His Drowned Grandmother

They told Tommy his grandmother drowned in the great storm of 1839. They told him for twenty-eight years. Then the dredge came up through the family plot, and the coffin they opened held a man in a sailor's coat with a Spanish coin over each eye. Tommy is twelve. He has a coin in his pocket, a pawnbroker's word for it, and a man following him home. Every quarter, someone pays his family to say nothing. Every quarter for twenty-eight years. His grandmother didn't drown. She knew where a ship went down. And the men who sank it are still in Liverpool, still counting. A Victorian historical horror mystery about the price of a secret.