A loud, boisterous voice called out, “Sammy, where the hell are you?”
Hank looked up to see John Duke, the chief reporter, editor, publisher, and owner of the River Sunday Sentinel, walking toward the site, camera slung over his shoulder. He had healthy white hair, long and flowing, and even though he was a contemporary of Pete in age, he climbed over the sandbags like a far younger man.
Duke had grown up in River Sunday and spent most of his newspaper career in Baltimore where he strived for but never achieved an editorial post on any of the city papers. He came home and bought the Sentinel when it was almost bankrupt and proceeded to keep it afloat with a mixture of exciting headlines and newspaper bluster. Hank thought people read the editorials as a game, to see what sort of a fool Duke was making of himself.
Duke could bluster. He was hard to outtalk, loud and opinionated, and fully capable of shouting down anyone who disagreed with him. He made a living from squeezing news from gossip. His followers, of dubious education Hank thought, paid to read the news he generated. Duke liked to tell stories, too, and if he had a saving grace it was his interest in the town, even though many times people would say he got story facts wrong. His knack for elaborating made his reporting more sensational than true. Even though Hank did not like him personally, he did enjoy, from time to time, Duke’s highly embellished stories about local happenings.
Hank remembered one day Duke was at the garden shop, talking to his father. Duke got going on why he was a writer. He said, “I like to wring the meaning out of our simple lives.”
His father, in his stolidity, pushed back his dark hair and scanned the puffed-up newsman in front of him. Then he lifted another sack of manure and said, in the practical way that he discussed most things, “I sure wish you luck with your wringing, Mr. Duke. Be careful, though, that you don’t wring so hard you got no life left to report.”
In developing a noteworthy issue in a small town like River Sunday, Duke had seized on the environmental. He promoted such loving care of wildlife that Hank sometimes wondered if the man had ever witnessed the hard side of nature. Had he ever got horse hornets attacking him after walking on their nest out in some cornfield?
Duke had increased his circulation noticeably in the past few years. He liked to report that the only war of the future was the war with nature. Most of his advertisers and readers were older persons who were retired and observed the world with conservative eyes. Many times he portrayed animals as far more worthy of attention than humans and greatly superior to humans. His newspaper was now receiving attention from a younger generation that had adopted the environmental crusade and he was often quoted on Baltimore television as a rural savant crying out with his message of saving the earth for the animals. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had even interviewed him because his newspaper had been found at the location of a bombing of a factory that used animals for testing new drugs. To him, when he talked of this interview, it was as a mark of his relevance, not of his participation in crime. This FBI interview was fodder for several weeks’ worth of articles, and the FBI’s letter of apology was framed and hung behind his desk.
Sammy, who appreciated Duke helping with fundraising for the fire department, waved to him from the tractor while preparing to run in for another load. Duke stopped and waited as Bob Johnny came up to him. Bob Johnny saw Duke as an accomplice in his never-ending public relations campaign for the Wilderness.
“It’s Hank Green’s boy,” said Bob Johnny, obviously pleased that Duke had arrived, and pointed to Hank, who concentrated on his shoveling.
“I got that much from town,” answered Duke, checking out the area. “What are the boy’s chances?”
“No way to tell whether he’s still alive,” replied Bob Johnny, putting his shovel to work.
“People want to know,” said Duke.
Pete tossed another shovelful. “Seems like most of the town is here already.”
“The television people have been calling,” said Duke, excitement in his voice.
“Come on, John,” said Pete, one of the few people who called the newspaper man by his first name. “No need to tell people in Baltimore about a poor kid getting trapped in a cave.”
“We got a story here,” said Duke. “This swamp’s against the boy, against the strongest team we could get together.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Pete.” If you don’t do the story someone else will be in here and do it just as bad or worse.” He called to Hank who was lifting his shovel. “All right with you, Hank?”
“Sure,” said Hank tossing another load behind the sandbags. “Melissa likes publicity.”
“OK, so tell me what happened,” Duke said.
Pete rested his shovel and said, “I had seen them go by on their bicycles. Hopping ditches. It was a real nice afternoon before the storm come up.”
“Hopping ditches?”
“That’s what I call it. One of them rides into the ditch along the road and tries to hop the culvert at the lanes coming off the main road. I saw Bobby smack up his bike, get himself up and start riding again. I watched them go down to the dock. I heard the outboard start up.”
“It was all right with me,” said Bob Johnny. “The kids don’t bother anything. They work for me sometimes, putting out corn for the geese.”
“The clouds started to come up,” Pete said. “The rain started, fine at first, but you could tell from the sky color we were in for something. I thought about taking my own boat out to search for them. Then I heard their engine, running wide out, coming in, fast. Could not really see it beyond the reeds.”
“I guess you weren’t around, Bob Johnny?” asked Duke.
“No, I was up to town. I heard the alarm go off and I followed the trucks out here right away.”
Pete continued, “A few minutes later I was inside my house and heard knocking at the door and screaming. I opened the door and a gust of wind howled into the room and blew my newspaper into the air. I believe it might even have been your paper, John.
