TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  He took another breath and squeaked back in his chair. “Well, what can I say? Tonight you’re listening to a very special Scrapbook of Sound, nothing at all like the stuff I usually do. For the past hour I’ve been playing some of the music that I’ve been putting on discs every Saturday night. It started out as a command performance—the boss made a gentle suggestion that it might be a good way to help us promote the big war bond show we’re doing on Saturday. So consider yourself notified—Miss O’Hara will sing for us live, in a ninety-minute special that’ll include music and poetry and an original drama that I promise you, people, will be worth your attention. Meanwhile, let’s listen to more of the pleasantest surprise these old ears have heard in a long, long time. Let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s reach all the way back to that very first broadcast, to the first song she ever sang on the air. Listen . . .”

  The sound of the crowd came in, like the start of an earthquake.

  “Listen,” said Stoner over the rumble. “We’ve just stepped back to March seventh, and she’s about to sing that good Helen Forrest number ‘You’re a Sweet Little Headache’ . . .”

  The quake deepened, a cheer went up, and there she was again, pulling Jack Dulaney through the midnight woods. To the east, to the sea, into the air. And such as it was, home.

  He felt better now. The specter of death was somehow less cutting in her presence and the world was a better place. He wouldn’t forget, but the raw edge would continue to retreat, and tomorrow he could face what had to be done with a cold eye.

  The road dead-ended on the north-south highway and he pulled to the side and poured in the rest of his water. As he headed north the country became bright: the woods fell away, and the marshes broke the land apart, and the moon, floating over the tidal waterway, cast the sloughs in an almost surrealistic silver. Maybe that’s what Whitemarsh meant. A place, a town, some district near here. He stopped the car for a moment and got out, and he stood looking over the white marsh to the glow in the east, where the town by the sea was.

  But the dread of his room returned in a rush and he went instead to the station. The ghosts of Kendall and the girl had filled his car, and what he needed was the simple presence of another human being.

  He let himself into the dark lobby and stopped at the desk. Someone was there, a pale figure in a shrouded corner just out of the night-light’s reach. Hazel. He waved and said hello but she stepped away, back into the dark, and he heard the soft swish of the ladies’ room door close behind her. He moved on through the double doors to the stairwell.

  Upstairs, the music was loud in the air, and he followed it into the studio. Stoner’s chair was empty, pushed back from the transcription that spun on the turntable. Holly’s voice boomed from the speaker, but he moved on beyond it, into a dark hall that skirted the outer wall. Something fluttered a few feet away—some kind of opening or doorway that led outside—and as he came closer he saw a small balcony, recessed into the building in an L shape on the southwest corner. Stoner stood at the railing, staring over the dunes at the sea and listening to the music on a small speaker near the door.

  “Hey, Gus.”

  “Hey, champ . . . what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know. Just restless.”

  “Me too.”

  “Must be a night for it. I just saw Hazel downstairs. She seemed pretty spooked about something.”

  “You probably spooked her. She’s not supposed to be in here at night, Barnet warned her once or twice before.”

  “Does she make a habit of hanging out here?”

  “She will if they let her. I’ve had her on my show a few times, to read some poetry or something from a woman’s book. But she never wants to leave. She’ll take over the show if I let her.”

  “I guess she’s one of those people like me. Spooked by the night.”

  “She’s a troubled lady. A remarkable talent, but she’s not supposed to be here at night unless she checks with me first.”

  “That probably goes for me too.”

  “Yeah, technically, if you come in this late you’ve got to check with the man on the air. If you’ve got a key, you’re probably okay.”

  “Maybe Hazel’s got a key.”

  “Not a chance. The only people with keys are the ones who need ’em—the dawn patrol, management, and me.”

  “Then how does she get in here?”

  “It’s not hard. Just come in during the day, hide, and come out when everyone’s gone. I’d better go down and see what the hell she’s doing.”

  “Too late. I think she’s gone.”

  He pointed out to the road, where a car sped away to the highway.

  “I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Don’t say anything, just let me handle it. No sense getting her in trouble, she’s got enough of her own.”

  He stepped out into the breeze and joined Stoner at the railing. From the balcony he got a good sense of the island at night. The view was panoramic, from the north bridge road to the lighthouse south, and west across the black marshes to the woods where Georgie Schroeder had killed himself. The lights of the coast guard flickered along the surf. “Lots of bungalow sailors out tonight,” Jordan said.

  “They’re trying to make an impression on somebody. Some pompous beer belly from the big tepee in Washington is probably in town.”

  “Anyway,” Jordan said. The thought trailed away. “I couldn’t sleep. Thought maybe you’d like to have a beer.”

  “Sounds great but I gotta take a rain check. I’m coming down with some damn thing, and if I don’t get some rest I won’t be worth a damn to anyone. I’m learning I’m not twenty-one anymore.”

  Behind them the music had settled into a lively instrumental rideout. Stoner let it run, past the announcements toward the end of the program.

  “This has been an interesting evening,” Stoner said.

  “I caught some of it. Heard your confession of . . . what would you call it?”

