Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) (13 page)

Bullard would do that, Mike thought. Mike had known men like Bullard before, had fought them in the ring, and recognized the type, a man whose life was based on aggravating weaker people, causing them to be afraid of him.

“Do you play checkers?” asked the attendant. “That's her game if she sits up long enough. Real weak. Just stays in bed. No more running around town for her, I guess.”

“Around town?” asked Robin.

“Oh sure. Becca is one of our vacationers. She likes to slip out for a day or so once in a while. We never can quite figure out how any of our clients get out of the hospital, but they do. Becca always comes back though. Just goes into town for a memory trip down the old streets of her life. One morning she’s gone. Before we can get the authorities to go to work looking for her, she’s back again.” He wiggled his waist. “Maybe even a little you know what. Some of these folks seem never to be too old for that.”

He stopped at a closed door. “From what we understand Becca was an orphan. She was brought up by a foster mother who wasn’t around very much. My guess, she was abused. Sometimes she talks in her sleep about her mother’s patrons and how she helped out. From what I understand her home was something of a brothel. From the descriptions she tells in her sleep though, Becca seemed to enjoy that life.”

He stopped and reflected. “When she’ll talk to me, and that’s not often, she says she liked her job with the Navy. She says that her boss was a friend.”

He looked at Robin with a smile. “I’m so glad someone from her family finally visited.”

Rebecca Scott’s room was tiny with white walls, no curtains. At the side of the room was a small window, covered with a steel grate, and looking out on the parking lot and front entrance. Mike could see a limb of a tree and a bird on the limb. The bird had his head cocked as if it were trying to see into the room.

“That same bird is here every day,” said the attendant.

“Goldfinch,” said Robin.

Becca took up only a tiny part of the bed, her body shriveled into a lump in the sheets. Her face was small, but Mike could see the remains of beauty among the wear and tear of old age and hard living.

“This is your niece to see you, Becca,” said the attendant.

The old woman said nothing, staring first at Robin then at Mike, her eyes the only part of her body that seemed alive.

“I’ll leave you folks alone,” said the attendant. He closed the door as he went out. Mike stood by the window while Robin sat on the foot of the bed.

The old woman suddenly asked the question, “Am I beautiful to you?” and Mike’s smile brought a smile from her in return. Becca reached under her pillow to push something back further out of sight.

Robin noticed her movement and said, “You’re hiding a book, Becco. People who can read aren’t really crazy are they?”

The old woman brought out a worn paperback, a romance novel judging from the lurid embrace of the man and woman on the cover, and looked at Robin. “I ain’t crazy enough to think I got no niece,” Becca muttered.

“No,” said Mike. “You don’t.”

“You’re here about the Captain,” Becca said. “That’s the only reason anybody comes except the church man and I don’t believe his hogwash either.”

“I want to know about Captain Lawson. I want to help,” said Mike.

“I told them before.”

“Becca, you don’t have to talk,” said Robin. “We’re not from the Navy or Aviatrice. We’re not lawyers. Jesse Lawson hired us to find his grandfather’s airplane, that’s all. If you can help us do that, we’d like to listen to what you have to say.”

“Jesse, that’s the Captain’s grandson, I expect.” She put her head into her pillow and whispered, “I can’t help you.”

“Just tell us what you can,” asked Mike.

“If I tell you, you got to promise me something.”

“If we can,” said Mike.

“They bury us out with stone markers in a field out back of the hospital. When I’m gone, you make sure my dust gets put in the ocean.”

“You’re going to live a long time,” said Robin.

“You got to promise me.”

“OK,” said Mike.

“We’ll make sure, Becca,” said Robin.

“Sometimes I remember,” Becca said, “But then I forget again.”

She sat up in her bed. “Cover that vent,” she whispered and pointed at a small grate on the wall. “That’s how they listen.”

Mike hooked his jacket over screws protruding from the grate.

“Too late to help the Captain. Maybe I can still help his family. Anyway, I’m too far gone to worry any more about what people will do to me one way or the other.’’

