by Tom Shepherd
She smiled. “I like history.”
“Girl, you better quit it. You’re hiding something.”
“I’ve got to talk to Dad first.”
“No fair,” Eric said. “Tell us.”
“Beaumont was all mixed up. Mosby’s wife was Pauline, not Paula.”
“So?” I said. “He could’ve forgotten.”
“He also forgot John Singleton Mosby was a Virginian, not a Georgian.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Did Mosby really kill tons of civilians?”
“Au contraire,” Tanella said. “The Gray Ghost was known to derail trains in cuts through small hills so the cars wouldn’t roll. And Union General William Tecumseh Sherman is the one who said, ‘War is hell.’”
Eric grunted. “Even I knew that.”
“Sherman,” I said. “Wasn’t he the guy who marched through Georgia and burned out Scarlet O’Hara’s neighbors?”
“Very good. You remember something from Mr. Lambert’s class.”
“So, Clancey Beaumont didn’t write the book?” Eric said.
“Either that, or he isn’t Clancey Beaumont. Why would a Mosby scholar not show up for a Gray Ghost lecture in his own back yard?”
I said, “Because your dad would have recognized the real Clancey Beaumont.”
“Right. But we still need physical evidence.” She pulled the hotel discount certificate from her belt bag.
“That’s what you were fishing for—you wanted his signature?”
She nodded. “Dad has an autographed copy of the book. From the look of his handwriting, Mr. Beaumont is not the man he used to be.”
“This is getting spooky.” I shivered in the wind.
“I love it!” Eric pedaled hard to catch up. “Let’s call Inspector Borkowski to arrest that fake Beaumont.”
“For what—bad memory, or bad handwriting?” Tanella said.
“Impersonating a hotel owner,” Eric said. “Ain’t that illegal?”
“The real Beaumont may have hired him to run the Gray Ghost.”
“Dog! He could be clean?” Eric said.
“We don’t have enough information.” Tanella adjusted her belt bag then leaned over the handle bars. “Yet.”
We hugged the white centerline in silence for a long while, occasionally swatting at bugs that whizzed by unseen in the darkness. Mosquitoes were stabbing and sucking blood all over my body, even with the stiff breeze tangling their flight patterns. Every few minutes Tanella muttered something about the weather, words like “high tide” and “storm surge.”
By the time the homing device started beeping again, clouds shrouded the moon and the sea wind blew steadily. Eric skidded off the road, waving the direction-finder.
“Here—he turned here!”
We found the mini-truck parked in a gully between two ridges of dunes near Loggerhead Point. Peter Antonucci took the shovels and wicker baskets, but did he trek north along the shoreline or south where the beach fanned into a delta of salt marsh islets sliced by freshwater sloughs?
“If he heads into the marsh, how will we find our way out?” I pulled off my backpack and plopped it on the sand, not relishing the idea of stomping around mosquito heaven after midnight. “The druggies will see my flashlight.”
Eric grinned. “Got that figured out.”
“I can’t wait to hear,” I said.
“Don't need no light. We squirt a little scent on a bush every few feet. Sniff our way home.”
“What kind of scent?”
“Uh...real powerful scent.” He stepped back, beyond my grasp.
“What kind of scent?” I felt the hairs stand up on the nape of my neck.
“Look—I contributed my water laser to this expedition. Least you could do was—”
“My Chloe McKenzie!”
“It smells like bubble gum.”
“Sally Ann…” Tanella reached for my arm but missed. I stalked toward Eric.
“Bubble gum?”
“God!” Eric said. “You are so emotional.”
“Give me my Chloe McKenzie, or the only emotion you’ll experience tonight is death!”
He took a black plastic assault rifle from his pack. The toy had a red orange safety device fastened at the muzzle, to warn people this wasn’t a real weapon. Otherwise it looked lethal. About a foot long with a wire arm rest, which Eric extended and snapped into place. He ejected a frosty container from the place where the bullet clip goes on a real gun. Gardenia scent filled my nostrils, but the pure joy of smelling exquisite perfume did not fill my soul.
