Stone Groove

by Erik Carter

  In 1939, a stone hauler named Bill Eberhardt discovered the long-sought second Dare Stone. Over the next three years, forty-seven more Dare Stones were discovered all over the South, mostly by Eberhardt. Prof. Pearce endorsed these stones as well. A journalist accused Eberhardt of using acid to forge the stones’ inscriptions, and when acid was subsequently found at Eberhardt’s workshop, even Pearce had to admit that the new stones were frauds. But he still maintained that the first stone was authentic. Even when no one else did.

  Dale found himself identifying with Prof. Pearce, which was the most antithetical notion to cross his mind in a while. But like Pearce, Dale had been ostracized to the periphery of society because he based his actions on convictions, beliefs, what he perceived to be right. The road to hell that’s paved in good intentions? It’s a freeway. Six lanes wide.

  A stack of books landed on the table. Wilson stood in front of him. “Here are the other ones.” He plopped into a chair.

  Dale put a finger to his lips. “Quiet, Wilson. This is a library.”

  Wilson groaned. “Any luck?”

  “Look at this.” Dale pointed to the book.

  On the left page were two images of the original Dare Stone—the top side of the stone and the bottom—each covered with small, scratchy letters. On the opposite page were transcriptions. The top side said:

  And the bottom read:

  “Is that English?” Wilson looked at the words like they’d just spat on his mother.

  “Elizabethan English,” Dale said. “Early Modern.”

  “Great. Care to translate?”

  Not long ago, Dale would have gone cross-eyed looking at all the strange spellings and oddly placed Vs. But last year he had a strange case in which his suspect believed there were anarchist messages hidden in the original texts of Shakespeare. As such, Dale had a rudimentary knowledge of Early Modern English.

  “The top side says, ‘Ananias Dare and Virginia went hence unto Heaven, 1591. Any Englishman show John White, Governor of Virginia.’ ”

  “John White,” Wilson said. “The man who went back to England?”

  “Right. The leader of the colony. It’s asking any Englishman who found the stone to show it to Governor White.”

  “And the back side?”

  Dale scanned over the text. “‘Father, soon after you went to England we came here’ … ‘Misery and war’ … ‘Half dead’ … There were twenty-four people left. The Indians brought them a message about an English ship, but they didn’t believe it was White. Then the Indians suddenly turned on them, killing all but seven. Virginia, her child, was ‘slain with much misery.’”

  Wilson looked at the words carved into the Marshall Village stone. “That doesn’t connect at all.” He sighed and crossed his arms.

  Dale read the riddle.

  He looked from the Dare Stone’s message to the riddle. There were a couple of parallels—the use of the word heaven and the idea of explaining the fate of a group of lost people. But the parallels were thin, and there was certainly no direct correlation. The creep wasn’t going to make it that easy on him.

  The others in the first line was clearly a reference to the original Roanoke colonists. So the writer was saying that the missing Marshallites could be found where those colonists had been … but not quite. The colonists had been at Roanoke Island. But what would be not quite Roanoke Island? Another place nearby?

  Dale grabbed one of the books Wilson brought, an atlas, and found a map of the area. Roanoke Island lay between the North Carolina mainland and the barrier islands of the Outer Banks. Perhaps one of the other islands? Directly east of Roanoke Island was Bodie Island, which was actually a peninsula. South of Bodie was Hatteras Island. Each island had several towns, and Dale cringed a little at the number of potential candidates.

  Wilson leaned in closer.

  Dale pointed to the map. “I’m thinking the place that the clue is referring to is somewhere near Roanoke Island, somewhere in the Outer Banks.”

  Wilson looked at the stone from the Marshall Village. “Would any of those places have anything that’s a form not quite to heaven?”

  “Not that I—Yes, of course!”

  A good-looking young girl—way too young—who was sitting a couple tables away shushed him.

