Louise's Dilemma

by Sarah R. Shaber

  We headed north for several miles, then turned west on a dirt road.

  ‘I think this is a driveway or a farm road,’ I said. ‘It’s not marked on the map.’

  Sure enough I saw Martin stop ahead at a building. We pulled into a layby sheltered by trees and cut off our engine.

  ‘Come on,’ Williams said, opening his door. ‘Let’s get as close as we can.’

  Which wasn’t close. Maybe 100 yards away from the building was a copse of loblolly pines that sheltered us from view. Williams pulled binoculars out of his jacket pocket and raised them to his eyes. ‘God damn it,’ he said, ‘my night vision is awful. Can you see anything?’ He passed the binoculars to me.

  I pushed my glasses onto the top of my head and adjusted the focus. ‘I see Martin,’ I said. ‘And there’s another man with him. He must have come out of the building – it looks like a tobacco barn. The door is ajar, there’s light inside.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Talking. Wait, they’re going into the barn together.’

  ‘I wish we could get closer! Anything could be going on in there! Illegal gambling, moonshine—’

  ‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘Here they come. They’re carrying something big and heavy wrapped in canvas. It sags in the middle.’

  We could hear the men’s voices, cursing by their tone, as they struggled with the unwieldy bundle. It didn’t take much imagination to wonder if it was a corpse.

  The moon came out, and we could see the scene more clearly. The two men carried their burden to Martin’s truck, then managed to sling it into the back. Both of them got into the truck, Martin turned it around, and they headed back down the road.

  ‘Down,’ Williams whispered, and we flattened ourselves on the cold ground. We were lucky. Martin went by without noticing us or our car. When they got to the intersection with Solomons Island Road I ran out into the middle of the dirt road to see which way they turned.

  ‘South!’ I said to Williams, who was already in our car starting the engine.

  We followed them south past the turnoff to Martin’s house, then west.

  ‘This is a state road,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t go anywhere. It dead ends at the Patuxent River. At a wharf.’

  ‘How wide is the river?’

  ‘About three miles across. There are two wharves and a couple of landings around here.’

  ‘We can’t lose them.’

  A few minutes later, my eyes glued to the map, I felt Williams engage the brakes.

  ‘They’ve stopped,’ Williams said. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Right at the river, at an inlet called Island Creek. It’s a dead end.’

  ‘Let’s wait here. They’ve got to come back this way. Maybe they’re dumping whatever they loaded into the truck into the river.’

  A few minutes passed.

  ‘Are you sure the road ends at the river?’ Williams asked me.

  ‘According to the map,’ I said. ‘And there aren’t any side roads marked. Of course there could be tracks coming off it.’

  ‘Let’s go see,’ Williams said.

  Slowly, we drove down the road, until I could see the Patuxent River gleaming in the moonlight. And at the edge of the shore was a ferryboat landing that wasn’t marked on the map. The truck was long gone across the river.

  Williams’s head dropped onto the steering wheel.

  ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘Damn it! What are those guys doing! And what was their load!’

  SIX

  I was awakened by a rap on my door.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ our hostess called.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Is it late?’

  ‘It’s only seven,’ she answered, ‘but I thought you might want to know that I’ve stoked up the boiler, and there’ll be hot water if you’d like to take a bath.’

  A bath! I hadn’t had a real bath in a week. Mrs Sullivan must have a coal furnace.

  ‘I’d love to, thank you!’ I called out to her.

  I flung off the heavy quilts I’d found piled on my bed when I got in last night and kicked out the hot water bottle tucked under the sheets.

  Throwing on my bathrobe and grabbing my sponge bag, I peered into the hall outside my door. The door to Room 102, Williams’ room, was closed, so I tiptoed over to the bathroom and let myself in.

  It was a real bathroom, one separate from the toilet, well stocked with soap and towels. A deep claw-foot tub took up most of the space in the room.

