Cards in the Cloak

by Jeremy Bursey

  Chapter 8

  “Beach House”

  By the summer of 1960, Norman found the time to make another trip into the wilds of the great U.S. of A., now that Randall was well into high school, and his younger kids, Diana and Jack, were of the state of mind that they wanted to help their mother with everything around the house, especially now that Norman had told them they had to if they wanted to keep living at home. Also, because his four surviving shops were in good hands, thanks to his store managers having such ambition that they each wanted to prove to him that they could take over the whole company should he ever decide to retire, an idea that he, who was approaching the age of 61 in November, was beginning to think about more seriously each month.

  In the past, he would have to set aside a small chunk of time to cover a reasonable swath of names on the list, as meeting everyone required not just the necessary time it took to meet them, but also the amount of time it took to find them. But thanks to transportation improving with the Interstate Highway System beginning to take over the country, and the growing trend to move from city to city by commercial air, Norman’s travels could move faster, and thus, he could cover more ground more quickly.

  And because he was leaving all of his business and home responsibilities in trusted hands, he felt more confident about setting aside a much larger chunk of his time to travel. So, he gave himself as much as five weeks to devote to the search for Maxie McWalter.

  This time he decided to head east to Bangor, Maine, and work his way down to Key Largo, Florida, using the new (but notably broken) I-95 as his travel hub. He’d hit a few towns along the way from Chicago, including Detroit and Pittsburgh, just to help him better complete the list. But once he’d reach I-95, he was determined to stick to it until he found himself sipping piña colada on a sunny beach in the Keys, or until he found the family he was searching for.

  The chunks of highway that split off to alternate routes slowed him slightly, as many sections still adopted the toll systems that were implemented prior to the Interstate Highway System’s induction a few years earlier. But having the Interstate available at all made traveling smoother and quicker than he remembered the route system ever getting. In just one week’s time, he was able to cover five houses along the path, where the old system might’ve gotten him to only three of the houses.

  This wasn’t to say that the trip was flawless. There were a couple of occasions where he’d gotten lost, notably once in New Jersey and twice in Maryland near D.C., because the traffic patterns were so wild that he’d accidentally rerouted himself, due either to reading the signs incorrectly or to following a convoy of commercial vehicles that he was certain was heading to Florida with him. Encountering fragments in the highway also contributed to his occasional disorientation, but nothing had taken him too far off course, as he was keenly aware of the towns he should’ve been passing through as he headed toward America’s penis, Florida.

  In Florida, he had three towns to visit: Daytona Beach, Key Largo, and Fort Walton Beach in the panhandle. Because Fort Walton Beach was the farthest out of his way, and because Key Largo was the most distant on the path he was already taking, he decided he would tackle Daytona Beach first. It was easily accessible from I-95 and U.S. 1, and the house he was visiting was right on the beach, so he could give himself a mini-vacation while he interviewed the current resident.

  Getting to the beach house in Daytona was simple enough. Because the development of hotels and condos in the area had been set to full throttle years earlier, beach access was a necessity, and the city had made certain that every inch of its adjacent road was friendly to travelers, providing connections that took drivers not only to an establishment’s respective parking lot, but onto the beach itself. Daytona was famous for its hard-packed sand, and it wasn’t unusual to find the occasional vehicle trucking along its shoreline. The beach even had its own traffic lane to protect sunbathers from getting run over.

  So, Norman had no difficulty with parking, since he could just park on the sand, and he had no difficulty walking to the beach house’s front entrance, since walking on the beach was not much harder than walking on the sidewalk. The only tricky part was staying cool. The temperature was in the nineties, and he hadn’t filled up his water jug since he was in South Carolina.

  He unbuttoned the first three buttons down his shirt and fanned himself as he waited for the resident to open the door. He was certainly impressed with the place, and he used his free seconds in waiting to admire the view. The house itself was small, with a back patio lined by seagrass and a sliding glass door separating it from the living room. The front porch was actually to the side of the house, and its normal wooden door led to the same living room. The eaves had vents installed, perhaps to keep the house cool during ocean breezes. And the landscape around the front of the house consisted of a plot of the greenest grass and several varieties of citrus trees. He could see himself living here, much more than he could see himself living in Chicago, and, with the exception of his time in New York during the late twenties, he had spent most of his post-War years in Chicago. To live anywhere else was sacrilege. But he could live here. The fact that he was sixty and this was Florida might’ve had some influence on that thinking. But the fresh air and warm temperatures added to it.

  But as he stood there on that porch, waiting for the resident to answer the front door, he chuckled at himself at his indulgence of the thought. It was just a pipe dream! His life was back in Chicago. Most of his history was in Chicago. Surely his life wouldn’t end on a beach in Daytona. How ridiculous.

  He heard the clinking of a chain sliding back, and then the door opened. A semiattractive young woman peeked through the door. She was in a nurse’s uniform.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m looking for the relatives of a Douglas Warburn,” Norman said.

  “Just a minute.” The young woman closed the door. Norman could hear her voice growing fainter as she moved farther away from it. “Missus Warburn. You have a guest. Shall I let him in?”

  The young woman peeked out the door about twenty seconds later.

  “What’s your business?”

  “Historical reference.”

  “Just a minute.”

  The young woman ducked inside the house. Norman could hear her repeating his answer to the resident of the house.

  She came back a moment later and opened the door wider. Then she stepped back to reveal a frail old woman sitting beside her in a wheelchair.

  The old woman had hardened blue eyes. Her face was wrinkled more fiercely than a pug, but they did not mask the deadness of her expression. The sun feared her skin, as it had left it pale, and had clearly allowed time and shadow suck out whatever was left of her milky softness. Judging by the twinge of pink in her cheeks, light deprivation was not yet done with her.

