Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) (16 page)

Robin’s father had told her of a place, an old three story brick row house. Some of the Americans in Nova Scotia were servicemen as her father was. These fugitives were from the Philadelphia area, absent without leave from Fort Dix, in nearby New Jersey. The house had been a safe hideout where they had been helped to escape to Canada. Oddly, long before the days of the Vietnam War, her father said that the house, owned by the same family for over two hundred years, had been used during another turbulent time to help escaping slaves in the Underground Railroad.

The part of Philadelphia to which Robin had directed their travel for the last two hours was the most run down they had yet visited. The streets were worse, more cluttered with wrecked cars and garbage, than the avenues in the neighborhood where Hiram and his former nephew and the nephew's girlfriend rented their squalid apartment.

Around them, though, were the summer signs of inner city life. Children played in the streets and men and women sat in doorways, watching the children. Prostitutes and dealers worked the doorways and some of them called to him, or whistled at Robin. She, in turn, whistled back. Police and ambulance sirens bleated by from time to time, causing the two of them to hide by staring into store windows until the cars passed by. The heat was exhausting, pouring up from the sidewalk as they trudged on.

They reached a section of the city where renovation had taken place. The street was cleaner and the parked cars were of better quality.

“This is the place,” she said, looking up at a house number. The building, like the ones on both sides of it, had been recently rebuilt, with a wooden door at the top of new concrete steps. The first story windows were covered with ancient iron bars, painted with fresh black paint. Robin led him up the steps as they squeezed by two young black girls sitting and playing pick up sticks. The children watched as Robin pressed the doorbell button. Mike heard the buzzer echo inside the house.

 Just then a shining blue car, a Lexus, pulled up and parked at the curb. A tall white woman in business suit and carrying a polished leather briefcase got out and approached them. She stood below them on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, her neck back, looking up to them.

“What do you want?” she asked in a commanding tone.

“Are you Janet Snow?” Robin said.

“Yes.”

“We’re from Mr. Johnson,” Robin said.

Robin had told Mike those words were the old password used by the soldiers seeking refuge.

The woman stared at Robin for a moment, then started up the steps. She stopped halfway up and again her eyes moved over Robin. Mike thought she might be trying to see if Robin had a gun. Mike realized that she was an elderly woman even though she appeared at first glance to be in her forties.

Robin said, “We’re not police.”

In the momentary silence, the little girls smiled at Mike and he winked back. Then the woman moved again, squeezing by all of them as she inserted her key in the door. As she moved by him, Mike smelled a strong flowery perfume, perhaps a magnolia scent. The door creaked back, showing a large hallway in the dimness.

The woman motioned them inside and to a parlor on the right side of the entry. The room had stuffed furniture and was lit with yellow light by a small lamp to the side of the room. It was tidy and smelled of strong soap. At the end of the room over a fireplace was a great painting of a clipper ship sinking in a wild storm, men falling out of the wreck, full white sails tattered in the hurricane and darkness.

Robin said, “My father told me about that painting. He said I could get help from you.”

Mike tensed, ready to go back out the door with Robin, if the woman went for her telephone.

“What did your father do?” she finally asked, staring at Robin.

“He left the United States because of Vietnam.”

“If I did know what you are talking about, what do you want from me?”

“The police are looking for us for something we didn’t do. We need a car to get out of the city.”

“That’s a lot you want. How do I know you’re not here to rob me? Maybe I should just turn you in.”

“I was told you were a good lawyer. You should know if we are telling the truth. Otherwise, we’ll leave right away,” said Robin.

The woman stared for a few moments. Then she said, “No, sit down.”

The three of them sat facing each other in the overstuffed chairs. As they did, the woman conducted another visual inspection of Robin, then of Mike, then spoke.

“You don’t have much time, I suppose,” she said. “You’re being sought everywhere.”

Robin nodded.

She said, “I thought all of this was finished.” She smiled as if she were laughing at a joke no one else could understand.

