The Pirate Vortex: Elizabeth Latimer, Pirate Hunter (Book One)

CHAPTER 28: I Will Never Give Up Until I Bring My Mother Home

They thought about it. All four of them—Elizabeth, Lulu, Stevie and Wang—thought long and hard about where Tess might go next, and where John Latimer, if he was still alive and living in the piratical past, would lead her. They thought about it all the way home, on their flight from Nassau to Vancouver and on to Victoria.

     None of them could agree.

     Liz sat down at her dresser in her bedroom back in their refurbished farmhouse at Gordon Head, in the Greater Victoria municipality of Saanich. She had to trust Tess like Tess had trusted her.

     Liz pinched her lips together, then opened the top lefthand drawer of her dresser. Inside, Daniel’s earring, with its delicate flying dagger, lay in a gauzy pouch by itself. She and Wang still couldn’t figure out what metal alloy it was made from, and she didn’t dare take it to a jeweller’s in case they wanted to keep it for testing. Liz lifted the pouch and dumped the earring into the palm of her left hand.

     How did the time chute work? This earring had got her to the past and it had returned her to the present. Did that mean the earring was an artifact of eighteenth century piracy days or was this some kind of voodoo? Liz shook her head. She drew the line at voodoo. Everything, cousin Stevie said, had a scientific explanation. Well explain this, Stephanie Rackham. How do I go back into the past to find Tess? She wanted to know what the earring could do, not how it did it.

     Did she dare try it? Daniel had said he would come if she put it on.

     Elizabeth hooked the flying dagger into her left ear. She waited, stared at the empty space in front of her, wondering if Daniel would miraculously appear out of blank air.

     Nothing.

     She shook her head to swing the earring from side to side. She looked into the mirror over the dresser, hoping to see the quartermaster’s surly smile behind her.

     Maybe the earring was broken. He did say to put it into her left earlobe, didn’t he? Liz sighed. Maybe she had dreamt the whole thing. Maybe there was no such thing as a Daniel Corker, and maybe this earring was just a piece of junk jewellery that some co-ed had dropped on the gym floor. Maybe this whole episode was like the Wizard of Oz and she was back in Kansas. And mama Tess—no Professor Tess Rackham, the instructor for the Archaeology of Piracy course at UVic—would come waltzing through Liz’s bedroom door to tell her she was late for school. And maybe John Latimer would be there, too, in the garage, working on one of his miniature model pirate ships.

     The earring dangled lightly on her ear.

     Elizabeth stared at her naked thumbnail. She had stripped off all of the chipped polish and she felt oddly shaky. She needed to feel that power again. The surge of the pirate—no, the surge of the pirate hunter—in her blood. She shook the bottle of red nail colour and took out a black ink pen from the opened dresser drawer.

     CJ sat on her bedpost and ruffled his feathers. “Crap,” he said.

     Liz looked up from doing her nail. She sent him a telepathic question. Do you mean that literally?

     Aye, he said.

     “Bad bird,” Liz said out loud, waving her painted thumb in the air.

     “Screw you,” CJ said, louder, and crapped on her bedpost again.

     Liz blew dry the fourth coat of clear varnish on her thumbnail. The black skull and crossbones on the blood-red nail polish gleamed as a reminder of what her ancestry had bequeathed her. She looked up.