  “Stupidity brought on by resentment.”

  Jordan laughed politely.

  “I’ve been annoyed at having to aircheck this thing every Saturday night. It’s a tense piece of work, a real pain in the ass. You feel like your job’s on the line if you screw one up, that’s how seriously Harford takes it. But I’ve got to agree with him now, it’s worth it.”

  “She does have a voice,” Jordan said.

  “She’ll go big time, there’s no question about it. I’ve got it on good authority that some very important people were listening to us up in New York tonight. I’m talking about big names, champ, major attractions in the band business. Kidd told somebody and I picked it up from there.”

  “Did they say who?”

  “The name I heard was Tommy Dorsey. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. I think he’d be crazy not to hire her. That’s where she belongs, with a real band, not this pack of beach bums. My money says she’ll be gone from here in a week.”

  They went inside and down the hall. The sign-off was simple, quick and easy if you’ve done it a thousand times. Stoner sat in the slot between the two turntables, leaned forward, potted up his microphone, and faded the show to nothing.

  “Miss Holly O’Hara,” he said, and that was his closing.

  “And now WHAR comes to the end of its broadcast day. Our studios are located at two-mile point, on Beachfront Boulevard, in Regina Beach, New Jersey. Our schedule resumes at sunrise with the Uncle Wally show. This is WHAR in Regina Beach. It’s two o’clock, eastern wartime.”

  He watched as the second hand swept past the hour. “Our national anthem will be played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.”

  The turntable started and a rousing anthem hit the air. Stoner hummed the melody, leaning back in the chair with his eyes half closed.

  “You walking, or riding?”

  “Walking, I think. My car’s running hot. I’d better not push it.”

  “I’ll drop you off.”

  Downstairs, he left a note for Maitland. I kn
ow the timing’s lousy but I’ve got personal business that can’t be put off. Hope you can cover for me with Kidd. I’ll try to get in late tomorrow and square things.

  Outside, he locked the door and they rode quietly into town.

  “Sorry for the rain check, champ. Let’s grab dinner later in the week.”

  And Jordan walked alone, feeling the horrors of the night closing in behind him.

  There was a letter in his mailbox. What an irony. His money had arrived from South Carolina. A day late and a dollar short. But no . . . when he ripped open the envelope he saw that his balance was $400, almost to the penny. Another irony. Ober had deposited two checks to his account for magazine work he’d done in California. So he had enough to live on if Kidd should get nasty and force him to quit. He could live for months, if he lived that long.

  Up in his room he rested, but sleep was elusive. His mind was on fire.

  What do you do now?

  What do you do, having seen what you’ve seen and gone where you’ve gone? He hadn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours. Didn’t know if he still had a job. He was a fugitive and now he had left that paper trail from South Carolina, so California could find him if California cared enough.

  At the end of the hour none of that mattered. He had a killer to find and the two questions that had come out of Yorkville were his only starting points.

  Who was Maynard? What was Whitemarsh?

  In the bathroom at the end of the hall he took a hot shower and washed away the last faint trace of the dead girl’s sweat. Then he slept.

  ( ( ( 32 ) ) )

  HE slept till eleven, and twenty minutes later he was out on the street. He deposited his check, kept some cash, and stopped at a gas station just north of town. There he paid a fellow $5 to drive out to Harford and fix his radiator hose, a job the man promised would be done by two o’clock.

  The Regina Beachcomber was located in a stone building that forty or fifty years ago had housed the jail. The office was in the front, with the print shop visible through an oblong window. No one was in the office, but through the glass he could see a man at work, moving back and forth between a press and composing table. A sign over the door said TAKE A LOAD OFF YOUR FEET, I’LL BE OUT WHEN I CAN, so he sat on a chair and waited.

  Soon an old woman came in from the street. “I hope you’re a paying customer,” she said as she went behind the counter. “We’re light on advertising right now, been that way all year long and I can’t figure out why. With our stories on the Schroeder boy’s death, you’d think we’d be jumping.”

  He came to the counter. “Sorry. I’m just a man with a mission.”

  “What does that mean? Is somebody suing us?”

  “Not me. I’d just like to see your back issues. If they’re open to the public.”

  She looked at him hard through thick spectacles. She was at least seventy, with curly white hair and a rosary hanging from her neck. “The back numbers aren’t here anymore. Don’t have room to store ’em, so we give ’em to the library. They were gonna have ’em all bound by years but they haven’t done that yet. As far as I know they’re still sittin’ in the storeroom in boxes.”

  “Can they be seen there?”

  “I doubt that, honey, they’d have to close the library down to take you over there. If you’d give me some help, maybe I could find something for you in the clips. Just what is it you’re looking for?”

  “About six years ago an actor disappeared from the radio station.”

  “March Flack. It’s become one of our local legends.” She went to a large black filing cabinet and pulled out an envelope bulging with clips. “This looks like a fat file but you won’t find much new after the first year. We just rehash it every summer. People are fascinated by stuff like that, so it’s always good for three columns under the fold.”

