“Our ma’s box of trinkets,” Benny says. “She always said the box belonged to her own mother but that she’d found the comb and medallions in the backyard at the orphanage. We think they must have belonged to Elly, the original Eleanor.” Benny hands the box to Marble.
“We used to play with these all the time, Marble. Now it’s your turn.”
Marble smiles at the box and smooths her hand along its silky surface, puts it up to her face and sniffs at the wood, then lifts the lid. Her mouth drops open when she sees what’s inside. She puts on her glasses.
“Oh, my,” Marble says, smoothing her finger over one of the disks. “These aren’t trinkets. This is gold. From a very long time ago. These probably belong in a museum.” Marble sits up straighter and reminds them that before she wrote about food, she studied art history. She pulls her tablet out of her purse and searches the Internet for a news story about divers who recently salvaged gold coins from the site of an ancient shipwreck. She shows Byron and Benny a closeup of the coins. They are identical to her mother’s medallions.
“This comb, too, has to be about three hundred years old. Could be from the same ship.”
“Dude, you’re kidding me,” Byron says.
At the word dude, Marble gives Byron a look that he can only think of as being extremely British.
“But if we go public with these,” Benny says, “won’t we have to explain where they came from? We might have to say something about our parents. Our parents invented a narrative for a reason, to hide their true identities.”
“But they’re not around anymore,” Byron says.
“No, they’re not,” Benny says. “But some of the people they knew are still around. Where does that leave us? What happens if we alter even one part of that story? What about the murder?”
“What about the murder?” Byron says.
“We still don’t know who killed Little Man, do we?”
“Exactly,” Marble says. “Do you think it was your mother? I mean, you know. Our…”
Byron and Benny cast her the same, big-eyed look. Marble has to get used to saying our mother. Or does she? She’s glad she finally knows about her birth mother, but her mum, Wanda, will always be her mum.
“I’ve thought about it and thought about it, but I really don’t know,” Byron says. “A year ago I would have said there’s no way my mother would have killed a man, but there’s a lot we didn’t know then. In her recording, our mother never actually denies killing Little Man.”
“I wouldn’t blame her if she had,” Benny says. “The point is, our parents told us a lot of lies over the years. We might never know how much of the truth our ma has told us.”
“Maybe when we go to the island, we’ll find out.”
“We can’t go to the island, Byron. We don’t really know what we’re getting into. There are people who helped our mother escape. We don’t want to cause them any trouble, do we? Not after everything they did for her. What do you think, Marble?”
Marble says nothing. She picks up the coins and comb from the table, puts them back into the wooden box, and closes the lid.
Shipwreck
In 1715, a hurricane plowing through the Caribbean sank two Spanish ships and smashed eight others into the shallows off the coast of Florida. Later that year, a pair of pirate ships set out from the island and returned home loaded with treasures, most of which the Spanish had already pulled up from the shipwrecks. Back in Port Royal, the raiders unloaded bullion, dyestuffs, tobacco, and other valuable items, some of which were not listed anywhere on the manifests of the ruined fleet and which promised to fetch a good sum on the black market.
Twenty years later, a runaway slave emerged from the bush in the interior of the island and sneaked onto the plantation from which he had fled four months earlier. Under the cover of night, he ran off with his woman, whose stomach had grown thick with child. She left with only the clothes on her back, two guavas in her apron pocket, and a large hair comb belonging to the mistress of the house. The mistress, on the occasion of her marriage to the master of the estate years before, had received the comb along with a case of gold medallions and other gifts from a high official who, it was said, had sent his men to Florida to loot goods recovered from the shipwrecked Spanish fleet. It was an assertion that he had always denied.
The enslaved woman had been waiting to reclaim her freedom. She had been listening for a signal every night for four moons but, as in all such things, she repeatedly steeled herself for disappointment. She knew that her man might never make it back. When the time finally came, she had only minutes to escape. She was already running across a rain-soaked field, holding fast to her man’s hand, when she realized that the comb was still wedged into the waist of her skirt. She would have washed the comb and put it on the mistress’s dressing table that evening, had she had the time, had she not been slipping in the mud and stumbling over tree roots in her quest for freedom.