The Last Refuge sahm-1

by Chris Knopf

  I checked all the names in the phone book. Only Ed and Sherry were still in their Bay Side house. The others were somewhere else in town or gone completely.

  At least half the houses in the highlighted area on Oak Point weren’t on Lombard’s list. I wondered if the same held true on the other side of WB. That section was part of a much bigger area called Jacob’s Neck. That neighborhood was unfamiliar, so it took a little longer for me to get all the paperwork organized.

  The first number was lot fifty-two, Gary and Elizabeth Richardson. Then fifty-four, Mary Fletcher. Then John and Judy Eiklestrum. Then Wallace and Dolores Weeds. That stopped me. I knew the name, and the house. I was now oriented with a mental picture of the neighborhood.

  Wally Weeds was known to my father. I hadn’t thought of the name in years, but I could hear it now, spoken in my father’s voice. I also knew he’d been dead for a long time. I could almost remember the exact day it happened. The day my best friend Billy Weeds woke up somewhere in the woods of Connecticut and found his father shot in the face with his own shotgun.

  As with Oak Point, most of the highlighted properties weren’t on Lombard’s list. There were only two more after the Weeds place. Number seventy-three, George and Janice Fitzhenry, and at the end of the line, the house opposite Regina’s, the last house at the extreme end of the Bay Side sweep.

  Lot number seventy-eight. Julia Anselma.

  I decided to spend the rest of that day cracking golf balls across the yard so Eddie could shag them out of the flower garden and off the pebble beach. My father’s three-quarter Harmon Killibrew bat was ideally suited to the purpose. Eddie probably had a little retriever in him, since he liked to retrieve. But he often got distracted mid-run and peeled off to track down heretofore undetected evidence of who-knows-what. This gave me the chance to sit down in one of my two exhausted redwood lawn chairs and look at the Little Peconic over an Absolut on the rocks. I didn’t have a strict rule about drinking during the day, just a general guideline—no hard liquor before noon. I had all the material I’d gathered up pertaining to Regina’s estate organized and waiting for me on the table on the screened-in porch. The urge to start in on it again had thus far eluded me. So I drank instead. And brooded.

  Eddie would always complete the cycle, no matter how long the detour, running back without apology, the golf ball hidden in his mouth.

  I’d just hauled myself out of the lawn chair so I could smack the ball out toward the bay when I noticed a sailboat coming in close to shore. Boats of any kind were far less common on the bay in October, even though it was an ideal month for sailing. The air was cool, but there was almost always a breeze, either a prevailing south-southwesterly or a seasonal northwesterly, clean and dry, riding down from Canada. It was a decent-sized sloop, probably around forty-three feet. I thought it was going to tack when I saw the sails fluttering in the wind, but then I saw the big head sail disappear into a roll. Though it’s hard to judge distances across open water, I thought his depth might have been about fourteen feet, judging from the boat’s proximity to the green buoy that marked the entrance to the cove bordering Regina’s property. After the jib was rolled as tight as a joint, the mainsail fell to the boom. The wind was mostly out of the west, so the boat’s beam drew parallel to the shore. It looked like some type of fast cruising boat, with lots of sharp angles, but also a lot of equipment hanging off the transom and mounted to the mast.

  I saw a lone figure dressed in white run out to the bow to drop an anchor mounted off the base of the bowsprit. The boat swung gently at the end of the anchor until settling nose to the wind. A few minutes later an inflatable dinghy busted out of the cockpit and dropped overboard right off the back of the boat.

  The guy in white descended a swim ladder into the dinghy with a small outboard on his shoulder, which he mounted at the transom, and soon after he was heading across the bay directly toward shore.

  Eddie was also looking out at the dinghy motoring in our direction. I tucked the bat under my arm and went out to the beach to help whoever it was make a dry landing. Eddie stood and waited with me at the edge of the water.

  The dinghy slowed as it approached, and you could hear the revs from the outboard rise and fall as the operator tried to calibrate the proper speed for hitting the beach. By now it was close enough that I could see his face.

