Ancient Shores

Someone knocked at the kitchen door.

Gi

Gi

The woman came in, unbuttoned her coat, and saw Max. “Good morning, Mr. Lasker,” she said.

“My name’s Collingwood,” he said.

Her only reaction was a slightly raised eyebrow. She turned back to Gi

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Gi

McCarthy nodded and lowered herself into a chair. She signaled Max for coffee. “I understand perfectly. I’d feel the same way. It is a lovely boat.”

Gi

“You do want to explore your options, dear,” she continued. “But I can assure you no one will offer a better price. I wonder if you’d be willing to let me look at it a little more closely. I’d like to see the cabins. And the motor.”

Gi

“Mrs.,” she corrected. “My husband, George, God rest him, would never stand for it if I abandoned him now.”

“Mrs. McCarthy.” Gi

Mrs. McCarthy pushed her coat off and let it fall back over the chair. Let’s talk turkey, she seemed to be saying.

Max excused himself and went to pack. It was time to go back to Fargo. With Tom coming in and the crowd wandering the premises, he could see no reason why he was needed. From the living room, Max watched cars continue to arrive. Rain was begi

Where had the yacht come from?

No serial number. No plates of any kind.

Sails that had to have been in the ground, Gi

He dropped his bag at the front door and went back out to the barn to look at them. They were neatly stacked in plastic sheaths. He opened one and removed the fabric. It was bright white. And soft. More like the texture of a shirt than a sail.

When Gi

“She’s in your business, Max,” she said. “Do you believe that? Except that she restores boats.” She held out a business card. Pequod, Inc., it read. Mrs. George McCarthy, director. Boating as It Used to Be.

“I take it she made an offer?”

Gi

A van pulled into the driveway and opened its doors. Its passengers, who appeared to be a group of retired people, hesitated about getting out into the rain.

Max shook his head. “Don’t jump too quickly,” he said.

“What? Why not?”

“Because it’s probably worth a lot more. Look, Gi

Gi

“Sure.”

“May I have a few? And one other thing: I’d like to make off with a piece of sail. Okay?”

She looked at him uncertainly. “Okay,” she said. “Why?”

“I’d like to find out what it’s made from.”

“It feels like linen,” she said.

“That’s what I thought.”

She smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.” A curtain of hard rain was approaching from the west. “I better put it away.” She jumped down off the porch, climbed into the tractor, and started the engine. Most of the visitors, seeing the sky, decided to get out while they could and ran to their cars.

She had to back the boat into the barn. It was about halfway in, and she was turned around in the operator’s seat, trying to ease between stalls, when she stopped and stared. “Max.” She waved him forward. “Look at this.”

“It’s raining out there,” he protested.

But she waited for him. He sighed, jammed his hands into his pockets, and walked across the squishy lawn. “What?” he said. The rain got heavier. It drove against him, drilled him, took his breath away.

She was pointing at the prow, paying no attention to the downpour. “Look.”

He looked. “I don’t see anything.”

“I don’t think,” she whispered, “it’s getting very wet.”

A haze had risen around the boat, much the way it will on a city street during a downpour. Max shrugged. “What’s your point?”

“Look at the tractor.”

No mist.

Well, maybe a little. The tractor had been recently polished. It shimmered, and large waxy drops ran down its fenders.

But the boat: The rain fountained off the hull and was shot through with rainbow colors. It was almost as if the water was being repelled.

An hour later the P—38J rolled down the runway at Fort Moxie International Airport and lifted into a gray, wet sky. Max watched the airstrip fall away. The wind sock atop the lone hangar was around to the southeast at about twenty knots. North of the airport, frame houses and picket fences and unpaved streets mingled with stands of trees and broad lawns. The water tower, emblazoned with the town’s name and motto, A Good Place to Live, rose proudly above the rooftops. The Red River looked cold.

He followed Route 11 west, into the rain, flying over wide fields of wilted sunflowers waiting to be plowed under. Only a farm truck, and a flock of late geese headed south, moved in all that vast landscape. He cruised over Tom’s place. The driveway was almost empty now, and the barn was shut against the elements. He turned south.

The rain beat on his canopy; the sky was gray and soupy. He looked over at his starboard tail boom, prosaic and solid. The power plant consisted of two 1,425-horsepower liquid-cooled Allison engines. White Lightning had been manufactured sixty years ago by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation of Seattle. It was magic, too, like the boat. But this was real; it was magic held aloft by physics. There was no room in the same world for a P—38J and a buried yacht with working lights.

None at all.

He climbed to seventeen thousand feet, his assigned altitude, and set course for Fargo.

Max dropped the fragment of sail off at Colson Laboratories, asking that they determine the composition of the material and, if possible, where it might have been manufactured. They promised to get the results back to him within a week.

Stell Weatherspoon was his executive assistant. She was an overweight, bright-eyed, matronly type with three kids in high school and an ex who was constantly delinquent with his payments. Her prime responsibility at Sundown was to handle the administrative details of the operation. She wrote contracts, scheduled maintenance, hired subcontractors. She was also a born conservative who understood the difference between risks and gambles, and who thereby exercised a restraining influence on Max’s occasional capricious tendencies. Had she been along, Kerr would have had his Lockheed Lightning, no questions asked. “Don’t get emotionally involved with the planes,” she warned him now and then. “These are business ventures, not women.”