Month 14, May 2023
Darkness was falling, but a warm breeze was yet in the air. A kind of peace had fallen on Aidan.
Did snakes live here, in the Outer Banks? Probably, she reasoned. And with uncharacteristic melancholy, missed the country in which she had grown up, and stayed out in, camping wild and lighting fires and walking in unassumingly beautiful countryside.
They had taken a trip, to the Forest of Dean. Her father - John Drummond, the man who had raised her - had shown her how to survive in the wild. It had been the best weekend of her life, and had awakened something inside her. Days and nights afterwards, Aidan had dreamed of living outside, about camping and dwelling far and away from any town and city.
She was doing it now, but in a different country. In the country of her parents' birth.
Even now, the story seemed fantastical.
A surge of anger rose in her chest as she thought of the photograph. John B and big John. Father and son. He was her father too...
Aidan gripped the document in her hand before thrusting it into her oversized shirt pocket. At least he hadn't this - at least she was closer to solving the mystery, closer to finding it than John B was.
Yet...Blackbeard's treasure...? That was another fantasy. And here she was, with the evidence to the contrary on her very person.
And in it. Hadn't Rafe said so? Or intimated the genetic lineage of her mother. Carla's only descendant...
Rafe. Why was he in her mind now?
A warm fire, that was what she needed, and Aidan shouldered her backpack, a trickle of blood dribblng down her arm. Damn! She must have caught it on the glass of the picture she had broken.
How could she have left them there? There was no choice. She had to find this treasure, and leave it for the true heir of Denmark Tanny, along with that she had instructed her mother, Carla's, solictor to pay him. It had been agreed, legally. But the question was its actual location. As was the location of this.
Something wasn't quite right - there was something dragging her mind back to the document. And sometimes
A hollow in a sandbank made an ideal place to stack the driftwood she had collected from the beach. Had circumstances been different, Aidan might have well noted the ambience, a still evening with ASMR-like waves washing onto the beach. Images such as this had sold holidays and breaks, and appeared in magazine features urging readers to, "Take a Break from the High Speed Rat-Race: Unwind", and so on.
Two pieces of rock never worked, however, no matter how much she and her father had tried. Aidan had tried many times since, and had concluded that the spark must be created by certain rocks, or a particular type of tree to take advantage of the friction between two twigs.
From her bag, a box of matches would have to suffice, one of two other things she had taken from Mr. Sunn's home, that and a bottle of rum. It would keep her warm, a sip or two, for the spring night was bound to be chilly - the rest could fuel the fire for the sausages she had also liberated from the fridge...
...darkness fell...
...and the sausages were busily being digested by her manic stomach acid, agitated as it had been by the lack of food these last few days. Aidan pulled her cardigan around her, and hunkered down in the sand, the warmth of the flames comforting her limbs, looking at the pieces...
...her eyes nodded as the fire beguiled relaxation...encouraged sleep...
...Tannyhill...she needed to get to Tannyhill, to find out whatever she could about this, this, and the gold that had already been discovered of the Royal Merchant, of the cross, of El Dorado. Was the gold she...yawn...that she had promised to...that she had agreed...was the gold already part of this...or was her mother's gold...somewhere else...?
It was black night when the crack of dry wood shot Aidan awake. The map pieces fell from her hand and she only just managed to stop them uniting with the embers of the fire and becoming engulfed in the tired flames. A hand folded over hers.
"Hi."
It was JJ.
JJ Maybank was standing beside her, and had seen the nodding head, and chosen, that night, as he walked alone - walked anywhere other than home - the gentle glow of a well-laid fire.
And it amused him to see who was sitting beside it. So, he sat beside her, watching Aidan as she slept.
His best friend's half-sister, a person hidden away across the ocean. A love child.
It amused him, too, that neither was willing to acknowledge one another's status, or talk about Big John B.
Yet, she had organised for Pope to receive all of the Limbrey money, keeping none for herself. Turn her back on a future filled with comfort. Choosing a drifter's life. Just like himself.
"You were just about to drop these," he told her, as Aidan wriggled her arm from his grip. JJ finally let go of her hand, but not before the gratifying discovery that was that he was stronger than she was. He would have won the fight, if she had not backed away when she had seen the gun. He was stronger than her. And that was interesting.
"Thank you," Aidan replied, contritely. And she did not object when he sat down beside her, adding more dry wood to the dormant blaze. It fired up, crackling a little and spitting tiny sparks of bark flakes into the sky above them. His hand had been warm. As was his body, next to hers. She turned her head and proffered JJ the rum stolen from, well, her father, such status being par for the course in the Caribbean islands.
"Go on, or go home," Aidan told him, taking the bottle back. And she could not go home, though she missed it. How she missed those days, safe, predictable. Unbelieveably dull. It was only when JJ put a hand on her arm that she realised she was bleeding.
"No, no, come on. Come back to mine, I can see you right."
The wrong words. Aidan froze, then snatched her arm back.
"I need to be somewhere else!" Aidan protested, nursing her arm with the cut. She just knew it. But where exactly? She had to trust that her feet would tell her. Get a few miles under them and her brain would come up with the right answer eventually.
"Would you like me to go with you?" JJ asked her, sprinting after her after a few moments, as Aidan hurried away. "Where are you going?"
Aidan was wrong. It wasn't a few miles. It was a few minutes, her feet pressing into the wave-damp sand as she hurried off. Aidan knew exacrly where she needed to go.
"Tannyhill!" Her voice was exhilarating, elated. Because she had seen the gold there, in her mind's eye, or something to do with gold at least.
Because...
...because...
"Because...?" It was JJ's voice that brought her back to the present. "You wanna go to Tannyhill because...?"
