Well, what the hell. Maybe he would take a beating, but for tonight he was back at the controls of the Lightning.
He’d installed modern navigational systems, of course, and he rode his directional beam in and lined up with the runway. At the three-mile mark the aircraft was at five hundred feet. He reduced throttle and dropped flaps. Indicator lamps blinked on to signal that his wheels were down. The field lights rose toward him. Gently he pushed the yoke forward. Off to his left, ground traffic was moving along Plains Avenue. Just over the tarmac he cut throttle and pulled the nose up. The plane drifted in, and his wheels touched.
Sundown Aviation had its own hangar, which also housed its business offices. He brought the P—38 around, opened the doors with his remote, and rolled inside. There were a couple of other aircraft here that the company was currently working on: a North American P—51 Mustang, which was headed for the Smithsonian, and a Republic P—47 Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt was owned by an Arizona TV executive.
He shut the Lightning down and climbed out, grinning, picturing how his mechanic would react in the morning when he walked in and saw that the Lightning was back. Moments later he was in his office. Stell had left the coffee machine on. He poured a cup and eased himself down behind his desk.
There were a couple of calls on the machine. One was from a parts supplier; the other was from Ginny Lasker.
“Max,” her recorded voice said, “please call when you can.”
Her voice had a tightness to it. He could almost think she sounded frightened. He picked up the phone but put it down when he heard the outer door open.
Ceil Braddock smiled at him from the doorway. “Hi, Max.” She looked at him curiously. “What happened? Deal fall through?”
Ceil was the owner and sole pilot of Thor Air Cargo, which was also based at Chellis. She had riveting blue eyes, lush brown hair, a wistful smile, and a TWA navigator in St. Paul. Max had tried his luck, but she’d kept him at arm’s length. They were able to joke about it occasionally. “You don’t love me,” she told him, “you love Betsy.” Betsy was a C-47 that Sundown had sold her three years earlier. It had become Thor’s flagship, hauling freight around the United States and Canada. There were two other planes in the fleet now, and she was negotiating for a fourth.
Ceil flew Betsy occasionally at air shows, and she and Max had even used it to do a joint good deed. On this past New Year’s Day a blizzard had buried the Fargo area. There had been more emergencies than there were medevac teams, and a boy who’d taken part of his hand off with an electric saw was in desperate shape on a remote farm. They had attached the skis and flown the C—47 to Pelican Rapids. They’d landed east of the town on a frozen lake, picked up the boy, and brought him back to Fargo, where doctors reattached the hand.
Max smiled. “She was too good for him,” he said.
She looked pleased. Max knew that his tendency to be protective of the planes was one of the features she most liked in him. “What happened?”
“I didn’t like him much.”
She picked up a cup and filled it. “We’re talking a lot of money here. There must have been more to it than that.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Listen, there are plenty of people out there who would kill to own that plane. I don’t have to take the first offer.”
“I doubt many of them will have Kerr’s money to throw around.”
There were times when Max almost thought he had a chance with her. He’d stopped beating himself up over her a year ago. “Maybe not.” He shrugged. “Probably not.”
She sat down across from him, tasted the coffee, and made a face. “You need some fresh brew.”
He looked at her. “You’re working late.”
“Headed for Jacksonville tomorrow.”
That would be the annual open house at Cecil Field air show. He understood she’d been inspecting the C—47. “Everything all right?” he asked.
“Five by.” She got up, put the cup down. “Gotta go.”
He nodded. “See you whenever.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then withdrew. He listened to the outer door open, heard it close.
Damn.
He punched the speed-dial button for the Laskers and listened to the phone ring on the other end. Ginny picked it up. “Hello?”
“Hi, Ginny. What’s wrong? You okay?”
“Yes. Thanks for calling, Max.” The hint of unease was still there. “I’m alright.” She hesitated. “But there’s something strange happening.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t have bothered you, but Tom’s gone to Titusville and I haven’t been able to contact him.”
“Why do you need him? What’s going on?”
“Do you know about the boat we found here?”
“Boat? No. Found where?”
“Here. On the farm.”
Max visualized the big wheat farm, acres and acres of flat land. “I’m sorry, Ginny. I’m not sure I understand.”
“We found a boat, Max. Dug it up. It was buried. Hidden.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Max, I’m not talking about a rowboat here. This thing’s a yacht. It’s been on TV.”
“I guess I haven’t been paying much attention.”
“Reason I called, I looked out the window earlier this evening and saw lights in the barn. It’s the boat.”
“The boat is lit up?”
“Yes. The boat is lit up.”
“So somebody went in and turned the lights on? Is that what you’re saying?”
“The barn’s locked. I don’t think the boat’s been touched. I think the lights came on by themselves. They’re running lights, long green lamps set in the bow.”
Max still wasn’t sure he understood. “Who buried the boat?”
“We don’t know, Max. As far as we can tell, nobody. At least, nobody recently.” Her voice shook.
“You want me to come out?” She hesitated, and that was enough. “I’m on my way,” he said.
“Thanks.” She sounded better already. “I’ll have Will meet you at the airport.”
