by Jack Lynch
“What’s this cave she talked about?”
“It’s the back room she has set up where she does her thing.”
“She’s a pretty dramatic woman.”
“She is that,” Bobbie agreed.
“How does she go about it?”
The girl shrugged. “It’s not difficult to describe. The tough part is what your mind goes through to get there. Have you ever been into TM? Meditation?”
“Me? Lawdy, no. Do folks still do that?”
“Don’t make fun,” she said softly. “It has helped an awful lot of people.”
“How so?”
“It’s a relaxation process. It lets you back away from yourself. It’s a letting go, only it takes a long time to realize you’re getting anything out of it. One of the primary disciplines involved is to get your mind to suppress your thoughts for a time. Five seconds, ten minutes. That’s very hard to do. Somebody once said the mind is like a frisky colt. It’s hard to make it lie down and be still. But that’s what you try to do in meditation. And what could sound more silly than to try to just shut off your thoughts?”
“It doesn’t seem to have much merit,” I agreed.
“But if you practice it, you learn differently. Anyway, you asked about Maribeth. It isn’t exactly a trance she goes into, not the sort of thing a person thinks of as a trance. What she does is go through a period of very intense meditation, blanking the mind. Or more like erasing a blackboard. Maribeth has been doing it for so long now she can achieve this state pretty quickly. It’s like stilling the part of the mind we usually work with and then digging somewhere deeper. It’s a stretching. Senses and impressions are roped in from places most of us never reach these days. That’s when she sees the things she sees, though maybe ‘seeing’ is poor word choice.”
She hesitated, then looked across at me. “I’m glad you’re the one she went to.”
“Why?”
She tilted her head. “I think you’re competent.”
I shrugged. “If what your aunt senses is actually out there, I’d better be. Do you have any of your aunt’s ability?”
The girl snorted. “Not an ounce. Oh, I used to meditate, or try to, but that’s as far as it went. I’m beginning to think it’s an every other generation sort of thing. My mother had it. She was eerie, but she always just treated it like a big joke. I’d come home from high school with friends, and my mother would tell us that somebody was going to phone or some weird thing was going to come in the day’s mail, then the somebody would phone or a weird thing would come in the mail, and it would just crack up everybody.”
She thought about it for a moment with a smile on her face. “Those were good times,” she said quietly. “But me, it’s all I can do to get through the day straight. My problem is I never learned to repress my thoughts all that well.”
“What do you think about?”
“Men, mostly,” she said with a little smile.
It was then we heard a cry that made us both start. A calling out, followed by a moan. Bobbie was on her feet and across the room like a shot and ran down the hallway.
When she returned she had Maribeth with her, one arm up around her aunt’s shoulders. Bobbie’s eyes were brimming with pain for the older woman. Maribeth was stooped, as if somebody had just beaten all the juice out of her. Bobbie helped her to the sofa and Maribeth collapsed back against the cushions, her eyes unseeing, hands twitching.
I started to go to her but Bobbie motioned me back. She let go of her aunt finally and stood with her hands knotted into small fists at her sides, as if ready to give battle to whoever or whatever was causing such pain.
Maribeth shook herself and began to get her strength back. She straightened on the sofa and tried to smile. Color was returning to her face and she reached out to grasp her niece’s hand.
“Batty old woman,” she said, “that’s what I’m turning into.”
“Auntie, you aren’t.”
“No, it’s true. I’m an old workhorse at this sort of thing by now. Shouldn’t indulge in such histrionics. But it’s hard, when it’s this close to your own doorstep.” She was quiet for a moment, then looked up at Bobbie again. “I think maybe you had better go cancel the afternoon session for me. The number is on my appointment calendar, in my room. Reschedule it for tomorrow, if he wants. And then I guess maybe it would be a good idea if you did fix us all a round of drinks.”
Maribeth looked across at me. “I don’t have a whole lot to offer at the moment. Vodka and tonic all right?”
“That’s fine.”
“Doubles,” she told the girl, but Bobbie stood her ground. The younger woman nodded, to let Maribeth know she’d fix the drinks, but she still stood her ground, and Maribeth looked up at her. “I guess you want to be in on it.”
“I guess I do,” Bobbie told her.
“All right,” said Maribeth, turning back to me. “I think I can help you some. I can tell you a couple of things about the surrounding territory. There’s a vinyard there, rows of stakes driven into a slope rising toward a wooded ridge in the direction of the afternoon sun. There’s a dirt road very near where the bodies are buried. Not far off there’s an old cottage and barns, but they seem deserted. And there are some old stone ruins not too far away.”
She sat very still for several moments, then looked up again. “What made me cry out…it’s different from the last time I was there. More people are buried there now. One of them is little more than a child.”
FOUR
When I first met Max Bolero I thought Commando Seaplanes was some sort of authentic airplane business, where they gave flying lessons and conducted flyover tours of downtown San Francisco and the bay and, who knows, maybe on occasion indulged in slightly mysterious and adventurous flight missions. Over the years I had come to know better.