“Cathy was standing there, soaked, missing one of her shoes, yelling, ‘He’s caught down in a hole. It just fell in. The mound came down on him.’”
“We just found a kid’s shoe,” called one of the firemen from the trench. The shoe was passed over from the sandbag area to Pete. He held it up into the light.
“Can I have it back?” asked Cathy, tiny in Pete’s large slicker which reached to the ground around her small body.
“I’ll get a picture,” said Duke. Pete waited while Duke adjusted his camera and snapped the photo.
Then Duke asked, “Robin Pond been here? She’ll want to tell you how to save the muskrats inside the mound.”
“No,” said Bob Johnny, staring at the boats a hundred or more yards offshore. “I’m sure she’s out there saving animals though,” he said, pointing out into the darkness where boat lights twinkled and moved slowly in the surrounding darkness.
Hank could see another man climbing out of a newly arrived boat, photographic gear strapped over his shoulders, his hands carrying a large video camera. Behind him came a woman in a full-length windbreaker. She yelled into the wind, “I want to see John Duke, the editor of the River Sunday Sentinel.”
“Well, we’re right here for you,” Duke called back, winking at Pete. “I’m John Duke.”
She stopped, slightly out of breath. “Tawny Slight. I’m covering this story for Baltimore.”
“You’re not one of the regulars,” said Duke.
“No way for them to get here from Baltimore,” she replied. “With the winds, the helicopters can’t cross the Bay. I was down on another assignment and my editor told me to come here right away.”
“How much do you know about the situation?” asked Duke.
She caught her breath. “A little boy was trying to find an airplane wreck and got trapped in a cave-in.”
She pulled out her notepad, shielding it from the drizzle. Duke put his hand under his chin and reviewed the young telev
ision reporter in front of him. “You’re not from this part of the country, are you?”
She smiled. “California. I just started with Baltimore news.”
“All right. Here you are,” Duke said as he took charge and pointed to the team of firemen shoveling in the trench. “Sammy there on the tractor, he’ll know the members of the rescue team. Hank Green, there with the shovel, he’s the boy’s father so he can tell you about the boy and his family. Pete Smithfield can tell you about the swamp. You being a stranger to River Sunday, if you want, I’ll try to fill you in on local background, human interest, that kind of angle.”
She nodded eagerly, her pad held up and ready in front of her face, the back of her writing hand brushing the paper from time to time to keep off the raindrops. Her photographer had begun to shoot pictures.
Cathy spoke up. “We were searching for the P47.”
Tawny’s eyes creased. “P47?”
Duke pointed to the twelve year old. “Cathy’s one of the kids with Bobby Green when he got trapped. A P47 is a kind of World War Two fighter plane that crashed out here during the War. The kids come out to try to find it. Kind of a tradition.”
“Tell me about the accident,” she said.
“I’ll tell her,” said Pete. He went through what the firemen knew. She wrote fast, lifting her face to him from time to time as he explained.
When he had finished, she said, “Tell me more about this airplane they were hunting for.”
Duke interrupted, “You should write about the woman pilot.”
“A woman was lost out here?”
“Zinnie. Her proper name was Melusina Allingham, a member of one of our oldest families. She had been one of the first commissioned woman fighter plane pilots, ferrying planes around the cities on the East Coast.”
“How did it happen?”
“Women weren’t supposed to be in combat. However, on Easter Sunday in 1944, she risked her life when she was checking out a newly repaired fighter. She was flying over the ocean and spotted a German submarine. She radioed continuously the sub position from her unarmed plane as the Nazis tried to escape. She was wounded by fire from the U-boat. When she flew home, she got into a storm - one of the worst storms the area had ever seen. We call it the Easter Storm of 1944. Her last radio message indicated she was crashing into the Wilderness Swamp. End of story. She and her plane were never found.”
“That’s why these kids were out here, still trying to find her?” Tawny asked.
“Fifty years later, that’s right. Zinnie was like a protector of the town, like a woman knight. People thought that she had finally destroyed the same enemy submarine which had blown up a tanker a few months before outside our harbor,” said Duke.
As he worked, half listening to the newsman, Hank saw a thin black line undulating in the mound surface in front of him, like a hill and valley and hill again pattern. He had not noticed this before in the light brown color in front of him. It was a trace of darkness. He picked at it with his shovel.
“After the tanker sank, the town tried to get this submarine. A retired World War One Army general even sent his schooner after her. In the early days of the War the Navy and Coast Guard didn’t have enough ships.”
“A sailboat after a submarine?” Tawny blinked in disbelief.
“The son of this General was given command of the schooner and its crew, some of the town’s best yachtsmen who were waiting for their call up for regular service.”
“How were they going to attack it?” asked Tawny, jotting quickly.
“They had a machine gun the General got for them from the Maryland Armory in Baltimore and there were some depth charges. I understand they practiced shooting the machine gun out in the harbor. People would assemble on the wharfs at the harbor and watch.”
“Wasn’t much,” said Sammy who was checking the tractor engine.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“The schooner met up with the submarine all right. When the sub aimed its big deck cannon at them, the General’s son immediately ordered the machine gun thrown overboard along with the depth charges and their racks. Then he hoisted a white sheet from one of the crew’s bunks.
