Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  He waved goodbye as he went down the condo front steps, knowing he’d hear more from her before he convinced her to embrace the Walker story. He’d listen, too, even if he didn’t want to. She was probably worried that he or she might get physically hurt. Both of them knew that violence erupted quickly in the summer heat in this area of the nation, and that their wooden newspaper building was a fairly prominent target for some emotional arsonist.

  He liked to talk to Annie. She was well educated and was also the only one in River Sunday who had ever read any of Harry’s old feature stories that he wrote when he worked at the New York papers. When she was a journalism student, she wrote a paper on his award winning story about New York City race problems. She once told him that the day he had first walked into the office of the Sentinel, she didn’t know whether to ask for an assignment or his autograph.

  She was also right about building up readership for the paper, not alienating readers. They had worked hard on the power boat story. They were finishing copy for the upcoming regatta weekend, the biggest event in the River Sunday year. This issue was the most researched copy that had ever come out in the local paper. Both of them had spent hours in the library digging out old stories of former champions, especially those about the town hero, Homer Kirby, one of the top finishers in the national ranks for years and a native son before his death in a race. They had also finished getting ads for the regatta issue, a task that Harry turned out to be very good at doing. She kidded him that he could get an ad by standing in front of the buyer and not saying anything and scaring the advertiser to death with Harry’s tough man stare and big muscles, then using his quick smile to get the order.

  He knew that she had a long relationship with a reporter in Baltimore and that when she broke it off, she came to River Sunday. She reminded Harry of Jess, who, like Annie, was in the business and a top reporter. He had loved Jess but lost her when she was killed getting a report on the Columbian drug trade. After that, Harry stayed drunk for a month. Her death almost destroyed him. After Jess, Harry swore he’d never get involved with anyone that deeply again and so far he had stuck to it.

  He parked the van at the office and stood for a few minutes looking out from the front door, trying to catch the first glimpse of the craft on the horizon. The doorway, raised on brick steps above the street, was like a listening post with its wide screen view of the street and through the buildings across from him, the harbor water with its boats. It was a spot from which he, like a century of editors before him, could glimpse and spy on the life of the town.

  Around him the town was in the racing spirit and the streets were filled with tourists and powerboat fans. They would expect an issue full of racing statistics, race driver backgrounds, history and pictures of past races. He and Annie had assembled photographs of the drivers and their brightly decorated boats, especially those in the very popular and high speed inboard racing class known as super stock, where large automobile V8’s sat up high, mounted on the polished decks of tiny eighteen foot hulls, the driver sitting in front of the roaring power, helmet forward, his body determined and holding on by luck and skill.

  Across the street, which was called Strand Street from some ancient colonial’s love of the old London street of that same name, and to his left, was the Kirby Marina, the wealthiest and biggest enterprise in River Sunday, and beyond it, Kirby Racing, the famous powerboat race shop. Year after year, the Kirby enterprises were the prime sponsors of the regatta. The dowager owner, the white haired and wheelchair bound Missus Kirby, dressed in black out of respect for her long dead race driver husband, Homer, rolled around town on her captive wheels as though she were sitting on a throne.

  One of the stranger sights in River Sunday was seeing Sheriff Good or Cheeks accompanying her, pushing her wheelchair, his size and tough reputation seemingly out of proportion to this nursing task. When Harry had asked Annie about the nursing duties of the sheriff, she replied with a wink that Cheeks had started as a boat mechanic for the Kirbys and that the old lady had spent a lot of money getting him elected.

  To the right, and about three blocks away, was the intersection and left turn to the suburb of Mulberry, a village formerly populated almost completely by black families, but now being settled by wealthy outsiders who bought expensive condominiums recently built along its pretty shoreline. On the newspaper side of the street to the right stretched a busy main street of modern stores. Beyond were churches and then the Courthouse with its statues and overgrown boxwood. To his left was the old bank, which advertised itself as the only survivor of the town’s fire thirty years ago. Further on was the Chesapeake Hotel with its wide porch and dark green rocking chairs, filled with racing fans, who came early to witness the boat tryouts and meet the drivers.

  Fully in view in front of him but distant by about a mile of open water, and jutting up from the middle of the harbor was the slave monument, a pile of huge building blocks that had been constructed following the Civil War. The slave monument had been rededicated recently as a memorial to the slaves contribution to the town and included a plaque with the names of all the former slaves who could be traced from the earliest days of River Sunday. This monument was of much historical interest and visitors from as far away as London, Paris and even Japan had been known to come to see it.

  Harry could see the edge of the harbor, darkening and shadow filled in the fading sunlight, and he could smell, or thought he could, even a half mile away, the twilight aroma of cooling creosote on the tall wooden pilings. He could also see a tall, four story, and at least three hundred foot long, abandoned warehouse. This depressed building, deserted for thirty years and dwarfing the cottages nestled around it in its neighborhood, was all that was left of the old Terment cannery system that once controlled packing of vegetables and seafood on the Eastern Shore. The building had entry doors, one marked in faint letters, “colored workers”, and the other with the words in heavier paint, “main office”. Both were boarded up tight. Then, above the first floor was the company name, Terment, spread wide and high, the painted letters fading.

