“You’d want to live with a failure? How could you be brave then?”
“You don’t understand, Jimmy. Making money is not the answer. All you end up doing is supporting others. You don’t really do anything for yourself, just help a lot of others with the money you make. It takes a lot out of you too, worrying about losing it. I know what has happened to my father. He collects his cars, the only thing that makes him happy anymore. All the money does not. People just want him to give it to them for their own happiness.
“I must go,” she had said. She had walked away from his arms that day, moving back to the big house, moving on to Texas, her bare feet making little padding noises as she stepped carefully on the old wood of their once special garden place.
Chapter Fourteen
8PM Friday August 20
“Mister Tench, you please come to my house right away,” Smote’s wife said on the telephone, her emotion evident. Her voice drifted in and out and he knew her hand was shaking as she moved the receiver. He could sense the muffling of her words as she spoke through tears.
“What happened?” Tench asked, speaking softly, trying to calm her. “Where’s Smote?”
“I tell you when you come,” she said, followed by sobs. Children’s voices cried out for attention, excited in the background, sounding aware of some trouble in their home.
He asked, “Is Smote there? Has something happened to him?”
“You come over, Mister Tench. Right now.”
“Of course, I’ll be there,” he said. She stopped sobbing and he heard her speaking to her children who were probably next to the phone, reassuring them in a low motherly voice. Then the phone clicked off.
He paused, not knowing how to reach Smote. He’d go to the house, then find Smote.
Smote’s wife was not one to get excited easily. Smote had met his wife, Silla, as a childhood friend when he was living in Ecuador with his natural father. When his father was killed sabotaging a government airplane, Smote came north at the request of Captain Bob to continue his schooling. Money had to be paid, a lot of it, to get Smote away from the Ecuador police. Silla stayed behind. Then six years ago she came north also, lived in Baltimore for a few months and the two got back together. Then they were married. The first child, a girl, Barbie, was named after Silla’s love of the little dolls of the same name. The second, another girl, Jazz, was named for Smote’s love of blues music.
As he entered the yard of Captain Bob’s house, the two children were playing on the front porch. Silla had calmed then down. Barbie waved hello to him with “Hi, Uncle Tench.” He leaned down and gave both of them hugs. Their mother came to the door, wringing her hands, her eyes glancing around the yard as if she were afraid of who might be following Tench.
“He’s gone,” she said.
Tench face fell. “Gone where?” but he knew as he asked. Smote was never one to wait around. He should have known he would do this. He went to the farm expecting Tench to catch up later.
She led him to the back porch, out of the hearing of the children and pointed to the mooring. The Emmy was not there.
“I’ll find him,” Tench said as he took her in his arms and comforted her.
“When did he leave?”
“Two hours,” she said.
Tench had a sixteen foot aluminum rowboat that had come with his rental house. The owner allowed him to use it for fishing and as such Tench kept two spinning rods and a tackle box aboard. The boat would make a good disguise to run along the fenced area of Strake’s farm and see if he could spot Smote and the Emmy.
The sun was almost down when he reached the small pier jutting out into the reeds. The darkness was already evident in the large number of shadows on the small creek. The green Johnson engine was old but he was able to get it going this time with only a few pulls. He noticed the oil skim that immediately flowed to the surface among the seaweed and wondered if the machine would run long enough to get to the Island.
The night came on fast. The harbor was to his right. He saw the house lights of River Sunday and the many mooring blinkers of the anchored yachts. Silla must be standing on her porch among those houses, looking out at the water wondering where her husband was. She was praying Smote was not dead from the hands of another evil just as bad as the ones she had grown up with in her native country.
The air remained warm from the day’s heat as he passed the northern side of the harbor and arrived at the mouth of the Nanticoke. He took off his tee shirt and felt the breeze full across his chest. The coolness mixed with spray from the bow of the runabout hitting the Bay combers. He sat on the stern thwart of the little boat, his hand on the tiller of the outboard. The engine struggled, running hot with an occasional abrupt sputter. It paused, and then caught and revved up. Overheated water came out of the ancient engine’s cooling duct, the two aluminum cylinders walls of power the only chance that Tench would get to Smote tonight.
The thoughts of Julie kept him going. In the old days when they were first friends, he remembered how she had worked with Katy in the garage. She was almost eighteen years old and she was Katy’s pal. Katy was twelve years old, the two of them teaching each other about cars and engines. They promised each other and Tench to build a great machine when they both grew up and became the first women in cars. Katy’s father would look on approvingly at Katy, the little girl with grease on her face and her hands full of socket wrenches. Both of them would swarm over Tench’s hot rod car and help him with the flathead, go to the drag races and watch with him as they learned how to race.
He felt the growing puddle of water around his toes and knew the leaks in the aluminum boat were getting worse. The pounding by the waves was not good for a craft like this especially one with so many improper patches along her seams. Captain Bob, on seeing this boat one time at his home, said simply, “You owe it to her to haul her and give her a real going over. Not fair to the boat, boy, to run her like that. She’ll get even with you too come a good sized blow.”
