“She’ll come around,” Pop told him. They were in the shop with McKee, working on a waste-oil still they’d started last fall, then put on the back burner when the airplane began to take up space. “Quicker if they find Miss Earhart of course, but however it works out, she ain’t going to stay in her pajammies forever.”
“Think they might actually find her?” He himself had had nagging doubts from the get-go. He didn’t let on to his cousin, but Pop did tend to see things with a broader view.
“I wouldn’t put my last dollar on it, exactly. But this ain’t the first time somebody went missing in the ocean only to turn back up again.”
“Sister,” said McKee.
Pop glanced at him, then back to Huck. “Yep. You remember it, I’m sure.”
McKee shook his head. “Nope. Annelise does, I know that. But we didn’t get much for news to speak of, where I was brought up.”
“I remember it,” Huck said. “A little, anyway.”
“Do you? You were a little shaver, back then. Three, maybe? Even my memory’s a little fuzzy.”
“No, I do. Mostly because of Ma.”
Pop nodded. “She took to her bed for a few days, too. Anyone with any sense just assumed the woman had drowned on the beach in California, when lo and behold here she is marching out of Mexico a thousand miles away. Nobody saw that one coming.”
All three went quiet, each of them appearing to study some private aspect of the waste-oil contraption, but Huck at least mulling in his mind the likelihood of the missing Amelia pulling off an Aimee McPherson–style resurrection clear down in the watery South Pacific.
McKee was evidently thinking the same thing. “How long was it, between the time she up and vanished and the day she showed again?”
“A while. Six weeks? Point is, this thing with Miss Earhart may not look real promising, but that don’t mean it’s over. Hell, half the U.S. Navy’s out there hunting for her.”
“And working in one big bucket of water, don’t forget.” McKee stood from his haunches. “Not trying to be a half-empty guy myself, but I don’t know what good it does to give our girl in the pajamas anything other than the straight dope.”
Roy nodded. “Expect you’re right. Anyway, anybody who mollycoddles Annelise does it at his own risk. And she will come back up, or I don’t know her like I think I do.”
She’d forgotten about the watches, the satchel, the shot-up cars, everything, in the shock and angst of the past few days. Also in her febrile race up and down the radio dial.
At night she’d slept fitfully, though deeply enough a time or two to descend into dreams. Not very good ones—in one she wound up corkscrewing toward the ground in a falling airplane, slamming awake with her heart in her throat at the moment of impact.
In another, she’d been kidnapped off the dark walk by the goons, spirited to a shack somewhere deep in the desert. Mexico, she was sure of it, although the passing of time from the abduction to the hideaway happened in an impossible blink.
What did drag on was the time she spent bound to a chair in an otherwise empty room. She could hear a steady conversation on the other side of the door, but make out only occasional words—vanished, ocean, search party. Eventually it dawned on her that she wasn’t hearing the voices of her captors, she was hearing the persistent thrum of a radio broadcast. She began to work against the rope at her wrists.
She could feel the bind on her skin but mostly as a peripheral figment to the drone of the radio, which she strained to hear. Then somehow she was free and projected forward, crouched at the door, still trying to hear the finer details of the broadcast. Finally she cautioned a turn on the doorknob.
The door creaked. She peered in, left then right. Only the radio, with its little light glowing. An announcer prattled away about the rescue effort, how the offer of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward was now implicated in the drowning deaths of two searchers off Venice Beach, and how another ransom note from a self-declared kidnapper turned out to be yet another hoax.
Venice Beach? Ransom notes? Then it struck her—the news reporter was confusing Amelia with Aimee. This was old news indeed, the opposite of anything that could qualify as an update.
She spun the dial, screeched to a halt at the next broadcast.
. . . meanwhile at Angelus Temple, mourners from across the country have gathered to . . .
She spun again, this time landing on the voice of Sister herself, a performance of the old perennial “Heavenly Aeroplane.” She spun again.
The airwaves were utterly dominated by Aimee McPherson, either wildly outdated news of her disappearance or evangelizing broadcasts from the woman herself. It was like Amelia Earhart had never existed, let alone vanished on a record-setting flight. She felt a flare of rage, pulled the infernal lying radio off the stand and hurled it across the room.
The radio hit the wall by a mirror she hadn’t noticed before, knocking it askew, and when she started forward in the same righteous fury, intending to smash the fallen radio to smithereens, she caught a glimpse of herself in the silver glass and stopped cold. Not herself at all, but Sister Aimee, staring back from within the crooked gilded frame.
The hard suck of her own shocked breath wrenched her out of sleep. The Zenith from the shop glowed at her from the night table, crackling with static. This time she didn’t reach for the dial.
By morning she’d finally tired of her own anxiety. In one way she hated to admit it, as though such a realization—not actual insight, not any sort of intuition or revelation, but abject boredom, of all things—constituted a betrayal against not only Amelia but also her own ideals.
She fought it for a while. Tried to will herself to keep on as though vigil itself were a rescue attempt. But her brain wasn’t working anymore. Her thoughts and her feelings ricocheted like delirious bullets, fired by some artificially alert psychopath.
