China Jewel (8 page)

“I had to have coffee.”

She tapped his leg with her toe. “You liked me and you know it.”

He tickled her stomach. “All right. So I fell for you.”

“You waited until Friday afternoon at closing time before you asked for a date. The women at the museum had bets going.”

“I was doing a lot of thinking about my kid in those days.”

“Jamie and I get along great, you know that.”

“He really likes you, that’s for sure.”

“The past wasn’t your fault.”

“He thinks it was. I was always working. My wife found another guy and he’s been good to the boy.”

“I remember I couldn’t get you to walk along the harbor with me. The only thing you talked about besides your son was a garden you wanted to plant.”

“I never liked the water.”

“You told me boats brought you bad luck.”

“I still feel that way.”

“You’re involved in with a sailing ship.”

“Strange, isn’t it?”

She rose up on her elbow. He could see the beautiful shape of her face with her hair just touching her cheeks. “I think we ought to find out if Captain Tolchester had relatives. The Bible might still be around and it could tell us something,” she said.

“Sounds good.” His fingers touched her nipples, one after the other.

She whispered, “Maybe we’ll be lucky.”

He slowly leaned over and lightly kissed her lips.

“I’m lucky now,” he murmured. He moved his body towards her as she reached for him with a sigh of anticipated pleasure.

Chapter 6

June 15, 9 AM

Staten Island, New York

Katy had discovered the location of Captain Tolchester’s Bible, the one from the wreckage of his ship. They were on the way to study it.

“Hotshot driver,” Cutter said as she weaved through the turnpike traffic.

“I like to get there,” she said.

“I noticed,” he grinned. “That’s all right. It’s not a deal breaker to me.”

She smiled, “I thought you Army Rangers liked danger.”

“Not when someone else is driving,” he said.

“Women want control too. I grew up in Southern Maryland racing my father’s Ford pickup against the boys who lived down the road.”

“Did you win?”

“Always. Best they had was a Chevy.”

“Anybody end up in one of those deep roadside ditches?”

“They did.”

Cutter touched her arm as they repeated together, laughing, “They had a Chevy.”

They left the turnpike at the exit to Staten Island. Their destination was the village of Narrows Beach. Beside them was the blue water channel into New York harbor. The span of the Verrazano Bridge arching to Coney Island stretched on the horizon north of them. Cutter took a moment to reread his last Blackberry text. Doc Jerry had written good news. The Peregrine was moving fast and had reached a point about one thousand miles east of Recife, Brazil.

Cutter’s attention was drawn to a car in the rear view mirror. “That guy is still behind us.”

“Who?” asked Katy.

“A red Honda has followed us from Maryland,” he said.

“You didn’t say anything before,” she said.

“You needed to concentrate on the driving.”

“Who do you think he is?”

Cutter shrugged. “Well, whoever, he’s been behind us and he’s gotten off at our exit. Here,” he said, leaning toward her, “Pull off, park and let him go by.”

She stopped and a red coupe rushed by. Cutter could not see the driver who was hidden behind tinted windows. The vehicle went to the end of the street, turned right and was gone.

“It has a bent rear fender,” she said. “Could not spot the license plate.”

“Let’s go,” said Cutter. “You’re a good detective.”

“What street do we want?” he said, thrashing the folds of a map as he tried to find their location. He looked again for the car but the Honda did not reappear.

“Hemlock Street.”

“This map doesn’t have that street. Too bad you don’t have navigation.” He folded it and they watched street signs. The macadam surface changed to tar-covered dirt and finally to packed sand. They were almost at a dead end beside the beach. Katy pulled over. Outside the car dozens of shoreline visitors strolled in colorful shorts and bikinis.

“I’ll ask,” said Cutter. He spotted an elderly man in a red shirt and dark shorts, reading a newspaper.

Cutter stopped in front of him. “Sorry to disturb you. I’m guessing you live around here.”

“Why’s that?” The man spoke with a drawl as he looked up from his seat on a wooden bench.

“You’re not interested in the beach.”

“You got that right. Don’t look at it. Just a place to read the paper until the sun gets too hot. Then I go home. You people lost?”

“We want to find Hemlock Street.”

