Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) Read online

“Did she have any proof of that?” Mike said.

  “Figure it out for yourself,” Jesse said. “A mob kills a man in broad daylight and highly trained big city police detectives can’t find anyone to arrest.”

  Mike thought for a moment. “He was killed twenty-seven years after the plane was stolen. You got to admit, Jesse, that’s a long time for anyone, even a man like Wall, to carry a grudge.”

  “Those Aviatrice people are vicious.” Jesse shrugged his shoulders. “One time when I was a kid, they came to our house. I still feel the evil of their invasion. The River Sunday police chief told my father that Aviatrice was within its rights to come to our house and ask us questions. That was typical of how we were treated in those days. One time our kitchen caught on fire and the fire department didn’t bother to come until that whole section of the house was lost. My parents knew we were on our own, that no one would stand up for the Lawsons.

  “I can still see those men sitting with my grandmother in the old parlor, which she called her front hall. I can smell their sweat drifting through the warm rooms. I imagined the stink remaining on every seat and place they touched, even for weeks afterward no matter how hard my mother would clean the chairs for me. My grandmother sat there not saying anything as they asked her over and over about where her husband was going with the plane. Then they got angry and went through the house, ransacking at will. They said they were looking for any notes or letters my grandfather might have left behind. They laughed at her as they tossed around the old family documents, ones signed by George Washington and Admiral Farragut. She never moved from her chair the whole time.

  “After they got through, they went outside to their car with my father. He tried to fight them and they beat him. My grandmother got up then and screamed at them that her son had been too little, only a baby, at the time of the theft, that he knew nothing. “Why don’t you bastards leave us alone?” she yelled. Her words echoed out over the isolated farm, the rustling cornfields. The men surrounded my father, talking to him in harsh voices. I had to watch from inside, through that screen door, my mother telling me that the men were threatening my father’s business if he did not tell them about Grandfather. I remember the slamming of the car doors, one after another, as the men finally left. I cried as my father walked slowly back to the house. The tires squealed as they drove away. My father got real quiet after that. He sat alone on the porch for hours and wouldn’t let my mother help him with the cuts on his face.

  “That day my grandmother took me upstairs to her bedroom where she had the huge bed that I used to climb on. She said, ‘Your father’s doing all he can do. That's all we can expect of a person. You watch and wait ‘cause your turn will come and you’ll make me proud of you too.’

  “After my father was killed, the visits stopped. My grandmother had died the year before and my mother said no one was left to push around.”

  “Did your grandmother ever talk about Captain Lawson’s flight?” asked Mike.

  Jesse answered, “My grandmother just said that her husband played hell with the devil one time too many and got himself caught. That’s the only thing I remember her saying. I never figured out what she meant. “

  “Strange that the Aviatrice people still came around after the Navy recorded that the plane went down at sea,” said Mike.

  “They might have thought that some of the stuff Grandfather took was hidden around the farm,” said Jesse. “It wasn’t, but no one could ever convince them.”

  Mike looked at Jesse and said, “You think that finding the seaplane wreck will get Aviatrice off your back once and for all. You think it will give you answers about the mystery of your father’s death?”

  Jesse nodded and stood up. “Maybe. Anyway, I’m willing to spend all this money to try,” he said. He was taller than Mike. “Come on, Mike, I want to show you something.”

  Outside, they climbed into Jesse’s Mercedes. Jesse held the back door open while the Chesapeake jumped in, throwing dust all over the leather seat.

  “We’re not going towards River Sunday,” Jesse said as they pulled out. “I want you to see Captain Lawson’s home.”

  Mike liked to drive fast but he was no match for Jesse. “You have a family, Mike?” Jesse calmly asked as the car lurched to avoid a slow pickup truck. Then Jesse speeded up.

  “No,” answered Mike, holding the door handle tightly. “My father died a few years ago. My mom was killed in an airplane crash. I live at my father’s house outside Wilmington.”

