Louise's Dilemma (20 page)

‘Ten minutes,’ the seaman said.

‘Correct. And you come down to the beach and work your way north. Miss …’ He looked at me. ‘What is your name again?’

‘Mrs Louise Pearlie.’ There was something about ‘Mrs’ that seemed to earn respect from men. Using it came in handy sometimes.

‘Mrs Pearlie and I might be needing your help. Ready?’ he said to me.

I had never been on a horse before. Only adrenaline and my determination to get back to the Martins’ cottage persuaded me to grasp the hand Jarvis stretched out to me. He hauled me up behind him, and I banged my knee on the rifle slung over his saddle.

I locked my arms around Jarvis as he gathered up the horse’s reins. Missy danced with anticipation, her bridle jingling. I felt like one of those heroines on the cover of a pulp romance novel!

The only way I’d seen up from the beach to the bluff where the lighthouse stood were the wooden stairs I’d scaled, but there was a hairpin path that led down the other side of the bluff to the beach. Missy went down it way too fast to suit me, but she’d clearly navigated it many times before and put her hooves down confidently. She leapt the last couple of feet to the beach, throwing me into Jarvis. He said something, but the wind blew it away and I couldn’t understand him.

Missy thundered up the beach. At this pace we’d be at the foot of the Martins’ dock in no time flat.

I’d forgotten the stone jetty. Jarvis hadn’t; he slowed as we approached it, and then pulled Missy to a halt. He turned around to me.

‘Missy can’t cross this,’ he said. ‘She could injure herself badly. We’ll have to go around it.’

I looked landward. A cliff rose off the beach to the top of the bluff. The wooden staircase that led up to a shuttered cottage had two full flights of steps. The horse couldn’t possibly navigate such a steep cliff.

Before I’d finished my thought, Jarvis pulled Missy to the right. Without hesitation she plunged into the surf. I held on for dear life as a wave broke over us, sending salt spray and freezing water cascading down our bodies. Missy powered forward, her broad chest parting the waves. I could see her shoulders working and feel her hooves searching for purchase on the sea floor. Then we were beyond the surf and the horse was swimming. Swimming! Water flowed past us like a river. For once the sky above was clear and bright with stars and the light of a quarter moon.

The two of them, man and horse, must have done this before on beach patrol. Jarvis knew when the jetty ended out beyond the waves, and he turned the horse north again. She swam parallel to the beach for a minute or two, then Jarvis urged her back towards the beach. Now the waves battered us from behind, but I felt Missy’s hooves catch the sand and soon we were on the beach again. The horse shook herself like a wet dog, almost throwing us off.

Thanks to my rubber overalls and parka I wasn’t too wet, but I couldn’t see out of my salt-encrusted glasses.

Jarvis didn’t permit Missy to gallop again. Instead he kept her to a walk while he peered ahead. The Cove Point light was behind and above us, but fog had moved in again and obscured our vision.

‘I think this is a good place to leave Missy,’ he said.

He lowered me to the ground, which felt hard and unyielding under my feet after the sensation of swimming on horseback. Jarvis slung his leg over the saddle and dropped to his feet himself, pulling Missy’s reins over her head.

He led the horse up the beach and slid her bridle off her head. She had a halter on under the bridle. Jarvis took a coil of rope from his saddle and tied her to a tree at the edge of the beach. ‘That’s so she doesn’t jingle,’ he said. ‘She gets so excited.’

‘You be quiet,’ he said to her. ‘No whinnying. No prancing. I’ll be right back.’ He gave her a peppermint, and she crunched on it with her big yellow teeth as we moved away.

Jarvis and I crept along the beach until we saw the Martins’ dock. I pulled him down behind a dune until we squatted on the beach next to the dock. Whispering directly into his ear, I briefed him about the area. I explained that the dock ran along the shoreline of the inlet before reaching out into the Bay. That a thick patch of woods stretched from the northern side of the Martins’ driveway, where my car was hidden, most of the way to the head of the dock, and up the side of the inlet. That the Martins’ cottage was on the other side of the driveway, quite out in the open, but visible to someone carefully hidden in the woods across from it. That the Nazi guards were a mile up the driveway standing guard on the other side of the bridge that crossed Perrin Branch. That I was sure I could get to my car, but not past the guards at the bridge.

Jarvis absorbed all this without comment, just nodding.

