The Lightning Stones

17

Judging by the volume of rain sheeting from the plumbic sky, Mercer half expected to see pairs of exotic animals trudging along the side of the road in search of an ark. The deluge reminded him of a tropical cyclone he’d sat through in a small hotel in the Philippines, overlooking a fishing village that was all but wiped out by the time the storm abated. Though the wind now wasn’t as strong, the rain forced him to slow the SUV to a crawl. Midwesterners, knowing that this weather could spawn tornadoes, wisely stayed indoors or stopped their cars under overpasses. He had little traffic to contend with as he made his way south and east toward the Mississippi River, and a woman who potentially had another piece of the puzzle — hopefully the last piece to solving why Abe and the others had been murdered.

Mercer had made arrangements while still in Kabul for the shard of crystal. First he’d had a guy in Sykes’s motor pool hammer out a copper envelope to sheathe the stone. Not trusting the Afghan postal service, he’d flown it to New Delhi and express-shipped it from there to an acquaintance at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies who was salivating at the prospect of getting his lab equipment on something as fantastical as had been described. Mercer promised him equal authorship of any paper that came out of the discovery.

The woman Mercer was en route to visit was Veronica Butler, and for the last few years of Herbert Hoover’s life, she was his personal secretary while he lived in New York’s famous Park Avenue Waldorf Astoria. After his death in 1964, Butler had returned to her native Iowa and worked at the presidential library until her retirement a decade ago. In a call from Kabul following their extraction back to the Afghan capital, Sherman Smithson promised Mercer that if there were any secrets pertaining to the late president’s life, especially his link to Mike Dillman, then Roni Butler would be the only person to know. Smithson had promised to inform the woman about his interest, and make sure she was up to seeing him.

Mercer had tried to verify with Smithson when he’d landed in Des Moines that the elderly woman knew he was coming, but the library had closed early because of the weather and the archivist wasn’t answering his cell. He hit redial as he traveled on through the downpour, but now he wasn’t getting any cell coverage.

Mercer tried the radio, and after scanning the frequencies finally found an emergency broadcast alert that discussed the flooding all along the Mississippi River Valley. The monotone announcer rattled off a number of towns’ names that Mercer was unfamiliar with that were under mandatory evacuation. Fortunately the one where Veronica Butler lived wasn’t mentioned, at least not yet.

Two hours later than the satnav promised he should arrive, Mercer pulled up short of his destination at a police checkpoint near a large complex of buildings that served as the middle and high schools for an entire county. Yellow buses were parked along its front like elephants performing a nose-to-tail parade. A couple of police cars were pulled across the road with enough room to squeeze through if necessary. A cop wearing a poncho and a plastic cover over his wide-brimmed hat levered himself out of one of the black-and-whites and approached Mercer’s door.

Mercer lowered his window a crack. The sound of the storm wasn’t the sizzle of bacon like a normal rain but the roar of a waterfall. Drops splattered against the glass and pattered his face, so he had to wipe it after just a few seconds.

“Sorry, sir.” The cop had to shout over the storm. “Can’t let you pass. It’s too dangerous.”

“Has everyone been evacuated?”

“Near as we can tell. There’s about two thousand people packed into the schools.”

“Do you know a Mrs. Veronica Butler?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry. I’m from Urbandale, here to help with the flooding. Whoever you’re looking for will be in one of the school’s gyms. There are people inside to help folks locate loved ones. They’ll be able to help you out.”

He turned away before Mercer could thank him and strode back to the warm, dry interior of his cruiser. Mercer wheeled through the barrier and turned into the high school’s parking lot, which was full. He noted the majority of the vehicles were pickups, and not one of them was foreign built. He found a space near a baseball dugout and ran through the storm to the nearest school entrance. A couple of men stood in the doorway watching the rain and parted so Mercer could dash inside. Just a few seconds outside left his jeans soaked to the skin.

“Mighty brave,” one said. He was big and wrinkled but with a light in his blue eyes.