  “Sorry,” Dale whispered then turned the atlas to face Wilson. He pointed to a town only about fifteen to twenty miles from Roanoke Island.

  Kitty Hawk.

  “A form not quite to heaven—an airplane,” Dale said. “The world’s first manned flight took place not twenty miles from the Roanoke Colony. At Kitty Hawk.” Two incredibly important places in American and world history were right down the road from each other. History does quirky things like that.

  Wilson nodded. “I’ll be danged,” he said. “You’ve done it again, smarty pants.”

  Dale nodded. It seemed to fit perfectly.

  Maybe too perfectly?

  The second line of the riddle was giving him pause. Names can be deceiving.

  “What’s wrong?” Wilson said.

  “Suddenly I’m not so sure.”

  “What do you mean? A form not quite to heaven. An airplane. It doesn’t get much more clear-cut than that.”

  “That’s why I’m suspicious.”

  These riddles weren’t always technically complex, but every word counted. And there was too much here that didn’t fall into place. Yes, the airplane connection was obvious, but what was there about Kitty Hawk that would be connected to caravan makers?

  Wilson scowled at the note. “Names can be deceiving. So what deceiving name could he be talking about?”

  That was the question. Kitty Hawk … Cat Eagle? Feline Raptor? There was nothing about the name Kitty Hawk that seemed deceiving. So maybe he was extending his search too far. Maybe he needed to look back to the original stone, back to …

  Roanoke.

  There was the Roanoke Colony of the 1500s that existed on Roanoke Island. But these days there was also the city of Roanoke, Virginia. A city famous for its railroad industry.

  The caravan makers.

  “That’s it! You said it yourself, Wilson. Back at the village. Roanoke, Virginia.” Dale pulled another book from the stack, this one a tourism book of the Southeast. He quickly flipped to the section about Roanoke. “Where the others were but not quite. The original colonists were from Roanoke Island. Today we have the city of Roanoke—two completely different places with the same name but not quite. And look at this. ‘Roanoke is perhaps most famous for being the home of Norfolk and Western Railways.’ Trains, Wilson. Caravans.”

  Wilson nodded slowly, hesitantly.

  Dale looked at the book in front of him again and clapped. “I knew we’d find it. Everything works—”

  “Everything works out if you give it time, I know.” Wilson waved it off. “But what about the form not quite to heaven?”

  That troubled Dale too. It was the vaguest part of the riddle. As such, it was likely the most important part as well.

  “I don’t know,” Dale said. “But I know this much—we need to get to Roanoke, Virginia.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Wilson raised an eyebrow. “Roanoke, Virginia, is hundreds of miles from Roanoke Island. It’d be a heck of a misjudgment.”

  Of course it would be. Wilson’s calculated trepidation was one of his strongest attributes as an agent, but it got in the way when Dale needed to make a firm decision and see it through. On their first assignment, Dale took a snap shot that shattered the kidnapper’s femur and saved a young girl’s life. Wilson thought that Dale had been reckless. Dale’s Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special, with its 1 7/8-inch barrel, wasn’t known for its accuracy, and neither, particularly, was Dale. But in the end, the girl was alive, and the creep was in prison.

  Wilson’s hesitance was more annoying than helpful. Dale knew when to follow his intuition. And he was right about this. “Roanoke, Virginia. That’s where they are.”

  “You’re the boss,�
�� Wilson said.

  “So they tell me.”

  Chapter 16

  Dale stood in the shadow of the massive Norfolk and Western corporate headquarters in downtown Roanoke. If there was anywhere in the country that could be considered a caravan maker, this was it.

  During the drive there, Dale read up on the building in the books from Madison College. Of course, neither Dale nor Wilson were Madison students, so the urgency of the situation required them to creatively “borrow” the books—shoving them into Wilson’s briefcase.