We left our hiding place and scrabbled along the sand until we got to the dock. Then we pulled ourselves up until we could see out onto it. The submarine was still there, rocking gently up against the tires that cushioned the dock.

We ducked down below the driftwood again.

‘Jesus H. Christ!’ Jarvis said, in a whisper. He looked at me with new respect. ‘Explain to me how you came to find this again?’

It would take way too long to tell him the entire story and would serve no purpose.

‘I met Anne recently. I came back here for the weekend and heard that her husband had died, so I thought I’d drive over to express my sympathy. I parked my car up the road in the woods to protect my tires and walked down the driveway, and then I saw the submarine. I ducked right back into the woods.’ So lucky no one had seen me!

‘Why did you park your car in the woods? Who are you?’

‘Nobody. I mean, I’m just a government girl. I’m a file clerk. I didn’t want to drive the car over all those oyster shells. The car doesn’t belong to me. I borrowed it from my landlady. What I don’t understand is how the submarine got up here from the mouth of the Bay.’

‘Just between you and me,’ Jarvis whispered, ‘it’s possible. Because of the deep freeze.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Eastern Command left the minefields in safe mode and the submarine nets open. Our own ships were crashing around in the ice and wind and in danger of hitting the mines.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘That’s not all. Power outages disrupted the searchlights and the sonar. I expect your Nazi captain didn’t plan to come up the Bay at all, but saw his chance and made a dash for it.’

Still crouched low, we scouted the dock, the cottage, and the lawn that ran from it down to the beach. There was no sound at all from the cottage, no light leaking around the blackout curtains.

‘They must be asleep,’ I said.

‘I guarantee you there are still guards up the road,’ Jarvis said.

Out of the corner of my eye something white moved, and I turned to look across the inlet from the submarine. It was the skipjack, tied up to a tree! I grabbed Jarvis’s arm.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘The Martins’ skipjack! It wasn’t here earlier! I think I must have been right!’

‘About what?’ he whispered.

‘That submarine is too small for combat duty,’ I said. ‘It would barely have enough fuel to get across the Atlantic and back.’

‘I was thinking the same thing.’

‘Do you think it brought a team of saboteurs? Say they docked here during the last high tide, the team took off in the skipjack with one of the sailors from the submarine, got dropped off, and the sailor brought it back?’

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he said again. ‘I’ve got to get back to the lighthouse to call HQ. I expect the Germans will leave on the next high tide.’

It was already coming in.

‘I need you to stay here,’ he said to me. ‘Keep watch. Do you still have a flashlight for signaling? Know Morse Code?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, to both questions.

‘You
are
a spy,’ he said.

For a second I was taken aback, but then I realized he was joking.

‘Here,’ Jarvis said, handing me his sidearm, the standard Colt .45 issued to most American servicemen. ‘Can you use this? Of course you can, why am I even asking?’

I hefted the gun in my hand. It was good to have for self-defense, but I couldn’t stop a submarine with it. In fact there was no way I could prevent the submarine from leaving the inlet if the cavalry didn’t arrive in time. But of course it would. High tide was a couple of hours away yet. The Solomons Island naval training station was just a few miles down the road.

Jarvis turned to me. ‘You do realize, don’t you, that this woman, Anne, will leave with the Germans if she can?’

Of course she would, the traitor. I could not imagine why she had done what she did. How could she betray her adopted country, the one that offered her safety and security after she immigrated? And how did her treachery relate to the postcard from Leroy’s ‘cousin’ in France?

It must have been meant for her, not Leroy, and signaled to her, what? And I had given her the postcard! She would need a suitcase radio to communicate, but Williams and I hadn’t found one when we searched the house. But then Leroy’s criminal adventure and murder distracted us from the postcard, and Anne, and her Nazi contact, must have decided to go ahead with the operation.

Jarvis slipped away to mount Missy and gallop back to the lighthouse.

I couldn’t keep watch effectively if I froze to death or lost consciousness from pain. Now that I wasn’t flush with adrenaline I began to shiver uncontrollably.

And worse, my feet began to register pain from the torture they’d endured from the sharp oyster shells and the stone jetty. They ached and throbbed relentlessly.

I needed to get warm. On the back seat of Phoebe’s car was the blanket that was always kept there and the sweater I’d bought at the Frederick Courthouse. My purse too, which contained a bottle of aspirin. I needed to get to that car.

