To Ben’s delight, absolutely no sign of radiation sickness ravaged Lonesome George’s heron rookery on Deep Banks Island. Ben would never treat an old friend in such a shabby manner. Especially a friend who was still guarding a fortune in gold.
There were somber memorial services for Lorton Dyze, Sam Nuttle, and Charlene and Hiram Harris, with Reverend Avery Mosby presiding. There was a special service held for Richard Blackshaw as well. Ulysses had finally come home.
Crisfield’s Sheriff Tilghman, a Smith Island native, proved especially helpful to the clean-up effort when three new patrol cars and a high six-figure donation to the Police Benevolent Association were promised. He and a suggestible medical examiner ensured that the causes of death of the five Smith Islanders were variously recorded as drowning, natural causes, and a lightning strike during the storm.
Knocker Ellis slowly recovered from his gunshot wound. Ben visited him in brief breaks from nursing LuAnna.
Ben still wondered where his mother was. He and Ellis talked it over one day while Ben changed his culler’s dressing. “In the Barren Creek Hotel, Pap told me he waited for her. I want to believe that.”
Ellis said, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. If she didn’t show, they’d try to meet later someplace else. So he wouldn’t get caught hanging out if she didn’t think it was safe to move. Something like that?”
“Exactly. She missed that first meet. He left.”
“According to their plan. Standard operating procedure. No harm, no foul, right Ben?”
Ben had to think about that one. “No. I suppose none at all. Except, we both know she did try to meet him. She left, she tried, and she never came back.”
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t think Chalk ever had her.”
Ben agreed, “But he knew about her. He sounded confident enough to believe he had more information about her than I did.”
“Unless he was psyching you.”
“Must have been a bluff.”
Ellis asked the most important question. “What’s it mean about your mother? That’s what scares me. What’s it really mean?”
Ben was quiet. “It means she made her way into a government file that Chalk could access. Which means one of Chalk’s operatives must have made contact with her at some point, maybe the night she left.”
“And they didn’t have tea.”
Ben said, “No.” He finished dressing Ellis’s shoulder. “My gut tells me she didn’t make it.”
Ellis watched his captain carefully. “You know where to look?”
Ben nodded.
CHAPTER 67
LuAnna’s infection ran its course, leaving her weak as a kitten. Despite her struggle, after a watchful few weeks, everyone was simply relieved she hadn’t taken sick with Pfiesteria Human Illness Syndrome from the toxic algae blooming in parts of the Chesapeake.
To help LuAnna get her strength back, she and Ben took long walks together on the far side of the Big Thorofare, in the Martin Wildlife Refuge. LuAnna never asked how or why they kept ending up at the ruined duck blind near the south pond. Then one day, Ben brought young Kyle Brody’s metal detector. Ben did not tell her why right away.
Seated at the foot of the ancient oak tree, she watched patiently as he swept it back and forth around the duck blind. The detector buzzed a few times. Ben kneeled and carefully dug up an old fork. Then a few old shotgun shell primers, their paper cartridges long rotted away.
An hour later, she looked up when the detector buzzed for what must have been the tenth time. Ben skimmed the dirt and grass away in thin layers with a garden trowel. He held up something small in his hand, brushed off the dirt, stared at it, showed LuAnna. She could just make out what it was underneath the corrosion. A button. An embossed metal button like one might find on a woman’s Norwegian style cardigan.
Ben carefully scraped away the dirt in a four foot circle around where he found the button. He soon turned up something else. It was long and thin like a metal knitting needle. He quickly found two more pins near the first. Surgical grade steel. Finally, Ben knew. His hands shook. These pins had once held his mother’s upper arm together, after she and his father had been run off the road into a stream.
More careful scraping and sifting. Ben found the spent bullet. It was flattened into a mushroom shape. Now Ben knew for sure. Ida-Beth Blackshaw had meant to rendezvous with her husband that night long ago, but she had been unavoidably and permanently detained.
For a moment, Ben wondered if his parents were together somewhere, the old appointment kept. It made him all the more determined never to lose LuAnna again.
Ben kneeled and looked at LuAnna. She smiled at him with both love and sorrow. Gorgeous as she was, Ben’s gaze was drawn up the trunk of the tree where she sat. Someone, something, was staring at him from a knothole where a branch had long ago fallen away. He whispered, “Don’t move.”
Ben slowly got to his feet, approached the tree. The thing inside the knot-hole went on staring at him, unblinking.
LuAnna said, “Ben, what is it?”
Ben said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
LuAnna got to her feet and turned as Ben reached for the knothole and snatched at the object as if it might get away, as if it were an Easter egg that was stashed up high where only a taller child, an older child on the verge of questioning his faith, might find it. Round. White. His blood ran cold. It was a prosthetic eye. There couldn’t be two of them. He was certain he had last seen it in his father’s hands on Spring Island over a month ago. The night his father died. There was something etched in its surface. It looked like two dates. Ben angled the object so the light favored clearer reading. The first date was his parents’ wedding day. Pappy Blackshaw’s way of proving it was he who left the eye just where he knew Ben would come looking.
The second date was for Ben’s and LuAnna’s upcoming wedding. That had only been decided and announced in the newspaper two weeks ago. Dick had been here, and quite recently. He had survived the fire and the bomb. He was still local, because no wedding notices had been posted outside of the one in the Crisfield-Somerset County Times. Ben figured his father must have known more about how the bomb worked than he let on, perhaps even how to roll back the timer to give him enough margin to escape. Dick had turned back time just enough to serve his purpose.
Ben remembered that delirious question his father had asked him in their last moments together on Spring Island; Dick’s corruption of Holy Scripture. ‘Why don’t you look for the living among the dead?’ In that instant, Dick must have figured out what happened to his wife. He had come here to be certain, and wanted Ben to understand this, too. Richard Blackshaw had found his long lost Ida-Beth.
Now Ben doubted his father had been hurt as badly as he let on; wondered if he had really been shot at all. Maybe he had faked the wound and all that blood as part of the plan, just to give himself a chance to see Chalk’s face one last time there in the old hotel, right at the moment of Chalk’s undoing, at the start of his fall. Dick was not just a piratical survivor; he had risked his life to gloat. This entire theft was set up from the very beginning to the bitter end as revenge for his wife.
He’s alive. This meant something to Ben, but in the cascade of emotions coursing through his heart, he could not be sure precisely what. Must have stashed a getaway boat ahead of time.
“Welcome home, Pap,” he muttered, smiling. LuAnna watched him, wondering, but she asked nothing for now. Ben pocketed the eyeball.
Ben dug no farther in the ground by the dilapidated blind. He gently troweled the earth he had removed back into place. The marsh was one of his mother’s favorite places in life. He felt she was home, at peace, and always had been since the moment she died. The next day Ben and LuAnna brought flowers to his mother’s grave. Ben read from the Bible, and when his voice failed him, LuAnna carried on. Together, their words transformed that profane old scene into a holy place forever.