She straightened her sheet. “Since Captain Lawson stole that airplane,” Becca said, “I’ve told everyone I was crazy. I never let down, never told anybody anything. It was the only way I knew to help him back like he helped me.”

“You pretended all these years,” said Mike.

“I loved him. Without him I had nothing. Nothing except getting drunk. That helped with the loneliness sometimes. Nothing else.”

“You must have loved him a great deal,” said Robin.

“I only knew him,” she said. “I never knew his wife.”

She looked hard at Mike. He could see the sanity in her eyes.

“That woman. His wife. He was lonely even when she stayed up to the quarters. She was hard on the Captain. Hard on the Captain. Didn’t like him at all. So he came to me.” She stopped talking to wipe away the saliva dripping from her mouth.

“I could never have talked to her anyway. I didn’t want to see her.” She looked plaintively at Mike. “I know now after all these years thinking what I did to their marriage, that she probably tried hard. Then again I have to believe that I could have done nothing different.”

Mike sat on her bed and stroked her forearm softly.

She said, “The Captain, he was a great inventor and a brain. No one can take that away from him. All the lies they said.”

“Do you know why he took the airplane, Becca?” asked Mike.

She motioned to her small table.

Mike opened the little drawer. Inside was a manila envelope, well worn as if opened and closed many times. He pulled out a faded newspaper clipping.

“COMMUNIST STEALS SECRET SEAPLANE

Famous Naval Aviator Attempts to Deliver ExperimentalAircraft to Soviet Battleship Visiting United Nations Opening

July 5, 1946

Yesterday, at 10 PM EST, Captain Edward Lawson, flew off in an experimental unarmed PBY Catalina flying boat, and attempted to deliver the secret airplane to the visiting Soviet battleship Stalin cruising just off the New Jersey shoreline on its way to New York City for the opening of the new United Nations facility at Lake Success, New York.

The Captain and the aircraft were declared lost at sea in a crash soon after takeoff and Navy teams are attempting to recover the wreckage. The Navy has issued a statement that the Captain has also stolen top secret documents from his office and has destroyed his research laboratory.

Captain Lawson is expected to be found guilty of espionage. The Navy stated that this is the most important spy case to come to their attention since the end of hostilities in Europe and Japan and indicates an increase in Communist subversive activities targeted at Navy bases.”

After Mike finished reading, he showed the excerpt to Robin. When she finished she handed it back to him. He put the clipping back in the envelope and replaced it in the drawer. The old woman watched without emotion.

She said, “He wasn’t a spy. I don’t know why he took that plane. He loved that thing. It was all he talked about.”

“ ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ he would say pointing to the seaplane. He loved that plane like he loved me, probably more. You probably blame me, kid, but I wasn’t at fault in this one. Before me it was a lady from Baltimore. I never knew her name, but he had her picture with her wearing a white bathing suit stuck up on the instrument panel of the seaplane for a long time. Dark features. I thought she might have been a Spanish lady. She left him, I think, maybe went back to Cuba, because after a while the picture was gone. Then he started staying around the lab on weekends.

“It was exciting working in the laboratory. Before the war came along, before Pearl Harbor we had a lot of attention from the big shots, from Mr. Wall and the brass, coming in to talk about the new engine Captain Lawson and his team invented. He had several men with him, young engineers, Academy graduates. They would work hard, dreaming of what they called the Giant Boat. Work had been done on a project called the Giant Boat, a seaplane, back in the Twenties in the lab, before the Captain came. Parts of it were still around in storage, the original wing, the boat hull. All of it was outdated, but Captain Lawson and his team thought they could make a better one. The problem was getting enough of an engine on it. I knew that much. They were working with steam power. The lab knew all about steam. They were also working on steam powered launchers for the aircraft carriers.

“They thought they could get enough power from steam to fly the plane. They knew they had to make the engine light because a lot of the steam engines were so heavy. After Pearl Harbor, the brass wanted to transfer all the engineers away from the Captain. He fought them as long as he could, almost to the end of the War.