To do that I must to crawl up the dock again and slip into the woods at the head of the Martins’ dock and make my way to the vehicle’s hiding place. And hope that the Nazi submariners who were guarding the Martins’ driveway stayed far down the road. They couldn’t have found the car or the crew wouldn’t have been sleeping peacefully in the cottage right now.

Again I crawled on my stomach up the dock, my head raised just enough to see where I was going. At least the rubber trousers I was wearing protected me from more splinters. At last I reached the woods, raised myself to a crouch and moved as quietly and quickly as I could.

It seemed like an age, but finally I got to the car. I moved a branch to crawl into the front seat. After the door closed I felt such relief at being out of the wind and off my feet that I allowed myself to cry, but only for a few minutes. I didn’t have time for any more tears than that.

I maneuvered into the back seat of the car and stripped off my foul-weather gear and what was left of my suit and stockings. I buttoned my new thick warm blueberry sweater around me. Then I ripped Phoebe’s blanket in half and wrapped one of the halves around my waist down to the top of my thighs, securing it with the belt from my skirt.

I couldn’t delay dealing with my feet any longer. I pulled off the sea boots. The wool socks Seaman Grady had given me had adhered to my feet and lower legs with dried blood. I peeled them off. It didn’t hurt much, just started the bleeding again. I used more strips of blanket to wrap my feet and legs, securing them with safety pins from my handbag. I redressed in my foul-weather gear. At last I swallowed three aspirin, dry.

I really wished I had a martini. Instead I took one of the NoDoz Williams had given me so I wouldn’t fall asleep.

An hour later the cavalry hadn’t arrived, and I understood why. Finding the team of saboteurs was more important than capturing the Nazi submarine. Within minutes of Jarvis calling his HQ a manhunt would be on, involving the FBI, countless police forces, the Coast Guard and the military. They wouldn’t have much time before the saboteurs would vanish. I had to wonder if any military assets at all would be deployed to capture the submarine. No one on board would know the saboteurs’ missions, not even the Captain. And did the United States really want to detain a Nazi submarine in the Chesapeake Bay? What if word got out to the public that a submarine had made it past all the defenses at the mouth of the Bay? The morale consequences to the entire country would be devastating. Wouldn’t it make strategic sense to allow the submarine to escape?

It made sense, but I was disgusted. In fact, I could hardly bear it. Especially if Anne escaped too. I wanted to see that woman behind bars or hanging from a gallows.

High tide was almost here. Time to take my station and keep watch, see if I could figure out the sub’s bearing. There was just one hope to take out the submarine. If it could be tracked out into the Atlantic it could be captured or destroyed without fear of alerting the American public. But now that the weather had changed, surely the sub couldn’t make it through the mouth of the Bay? Eastern Command couldn’t count on all the soldiers and sailors on duty at Hampton Roads to allow a Nazi sub to escape and then keep such a secret.

Another option for the submarine was to cross the Bay, ditch the sub in another sheltered spot, and swim to the eastern shore. The Nazis could easily cross the rural peninsula and be picked up on the Atlantic shore by another sub. The more I thought about this, the more it seemed the obvious choice. Landing on the eastern shore might have been the sub’s plan in the beginning, until the captain saw his chance during the artic cold snap to dash into the Bay itself.

I crouched down in my spot under the tree. Light shone around the edges of the cottage’s blackout blinds. In the shadows on the porch I saw several men, indistinguishable from each other in their grey leathers and black caps, eating sandwiches and drinking from steaming mugs. A couple of crates sat on the porch. Fresh supplies for the long sea trip back to Germany? Supplies that Anne had gathered for them? More figures came out onto the porch. I saw the lights go out in the cottage. I felt sick. Small waves lapped high on the shore of the inlet. They’d be leaving soon.

I squinted, hoping to pick out Anne in the mass of seamen collecting on the front porch of the cottage and in the yard. Soon it seemed at least twenty were milling around. I noticed a slight figure wearing loose leathers and with what looked like hair up in a bun. It had to be Anne. She, because I was sure it was her, carried a small bag, just a little bigger than a handbag, that was feminine, not a sailor’s sea bag. She’d probably taken no more than a change of underwear, the picture of her family, and her pearls. There wouldn’t be room for more in the submarine. A woman crammed into the cramped submarine with all those men would have a most unpleasant journey. But she’d been through worse, hadn’t she?