Free Black Jack: A nail biting, hair-raising thriller (Jack Ryder Book 4) by Willow Rose

disappeared.
    “You think we’ll ever see her again?” I asked.
    “Part of me hope we won’t,” Shannon said.
    “And the other part?”
    “Wants to run after that car and tell them to bring her back here.”
    I looked at my bride to be and felt such deep love for her. She was holding Tyler on her arm.
    “You feel that too huh?”
    “I couldn’t stand the way they carried her away like that. And she clearly didn’t know who they were. Did you see that look on her face? She was so confused. Shouldn’t she be able to remember them?”
    I shrugged and caressed my drooling son gently on the cheek. “I don’t know. It’s been five years. She was very young when she disappeared. No one knows what’s going on in that little girl’s mind and what she’s able to remember and what she’s not. I mean being taken from her parents five years ago must have been quite the trauma for her. Maybe she blocked out all memories from before then simply to survive?”
    Shannon put her head on my shoulder. Tyler was fussing and she tried to make him calm down. When she didn’t succeed I told her to hand him to me. I looked into he eyes of my beautiful baby and wondered how I would react if he was kidnapped.
    I couldn’t even finish the thought.
    Shannon’s hand landed on my shoulder. “We have done everything we can. There really isn’t anything else we could have done. I mean the girl is back with her real parents.”
    I nodded and kissed her. We had to let it go. Both of us.
    “So should we order in?” I asked.
    “Or…” Shannon said with glistering eyes.
    “Or we could go out!” I said. “Now that Betsy Sue isn’t with us, it’s a lot easier.”
    Shannon threw herself in one of the old couches, her Ipad in her hand. “I’ll find a place. Somewhere that is fun for the kids too.”
    “Oh what about the Pirate House? Someone recommended that to me,” I said. “It’s supposed to be haunted and everything.”
    “What place around her isn’t?” Shannon said and I couldn’t stop thinking about Betsy Sue and the boy she said was constantly by my side. I didn’t believe in ghosts yet I felt a chill run down my spine while Shannon called to make reservations for us.

Chapter 22
    M ay 2016
    The Pirate’s House was a restaurant that had been there since 1753. The small building adjoining the Pirate’s House was said to be the oldest house in the State of Georgia. Situated a block from the Savannah River, The Pirate's House first opened, as an inn for seafarers, and fast became a rendezvous for bloodthirsty pirates and sailors from the Seven Seas. Here seamen drank their grog and discoursed sailor fashion on their exotic high seas adventures from Singapore to Bombay and from London to Port Said.
    At least that’s what the sign at the entrance said. I was reading it while we were waiting to be seated at the very popular place. The kids were already running all over the place, yelling and acting like pirates stomping the old wooden planks and talking to the pirate statues like they were part of the game. Well my kids did. Angela stayed close to her mother as always, looking dazzled and amused by Austin’s goofiness.
    A guy dressed up like a pirate approached them and started telling the tale of how the tunnels underneath the restaurant were used to transport shanghaied seamen to the boats. They were drugged and captured at the Pirate’s House, then shuttled to waiting pirate ships via a secret tunnel where they’d wake up far out to sea.
    “Stories still persist of a tunnel extending from the Old Rum Cellar beneath the Captain's Room to the river through which these men were carried, drugged, and unconscious, to ships waiting in the harbor,” he told them making his voice scary and piratish. “A Savannah policeman - so legend has it - stopped by The Pirate’s House for a friendly drink and awoke on a four-master schooner sailing to China from where it took him two years to make his way back to