  The twilight air even with the cooling effect of a gentle onshore breeze was still hot. The creosote smell mingled with that of seaweed, and was a strange concoction and not unpleasant. Every harbor Harry had visited around the world had its own welcoming smell. This one was no different. It was more pungent than most, a cleaner smell yet filled with some of the same rot that the others had, the decay of dead fish and stagnant shallow water.

  Then he saw it, a raked line of black moving behind the tall pines far out over the harbor and at the end of the distant point of land and trees, then breaking clear of the trees and now outstanding against the orange and red evening horizon as it rounded the point over the sandbar, and entered the harbor proper. That far away from where Harry stood, the darker Chesapeake Bay water seemed to mix with lighter water of the harbor. He could not see the figures, the sheriff and the operator, on the deck of the barge, but he knew they were there. He could visualize the sheriff looking impatiently ahead and the slender wizened captain, clinging to his small seat in the little wheelhouse, and doggedly working the wheel to keep the bow headed against that sandbar’s cross current. At the jutting land, the point that framed the harbor entrance, the harbor water mixed with the bay water creating a rip current that could be difficult to navigate especially with a clumsy and top-heavy boat like that barge. He watched but, except for an occasional dip of the crane boom as the barge hit a wave, all Harry could see was the steady onward inching across the horizon. Then, Harry realized that the barge was through the rip and coming into the harbor, that it had turned towards him.

  The barge tied up at the pilings. Harry could now reflect that he had never seen such an ugly craft, its green and yellow paint precluding any attempt at design, only showing an unfortunate lack of taste.

  A truck roared by his office, its dual rear tires reverberating over the potholes of broken blacktop and cobblestones. On its door was the sign, Kir
by Racing, River Sunday, Maryland. The driver slowed, stopped with a slight skid at the intersection for Mulberry, then with a crunch of gears, jerked forward toward the barge.

  Other people had somehow heard the news of the find. Harry could see a crowd gathering, many of them children. Some of their parents too, most of them women but some men, eased into the street from their weathered and unpainted cottages and small houses to look.

  The driver of the truck pulled to the edge of the barge, shut off his engine and jumped down, the truck’s worn springs lurching slightly. Seeing the man’s swaggering walk, Harry was sure it was Catch Kirby, manager of Kirby Racing, and the town’s expert on racing boats. Annie had interviewed him for the racing article, her only comment being that he was one of the most unpleasant and self-important people in River Sunday. Catch was known for being drunk when he wasn’t working on boats. She was, however, impressed with Catch’s knowledge of regatta history and the boats and their drivers. The regatta’s name had been changed a few years ago to honor Catch’s father, Homer, who had been one of the town’s greatest drivers until his death in a race a few years ago.

  The crane lifted the old raceboat hulk up to a height of about twenty feet. The sheriff indicated to the crane operator that it was time to bring the boat out over the truck. The boat swung out precisely over the truck and was lowered. When it was made secure, Catch climbed back into his truck with the sheriff, and the truck began to lumber towards the town center again.

  The truck, now lower on its springs with the weight of the waterlogged hulk, went by Reverend Jefferson Ellingham’s Third Baptist church. Harry noticed parishioners coming outside from that church and following the truck. The area there, where the church had usually appeared as a closed up building on a Wednesday night like this one, was suddenly alive with black men and women and children, and plenty of them. Harry thought that the church might be having a special meeting and was surprised that no notification had come to him at the newspaper. Many parishioners milled at the edge of the road. Harry stepped forward his hand on his camera sure that some of the crowd might surge into the street and actually hold up the progress of the sheriff. The truck stopped for the traffic light at the intersection with River Sunday’s main street, and in the time it took for the light to change, more people came towards it. Children too were standing with the adults, and he saw the old man Harry knew to be Pastor Allingham who appeared standing beside the intersection surrounded by several larger black men. Active conversation was going on among them as Harry watched, and the old preacher, the white hair on his head standing out, was pointing to the boat on the back of the truck. Harry used the telephoto lens on his camera to catch the shot as Catch pulled away into the main street.

  Now up on Strand Street the truck slowed down as it mixed with other cars in the evening traffic. It pulled to the curb in front of the courthouse entry walk, part of the stake truck bed rubbing against the ancient overgrown boxwoods.

  Sheriff Good got out and walked quickly inside the Courthouse. In a few moments he came back with two town officials trailing him. One Harry recognized as his informant, the lanky deputy Marty Sol, and the other, a local politician, a middle-aged white man with quick eyes nicknamed Senator. Senator was called just that, Senator, as if the article “the” had somehow been erased over the years of his name being used. The three men stood at the curb and looked at the boat, their arms crossed up on their chests. Around them the crowd milled, eyes wide and fingers pointing at the wreck. Then they parted and the sheriff returned to the truck as Catch got underway again.

  The story of the finding of the Black Duck had apparently spread also to the Chesapeake Hotel and the sighting of a racing boat, even one as decrepit at this one roped up on the back of a stake truck, was exciting for the tourists. Harry could see tourists coming into the street already, walking along side, mixing with the black parishioners, as the truck moved slowly in the evening traffic.