Part of the delirium and maybe the foggy acuity as well came down to simple lack of sustenance. A couple of days of privation and her stomach had begun to squawk like a gaping baby bird.
But what on earth was A.E. eating out there? Certainly not the steady procession of scrambled eggs or Texas hash that Roy kept carting in. She tried to steel herself out of solidarity, told herself she’d eat when Amelia could too.
It didn’t last. She could smell bacon from the breakfast Roy had dutifully brought for her. She found herself peering over the cliff edge of the bed at the plate on the floor, the rashers gone cold but nevertheless a supreme distraction. Maybe even a temptation—she hadn’t touched the radio dial in the better part of an hour, could hardly listen to anything besides her own petulant belly. Finally she reached for the plate.
She thought she’d stare a moment at the shriveled brown bacon in its glaze of grease and then leave it uneaten in moral triumph. She’d continue with her mission of solidarity, depriving herself for the cause. She never had lacked for willpower.
Then again, she’d never lacked for a square meal, either. Before she knew it the bacon crumbled in her mouth, then half the strip went down in a gulp. Her belly groaned, a sound with an almost carnal satisfaction. She didn’t think about guilt and she didn’t think about consequence, she just wolfed the glorious smoky remainder and scrambled over the edge for more.
She knelt on the floor in her pajamas and cleared the plate like a soup-line hobo, cold eggs and stale toast and all. She actually licked the empty porcelain, tongue lapping like a famished dog’s, and finally, when there was nothing left, she set the thing woozily aside. She lowered herself on the floor, drawing great draughts of glorious air.
She stared at the ceiling, watching a spider track across the plaster. She wondered what was truly superior, a long life span or the ability to stomp around upside down.
Her head lolled sideways. The radio played on, a piano concerto that would no doubt go on awhile, but she didn’t reach for the dia
l because she noticed something else. The slim satchel from the Model A, tucked under the bed with the dust motes and a stray sock and her collapsed travel valise.
McKee had brought it into town from the barn. Annelise couldn’t remember carting it into the bedroom in all the panic over Amelia, but evidently she had. She reached over and pulled it to her. The concerto played on.
She dumped the diary into her lap and saw something she hadn’t noticed before: a pair of keys on a length of cord, dangling out of the upended satchel. One appeared to be a simple padlock key, but the other looked more like the one that opened her father’s safe-deposit box. She brought her palm up so the key lay flat. The number 1260 was stamped into the bow.
She set the satchel aside and took up the diary, leafed again through the pages. Most were blank from about the midpoint on, with notions in that inscrutable code or shorthand in the forward half. She flipped to the inside cover.
Chas. H. Angle
Box 1260
2310 Montana, Billings
The time had come to spill it to the police, now that they had an actual name. Just tell it like it happened. She’d been jumped in the dark and had her watch stolen, only it hadn’t been the right watch, because, rare as the thing was and unbeknownst to anyone otherwise, Houston had pilfered an identical Hour Angle Lindbergh model from the dead guy in the riv—
There was no Chas. H. Angle. No Detective Blank, and no Charles Angle. A bulb flashed in her brain and she simply knew it, as surely as she knew her own name. She looked at the number on the key, same as the number on the page.
Centered at the bottom was an odd little legend: X__/__/__.
Except for the X it almost looked like the standard format for a month/date/year notation, minus the actual numerals. Or the sequence for a high school locker combination, again without the numbers.
Chas. H. Angle. Charles Hour Angle. Charles’s Hour Angle? She frowned at the watch on her wrist. The rotating bezel around the perimeter did indeed resemble a combination lock, numbers and all. Was there some trick to the alignment of the thing, to reveal a particular sequence? That wouldn’t make sense, though, or they wouldn’t have needed the goon’s watch back when they had Blix’s identical one.
The tumblers inside her brain fell into place. She clawed at the strap and got it unbuckled. She pried the hinged back open.
She was on her feet and heading for the garage. Behind her the concerto began to fade. Nobody was going to the police after all.
Pop barely predicted it and here she was, barreling back into the shop. Huck wished Pop hadn’t just rolled out for the ranch, so he could see it, too.
“Back among the living,” McKee said. “Still in your jammies, though. What’s the news?”
“I don’t know. I quit listening, in the interest of my own sanity.” She had the diary from the goons’ Ford in one hand, Blix’s Longines in the other. “Do you have the other watch?”
“It’s inside,” Huck told her.
“Drag it out here.” She held up the book and started for the office. “I think I know why they wanted it back. Come here.”
When he returned from the bungalow, she and McKee had the diary open on the desk.
“Looks like a brand, there at the bottom,” said Huck. “Not sure how to read it, though.”
“It’s no brand, and that’s not a mailing address up above.” She set her watch facedown on the page, its back cover still open. “I think it’s a combination. Let me see yours.”
Huck handed her the other watch. She set this one facedown as well, so the engraved legend on the back of the case faced up.
LONGINES LINDBERGH
INVENTED BY
Col. Chas. A. Lindbergh
HOUR ANGLE WATCH
“Look at the name in the diary. Chas. H. Angle. Charles, as in Lindbergh. H. as in Hour.” She gave him a prodding look, chin down and her eyes angled dramatically. Despite their hawklike gleam, he could see how haggard she looked. Four days, no sleep.
