Mrs. Pease got a peculiar expression on her face halfway through her lunch. She was short and round with dimpled elbows and dimpled knees and short curly white hair. She slid her glasses low on her nose and squinted into her soup. “There’s something staring at me in here.”

Her husband looked over her shoulder. “I don’t see anything.”

“Right there.” She pointed with her spoon. “It’s a little bitty eyeball.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “What would an eyeball be doing in your soup?”

Ace jumped to Mrs. Pease’s side and dipped his spoon into her mug. “Okay, where is it? Where’s this eyeball from outer space?” He held the spoon an inch from his nose and studied its contents. “That’s not an eyeball. That’s a black-eyed pea.” He fired the object off his spoon slingshot style, and a seagull caught it in midair. “Seagulls love black-eyed peas,” he told Mrs. Pease. He looked at Stephanie and mouthed the word “eight.”

Stephanie took a biscuit and avoided looking in Ivan’s direction.

“Our captain is staring,” Ace said. “You think he knows it was an eyeball?”

“Not a chance.”

“He looks intense,” Ace said. “I’ve only seen him look like that one time before. It was when Andy Newfarmer’s dog lifted his leg on Ivan’s new all-weather boots, and Ivan was in them.”

Stephanie nibbled on the biscuit. “What’s Ivan like? Have you known him long?”

“Ivan’s first-class. Comes from an old seafaring family. His grandfather and great- grandfather were captains of coasting schooners, and people tell me Ivan’s a descendant of Red Rasmussen, the pirate. Supposedly, Ivan’s house, Haben, is haunted by the ghost of Red’s widow. Lucy said Ivan sold the house this summer.”

Great, Stephanie thought, I bought a haunted house. Another point of interest the real estate lady failed to mention.

A gust of wind rattled the sails, Ivan spun the wheel, the ship leaned into the wind and surged ahead, and Stephanie found herself watching Ivan, trying to sort through a mixture of uncomfortable emotions.