“Unfortunately just as he hauled up the sheet, the jettisoned depth charges hit their level and exploded below the schooner. They threw up geysers. The Germans fired back and set the schooner on fire. A Nazi crew boarded and lined up the River Sunday people on deck. The soldiers made our people kneel and take a pledge to not shoot at any more German warships. Then they put them into the schooner lifeboat, set them adrift, and submerged the sub just as the schooner sank. The River Sunday crew finally came ashore in the breakers off Ocean City and took a bus home.”
“That was the end of it, until Zinnie?”
“Yeah,” said Duke.
“What happened when the crew got home?”
“Well there wasn’t any parade. The General was quoted as saying, ‘If I’d been there, I would have put a few rounds in the Krauts before they got me.’ The town had his remark printed and stuck on the walls of stores around River Sunday.”
“Like the saying don’t give up the ship?”
“Like that,” said Duke.
“Didn’t mean a thing,” said Sammy, climbing back up on the tractor. “Germans got a laugh and the man lost a good schooner.” The tractor engine roared again.
“So Zinnie really got the town honor back,” said Tawny.
“Yes,” said Duke. “You can understand why people want to find her airplane.”
Hank continued digging. More of the seams were appearing. Other men found them too. All had the same characteristics, three to five feet in length, and the curving pattern. Shovels cut through them and there was no extended seam. It was as if these were buried signs from the past. Reverend Blue would say they were a sign of the intelligent design. He wore a battery-powered necktie with little lights. He’d set them off and on to show his enthusiasm.
Chapter Five
Pete came up behind Hank as the tractor was backing away to dump another load. “Any more of the marks?”
Hank ignored him for a moment and turned to Charlie. “Charlie, you hear anything yet?”
Charlie shook his head. He continued to adapt and adjust his simple radio equipment. He’d placed microphones at various spots around the mound, which fed signals into the small tent where he had his gear. Charlie’s idea, as he explained it to Hank, was similar to the way the Navy used radio direction finders to locate a ship at sea. He’d try to locate the source of the noise by observing the strength of the sound picked up by the microphones in various locations
Hank turned back to Pete. “About the marks. I did spot these on the wall where the tractor just scraped.” Hank pointed to one of the lines with the tip of his shovel. “They are not like the marks the muskrats make.”
Pete put his finger on the line and withdrew it, studying the residue. “Yeah, muskrats don’t walk on the side of a hill like this and there are no prints that resemble little hands. Tell you what, I think that’s rust.”
“Rust?”
“Maybe there was a link steel fence along here and it got buried somehow.”
Hank pushed his shovel into the ooze that the tractor had left behind. He lifted the heavy wet earth and threw it to his left so that it did not hit Pete. The muck splashed harmlessly into the marsh water outside the sandbags.
Hank said, “Jimmy used to tell Bobby about the muskrats.”
Pete nodded. “Don’t you worry about Jimmy. He understands what we got to do here.”
“It’s natural for him to be concerned,” said Hank. “It’s the graves of his people.”
“Jimmy believes in the living more than the dead.”
“You know, Bobby likes animals, too. Maybe Jimmy taught him that,” said Hank. “Melissa wouldn’t let him have any pets up there in that big old house. He had a cat at the store - an old alley cat that used to hang around my father.”
“I tell you what, Han
k. I miss your father planting his trees.”
Hank thought about his father. One time he was at the kitchen table talking about his experiences as an immigrant. “I wasn’t a Jew but they thought I was because of the way I talked. They thought all displaced people must be Jews,” his father had said, drinking his coffee. His father would stir in several spoons of sugar, one after another, watching the grains fall into the black water.
His mother had looked over from the sink where she was washing dishes. “People here didn’t like Jews right after the war and some of them still don’t. You’re going to hurt the business with your charity work.”
“The rabbi came to me. I wanted to help him grow a garden at his synagogue.”
“You gave him too many free plants, too many hours without getting paid,” she had insisted before she had left the room. She was angry and had left them to eat their breakfast without her.
Pete interrupted Hank’s memories. The old man dumped his shovel. “I remember the last one of those pines your father planted for Bobby out here.”
“Yes. That was before Melissa took Bobby to her house. She had left me but Bobby still came around. Bobby’d come into the store with his nanny,” said Hank. “The nurse would let him run around in the greenhouse. He’d ask my father all kinds of questions about the plants.”
“I bet you liked that,” said Pete.
“Yes. As far as the animals, I remember that Bobby loved the old cat best of all. ‘Where’s the cat?’ he’d ask. ‘Where’s the cat, Daddy?’ Then without waiting for me to tell him, he’d just take off hunting for it. He was an expert on that cat. Knew all its hiding places.
“There was one time in the store, Bobby wanted a particular toy. That was the only time I ever saw my father upset about giving the child anything.”
“A toy?”
“The salesmen would bring in samples. My father went over everything. He was pretty particular. You’ve seen the toy room. There are a couple of shelves of things - games and the like for kids. On that day, some of them were in a pile on the floor by the cash register.”
Easter Sunday (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 7) Page 4