  “That’s tough losing your mother,” observed Jesse.

  “I never knew her,” said Mike. “She died when I was only a year old. My father met her when he was still flying. He was a test pilot after the War. She was a lot younger than him. They were both pilots and I guess that was one reason why they were together.”

  Mike’s mind went back to a small gilt frame on a mantel at his Wilmington home, a picture of a smiling young woman standing next to his father and holding him, a baby, in her arms.

  “They went on a trip to the Adirondacks,” Mike continued. “They were in a float plane and something went wrong as they set down in a lake. She was crushed in the wreckage. My father had to get help. By the time the rescue team got back, she was dead.”

  “Must have been pretty rough on your old man,” said Jesse.

  “Not him. He was a Navy hero,” said Mike. “He told me one time that when trouble comes, you have to keep on flying. Something he learned when his buddies got killed during the War. He was like that. Nothing stopped him. He just kept on going with his life. He never talked about her again.”

  The road was narrow and, with several cars ahead of him and no way to pass, Jesse had to slow down. They drove in silence for a few minutes, gravel clattering against the metal fenders. Behind them a rooster tail of dust rose into the sky. Then Jesse slowed again as they approached a property sign. Mike read on the sign the words, “Lawson’s Post, 1690.”

  They turned into the lane and rode along a stretch of ancient gnarled trees.

  Jesse said, “The Lawsons started out growing tobacco. They had a store here to buy animal pelts from the Nanticoke natives who inhabited this area. That's how far back we go in this place.”

  Part way up the lane, they came to a closed white gate. Jesse pressed a button on his dashboard and the gate swung open. They drove ahead. Then, nestled among large boxwoods, Mike saw a great brick house with tall chimneys. They parked the car behind a large tired Jeep that had its canvas top removed.

  Mike followed Jesse around the side of the building. A quiet, beautiful woman, tall with dark hair and bright eyes, was working among a snug plot of bright flowers sheltered among the boxwoods. Two gardeners labored beside her. She looked up with a smile and Jesse introduced her as his wife.

  “I’m sorry you won’t be able to meet our children,” she said, in a quiet and welcoming voice. “They are off at camp.”

  As Jesse and Mike walked towards the river which was a quarter mile below the mansion, Jesse continued to talk. “I don’t keep the kids around here any more than I have to. I try to spare them the hatred. I just wanted you to see this so you would understand why this search is so important to me.”

  He stopped and sat on a fallen tree at the side of the path. Mike sat down beside him.

  “This is the road the Lawson tobacco went down when it was loaded on the English trading ships,” said Jesse.

  He went on, “Mike, my family is important to me. Lawson used to be a good name around here.”

  “The Navy put your grandmother through a hearing. Who was her lawyer?” Mike asked.

  “I only met him once,” Jesse said. “His name was Thomas Drexel. It was in 1972, at my grandmother’s funeral. Big man with a fat stomach that his suit wouldn’t hide. Sometimes you could see the skin between the buttons of his shirt. I went up to him, standing up straight, all ten years of me in my best church clothes and asked him why my grandmother was accused.

  “‘Sure, sonny,’ he answere
d me, ‘you want to read up on the case. I sure do understand how important that is to you, especially a youngster like you who's just lost his grandmother.”

  “The lawyer went on, ‘I really want to help you, young Lawson, same as I tried so hard to help your grandmother, and your mommy never understood that. I got your grandmother out of jail. I got her home. I got that much done.”

  “‘I have some files from the hearing,’ Drexel said, ‘that might inform you how tough it was. No, you just write me a letter or call me up when you get around to it and I’ll send them to you.”

  “Mike, I wrote letters to Drexel for years. I would change the words each time until the letters finally begged for attention, with no pride at all. I never got an answer from him. My mother didn’t like him, always badmouthed him, and I guess he was afraid she’d start up on him again, maybe try to get back some of the money we paid him. Anyway, finally, I swore I’d never beg him again. Maybe, if it comes from a different person, someone out of the family, he’ll tell you something.”

