Lost Girls

CHAPTER TWO

The sun rose slowly, fighting through the mist to send warm fingers to the wide beach left exposed by the inevitable cycle of the tide. High above, the trade winds blew thin cloud contrails against the last vestiges of night. The sounds of the thick swamp beyond the beach shifted from the occasional outbursts of predators and prey to the more serene symphony of daytime activity. Palmettos, old oaks gray-bearded with Spanish Moss, and tall pines rose high, competing for the coming sunlight.

Between swamp and beach is a thin stretch of grass-covered sand-dunes where storms had heaped all they picked up as they thundered toward the coast, and the ocean in calmer weather could never quite reach to pull away. It is called Pritchards Island, but at high tide it really is several islets as the seawater filled canals like blood into the island’s veins, bringing fish, turtles, gators and birds. It is one of thousands of islands that dot the coast of South Carolina. The Marine Corps base at Parris Island is to the west, and to the south, separated by the Broad River, is Hilton Head Island, a vacation destination along the east coast. Just north, Fripps Island was following the same fate of Hilton Head as developers moved in and seized prime ocean front property.

The man sat on the crumbling concrete portal of a long-abandoned Coast Guard station. He’d heard that a beach front lot on Hilton Head went for a couple of million. As far as he could see left and right, the beach was clear and open. Of course, he didn’t own any of it. He didn’t own any land. He considered himself a visitor, even though he’d been here for just under a year and a half, except for his few trips. He’d learned the island was privately owned, but perpetually deeded to the University of South Carolina for research. He’d often seen the students and their professors making forays out of the bungalow on the north side of the island in their small boats and ATVs, but they had never seen him. The island was a preserve for sea turtles and the visitors were focused on that.

As he sat, watching the sun rise, he lifted his entire body off the concrete by virtue of pressing the fingertips of his right hand down and keeping his legs extended straight out in front. He would do this ten times with each hand, staying balanced on those five fingertips for the space of two breaths on each lift, then shift to the other hand. He did it almost without noticing, a monotony born of long practice. The fact he was lifting one hundred and eighty pounds with each thrust was displayed only by the veins on the down arm pulsing full of blood, much like the canals of the island at high tide. He breathed slowly, forcing the tensed muscles of his stomach holding up the legs to ripple with the exertion.

He’d come to the Low Country for simple reasons for a man who lived a complex life. He’d read Pat Conroy’s tales of the land while at the Military Academy and he thought it was about as far as one could get from the mountains and the deserts of the world he’d spent the previous decades fighting in. And before that the streets of New York where he’d spent his childhood. He particularly enjoyed the mornings, watching the sun come up out of the ocean. It made him feel small and insignificant, as if his actions mattered little. That gave him comfort.

He’d also come to the south because he’d always been fascinated by the Civil War, and he’d already walked all the battlefields of the North — Gettysburg, Antietam and the others— and most of the rest were south of the Mason-Dixon line. The previous month he’d gone to the site of Andersonville Prison in Georgia, not exactly a battlefield, but a place of significance in that war and he still hadn’t shaken off the depression and despair still emanating from that small patch of South Georgia despite the years that had passed since it had been home to so many Yankee prisoners.

While the occasional students and professors knew nothing of the long time visitor to their island, there were those who had known of his presence within a few days of his arrival. The Gullah, the descendants of freed slaves who’d lived on these islands for generations, had noticed him almost immediately but left him in peace. He’d returned the courtesy, only gradually getting to know these people with their own language as he met them hunting and fishing around the island. It took six months of passing nods across the water and marsh before one of them pulled close enough to speak to him and then it was only a brief greeting and a warning of a storm coming despite the deceptive blue sky.

He’d always found that there were those who had their senses attuned to the pulse of the land and saw more than most. In Germany, the local forest-meister always knew when a Special Forces team had parachuted into their woodlands to conduct training exercises. In the desert the Bedouins could also sense a sand-storm on the clearest day and were aware of who traversed their lands. In Afghanistan the mountain villagers knew who walked the high trails and when. As a child in the Bronx he’d seen the men in white undershirts who sat in front of the small store on the street corner watching with half-lidded eyes whenever unknown cars turned into the block. Territoriality seemed to be genetic in men, but he must have missed out on that particular chromosome. He had no yearning to return to the Bronx from the day he escaped there to go fifty miles up the Hudson to West Point at seventeen. He considered wherever he currently slept to be his home.

