The Second Letter

by Robert Lane

  Copyright © 2014 Mason Alley Publishing, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0615841880

  ISBN 13: 9780615841885

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013912377

  Mason Alley Publishing, St. Pete Beach, FL

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, localities, businesses, companies, and events is entirely coincidental.

  We are all of us born with a letter inside of us, and that only if we are true to ourselves may we be allowed to read it before we die.

  Douglas Coupland

  I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.

  John F. Kennedy

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 1

  West Coast of Florida, April 14, 1961

  The day the letter arrived Dorothy Harrison heard the song for the first time and thought it was one for the ages.

  She twisted the ribbed knob of her car radio in an effort to eliminate the static and noise that crackled through the speakers of her pearl fawn 1959 Buick Electra 225. A deuce and a quarter of fins, steel, and chrome that the world would never afford the luxury to construct again. Machine, time, and a woman forever joined in a singular stylistic statement.

  She drove down the beach road and swung onto a green-canopied street. She turned into her drive and parked on the packed white sand next to the trimmed oleander bush with its tropical red flowers. Angelo, her young Cuban gardener, dragged branches to a brush pile. She knew he would wait for a west wind before igniting the dry sticks. The oleander bush was toxic and its smoke dangerous to inhale. A black sedan rested across the street. She wondered what they wanted this time and why they just didn’t leave her alone. Beyond the sedan in the park, old men played cards, read newspapers, and smoked cigars.

  “Morning, Miss Dorothy,” Angelo said. He faced her with his hands at his sides and his shirttail tucked in. The shirttail was always tight within his trousers.

  “Good morning, Angelo. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. When the Lord wants, he can make a sweet one. I’ll be here just a couple of hours if that will be all right with you.”

  “That’s fine. You really do have everything looking very nice.”

  “We have a visitor,” Angelo said. “He came by himself in that black car. Said he knew you. He’s inside right now and all dressed up.”

  “I’m sure he’s just an old friend.” She knew of none, though, who would be casually driving around the west coast of Florida.

  She had been listening to WTSP 1380 AM on her in-dash radio playing the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” The question swirled in her head. Dorothy, Dottie to the friends she’d abandoned in Washington, DC, liked the song and wondered what Jim would have thought of it. He always admired the big swing bands of Dorsey and Miller, and he eventually grew to appreciate Ellington’s style, but you didn’t hear much of that music anymore. Although it had only been a few months, it was almost as if that era had slipped out with him. Dorothy thought the world was changing at an accelerating pace and in the process, redefining time.

  Her Northeast friends could not fathom why she and Jim had relocated to Long Key, a mile-and-a-half strip of untrimmed subtropical foliage, crushed seashells, and small cottages on the extreme southern tip of St. Petersburg Beach. A few extra feet of water could obliterate it all, and nearly did in the unnamed storms of the 1920s. But her friends knew that Dottie always did things on her own terms, and besides, it didn’t matter where she lived. The party followed her.

  She had spent her childhood years in India and China as the only child of missionary parents. In 1925, when she was twenty-eight, she married Jim. He was a dashing Secret Service agent before such men even existed. On the DC socialite circuit, Dorothy was a svelte blonde of physical and intellectual energy. Thanks to her father, who wanted to tell the world about Jesus, and her physician mother, who wanted to tell the world about the importance of clean drinking water, Dorothy possessed a greater knowledge of world affairs than the bottom half of the Department of State.

  Dorothy had once confided to her mother that she thought clean drinking water did more good for the world than Jesus. “Don’t tell your father,” her mother had replied with a smile.

  While Jim served as chief of the White House Secret Service detail under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Dorothy became an expert in historical preservation. She was credited with reviving much of Alexandria, Virginia’s, historic district. His interest eventually migrated to covert operations, and in 1947, he joined to the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. An invitation to one of their fanfares was a quick ticket up Washington’s slippery social ladder. But it wasn’t the life they wanted.

  They moved south to an island.

  They initially bought a house on Boca Ciega Bay, but when the old stone church just three blocks away faced demolition—the post office passed on its option to purchase the building—Dorothy couldn’t let the small 1917 building go. They handed over $1,385, unloaded the bay front property, and renovated the church into their home. They discovered the warm waters of the Gulf were an ideal place to make love, just as the falling sun split itself between the sky and the water and was level with their bodies.

  Jim was away on business when the first black sedan had arrived. Dorothy knew by the look on the driver’s face before his foot ever touched her front porch.

  Jim died January 5, 1961. One hundred and one days ago.

