The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  But Jarvis knew how to protect himself. He smiled and said, “So, you see, all this brouhaha over an annotated first draft is just … noise.”

  “You’re a supporter of the Second Amendment, then?” said Peter.

  “Of course,” said Jarvis. “The right to keep and bear arms is God-given, as are all our rights, delivered by a Christian God to Christian men at a Christian convention. If you read the annotations, you’ll see it on my draft.”

  Jarvis pointed to one of Langdon’s handwritten notes. “A state preacher? A decree as to our roles as Christian men? Religion may remain separate, so as to protect the interests of Methodist versus Presbyterians, et cetera, but it must be encouraged.”

  “I’ve never seen that before,” said Peter. “ ‘Religion must be encouraged.’ “

  “Strong words,” said Jarvis. “But true.”

  “The other day,” said Peter, “I was reading something Elbridge Gerry wrote on his first draft, about no religious test being required of an office holder.”

  Jarvis nodded again, as if he had heard all that, too. “And in the Massachusetts ratifying convention, his compatriots spoke out. One man proclaimed that he wanted no politicians who did not believe in Christ because, as he put it, ‘a person cannot be a good man without being a good Christian.’ “

  “Couldn’t have said it better yourself,” said Peter.

  “You’ll read it all in my new book. I build on Langdon and the faith of the Framers, who could never have imagined the attacks we see today upon their ideas.”

  Peter looked at Kelly. “This means he’ll go after gay marriage.”

  Kate glanced up from her magazine. “That’s why I keep guns.”

  “We’re just fine with a civil union,” said Kelly.

  Jarvis closed the case and locked it. “People will try to tell you that the Founders were not religious men, but all of them agreed that religion must be encouraged, even Franklin. The first thing that Washington did when he took over at Cambridge was to mandate that the men attend religious services. And they try to tell us that he was not a churchgoer.”

  Peter was running through his American history, coming up with more than his share of objections, but he didn’t think that such a gimlet-eyed student of his own truth would be moved by anything else that Peter said.

  “So …” Peter asked Kelly, “what should I take from all this?”

  “Realization that you’ve been wasting your time,” said Jarvis. “There’s no annotated draft, other than this one. It passed through the hands of Will Pike, Caldwell P. Caldwell, and George Amory. It somehow fell to an Irish family—”

  Peter took breath. Here was the test. If he had one more name … it was …

  “—the Ryans.”

  … over. Jarvis had the right name. This had to be the right version.

  And if it was over, could Peter convince those nut-bags in the Maine woods to let Evangeline go without a Constitution to show them?

  Jarvis kept talking. “It went from the Ryans to the owners of the Pike Mill. Then it found its way to us. I can’t tell you how, but you understand.”

  “So, that’s that,” said Kelly.

  But Peter wasn’t giving up quite that easily. He couldn’t. There was too much unanswered to leave it all in the hands of this guy. And the biggest question still needed an answer.

  “If that’s that,” said Peter to Jarvis, “how do you explain that someone driving a Chrysler Sebring registered to your real estate company has been following me?”

  Jarvis looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He followed me through Newport. He parked in front of the Old Curiosity Bookshop in Portland just before he and his pal chased me through town.” Peter left out the murder at the mill. He was only talking here about the car.

  Jarvis shook his head. “My company is large. We hire a fleet from Chrysler. But if you’d give me the information, I’ll look into it.” Then Jarvis looked at his watch. “Tee time with Secourt.”

  “WHAT NOW?“

  They were back in the plane, heading toward the Quabbin.

  “I make a call to those boys in Maine, see if they’ll let Evangeline go,” said Peter.

  “So you’re convinced,” said Kelly.

  “Not really. But I can still use the story.” Peter was thinking out loud, but not too loudly, because he still didn’t trust these women entirely, even if Kelly had taken him to what seemed to be the end of the road.

  “If my father is still looking for something,” said Kate, “it’s still out there.”

  “We’re trying to straighten him out,” said Kelly. “Don’t keep him hunting for something that doesn’t exist.”