3
Here at the quiet limit of the world…
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Tithonus”
If nothing else, it was an excuse to take the Lightning out again.
Fort Moxie and the border are a hundred fifty miles north of Fargo. It was a starless night, and the landscape was dark, punctuated by occasional lights, farmhouses or lone cars on remote country roads.
When he was in a cockpit, Max felt disconnected from his own life. It was as if all the mundane events of daily existence were directed toward the single purpose of getting him off the ground. The steady roar of the twin engines filled the night, and he thought how it must have been, flying alongside the B—17’s over Germany. He imagined himself strafing an ammunition train, watching it erupt into a ball of flame as he pulled up to engage two ME—109’s.
He was grinning when he touched down at Fort Moxie International Airport. Will Lasker was waiting with a black Ford station wagon. The kid wore a jacket with a football letter, and he looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way, Max,” he said. “I mean, we aren’t really scared of a light, but you know how women are.”
Max nodded and threw his bag in the trunk.
Will was full of information, describing how they had found the boat, what it looked like, how visitors were still showing up every day. “A lot of them think we put it in the hole.”
“I can see,” said Max, “why they might think that.”
Will hunched over the wheel, and the car left the lights of Fort Moxie behind and rolled out onto the dark prairie. “You’d have to be crazy to think that,” he said, as if Max hadn’t spoken. “If we had a boat like that, we’d have put it in the lake, not in the ground.”
Max wasn’t sure what he expected to find at the farm. He’d conjured up a vague notion of a rotted-out hulk with lanterns hung on its gunwales. He was therefore not
at all prepared for what he saw when Ginny led him into the barn.
“My God,” he said. “You’re kidding me.” The yacht was bright and sleek even under strings of bare light-bulbs. Will was right: It belonged on Lake Winnipeg, not stored in an old farm building outside Fort Moxie.
Ginny read his eyes. “We have no idea where it came from,” she said. “None.”
It was mounted on a trailer. The mainmast, which was hinged, had been folded over. Several piles of white canvas were shelved along the wall. “Those are the sails,” Ginny said, following the direction of his gaze.
A moist, animal smell alerted him to the presence of horses in stalls at the rear. He saw a lamp forward on the hull, long and teardrop-shaped, but it was not lit. Nor was any other part of the vessel lit. The keel was broad and deep and ran the length of the hull. A wheel was installed in the stern, and there was probably another in the pilothouse just forward of the cockpit. Black spidery characters unlike anything he had seen before were stenciled across the bow, below the lamp.
“Did you turn them off?” he asked. “The lights?”
“Not exactly,” said Ginny. She flipped a wall switch.
The barn went dark. It was a tangible dark, absolute, universal. The horses sounded uneasy.
“Ginny?” he asked.
“Wait.”
Something began to glow. It reminded him of phosphorous, ambient and silver and amorphous, not unlike moonlight through thin clouds. As he watched, the effect brightened. It was green, the color of a lawn after a spring rain, of ocean water just below the surface when sunlight filters down. It penetrated the stalls, illuminated pitchforks and hoes, and threw shadows from the tractor and the feeding troughs across a side wall. He gaped at the light, suddenly aware why she had been spooked.
“There’s one on the other side,” said Ginny. “A white light.”
“Running lights,” he said. “But that’s not right, is it? This is the port side. The light should be red.”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure. Red to port, green to starboard.” He walked around and looked at other light. “White’s not even in the ballpark,” he said. He touched the hull. It felt good, the way carved mahogany feels good, or a leather chair. He turned back to her. “How old is this supposed to be?”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “I don’t know.”
Max folded his arms and circled the boat. First things first: Why would anyone want to bury something like this? “No one’s called to claim it?”
“No.”
“This thing’s in showroom shape.” He stared at its gleaming bow, its polished masts, its color. He walked over to the shelves where the sails had been folded. They did not feel like canvas.
“We washed it,” Ginny said.
“It can’t have been in the ground long.”
“I can’t believe anybody buried it while I was living here.”
He looked at her. That went back a few years. “What’s inside it? You find any bodies in there?”
“We thought the same thing. No, no bodies. And no drugs.”
“How about an identification number? There ought to be something that would allow you to trace the previous owner.”
“If there’s anything like that, we haven’t been able to find it.” She stayed close to him. “Max,” she said, “it also doesn’t have an engine.”
“That can’t be. It has a propeller.” He noticed that the shaft was broken off. “Or at least it had one.”
“I know. The propeller tied into a little green box. We can’t open the green box, but it doesn’t look much like an engine.”
She turned the lights back on. Max cupped his hand over the running light and watched it fade.
“Scares me silly,” said Ginny. She folded her arms over her breast. “Max, what is this thing?”
It didn’t look like any boat that Max had seen before. “Let’s go back to the house,” he said.
He was happy to be away from the boat. Ginny insisted her two sons bring their bedding down to the living room. Jerry was delighted by the opportunity to camp downstairs, and anyhow he was jittery, too. Will didn’t really mind, although he pretended to be annoyed. “Humor your mother,” Max told him, adopting the just-us-guys mode from the airport.
