The Bermuda Shipwreck

by Eric Murphy

  At the entrance to the park, Will again spun around to see if he was being followed. Two powerful arms slammed into him from behind and pinned him. He was caught. His knees buckled.

  “Will McCoy, what on earth has gotten into you to disappear like that? Are you completely crazy?” shrieked Harley, who had twirled him around. “You don’t like Yeats, that’s fine. But don’t you ever pull a little hissy-fit like that again and, damn it all Will, you scared me. Really scared me. I thought —” She stabbed his chest with her finger and he could see she was near tears and unable to finish her sentence.

  His message scrawled in yogurt had faded in the bright sun. All Will could do was pull her into the park and away from sight.

  “Harley, sorry, sorry, really, I, they, those two, they, oh, wow. That was close,” he blurted, stopping to catch his breath.

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her across the street to where they’d locked their bikes. He flicked his thumb up Reid Street.

  “I saw Bennett walking across the park and wanted to follow him to the boat so we could, you know, call the police with proof that we — well anyway, he didn’t go there, to his boat. He went to the archives, doing research I think is related to the wreck we were diving on. They were chasing me. Bennett and Drury. I just left them two blocks that way. Drury’s got a scooter and I don’t want to be anywhere near him. I don’t know if he’s crazy enough to pull a gun in broad daylight but I don’t want to find out, do you? Now go. I’m right behind you.”

  Harley frowned, peered down Reid Street, not looking the least bit convinced. She whipped her keys out, unlocked her bike, and pushed it down Queen Street and across Front Street past the uniformed officer who was posing with a new group of tourists.

  Harley turned left before hopping on and pedaling with Will right on her heels.

  Will picked up the pace, passing Harley to lead them into a car park that ran along the water. The cars shielded them from view as they headed back out of town. Harley’s face was set in angry determination. That was fine with Will, as long as they got away.

  At a big pavilion by the water’s edge they heard very loud drumming, whistles and horns blowing. They coasted to a stop and pushed their bikes to the edge of a raised, tented area where a dozen costumed people were running and jumping in front of a throng of tourists. The performers were dressed in costumes made up of strips of fabric in bright pinks, blues, greens, and yellows. They wore tall hats made of feathers and had masks that hid their faces, which made it all a bit spooky.

  Will and Harley heard a woman call to her husband, “Come on honey, the Gombeys are performing.” The Gombeys? What on earth are the Gombeys? wondered Will as he pedaled, hoping Harley would calm down once they reached Windy Farm.

  Dinner at Windy Farm wasn’t as boisterous as lunch had been. Harley was still upset with him and wasn’t very talkative. Yeats looked upset because she had removed his hand from hers. Well good, thought Will. Now he knows how I feel.

  Will volunteered for kitchen clean up. When he had finished, Yeats told him Harley had gone to bed. Will saw the light on beneath her door, but decided against trying to explain things further till the morning.

  The shower he took made him feel much better. He said, “I sank some boats and set fire to the port today, Humbert.”

  The parrot answered, “You betcha.” He slept in a pair of running shorts with the mosquito net overhead. He was anxious to read the rest of the letter but promised himself he wouldn’t get into it until he could share it with Harley.

  He would have had a peaceful sleep if it hadn’t been for the dream he had about Papineau Benoit’s fight.

  Chapter Eleven

  A Confederate Town

  Patch screw: One of the first propellers made for ships that succeeded the paddle wheel boats, powered by coal-fired steam. John Patch of Shelburne, Nova Scotia tried to patent his design, only to have it stolen and patented years later while he died in debtor’s prison in 1862.

  Will knew he was having a dream because the man sitting back in the barber’s chair with his feet up on a stool was Papineau Benoit, the same man whose picture was on the calling card.

  The stocky barber was a black man with a light complexion and huge sideburns that swept down his broad face like the blades of hockey sticks and rested just above his chin. He finished shaving Papineau’s face with a straight razor, then retrieved a hot steaming towel from the clay pot sitting at the front of the kitchen’s fireplace, which gave off an occasional crackle. He toweled off the last bits of shaving cream.