Aidan turned round to face him. She had seen the same tulip bulb, something about this treasure was linked back there. The spirit and warmth of the fire had depressed her senses and Aidan marched over to JJ Maybank.
"I have been into that place so many times that...and there's something I need from there. Something Rafe has. In the safe.
"Would you like me to go with you?" JJ repeated. "Cos, I can get into places, out of places. I can - "
"No!" Aidan felt herself protest, loudly, sharply, and she put a hand between them. But her defence was short lived, and JJ's blue eyes were what lingered in her mind as she remembered herself telling him, "I need a place to hide out, before I break in." Because she had to find out about the skull, had to get to the bottom of the legend of Blackbeard. Because it wasn't just a legend, it was real, history. She was the proof of that.
"My house has a bunker, for storms," JJ told her, and stepped as close as a heartbeat to Aidan, before holding out a hand. "It's safe - you'll be safe."
And Aidan took his hand, and a new path opened up to her. She could not go back, and she would go on, eventually. Now, she would take a detour.
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"Stay as long as you want," JJ told her, as he took her down the steps to the emergency bunker. Buried deep into the ground with three feet thick concrete and a steel inner shell, it would keep anyone safe from any tropical storm. JJ often wondered why, when it was so well stocked, he and his dad had lived in the squalour above it, though he knew the answer. Luke Maybank was more obsessed about future impending doom than present destitution.
The steps were a ladder built into the shell, and JJ opened the hatch and pulled on the lights. "Go on," he told her. There was just a moment where Aidan's mind told her that she shouldn't really be going into an enclosed space at the invitation of a person who had recently been her enemy. Yet, her body was tired, her mind dull. And the look of the furniture, comfortable, new, had made the decision for her.
There was also a fridge, although nothing was in it at the present. There was a couch-bed, and a bed. Not large, six feet by four, its compact nature was enough for...
...would be enough to...
...God, she was beautiful being so vulnerable, washed up on the beach from over the ocean, so to speak.
And the voice that was screaming for all that it was worth in JJ's mind telling him that she was John B's sister was blocked by his libido.
"I wish i had friends like yours," Aidan told him, as he closed the storm shelter and the industrial, emergency lights clicked on, replacing the ones that had lit the steps. He sat on the couch, she on the bed. The map pieces, he knew, was in her pocket. He still might steal it. If she were to trust him enough to go to sleep.
Yet, the idea of breaking into Tannyhill and getting one over on Rafe was appealing more and more, as was the intriguing idea of knowing what the next step in the puzzle was.
"Did you have no friends?" JJ asked her. She was within arm's reach. But she did not move, did not flinch, when he extended his arm to her. JJ turned the gesture into a consoling pat on her shoulder.
"I had Dougie," Aidan told him, her face brightening. "I wonder where he is now. Oh - " she moved her hand to wipe a swell of tears from her face, " - oh, I wonder. Back at his father's business, or maybe back in Scotland." Aidan looked across to JJ and smiled at the realisation of the wonder of their bond. "We were friends forever, we got into so much trouble!"
"Smoking? Drinking?" JJ suggested.
"Stealing cars, running away from home." She glanced over to JJ. "Not so much smoking, but yes, God, we put away some boozre. And skiving off."
"Skiving off?" JJ asked, confused. "You and he...slept together?" Aidan laughed, at his incomprehension of the phrase, lost deep in translation.
"Bunking off, skipping school," she told him. "Having a wag - "
"Having a what...?" JJ's face made Aidan laugh again.
"Again, skipping school," she told him. "No, Dougie and I...we were as close as two people could be...platonically...like brother and sister."
"Ah," JJ replied, knowingly. "That's me and Kie."
"Once," Aidan confessed, probably the first time she had breathed this secret aloud. "We slept with each other, once." She sighed. So that it was done, and never an issue. Dougie hadn't protested. But it had been Aidan who had suggested it. After, they had sat on the bonnet of one of his dad's taxis under the new Severn Bridge and watched the car lights flashing through the wind break gaps in its surface.
"That was Pope and Kie," JJ told her. "And I miss how we used to be. It spoiled everything." And it surprised JJ that it was so easy to tell her this. She was easy to talk to, not a stuffy, stuck up Brit.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Aidan told him, and moved herself down so she was lying on her side facing JJ, who had laid down on the couch bed.
"It's how it is. I just...miss how things used to be." He turned to look at Aidan, whose face was beautiful even in the white-green glow of the industrial lighting. "Do you miss anything?"
"I...miss home, I miss tea, and pants meaning pants, biscuits being small and something you have with a cup of tea, and I miss chips being big hot chunks of fried potatoes." Aidan paused, then added, "And cars being in the right lane."
"They are on the right here," JJ told her. Aidan moved her head to look at his face.
"I mean on the left," she continued, then sat back up, now in full flow as she remembered everything she might otherwise be eating, drinking or doing that could only be found to be done in Bristol.
"And potatoes wrapped up in paper, and...so many things I never thought I would miss!"
"All for finding your real father and your brother?" JJ asked, slyly. Aidan gave him a narrow-eyed look.
"My father had a child. He has a son."
"Your brother."
"My brother," Aidan admitted, and watched JJ go over to one of the supply cabinet, lean on a corner, and when the front came down and he took out a small box. Then, he came over to where Aidan was lying and beckoned for her to sit up.
"First aid," he told her, taking a sterile wipe packet in his mouth then tearing it open. It smelled sharply of rubbing alcohol, and JJ took the corner and shook it open. "Here," he told Aidan, and she let him nurse her wound.
JJ would have nailed her there and then - why else bring up the subject of losing her virginity? Had she not been his best friend's sister, he would have lingered beside her, would have touched her hand, her arm, her neck...
Instead, he watched as Aidan Drummond settled down onto the bed and drifted almost instantaneously to sleep.