  The building was a 150,000-square-foot art deco behemoth located in the heart of downtown. It was built in 1931 as an eight-story, 138-foot corporate castle that could withstand almost anything. The impetus behind creating such a sturdy building was the loss of the original headquarters to a fire in 1896. Not ones to tempt fate, Norfolk and Western made this building to last. Not only was it fireproof, but it was built on a foundation of solid rock with steel foundation columns that sank to a depth of ten feet below the surface of the basement, which itself was seventy-two feet deep. The construction included one million bricks, two million pounds of structural steel, and 5,000 cubic yards of concrete.

  In short, the building was imposing.

  Norfolk and Western was the caravan maker, and Roanoke was the location that was the same but not quite. Dale was certain. But what he didn’t know was where precisely the riddle wanted him to go. He had considered going to the nearby Roanoke Shops, which was Norfolk and Western’s storied manufacturing and maintenance facility where they famously made their own engines. Dale thought that this was a long shot. After all, how would the kidnapper be able to hide a hundred forty-seven people in a busy plant full of steel and machinery? Still, it was worth considering, so he’d sent Wilson to check it out.

  The more logical location was the company’s corporate headquarters, so that’s where Dale had gone. The final piece of the puzzle remained—in line with a form not quite to heaven. He didn’t doubt that solving the kidnapper’s riddle would lead him to the kidnapped people. These crazies always made their puzzles challenging but solvable. After all, if the puzzles weren’t solvable, no one would ever see their genius.

  The problem was that once Dale found the people, they were just as likely to be dead as alive.

  Heaven could mean one of two things—some representation of a blissful hereafter, or a reference to the sky. As Dale wasn’t quite sure how to get to the afterworld in the middle of downtown Roanoke, his first instinct was to look upwards.

  He cupped his hand over his eyes and peered toward the tops of the buildings. Nothing out of the ordinary. A plane passed overhead, and for a split second he thought that maybe this was the work of the kidnapper. It was a jetliner and was several thousand feet away. Dale felt absurd. Sometimes working among the delusional gave him a tendency toward paranoia himself.

  In the distance were the Blue Ridge Mountains. Something caught Dale’s eye, something on the side of one of the peaks. It looked like some sort of communications tower at first, but as he looked at it for a moment, he realized it was not a tower at all. It was a star. Not a point of light, but a geometric star. A giant, five-pointed star, like a sticker on a grade schooler’s paper.

  A star. A form that was supposed to be in the heavens, but was rather stuck on the side of the mountain. A form not quite to heaven.

  Why the hell would someone put a huge star on the side of a mountain? He pushed his sunglasses back onto his nose and looked around for someone to ask. Across the road was a coffee shop. He jogged over.

  It was a small place with raggedy booths and raggedy patrons. The air was thick with smoke, and there was a cooler of pies on the front counter. It was the kind of place Dale would like.

  He went to the counter where a large, older woman was reading a newspaper. She looked up from her paper and gave him a big smile as he approached.

  “Help you, sugar?”

  “I’m wanting to know what that star is on the mountain out there.”

  She just looked at him for a moment. “Not from around here, are you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the Roanoke Star up there on Mill Mountain. It’s the city symbol.” She leaned around the cash register and thumbed through the various brochures that were displayed there. She grabbed a red one and handed it to Dale. “Here.”

  It read:

  Roanoke: The Star City of the South

  Dale thanked her and headed toward the exit.

  “Not gonna get nothin’?” she called after him.

  On the front of the brochure was a picture of the star he had seen. It was composed of a series of five concentric neon stars held up by a metal scaffolding structure set among the mountaintop trees. Next to the picture was a brief paragraph.

  The Roanoke Star gives the Star City its nickname. Constructed in 1949, it sits over 1,000 feet above the city and can be seen for miles. The star is 88 ½ feet tall and weighs 5 tons. Soon, to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial, the star’s colors will be changed from all white to RED, WHITE and BLUE!

  Dale stuffed the pamphlet into his back pocket and pushed through the glass door of the coffee shop.