  I turned on the hot water spigot and filled the tub, steam rising from the water. I added a little cold water until I could bear the temperature, and slid down into the tub up to my neck. After soaping myself off I luxuriated as long as I thought I could get away with it, then I opened the spigot again and washed my hair.

  There were towels warm from hanging over the hot water pipe. I wrapped myself in two, checked the hall, and found the coast was clear to scoot back to my room. Once inside I changed into clean underwear and a fresh blouse before putting on my ‘uniform’: the same tailored wool suit I’d worn yesterday.

  I dried my hair as best I could, brushing it over the vent in the floor of my room. As I did I heard the bathroom pipes gurgling. Williams must be taking advantage of the hot water too.

  A few minutes later I heard another knock on the door. It was Williams, of course, clean, shaven, and dressed like an FBI agent again.

  ‘Let’s get some breakfast at the café,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice. ‘We need to retrace our steps from last night, see if we can figure out what the hell was going on. You had the map, can you find the way?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, annoyed that he would even ask.

  We stopped at Bertie Woods’ Café, where Williams and I had had lunch. We were the only customers.

  The same waitress seated us and handed us menus. ‘You’re back,’ she said to me, without warmth. She stared at Williams.

  ‘This is my boss,’ I said quickly, indicating Williams. ‘We’re from the Office of Price Administration.’

  She stood with one hand on her hip and scrutinized us. ‘Where’s the fella you were with last time?’ she asked me.

  ‘Busy, I’ve taken his place,’ Williams answered.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked, trying to divert the conversation.

  ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘they’ve come and gone. It’s almost seven thirty. We get started early around here. Coffee?’

  The coffee was real, not cut with a speck of chicory, and hot. The sugar was real too, and I spooned two heaping teaspoons into my mug.

  We ordered eggs, bacon, and toast. When it came there were four strips of bacon on each plate, and from tasting it I could tell it was home-cured, like I was used to getting at home in North Carolina.

  ‘People around here live pretty well,’ Williams said. ‘There’s not a place in DC where you can get more than two strips of bacon for breakfast. They don’t seem to have heard of rationing here. And that was the hottest hot water I’ve experienced in a very long time.’ He dug into his plate greedily.

  ‘This is the country,’ I said. ‘Mrs Sullivan has a coal furnace. And you can’t stop people from butchering their own hogs.’

  ‘As long as they don’t sell it to someone over the controlled price, I suppose not,’ Williams said.

  As we left the café I heard the waitress mutter ‘pencil pushers’ as the door swung closed behind us.

  We pulled into the Esso station, where the attendant looked at our ‘A’ gasoline coupon and shot us as dirty a look as I’d seen in this town so far.

  ‘Ain’t you lucky,’ she said, tucking long greying hair behind an ear before she jerked the nozzle from the pump. ‘Government people get all the gas they want. We got to get by on two gallons a week. So what do you two do?’

  ‘We’re from the Office of Price Administration,’ Williams said.

  ‘You can see I charge just what I’m allowed,’ the attendant said, gesturing to the sign that hung over her pumps. ‘Nineteen cents a gall
on and not a penny more.’

  The attendant ripped the nozzle out of our gas tank and took the cash and the ration coupon Williams handed her.

  ‘You’d think the government would have better use for two able-bodied people than coming out to our little town and checking up on our prices,’ she said.

  As we pulled out of the filling station I saw the attendant shaking her fist at us in the rear view mirror.

  ‘I don’t think that woman would hesitate to sell Leroy a few cans of gasoline for more than the ration price, do you?’ Williams asked.

  ‘No, I do not,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s see if we can find the tobacco barn,’ Williams said, turning north on Solomons Island road.

  About two miles out of town I spotted the unmarked dirt track that led to the barn.

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I bit my tongue. I could read a damn map! Hadn’t I proven that already? ‘Positive,’ I said. ‘I took notes on the mileage on the odometer last night. This is it.’

  We bumped over the track through pastures where cattle huddled together for warmth and bare tree limbs groped the sky. A farmhouse on a low rise overlooked the fallow tobacco fields and the herd of cattle, smoke rising from two stone chimneys. Glazed-over puddles of water collected in the low areas of the fields and on the road.