  Peter’s phone rang. He saw that it was Antoine, so he slipped his ear bud under the headset and took the call.

  “Boss, I got some good stuff on Gilbert Amory.”

  “Like what?”

  “You say you’re in Peacham?”

  “Heading back now.” Peter glanced down. “We’re over the Quabbin Reservoir.”

  “Well, Gilbert bought some land near Peacham in 1927. The year of the Great Flood.”

  “I didn’t know there was a great flood in 1927.”

  “That’s where this story begins. Gilbert did some business up there and—”

  Peter didn’t notice the engine begin to sputter. But he thought he heard Kate say, “Oh, shit.”

  “What is it?” asked Kelly.

  Peter said, “Unh … Antoine, we got a little problem here. Hang on.” He pulled the headset over his head. “What is it?

  “Oil pressure is dropping,” said Kate.

  “Did you check it before we took off?” asked Kelly.

  “Doesn’t matter if I checked it then. It’s falling now.” Kate sounded dead calm, like a test pilot in a movie.

  But Peter saw her hands shaking as she reached out and tapped the gauge.

  The sputtering grew louder.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Kelly.

  “Calm down,” said Kate.

  Peter said to Antoine, “If you don’t hear from me in fifteen minutes, call the State Police and tell them a small plane has gone down in the Quabbin Reservoir.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Antoine.

  Peter clicked off.

  There was nothing he could do to help, so he followed some of the steps he took when he boarded a commercial airliner. He looked around for the exit door and tried to plan his escape. He told himself that the best thing to do was to stay calm. He might get out of this alive if he did. Which was probably a lie.

  The engine sputtered a few more times; then it stopped.

  Kate tried to restart. It whirred. It coughed. The prop didn’t move.

  “Oh, no,” whispered Kelly.

  Kate said, “Decent wind from the west. It will hold us up for a bit. We might be able to glide straight over the trees. Aim for the steeple. There’s a road there, right?”

  “Right,” said Peter.

  “How close are the trees on either side?”

  “I can’t remember, but the area in front of the meetinghouse gives you room to touch down. You might tear the wings off when you’re taxiing but—”

  “That’s our play.”

  “But what if you hit a car?” said Kelly.

  “Then we die,” said Kate. “If we hit the ground at the wrong angle, we die, too.”

  “What about a water landing?” asked Peter.

  “Hitting water is like hitting concrete. Our only hope is to avoid the trees, drop right in front of the church, and taxi to a stop before we kill ourselves.”

  Then they were quiet. The only sound was the rush of the wind over the wings. It was … beautiful. The sound of the angels, thought Peter. But they weren’t playing their harps … yet.

  The plane dropped down … down … almost clipping the tops of the trees on the west side of the reservoir. Then there was the meetinghouse and the road and two cars and a patch of grass.

&nbs
p; Peter was making plans for every contingency he could think of: What would he do if the plane clipped a power line and flipped? If the plane lost a wing as it glided? If it hit a car? If it missed the road and hit the meetinghouse? The answer to every question: Stay calm and you’ll find your way out. Panic and die.

  Not once did he imagine himself flying through the windshield. Or spinning about the cabin. Or feeling the aluminum skin of the plane crush in around him like a collapsing beer can.

  Stay calm. Stay quiet. And…

  “Wheels down!” said Kate, her voice as cool as Chuck Yeager’s.

  But it wasn’t over yet.

  Time slowed. Reality reduced itself to a series of sounds and images, each of them entirely discreet. They were all unfolding at the same moment, but the mind could lift each strand and study it as though it were separate.

  Tires squealed … horns blared … two cars collided.

  The meetinghouse was on the right … and a tree on the left.

  The left wing hit the tree and ripped off with a metallic scream.

  At the same instant, the right wing struck the message board in front of the meetinghouse. The board went flying, along with half the wing.

  Kate threw over the wheel. The plane spun into the lot in front of the meetinghouse and stopped just feet from the front door.

  All three passengers pitched forward and snapped back. Automatic whiplash.