  “Hi, Burt.”

  “Grab the bow and give a good pull, would you?” he said as the inflatable nosed into the beach and he killed the outboard, nimbly tipping the prop up out of the water. I dragged it up on shore.

  We shook hands.

  “Expecting pirates?” he asked, pointing to the bat.

  “Just shaggin’ balls with Eddie. Though you never know.”

  “Well, I’m unarmed. And thirsty.”

  I led him up to the cottage and sat him down in a lawn chair. I went in to put together drinks, leaving Eddie to pester him into hitting out another ball.

  “I called ahead but no one answered,” said Burton. “You know they’ve developed answering machines.”

  “I got a phone. That’s as far as I go.”

  By now it was beginning to cool off. The sky had mostly cleared up and the westerly that Burton had fought all the way from his mooring in Sag Harbor had picked up a few knots. I got us both sweatshirts so we could stay outside and watch the sunset. Burton told me he’d designed his boat mostly himself, with a little help from Sparkman and Stephens, who’d produced designs for several generations of Lewises. I knew just enough about sailing to follow his story, having crewed for friends of Abby she’d acquired during childhood summers in Marblehead. I had to transfer my own childhood experiences on the Peconic in busted-up, clinker-built dories and cat boats to the graceful Herreshoffs and Hinkleys the poshes in Massachusetts raced off the coast. I learned a lot, but I didn’t like the people. Though I sure loved their boats.

  As the red ball of a sun burned it’s way into the horizon, lighting up the bottoms of the few remaining clouds in electric shades of pink and yellow, I caught Burton up on what I’d learned about Bay Side Holdings.

  “Mr. Lombard is an astute man,” said Burton, when I was finished.

  “A captive.”

  “A wholly-owned subsidiary of Willard and Bollard, Incorporated.”

  “Willard and Bollard.”

  Burton had been holding the Harmon Killebrew bat. He used it to point over my shoulder at the clump of woods across the entrance to the cove next to Regina’s house.

  “WB,” I said.

  “The manufacturing arm. Bay Side was set up to manage the real estate owned by the company. The buildings and the land it sat on. Great tax advantages, then and now, if you do it right.”

  As far as I was concerned, the old WB factory was as old as the Peconic itself. It had always been just there, invisible from land or sea, accessible only to the people who used to work there every day, whose numbers steadily dwindled until the gates closed and the rust and sumac took over. I never knew what the initials WB stood for.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Burton reached under his sweatshirt and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

  “An e-mail, courtesy of our research department.”

  He started to read.

  “‘If you go all the way back to the original owners of the site, you’re in the nineteenth century, when they held a sizable chunk of North Sea, including farms and woodlands. Willard Wakeman and Carl Bollard bought the place in 1908, and ran a fairly successful business for the next thirty-four years. They specialized in sporting goods—camping gear, volleyballs, quoits, whatever people played in those days.’”

  He looked at me.

  “No Rollerblades or windsurfing, I’d imagine.”

  “Rafts,” I said. “My father always said they made rafts for the war.”

  “Right. Rafts and rubberized tents for the Pacific. If you notice, everything they manufactured was at least partly rubber, or some kind of synthetic material that was tough and
waterproof. Perfect for rafts.”

  He read the rest of the e-mail, skipping ahead since I’d scooped part of the report.

  “‘From its peak in about 1896, the WB landhold was reduced through normal attrition, and as an important capitalization tool for the core manufacturing business, leaving the last important segment—the peninsula adjacent to Oak Point—with its access to the Little Peconic and, subsequently, to Greenport and on to the sea. In order to preserve free use of the two inlets on either side, they retained all the shore property. Plus a few large tracts across Noyack Road, which were sold off in the 1960s.