  ‘I’m surprised those cattle are outside,’ Williams said.

  ‘The sun feels good on their backs. They’ll head back to the barn when they’re ready.’

  The road stopped at the decrepit tobacco barn. Right behind it I could see a narrow creek – Battle Creek, according to the map – which ran into the Patuxent River. Also according to the map, a big wharf was located there. If Martin’s late night run had been legitimate, wouldn’t he have used the wharf in broad daylight?

  There wasn’t a soul around.

  Williams lifted the latch that sealed the door shut, shoved on the rotted wood, and we entered the dark building. It reeked of a century’s worth of tobacco and the fires that cured it. Daylight filtered through holes in the chinking, but we still had to fetch our torches to see properly.

  There was nothing in the barn except for a few bales of moldering hay, a discarded rope with a rusted pulley attached, a broken wagon wheel, a kerosene lantern sitting on a hogshead, and a pile of filthy canvas on the floor.

  Williams lifted a corner of the cloth. ‘This is sailcloth,’ he said. ‘Wonder what it’s doing here?’

  Together we gathered up the cloth, and as it lifted from the floor, we saw a dark stain on the boards underneath.

  We tossed the sailcloth aside and knelt to inspect the stain. It was blood – I recognized the odor at once. Lots of blood, soaked deeply into the wood.

  I thought of the dead weight wrapped in canvas that Martin and his accomplice had carried to Martin’s truck last night.

  ‘Do you think that bundle those two men carried out of here last night could have been a corpse?’

  ‘That possibility occurred to me, too,’ he said. ‘We’ll know soon. The FBI can type blood in twenty-four hours now. Our crime lab is the best in the world, thanks to Director Hoover and Congress.’

  He pulled a pocketknife and a small glass vial with a rubber stopper out of his pocket. He sliced a sliver of the stained wood off the rough floor and placed it carefully in the vial, stoppering it and tucking it into his suit pocket.

  ‘I’ll get it back to the lab on the next bus and put a rush on it. Look for a weapon,’ Williams said. We searched the tobacco barn top to bottom and didn’t find anything that could have caused a wound that would result in so much blood.

  We piled the canvas back over the stain and left it looking as if no one had disturbed it, then went back outside to Martin’s car.

  ‘Let’s find that ferry landing,’ he said.

  We drove the four or so miles back to Solomons Island Road, passing the farmhouse on the hill again, then turned almost immediately south, on Broome’s Island Road, and drove the six miles to the ferry landing right on the Patuxent River.

  There wasn’t much to see. The road stopped at the landing, a dirt space that sloped down to the river. You wouldn’t necessarily know it was a ferry landing except for the sign mounted on a leaning fencepost shoved into the sand at the edge of it.

  The Patuxent was a good-sized river that ran between the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac. During the summer it would be thick with fishing boats and skipjacks, but now it was empty except for a few chunks of floating ice and one vessel headed our way.

  I grabbed Williams’ arm. ‘I think I see the ferryboat,’ I said.

  Williams lifted his binoculars to his face. ‘That’s it, all right.’

  We watched the ferryboat, powered by a noisy engine belching black smoke, coming towards us. What remained of the ice on the river cracked and broke apart as it approached.

  When the ferryboat struck the beach, a young man, a teenager really, leapt off the boat and used its momentum to pull the boat a few extra feet up the slope, then docked it to the solitary pier.

  There were two vehicles on the ferry: a truck loaded with hay bales and a car with no tread on its tires. Using the ferry saved them from driving way north to the bridge to get to the lower part of the western shore.

  The truck and car motored off the ferry and on up the road, and the ferryman jumped off the deck. It was Dennis, the angry man from the café, the one who’d threatened to beat up Collins.

  Dennis eyed Williams from head to foot, taking in his citified topcoat, suit and tie. ‘You looking to ferry across the river?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Williams said. ‘I’m Special Agent Gray Williams, FBI. This is my assistant, Mrs Pearlie.’

