Chapter 32 #2
It also made the Wags realize that we couldn’t tell anyone about what we found. Not the gold, and not the Venus. If we announced
anything, it would be all over the news, and if I thought I was worried about the cottage being broken into before all this,
well. Let’s just say that Mabel was right to be paranoid, back when she was responsible for it. And now that we were its guardians,
we decided jointly that the best way to do that was to hang on to its secrets. For now, at least.
Seb drove us into Boston proper, where traffic was even worse until we got to Boston Harbor. I surveyed all the sailboats
bobbing in the water from my window alongside Punkin, who eagerly sniffed the briny harbor air as if it were made of beef
jerky.
“Seriously, Seb,” I said. “Where the hell are you taking me?”
“I barely know myself,” he said, taking a turn toward the harbor. And that’s when I saw a sign that identified our destination:
charlestown marina. “When I tell you that I made a large deposit on something, sight unseen a month ago, I feel like you’re going to get mad
and yell at me.”
Uh-oh. “Sight unseen . . . ?”
“But,” he argued, flicking a sheepish look in my direction. “I think it all turned out okay, so maybe you’ll fall in love
with it like me and Punkin did.”
“You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m making myself nervous,” he muttered under his breath as we drove through a small parking lot that bordered some of the slips in the marina. “Oh shit, this is us.” He whipped the Bronco into a parking space and shut off the engine. Punkin got excited.
“Seb . . . ?”
“Just come see it before you say no. Please?”
I had no idea what I saying yes or no to until I climbed out of the Bronco and watched Seb jog across a narrow strip of grass
that separated the docks from the parking lot. He stepped onto the dock and stood in front of a white-and-brown trawler—one
that was clearly being used as a houseboat.
I stopped in front of him, head cocked. “What am I looking at?”
“Madame, you are looking at a custom-built houseboat—a real, working boat, not just a floating barge. It’s seaworthy. Slow,
but seaworthy.”
“Um . . . ? Huh?”
He stepped onto the boat’s main deck from where it was moored to the dock. “A lot of houseboats aren’t real, working boats.
The guy who built it is totally legit. He spent like three hundred thousand renovating an old fishing trawler into this. Let
me show you . . .”
Seb offered me his hand and tugged me onto the boat with him. Punkin jumped on as if she’d done it a thousand times. The trawler
had some nice seating on the main deck, a windowed wheelhouse on a small level above, behind which was a second covered seating
area under a canvas Bimini top.
“Look!” he said. “You get inside it proper through here,” he said, inviting me inside to a cozy cabin with seating, a TV,
and a two-person dining table. “And through here, there’s a sweet galley. That means kitchen, Paige.”
I knew what a ship’s galley was, but he was so excited, I let it go. This galley was super tiny and you had to step down to get to it. But I was surprised how nice it was. Nicer than the kitchen in the cottage.
We headed through it, into a narrow hallway with storage and a couple of doorways.
“Main bedroom is here,” he said, showing me. “Queen-sized bed, baby! Bigger than the cottage! Lots of little nooks for storage.
And the bathroom isn’t ridiculously small—look. Fancy shower. Oh, and there’s a tiny room back here with two extra fold-down
sleeping berths and a little desk. See . . . ?”
“Seb,” I said, trying to get a word in edgewise as he bounced around the boat. “What is all this?”
He stopped in the open doorway that separated the galley from a short flight of stairs leading to the main deck and spread
his arms wide, waggling his blond eyebrows. “This is Queen Anne’s Revenge.”
I tilted my head. “Blackbeard’s ship?”
“Exactly!” he said, excited. “Technically, it’s just Queen Ann’s Revenge, without the ‘E,’ because the owner’s wife is named Ann. But come on! When I saw the name, I knew it was meant to be.”
I put a hand on my chest. “Seb. You just said this was a custom three-hundred-thousand-dollar boat. You don’t have that kind
of money.”
“Nope. I rented it.”
“Oh.” Huh.
He was practically exhilarated. “The owner built it to cruise the Great Loop when it was just him and his wife—”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“Great Loop—you cruise through the Great Lakes, Mississippi, Gulf of Mexico, and up the East Coast into the New York and Canadian canals. Takes six weeks if you’re speeding through it, but people sometimes take years to do it.
Anyway, the guy who built this is a Looper—he’s done the Loop a couple times.
But now he’s got kids and needs something bigger.
So he’s renting this out while he builds a new one. ”
“And you now have this one because . . . ?”
“I got it for us,” he explained. “You said to figure out a way for us to be together while you go to school.”
I had.
