“No, Glen, of course not.”
“Good. Very good.”
I looked around the dark room we were standing in. I thought at first we were in a storage room, but upon closer inspection, it looked like an unfinished display room. The pirate crap. Joy. “Was this what Cassidy was working on?”
“Yes. I’m not sure what to do with it all now. My expertise is in sunken ships and Spanish treasure, you see. Pirates? I can’t say I’m well versed. That was all Lou.” Glen sounded sincerely upset. I wondered if it was because he’d believed the nonsense Cassidy had been spouting as fact and now realized he’d been played, or if he was simply lamenting the lost money he’d poured into the pirate angle of the business.
Probably the latter.
Still, to say I wasn’t curious about the display Cassidy had been concocting for Smith would be a lie. I was here, right? Where was the harm in checking it out? For all I knew, maybe it was the big, neon flashing sign pointing to the reason for all of yesterday’s insanity.
“Glen?”
“Hmm?”
“Would you mind if I took a look at Cassidy’s work? He was pretty adamant with me that he’d connected Captain Smith to piracy and, of course, you can understand why I’d want to know whether that was truth or conjecture.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mind at all. Let me get the lights.” Glen shuffled around in the dim room before the overhead lights switched on.
The display cases were messy, still in the process of a cohesive story being prepared for each. There was a life-sized cardboard cutout of a stereotypical Hollywood pirate in one corner, and a wall-mounted television beside it with a dark screen.
“Interactive video?” I asked, pointing.
“It was supposed to playPirates of the Caribbean.”
I rolled my eyes so hard, it hurt.
The rest of the setup looked to be a general history of piracy before it began to focus specifically on the Keys. Then I found a few handwritten notes atop a glass case that was practically empty.
“One-Eyed Jack,” I read.
“Yes,” Glen said, hurrying toward me. “Lou was obsessed. He was the Pirate King of the Florida Keys, more infamous than Blackbeard or William Kidd. But his career was shrouded in mystery, as was his death.”
“Maybe he never existed at all.” I looked at Glen’s startled expression. “Pirates were eliminated down here by 1825. Maybe One-Eyed Jack was nothing more than a rumor—something one of the less savory wreckers came up with to scare visiting captains and crews, you know?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Glenn said quickly, shaking his head. He wore big glasses, like circa 1979, and shoved them back up the bridge of his nose as they started sliding down. “Lou was insistent. Jack was a real man.” He picked up some of the notes. “See here. He estimated Jack was born around 1818. He was always described as a healthy, powerful man, even in his old age. Lou’s research shows all mentions of Jack vanish from public record after 1871, so he suspected Jack suffered a tragic fate at sea, or even something more sinister. Murder, you know, possibly by rival pirates or even at the hands of the Navy! Can you imagine if Jack had lived and there was a resurgence of pirates?”
I grunted.
It just so happened these dates were horribly close to my own records on Smith. Born in November of 1818, died of unknown causes in (estimated) July of 1871. And yeah, Smith had cut quite an imposing figure. But his entire adult life was dedicated to the sea. That’s rough, unforgiving work, so of course he was built like an ox.
Glen turned the page. “Look at this. Lou said the first mention of Jack being ‘One-Eyed’ is in 1861.”
“Yeah. What a coincidence,” I muttered. “The same year as Smith’s accident.”
“Was it?” Glen asked, startled and yet curious.
“It was,” I ground out. “But that doesn’t prove anything. I’m sorry to say this, but Cassidy was taking evidence A and evidence B and making them fit because it was convenient.”
Glen sighed and set the papers aside. “Well… maybe… but I guess we’ll never know for certain now.”
I crossed my arms and was about to walk to a different display, when a little plaque sitting inside Jack’s case caught my attention. “Santa Teresa? Another Spanish galleon?”
Glen leaned down to read the plaque through the front of the case. “Yeah. This one’s a doozy.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s conflicting reports as to whether theSanta Teresawas… real.”