The kids complied, and they all bunked together. Ginny left lights on all over the house.
4
…Glides through misty seas
With its cargo of time and space…
—Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores
Max did not sleep well. He had put on a show of good-natured amusement at Ginny’s fears and her insistence they stay together, as if some demonic spirit had come in off the plains and invaded the barn. But it was he who suggested they leave a few lights on outside. Best that the glow leaking in through the windows be coming from GE sixty-watt bulbs rather than from the whatsis. But he felt a degree of pride that she had turned to him for support.
It was not the presence in the barn, however, that caused his restlessness. It was rather the sense of home, of a family drawing together. He had known this kind of atmosphere as a child but never as an adult. Lasker occasionally joked about the assorted pleasures of Max’s social adventures. Never the same woman twice. And Max played along, because it was expected. But he would have traded it all to get a Ginny in his life.
In the morning they located Tom. The previous evening’s alarms now seemed overblown, and if Ginny had a difficult time explaining why she had summoned help, Max felt uncomfortable at his presence in the rambling farmhouse. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was nervous,” she told her husband over the phone. “But it was really spooky here. I’m in favor of getting rid of the damned thing.”
Lasker was on the speaker. He couldn’t believe that the lights had come on, and he kept asking whether she was sure. Finally he seemed satisfied, although Max knew he would not believe it until he’d seen it for himself. As for getting rid of it: “I don’t think we want to make any quick decisions,” he said. “Let’s find out what we’ve got first. We could throw some canvas over it, if you want. That way you wouldn’t be able to see the damn thing.”
Ginny looked at Max. “I don’t think that’s going to make me feel much better, Tom.”
“Max,” he said, “what do you think about this? Does it make any sense to you?”
“No,” said Max. “I have no idea. But I’ll tell you one thing—that boat hasn’t been in the ground any length of time at all.”
There was a long pause on the other end. “Okay,” Lasker said at last. “Look, I’m on later this morning. I’ll do my stuff and leave right after. Be home this afternoon.”
It was a cold, gray, dismal day, threatening rain or snow. During breakfast a few people arrived and banged on the front door. Could they see the boat? Ginny dutifully unlocked the barn, hitched the trailer to an old John Deere, and pulled it out into a gray morning. Signs posted on the trailer requested people not to touch anything.
“Why do you bother?” asked Max, deeply engrossed in a plate of pancakes and bacon. “Leave it in the barn and all this will stop.”
“I’d do it in a minute,” she said. “But Tom thinks it would be unneighborly. He thinks if people come all the way from Winnipeg or Fargo to see this thing, they should get to see it.” She shrugged. “I don’t really disagree with that, but it is getting to be a hassle.” More cars came while Max was finishing breakfast. “We figure they’ll get bored soon. Or frozen. Whichever.” Ginny’s cool blue eyes touched him. She was still frightened, even in the daylight. “Max, I’d like very much to be rid of it.”
“Then sell it.” He knew she could have her way with her husband.
“We will. But it’s going to take a while. I don’t even know whether we have a free claim to it.”
Max finished off his pancakes and reached for more. He usually tried to be careful about overeating, but Ginny’s cooking was too good to pass up. “I wonder,” he said, “if there’s anything
else buried here.”
She looked momentarily startled. “I hope not.”
Max was trying to piece together a scenario that would account for the facts. He kept thinking about the Mafia. Who else would do something this weird? Maybe the boat was a critical piece of evidence in a Chicago murder case.
Someone knocked at the kitchen door.
Ginny opened it to a middle-aged woman wrapped in furs, accompanied by a stolid, gray-haired chauffeur. “Mrs. Lasker?” she asked.
Ginny nodded.
The woman came in, unbuttoned her coat, and saw Max. “Good morning, Mr. Lasker,” she said.
“My name’s Collingwood,” he said.
Her only reaction was a slightly raised eyebrow. She turned back to Ginny. “I’m Emma McCarthy.” She had sharp, inquisitorial features and the sort of expression one gets from a lifetime of making summary judgments. “May I inquire, dear, whether your boat is for sale?” She closed the door behind her, leaving the chauffeur outside on the step.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Ginny. “My husband’s quite fond of it. We’re planning to use it ourselves this summer.”
McCarthy nodded and lowered herself into a chair. She signaled Max for coffee. “I understand perfectly. I’d feel the same way. It is a lovely boat.”
Ginny filled a cup and handed it to her.
“You do want to explore your options, dear,” she continued. “But I can assure you no one will offer a better price. I wonder if you’d be willing to let me look at it a little more closely. I’d like to see the cabins. And the motor.”
Ginny sat down across the table from her. “I must tell you in all honesty, Ms. McCarthy—”
“Mrs.,” she corrected. “My husband, George, God rest him, would never stand for it if I abandoned him now.”
“Mrs. McCarthy.” Ginny smiled. “I’ll be happy to show you around the yacht. But I’m not ready to entertain an offer just now.”
Mrs. McCarthy pushed her coat off and let it fall back over the chair. Let’s talk turkey, she seemed to be saying.
Ancient Shores Page 3