  “‘WB was strictly manufacturing, working to specs from brand marketers, or in the case of the war effort, government contractors. Postwar they continued with the same mix of products, but sales apparently declined steadily until 1976 when they closed down the shop permanently. Since private companies have minimal reporting requirements, this information has been derived from various secondary sources, including Dunn and Bradstreet, and should not be regarded as definitive, but rather directional.’ We’re going deeper into some other databases that take a little longer, but I thought this might give you a start.”

  “So Bay Side Holdings is all that’s left of WB.”

  “Bay Side Holdings is WB, since there’s nothing related to the corporate entity but real estate. All of it right here, by the way.”

  “So who owns Bay Side Holdings?”

  “That’s the interesting part,” said Burton, handing me the e-mail printout, “we have no idea.”

  “Really.”

  “Not that we won’t find out, but it won’t be automatic.”

  “For you guys?” I had a mental image of Burton’s big building down there on the Street.

  “For anybody. It’s in a trust.”

  “Really.”

  “For which there’s no public record. Bay Side is a privately held C corp, chartered under the laws of New York State, all of whose assets are held by the eponymously named Bay Side Trust.”

  “And we’re not allowed to know who owns what?”

  “By ‘we,’ if you mean the general public, yes and no. The creators of a trust have no obligation to publish the names of the beneficiaries as a matter of course, but they can be compelled to do so under certain civil actions. Beneficiaries have to be named in the trust document itself, which in certain circumstances will end up in the public record. But there’s no legal requirement to do so just because. Ninety-nine percent of the time, these are all tightly controlled, personal things that have little effect on anyone beyond the principals, unless there’s a contested estate, or a tax dispute, or a legal claim. That’s the next place we’re going to look.”

  Eddie had heard enough and decided to trot off to the beach to check for encroaching sea life. I found myself looking over at WB as if the dense tree cover was about to open up and disclose another stunning revelation. You think you know a place.

  “So who’s got the trust document?”

  “I’m guessing Milton Hornsby.”

  “I’m back to him.”

  “I’m afraid so. But don’t be discouraged. We’ll find everything out, eventually.”

  He took a sip of his drink.

  “One more thing. Regina Broadhurst. No assets we can find, unless you consider Social Security. There’s so little on her, she almost doesn’t exist. Hasn’t filed a tax return to the IRS, or to New York State, since 1976. The last year she received a W-2. There are two points of interest here, in my mind.”

  “She worked.”

  “That’s point one. She did indeed. As a floor supervisor. Essentially a foreman, watching over manufacturing, assembly or materials handling.”

  “In a factory.”

  “Yup.” He gestured again with the Harmon Killebrew bat.

  “WB?”

  “Yup.”

  “How ’bout that. Walked to work.”

  “Nineteen hundred seventy-six was the year they closed down. Never got another job. At least, nothing she shared with the IRS.”

  “I’m trying to remember her husband. What he did.”

  “You’ll be trying a long time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Regina got her Social Security number in 1938, when she was 16. Under the name Regina May Broadhurst. Just to be sure, the researcher found her in the Suffolk County birth records. Born at Southampton Hospital, June 5, 1922. Regina May Broadhurst.”

  “There was no Mr. Broadhurst.”

  “We’ll keep looking. You never know.”

  “You’ve already done too much.”

  “So get me another drink.”

  We moved on to other topics while we drank and gazed out at the waning sunset and the steel blue water, now uniformly roughed up by the freshening winds. His boat looked great, now a backlit shape rocking comfortably at anchor and casting a shadow across the water, a formless reflection of the dark blue hull and towering mast.

  The sun was just starting to light up the oaks and scrub pines of North Sea. I’d started running before dawn, and had already covered about ten miles. I’m not very fast, but I can run a long way when I’m in the mood. I’d been up to Long Beach and back, toured the sea fowl refuge on Jessup’s Neck and stopped at a deli for coffee. The day was cold and overcast, a sample of the coming November. On the way back I ran along the bay coast up to the WB peninsula. I cut back inland and ran along the sand road that ran parallel to WB’s cyclone fence. At one of the sharp turns in the road, I ran straight for it and leaped. I stuck about halfway up and climbed the rest of the way. I pulled a pair of wire cutters I’d brought along out of the back pocket of my shorts and snipped the barbed wire. Then, very carefully, slipped over the top and dropped into the WB grounds.

