The Black Bullet

CHAPTER TWENTY

O’Brien sipped a cup of coffee on his back porch and listened to Abby Lawson. She said, “My grandmother used to talk about what Florida was like in the days before, during and after the war. She said it was in the summer of ‘42 when the man who would become my grandfather decided to join the Army. He made the decision when he and my grandmother, and dozens of other people, witnessed a German U-boat blow up an American tanker a few miles off the coast of Jacksonville Beach. Right, grandma?”

Glenda Lawson smiled. “Right, honey. I’ll never forget that night.” Her white hair was combed neatly, parted off center and pulled back. Her face was pale, eyes the color of a budding leaf, pastel skin smooth for a woman in her eighties. She wore a trace of rose-colored lipstick. O’Brien thought she possessed a quiet dignity, and yet a sadness as faint as the small blue veins beneath her opaque forehead.

“Grandma told me it was horrible, bodies floated in with the oil slicks, right here on Florida beaches. It wasn’t long after Pearl Harbor was bombed. A lot of people don’t even know that kind of thing was going on so close to our shores until the Navy put a stop to it. The irony is that my grandfather went to war in Europe because of what he saw close to American shores. It infuriated him that the Germans had taken out some of our ships. He went over there, fought them, got shot, and came back here to see a U-boat in the summer of ‘45.”

O’Brien asked, “Why’d the authorities think he’d been killed in a mugging?”

“We don’t know,” Abby said. “They say they found him with his wallet scattered. What little money he had, gone. Or so their reports said. And this was after my grandmother told them everything he told her before his death.”

“If it was some kind of cover up, what would have been the reason?”

“We don’t know that either. It could have something to do with that mystery man who met the men from the submarine. Maybe it’s because they never caught the Japanese. Or maybe it’s because they did catch the Japanese.”

“I wonder what two Japanese men were doing riding in a German sub. Why didn’t they return to the sub?”

“Those are all good questions, Mr. O’Brien-”

“Please, call me Sean. What did the Germans and Japanese bury?”

“We don’t know that, either? Grandma, tell Sean what granddaddy told you.”

The old woman folded her hands, took a deep breath and said, “Billy told me they dug near the fort … you know … Matanzas.”

O’Brien nodded. “Yes, I fished there as a kid.”

She slightly smiled and continued. “He said it was when the light from the St. Augustine lighthouse comes across the fort’s tower, it shines through an opening, makes a line. Billy said they buried some cylinders in the path of that line of light.”

O’Brien said, “The lighthouse is about twenty miles from the old fort.”

Glenda Lawson smiled and said, “Yes sir, it is.”

“Today,” said O’Brien, “the area of Matanzas Pass is a national park. There hasn’t been development. Did the authorities find what was buried?”

Glenda Lawson’s eyes grew wide and she leaned forward. “If they did, nobody bothered to tell me! I asked and they said they’d dug up dozens of sea turtle nests and could never find the hole Billy said was covered up.” She reached in her purse, her hand trembling, blue veins visible under milky skin. She retrieved a folded piece of newspaper, faded yellow. She carefully unfolded it and handed the paper to O’Brien. “They printed this the day after Billy died. There were a few other stories, but they stopped writing when police found nothing.”

O’Brien scanned the story. The sound of a boat came from the river and mixed with the full throttle of a mockingbird in a live oak. “Glenda, the night your husband called you, when he was shot … how many gunshots did you hear?”

“Three.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I’ve heard those shots fire in my nightmares for many, many years, sir. It’s something I will never forget.”

“This story quotes a deputy sheriff saying Billy was shot once.”