Max and his partner ran a small terminal building with various offices that had old FAA maps on the walls and rest rooms for the customers. And they had a couple of float planes and some other aircraft available, and they did give flying lessons and tours over the city and bay, and there even was a helicopter pad next to the terminal building from where a chopper operated daily to check out the Bay Area traffic picture for one of the local radio stations, and Max from time to time would talk vaguely of getting his hands on some bigger sort of plane he could use to set up a freight charter business between the Bay Area and Portland and Seattle, maybe, or even up to the Northwest Territories in Canada and Alaska beyond.
But I had learned in time that the real heart of the Commando Seaplanes operation was a second building out behind the terminal. It was a small hanger building with a concrete floor and with overhead loft storage space crammed with all sorts of tools and equipment and paint and old duffel bags filled with who knows what. At the rear of the main floor there was a counter with a refrigerator and stove behind that, although there wasn’t much food preparation done there. Mostly they ate takeout.
And scattered throughout the hanger could be any number of various projects in progress. There might be one of the float planes being checked out or worked over, the engine being given its 1,000-hour check, or something being resealed or the paint being touched up. Or you might find a two-seat helicopter in there with somebody going over it, daubing various fittings with Par-Al-Ketone to ward off oxidation caused by the salty bay air. And in another part of the hanger there might be an elderly automobile undergoing an exacting customization, and lately, whenever I stopped by, a fellow of about 60 years had been on the upper landing that ran along one side of the hanger building, bent over a long, wide, flat table where he was drawing up a set of plans to build himself a three-quarter size replica of a World War II P-51 Mustang fighter.
Max or his partner usually was there along with two or three or more other guys, all of them working at this or dabbling at that, the air filled with aromas of epoxy and paint and a solvent they called MEK, and from back in the kitchen area a radio would be providing jazzy background music, and e
very once in a while somebody else might stop in to get a couple of tools to change a cracked wheel casing on one of the amphibian planes stashed in the parking lot out back, and it finally dawned on me. Max wasn’t running just a seaplane business down there on that south shore of Richardson Bay in Sausalito; on the side he was running a playground for grownups.
The people who drifted in and out and took part in these various projects, or just hung out swapping tales, were an egalitarian bunch. I had met an eye surgeon from the Davis Medical Center in San Francisco there one time, an insurance broker who also was on the Marin County Board of Supervisors, a San Francisco cop, an Alameda County assistant prosecuting attorney, a former beer truck driver who now tended bar at a rowdy place just down the road, a fellow in the import-export business who seemed all the time to be flying off to places like Hong Kong and Beijing, an ambulance driver and another fellow who taught mentally handicapped kids at a special school up in San Rafael.
And if all that wasn’t enough sham, Bolero wasn’t even Max’s real name. He’d never told me the name he’d been born with. He just said he’d never liked whatever name it was, so when he’d grown up he’d had it changed. He said a recording of Ravel’s Boléro had been playing the first time he got laid and he had liked both that particular melody and that name ever since, so when he made the official name change that was the moniker he chose.
Max stood six feet tall and never would see forty again, nor maybe even fifty. I never asked. He wore a pair of rimless eyeglasses, was losing his hair and had a stomach that might have been an advertisement for the beer company the bartender down the way used to drive for. He was partial to smoking cigars and wearing an old scabby-looking leather flight jacket.
I had phoned Max the afternoon before telling him I wanted to hire him and one of his planes for the better part of Sunday. By the time I got down there at a little after ten o’clock, Max had put the craft in the water and given it the morning run-up. Now he was in the hanger loft consulting with the older gent who wanted to build his own plexiglass version of a P-51. A couple of other fellows were tinkering at this and that around the hanger building.
Max saw me and waved. He continued chatting for another few moments then came down the wooden stairs and said something to another fellow who was sorting through a pile of nuts and bolts on a side counter. The man looked across the hanger at me. He was a mild, owly looking chap of about forty. He wore glasses, his frame was slender and his hair was thinning.
Max brought him over and introduced him as Harvey Draper. “I got to thinking last night after we talked,” Max said.
I had told Max about the flight I wanted to take. I’d told him about Maribeth and the bodies she saw and the trip I had made to Santa Rosa. Max had taken it all in his stride, as I knew he would. You could have told him you wanted to go up and chase flying saucers, and it would have been okay with Max.
“It sounded,” Max told me now, “like the sort of thing Harvey here might be interested in, so I called and asked if he’d like to come along for the ride. He said he would. That makes it more of a joyride than anything else, and I don’t have to charge you the hourly rate. Just for the fuel we burn.”
“Sounds good to me,” I told him. “An extra pair of eyes is welcome. Did you tell Harvey here what we’d be looking for?”
“I sort of sketched it out for him,” Max said, tearing the cellophane wrapper off a cigar.
I turned to the smaller man. “If I might ask, Harvey, just what do you do when you’re not goofing off with everyone else down here at Max’s hanger?”
“I’m an anthropologist,” he said in an apologetic tone of voice.
“I’m impressed,” I told him, and the three of us trooped on outside and over to the wooden ramp that led down to the floating walkways where they tied up the seaplanes. We clambered into an old Republic Seabee amphibian with a huge Franklin pusher engine behind the five-person cabin.