“Anyway,” he said, “I had to dilute the stuff with water.”
“Water...you mixed—?”
“Cheap little bottle didn't fill my cartridge.”
“Cheap! It cost me two hundred dollars.”
“You wuz robbed, Cuz.”
“I’m gonna kill him.”
She touched both our shoulders. “Can’t we work this out like civilized, Christian young people?”
“After I claw out his eyes and cram them up his—”
“Sally Ann!” Tanella’s voice pleaded.
“Look,” Eric offered, “I’ll give you my whole bottle of Brut.”
“I want my Chloe.”
“Brut is good stuff.”
“I hate you!”
“Quit yelling,” Eric handed over the machine gun. “Every druggie in Georgia will hear you.”
I gripped the toy gun in both hands, wrapping fingers around the plastic barrel. “Of all the disgusting, evil, ignorant things you’ve done to me in your stupid life, this is... this is the meanest, the nastiest, the most ignorant—”
“Sally Ann, focus!” Tanella grasped my arms. Eric ducked behind her, putting my friend between us.
“It’s so mean—I can’t believe what he did to Chloe.”
“Sally Ann, he’s an only child.” I looked into Tanella’s brown eyes, clearly visible in the moonlight off the white sand. She hurt for me, I could tell. But this was research, and Tanella’s single-mindedness pushed aside her compassion.
“Yeah,” Eric agreed. “You can’t kill no children in Georgia.”
“Focus. We’re here to track Peter Antonucci.” She released her grip. “Can you do that?”
I nodded, still numb with grief from Eric’s defilement of my most prized possession.
“All three of us can’t go after Antonucci,” Tanella pulled out her phone. “Someone must stay here in case we encounter any anomalies.”
“Anomalies?” I said.
“Yeah.” Eric wore a devilish grin. “Stacks of guns, bodies floating in the surf, tons of white death—”
“Quit that! I may still murder you.”
“You’re getting to be an old lady, like Tanella.” He turned to her. “I’m ready to go.”
“Stay,” Tanella told him.
“No way! I want to see the druggies.” He glared at me. “Let ol’ Chicken McCoward here stay.”
Tanella shook her head firmly. “Neither Sally Ann nor I know how to operate your receiver. Do you have the spider bug?”
He fished the bug-monitoring receiver from his bag of tricks. “What’s the plan?”
“We’ll keep the link activated,” she said. “You’ll hear whatever happens. If we get into trouble, we may need you to call Island Club Hotel security. Do you have your cellphone?”
He handed it to Tanella, who punched in what I presumed was the security desk number and cancelled the call, leaving the digits accessible in Eric’s call log. She returned his phone.
“Wow! I’m on stakeout, like the FBI.”
I scowled. “You’re the fire department, bonehead.”
“And you’ll keep the bug exposed, so I can hear what’s happening?” he said.
“Every word.” She poked the spider into the pocket of my T-shirt.
“Feels like a deformed nipple,” I said.
Eric snickered. “That makes three.”
I looked at my friend. She was biting her lip, fighti
ng a laugh. “Take off your backpack. Belt bags only.” Tanella tossed hers behind a clump of sea oats.
“No way. Chloe stays with me.” I slipped my arms through the straps and shook the pack in place. “Mr. Dodo Brain might decide $200 an ounce is the right price for mosquito repellent.”
Tanella and I marched north over the crest of the dune, where the wind smoothed the sand like new-fallen snow. These dunes were outside the heavy foot-traffic areas, so people were allowed to walk on them. Reaching the beach, she dropped to all fours and began crawling. With the full moon and white sand, it seemed like a good idea to present a smaller target to automatic weapons when hunting drug dealers, so I did likewise.
A few yards farther we slithered over a trough of churned up sand, about a foot deep and half as wide as my body length, then the silky surface returned. A few minutes later, Tanella stopped crawling and lay flat. The wind whipped grains of sand in our faces, so I covered my eyes and listened to sand patter off my backpack. Straining into a push-up position, I saw a flashlight beam wiggle across the beach to the south, at the edge of the salt marsh.