“I have an old car,” she said, “that was left here a long time ago by someone much in the same position as you two. You can take the car. As far as I’m concerned, you’re stealing it, but I won’t report the car gone unless the police come here. I don’t want to know any more and I’m not saying any more.”

She stood up. “Come with me quickly.”

As she guided them through the big house to the back door, she continued, “A lot of memories come back when I think about this old car.”

The woman spoke like she was really talking to someone else in the room. Even when she looked at either of them, her eyes were looking restlessly beyond or over them, at someone else, as if she couldn’t quite make him out in the shadows.

“The boy who left the car said to give it to someone who needed it,” she said. Robin watched as she loosened her hair and pulled it down, idly making it into a long ponytail, the hair flecked with white and gray among the original brown.

“He was shot crossing the border.” Then her face brightened. “I’m glad, as you say, your father made it safely. I never knew.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Robin.

“Vietnam,” she muttered, closing her eyes. She nodded to herself, slightly moving her body as if in time to an old beat. Then she reached the back door and opened it.

Outside, the night was black with a small amount of starlight. Snow turned on a small light which provided some illumination in the darkness. Around a small garden Mike could see a tall fence that was totally covered with vines. At the bottom of the garden was a small barn, built at one time probably just big enough to hold a carriage and two horses and decorated with Victorian woodwork, like cake icing, that descended from the eaves.

They reached the barn and Mike pulled at an entry door at the top of a wooden step. Rusty hinges creaked.

“That door hasn’t been opened for months,” Snow said, standing far behind them in the lighted doorway, her eyes looking around at the fence.

Mike pulled again and the door opened fully. Inside they saw tail lights pointed at them, glinting, glassy, round and familiar.

“It’s a Volkswagen,” said Mike. He pushed aside some cardboard boxes stored on the fenders and climbed along the wall behind the car, then opening the car door to enter the driver’s seat. Inside the car, the key was in the ignition. He turned the key but nothing happened.

“Let me look,” he said and climbed out. He pulled boxes away from the engine door and opened it to see the engine. Several boxes of books shifted to the floor with a crashing noise as they fell. In the light that trickled into the garage from where Snow kept the back door open, Mike could see that the carburetor was still intact.

He entered the car again and lifted the back seat cushion. He grinned as he saw that one of the battery cables had been disconnected, and, after scraping the contact surfaces with the edge of the ignition key, he reattached the cable.

“Maybe she’ll go now,” he said, climbing back into the driver’s seat.

He turned the key again. This time, the car coughed and rattled to life, then ran very rough. The room filled with white smoke.

“Valves are way out of adjustment,” said Mike. “Let’s get the alley door open.”

Robin managed to lift the sliding door of the small building and as she did the air began to clean.

She climbed into the passenger side of the car. “Let’s hope that battery keeps charging as we drive,” she said.

“Let’s hope the battery doesn’t fail completely,” Mike said as he turned on its headlights and eased the car forward out of the barn. More boxes tumbled off the roof of the car. Out in the light they could see the colorful flowers painted all over the hood in front of them. The car wobbled as it moved forward.

“Tires are full but they are in bad shape. So’s the steering,” said Mike.

Robin got out and closed the garage door. The back door of the woman’s house closed and except for the weak lights of the old car, they were in darkness. Entering the car again, she said, “We’ll look like flower children or some kind of modern rockers.”

“You think this car will fit your father’s getaway rules?” said Mike.

“No question about it.”

“We’re out of here,” said Mike, as he pulled out of the alley into the main thoroughfare and entered the line of traffic.

The car tended to pull first one way and then the other, but Mike found a way to compensate. He thought that he could maintain a speed of about fifty miles per hour. By now, they had pulled onto an expressway. As they went along, far over in the right lane, Mike began to relax for the first time since they left Becca’s hospital.

They had been driving without talking when Mike asked her, “Why did you go away?”

She looked at him with a smile and said, “I wrote a letter and explained to you when I left.”

