Louise's Dilemma (18 page)

‘I hope you’ll have dinner with me,’ Lenore said.

‘I would love to, but I thought you didn’t do meals?’

‘It’s just stew; it’s no harder to cook for two than one. And I didn’t think you’d want to go into town, what with the murder and all.’

‘I’d planned to go out of town to eat.’

‘No need to do that.’

‘So St Leonard is still talking about the murder?’

‘Honey,’ Lenore said, pouring a healthy dollop of cream into her mug, ‘this town is abuzz with talk about Leroy Martin’s murder, Dennis’s arrest for murder and Frank’s arrest for smuggling. I’m afraid what might happen if you go out.’

I felt my pulse begin to race. ‘Why?’

‘The town is split over all this. Some say Dennis has always been a bad one and they’re not surprised he killed Leroy. Some say Dennis would never have killed Leroy – they grew up together, and Dennis has never hurt a fly, despite all his bluster and shooting off shotguns when he’s drunk and such. And some, I’m sorry, dear, blame you, and that FBI man who treated us so arrogantly.’

‘Why on earth?’

‘They say that if you two hadn’t come nosing around Frank and Leroy wouldn’t have gotten scared and Dennis wouldn’t have killed Leroy.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Anne told Constable Long that Leroy wanted out of the beef smuggling business because of all the government people snooping around here because of price controls. He was afraid they would get caught. So the FBI’s figured that Dennis and Leroy argued and Dennis killed him so he could keep on with the smuggling business.’

‘So the town either believes the FBI is wrong about Dennis, or they blame the government for Leroy’s murder in the first place!’

‘They’re just human.’

‘True.’

‘More tea?’

‘I would love some.’

Lenore took my mug into the kitchen.

Lily rose from the rug and came over to me, tail wagging, and put her paws and head on my knee.

‘Come to comfort me, girl?’ I asked, rubbing her head.

Her tail wagged so hard that it thumped the floor, and I realized I had half a cookie in my hand. Lenore was still in the kitchen, so I slipped the cookie to Lily, who was so deliriously happy that she dropped to the floor and rolled over so I could scratch her belly.

‘Lily!’ Lenore said, returning with my tea. ‘Leave Louise alone!’

Lily ambled back to her rug by the stove and lay down on her rug, but she kept an eye fixed on me. We shared a secret, she and I. We’d been naughty.

‘Then,’ Lenore continued, ‘you did find the body. Everyone will want to ask you about it.’

Of course. In a town like this a murder would be sensational. I knew I might testify at Dennis’s trial and could not talk about the murder beforehand. I was right to stay away from all the townsfolk.

Except Anne. I had to clear up the birthday question for the Martin postcard file, just in case Lt. Collins reviewed it. If he noticed my error he would be bound to point it out to Egbert.

I would visit Anne after dinner. Then I could enjoy the evening and tomorrow morning here in this cozy room with my book before I drove back to Washington.

Over our dinner of stew and crusty homemade bread, eaten at a scratched and stained kitchen table that I figured had been in Lenore’s family for a couple of hundred years, I asked Lenore about Anne’s state of mind. I wanted to be prepared for what I might find when I went to see her.

‘She’s doing all right,’ Lenore said. ‘She’s always seemed real strong – emotionally, I mean. When she was just fifteen her grandmother died and she had to leave school. But she went to work at Bertie Woods’ café and met Leroy there. And she put up with a lot of nonsense from people about her accent and being foreign and all. Of course, once she married Leroy she became an American.’

‘She lived through the Boer War,’ I said. ‘Most of her family died. That would toughen anyone up, if it didn’t destroy them.’

Lenore sliced another thick chunk from the loaf of hot bread for me. ‘I reckon so. Do you know, I went with another woman from my church to sit with Anne for a while after Leroy’s funeral, and we found her on her hands and knees, scrubbing Leroy’s bloodstains out of the floor, calm as she could be!’

Solomons Island Road was nearly empty of traffic, which pleased me under the circumstances. I had pulled my hat low over my eyes and wrapped a scarf around my neck, and I was driving a car unfamiliar to the denizens of St Leonard, but still I feared being recognized. I didn’t want anyone but Lenore and Anne to know I was here. I could count on their silence, I believed.

