William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

Jake said he didn’t have a gun. A leftover from an earlier owner or outing? She considered asking but he was preoccupied in the toolbox. The casing tickled her memory, but she wasn’t sure why. She pocketed it for later.

“Come on, heiress!” He swung the lantern to help beat a path through high weeds and blackberries to the cabin’s sagging porch. When Rominy stepped up, a piece of deck broke through. Something furtive skittered away. Great.

“Another piece of my fabulous inheritance?” she said, pulling her heeled shoe free of the rot. “I should have worn waders.”

“Another piece of the puzzle, I hope. And I’ve got some spare boots in the truck I can loan you.”

“You have my size?”

“Maybe. Old girlfriend left ’em when she dumped me.”

“Now why would a woman do that?”

“That’s what I asked.” He stepped over some animal droppings and went to the plank door. “You never get an answer.”

“But now you’re Prince Charming and I get a hand-me-down glass slipper?”

“I’m on the trail of a story and you might need to walk in the woods.”

“Gosh, she was wrong. You are romantic.”

She’d joke with him now.

The key from the safety deposit box was to a padlock on a rusty hasp, and Jake had to twist and jerk to force it open. The door swung with the proverbial creak, or more precisely a squall of protest, and let out an exhalation of must. The cabin was dim inside, lit by greasy multipane windows that hadn’t seen a wash in decades. The thought that Hood had decomposed here, until his discovery months later, gave her the creeps.

The place was also a time capsule. There was a Depression-era iron bed frame but no mattress, an old drop-leaf table with three painted wooden chairs, a counter with porcelain basin and hand pump, and a river-rock stone fireplace. The fur rug was so decayed as to make the species unidentifiable. The joists and rafters were bare, the underside of the shingles stained where rain had leaked through. There was even a bookshelf, and Rominy inspected the volumes. Faded tomes on Tibet, Buddhism, zoology, and flying, time having glued their pages to a pulpy mass that mice had chewed. Droppings dotted shelves and floor. Hanging on a peg on the wall was a calendar with a faded scenic of Mount Baker, turned to September 1945. It was as faint as a ghost negative.

“Is that when he died?”

Jake nodded. “Apparently. Remember, he wasn’t found right away. That calendar page is right after the end of World War II, and they found him the next spring.”

“He sat out the war up here.”

“Yep. And this is the edge of the edge. To the east of us is a hundred miles of mountain wilderness.”

She turned, reluctant to touch anything. “All right, Woodward and Bernstein, what are we supposed to find?”

“The story, Lois Lane. What happened to Great-grandpa? He goes to Tibet on the eve of the war, comes back to play the hermit here, and dies forgotten. Except his descendants meet untimely deaths, and a great-granddaughter who doesn’t even know he exists is almost blown up in her MINI Cooper. So finally we have access to his cabin, and to his safety deposit box, and suddenly you’ve got enough moola to buy several new cars, thanks to me. All you have to do is give me the scoop of the century and I’ll be on my way.”

“Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

“I wouldn’t put it so crudely. We’re partners now, Rominy. If I’m Woodward, then you’re Bernstein.”

“I want to be Woodward. You be Bernstein.”

He smiled. “You’re on.”

She glanced around. “The place is a sty.”

“Let’s call it a dusty attic of nostalgia.” He glanced up. There were cobwebs enough to festoon a crypt. Mice and spiders and flies, oh my.

“But someone’s been here.” Rominy was looking at scuff marks in the dust on the floor. “If this place is haunted, the ghosts leave tracks.”

Barrow frowned. “Kids, maybe. Through a window? Or drifters looking for food.”

“Or your skinheads. Shining lights around and acting spooky.”

“I don’t think they’d know enough to look way up here.”

Rominy dragged her finger in some dust. “Yeah, for their sake. I think my neighbor would answer the Hitler salute with buckshot, and they’d probably contract a disease in this dustbin. No self-respecting ghost would take up residence.”

Jake smiled. “We’re safe, then.” He sat on the old bed frame, springs groaning. “Welcome home.”

“I hope you don’t think that’s seductive.” Rominy walked to the kitchen window, looking over the enameled sink basin. Outside there were claustrophobic walls of fir in every direction. It was like being at the bottom of a green well. “It is odd that he came here and died here. But just because I’m his descendant doesn’t mean I have any clues.”

“You now have the contents of the safety deposit box.”

“Geez, a fossilized finger? Thank you, Grandpa. Was it the middle one?”

“In that case I think he would have left the entire hand.”

She sighed. “Okay, let’s think about it.” She sat at the painted table, using her forearm to shove off some dust, and emptied the cookie tin of what they’d found at the bank. “A scarf. It’s a memento, I’d guess.” She held it up to the light. “Part of it ripped away, and dirty from someone’s neck. Nice. What else? The Chinese gold pieces are cool. And this is quite a heavy pistol.” She lifted the. 45 so it fell back with a thud. “You could use it to drive nails.”

“Army issue from back then.”

“A compass to find our way, if we had a direction to follow. If it’s not just memorabilia, that suggests a destination and even a map, don’t you think? But no map.”

“Maybe the finger means pointing, like Sacajawea with Lewis and Clark,” Barrow hazarded.

“But no Sacajawea to go with it. And this cabin? He dies at the end of the war. Why? He leaves… what?” She glanced around. “No pictures, no maps.” Shelves and cupboards held rusty cans and utensils. The books were ruined. “Hidden passageway? Secret compartment?” She fingered the rock on the fireplace and then had to dust off her hands. She paced around the tiny cabin, Barrow watching her think. Or maybe just watching her. Guys did that, she knew. Just not quite the right guy, yet.

So who was Jake Barrow? Savior, abductor, stalker, or partner? “So what else do you report on, when you’re not rescuing damsels?” she suddenly asked.

He shrugged. “All kinds of stuff. Reporters are generalists. I like science, actually. Talk about spooky.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that the world is a lot weirder than it looks to us, when we peer up at galaxies or down to subatomic particles.” He slapped the bed frame. “Do you know this is all an illusion?”

“I wish it were, but okay, I’ll bite. An illusion how?”

“That things aren’t solid in the way that we think. Atoms are mostly empty space. You make a nucleus the size of a tennis ball, and its electrons are like BBs buzzing around a mile or two away. What keeps us from falling through the floor isn’t matter, exactly, but physical forces that keep atoms together and then repel other atoms. Our eyes give us this illusion of solids, but if we could really see at that level, we’d see this oscillating fuzz of force fields, all the little bits jumping like popcorn in a popper. A lot of it is chance, particles bouncing like dice, but it adds up to normalcy. It’s very, very strange down there at the smallest level.”

“Except you still can’t walk through a door.”

“But what if you could? I mean, if we really understood how matter and energy works? You know, the Bible says, ‘Let there be light,’ and the universe really started as light. Some energy later became matter, and yet this frozen energy can unthaw again in an atomic bomb-all interchangeable. Physicists talk about extra dimensions, multiple universes, and all kinds of bizarro ideas. But it’s no stranger than electricity would have seemed to Galileo.”