  Papineau nodded to a notebook whose page was full of corrections. “I see you continue to take lessons, Joseph.” The barber nodded and said, “It is hard for a man to be the author of his own destiny if he can’t read or write.”

  The barber’s small hands snip, snip, snipped away with such speed that they resembled brown butterflies hovering around Papineau’s head. The captain read a letter and didn’t look happy about its contents. He folded it and placed it on a nearby table.

  The barber held the mirror up for Papineau and asked, “Everything all right, Mr. Papineau?”

  “Disturbing news from home. But it pales in comparison to what the world is going through.” He looked at his reflection in the mirror and nodded his approval, saying, “Yes, that will do nicely, Joseph. I sail for Charleston in the morning but will look in on you upon my return in a few weeks.”

  Joseph the barber spun the big cape off of his client’s shoulder, shaking cut hair to the ground. Papineau pivoted his legs off the stool, standing up stiffly as he pulled coins from his pocket.

  The barber swept the hair from around the spindled chair and, without looking up, said, “Now, Mr. Benoit, you know your money’s no good in this establishment.”

  Papineau stacked the coins on the table by the letter, then adjusted his shirt and refastened the top button. The barber rested his broom on the wall so he could pick up the notebook, opened to a page full of spelling and grammatical corrections.

  Nodding to the coins, Papineau said, “Remember, Joseph, you need to be treating Susan to an occasional delight. Man has to know how to treat his wife with a little indulgence now and then, isn’t that right? Did I hear that Susan’s making a dress for Georgina Walker? What wouldn’t I give to be a fly on that wall?”

  The barber let out a sigh and smiled as he nodded.

  “At a dinner I attended, I heard Georgina Walker complain that black Bermudian women greet her as an equal,” added Papineau as he pulled on his jacket.

  “Well,” said Joseph, brushing the jacket’s shoulders, “She is married to the Southern Consul, and their stated purpose is to maintain slavery. Imagine that’d be a hard thing to do if you thought the person you kept in chains and whipped was your equal.”

  The door flew open and a frail man with a beard and a smock flecked in paint poked his stricken face inside. Speaking with a British accent he blurted, “Mr. Benoit, come quick, Villiers Rougemont and his men are attacking poor Mr. Allen. When he tried to stop them from cutting down the American flagpole, six men beat him to the ground. Please hurry, before —”

  Despite his limp, Papineau sprang past the painter.

  Rainey leaned into the fireplace, reached under the mantel, removed a brick, pulled out a small steel box and clinked the coins into it. He hesitated a second, then also stuffed Papineau’s letter in the box before putting it back. Rainey tossed his striped barber’s apron onto the table and charged behind, asking, “Where is he, Mr. James?”

  The painter clapped his straw hat back on his head and scurried behind, yelling, “Over by Penno’s Wharf.”

  Six men huddled around a man lying on the ground beside a flagpole rising like a mast above the wharf. The men passed around a bottle of rum and laughed. The one with the ponytail was wound up to kick the stricken man when Papineau’s thick hands spun the bully around.

  Papineau tapped his broad, high forehead against the bully’s then pushed him back, holding him at arm�
��s length.

  “Enough, Villiers. Take your hooligans and be off with you, d’you hear, man?”

  The laughter stopped as the others watched Villiers Rougemont pull a small, double-barreled pistol from his jacket, cock the hammer, and jam it into Papineau’s ribs.

  “How about I blow your guts all over Penno’s Wharf, Papineau?” hissed Villiers.

  Joseph arrived and parted the cluster so he could tend to the fallen man. He yanked a handkerchief from his pocket, using it to wipe blood from the victim’s forehead.

  “You’d be charged with murder, Mr. Rougemont,” said Joseph to the gunman. “Shooting a blockade-running captain isn’t the same as shooting a black man. ’Sides, you’ll find a heap o’ trouble from Major Walker if’n you kill one of his most successful captains. That’s the truth of the matter.”

  The painter pointed his hat at the gunman. “Local sympathies for the Confederacy won’t save you from hanging if you pull that trigger. As God is my witness.”