  The landscape had completely reverted to weedy grass and first growth—pin oak, cedar and sumac. But the asphalt driveway looked almost new. Evidence of teenagers was piled next to rusted machinery that lined the driveway. I trotted up to the main entrance and tried the door. Locked. I circled the building looking for unboarded windows. I found a busted-out basement window half obscured by broken bricks and cinder block. I cleared a space and shimmied through into an icy black depth. I had a miniature Mag light, but it barely cut through the darkness. I felt my way along while my eyes adjusted enough to see glimmers of light above me. I searched, and finally found, a staircase up to the ground floor. The door opened.

  I was in a corridor. The walls were a faded pale green and the woodwork clear pine stained to simulate mahogany. Behind the doors, some of which were paneled with translucent glass, were office groupings—a block of four with secretaries in the middle. Little departments. At one time they’d been identified by removable placards that slid into chrome holders mounted to the wall. Most had been removed.

  I moved methodically from office to office, opening desk drawers and file cabinets. There was almost nothing there. A few empty hanging folders. Cracked and stained coffee mugs. Empty steno pads and a rusty hole-punch.

  I found what looked like a common area. There were two linoleum-topped folding tables with a few chairs, and an area for vending machines. There was a bulletin board with some yellowed safety posters and a few regulatory notices. On the other wall was a glass trophy case, long smashed into particles and stripped of its trophies. Still stuck to the disintegrating cork-board were three curled and yellowing eight-by-ten-inch black and white photographs of bowling teams and softball players. I popped them off and stuck them in the rear waistband of my shorts.

  I worked my way through the rest of the offices and out to a shop floor. Attached to the ceiling were long I-beam rails that supported sliding chain hoists used to transport raw materials and assembled parts. Huge incandescent lights were caged overhead at the end of galvanized conduit. In the center were a half dozen benches, each about forty feet long, lined up in neat parallel rows. Around the perimeter were machine tools and pressure vessels of various shapes and sizes. It looked naked without the distributed control equi
pment—computer automation—that I’d been working with for the last twenty years. No sensors, controllers, activators, big red coil cords, keyboards or CPUs. None of the signposts of late-twentieth-century manufacturing.

  There were three other interconnected areas where things were made. It looked like WB was ready to make almost anything, and probably tried to in its relentless pursuit of market redemption. I was able to identify compressors, hydraulic lines, conveyors, centrifugal sorters, parts bins and machines that cut, stitched, folded, wrapped, stacked and packed. There were large empty spaces where equipment was once bolted to the floor. Either salvaged or purloined long ago.

  I went back outside, squinting in the hazy sunlight. There was one building left to look in. It was red brick like the others, but unattached. I jogged across the overgrown lawn and looked for a way to get inside. The front door was locked, but there was an open window on the east side. I jumped up and grabbed the sill, and pulled myself over. I dropped into a janitor’s closet. It was still stocked with buckets, mops and assorted cleaning utensils. Nothing worth pilfering. The door was locked, but gave away easily with a solid kick. On the other side was a big open warehouse. I waited for my eyes to adjust again to the dim light. As expected, the room was almost empty. There was one rusted-out wreck of a forklift, stacks of splintered skids, a lot of metal shelving racks and a few dozen ten-gallon drums. Plus a lot of seagull shit and the mildewed smell of a dark, damp place.

  I’d worked up a sweat during my run, so my body temperature dropped quickly as I walked around the cold rooms. I needed to start running again, so I scaled the main fence and took up my regular route where I’d left off. By now the day was fully underway, though the diffuse sunlight did little to warm things up.

  I began to picture hot coffee and toasted sesame seed bagels.

  And the way Amanda Battiston looked that day walking away from me across the sand, her hair blown off to the side, her back straight and her face filled with thwarted plans and threadbare expectations.