  The truck approached the New Jesus Temple, captained by Reverend Blue. This was a well painted white building with a small modern steeple set back up on the only hill in town. As the procession of the truck carrying the boat went by, church members from the Temple in far greater number than their neighbors in the Third Baptist ran down the hill to gather almost in a formation at the edge of the street. People were coming around the sides of the church from the parking behind as though they were being summoned. Blue stood in front of the street formation waving a small cross as though he were blessing each person against evil. The cross had tiny light bulbs on it which were wired to a battery at the base and showed red and white in alternating colors and blinking routines. The preacher was a strong looking man with short hair, dressed in a black suit which was all Harry had ever seen him wear. Singing voices from the Temple came over the street, loud from amplifiers and speakers, and mixed with the sound of the truck and several cars. Harry saw a young very fat woman leading a small choir, the jounce of her overweight body giving a beat to the song, the continuously repeated lyrics of which drifted over to Harry.

  Father meets us on the river

  Mother meets us on the river

  Our children meet us on the river

  To chase the evil away.

  Blue walked down almost to the side of the truck and jerked up and down his colorful cross near the boat. He kept moving the little crucifix even after the boat had passed and gone further down the street. Finally he stopped and signaled to his followers to go back to the church.

  Catch, however, drove on and after about two more blocks, Harry saw the red tail lights of the truck signal a turn to the right. Harry crossed the street from his office and walked among the onlookers to follow the truck. Catch entered a small road between two stores leading to his shop. The shop was a cinder block, white paint still showing above the bottom half of its front wall which was encrusted with years of black oil and grease. Along the outside were wooden crates overflowing with engine and boat parts. Interspersed with high grass and ragged weeds, were broken pistons, their connecting rods still attached, or old camshafts, scored with carbon on their once shining lobes. Most impressive, though, were the three racing hulls resting in rusted trailers most of them with flat tires. One hull was stripped of great sections of its fiberglass, a piece of canvas thrown over the now bare frames and partly blown back by storm winds. The hull was full of rainwater, the engine sitting in the grass below the hull, oil leaking from a crack in its side. Another boat, charred from a fire down to its waterline, still retained its engine and its driver’s seat, both items in disrepair, and rusting. The third, almost complete, with the calligraphic letters of its name, Miss River Sunday Three, peeking from below its canvas cover, showed its flaw as a great crack where a part of the drive system had apparently broken loose and rent its way through the hull. This was the last boat which Homer Kirby raced, the one in which he had been killed.

  Beside Harry, tourists were crowding ahead trying to see the Black Duck wreck. Harry walked through them toward the truck, passing by the still glossy but ruined machines, his fingers moving along the chines and sheers of Miss River Sunday Three. He had been here before on interviews with Annie and he could not walk by these machines without sensing their grandeur, their power. He could almost hear, against the distant noises of the street excitement and the relative silence of the shop yard, the once mighty roar of the open exhaust tubes that now stuck up, powerless in the air, through holes in stained canvas strapped with rusty metal strips to the engine base.

  A wide garage door in the wall of the shop had been raised. The truck had been turned around, its platform and tailgate backed several feet inside the doorway of the shop so that the old hulk could be unloaded. Catch was inside, the sheriff beside him, both of them standing in the dim light, fastening a ceiling crane to the wreck. A wheeled carriage was directly behind the truck bed and under the crane.

  Catch wiped his hands on a cloth. He was a short man, his stomach showing below his oil stained tee shirt, his tr
ousers sagging around a full stomach, his eyes small and sharp. The hulk itself was up on the truck. Harry could see it closely for the first time. He noticed that a small portion of the front deck was missing or ripped out.

  Harry had wondered why the boat had not been brought directly to the shop on the back of the barge to be unloaded here. However, when he looked in the door of the shop he saw the reason. The overhead crane could not reach the water side of the shop. The whining electric hoist was now pulling the boat upward and then back toward the carriage. In a few more minutes the hulk was lowered into the carriage and Catch stopped the motor and unhooked the crane lines. He walked back to the truck and pulled it outside the garage.

  Harry walked up to the sheriff who had come out of the shop following the truck. He asked quickly, “You going to hunt for the killer out in the marsh?”

  The sheriff smiled and winked at Catch, who had parked the truck and was climbing down from its cab. He said, “Thirty years is a long time, Mister Jacobsen. We’ll have to let you know on that one.”

  Catch glared at Harry. The sheriff continued to smile. Harry noticed something he had never seen before in Sheriff Good’s face, a shadow of something else, some kind of deep feeling that hid behind the smile. The sheriff always had a stare which, while he was not handsome in any way, having a rather fat face, tended to entrance his listeners into thinking that he understood what was being asked of him. Annie once told Harry that Cheek’s expression hid that he was not very smart and usually did not comprehend much of what was being said. Harry had laughed, replying that a man who did as well as he obviously had done, being sheriff and all, probably acted stupid to keep his enemies off base and was most likely a lot smarter than he appeared. This time, though, the sense of deep feeling came through and Harry could see that the discovery of the boat had really affected the sheriff. Something was on his mind all right and Harry wondered what it was.