseat. “There’s some Bennett in you.”
Isaac rolled his eyes. “Don’t remind me.”
* * *
Dozing—and pretending to doze—on the drive west at least allowed Samantha to stop trying to convince her uncle that she hadn’t lost her mind. He’d interrogated her on the contents of her backpack—he was pleased she had a first-aid kit and an emergency whistle—and her reasons for venturing to Knights Bridge on her own. “You and this damn pirate, Samantha. You’re obsessed with this Captain Benjamin Farraday of yours.”
No argument from her.
She hadn’t mentioned the cider mill painting and the story she’d discovered in his father’s Boston office. She had enough to overcome with her uncle without telling him she was off to Knights Bridge because of an anonymous painting and the fanciful writings of an unknown author—a woman, Samantha would guess given the feminine handwriting. She had no doubt her uncle would have dismissed The Adventures of Captain Farraday and Lady Elizabeth as worthless to a proper historian and tossed the pages into the fire.
Samantha had copied them and brought them with her, possible clues to her pirate mystery, as well as a reminder of the reasons she was undertaking this mission and returning to Knights Bridge. It was a fun story. One particular passage had stuck in her mind.
Lady Elizabeth Fullerton refused to choke on the terrible rum the black-haired, black-eyed pirate had thrust at her. “What’s your name?” she asked, returning the flask to him.
“Farraday. Benjamin Farraday. And yours?”
“Bess.” She’d already considered what name to give him. Something simple and not too far from the truth, so that she wouldn’t forget. “Bess Fuller.”
He grinned and leaned in close to her. He obviously didn’t believe her. “Well, Bess Fuller, drink up. We’ve a long way to go before you’ll see England again. You can thank me later for saving you.”
“I’d rather have drowned than to be rescued by a pirate rogue.”
It was a rousing tale of a spirited high-born British woman who’d been captured for ransom by a dastardly enemy of her remote but wealthy father and then “rescued” by a dashing pirate. Although entertaining, the story bore only marginal resemblance to the life of the real Farraday—at least his known life. There was much not yet known about the Boston-born pirate and his exploits.
Samantha had her grandfather to thank for sparking her interest in Captain Farraday. A few months before his death, he had plunked a copy of an eighteenth-century broadside in front of her. It detailed the crimes credited against Farraday, then a wanted man. “You like pirates, Sam. Check out this guy.”
She had dived in. As her grandfather’s health quickly had begun to fail, he loved for her to sit at his bedside and tell him every new development in her research. She had theorized that Farraday might have hidden treasure in the wilderness west of Boston, first as his personal insurance policy against his capture, arrest and ultimate execution, then to finance a new sloop to continue his raids on other ships.
She had little to go on—no proof beyond snippets here and there and her leaps to connect the dots of her research. She didn’t know why her grandfather hadn’t told her about the painting and the manuscript pages in his closet—he could have simply forgotten they were there. Now she suspected at least the story had brought Captain Farraday to his attention in the first place.
“Samantha—Samantha, we’re here.”
She sat up straight at her uncle’s voice. “Right. So we are.”
He slowed the old Mercedes as they came to the Knights Bridge town common, an oval-shaped green encircled by a narrow main street with classic homes, a town hall, a library, a general store and a few other businesses.
Caleb shuddered. “This place is straight out of 1910.”
“It just looks that way on the surface.” She pointed vaguely. “You can drop me off anywhere here.”
He stopped in front of the Swift River Country Store. “What about mosquitoes? Ticks? I hope you packed DEET.”
“DEET and Scotch,” Samantha said lightly. “The necessities when hunting pirate treasure.”
Caleb looked at his son. “You’re going to be an engineer.”
Isaac managed to stir enough to wish her luck. As she grabbed her pack out of the backseat, she caught him smirking and muttering something about hoping she found herself a sexy pirate of her own.
“This isn’t about sexy pirates,” she told him.
He gave her a knowing grin. “Right. It’s about scholarship.”
She