“So I’m moving here to be with you,” he said, shrugging. “If you want to stay in the dorms, that’s fine. I know you work hard
and don’t need distractions. But if you want to live in here with me, there’s a tiny extra room back there that we can turn
into your study room. And it’s only twenty minutes from campus, even in shitty traffic, as you just saw. Plus, the views from
these windows are pretty excellent . . .”
I looked around at all the warm wood and steel inside the belly of the trawler. It was pleasant in here, I had to admit. And
he wasn’t kidding about the views. Nothing but water and boats. My favorite.
“What about your job with Mr. Neely back in Haven Beach?”
“He was disappointed but I gave him notice. He hired my replacement last week.”
“Jaz and Benny know?”
He nodded. “I asked them to keep it secret. I wanted to surprise you?” He didn’t sound very sure about that. “I rented this
slip here at the marina until next summer. It’s a little pricier than Neely’s Marina, lemme just say . . .”
“This isn’t an RV,” I said, remembering his ultimate dream of life on the road.
“It’s way better. I mean, Jazmine’s right—if a hurricane comes, we’re going to need to go to a shelter, but otherwise, it’s perfect. You go to school and get your art history degree while I go to this tech institute up the road and get my ASE certification to become a mechanic in a year.”
I shook my head, astounded. “You signed up for school here?”
“I start after the New Year. Registered and everything. I can always find work as a mechanic, and certification will get me
better pay.”
Punkin trotted through the cabin, sniffing every corner. I watched her, a little overwhelmed. “What about the cottage?”
Seb reached for my waist and tugged me closer. “The cottage will always be home base. We can still spend summers there. And
now that Benny and I reinforced the smuggler’s hole under Mr. Legs, the Golden Venus will be safe until we’re ready to bring
her out.”
We put her back into the smuggler’s hole. She needed to be authenticated, and there was the matter of cultural reappropriation
because technically, she’d been smuggled out of ancient Rome. I was making contacts at Harvard who could help, but I wasn’t
ready to trust anyone yet.
Mabel was right to worry about literal gold diggers who’d do anything to get their hands on treasure. We didn’t want the local
news celebrating our discovery of the statue or the gold bars, didn’t want our faces and names plastered everywhere. I mean,
the town was still talking about the single gold bar that was found in the downtown sewer. If people knew how many other bars we’d uncovered,
we’d be fighting people back with pitchforks and fire.
Best to keep it down low. So we all agreed that our discovery was Wag business, no one else’s. Not until we were ready.
“Venus will be fine,” he told me, encircling me with his arms. “No one knows her resting spot but us, and we have the keys to open Mr. Legs. Not even Paul can get to her.”
“You’re right.”
“And like I said, you don’t have to live here with me if you think it’s distracting, but I can’t do long distance. Not with
you. It’s been three weeks since we last saw each other, and I can’t take it.”
I slipped my arms around his back. He felt so nice, warm and solid.
He felt like mine.
“I can’t take it, either,” I told him. “Having two homes is too hard.”
He kissed me softly on the top of my head. “Then you and I are lucky, because we can make our home wherever we want. It could
be in an RV, or a beach cottage, or this unbelievably dope boat. It doesn’t matter. You know why?”
“Why?”
He pulled back to look into my face. “You and I don’t really need walls. All we need is each other. As long as we’re together,
that’s home. In fact, we’re home right now. Doesn’t it feel good to be here?”
My eyes brimmed with happy tears. “Oh, Seb, I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll make a home with me here, and that you’re not mad that I did this.”
“If you’d bought the boat, I’d be mad. But you did good. Maybe we could make this work . . . ?”
“This is a try-it situation, Paige. We could hate the boat. But we might just love it. And, bonus, it just so happens that Benny discovered chatter on some treasure-hunting message boards about a series of buried gold caches along the Great Loop left by some Canadian fur traders around the Revolutionary War.”
“Seb . . .” I warned.
“Just saying, this summer, if we decided we wanted to take this baby through the Great Lakes, we could renew the rental and
ride it through the countryside. It sleeps four. So Jaz and Benny could join us, and we could just take a little peek at those
Revolutionary War gold caches—”
“A little peek?”
“The littlest!”
“Seb?”
He made a face and braced himself. “Yes . . . ?”
“You can help me move my stuff out of the dorm tomorrow.”
His eyes lit up. “Yeah? Roomies again?”
I nodded, ridiculously happy. “We just need to agree on a few rules . . .”
“Nope, nope, and hell nope,” Seb said. “We only need one rule this time. The golden rule . . .”
“Do unto others?”
He shook his head slowly then flashed me his dimples. “Never leave home.”