He’d been told by an old Gullah man named Goodwine that a house had once stood at this spot, built by pirates in the late eighteenth century. And that the pirates had been caught by the fledgling American Navy and massacred to a man, refusing to give up the location of their treasure even under the painful incentive of the blade. Goodwine said the sailors burned the house and then dug through the ashes searching for the gold and, finding none, filled the hole with the bodies of the pirates. It was not a place of bad spirits Goodwine insisted, but of discontented spirits. The man liked that story. He didn’t share with Goodwine his own belief that the pirates had not had any treasure, which explained why they couldn’t point out where it was buried. The man knew the difference between fact and fiction and the fact was, in his experience, that everyone talked under enough pain and in fear of death.

The Coast Guard station had been built on the spot during the early days of World War II when German submarines had hunted the coast, sinking ships within sight of the shore, the flames observed by a civilian populace who thought themselves safe. It had been abandoned after the war and slowly gave in to the weather and vegetation. The man had constructed a cozy shelter inside, one that kept the rain off in winter and gave him shade in summer.

There was no bed. He had forsaken beds years ago as they were a place where one could be expected to be found, usually in a vulnerable state. He had a thin therm-a-rest pad that he rolled out when he was tired. Sometimes he slept on the beach above the high water mark, sometimes in the dunes, and if the weather threatened, in the station. He had a small battery powered radio with which he listened to National Public Radio twice a day. The portal to the station had been made for smaller men, set at an even six feet, so he had to duck slightly to come and go.

The biggest issue was fresh water. He made a run in his kayak over to Parris Island once a week and filled up two five-gallon cans at the dock. He had a solar shower, simply a clear bladder of water resting on top of a shelf, under which he quickly bathed when needed. The green-colored kayak he kept hidden up one of the waterways, tucked behind a cluster of thick palmetto bushes.

He knew what time it was very accurately according to some inner coding he’d never bothered to examine. In the same manner he’d never used an alarm clock. Even at the Academy during Beast Barracks. He always rose when he determined he needed to wake before he went to sleep.

Done with that exercise, he walked onto the beach and began his katas, the ritualized movements that were part of martial arts training. His specific form would not have been recognized in any dojo as it was an amalgamation of various techniques from a spectrum of disciplines. The moves were focused on those that incapacitated and killed as quickly as possible.

He heard the tinny murmur of a small outboard and came to a halt in mid-kata. He walked down to the beach as a small flatboat came around the headland.

Goodwine saw the strange white man waiting on the beach. He was always up. Goodwine had passed by the island late at night or hours before dawn and it seemed the man was always around, like a ghost, often simply sitting in his strange way on one hand, or moving slowly along the beach or through the swamp. The first time he’d spotted the buckra—white man — Goodwine had thought he was a lost hunter or fisherman as few came to Pritchards, but the man had shown no sign of distress nor did he seem interested in what Goodwine was up to, so the two had noted each other with a simple nod but said nothing.

So it went for months before one day Goodwine saw the man out on the sand-bar a hundred yards from the shore, simply walking, paralleling the shore at low tide, the water up to his waist. It was February and the water was cold, but the man had not seemed to notice. It wasn’t until he got home that Goodwine realized that the man had been working his body against the water, building up his legs.

Goodwine had paused to tell the man a storm was coming and the tide would be up higher than had been seen for a while. The man had simply thanked Goodwine and continued on his way. What had impressed Goodwine more than the man’s taciturn manner was his skin. He was a buckra, but the sun had burned him brown, except the lines and craters that marked the impact of violence on his flesh. There were dark tales written in those scars but the man said nothing of it, not even after they spent more time together. Goodwine had a similar crater on his right thigh where a North Vietnamese bullet had punched a hole many years ago. He didn’t like talking of that so he respected the man’s silence. It had been Goodwine’s only time away from the Low Country and he had been glad to return, even though the leg had never quite been the same.

After several more months of gradually longer exchanges, Goodwine offered to take the man deep into the swamp. He was unlike any white man Goodwine had ever met. The man had blue eyes that constantly moved yet always seemed to be focused on something. The thing that Goodwine told his wife as soon as he was back home was that the man had the patience of the ‘gator. This was indeed a high Gullah compliment as Goodwine had seen alligators submerged, eyes and nostrils only showing, in the same place for days on end. The ‘gator knew it needed just one good meal, a nice fat buck coming too close to the water’s edge, to last it for months, so it was willing to be still for days in exchange. It was the epitome of disciplined violence.

The man had spoken only in response to something Goodwine said. He’d helped with the hunting in silence. And when the tide went out, he’d assisted in pushing the boat across the mud barriers while mosquitoes feasted on his blood without a word or sign of protest or inconvenience. They’d efficiently butchered the deer Goodwine had shot and the man had accepted a portion of the meat with thanks.