  Jesse looked over at Mike, shifting his body on the tree trunk. “Your father was a war hero. What do you think about working for the grandson of a traitor?”

  “Jesse, you and I both know I haven’t got any choice. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be here. I will say that being the son of a hero has its bad side too. “

  “Why?” asked Jesse.

  “It’s like you always have to be brave,” said Mike.

  Jesse didn’t speak for a while. He poked at the ground with a stick. Then he said. “My mother married Dad right in the middle of all the troubles. She stayed around after my daddy was killed. Nothing was easy in those days. I went to the regular schools and the kids were tough on me. In time I made friends. My mother fought a lot of battles for me. She got worn down. The day of my graduation from high school, she told me she was done here. She said Loretta Lawson wasn’t going to fight her husband’s war anymore.”

  He continued. “A person has a right to have his name cleared if he is innocent. My mother left the Eastern Shore because of the hatred. Marrying into the Lawson family gave her a right to share the Lawson shame, to have the townspeople thinking she was more than a little bit, as they said, “ignorant”, joining up willingly with the Lawsons.

  “She told me that she was still a young enough woman, she had met somebody, and she was going to have a new life. She moved away, runs a garden store over on the Western Shore. “

  “You stayed here,” said Mike.

  Jesse said, “I guess I got that from my grandmother. I don’t like to back down. My father had been working other people’s harvests before he went off to the war. Farmers call it custom harvesting. I took over the business and built it. I was lucky.”

  Jesse laughed. “My grandmother named me Jesse James Lawson. She thought if I was named after a train robber, it would make me strong enough.”

  “Maybe she was right,” said Mike.

  As he drove back to Wilmington, Mike felt he could understand where Jesse was coming from. He realized that he did know something about hate, how children suffer for the deeds of their parents.

  Robin had told him about hate. She had been brought up in Canada. Her father left the United States because of the Vietnam War. When he had been a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he had refused to report to the draft. Instead he had fled to Canada and had stayed there during the war. That’s where he had met and married her mother. She’d taken a lot of criticism trying to defend her father. Some people were still vicious about his choices.

  He looked ahead at the highway in the night. Robin’s father and Jesse’s grandfather had one characteristic different from his own father. Robin and Jesse didn’t seem to want to be like them. On the other hand, he did want to be like his father, or at least, as Robin had often reminded him, he wanted respect from him, the worst kind of respect because it was from a person who was no longer alive to give it to him.

  Chapter Three

  8 AM, June 30

  Wilmington, Delaware

  As Mike arrived the next morning at the Museum, Jeremy drove in, sliding to a stop, dust flying. Mike smiled as he saw again the main description of Jeremy’s attitude toward living, that being that everything had to be done at the same speed, full ahead.

  “Wait’ll you hear what I found out,” Jeremy said, rushing up to Mike.

  “Let’s go to my office,” Mike said.

  They entered through the hanger where work was continuing on the Thunderbolt restoration. The Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp radial engine had been hoisted by chain and tall aluminum ladders were set up on each side of it. The white haired mechanic was on one of the ladders, his head and torso hidden behind some of the big cylinders as he tried to disassemble what was left of the fuel system. His left leg hung loosely as he maintained a precarious balance and his once white overalls were stained by dripping ocean water mixed with ancient grease and oil freed from the old cylinders.

  “Find any surprises?” asked Mike.

  “Caught a few fish but they weren’t keepers,” they heard him reply, his voice muffled by the cylinders.

  Inside, Mike sat down at his desk and quickly looked over his mail. Jeremy, meanwhile, walked back and forth.

  “What did you get out of Jesse Lawson?” he finally asked.

  Mike looked up from a handful of correspondence, and said, “The Lawsons are no friends of Aviatrice, that’s for sure. First of all, Jesse doesn’t believe all the facts about his grandfather. On top of that, his father was killed in Baltimore in 1973 and his mother is convinced Aviatrice might have had something to do with the death.”