“Just a little rain,” Mercer replied.

“Talking ’bout the hat.” He pointed a finger to his own black-and-gold baseball cap. “Folks in these parts are Hawkeyes. You’re wearing Iowa State.”

Despite his gruff tone, the man was obviously teasing. Mercer acted as if he were having a sudden epiphany. “I knew there was something wrong with it. It only keeps a little of the rain off my face.”

The big farmer laughed. “That got you a pass. Head on down this hallway and take a left. That’s the gym. There are towels, doughnuts, and coffee.”

“Thanks.”

A moment later, Mercer had a tepid coffee in hand and was explaining to an overworked volunteer coordinator that he was looking for Veronica Butler. The din in the echoing gymnasium was a beehivelike buzz, punctuated by children’s shouts and infants’ wails. He would have much rather listened to Harry singing falsetto than endure this cacophony for a moment longer than necessary. The air was heavy and smelled of wet dog.

“I’m sorry, she isn’t here,” the woman said without needing to consult the binders she and the others had compiled of the storm’s temporary refugees.

“She’s in the middle school gym, then?” he asked hopefully.

“Obviously you don’t know Roni too well. She won’t leave her home no matter how hard the police try to get her to evacuate. She’s as stubborn as a mule, and ten times as tough.” There was a trace of civic pride in her voice at how the old woman defied the authorities despite the danger.

“So I’ll find her on Water Street?”

“She’ll be there all right, but I wouldn’t go looking for her just yet or she might mistake you for a deputy and fire off a few potshots.”

“Is she…” Mercer tried to find words that wouldn’t insult the old woman. “All there?”

“Oh yes. She’s as sane as they come, just ornery. Her grandfather built the original house where her place is now, and she claims in over a hundred and twenty years that spot has never flooded, no matter what the Mississippi does.”

“And she knows that since then there have been hundreds of miles of levees built that change the game entirely?”

“Don’t matter to her none. She’s sticking by her place come hell or high water.” She chuckled at her own unintended pun. Just then some more people came in, a young couple with two children and an infant in the woman’s arms. The baby was thankfully quiet but the younger boy sniveled with his face buried in his mother’s jeans. “Crystal, Johnnie, how you two holdin’ up?” The volunteer produced a lollipop from a bag at her feet, and the crying boy’s tears suddenly dried when he reached for it.

Mercer nodded his thanks to the woman, who was already too busy to notice and made his way back to the door he’d entered a few minutes earlier.

“They’re chasing you out, eh?” the comedian-farmer asked. “Should have pocketed that cap, boy.”

“At least I didn’t wear one from my real alma mater,” Mercer replied, paused for effect, and told the Hawkeye, “I’m a Nittany Lion.”

He was back out into the storm before the older man computed that Mercer had gone to one of the University of Iowa’s Big Ten rivals, Penn State.

The cops at the roadblock were busy helping guide a semitruck with a trailer-load of new farm equipment through a tight U-turn so the driver could head back to wait out the storm in a hotel someplace. Mercer ran back to his rental and drove along the verge to get past the preoccupied cops. If they noticed him, they didn’t bother to give chase.

The rain continued to pound the earth and rattle off the truck’s bodywork like it was taking small-arms fire. The wipers could only keep the windshield clear for half a cycle, leaving Mercer to drive on faith as much as his vision. Fortunately, the GPS was still pinging off the satellites even if his cell showed zero bars.

He passed through a deserted town with roads awash like flat black streams. The power was off, either by accident or design, and it gave the place a haunted feel. There was no one around, no motion other than the downward streak of rain and the froth of water boiling down from the hills. It was barely noon, but the storm cast the buildings in twilight gray that shrouded them like a layer of decay.

He spotted two men with a trailered Zodiac boat standing under a gas station canopy next to their pickup. They were dressed in waders and rain jackets and appeared to be part of a volunteer rescue team. The truck had a modified suspension so it could be jacked up on massive tires and had a magnetic red strobe attached to his roof. The pair pointed at his truck and made waving gestures with their arms as if to warn him off. Mercer tooted his horn in acknowledgment but kept on going.