“Most of ‘em wants the ocean. Can’t tell them it’s really the harbor. They don’t want to hear it. Anyway, Hemlock, that’s in the old part of town. It’s near the quarantine memorial, where they used to keep the immigrants.” The man stood up, gave directions and pointed. He added, “Building is gone. Ain’t much to visit. All run down now. People forget.”

The house Katy wanted was the last in a series of small two-story unpainted wood buildings. No sidewalk existed and several abandoned cars stood rusting in the overgrown weeds. Children with ill-fitting clothes ran barefoot among the vehicles pausing only to stare quickly at Katy and Cutter.

In front of the house was a mound of dirt covered with weeds. What remained of a rotten wooden sign was bent over in tall grass, its message unreadable. Cutter identified a few straggling white perennials among the green.

They ascended the rickety unpainted front porch. Three rusted mailboxes hung by the faded diamond-paned door. The top one was for Miss Mary Tolchester, the person Katy sought. Cutter pressed the doorbell and heard a buzzer sound inside.

As he waited he studied the neighborhood. Past their car he could only see a little of the beach. He spotted a large red tanker heading in to New York oil terminals.

The door squeaked open a crack. A thin elderly woman, her glasses down on her nose, peeked out nervously.

“What you want?” she said in a high pitched voice, her arms poised to slam the door shut.

“Are you Mary Tolchester?” Cutter asked.

“I’m her neighbor. She’s down the hall. I heard her buzzer ringing so I came.”

“Is she here?”

“I always answer for her. She’s there but she don’t come out. I don’t like to hear the door ring too long. It gives me bad headaches.”

“Can we come in?”

She appraised Katy, then Cutter. She relaxed, apparently satisfied they meant her no harm. She said, “You wait now, mister. I’ll go and see.” The woman closed the door, then quickly opened it. “What’s the name? I’ll tell her.”

Katy told her. The woman snorted, turned and closed the door again. They waited on the porch. A small dog had arrived and nibbled at Cutter’s shoe.

“You’ve got a friend,” said Katy.

Cutter smiled. The door opened again. The woman peeked out and asked Katy, “Are you the lady from the museum?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Well, she says you can come in. Bring your man with you.”

“OK,” Katy grinned. “Let’s go, man of mine,” she chuckled and pulled Cutter behind her. The woman closed the door after them. The hall was dark and smelled of burned food.

“We keep the lights off to hide the roaches,” the woman explained. “Mary’s door is the last one on the left. You just walk toward her light coming under the door. She don’t ever turn off her light. Says she’ll die when it goes off.”

Katy reached the Tolchester apartment and knocked quickly. A rasping voice answered, “That you, Doctor Marbury?”

“Yes, it is.”

A big woman, the fat folds of her body overflowing a corroded and worn wheelchair in which she sat, pulled the door open slightly. She asked, “Who’s the man with you?”

“I’m Jim Cutter. I’m helping Doctor Marbury.”

“Oh,” she peered at him running her eyes up and down both of them.

“Mary Tolchester?” asked Katy.

She nodded. “All right. You two can come on in.” She moved her chair back. Cutter followed Katy and was met with a new smell of stale milk, sweat, and cigarettes. Mary’s hair was short and straight like a style of the Roaring Twenties. Her eyes were bright but her teeth dark with age and tobacco. She invited them graciously to the large sofa at the side of the room. She said, her voice hoarse from smoking, “Just move those newspapers. I don’t have the time to clean up everything these days.” Cutter smiled at her as he gathered the large pile of newsprint. He and Katy sat down and the woman wheeled her chair closer.

She opened a new pack of cigarettes, then lit one. She held the tobacco daintily in her forefingers, and puffed its smoke into the air above her. Mary spoke softly, her eyes constantly inspecting around the room, as if she were afraid someone would overhear them.

“I’m still not sure I can help you.”

“We’re interested in the Tolchester family,” said Katy. “We looked in genealogical files. That led us to you as a Tolchester descendant.”

Katy read from her notes “Mary Tolchester, born Staten Island, 1914.”

“That’s me,” she coughed.

“We’re especially tracking the Captain Tolchester who was in the China Trade. He was drowned in a shipwreck in 1840.”