Few lights were on at the Strake mansion. He could not see if anyone were on the porch. Further on, past the mansion and the yacht anchorage, he found the Emmy in the night dimness. She was rocking at a mooring close to shore, her bow high in the air. The boat was deserted. He tied up and went aboard. The engine was still warm. Smote had left her only a little while ago.
He shipped the outboard engine and hid the boat in the cornfield at the top of the short bank above the beach. The boat was easy to pull back down to the water and ready for his escape. Suddenly he heard voices in the darkness. A small light went on. A guard was sitting in the garden house about two hundred feet ahead. A large machine gun protruded in front of the guard. Another light went on and illuminated the big yacht. The voices came from more African guards carrying cartons into the boat.
An engine roared and two small lights came to life on the field above him. They were the guide beams of a bulldozer crawling forward, its lights bouncing back and forth across the lawn of the mansion. The lights seemed to rock upward and then race down as the machine attempted to smooth out the bumps of the field. It ran at night, Tench reasoned, because Stagmatter was hiding something. Now the distant porch lanterns in the mansion were turned up brighter and a barn light flickered on near the museum.
The bulldozer came to a stop at the side of the field a few hundred feet from Tench’s hiding place. Then, Tench heard a sudden roar as though the world were erupting and swallowing him into its bowels. A plane, its landing lights arcing ahead of it, and its engines throttling down, had come up behind him, its noise slightly behind its approach so that the wave of sound forcefully hit Tench by surprise. If it had been a fist, it would have thrusted him down into the sand. The plane, a twin engine Aero Commander, went over his head, so close that he could see the glare reflecting from tiny heads of fasteners in the metal underbody. The wheels of the landing gear were spinning only a few feet above him, ready to touch the grass ahead. Spray driven in from the shallows nearby kicked up around hi
s head, temporarily blinding him with the saltiness, as it thrashed at his face.
Then he could see again. The plane landed and moved up the lawn and past the bulldozer. A porch light searched out toward the plane from the mansion. The plane ran along the lawn to a distance halfway to the house before coming to a complete halt. The lawn had been made into a landing strip.
A door of the airplane opened and its interior lights spread a glow of light out on the nearby grass. Shadows traced up and down as the light was broken by a tall figure in a military uniform climbing out. He had to stoop to exit the plane through the small steel portal. The light bounced off bright metal insignia fastened to his clothes. When the figure had fully exited the aircraft, the lights were switched off. Then the door to Stagmatter’s office in the museum opened. In the new light Tench could see the visitor carried flat document package. After the tall figure entered Stagmatter’s door, it closed and the landing area grew dark again.
Minutes went by, than a half hour, and finally the office door opened and the man came out without the package. With his uniform buttons still flashing in the glow of the airplane’s landing lights, the man entered the airplane again.
Its engines were turned up and the plane turned around. It revved up and quickly moved back toward the spot where Tench was hiding. He crouched further into the brush as the plane began its takeoff. Its headlights flashed over Tench’s spot illuminating it so brightly, he feared he would be spotted. It roared over him, so close that he could see the oil streaks on the underbody of the engines. Then the plane was aloft and roaring out over the Bay until it was gone. Quiet came back over the farm.
Tench tried again to uncover the tunnel entrance. He worked from the crest of the bank down to the beach in a top to bottom method of searching. He was on his knees his body being constantly scratched by the briars and brush, feeling his way. His hands often scared up small creatures and birds whose noise caused him to freeze for moments hoping that the guards did not heard any commotion and come looking for its cause.
Chapter Fifteen
10 PM Friday August 20
Tench felt his hand go into space behind some brush. Reaching further and touching nothing but air, he knew it had to be the opening to the tunnel. He felt the sand and discovered it had footprints. Whether these were tracks made by the Captain, his captors or he did not know from his exploration.
He stepped further into the emptiness. More clods of dirt and sand interspersed with bushes and roots were beneath his bare feet. He discovered that the tunnel entrance was framed in what was left of a brick archway. Within it was the timbering of a doorway and broken panels of a wooden door. A shiny new lock still in its hasp was attached to the side of the door with part of the frame timber still secured where it had been split off. Beside it was a rubber waterman’s boot. At last he knew what had happened to the Captain. He’d been found here by the guards and the boot had fallen off his foot as he was dragged away
Tench looked behind him at the Chesapeake Bay. Nothing moved on its placid water, slightly lit by starlight. Far out on the Bay he could see the freighters and tankers moving to and from Baltimore as they navigated the ship channels. To the south he saw only the yacht lights and the workmen. In the surrounding brush he listened and could ascertain no movement of guards. He entered the tunnel to follow Smote.
In the blackness he felt his way with his outstretched hands and fingers. He smelled the musty stench of old plaster walls while his feet touched what remained of a buckled brick floor. As he went further the tunnel dimensions were larger and he found he could stand without trouble. He stepped forward for ten minutes until by his estimate he had travelled half of the way up towards the mansion. The tunnel also angled to his right. He was getting close to the open area with the new runway. Then his hands came to a pile of tumbled sand and stones.