Beyond the town and through some trees he could see a long grass-covered levee that stretched from north to south in an unending wall of compacted dirt. He knew on the other side raged the Mississippi River, one of the world’s greats, and one that hated to be contained the way a wild animal fought its captivity. Give it just a chance to escape and the waters would run until the whole miles-long system of earthworks collapsed into so much mud and sludge and this little town was wiped off the map.

Mercer turned right, tracking south out of town. He crossed a spindly steel through-truss bridge whose surfaces were more rust than green paint. Eight feet below the road deck, a once lazy stream coming from a valley ahead of him was now a brown seething mass that raced past like a locomotive. Swirling on the raging water were tree trunks and other unidentifiable flotsam caught in its inexorable grip.

The road to Veronica Butler’s home paralleled the stream. It was like a river in its own right and was well over its banks and at various points sluicing across the road itself. Driving in conditions like this was not the smartest thing he’d ever done. Despite the SUV’s size and the shallowness of the water careening across the road, the torrent could easily lift his truck and hurl it into the main channel so fast he’d never have time to react.

The wipers now barely made a dent in the rain slamming into the windscreen.

On his left were houses every couple hundred yards with barns in the back, and occasional silos. He couldn’t see through the storm past them, but Mercer figured their backyards were fields stretching to the horizon. To the right was the river lapping at the road. Movement in the channel caught his eye, and he saw a large white box shoot past. It took him a second to realize the box was actually the back of a large moving van, and its cab and engine were completely submerged.

“You will reach your destination in five hundred feet,” the female voice of his GPS informed him.

Veronica Butler lived in a white single-story clapboard house on a bluff directly above the tributary. When the weather was clear, there would be a long gentle slope down to the water’s edge, but today the current was rushing by no more than thirty feet from the back door. She had no garage, so her late-model American sedan sat in the driveway and was being lashed by the storm. Next to the house was a tractor shed just big enough for a riding mower and maybe some gardening tools.

Mercer pulled in behind her Ford four-door and killed the engine. Without the motor noise and the whipsaw action of the wipers, he could hear the stream’s passage even over the rain. Roni Butler’s grandfather might have picked a great spot for his homestead and it might never have flooded before, but there was always a first time and Mercer feared this might be it.

He took a deep breath and threw himself out of the truck, running toward the front porch as hard as he could go. Just before reaching it he remembered to whip off his baseball cap and stuff it into a jacket pocket. No sense in antagonizing her by wearing the wrong colors.

The porch was only five feet deep but stretched the full width of the house. A curtain of rain fell from the eaves, so it wasn’t until Mercer was through it that he could see the house wasn’t white, but a pale blue. The trim was a darker shade in the same family. Flower boxes hung from the windows, but they hadn’t yet been planted. The outdoor furniture was all made of either wood or thick-gauge steel and looked like it had been there since the Dust Bowl. He saw no lights and assumed her power was out. Mercer swung open a screen door with a coil spring return and rapped on the jamb. With no answer he hit it harder. But to no avail. Next time he kicked the door with the toe of his boot, and it swung open in a flash. The shotgun barrel came at him with the speed of a striking cobra. He just managed to get a hand on it to deflect it away from his head.

“I told you, goddamnit, that I ain’t leavin’.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Mercer said, still holding the shotgun barrel high and to his right.

Veronica Butler was probably in her eighties by now, but she looked a decade younger. She had her fair share of wrinkles and crow’s-feet, but she stood tall and proud. Back in the day she would have been a stunner and even now was still attractive, with dyed red hair that swirled around her neck in permed curls. She was busty and curvy and fiery as hell, and Mercer knew if Harry were here the old letch would be tripping over his tongue.

“You aren’t one of Sherriff Conner’s boys.” She eased her grip on the Mossberg pump-action, and Mercer let her take it back so it hung in the crook of her arm.