  “We’re on the ground,” said Kate.

  Kelly let out with a laugh.

  And Peter looked down at the shattered message board. Looking back up at him was the face of Daniel Shays. The historical society occupied the meetinghouse. The message board told the story of the obscure farmers’rebellion that some people called the last campaign of the American Revolution.

  Then Peter’s cell phone rang. It would be Antoine.

  Peter hoped that he had more about Gilbert Amory and the Great Flood, because this story was not over yet, no matter what Clinton Jarvis had told them … because who else but Jarvis had just tried to kill them?

  TWENTY-THREE

  November 1927

  OCTOBER HAD BEEN WARM, so warm that by late in the month, people were talking about having no winter.

  In Boston, the magnolia blossoms swelled. On Connecticut hillsides, forsythias pushed out yellow blossoms to compete with fall colors. In the mountains, bluejays that should have migrated weeks earlier still screeched in the branches.

  A headline in late editions of the Boston Globe: “Warmest November 2 in Fifty-two Years; Weatherman Declares Showers Coming.” The National Weather Service was predicting “a southwesterly storm from New York to Eastport, Connecticut.” What was coming would be far worse.

  THAT AFTERNOON, GILBERT Amory and a timber man by the name of Eustis Morton shook hands on a mountaintop in Vermont. Gilbert had just given this old Yankee a thousand dollars in cash as a deposit on the purchase of Mount Morton.

  “Hate to sell my keepsake,” said Morton.

  “Namesake,” said Gilbert.

  Morton spat a shot of tobacco at Gilbert’s feet. “It’s been in my family two hundred years. I’ll call it a keepsake if I want.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Gilbert.

  Eustis Morton was a small man with false teeth that whistled when he spoke. “Can’t figure why you want a mountain that’s mostly clear-cut.”

  “For the slopes.”

  “Slopes?” The word whistled bow and stern in Morton’s mouth.

  At twenty-five hundred feet, Mount Morton was not high, even for Vermont. But large swaths had been cleared of trees and subjected to lightning fires that conveniently removed the slash. When it snowed, a man would be able to strap skis onto his feet and glide all the way down. And he would be so exhilarated that he’d want to go right back up again. Gilbert had already imagined the ways in which to get that skier to the top of the slope—T-bars, chairlifts, even a horse-and-pung working the old tote roads.

  Ever since he oversaw the Perkins withdrawal from the mill—and pulled out his own money at the same time—Gilbert had been looking for an investment. But he wasn’t following the path suggested by Magnus Perkins—trusts, bonds, equities.

  Gilbert was now forty-eight. Life was flying fast, like the clouds he could see on the southern horizon. He had enjoyed the company of a few women, but he had missed the pleasures of conjugality. He had loved skiing and travel, but many a year he had stayed in Portland, handling his title and estate work, when he yearned to be elsewhere. His answer to any busybody who asked was always the same: The law had been his mistress and his lover.

  But no longer. He was still ramrod straight, but there was gray in his mustache. So he would feed his passions before he turned fifty. New Englanders, who had always endured winter, were learning to enjoy it. Gilbert, who had always endured life, was determined to enjoy it, too.

  And he would enjoy it in a big way. He had gone to Chamonix, in France, for the 1924 Winter Olympics. He had dreamed ever since of buying a mountain like this one: not too steep, so the slopes wouldn’t be too challenging, and clear, so preparation would be minimal, and near a rail line, so skiers would have transportation. And there was room enough for a cottage colony at the base. But it would cost more money than he had.

  So it was time to sell the Constitution, which meant it was time to visit his father.

  AT THAT MOMENT, his father was deciding where the crew should move next on the east-facing slope of Mount Kancamangus.

  “Hate to clear-cut,” he said, “but that’s what the managers want, so …”

  “Yes, Pa,” said Aaron Amory.

  “At least we stopped those damn Henrys.” The old man popped up in bed. “They were cutting on our land and saying it was theirs. The gall of them.”