  “Aviatrice people killed the man’s father?” Jeremy said, surprise in his voice.

  Mike said, “Jesse told me that the company’s investigators have been roughing up his family for years, looking for information about the lost airplane.”

  Jeremy’s mouth hung open.

  “I know,” said Mike. “It’s hard to believe this kind of thing about a big company like Aviatrice.”

  “We going to be able to work with this guy?” asked Jeremy.

  “I think so,” said Mike. “From what I could tell, he doesn’t want to put us out of business. He just needs to find out about his grandfather. A lot will be up to the attitude of Aviatrice.”

  Jeremy said slowly as he thought, “My friend Jenni works at Aviatrice headquarters. She could check around in the files there, see what turns up.”

  Mike shook his head. “I don’t know if I want to get anyone but us involved. This whole thing is going to take some finesse. What did you find out in Washington?”

  “Not much of a bibliography on the case,” Jeremy answered. “The books that are written are propaganda types, without much fact. No official hearing was held on the Captain. The Navy figured he was dead, that’s all. Maybe they were ashamed of him. I don’t know. Anyway, he was given a dishonorable discharge, posthumously. The reason was, and I quote,” Jeremy said, reading from his notes, “suspected treason based on theft of a classified seaplane and materials thereof, destruction of a military laboratory, and other circumstantial evidence.” As far as the Captain’s wife, she was put through a Navy hearing, but she got off.”

  “Historians haven’t been interested in a traitor, I guess, as long as they have heroes to write about first,” said Mike.

  “Check this out,” said Jesse. “Someone had ransacked through the files. Reference items that were in the index were gone, disappeared. All the court hearing materials on the wife were gone, with only a few notes remaining.”

  “Could you tell if this happened recently?” Mike said.

  Jeremy shook his head. “For this section of the library, I didn’t even have to sign in. The files could have been tampered with anytime over the last ten or twenty years and no records would be kept. The library isn’t set up to guard its stuff. Research is done on the honor system.”

  Mike nodded. Jeremy continued, “I had to look in different places. I
went for the base records, day reports, warehouses, supply records.”

  “How about a description of the plane?” said Mike.

  Jesse said, “A Catalina seaplane, one of the later boats, with landing gear.”

  Mike observed, “An amphibian.”

  “Those planes need a good size crew,” said Jeremy.

  “Jesse told me it was normally a seven man crew, but the guy took off alone,” said Mike. “Pilot, copilot, navigator, engineer, radioman, gunner, bombardier.”

  Jeremy went on, “She was in the water, being prepared for a test flight later that week.”

  “Fueled up?” asked Mike.

  “Mineral oil,” said Jeremy.

  “Mineral oil instead of aviation gas?” asked Mike.

  “Some kind of special power plant,” said Jeremy. “The records said ‘experimental.’ One other thing that I found strange. Records were in the files from the sailors who serviced the craft moored in the harbor. Kind of like gasoline receipts for fueling. I went through all different kinds of aircraft, other seaplanes, some patrol craft, even a submarine, all of which had supply records. Finally I hit paydirt. I found a notation in one of the files that this seaplane, I knew it was our plane by the serial numbers, was fully armed by the sailors for a patrol mission. This was done just before it was stolen, like a day or so. Yet every other source including all the newspaper articles consistently stated that the seaplane was unarmed.”

  “Patrol against what?” said Mike. “The war was over.”

  He paused then suggested, “Maybe testing? She was experimental. Wonder how we could find out for sure?”

  “Find someone who was there at the time?” said Jeremy.

  “I’ll ask Tim about it,” said Mike, thinking of his old friend at Aviatrice, although he suspected the old military man by nature wouldn’t tell any secrets of his company. “See if he ever heard that she had munitions on her.”

  “It doesn’t fit with the idea of a traitor giving away secrets,” said Jesse. “Why would he arm the ship if he’s flying off to join his buddies?”