  Williams had abandoned our cover. I supposed it was time. We were investigating a possible serious crime.

  Dennis spread his legs and put his hands on his hips, as if standing his ground. ‘Son,’ he said to the teenager, ‘you go on board the ferry. I’ll be there in just a minute.’

  The boy shrugged and climbed back on board the boat.

  Dennis turned back to us. ‘What does a G-man want with me?’ he asked.

  ‘Why did you meet Leroy Martin’s truck here in the middle of last night and take him across the river?’ Williams said.

  Dennis leaned his head back and laughed. ‘You government people,’ he said. ‘You’re a bunch of idiots. Any ferry can use this landing! Not just mine. There are dozens of private ferries around here. You can’t prove it was me!’

  ‘How many ferries operate in the middle of the night in this cold?’ I said.

  Dennis didn’t even blink an eye. ‘You’re a fool too,’ he said. ‘Anyone who can drive a boat, and that’s everyone who lives around here, could borrow my ferry. It’s just tied up across the river.’

  Williams pulled out a business card and handed it to him. ‘I’m not that worn-out policeman of yours,’ he said. ‘I’m the FBI. You think about this. I’m going to find out what you and Leroy loaded onto that ferry last night. There was another guy, too. You’d better wise up and tell me before I arrest you.’

  Dennis tore up Williams’s card into tiny pieces. ‘It weren’t me last night,’ he said. ‘You keep out of my business. I got a right to protect my property, and I keep a loaded double-barreled shotgun on my boat.’

  As if on cue, Dennis’s son appeared on the boat with the shotgun slung over his arm.

  ‘And I,’ Williams said, opening his coat and showing Dennis his shoulder holster, ‘carry a Colt .38 Super at all times.’

  For just a second I saw Dennis’s eyes flicker, as well they might. The Colt .38 Super could shoot through a car door.

  Williams closed his coat and buttoned it, signaling the end of the confrontation. He tipped his hat to Dennis. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said. ‘Don’t take any vacations.’

  He calmly turned, exposing his back to Dennis and his shotgun-bearing son, and we went back to our car.

  I didn’t lik
e Williams, but I had to admit the man was cool. Turning his back on Dennis was an impressive display of courage, but I didn’t see that he’d learned anything. We couldn’t prove that Dennis was running his ferry last night, and Williams had antagonized him to boot.

  Back in the car, Williams started the engine. ‘Let’s go talk to the farmer who lives in that house that overlooks the road,’ he said. ‘Maybe he saw something.’

  A woman answered the door at the white farmhouse on the hill. She had a warm and welcoming expression on her face until she took in Williams. The man’s suit told the people around here he was from the government. They didn’t want someone from the government to knock on their door. Damn the FBI and their bloody dress code!

  Williams removed his fedora. ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’m Special Agent Gray from the FBI …’

  Sure enough her eyes opened wide enough to touch her eyebrows and her hand gripped the doorknob. She’d been halfway to opening the door, but stopped. ‘What do you want here?’ she asked.

  ‘Just making routine enquiries,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be concerned about.’ He indicated my presence with a nod of his head. ‘This is my assistant, Mrs Pearlie.’

  Soon there would be nothing left of my lower lip. So, Williams had abandoned our cover, but I was apparently still his assistant!

  ‘We need to ask you some questions,’ Williams said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘May we come in, please,’ he said.

  Reluctantly, she showed us into a warm sitting room heated by an ancient wood-fired stove. She gestured to a couch covered with a quilt. ‘Have a seat. I just fixed a pot of fresh coffee, can I offer you some?’

  I hurried to accept, but Williams put a hand on my arm before I got the words out.

  ‘No, thank you, ma’am. Can I have your full name, please?’ Williams asked. By the look on her face her name would be about all he would get from her.

  ‘I’m Gladys Cooke,’ she said. ‘My husband Frank and I own this place.’