  Her body had been withering for some time now, and she was left with a hunch in her back. Her left shoulder was higher than her right, and her wrists were barely wider than her bones. And she had a palsy shake, not unlike the shivering one might display in a fierce cold. But the room wasn’t cold. She was the only cold thing outside of an icebox within five thousand miles of here.

  “Good afternoon, Missus Warburn,” Norman said, as he tipped his hat. He looked down at her lap. She had the latest hardcover from Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only, resting on it. “You enjoying your book?”

  “What do you want?” she said. Her voice was hard, but not entirely unpleasant. Just shy of a cackle.

  “Okay, I’ll get to the point. I’ve come from Chicago to fulfill a mission I’ve been on since the end of World War One. To do so, I need to identify a man I’d met only briefly in the trenches before he was killed in front of me. His name is not on the official record, at least not the name he gave me, but I refuse to believe that he was a product of my imagination.

  “You see, Missus Warburn, this man gave me an invention of his, just before he died, and the parts he offered have all but decayed
. This invention could change the face of the twentieth century, perhaps creating an entire generation of healthier people. But I cannot identify the pieces, and I fear it’s too late to have them analyzed. The only hope I have is to see whether this man had left any written or photographic evidence of his experiment behind.

  “Normally I would not go to such lengths or to spend so much of my life trying to figure out the identity of someone I had known for less than ten minutes, especially if there was any chance that his invention was a failure. But that’s the thing. It wasn’t a failure. I’ve not been sick with the flu a single day since I’ve taken the combination he’d given me. Not even a fever. I believe he had discovered the cure to a most pesky ailment, and I want to make sure the world has a chance to benefit from it. All I need is to find his family and search any notes or journals he might have in reference to this discovery.”

  Norman paused as he watched for her reaction. She had none; she continued to stare at him as if he had just finished telling her about this itch he’d been trying to rub out from his armpit.

  “Ma’am, did your son Douglas have another name?”

  The old woman shrugged.

  “Is that a yes, no, or I-don’t-know?”

  “Chester was his middle name,” she said.

  “Did he have any nicknames?”

  She leaned forward as far as her hips allowed. Her eyes were birdlike now.

  “I assure you, sir, I have not seen Dougy in over forty years. I no longer remember his names, nicknames, imaginary names, or friends’ names. I remember only his real name, and lately I’m forgetting that, too. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Do you remember if he’d ever gone by another name?”

  “No. He might have. He was a creative boy. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Ma’am,” the nurse interrupted, “you did mention your son to me a few times, and you did claim he had several nicknames for himself.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, you said that he often answered to whatever character he was reading about at the time. You said he’d spent his entire fourteenth year calling himself Bob Cratchit.”

  The old woman screwed her face in thought. Her puckered lips nearly went vertical.

  “Oh yes, I do remember that. Thought his father and I were being stingy for Christmas that year. He kept that name until the following Christmas when he thought we’d ‘try to get it right this time.’ He thought his rebellion would earn him a sled. It got him a stocking full of coal instead. He started going by Captain Ahab after that.”

  “Do you remember what he called himself before going off to war?” Norman asked.

  The woman shook her head.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said.

  The nurse put her hand on her hip and smiled.

  “You told me that, too,” she said. “You said he went by the name of a book hero he was reading about when he’d gotten the news he was drafted.”

  The woman shook her head.

  “No idea. It’s possible.”

  “Yes, it was an obscure book, none we’d remember today. A Victorian detective story, like the ones featuring Sherlock Holmes, but not as popular.”

  The woman continued to stare at Norman. She had no more answers for him, it seemed.

  The nurse leaned against the wall and ran her fingers through her hair. Her eyes were fixed on the wooden floor. She was thinking hard about this.

  “Natty Waters, I think,” she said. “Nicky Waller. Mickey Troller.”

  She was staring off to space by the time she’d uttered a fourth name.

  “Maxie McWalter?” Norman asked, trying to help.

  The nurse snapped her fingers and pointed at him.

  “Yes! Maxie McWalter. That’s it.” She rubbed the old lady’s shoulder. “Remember, Missus Warburn? You told me he was calling himself Maxie McWalter, after that second-rate Victorian detective, just before he shipped out to France.”

  The old woman shook her head.

  “I just want to remember my boy as Dougy.”

  A silence followed for several minutes as everyone thought about what the old woman had said. And then Norman broke the solemn mood when he recognized the giddy feeling overcoming him. If this story was correct, then he’d finally found the identity of the elusive Maxie McWalter, and he would no longer have to consult that blasted October 23, 1918 death list. But his mission wasn’t complete until he could unlock the final mystery shrouding the truth behind the flu cure.

  “Missus Warburn?” he said. “May I look around for any document your son may have left behind?”

  Mrs. Warburn glanced up at him. Her eyes were hardened again.

  “No,” she said. “No, you may not go through my son’s things. I think you’ve disturbed my peace long enough.”

  Norman was crestfallen.

  “Wait, but ma’am, if I may. I’ve been on a very long journey to—”

  “Sir, I appreciate your visit, I really do. But I am a tired woman, and I do not want company any longer. Please be gone now. I need my medicine.”

  Then she signaled the nurse toward the door. The nurse snapped to attention. Then she gave Norman a pitiful smile.

  “Sorry,” the nurse said.

  She closed the door in Norman’s face. Then she reopened it and peeked through the crack with a sheepish grin.

  “Really sorry. She’s not feeling well.”

  Then the nurse closed the door again, this time keeping it closed.

  Apparently, he wasn’t going to solve the mystery today.