Tanella beckoned me with a finger and we retraced our path in the direction of the bouncing stick of light, which kept crisscrossing the beach from surf to dunes, heading our way. Soon we had to stop creeping because Antonucci was getting closer in his sea-to-tree sweeps.
“What’s he looking for, sea shells or drugs?” I whispered.
She popped up on her knees. “His hotel!”
“He’s looking for his hotel?”
“What did Olivia Bennett call Antonucci’s hotel?”
“Caritas or something. Sounds Spanish—”
Tanella jumped up. “Caretta! He’s looking for Caretta caretta.”
“Get down and shut up! He’ll shoot you.”
“Mr. Antonucci!” She trotted toward the little man in his shorts and support hose.
Grabbing my shirt pocket, I squeezed the misshaped nipple. “Eric, call the cops. Tanella has lost it.” I crawled after on trembling elbows.
Eleven
“Mr. Antonucci!”
The man trained his flashlight on Tanella. I waited helplessly for gunfire. “Who is it?” he said. “You shouldn’t be on the beach at night, young lady.”
“I'm Tanella Blake. Have you found any nests?”
“Are you here to help save them, or to poach?”
“How can we help?”
“We?” He swept the darkness until his light found my blonde hair and white face.
That’s Sally Ann Palmer,” Tanella said.
“Hi!” I waved, forcing a grin, certain we were now facing a hurricane of lead. “We didn’t see anything.”
“We’ll help you save them,” Tanella said.
“Save what?” I called above the wind, while still lingering at the far end of what I thought was pistol range.
“Loggerheads,” she said. “Caretta caretta—sea turtles. Remember those leathery eggshells we found?”
“You’re looking for sea turtles on the beach?” I wiped a long strand of hair from my eyes with sandy fingers.
“Your friend isn’t much of a naturalist,” the little man said with his New York accent. He resumed the flashlight sweep.
“Mr. Antonucci, you’re looking in the wrong direction,” Tanella said. “We crossed a fresh furrow up the beach, just south of here.”
“Did you track her?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
He clicked off the light. “Show me.”
Antonucci took us to his stash of shovels and baskets. Tanella chose a pair of spades, leaving me the wicker buckets to stack and haul northward into the dunes. When we found the churned up sand, we huddled together. Peter Antonucci’s voice became a whisper in the wind.
“No lights,” he cautioned. “The Caretta doesn’t like lights when she lays.”
“We’re after turtle eggs?” I puffed under my burden of baskets.
“Sea turtles have been coming ashore here to lay their eggs since dinosaurs grazed these marshes,” he said softly. “They’ve existed as a species for 175 million years.”
“So, why are we after their eggs?” I said. “Turtle eggs good to eat?”
His head froze and his shoulders jerked up, like someone kicked him in the groin. Antonucci gave me the kind of desperate, disappointed look a father might give a daughter caught snorting cocaine in the bathroom.
“It was a genuine question,” Tanella said.
“I’m really very ignorant,” I said.
“She is,” Tanella agreed.
Antonucci continued following the Loggerhead furrow. “They’re excellent food. Turtle egg whites don’t clot like chicken albumen. Makes a fresher, richer cake batter. Until few a years ago, some Florida restaurants specialized in turtle egg pound cakes. Pancakes, too.”
“Sounds yucky.”
“Good. Tell your friends.”
“Why should I badmouth turtle eggs, if they taste so good?”
“Because egg poachers almost killed off the whole population, and extinction is forever,” he said.
“So, if we’re trying to help them not get extinct,” I said, “why are we hunting the survivors?”
We crossed from bare dunes to a ridgeline where sea oats flapped in the stiffening gale.
“Turtles won’t lay in a hurricane, but they’ll come in just beforehand. Sometimes the females get stranded ashore when a big blow hits. If we don’t find her eggs and shift them to high ground, the babies will drown in their shells.”
“We’re going to dig them up?” I said. “Move them in baskets?”
“We’ve got about twenty-four hours after she lays to find the eggs. After that, the embryo sticks to the shell side and any jostling will kill it.” Antonucci side-stepped down the other side into a gully between the dunes.