I found myself at the turn-off to the Martin house and drove carefully over the rough road, crossing the rickety bridge at Perrin Branch, now free of ice and flowing sluggishly. It was about a mile from the bridge to Anne’s quaint cottage on the Chesapeake Bay, but it might as well be fifty, it was so isolated.

I slammed on my brakes, forewarned by instinct before I actually registered the deer that leapt across the road in front of me. I felt a bump, but the deer – scrawny and small, it must have been starving in this cold winter – continued leaping, vanishing into the woods to the left of the road. My madly pumping heart slowed, and I got out of the car with my torch. Please don’t let Phoebe’s car be damaged, I prayed. I could afford to fix it, but I didn’t want her to think I was an unreliable driver. She might not let me borrow the car again.

I couldn’t find even a mark on the car. Thank goodness.

Then I heard it. Music. I could swear I heard music.

The wind was blowing from the bay. Could it be coming from Anne’s house? I doused my torch and listened, bending into the wind. It was music, all right, orchestral music. It must be quite loud for me to be able to hear it. How odd.

Listen to your gut, my instructors at the Farm told me over and over again. Don’t be sanguine about anything.

I got back into the car and maneuvered it into the sheltered spot in the woods across from Anne’s cottage that Williams and I had discovered on our stakeout.

When I got out of the car I listened for the music again. Not a sound, except for one optimistic bird song. I felt foolish. So what if Anne was listening to her record player?

But the music had seemed so loud, and, frankly, it sounded German. No one these days played anything by German composers. Stupid, really, what did Bach or Beethoven have to do with the war, but still it made people feel patriotic to eschew all things German.

I cautiously made my way through the copse. I didn’t want to fall or switch on my flashlight. When I got to the edge of the woods I saw Anne’s house. It was completely blacked out. The wind changed, and I could hear music again. I’m not an expert on German composers, but it sure wasn’t Aaron Copland. I hesitated, still feeling ridiculous; what did it matter if Anne was listening to Bach?

To my left was the head of the Martins’ inlet. I didn’t see the mast of the skipjack at the pier. That was odd.

I found the path that led along the bank of the inlet to the head of the pier. A long black low-lying vessel was tied up there, floating gently, silhouetted against what little light there was.

It was a submarine.

I
ducked behind a tree, propping myself up against its rough trunk to support legs that threatened to collapse under me.

Like Saul when he received the Holy Ghost, the scales fell from my eyes. The postcard from Richard Martin in Nantes
did
refer to a Nazi covert operation. Named ‘Mother’. That would commence around February thirteenth, Anne’s ‘birthday’.

This sub was German. Had to be. Why would an American submarine be hidden in an oysterman’s cove in Maryland?

Why was I so shocked? This had happened before.

On May twenty-eighth, 1942, last summer, a team of Nazi saboteurs left the submarine base in St Lorient, France on
U-202
bound for the South Shore of Long Island, near East Hampton.

The team was led by George John Dasch. Dasch had served in the German army during World War One, then emigrated to America, where he had worked as a waiter. When war broke out in September 1939, he impulsively went home, where he was recruited as a saboteur because of his fluent English and American mannerisms.

Dasch’s four-man team was assigned to destroy the hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls, the Aluminum Company of America factories in Illinois, Tennessee and New York, as well as the Philadelphia Salt Company’s cryolite plant in Philadelphia, which supplied raw material for aluminum manufacture. They were also instructed to bomb locks on the Ohio River between Louisville, Ky., and Pittsburgh, Pa.

The four saboteurs in Dasch’s team carried thousands of dollars for living expenses, bribes and travel. They were supplied with four waterproof wooden crates, each about twice the size of a shoebox. Three were filled with dynamite, some pieces disguised as lumps of coal. The fourth box carried fuses, timing devices, wire, incendiary pen and pencil sets and sulfuric acid.

U-202
made the 3,000-mile-plus trip across the Atlantic in fifteen days, traveling underwater during the day, on the surface at night. At eight o’clock Friday evening, June twelfth,
U-202
came within sight of the American coast. She submerged and slowly crept closer, grounding about fifty yards off the shore at eleven p.m. Because of the fog, visibility was terrible.