“No, Mrs. Butler. My name is Philip Mercer. Sherman Smithson at the Hoover Library was supposed to call you and tell you I was coming.”

“He mentioned it yesterday, but I didn’t think anyone would be damned fool enough to drive out in this.”

“I surprise myself sometimes with what damned fool things I do,” he admitted.

She gave him a critical look. Her eyes were an almost identical gray to his own, and she must have seen something in them. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot that surprises you, Mr. Mercer. Come on in out of the rain and tell me why you’d risk your neck to talk to an old broad like me.”

Mercer followed her into the house. He loved the temerity of women who referred to themselves as “broads.” It told him they were comfortable enough in their own skins not to care what others thought.

She didn’t ask him to remove his wet boots, for which he was grateful, but waited so he could hang his bomber jacket on a peg next to her coats. She led him through a dim living room to the kitchen at the back of the house. A big picture window overlooked a backyard now dominated by the overflowing stream. They had maybe another eighteen inches of elevation before the water seeped into the house.

She must have read Mercer’s mind. “We’re one foot higher than Blair Creek’s ever crested. My grandfather was an amateur geologist and figured that record goes back well over a thousand years. That’s why he built on this bluff.”

“I’m actually a geologist myself and I’d agree with his assessment, but that was before they started putting levees along the Mississippi, and God knows what other flood control measures upstream of your house.”

She suddenly looked a little less sure of herself and her grandfather’s geologic insights. “There’s a dam about ten miles from here.”

“Concrete?”

She nodded and Mercer relaxed. So long as the dam held, they could drive west through the fields faster than the river rose, so there wasn’t any real danger. Still, he said, “I told you earlier that I’m not here to ask you to leave, but I think it might be a good idea.”

She set the shotgun in the corner of the kitchen and fired up the gas stove with a wand lighter. “You’re welcome to shove off, but I am not going anywhere. The dam’s been there since the thirties, and I’ve seen storms a lot worse than this. Coffee? I only have instant.”

“We should drink it fast,” he said to prompt her to rethink her position.

“Sherm said you were looking into some rock samples President Hoover once owned.”

Mercer assumed wryly that Roni Butler was probably the only person in the world Sherman Smithson allowed to call him Sherm. “That’s right.”

She didn’t let him elaborate and went on, “I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Mercer, but I know nothing about rock samples. When I worked for the president we were living in New York, and he was working on his greatest book, Freedom Betrayed. He was a top-notch mining engineer when he was a younger man, but by the time I started as his secretary in the late 1950s he considered himself an elder statesman and historian. Other than a few tales of adventure he’d tell me from time to time, I know almost nothing about that earlier part of his life.”

She said this last line looking over her shoulder as she fiddled with the copper teapot atop the blue ring of burning propane. Mercer imagined that her convincing delivery was enough to deter most everyone who ever asked, but not him. Hoover had to have coached her on what to say and she’d likely practiced it in the years following his death, but that had been many, many years ago. With so much time having gone by, she couldn’t have expected to be asked about this any longer. She had to feel the secret was comfortably in the past.

Her smile seemed a little forced, and she turned back again to unnecessarily adjust the stove’s burner.

“Roni,” he said over the rattle of wind-driven rain against the window and shutters, “you knew someone would come along eventually. Hoover knew it too. That’s why he told you about it in the first place. It’s too big of a secret to have died with him and it’s too big to die with you either.”

That flustered her, and she stammered, “I–I don’t know…what you’re talking about. I think maybe you should leave me be.”

She turned back to him and they looked at each other across the simple kitchen. In the background came the serious voices of broadcasters on an emergency radio talking about the storm. “I’ve been to the cave, Roni,” Mercer said and he saw her resolve start to crack. She’d carried this burden for fifty years, and she wanted so badly to pass it along. “I was in Afghanistan two days ago. I know Mike Dillman went back there and cleared it out, but I found a sliver of Sample 681 he overlooked.”