  A policeman parted the farthest group of onlookers who had stopped at the dock to watch. Seeing him, Villiers slipped his gun back into his vest pocket, and smiled a crooked smile as he waved his drunken fellows away.

  Papineau helped Joseph pull the traumatized man to his feet. “Are you all right, Mr. Allen?”

  Despite his dark beard, the man looked pale and was so unsteady on his feet that Papineau and Joseph each draped one of his arms over their respective shoulders as they walked him away.

  “They didn’t get my flagpole this time,” said Mr. Allen with a small smile.

  “How did we come to this?” asked Joseph the barber, shaking his head.

  “I will tell you, Joseph, how we came to this. We lost sight of the one element that makes America a great country,” said Allen. “We have lost the ability to compromise and will be forever cursed as a nation until we recover that faculty. And our enemies will feast on our bones as we fight amongst ourselves.”

  “Come, let’s get you home and I’ll put the kettle on for some tea,” said the painter as he led the way. He turned to Papineau and Joseph and whispered, “Somebody should take a straight razor to Villiers Rougemont’s throat.”

  Will jerked awake and sat up in bed, his hand to his throat.

  After breakfast, Will and Harley were asked to help exercise some of the horses boarded at Windy Farm. “The room and board charged to keep these horses helps defray the costs of running the center. We also sell the manure to local gardeners and grow our own vegetables to keep expenses down,” explained Dr. Doan as they left their dirty plates on the counter and headed to the barn.

  Inside, Harley grinned as she tapped a sign over the office door that read, “A woman’s place is on a horse.” On the office’s inside wall hung a bow and arrows. The bow wasn’t the kind the participants used. This bow looked like a curly bracket and had pulleys at either end. When used in tandem, pulleys, as Will knew from sailing, allowed the user to exert greater force than he or she expended. In this case, the bowman could pull the string back quite far with little actual effort. The system compounded the user’s strength, hence the name compound bow.

  It also had a carrier that held three arrows. But these weren’t target arrows, unless the target had four legs and could find its way into an oven with baked potatoes, thought Will. The three sides to these tips looked razor sharp and likely not easy to pull out of a body on the receiving end.

  Harley had taken riding lessons for a few years so she knew her way around a horse. Her mood had improved after a good night’s rest.

  Yeats showed Will how to tack up and mount a horse. He explained that it was mostly a question of balance, and that was achieved through the knees. They walked their horses through the open paddock because it was overcast and the sun wasn’t that hot.

  Will was shown how to hang on to the mane if all else failed, a decision that could make the difference between being thrown or keeping one’s saddle.

  Will trotted for a while then watched as Yeats and Harley cantered around the paddock. After a few minutes, Will asked to try cantering, so Yeats helped him do it. It was thrilling and he didn’t fall. They took the horses back to their stalls, tethered them to the middle with lines on either side of their bridles, and groomed them. While cleaning the horses’ hooves, Will commented on how some of the horses’ shoes looked new. Yeats said his father had shoed the horses during his last visit. His father had put himself through university by working as a farrier and continued to shoe horses in Maine on a part-time basis, mostly during the summer when he didn’t teach university classes.

  Harley mentioned he should be aware of the back legs of a horse because, if spooked, its instinct was to kick, “And that won’t be as much fun as it sounds.” Yeats warned them against banging the stalls. To make his point, Yeats slammed the flat of his hand on a nearby stall and a rescue donkey called Tempest, standing in the last stall, leaned forward and gave his door a powerful kick that rattled the beams. Tempest didn’t like loud banging.

  Yeats drove a narrow truck into the barn and asked them to shift bags of manure from the truck to a dedicated area of the hayloft. This soupy manure in the plastic bags was sold to island gardeners.

  Once Yeats was gone to his archery class, a bus pulled in with a group of participants who were met by their blue-shirted volunteers. Will tapped Harley on the shoulder and pointed to one of the volunteers who was coming over. It was Aubrey. Before he even made it to the front of the bus, Jason ran over, took him by the hand, and led him over to his mount in the paddock.

