‘It’s curious,’ I said as I wandered about reading the inscriptions. ‘You’d expect the names of the dead to be listed here, but they’re not.’
‘Too many names,’ Cathy stated simply. ‘Too many names.’ As I watched, she reached into the outside pocket of her backpack and withdrew a red silk rose and a laminated four-by-five photograph. ‘This is my father,’ she said, handing the photo to me.
Behind the plastic, a handsome, bright-eyed sailor smiled for the camera, his Dixie Cup cap shoved to the back of his head at a jaunty, non-regulation angle. ‘You favor him,’ I told her as I handed the photo back. ‘Especially around the eyes.’
‘That’s what Mom always said.’ She propped both the photograph and the rose up carefully on a tread of the giant amphibious vehicle.
‘It feels odd to be praying at the side of a flipping tank,’ she said after a moment of respectful silence. ‘Normal people have a grave they can visit. There’s a space for Dad back in Pittsburgh, in Allegheny Cemetery, next to Mom.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Until then, I suppose this tank will have to serve as his unofficial tombstone.’
‘So,’ she said after a bit, slapping her hands together in a let’s-get-down-to-business way. ‘Why don’t you take me to the field where the bodies were buried?’
‘Field? What field?’
‘The one Ken Small mentions in his book. Here.’ Head down, Cathy rummaged in her backpack for a moment, stopped, then raised a hand. ‘Never mind, I must have left the book back at Horn Hill House. But here’s the gist of it. After the disaster, bodies began washing ashore. Hundreds of bodies. Small says they were buried temporarily in a field. He knew where it was, too, and so did this old farmer he talked to.’ She gazed west over the Ley, toward the rolling green hills beyond, shading her eyes against the brightness of the afternoon sun. ‘I wonder which field it was.’
It had been a while, but I’d read Small’s book, too. ‘Small doesn’t exactly say, does he? He’s really rather secretive about it. Too bad he died back in 2004, or you could ask him.’
‘Do you think that farmer he wrote about is still alive?’
‘I don’t know. He could be, I suppose, but since Small never identified him…’ I shrugged. ‘What can you do?’
‘I think there needs to be an investigation. I counted the number of missing and unaccounted for. Eighty. Their bodies have to be somewhere, Hannah! They didn’t simply go poof! Somebody must have seen something.’
‘I’m not so sure about that, Cathy. Everyone agrees that security was super tight back then. The Home Army kept everyone out of the American Zone, and not even the displaced locals knew what went on in their homes and in their fields during the war. The US really kept the lid on.’
‘I guess so,’ she admitted. ‘Thousands of people involved, from Eisenhower down to the lowliest seaman, and yet they were able to keep the screw-up that was Operation Tiger secret for more than forty years. I’ll bet that took some doing!’
I hated to mention it because she seemed so distressed, but I wondered aloud if her father had been one of the sailors who went down with the ship.
Cathy shook her head. ‘We thought of that, but no. Through the VFW, I was able to track down a couple of his buddies. One of them, a guy named Jack, told me they’d been asleep in their bunks, heard the klaxon, grabbed their gear and were halfway up the ladder to their duty stations when all hell broke loose. The ship was on fire, men were screaming for their mothers, they were jumping into a sea of burning diesel. Jack says that he and my father jumped together, but got separated during the night in the freezing water. Jack was picked up by a lifeboat, so Dad could have been, too. Dad could have drowned – I can concede that – but I know he didn’t go down with the 531.’
I laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘I hate to deflate your balloon, Cathy, but some people around here believe that Small made up the bit about the bodies as a publicity stunt to help drive business to his guest house.’
She ran her hand along the flank of the vehicle as if it were a prize steer. ‘I don’t think so. I believe it’s all part of a massive cover-up.’
I’d heard anecdotal tales about bodies being unearthed while doing back garden renovations, but nobody had ever confirmed that. Alison Hamilton’s father in particular had pooh-poohed the whole notion, going on and on (when Alison let him!) about the inaccuracies he’d discovered in The Forgotten Dead. I could tell Cathy about them now, or…
Looking at my new friend’s hopeful face, I took the coward’s way out. ‘I know someone who grew up on a farm near here. Her father was one of the people evacuated back then. Stephen Bailey. He might be able to answer some of your questions.’
Cathy’s face brightened like a child on Christmas morning. Santa Claus might be coming after all. ‘That would be super! Would you put me in touch with him?’
‘Of course.’
‘How soon can you do it?’ she hurried on. ‘I have to fly home next Thursday.’
‘I’m seeing Alison for dinner tomorrow night. I’ll ask for her father’s telephone number. Best if you talk to him directly.’
‘I really appreciate this, Hannah.’
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I knew almost precisely what Stephen Bailey would say. If Cathy actually got to speak to him, I knew he would totally shatter her hopes.
FIVE
‘When I was a little girl, I discovered I had a gift: communicating with those who are no longer with us. Some people say what I do is scary. Other people say I change their lives. I just say what I hear and see, and I see a lot.’Lisa Williams, www.lisawilliams.com
When Alison and Jon Hamilton arrived for dinner at Horn Hill House on Thursday and we’d settled ourselves down on the sofa in Janet’s cozy lounge, I asked Alison how her father was doing. I remembered Stephen Bailey as a spry, weathered man with a shock of Clintonesque white hair and hands calloused from a lifetime of farming.
Alison snorted. ‘Cantankerous as always. Just celebrated his eighty-sixth, but he’s still milking the cows himself every morning. He’s always had help with the crops, of course. Barley mostly. Some maize.’ She sighed. ‘Don’t know why he bothers with the bloody cows. Most of the milk comes from Holland these days.’
‘That’s one of the reasons we’ve put the farm on the market.’ From behind thick lenses, Jon’s smoky eyes considered me somberly.
Like a bobblehead doll, I glanced from Alison to Jon and back to Alison again in the moment it took for that news to sink in. ‘Oh, Alison! I’m so sorry. That farm’s been in your family for, gosh, how many years?’
‘Since Cromwell’s corpse was beheaded, at least that’s what Granddaddy always said.’
‘Which Cromwell?’ I asked. ‘Thomas or Oliver? There’s a century difference.’
Alison made a face. ‘The second one. They dug up his body and decapitated it later. I guess they wanted to make sure the old tyrant was really dead.’
‘I can’t imagine your father being happy with the idea of selling.’
‘Lord, no! But it was time, Hannah. He’s getting too old to manage the chores on a working farm. There’s Tom Boyd to help out, of course. I don’t know what we’d do without Tom. Dad’s been getting forgetful lately.’
‘Talking him into just visiting one of those retirement communities was like pulling teeth,’ Jon said.
‘Practically had to kidnap him,’ Alison added.
‘We took him on a drive up to Coombe Hill in Dittisham,’ Jon said, anticipating my next question. ‘It’s a historic house on Riverside Road, not far from the town center. They converted it into thirty-six one-bedroom flats. Nicer than most.’