Dressed as German marines – so they would not be shot as spies if they were caught during the landing – Dasch and his team crawled into an inflatable rubber boat, and their crates were loaded aboard. Two armed German sailors rowed the boat to shore, where the sabotage team changed into civilian clothing.

While the others were burying the crates and uniforms, Dasch climbed over a dune to reconnoiter. Unexpectedly, he spotted a young Coast Guardsman heading toward him, waving a flashlight. Terrified that the Coast Guardsman would spot the half-buried boxes and the rest of his team, Dasch quickly walked to meet him.

Dasch told the Coast Guardsman that he and some friends on the beach were stranded fishermen. The Coast Guardsman suggested they take shelter at the Coast Guard station, less than half a mile away. Dasch declined, saying that he and his friends had no IDs or fishing permits. Not surprisingly, the young Coast Guardsman became suspicious.

Dasch offered the Coast Guardsman a bribe, which he pretended to accept. But Seaman 2nd Class John Cullen ran back to the Coast Guard station and roused his colleagues. They picked up weapons and hurried back to the beach. Dasch and the others were gone. But through the fog, the Coast Guardsmen spotted the departing submarine. When they searched the beach, they found freshly dug holes and, inside of them, the four wooden munitions crates, as well as a duffel bag filled with German uniforms.

The saboteurs might never have been found, but George Dasch, who regretted leaving America for Germany, had always intended to betray the operation as soon as the team arrived in the United States.

By midmorning he’d arrived in Washington, checked into the Mayflower Hotel and called the FBI.

Who knew what Dasch’s team might have accomplished had Dasch not betrayed them? Since then the Coast Guard and the Navy had kept close watch over Atlantic beaches.

But the Chesapeake Bay was supposed to be impregnable to Nazi submarines!

I didn’t know if Leroy was involved in this scheme, or what his murder might have to do with it, but clearly Anne was central to the story, a Nazi agent. Anne, so lovely, so stoic, so happy to be an American!

What did I do now? I reviewed my training from the Farm. Hide, reconnoiter, verify and communicate.

Even if half the submarine crew came out of Anne’s house, where I was sure they were holed up, listening to Bach and drinking, they couldn’t see me. I was concealed in the woods, under the low branches of a cedar tree, on the other side of the driveway from Anne’s cottage. The moon was a mere sliver in the sky when it could be seen through the clouds and fog of the Chesapeake Bay.

What about Phoebe’s car? I glanced at the house to make sure the blackout shades were still drawn and no one was outside on the porch, then slipped back to its hiding place. It was well concealed down the sandy track into the tiny clearing in the woods that Williams and I had discovered.

Broken tree branches felled by the weight of ice littered the woods. I collected some of the thickest branches I could find and piled them around Phoebe’s car, camouflaging it from even a nearby observer.

Poor Phoebe! What would she think if she knew!

I crept back to my hiding place under the tree across from Anne’s cottage when I heard a door slam. Music leaked out into the night, and with it the low hum of conversation in another language. Ever so carefully I edged around the tree truck. A man stood outside Anne’s front door, silhouetted by the light of the half-open door behind him. He struck a match, and its flare revealed the peaked white cap and long black leather greatcoat of a captain in the Kriegsmarine. The captain cupped his hands around the cigarette and inhaled until it was well lit. The orange glow floated in the dark. While he puffed on his cigarette, the captain surveyed his surroundings, almost clinically, starting from the Martins’ shed, proceeding past the driveway until he stared directly at my hiding place.

I’d already slumped until I was almost lying on the ground, sweating in the cold night air. I knew beyond all doubt now. This was a German sub, complete with captain and crew. How had it gotten past the forts, the searchlights, the contact mines, the submarine nets at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay? Even more critical, what was its mission?

The captain crushed his cigarette under his boot and went back inside the cottage, where I expected Anne had prepared food and drink for him and his crew. It might be crowded inside the little house, but it would feel like a ballroom compared to the interior of the submarine after a two-week trip across the Atlantic. On board the sub the crew shared one toilet and one sink. Their sleeping hammocks, shared by two seamen on different shifts, would be filthy. Fresh foods supplies were either spent or spoiled. And after their mission was concluded, there was another two-week trip back across the Atlantic to look forward to.