“It’s hard for me to explain because I don’t have the education the Captain had. I only know what I heard all of them talking about, mentioning over and over as they worked on the problems. I got to be cheering, like, for them to figure out answers, you know. We all worked together like a family. It was like we were doing something really special that no one had ever tried to do before. The Captain was the leader and to the younger men he was like a god. I remember the day that Aviatrice delivered the special turbines to be fitted in place of the regular engines on the flying boat. The Aviatrice engineers, we all called them the outsiders, them and their security men that always came along too, would come down. Those days we had to have everything cleaned up and looking good. Usually the Captain hid all the important valves and controllers behind big partitions he had painted the same color as the walls, like camouflage, so visitors didn’t know anything was there.”

“Tell me about the Captain and Mr. Wall,” asked Mike.

“Mostly Aviatrice and the Navy stayed away from the lab, because the Captain ordered them to stay away. The Aviatrice people, I remember, never did see his new condensers. Mr. Wall had no idea how well they worked and the Captain didn’t want him to know for a while. He welcomed Mr. Wall for a long time, but then he started not to like Mr. Wall, didn’t want to see him. I don’t really know what caused his dislike but I never liked Mr. Wall myself. Too greasy for me, too slick.”

“ ‘You’ll get your plane soon enough, Bernie,’ he’d say, and send Mr. Wall on his way. That would keep Mr. Wall away for another month or so.

“The Captain could fly the seaplane alone too. He’d go out and fly the plane once in a while to test some new part. I don’t understand how they could say he crashed that seaplane. Something on the plane must have broken, because he could fly it with his eyes shut. Most times he went alone too. He liked to fly alone so he could adjust valves without telling anyone. He’d say to me, ‘I don’t have to explain things. I don’t have to tell somebody how to do it. I like to do it myself.’

“Most of our people, our family, the ones the Captain trusted, were killed in Okinawa in the last days of the war. The Navy needed our engineers to handle the technical equipment they were using on the aircraft carriers fighting the Japanese. Our engineers could run the new equipment. They were stationed on the ships out on the decks with the launchers and the suicide planes killed them.

“When Hiram Jones came to work early in 1946, he wanted to arm the seaplane, put bombs on it. The Captain had taken off all the guns the day he heard that the engineers were killed at Okinawa. I remember him saying that he didn’t want to see guns anymore, not on his plane. He and Hiram, and later Wall, argued about the weapons being put back.

“Hiram, you see, had his orders from New York. He was there to make that plane into a bomber, something Wall could sell to the Navy.”

“Tell me about the arguments,” said Mike.

“When Mr. Wall found out that seaplane had no bomb racks, he was very upset. He made long phone calls from New York to the Captain.”

“What happened?”

“Far as I know they never were installed.”

Her tiny body stirred. “After the Captain was killed, I pretended to act crazy so they wouldn’t ask me anything. I never told the Navy investigators anything. They wanted me to tell what happened and I suspected they were going to blame the Captain no matter what I said. The man was dead. Leave him be, I said over and over, whenever they asked me questions. I wouldn’t talk to that lawyer, Drexel, either. He was just trying to build his reputation. I always thought he’d sell out to the other side if he got a better offer. Mrs. Lawson probably had to sell off that farm to pay him. It wasn’t hard to be crazy like I been all these years.”

“Tell me about the Fourth of July when the Captain took the plane,” asked Mike.

“The day it happened the plane was at the seaplane ramp. Only the Captain and I were in the lab during the day. He had made another flight maybe two weeks before. I don’t know where he went. He just left in the evening and he was back in the morning. I’d see him in the office talking on the telephone. The office had glass walls separating him from the rest of the factory. When I went into the office, he started kidding me or talking about the seaplane, about how good it flew. I didn’t care about the engineering talk but I liked to listen to his voice.

“I remember that day some of the gray jars of explosive were sitting on his desk. I asked him about putting them away. We always kept the explosives in a special closet. They were for testing fuses in some of the experimental equipment.

“Of course, in the early days of the War we had all been worried about sabotage. When I started there in 1942 you could not go in or out without signing, going by Navy guards who would check you out. Everyone was worried about enemy submarines coming up the Delaware River and shelling the factory from the harbor.”