A Touch of Gold Read Free Page A

always love your stories.”
    “We both know they’re so much more than stories,” he said with another glance at his watch. “They keep the history of Duck alive, Dae. Without our past, we have no future.”
    One of the teachers saved me from an intense lecture on the importance of Duck history by coming over and thanking Max for his program. She was a newcomer to Duck, one of many who came for a vacation one summer and decided to stay. They added to our increased population of almost six hundred full-time residents.
    It may sound small, but for a scrap of land hemmed in by water that could rise up at anytime and wash us all away, it was a lot. It was the largest population Duck had ever known. The town was becoming more popular as a tourist destination every year. We didn’t have the wild horses of Corolla or the lighthouse at Hatteras, but we were sandwiched in between on the one-hundred-mile stretch of land, brought together by a narrow ribbon of road.
    Some people liked the growth. Others were unhappy about it and wanted things to stay the same. The one thing I’d learned in my thirty-six years was that nothing ever stayed the same.
    It was almost time for the story adventure to be over. The teachers gathered the kids together and thanked Max for his time. They were equally enthusiastic in their thanks to Agnes for her cupcakes. I knew Agnes enjoyed these moments as much as Max. Their daughters still lived in Duck, but neither of them were married yet. No grandchildren.
    As the teachers took the kids to the bathroom before leaving to walk back to Duck Elementary School, I helped Agnes throw away the cupcake wrappers and empty juice boxes.
    Max paced the floor, continually looking at his watch. He was obviously nervous about meeting what could be an ancestor of Aaron Burr. It would either validate his life’s work or turn into another joke that Sam Meacham could throw at him in the bar at night. I supposed that would be enough to make anyone nervous.
    “He’s got everything riding on this DNA,” Agnes told me when we walked out to the trash cans. “Damn fool went ahead and told Sam about the whole thing, of course. He’ll crash and burn for sure if it isn’t true.”
    “Let’s hope it works out then.” I took the lid off the trash can. “He and Sam really like to argue about Theo Burr, don’t they?”
    “And everything else.” She stuffed the trash in the can. “They argue about which town was settled first, Duck or Corolla. Which museum has the oldest artifacts. Honestly, they act like little kids with their toys.”
    Before I put the lid back on the trash can, I bent down and picked up a scrap of paper from the ground. It was one of the coffee cards they punched at the Coffee House and Book Store. It seemed odd to me because Max and Agnes didn’t drink coffee. As I tossed it into the can and put on the lid, I decided it was probably something a visitor had left.
    As Agnes and I walked back around the front of the plain little building that had been donated to the Duck Historical Society, I recalled the old store that had been here, a place where we used to buy chips and soft drinks. Someday no one would remember that little store. Agnes was right. Everything was changing too quickly.
    Near the front door of the building, a large statue of a duck that had been used to promote tourism stood beside a statue of a horse. Both had become animal icons in this area. There were two rusted cannons legend said had washed up on Duck’s shore back in the 1700s. Several cannonballs were stuck in concrete around them.
    The old museum was cool and musty smelling when we went back inside. The light was too dim to really see everything the historical society had managed to piece together through the years. But I was proud of this little place anyway. It represented the heritage of everyone who’d been born here. From pirates to wild horses, all of it was part of our past.
    The teachers were getting the kids lined