Max had once told me the story behind the sturdy little plane. Republic was the same aircraft company that had built the P-47 Thunderbolt in World War II. Somebody at the company figured that after the war all those returning airmen who had piloted the Thunderbolts and P-51s and Corsairs and Helldivers and Flying Forts and Liberators and all those other aircraft that had invaded and finally conquered the skies over Europe and the Middle East and the South Pacific, would be just aching to get their hands around the yoke of their own reliable, versatile and inexpensive airplane. The Seabee was going to become the Volkswagen of the airways.
“Unfortunately,” Max had told me, “about ninety-eight percent of all those pilots who won the war came home so scared of flying they never wanted to see another plane so long as they lived.”
Now, taxiing out into the bay, Max had a small grin working around the edges of his cigar. It surprised me a little, considering the business we were on, but then Max always had been a little strange. He was an ace mechanic, and chances were he could have built the P-51 replica the older fellow wanted all by himself using just a wrench and his Swiss Army knife. I suspected Max loved rubbing shoulders with the fellows with the advance educations and the degrees and high-powered positions because he knew he could work rings around them when it came to a piece of mechanical equipment.
We lifted up off the morning’s placid bay waters and circled for altitude then turned north before Max throttled back on the engine, making conversation possible again. I sat up front beside Max while Harvey was scrunched down on the bench seat behind us. It was then that Max took the cigar out of his mouth with a little chuckle.
“Ah, go ahead, Harvey, tell Bragg.”
“Tell him what?”
“What you really are.”
I looked over my shoulder. Harvey leaned back, his round eyes suggesting that Max Bolero had just insulted him.
“Why, I’ve already told Mr. Bragg what I am. I’m an anthropologist.”
“What kind of anthropologist?” Max demanded.
“I’m a professor of biological anthropology at San Francisco State University. You know that, Max.”
“Yeah, yeah. What else do you do?”
“I do consultation work.”
“Who for?”
“Various jurisdictions. Counties, for the most part.”
“And you have a San Francisco Police badge, right?”
“I have a shield, yes, but I’m not a police officer.”
Max did some fiddling with the trim tabs then turned to me with another big grin and jerked one thumb back over his shoulder. “Harvey’s a bone detective.”
I turned in my seat again. Harvey shrugged, with that apologetic little smile on his face.
“Does all that mean you examine stiffs?” I asked.
“Some of the time. I also am a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.”
“He’s also an assistant medical examiner for the San Francisco cops,” said Max.
“That’s what the shield is from,” Harvey explained. “And I work some of the time as a deputy coroner for various Bay Area counties. When Max called me last night and told me what you’d be looking for today, I was naturally curious, and told him I’d love to come along. I hope you don’t mind.”
He said all that in an apologetic, low-key manner.
“No, I don’t mind at all,” I told him. “I just hope now it doesn’t turn out to be a wild goose chase of some sort.”
“It’s worth the gamble,” Harvey told me, leaning forward to scan the ground below. “I might even get some work out of it.”
Max had unfolded a big FAA chart for a part of Sonoma County, 20 or more miles to the north of us. “Tell me again what sort of terrain we’re looking for.”
And so I repeated everything I’d been able to dredge out of Maribeth following her painful session of seeing things most normal people couldn’t. I told how she had described the immediate area as a broad, open expanse amidst wooded forest land that rose toward the west. There was an old home nearby, painted white, sh
e thought, and other structures in the area. Some sort of ruins, as well, she thought, not too far away. A nearby vineyard. Picnicking in the area and something else she had sensed. Something like “a pile of old, cold stones, some ways off. A pile with form to it.”
Max put aside the chart after a moment and hunched forward, staring straight ahead, his cigar jutting out like a bird dog at point. “Damn it,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Something at the edge of my memory.”
“You think you recognize what she’s talking about?”
“Maybe. What about you, Harvey?”
“It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
“I could swear I’ve seen it somewhere,” Max told us. “But not from up here.” He was scanning the sky around us for other traffic. “Well, what do you say, Bragg? Vineyards. Old pile of cold stones. That could be a warehouse where they store wine barrels. Sebastiani has a place like that just outside the town of Sonoma. And they have a picnic area where you can sample the products and eat lunch. Why don’t we fly over that and maybe some other wineries?”
“Okay by me.”
It was as good a hunch as any, I figured. Sonoma County covered a lot of territory. It was nearly 60 miles from its southern border with Marin County to the Mendocino County line up north, and at its widest it was nearly 40 miles across. Santa Rosa, the county seat, was growing like a boom town with smaller towns scattered its width and depth, but still the county was mostly agricultural ranch land and vineyards, tawny rolling hills and thick woodlands of oak and madrone and manzanita. Flying over it in a plane, looking for the burial ground that Maribeth had sensed, gave us an edge, but it still was a lot of territory to cover.
Max began flying a search grid from the southeastern corner of the county, off San Pablo Bay, traveling in a northerly direction until we were over the small town of Sonoma, where in June of 1846 a group of American roughnecks proclaimed California a republic and raised the Bear Flag in a plaza that used to be a drill field where Spanish soldiers marched.