A crack appeared in Roni Butler’s decades-long resolve. “That’s what the president labeled it for his collection, though he called the mineral electricium. I liked Mike Dillman’s name more. He said they were called the lightning stones. I don’t know if he made that up or heard it from natives living around the cave.”

“A single sample of these lightning stones ended up with a friend of mine, who was murdered along with several other people when the crystal was stolen.”

“Murdered? Stolen? What are you talking about?”

“It’s no longer all that secret,” he informed her. “But I need to know the rest of it if I’m going to stop the killers.”

She sagged further, and in a symbolic gesture of which she herself was probably unaware, she set down a dishrag as if throwing in the towel. “Like I said, President Hoover named the gems electricium, because of how it attracted lightning, and also how it changed the way magnets worked. It had other strange properties, but I honestly don’t remember what they were — it’s been too long now.”

“That’s fine. Just tell me what you do recall. Who was Mike Dillman, for example?”

“He worked for the president when Bert was running a mining concern in China. The president called Dillman his bloodhound because he could find minerals everywhere.” Mercer didn’t point out that minerals were everywhere. “He credited Dillman with finding lodes of ore that the Chinese had overlooked for centuries. Dillman would go off prospecting for months at a time without telling anyone where he was going. The president was in his early twenties at this time, young to be given such responsibility, and he said that Mike Dillman was younger still, not yet out of his teens.

“President Hoover said that his protégé was as much an anthropologist as he was a geologist, and would use local lore to help find interesting rock samples. That is what took him so far to the south that he ended up in Waziristan, as it was known at the time. On this particular trip he was accompanied by a young Frenchman who’d been sent to the Orient by his family to avoid a scandal back home. They had some connections in Peking or Tianjin or some such. Anyway, as the president implied when he told me the story, the Frenchman had a particular predilection that wasn’t appreciated back home even if they did call it ‘Gay Paris.’ ”

“Ah.” Mercer’s eyebrow went up. “Was Dillman…?”

“I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea, but the two of them did find something on that trip and they had a bit of a falling-out over it. The Frenchman left Asia soon after they returned to the capital. Not long after that came the Boxer Rebellion and the Hoovers left China for Australia. Dillman went off on his own at that time. No one realized the potential of the few crystals Dillman returned with until many years later, when the president was donating a lot of his possessions. A crate of old geological samples went to a scientist friend at Carnegie Mellon University. President Hoover said after the fact that it was mostly samples of copper ore, recovered from several mines he had worked, and this had something to do with stopping the crystals buried in the crate from showing their true selves. It was the friend at Carnegie who went on to discover all the odd phenomena and actually coined the name electricium.”

“So that’s how and where Abe got his sample,” Mercer said, more to himself than for her benefit. She made an inquiring gesture as if he should elaborate, but he shook it off and said, “Please, go on.”

She asked first if he wanted cream or sugar, and when Mercer demurred she handed him a ceramic mug of strong black coffee. After the swill he’d had back in the school gymnasium, this was just what he needed. His body had no idea what time of the day or night it was, so he was awake by force of will alone.

“When President Hoover realized the importance of what had been in his collection all those years, he reached out to his old friend Mike Dillman one more time and asked that he return to the cave where he had first discovered the crystals, to bring back the rest.”

The emergency radio cut to static, and Roni fiddled with it until the newscasters were audible again. She added with a dark tone, “It was only later that the president learned Dillman had called upon the Frenchman to help, not realizing this was supposed to have been a secret.”

“Do you know the Frenchman’s name?”

“No. I was told it once or twice, but I can’t recall, and the president forbade me from writing any of this down.”

Mercer hid his disappointment. Knowing that could open up other avenues for investigation. “Please, continue.”

“The Frenchman refused to return to Waziristan, or so he claimed, and Dillman went off to recover the rest of the electricium by himself. Just so you know, this would have been in January of 1937 when he left California, where he worked as an assayer.”

“And they discovered the mineral at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. That was 1900, right?”