“My, you are going way back.” Mary wheeled towards a tall sideboard, its center leg missing, and unpacked blue china cups and saucers. “He was a cousin. My part of the family never knew him. He commanded ships for a New York firm.”

She placed the cups on the top of the sideboard on a small tray. “A later Captain Tolchester lived right in this house.”

“We found this article on the later man,” Katy said and began reading:

“Staten Island, sister to Manhattan, has its share of mysterious stories of the sea. There is near it on the western side a shoal called the West Bank, the terrible executioner to many a fine ship caught in a storm entering or leaving the New York harbor.

“One of the strangest tales to come from this area concerns an old timer named Tolchester, nicknamed Captain, who spent his later days in a small house near the shoreline, close to the quarantine buildings. He claimed descent from clipper ship captains. He was known to row his boat out almost daily to the West Bank shoal and sit with a small net working the shallow water for shellfish. He’d often be seen plunging his net over and over even though he brought up nothing but mud and sand. It was thought by his neighbors he was perhaps a little mad and best left alone. He’d be at his spot in such a timely way the steamer captains coming into the upper bay would check their clocks at seeing him and give him a steam toot.

“Then one very freezing day in the winter of 1910 the old man was discovered dead at home dressed in his fishing clothes with his boots still on. He sat stiffly upright in a rocking chair in front of his cold fireplace. He had died a few hundred yards from his boat and the shoreline. Whether he was coming home from a trip or getting ready to go out no one was able to discover. His neighbors and many of the townspeople came forth at his funeral. Some of the steamer captains pitched in and set up his boat on his front lawn. That jolly boat, fresh with a new coat of white paint, still rested proud when last visited by this author. It was a fitting monument to this old gentleman.”

Mary had closed her eyes concentrating as Katy read. She said, “I was told as a child his rowboat was given to the family back before the Civil War. They brought the boat up here from New Jersey. Some said it was a part of the tea clipper that his ancestor Captain Tolchester wrecked offshore.”

“So the old man who went out in the boat was a relative of the Captain Tolchester we are asking about?”

“He claimed to be. However, he would have been very young when the clipper captain was drowned.”

Mary went on, “They are such good people here. Most of the staff of the historical society I knew. I think they are all dead now. I haven’t been in the library, must be five or more years. Certainly not since my legs gave out. Used to have tea and discuss books.”

She shrugged. “One time this room was full of visitors. We even had the Captain’s boat pulled up on the lawn with plants around it. Mother put them in. Friends would come and repair and paint the craft.”

She looked at Katy. “I been sick. I had to sell this house to pay medical bills. These days I just rent an apartment like everyone else. The landlord’s daughter, you met her at the door, she comes and gets rent once a week. She helps me with Social Security, bless her.”

“We didn’t see any boat outside,” said Cutter.

“I think last year the final piece of the old keel was destroyed by the landlord’s lawn mower.” She smiled. “Bless him, he wanted to pay me but of course I wouldn’t let him.”

Mary started back working on the cups. “I don’t entertain much anymore. I fixed us some hot tea though. I thought you might be thirsty in all this hot weather.”

She placed a silver tray in front of them and carefully put out some placemats and napkins with the china. When she wheeled into her small kitchen, Katy whispered to Cutter that the mats were easily worth a thousand dollars apiece as pre Civil War laces. “The china is rare Canton,” she added.

Mary came back. “I guess you two are all right to show you something.” Mary wheeled over to a large cardboard poster of the Statue of Liberty held against the dirty plaster wall by a string hooked over a nail. She reached up with a pole and disengaged the string. The poster rested on her pole as it came down and she put it on the floor. Revealed were three oil paintings, each about a foot square in size and protected by richly enameled black frames. All had smudges on their edges as though they had been in a smoky fire.

Katy could not help a quick sigh of surprise as she saw the artwork. She gripped Cutter’s hand. The paintings, all portraits, were mounted in a triangle arrangement, one at top and two side by side below. The top one was of a smiling young man in a high collar blue jacket. His right hand held a large curved knife across his chest like a narrow shield. The one below it to the left was of an elderly Oriental man sitting in a plush chair, the colors of the room and his robe bright reds and blues. At the bottom right of the ensemble the portrait was of a beautiful young Chinese woman with a green jewel hanging from her neck.