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hailing her, you know. But nobody answered.”
    “Did you see anything on it?”
    He shook his head. “Not a soul—or even a sail. It was dark as pitch out there, and foggy to boot. Nothing but the flicker of a lantern, and that could have been a trick of the night, you know. And then, like that”—he snapped his fingers—“she weren’t there no more.”
    “It just disappeared?”
    He nodded.
    “Even the smell?”
    “It hung around for a minute or two, but then it was gone, too.”
    “Creepy,” I said.
    “Ayuh,” he said, nodding. “That was the strangest night I’ve ever passed, on water or on land. My da steered out of there quick as anything. I never saw that old boat cut through the water half as fast—even with the fog thick as chowder.”
    “Did he think it was a ship?”
    “To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed best to leave it behind us; we never said a word about it.”
    “What happened to the lost lobster boat?”
    “Turned up the next day,” he said.
    “Was everyone okay?”
    “Ayuh. They just ran out of gas. Looked like total idiots. They were lucky the Coast Guard found ’em drifting south.” He chuckled. “They would have been halfway to Florida soon enough.”
    I gazed at the dark, restless water—beautiful, but deadly. We were heading east of the island, out toward what looked like open water. “Where did Adam and Evan find the wreck?” I asked.
    “Funny thing about that,” he said, reaching in his pocket for another piece of cake. He looked back at me with shrewd eyes. “It’s right smack in the middle of Deadman’s Shoal.”
    I swallowed. “Where you saw the ghost ship.”
    “If that’s what it was,” he said, with a half-shrug. There was a faraway look on his craggy face. “Fog can play tricks on a man’s mind. And it was a long time ago.”
    “It’s a great story, though.”
    He looked back at me and winked. “Maybe so. But not one I’d want bandied about, so if you’ll keep it close, I’d be much obliged.”
    “Of course.”
    He nodded and returned his gaze to the boats, which were drawing closer by the moment. I looked back at Cranberry Island, which had shrunk to a dark gray mass in the distance. “Who was Davy Blue’s lady love?” I asked.
    “A young lady named Eleanor Kean,” he said. “Or at least that’s the story.”
    “Really? She was one of Charlene’s ancestors?”
    “Unless there was another Kean family on the island, I’m guessing she was.”
    I chuckled to myself; evidently the Kean women’s effect on men ran in the family. Charlene, whose natural beauty was enhanced by her carefully coiffed caramel-colored hair and always-impeccable makeup, had half the lobstermen on the island mooning after her. She hadn’t seduced a pirate yet, though—or at least not that I knew of. “So, she’s not the only heartbreaker in the family,” I said.
    “Comes by it honestly, I’d say.”
    Any further conversation along that vein was tabled till later; we were growing closer to the two boats—and moving into the danger zone.
    Eleazer nodded to me. “Head up to the bow and keep an eye out for rocks, will you?”
    I’d steered around rocks in my own skiff many a time, but the tale of Deadman’s Shoal made me nervous. If a seasoned pirate could get caught by submerged rocks, where did that leave me? “Any tips on what to watch for?” I asked.
    “Well, you want to holler if you see anything sticking out of the water, for starters. But sometimes you’ll see light patches, or seaweed—you know, you’ve done it before. If you see something, just yell out ‘eleven o’clock’ or ‘two o’clock’, and I’ll adjust.”
    “Got it,” I said, and spent the next few minutes staring hard at the inky water, trying to prevent the little skiff from joining the ship on the bottom of the ocean.
    Fortunately, Eleazer steered us through the danger zone without incident, and soon we were idling next to the two larger