  The sun rarely penetrated the leaves that shielded her expansive side yard. A constant breeze, like a lover’s memory, blew through her property and caressed her home with the scent of the sea and a hint of the exotic places that had landed her there. Harbored under long-needled Australian pines with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the bay guarding the other, Dorothy Harrison held court for the relentless stream of visitors anxious to escape the nation’s capital as well as new acquaintances eager to engage her company.

  She entered her house and saw him as he stood underneath the stained-glass window that depicted a cross on a shield. Dorothy always thought it looked like a map of Ohio with a crooked X in the middle.

  “My goodness, Ted, you’re a pleasant surprise. What brings you to my ‘God-forsaken piece of sand’? I believe that was your comment when you viewed it on a map.”

  Theodore Sullivan placed a copy of Vogue magazine on a table next to a brigh
t blue-and-white Pan Am luggage tag. Dorothy noted his summer beige suit and wondered if he had purchased it solely for this trip. He was a man who was rarely seen in public unless charcoal gray or deep blue cloaked his body. His hair, as always, was closely cropped. He greeted her with a kiss on her offered cheek. “I spoke too hastily then; it’s a beautiful home, shows you what I know. It’s good to see you, Dottie. The town’s not the same without you. The parties, always a bore, you know, are even more so. All serious business now.”

  “Certainly seemed serious at the time.” She glanced at the magazine. It had arrived yesterday and she hadn’t the time to read it. The cover featured a woman in a rainbow-striped dress and short hair under the banner “The new enticements.” Is that what’s in? Things certainly are changing rapidly.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Sullivan said. “There’re just so many more players now.”

  “Did you fly yourself down?”

  “Yes. It is the one element that I still enjoy.”

  “You know you can take your tie off here. I won’t tell.” She imagined that he piloted his plane with his tie and suit coat on.

  “I really do like your place.” He glanced around. “It looks like an easy place to walk into and a hard place to leave.”

  “Those are the best. Can I get you an iced tea or lemonade?”

  “That’ll be swell.”

  “Which?”

  “Oh, a lemonade would be great.”

  “How’s Maureen?” Dorothy moved off to her side kitchen and poured a large glass of lemonade from the hand blown pitcher she kept in the refrigerator. She had just purchased it from Nancy’s gallery down the street and was using it for the first time. She wanted to share that with Ted, but she knew that despite his ulterior politeness, Ted Sullivan harbored no interest for anything but his work.

  Nor did he engage in social visits.

  “She gives you her best,” he said. “Still planning to come down and see you in the fall. I believe that Betty is joining her as well. They think DC is hot.” Sullivan took a handkerchief across the back of his neck.

  “I’m glad Betty’s coming. Maureen and I discussed them visiting in early November and I was so hoping Betty would join her. Let’s move to the porch. There’s a nice breeze there.”

  They sat next to each other, and Sullivan drank half of his lemonade in one long, slow, appreciative act. “It really is a remarkable bit of sand you have here,” he said. “You can practically spread your arms and touch water on both sides. You always had a knack for style. You found that perfect perch, no matter where you were.”

  “‘The symbolic spot’ is what Jim would say.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Two fishermen holding lines with a dozen fish strewn on them ambled down the road. She assumed they were headed to the restaurant with the pine walls on the bay where the fish would become the two-dollar catch of the day.

  “You still have your tie on,” she said.

  Sullivan glanced at her. “I envy you, down here. The game has so much more money, so many strata. We used to sit at a round table and we knew the enemy was on the other side of the pond. Now we sit at the same round table and hide our notes from each other, disguise our thoughts, and measure our words. Where there used to be one agency, there are now five. Where there used to be three divisions in an agency, now there are a dozen, bumping into each other on foreign corners and in embassy basements. You can’t fathom the money that goes into it all.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  Sullivan blew out his breath, hung his head, and looked down at his polished tan tied shoes sticking out from his cuffed pants. Dorothy thought they seemed so out of place on a wood porch swept with sand. “A few more years,” he said. “A few more years.”

  “I don’t think so, Ted.” She looked hard at him, not letting him get away with it. He brought his head up and met her stare with an emotionless gaze.

  “It’s a battle, and we line up three deep on both sides of the ball. Even after Korea, there’s still a growing contingent that’s salivating to get entwined in French Indo-China. Heaven forbid that some third-rate country has a civil war and we stand idle. We always have to put a spin on how it threatens our very democracy and how our indifference is akin to shunning Almighty God himself. Why all the muscle, they contend, if we’re never to use it. The world is a domino, they say. But where is that written? Department of Defense—what a sick Goebbels twist. Call it the Department of Offense and see what type of public support you’d garner.” Sullivan broke eye contact and looked again across at the park. “And now we’ve bedded with Satan to export our righteousness south of the border.