The man raised his hand in greeting as the flat bow grated on the sound and Goodwine tilted the engine forward. The man put the hand down and held the boat still as Goodwine carefully stepped over the gunwale onto the sand. The man then pulled the boat above the tide line with ease.

The man let go of the boat, then turned to face Goodwine. He saw the envelope in the old man’s hands and was not anxious to know its contents. He pulled a cigar he’d bought on his last trip to Parris Island out of his shirt pocket and offered it to Goodwine who accepted it with a nod of thanks.

“Yuh.” Goodwine held out the envelope.

The man took it. He glanced at the return address. New York City. Addressed to Major Jack Gant. He found it interesting that his Uncle used his rank and that name. An appeal to loyalty and to forgive the past, he realized.

Goodwine had cut the end of the cigar and fired it up, inhaling deeply and letting out a puff of smoke that was borne away by the off-shore breeze. “Be good news?”

Goodwine spoke the white man’s English as well as any on the coast when he wanted to. Gant had listened to Goodwine enough to have a basic understanding of Gullah, but he felt it would be insulting to try to carry on a conversation in the old man’s native tongue.

Gant opened his Uncle’s letter and looked at the thin, spidery writing. He read the first line and then lifted his eyes and looked out to sea.

“Is ya all right?” Goodwine asked.

“My brother is dead.”

“I am sorry.” Goodwine hung his head, his lips moving as he said a prayer for the dead.

“I knew it,” Gant said, when the old man was done. He tapped his chest. “I felt something a few weeks ago. I felt something go. He was my twin.”

Goodwine tapped his own chest. “His spirit be taken.”

Gant shrugged, uncertain. “Something.”

“Were you close?”

“Once. Not for a long time.” Gant looked at the rest of the letter. “My Uncle would like me to come back to New York for a visit with my mother,” he finally said.

Goodwine nodded. “Will ya be going?”

“No.”

Gant heard a sound in the distance, one that brought mixed emotions on the top of the news of his brother. Today it brought a feeling of utter weariness. He wondered if it was connected to the letter, but doubted it. The man who had sent the helicopter didn’t deal in sentimentality, if Gant’s guess about the chopper’s mission was correct.

“You shoulda get home,” Goodwine said. His voice deepened as he shifted to Gullah. “Mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree.”

Gant mentally translated the words — must take care of the root to heal the tree. The helicopter was getting closer. He looked along the shoreline to the south. Goodwine also turned in that direction, the old man’s stomach fluttering a little also at the sound, decades old memories of a faraway land threatening to come back. A Coast Guard chopper appeared just above the surf line, coming in fast. Gant hoped it kept on going, but it was too early in the morning for the first shark patrol.

The helicopter slowed and came to a hover fifty feet away. It settled down onto the sand and a crew chief jumped out, sliding open the cargo bay door. A man dressed in a blazer and tie got out. There was a metal briefcase chained to the man’s wrist. He stood underneath the rotating blades and waited. The man was bland looking, portly, with thinning blond hair and a broad face. Someone people would pass on the street and never give a second glance to.

There was nothing in the old station Gant needed. He stuck out his hand to Goodwine. “Keep an eye on everything. I’ll be back.”

Goodwine simply shook his hand and nodded.

Gant walked to the waiting man. He did not shake his hand, but jumped into the cargo bay and took a seat. He picked up a helmet and put it on. The man got on and did the same so they could talk over the intercom. Gant nodded. “Mister Bailey.”

“Mister Gant. Mister Nero needs you.”

Gant leaned back against the red cargo webbing as the chopper lifted and turned back to the south. “When did you know about my brother?”

Bailey reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a piece of gum, which he carefully unwrapped. He rolled the pink rectangle into a tight cylinder and then popped it in his mouth. “Three weeks.”

“How did he die?”

“A natural death.”

That earned Bailey a sharp look from Gant.

“I dug up his grave,” Bailey said. “He was buried outside his cabin in Vermont.”

“Who buried him?” Gant asked.

“Neeley.”

Gant nodded. One bright spot in a sea of black. Gant had never met Neeley but he knew his brother had excellent taste in women. “What did he die of?”

“Cancer,” Bailey continued. “I re-buried him.”

Gant didn’t ask why Bailey had dug his brother up and he recognized that Bailey wasn’t offering an explanation so he changed the subject to the future. “Is this a Sanction?”

“We don’t know yet.” Bailey pulled a picture out of his pocket. Gant took it. A girl smiled up at him.

“And?”

“Emily Cranston is the daughter of Colonel Samuel Cranston.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar. “And Cranston is?”