“Isn’t science wonderful?” Tanella said.
“My arms ache.”
“Drop your backpack.” She plodded down slope after him.
“No way.” I whispered. Taking a deep breath, I started down the steep incline of the dune. “Me an’ you, Chloe. Me, you, and the blessed turtle eggs.”
We followed the gully until we saw her spreading sand with flippers.
“Good. She’s already laid,” Antonucci said, his voice trembling. “Now she’ll pack the mound.”
This Caretta looked big enough for an adult to ride. She turned toward us, rotating at her task and not noticing the human audience. Barnacles crusted her back, gathered during years at sea. But what a smell! We gawked at her, about ten paces away, and even from a distance I could smell the stench of her breath like a barrel of fish guts left to rot in the heat of day. I turned away, gasping for clean air, grateful when Hagar’s long arm scooped a sea breeze into this depression between the dunes.
“Momma turtle needs mouthwash,” I said.
“She sees us, knows we’ve found her nest,” Tanella said. “Why doesn’t she crawl away?”
“Light spooks her, but spectators don’t. Raccoons have been spotted catching the eggs as they’re being laid. She runs on instinct, not intelligence. Incredibly stupid animal. Brain about the size of a grape.”
“Eric,” I said.
We watched the Caretta slide back and forth, smoothing her nest.
“Do you often see people on the beach?” Tanella said.
“Not this late,” Peter Antonucci said. “Oh, maybe a few couples, doing their thing among the sea oats. No poachers so far, thank God.”
“Any aircraft?”
He shrugged. “Helicopters from Fort Stewart occasionally pass over the channel. And there’s some fool in a twin-engine job who likes to play strafe-the-beach. Comes roaring in from the sea without lights, flies low-level along the shore, then veers out to sea again.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Almost every night, between midnight and two A.M. I figure he’s a lone eagle on a cargo run and likes to pretend he’s a combat pilot.”
&nbs
p; “But nobody on the beach?”
“Pretty hard to spot people, even on a moonlit night. But the Glynn County Police patrol these beaches. They’d run anybody off. I’m surprised they didn’t see you.”
The sea turtle finished and started waddle-dragging her big shell up the gully toward a place where the dune slope was easy to climb. Antonucci watched her go, then stuck the point of a spade in the sand at the far rim of the nest mound.
Two hours later we had transplanted one hundred sixty three little white shells to the back of his mini-truck, tucked them under a blanket of sand, and stashed the shovels and empty baskets behind the driver’s seat. I saw Tanella deftly pluck the spider “bug” from the floor of the truck’s cab. Antonucci had not suspected how we found him that night.
“Thanks for your help, kids. I’ll bury them inside a fenced enclosure on the high dunes behind my hotel. Electrified wire to keep the ‘coons and wild hogs away.”
“Will they survive the hurricane?” Tanella said.
“Depends. In heavy gale—Category Four or higher—the whole island could go under like a submarine. The fenced dune mound is only twenty-four feet above sea level.”
“Why not move them higher?” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s the highest elevation on Barrier Island.”
“Mr. Antonucci, one more question,” Tanella said. “Did you spend any time with Carsten O’Malley last night?”
He studied Tanella for a moment, as if seeing her for the first time.
“You’re the kid Inspector Borkowski says is playing detective. Look, I appreciate your help tonight, but I don’t want to talk about Carsten.”
“Did you know him well?”
He nodded, but said no more.
Watching Antonucci drive away, I remembered I’d told Eric to call the cops. Fortunately, the little turkey was asleep twenty feet from the place where Antonucci parked his truck. I poured sand from my Nikes while Tanella nudged Eric with a foot. That’s when I heard the airplane engine from seaward.
“Let’s go!” Tanella said.
Abandoning her attempt to rouse my cousin, she pulled out her phone and flew over the dune ridge while I tugged a shoe over sand-filled socks, grabbed the straps of my pack, and galloped after her. Tanella stopped on the ocean side of the slope. In the dark, even with my eyes adjusted to the night, I nearly crashed into her.