He turned on his flashlight, careful to shield the beam with his hand so that the light went forward in a small one foot circle. The pile of rubble was sloped from the top towards his feet. Also he could make out the patches of white plaster covering sections of the walls. In other sections that covering had worn off and brick siding was exposed. On the curved white plaster surface of the tunnel ceiling, one part had fallen making this pile of rubble. Beside it on the unbroken wall of what was still white or yellowed white plaster, he saw clumsy marks, made with black soot that had stayed on the white. The marks were words written by someone who did not have the letters correct as some figures were written backwards. He read the words.
“Follow the star in the north.
That the star of Jesus.
Abner Swan, March 1857,
North Carolina.”
He wondered what happened to that person, probably a runaway slave, who had hid in this tunnel while waiting for his next guide to the north and freedom. He wondered if the man had been alone, or if the man was with his family. He wondered if his children had been spread all over the state of North Carolina as they were traded by the slave owner, and wondered if the black man was sick and if he was warm. March had always been a cold month in the River Sunday area. He looked down at his own bare feet. He suspected the fleeing man was probably barefoot too. Ironic. The man had been leaving a crime site while Tench was entering one.
He felt the earth tremble as the tractor traveled on its path across the land. The pilot of the Aero Commander must have reported rough spots in the new runway that needed to be fixed before the plane could return. The noise grew as the machine approached and when it was at its nearest to Tench, he could hear its treads brake to begin to turn to the other side of the field. He felt dust falling from the ceiling of the tunnel. Then, lights flickered on the wall of the tunnel ahead. He moved forward slowly and felt the outside hot air touch his face. Behind him, shouts started up from the shoreline. He moved faster. It sounded like they had found Smote’s boat, the Emmy. Now they would know that someone was on the property, someone who was not welcome. Perhaps they already knew this or perhaps they had already captured Smote. He was glad he had put his own boat further away up the shore.
Then, his hands, outstretched in the dark in front of him, touched the texture of wooden planks. He had come up against a door, solidly built into a frame of heavy timbers. He risked his flashlight for a moment. A snake uncoiled and dropped from a small candle shelf built into the plaster beside the door. The animal slithered across his bare left foot, inching its way into the darkness behind Tench.
He scanned to the side of the door for a handle and found instead a large metal bolt. He could tell that the bolt was pulled back. He turned off the light and pushed on the door. It moved inward with a squeak of its ancient blacksmith hinges. He slowed his movement and waited then inched the door open more. He heard nothing from inside. He touched more brick on the sides of the inner wall. He was standing inside the great chimney foundation arches that he and Julie had explored long ago. The door was part of the wooden closet walls. It was so well fitted into the woodwork that they had never discovered it.
He pushed the door further and moved inside into the cellar room. He heard voices. They were close to where he stood. Then they were silent as if the speakers had suddenly discovered he was near.
Chapter Sixteen
Midnight, Friday August 20
Tench carefully pushed the slatted door further inward on its iron hinges, the old wood brushing the crumbling handmade bricks of the chimney arch. Ahead of him, the grated windows along the walls of the cellar let in a tiny glare of light from the back of the house, perhaps from the porch above. Inside what was a cellar room under the mansion, Tench could see irregular shapes in the dim space. The air of the cellar was different than that of the tunnel; the moist earth scents of the passage were replaced with dry musty dust and a sweet perfume.
The builders long ago had placed the mansion on a slope to allow them to put the cellar into the hill, making what might be called today a split level. As such, the cellar was cool in the summer and a good place to
hide from adults, a use to which he and Julie had often put the place. The draped furniture and shelves of pots and trash cluttered the large open space as before. Above him he could feel the ceiling of the room, transverse timbers some with the bark still on them from when they were hewn by slave labor from local forests where Native Americans had once hunted, flakes of whitewash coatings applied long ago by plantation blacks, painted to the rough wood. These flakes came loose as he stirred the air currents and they tumbled on him with every motion of his body. Cobwebs hung distorted, brushing and sticking to his sweat covered skin as he moved forward, the traps of spiders already broken by Smote’s trip through here in advance of Tench. Tench’s bare skin absorbed what he thought were thousands of tiny legs of insects scurrying for safety. In the blackness ahead of him as he stepped forward, he heard the movement of mice and rats as they watched him from their hidden burrows, long ago dug through the walls.
The sweet perfume was from a wad of Smote’s chewing gum stuck on the door where he could see it. Smote’d give a broad grin when he opened his first stick of the day and then chew the same piece for hours. Smote claimed proudly that his taste for that gum came from his Ecuadorian culture. The odor certainly marked him as different, and whether the smell added to the local people’s disdain for his friend, Tench did not know for sure.
The fact that this door was loose, probably broken, the disrupted boxes that were carelessly moved aside in front of him, making a path through the careful stacked order of the storage, were also proof of Smote’s travel. The signs were his signs, describing the kind of impatient and careless man he was in the dark, a man who smashed his way into places moving cartons aggressively like this, the spider webs ripped and left distended, broken, and already under repair by the many spiders Tench could spot, the dust still whirling in the air. A farm employee or a guard, his path well lighted probably with his flashlight, would have, of necessity and duty, moved with more care around his workplace, out of respect for the owner.
Terror Flower (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 5) Page 13