  Adrenaline surged through him. This star was his form not quite to heaven, and the Norfolk and Western headquarters was his caravan makers. Now he just had to figure out how the two were in line.

  He looked back at the building. The best he could figure, the southeast corner of the building would logically be the most inline with the star—the corner of Centre Avenue and Jefferson Street. He ran over.

  The corner was nothing of note. Just brick walls and a decorative tree in the sidewalk. He looked all around him. Cars and other buildings.

  He leaned against the tree and looked back out to the star, hoping that somehow inspiration would strike. This had to be the place.

  But he sure as hell was at a standstill.

  Dale stuck his hands in his pockets and dropped his chin to his chest. That was when he saw it.

  A rock about one foot across. It was in the square of earth surrounding the tree he was leaning against. Like the ROANOKE stone back at the Marshall Village, this stone was buried in the dirt.

  Also, like the stone at the Marshall Village, there were letters scratched upon the surface.

  Chapter 17

  The man’s heart was still racing. Conley had walked right past him. Who would have thought that he would choose to come into the coffee shop? Of all fluke decisions, why in the world had Conley decided to come in here? It was a good thing the man always prepared himself for every contingency.

  He was dressed like a working-class man—at least how he imagined a working-class man to dress. He wore a big, red flannel shirt and a pair of greasy jeans. To help further disguise himself, he wore a pair of sunglasses and sported a two-week beard, which he’d been growing out for the occasion.

  And Conley hadn’t noticed him at all.

  He just walked up to the front counter, asked the old hag about the Star, and left with a brochure. Twice he’d walked right past him, once on the way in, once on the way out. Within a foot of him. So close that he felt his breeze. He could smell him.

  When he first came to Roanoke to stake out the logistics, the man had decided upon the coffee shop because of the large glass windows. They faced Centre Avenue and looked upon the Norfolk and Western building. The perfect vantage point. From here he could witness everything, and he wouldn’t have to sit in a parked car or stand suspiciously on the street corner. There were even counters with barstools right up against the windows on either side of the door. He couldn’t believe his luck when he first found the place. It was another sign that this was all meant to be.

  His excitement was at a rapid boil, not just from seeing Conley so close, but because he could see Conley putting everything together. He’d watched him find the building, search for a form not quite to heaven, succumb to frustration, and finally he saw him look out to Mill Mountain and discover the Star. It was th
rilling to see his plan come together so wonderfully, and it made him bulge in his pants. The ache was fantastic.

  He’d known that Conley would be able to put together all the pieces. He was the puzzle man, after all. Now there was only one more piece left for him to discover.

  Conley had done so well thus far, as a matter of fact, that he’d given the man a fright. Back in Staunton he hadn’t anticipated that Conley would actually chase after him. When he drove by the village the second time and saw all the idiot police trying to handle the girl, he figured he was home free. Several minutes later, he was beyond surprised to see a sheriff’s car flying down the road behind him with its lights on. Of course, whatever the hillbilly had put into that Custom 500 hadn’t stood a chance against the 360 he had in his Duster.

  The man had handled that minor hiccup perfectly. He easily lost Conley and the fool sheriff. And since then everything had gone exactly as planned. As predicted, Conley figured out the initial clue that he pinned onto the girl’s back. That led him to the second clue under the rock in the village. Since he had buried the stone two years ago, it had always nagged at him that maybe he had made the riddle too obscure, that Conley wouldn’t be able to decipher it.

  But here he was in Roanoke, Virginia, sitting back comfortably, drinking coffee and watching Conley as he did indeed put the finishing touches on the riddle.

  Conley was about fifty yards away. He wore a tan leather jacket and jeans and was leaning against the tree. Just then he noticed the stone and bent over to read what was scratched on its surface.

  It was time. The man grabbed the walkie-talkie that was sitting on the counter in front of him and pushed the button. “Proceed.”

  He smiled and took a sip of his coffee. Conley was about to get a big surprise.