  “I do it to be heard,” he said, his eyes still lost in the park, “to sleep at night, to sleep forever, and know that I voiced what I believed, and to have done it in a manner that exceeded what I thought I was capable of. I’m afraid that’s as good as I can come up with.”

  “Pretty heady stuff for island conversation,” Dorothy said. “Jim always said you were too good for the CIA.”

  “I left an envelope on your coffee table.”

  “I saw it. Does it have anything to do with Jim’s death?”

  “We’ve been over that.”

  “I know.” His evasive answer did not escape her.

  “I can walk out with it. But I’d rather not. It brings no harm to your door. It contains an official letter that I, and others, would like preserved, but not in Washington.”

  “The safes are getting too full up there?”

  “We don’t know whose safe to trust anymore. I mean that in both semantic senses. In the wrong hands the letter could be used as leverage against the US. It shows how far our madness has gone.”

  “Angelo is torching the brush pile when the wind is right. Why don’t I just toss it in with the pine needles?”

  “The wind is never right. We need to preserve it to remind us of who we are. Perhaps it can be used someday to help turn the tide toward saner times.”

  The Shirelles’ song still massaged her head. WTSP used to play polka, but she woke one morning and they were broadcasting something called “Top 40.” Jim used to be in her life, but she woke one morning and he was gone.

  That airwave remained silent.

  “You would like me to keep it?” Dorothy asked.

  “Do you mind? You were always topnotch at preserving things. I could use a bank box, but I’d rather have it where, if necessary, I am not beholden to banking hours.”

  She let out a laugh and it surprised her. She was not a woman who laughed merely to bridge awkward conversational moments. She saved it for humor, and found heaps of the real stuff every day. “You and your cloak-and-dagger games. I’d be happy to keep it on one condition: that you and Maureen come visit at least once a year and that you walk away from that game you’re drowning in.” She thought “drowning in” was a little harsh, but there it was.

  “We have a deal.”

  “Shall I tell you where I hide it?”

  “Matters not to me, only to you.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “All this sand,” Sullivan said as he surveyed the park, “reminds me of Shelley, ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.’”

  “Oh, Teddy, it can’t be that bad.” She surprised herself by reaching over and lightly touching his shoulder.

  Theodore Wayne Sullivan III, Skull and Bones like his father before him, and valedictorian of the class of 1920, said nothing. He watched the men across the street in the park and then turned his head toward Dorothy. He shifted his weight away from her.

  “What?” she asked.

  Sullivan hesitated. “Nothing. I really must be going.”

  Dorothy watched his eyes look above her own and she thought his voice betrayed a tint of self-contempt. No, she thought. Finality. Within the minute, he drove away.

  “Where do you want to hide it, Miss Dorothy?”

  Angelo he
ld the 8½” x 11” yellow letter-sized envelope. They stood in the middle of her home. The slight young man had appeared on her front porch grasping remarkably good English and a garden rake the day after she moved in. He had held the rake as if it was the proudest thing he’d ever possessed and he knew that he would accomplish great tasks with his simple, crude tool. His parents had moved to the United States when he was young and wanted their two sons to speak as well as Hemingway wrote. They considered the great fisherman, coming down to Havana from Key West to stalk marlin around the time Angelo was born, to be a bridge between the two countries. He took care of several properties on the island, but he was soon spending his extra time under the soft pines of her residence. We have a visitor.

  “I haven’t a clue,” she said.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s in it, what the letter says?”

  “No, I’d really rather not. In fact, I don’t even want it in the house.”

  “The salt air and rain will have to be kept out, Miss Dorothy. They just eat everything. How long do you think you need to hide it for?”

  The challenge seemed to perk him up a bit. He was so despondent since his terrible loss and she fretted about him. That part hadn’t worked out for her and Jim and she knew she was leaning on Angelo and his wife to fill the void and now that, too, was gone.

  Dorothy let out an exasperated breath. “You’re right. We need to wrap it and then seal it in a container.”

  “I got an old tackle box, tighter than anything I know.”

  “I’d hate to have you use that.”

  “It’s old, Miss Dorothy, and I don’t use it anymore. We can wrap it in oilskin and put it in the box. You know those loose stones out back, corner of the house? I think that hole’s large enough. Been thinking for some time how to fill that hole. It’ll be good in there for a long time.”

  “That’ll be fine. That hibiscus is going to take over that corner anyway. Go ahead, but better not tell anybody where you put it. That will be our secret.”

  “How long do you think you need to hide it for?” Angelo asked for the second time.

  “I don’t know,” Dorothy said. “I guess until someone comes looking for it.”