“Charles’s Hour Angle,” he said.
“It’s an inside joke. All it does is refer to the watch.” She tapped the script on the page with the key. “This is the key to a safe-deposit box. Which means 2310 Montana is probably the address of a bank.”
“If memory serves,” said McKee, “that’s the street number for the Billings depot.” He pulled the telephone directory out of the desk and thumbed to the right page. “Bingo.”
“Okay, there are security boxes in train stations, too. Look at the serial numbers. They’re both seven digits long, and they both begin with the number five. Except for the other six numbers, these two watches are ringers. What if the X is meant to cancel out the first five and leave the other numbers as the integers to a combination lock? That would explain why my watch—Blix’s watch—wouldn’t stand in for theirs.”
McKee chewed the corner of his mouth. “You have some notion of these bank boxes?”
“Yes, we have one. Or my father does. Some of them take two keys, one held by the bank, and one”—she flipped her fingers at the key on the thong—“by the box holder, who also sets a dial combination for himself.”
Evidently she still had a pang at her heart, because he watched her well up and blink it back again.
“Last year, on my birthday, he showed me where he keeps the key. He made me . . . memorize the combination, in case something happened to him. I guess he trusted me.”
Huck felt himself start, but he caught himself and managed to stay mum. Pop had sworn him to silence on his own birthday just last year, with an oddly similar secret. He’d taken Huck down into the root cellar at the ranch and worked a loose fieldstone out of the wall, pulled a quart Mason jar out of the cavity behind. The jar was about half full with gold coins. Pop dumped a few into his hand.
Reckon you know these aren’t legal these days.
Huck remembered nodding, remembered people hauling eagles and gold notes down to the Farmers’ Bank to turn them in for new paper scrip when President Roosevelt outlawed private gold possession. But not Pop, evidently.
Ma know about these?
Hell no. If it was up to her, she’d have turned them over faster than you can say “render unto Caesar.” That’s why I’m letting you in, in case something happens to me.
In truth, at face value the coins in the jar amounted to only a few hundred dollars, which hardly seemed to qualify as any kind of a hoard. They were pretty neat, though, nearly like a pirate’s treasure. Two of them went back to the 1850s.
What was the point of ordering people to give these up, anyway? Seems kind of fishy.
Pop snorted. I wish I had an answer for you, other than never trust a politician. Or the banker he works for.
Now he bit his tongue and looked at McKee, and McKee was not looking at Annelise. He studied instead the numbers inside Blix’s watch. “So if I’m following, our hapless bad guys have already tried twenty-five-twelve-zero-nine.”
She seemed to resurface. “What? Yes, assuming I’m right on this.”
“It’s a dial combination, like on the school lockers?”
She shrugged. “My father’s is.”
“They wanted this particular watch back pretty dern bad,” said McKee. “It’s as good a theory as any.”
Huck thought of something else. “Why would the guys in his own gang not know the combo, though? Seems kinda shaky.”
She wiped one of her eyes, but her voice had steadied again. “Oh, I don’t know. All that Tom Sawyer, blood-and-honor-among-thieves business? That is the joke. I doubt a real gangster would trust his own grandmother.”
“She’s right,” said Yak. “The less the hired help knows, the less they have to sell him downriver with.”
“Didn’t work in this case. He done went downriver on his own.”
Annelise laughed, even though she swiped at her eye
s again. Her hair had grown out since spring, and she twisted a curl around her finger and stretched it like a tempered coil. She shifted her eyes to take it in. “I’m going to wash my hair and put myself together. I think we need to go for a drive.”
Four hours later she walked alone across the marble floor of the Northern Pacific depot in Billings, Houston and McKee in the panel truck outside. She’d washed her curls and lined her eyes. She wore the best summer dress she’d brought from home, black-and-white patent leather heels tapping down below and the leather satchel tucked like a purse beneath her arm.
It struck her as she made her way for the ticket counter that she had not returned to Billings since Uncle Roy whisked her away from this very station back in the spring. The intervening four months may as well have been four years. She told the clerk she wanted to rent a security-deposit box. He pointed her to the U.S. Mail office at the other end of the building.
Two minutes later she stood before the postmaster, a shuffling old gent with a paper collar and sleeve garters straight out of the Gilded Nineties. He studied her through wire spectacles perched so far forward on the tip of his nose, he had to tilt his head back to take her in. “Do you have mail?”
“I do not,” she told him. “I need to open my deposit box. Number twelve-sixty.”
He shuffled off again into the back and returned a few moments later with a key and a ledger book, a fairly large one. He tilted his head back from that as well, flipped around a bit, and finally ran a knurled finger down a page. “And you are, Miss—?”
She had the name on her tongue, the only logical guess if it came down to it. Again she twisted a curl around a finger. “Angle. Charlotte H.”
Despite the ridge of arthritic knuckles, he pincered the pencil from his ear as delicately as a florist might pluck an errant petal from an otherwise perfect rose.
Cloudmaker Page 30