“That letter was the shortest letter I’ve ever seen. I’d like to frame it for the record book. ‘Hi, I’m leaving, love to all, Robin.’”

“I thought I was leaving for good.”

“I was worried about you,” said Mike.

“I met up with a team out West and we went around to a few events. I couldn’t get with it, I guess. Pretty soon, I ended up in a little beach house on a California beach. I looked at the ocean all day and waited tables for rent. That’s when I finally began to figure it out.”

“What did you figure?”

“The problem was bigger than you or me. It had to do with belonging somewhere. All my life I haven’t belonged.” She pulled her bare feet up on the small Volkswagen seat.

“You belonged at the Museum.”

“No, no, I didn’t,” she said. “Although, when your father hired me, I thought I had come home. I thought I had finally found the perfect job.”

“What happened?”

“You happened. The trouble was, you were like one of those clouds my plane flies through at ten thousand feet. Just a wisp. Nothing solid. As I got to know you, I found out that you were fighting your past and trying to be something you weren’t. As hard as you worked, you never felt you had accomplished anything. I sometimes thought you were trying to win the same medal your father won, and you didn’t know how to go about that so you would succeed.”

“So you felt that being with me was a bad thing, not getting you anywhere,” said Mike.

“No. You are my friend. I just had a problem finding a way to be with you, to live with your disappointment.”

Mike didn’t speak.

“My father was a lot like you, Mike. I remembered not being part of the country where I was brought up, then not being part of the United States when my father decided we should return. Then, when I wanted to fly, my father couldn’t understand. At one time I guess I mentioned going for aviation training in the Air Force. He got the idea that my flying would become military. He could not face up to his own past, I guess.”

“You came back,” said Mike.

“I left my own family years ago. I couldn’t leave my second family,” she said.

She smiled, “I’m going to see it through this time, Mike. Don’t worry about me.”

Mike said, “I’m just glad you’re here, any way you want to be.”

She fiddled with the old radio. “Should we go back to River Sunday?”

“No,” Mike said, firmly. “I want to go see Jesse Lawson’s mother.”

“What can she tell us?”

Mike explained, “You remember what Rebecca said, that Jesse’s grandmother knew what was going on all the time. I’m hoping that the grandmother told Jesse’s mother something, anything, before she died.”

“OK.”

“She’s the last chance we have,” Mike said. “Jesse told me how to find her garden shop. I didn’t think I would need to go there. Now, with all that’s happened, I do.”

“We’ll have to be careful on the highway.”

“I figure we drive there tonight,” said Mike. “Then we’ll hide and wait for her. We’ll try to see her early in the morning.”

They both listened to the buzzing of the Volkswagen, its engine skipping a beat every minute or so, as the old valves struggled to keep in time.

Robin said, “Do you remember the time your father told us about his family flying to Brazil on the big German boat, the Dornier Do.X, the one with twelve 500 horsepower engines on top of the wing?”

Mike grinned. “A magnificent flying boat. The Germans only built three of them. Too expensive. More engines than even the B-36 bomber that the United States flew in the 1950’s. Those Dorniers were bolted together more with trust and luck than knowledge.”

She said, “The seaplane had engines up on metal struts above the great wing surface. The cabin hung below the wing, holding a few brave passengers in an Art Deco interior, cane seats and all. In the old pictures of her in flight, you can see the crew swarming over those engines like ants.”

He said, “Think of that monster coming in to the Amazon River, the pilot landing among the natives who would paddle around the machine with amazement on their faces, naked and sitting in primitive dugout canoes.”

Robin said, “I used to watch you and your father look at the old magazines together.”

Mike said, “Jeremy has indexed them for our library. The magazines were great for stories of adventures in experimental aircraft, and, of course, the scientific articles, or what the engineers of the time called science.”

“I would have loved to fly that Dornier,” said Robin, still moving the radio dial.

Mike said, “My father was fun to be with sometimes. I guess I could never decide whether to love him or fear him.”