  “Yes, Pa.” Doc Aaron Amory gently pushed his father back and placed a stethoscope to the old man’s bony chest. “Lie still.”

  “Could’ve armed our boys with rifles and gone right up like Fredericksburg,” muttered George. “They called me coward, said I went and shot myself in the foot but I went up that hill, brave as any man.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Your mother believes me. Where is she?” He popped up again. “Cordelia!”

  Then he dropped back and was quiet.

  Frenchy LaPointe leaned over Aaron’s shoulder. “He was swingin’ his ax. Cuttin’ firewood. But the ax slip, hit his leg. He don’t send for you till the leg, it start to swell—”

  George cried out, “Cordelia … Cordelia!”

  “Ain’t right for husbands to lose wives,” said Frenchy. “Wives supposed to live longer.”

  “God’s ways are past knowing.” Aaron stood and patted Frenchy’s back.

  Where Gilbert was distant, formal, fastidious, Aaron was a bit slovenly, built like his grandfather and namesake, though far more forgiving of human weakness. People felt relaxed around Aaron, tense around Gilbert. But Gilbert was a lawyer; it was his job to make people tense. Aaron was a country doctor, and his manner came naturally.

  Frenchy brought a red handkerchief to his nose and blew. “Will he be all right?”

  Aaron looked down at his father. “He’s met the old man’s friend.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Pneumonia.”

  George Amory spent most of his time in Livermore, watching his logging town die a bit more every year. In 1922, the sawmill had burned in a conflagration that lit the sky all the way to Bretton Woods. Operations had stopped for six months. But they had built another sawmill and kept going. Then the ancient Charles W. Saunders jumped the tracks and was wrecked, but still they kept on, gasping toward the end.

  Aaron pulled out his tobacco pouch and said to Frenchy, “Time for a pipe.”

  They stepped onto the porch. Down below, the sawmill was whining, and the new Baldwin engine breathed on a siding.

  “Mighty warm for November,” said Aaron.

  “It’s changin’, though,” said Frenchy. “It always does.”

/>   IT WAS ALREADY cloudy in Massachusetts.

  But Sarah Pike McGillis and her husband, Bill, did not notice the weather. They were doing a final walkthrough of the Pike-Perkins Mill with the representatives of the bank that held the mortgage.

  Eight years before, Perkins Holdings and members of the Pike family had sold their interest to Manchaug Mills of Sutton, a failing company trying to save itself by expanding. Total collapse was the result.

  But the granddaughter of Bartlett Pike and her husband had refused to stand by and see a great legacy sucked down by someone else’ failure.

  They had made deals with the bank. They had raised capital as they could. They had worked with the unions. If no bidder met the reserve, the mill and looms would go to them. But the outbuildings, the worker housing, the company vehicles, the mountains of finished goods on sidings awaiting shipment—all the ancillaries—would be sold to the highest bidder no matter what.

  “The looms alone are equal to the reserve,” said Raymond Dunne of the First National Bank.

  “Not if they have to be moved,” said Sarah. “They’re worth nothin’ ’less you run them.”

  “And we intend to run them,” said Bill McGillis.

  IN NEWPORT, MAGNUS Perkins was taking a final sail before pulling his boat for the winter. The thirty-five-foot sloop was sleek and seaworthy, so he wasn’t worried about thickening clouds or rising wind. There was a southeasterly blow coming, but the radio said it would head inland over Connecticut and die out once it hit the hills.

  Magnus took any chance to sneak away from work and wife.

  He was sailing with Bunson, who would never tell tales to Mrs. Perkins about their first stop, at the steamer called the Brunswick Belle, Canadian registry, anchored three miles and one foot off the Rhode Island coast.

  The Coast Guard now enforced an amendment to the Constitution that had inspired more illegal activity than any law ever written: the Eighteenth, Prohibition. But they could not touch a ship flagged to another country outside territorial waters, so booze-laden rust buckets like the Brunswick Belle anchored just beyond the limit and did business with inbound rumrunners and outbound sailors like Magnus Perkins.