  The therapeutic riders were out of sight when they heard a car pull into the parking lot, its tires scrunching over the loose gravel. Will and Harley continued hoisting manure bags three at a time on the big hook, then activated the electric hoist so it could be stacked at the back of the hayloft.

  Will heard a car door open and close and glanced through the loft’s air vent and froze. Bennett got out of the gray BMW driven by a redheaded woman. Will hissed to get Harley’s attention, signaling for her to be quiet but to look in Bennett’s direction.

  Harley frowned, crossed over from where the manure bags were stacked, and stepped over some bales to peek through the vent. But by that time, Bennett had made his way to the opening to the stalls below.

  “Hello, anybody home? Hello?” Bennett called out as he made his way past the truck and past Tempest’s stall. He stopped there a moment and banged on the wall to get someone’s attention. He got Tempest’s attention. The rescue donkey kicked his stall door closed. Bennett jumped so high to the side, Will and Harley had to stifle a laugh.

  “Can I help you?” said Yeats, who had just appeared behind the hay truck. “For their safety, we ask that visitors not enter the premises without being accompanied.”

  “Sorry, didn’t know,” said Bennett with a disarming smile. “I’m looking for Will McCoy and his cousin Harley McCann. I met Will downtown and he forgot his hat,” said Bennett, holding up the powder-blue baseball cap with the Windy Farm horse logo on the front.

  “I threw my hat as a decoy when they chased me,” Will whispered to Harley as the two crouched and watched Yeats deal with Bennett.

  “Are they volunteers here?” asked Yeats. “There are a lot of volunteers here who get to wear that hat. I’m afraid I don’t know all of them. If you leave me the hat, I’ll give it to my mother, Dr. Doan. She knows most of the — oh, there’s mum now, why don’t we talk to her? Who shall I say was looking for them? Hello? Hello?”

  Will looked through the vent and saw Bennett hurry back to the gray BMW, which left in a shower of gravel as Dr. Doan looked on.

  Will and Harley sidled over the big beams straddling the barn and dropped onto the bales of hay in the truck before swinging over the sides to the barn floor.

  Harley answered Dr. Doan’s puzzled look by saying, “That was the man Bennett, who hired us to sail Wavelength here and who made us dive for that wreck.”

  “Really?” said Dr. Doan, staring down t
he road the car had taken. “Well, that’s not a good sign. The redheaded woman driving is Claire Calloway. She works for a man called Brian Ord. She manages the Ord Art Gallery for him in Hamilton.”

  As the therapeutic riders were coming back, Dr. Doan waved them inside her office, which was air-conditioned but also more private.

  Dr. Doan sat in her big chair and waved her hand in a “sit down” gesture. Will and Harley did; Yeats leaned on the doorframe.

  “Brian Ord is a very wealthy Bermudian. He inherited a fortune from his father and he made it grow. Not always in a legal or nice way, but he did make it grow. He’s into art and real estate. Hector Ord, his father, launched the art thing. Hector was a good painter who some say made his money selling stolen works of art along with his forgeries. Like father like son.”

  Dr. Doan sighed and looked to her desk as she collected her thoughts. “I’m not sure how his son Brian Ord is involved with your wreck nor do I know why. But I can tell you that if Claire Calloway’s involved with this man Bennett, it’s with Brian Ord’s knowledge. Now some Bermudians may not like to admit this, but the courts here will favor the island son over the tourist or expatriate, especially with his money and influence. You’re going to need absolute proof of their guilt.”

  Will and Harley looked at each other.

  “So what do we do?” asked Will.

  “If you leave the island now, you might not be implicated in the illegal wreck diving. But at the moment, you can’t prove you were forced to do it, so if you do leave and the police tie you to the Wavelength and the wreck diving, you could be sent back here to face charges. Why don’t you take some time to think your options through over lunch?” suggested Dr. Doan, rising to the sound of the lunch bell.

  They trudged across the parking lot to the main building where volunteers were already carrying their lunch plates out to the tables under the veranda.