“The commander of the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.”

Gant wondered why Bailey was dragging this out and didn’t hand over the file. Gant glanced down at the titanium case on the floor next to Bailey’s sand covered shoes.

“I only want to brief this once,” Bailey said, catching the glance.

Gant frowned. He worked alone. “Who else do you have to brief?”

“We’re picking someone up.”

“Who?”

“A shrink.”

“Why do we need a shrink?”

Bailey took the photo back. “Because we think the girl is still alive.”

Gant wasn’t sure what that had to do with a shrink but he was used to Bailey being evasive. “Why do you think that?”

Bailey reluctantly opened the briefcase and removed a piece of paper. “That’s a copy of what was left at the site she was taken from.”

Gant glanced at the paper. “It’s part of a cache report.” Gant had first learned to make such a report at Fort Bragg, as a student at the center the father of the girl now ran. He knew now why Bailey had come for him.

Bailey nodded. “We think Emily Cranston is the cache.”

The lifeguard was setting out the beach chairs as the woman came by, right on schedule. He saw her every morning he worked and he assumed she came by on the days he didn’t, not being so self-centered to imagine her walks revolved around him in some way. The tide was going out, water giving way to gently sloping beach. The woman appeared to be in her late thirties, in good shape, but the skin on her face was stretched tight, not from a lift as many of the rich women on the island did, but from some inner tension that the lifeguard instinctively sensed he didn’t want to know the reason for.

She walked at a steady rate, not with the frenzy of the ‘power walkers’, nor the idle stroll of the tourists looking for shells. She walked as if she were on her way to some place she had to be, but didn’t want to get to. The lifeguard paused in his chair unfolding and raised a hand in greeting as was the way here on Hilton Head, where everyone acted friendly, especially to locals.

Susan Golden forced herself to acknowledge the lifeguard’s wave with a flutter of her right hand. It was more out of habit than anything else, but years ago she had allowed herself to accept that habit was important. Indeed, she had built a large portion of her professional life on the principle that people were predictable.

Passing marker number fourteen, she turned right, heading inland toward the house she rented. As she walked up the thin concrete beach access path, she noted that the off-shore breeze had stopped and the air was still and hot. She too came to a complete halt when she saw the Beuafort County Sheriff's car parked in her drive. A young deputy was standing next to the car, looking decidedly nervous. His apparent discomfort paled in comparison to the surge of emotion that raced through Golden. He saw her and straightened, one hand unconsciously running down the front of his khaki shirt, straightening the folds.

"Dr. Golden?"

She could only nod at first as she struggled to find her voice. "Did you find him?"

"Excuse me?"

"Did you find him?"

“Who, ma’am?”

“My son. Jimmy.”

"I'm not sure—" he paused and regrouped. "I was sent here to escort you to the airport."

"The airport?" Golden repeated dully.

"Yes, ma'am." He awkwardly opened the door to his patrol car and pulled out a clip board, and held it out to her.

She didn't take it, afraid to see what was on it.

The deputy continued to hold the clipboard out as if that would relieve him of his discomfort. "It's a request from the Department of Defense. Asking us to help you get to the airport as quickly as possible. A plane will be there shortly for you. Apparently someone needs you."

Golden's shoulders slumped. A mixture of relief and anger replaced her fear. "Why?"

The deputy pulled back the clipboard and glanced at the faxed letter, and then shrugged. "It doesn't say, Ma'am. It's signed by a Mister Nero if that means anything to you."

"It doesn't."

Golden still didn't move as the deputy shuffled his feet.

"There's a number you can call?" the deputy suggested.

Golden didn't want to call but she knew she had to. It could be about Jimmy.

She took the cell phone the deputy offered and the clipboard. She punched in the number.

It rang once and a woman's voice answered.

"Yes?"

"This is Doctor Golden and I—

"Hold please."

The voice that came next wasn't human, that was Golden's first reaction even before the words hit home. The voice was metallic, words sliding over steel and adjusted to be legible.

"Doctor Golden, my name is Mister Nero. A young girl is missing and we need your help in trying to resolve the issue. The girl is Colonel Cranston’s daughter. Please go with the deputy to the airfield. There will be a plane there shortly to pick you up. All will be explained then. Thank you."

The phone went dead.

Sam Cranston. Golden remembered seeing a photograph on his nightstand. A young girl, pretty in a clean, freshly scrubbed way, slightly overweight. Golden felt faint and her body slumped, the deputy reaching out a protective hand, placing it on her shoulder.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

“Please stop calling me ma’am,” Golden said. “And take me to the airport immediately.