  The first story was dated mid-July 1936. Almost three weeks had passed since March Flack had disappeared and still he rated only two paragraphs on an inside page. The writing between the lines was clearer than the story: even the press had not taken it seriously at that point. Not until the end of the summer had the story reached page one, when the sheriff ’s theory was subjected to serious scrutiny. One by one the newspaperman had found and interviewed all the women March Flack had known in recent years. None seemed to be hiding anything. Readers would have to take the newspaperman’s word for that, for the paper’s policies in stories of sexual shenanigans was to protect the idents of women until a crime was shown to have been committed. The woman in Canada hadn’t seen March in more than a month when he disappeared. At that point foul play had to be given serious consideration, but the sheriff ’s heels were entrenched in his usual pits of resistance. “Show me a body and I’ll investigate it. Until then I’ve got to assume that Mr. Flack left here under his own steam. Especially under the circumstances.”

  The sheriff wouldn’t elaborate on the circumstances but they were common knowledge by then. Mrs. Flack had been quite candid about it when the newspaperman had walked out to her beach house and asked the right questions. “We had an awful row that day. There was no use denying it, three dozen people at the pier saw me throw a glass of beer in his face.” A third party at the table, the former actor Thomas Griffin, had then gotten into a shouting match with March, which had almost come to blows. “They had to be separated by one of our bouncers,” said the bartender.

  All essentially what Pauline had told him.

  When the inevitable question came up, about Mr. Griffin as a possible suspect, the sheriff ’s long-suffering sigh seemed to hiss out of the newsprint. “A suspect in what? I keep saying this but you don’t seem to get it. There is no evidence of a crime. And you can’t say I didn’t look.”

  He had searched the island from sternum to apex. He’d taken a large posse of men and combed Harford’s woods across the way. He had searched with a dog and nothing had been found. And yes, Mr. Griffin had been interviewed by the sheriff, and no, he did not have a satisfactory account of his whereabouts that night, but people sometimes do retire early, and alone, and most of them are innocent. “And we still need a body, don’t we?”

  Mr. Griffin had refused to talk to the newspaper.

  “Find what you want?”

  “I don’t know what I want. I’m new in town, I heard this yarn and I got curious. Disappearances have always fascinated me.”

  “Well, this is a good one. My guess is it’ll never be solved. Not after all these years.”

  “You been around here long?”

  “Only all my life, is all.”

  “You must know pretty much everybody.”

  “I didn’t know you till you walked in that door. But I do tend to know the people who’ve been here awhile.”

  “You ever hear of anyone named Maynard?”

  She turned the name over on her tongue. “Maynard . . . Maynard . . .” Shook her head. “Never been anybody named Maynard in this town, I’d stake my reputation on it.”

  “What about Whitemarsh?”

  “You mean like a family name?”

  “Could be that. Or a district. Maybe a township.”

  “I don’t think so. Not around here.”

  Suddenly she said, “Maybe you got ’em backwards. There was a town called Maynard. Not a family. A town.”

  Jordan felt a prickly feeling at the edge of his scalp. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Got your tenses wrong, honey. It ain’t, not anymore. Hasn’t been for years.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Burned to the ground. Everything in it lost to fire.”

  “When was that?”

  “Oh golly, I was a young woman then. At least forty years ago. We did a story on it a year or two back. Wanna see it?”

  She brought another envelope from the steel cabinet. This one was thin, with only the one clipping inside it.

  THE STORY OF MAYNARD, he read. EXTINCT TOWNSHIP ON THE RAILROAD LINE FROM GOTHAM TO CAPE MAY.

  There
was a picture with a cutline. Downtown Maynard in the 1880s. It looked like a frontier outpost, with wooden buildings and muddy streets. A hotbed of gambling, a center of wild and woolly hell-raising in its day. The whorehouses were known from here to Philly—they had written this so cleverly, letting it be known without saying it in so many words—and there were fights every Saturday night. The town was entirely recreational, so to speak: hardly anyone lived there, and when it burned, on January 12, 1900, most people said good riddance. In a few years the forest had come back thicker than ever, and a new highway built in the twenties had skirted the area, and the old dirt road had begun growing over as well.

  “Nobody goes there now,” the old woman said. “But it’s easy enough to find. There’s still a sign on the railroad line, though the train doesn’t stop there anymore.”

  This made his blood tingle. Something had happened in Maynard, and not forty years ago. Something recent, bad enough to give a man nightmares.

  That’s where I’ll find Carnahan. And maybe March Flack as well.

  He didn’t want to go into the station, but the man was still working on his car when he arrived at two o’clock. He didn’t want to be seen by anyone who might ask questions or slow him down. He had a couple of stops yet to make and by then it would be three o’clock, less than six hours of daylight left under the best of conditions. He sat in the car with both doors open, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He was impatient to get away, and he almost made it.

  The repairman slammed his hood just as Becky walked around the corner of the building. On the path beside her was Holly.

  “Jordan! My God, where’ve you been? Kidd’s been asking about you all morning.”

  “Something came up. I left Maitland a note.”

  “But you need to be here. Surely you know that; we go on the air in just three days.”