“Well done. Yes.”

“So Dillman was no longer a young man?”

“He wasn’t, but President Hoover had a way about him that almost compelled people to drop everything they were doing and help him. That was why he is credited with saving Belgium from famine during World War One, and it was his idea to distribute food across Europe after the Second World War. When he asked you for something you did it, because it was invariably the right thing to do. In this country, history has not been kind to him, because he is falsely blamed for the Depression, but internationally he remains one of the most respected presidents this nation has ever produced. He was a great man, Mr. Mercer. Even in his golden years he was so…”—she sought the right word—“well, compelling.”

“Mike Dillman,” Mercer prompted when she became lost in her memories for a few seconds.

“Yes. Mike Dillman. He returned to what is now Afghanistan and recovered the rest of the crystals from the cave. He managed to cable a report from Rawalpindi once he was safely back in civilization. I remember President Hoover telling me that Dillman said there was a dead body in the cave that hadn’t been there on his first sojourn.”

That made the corpse of the mystic Mercer had seen much newer than he’d lied to Jordan about.

“His next cable came from Calcutta, on the eastern side of the Indian subcontinent. He informed President Hoover that men had tried to rob him of the crystals several times since his return from the tribal areas. He believed they were agents of the Frenchman and said that they had managed to trick him out of a single shard before he realized their nefarious intent.”

Roni gave a soft sad smile of remembrance. “Those were President Hoover’s exact words. I can still hear his voice in my head. Sorry. When you reach my age all you have is arthritis and memories.”

“My eightysomething friend Harry says an enlarged prostate, too, but that doesn’t apply here.”

She chuckled. “I was going to add ‘and boobs down to your knees.’ I should meet this friend of yours.”

“He’ll feel the same when I tell him about you.”

She went back to her story while Mercer’s coffee went cold and forgotten in his cup and the rain continued to fall. “Dillman managed to stay one step ahead of these dark agents as he hopscotched his way ever eastward by tramp steamer, sailboat, and whatever native craft he could beg a ride on. But by Dillman’s own admission to President Hoover, it was a race back to the States that he was going to lose. His health was failing, and the Frenchman seemed to have bought thugs in every country from India to the Philippines. Every time Dillman tried to book passage on a legitimate steamship, corrupt agents informed the Frenchman’s proxies. In Singapore Mr. Dillman had to shoot his way off a San Francisco — bound ship and leap over the side several miles from the nearest land. Through cables, President Hoover urged him to find an American consulate or embassy, but Dillman had begun to crack under the pressure of the pursuit and was too paranoid to turn to strangers. By this point he was hiding in the city of Rabaul on Papua New Guinea, and wrote that there were men roaming the streets looking for him. Unknowingly, though, he had put himself in the perfect place. The president came up with an idea to end the chase once and for all, and he called in a favor from George Putnam.”

“Who is?”

“I’ll tell you in a second because the end of this story is going to knock your socks off.” The old woman chuckled knowingly.

“Like everyone else, Putnam couldn’t resist the former president’s request and he in turn allowed President Hoover to contact his wife. Dillman was given a new final destination, and he agreed to turn over the crystals once he got there. He managed to steal a sailboat and sailed it south to the town of Lae, where on the morning of July second Putnam’s wife sent a note back to her husband informing him that the package had been delivered the night before.”

Mercer started getting a bad feeling.

“And so she took off with the crystals aboard her Lockheed Electra with navigator Fred Noonan on the longest and most dangerous leg of her round-the-world journey, a publicity stunt so her husband and financier, George Putnam, could sell more newspapers.”

He groaned when the names and dates all came together in his mind. Few knew George Putnam, but every schoolchild knows the name of his famous wife.

“You know who I’m talking about?” It was more statement than question.

Mercer wasn’t sure whether he wanted to laugh or cry at the cruel irony of it all. “Amelia Earhart,” he said dejectedly. “She had the lion’s share of Sample 681 aboard her plane when she vanished.”