by Jaime Maddox
This had been the scene all day at her home on Canal Street, and indeed in all of the homes in the flood plain of the Wyoming Valley. Hurricane Agnes had settled in the region, rain was falling at record levels, and the river was rising at an equally unprecedented pace. Jeannie had spent her day helping her parents pack boxes. They too had shifted furniture and household goods to the second floor, which was safely out of the river’s reach. Floodwaters had never reached the second story of these homes.
“Let’s go see what General Parker wants us to do now,” Sandy said teasingly, referring to the no-nonsense manner in which her grandmother took charge of the workers.
They entered in the middle of an argument. Nellie’s brother Arthur was there to drive them to the Poconos. While Nellie felt comfortable behind the wheel, she didn’t drive long distances and certainly not in a hurricane. The siblings were arguing about the Norman Rockwell painting that had stood watch over her dining-room table since the early days of her marriage.
“Why can’t I bring it, Arthur? It won’t take up much room!”
“It’ll get damaged, Nell. Just put it upstairs under a cloth and it’ll be safe.”
“I’d hate to lose that picture. David bought that for me, you know.”
Arthur smiled at Nellie and patted her shoulder. “I know you treasure it. And if I thought for a moment there was any danger, I’d tell you to take it.”
Sandy and Jeannie stood near the entrance to the command center in the kitchen, and Nellie called Sandy close. “Get a Buster Brown box for me, and bring my jewelry box. And bring your grandfather’s pocket watch as well.”
A Buster Brown box was their private code for the cash they kept stored in the attic. Each box held between five and twenty-five thousand dollars, depending on the denomination of the bills. A box would give them plenty of money to hold them over during their exile.
Sandy and Jeannie went back up the stairs, and Sandy went alone into the attic to retrieve the money. She handed the box to Jeannie. Back in her grandparents’ bedroom, Sandy picked up the small wooden box that held Nellie’s jewels, and then she retrieved her grandfather’s watch from the drawer where it had always been stored. She handed the watch to Jeannie, who lifted the shoe-box lid and placed the watch inside for safekeeping. If the stacks of money there surprised her, her face didn’t betray her.
Out in the hall as they were about to descend to the first floor, they heard a deafening crash in Sandy’s room. She and Jeannie rushed to the doorway and screamed in horror at the bloody mess they found. Robbie Burns was covered in blood, and glass was scattered from the table he’d fallen through after tripping in all the clutter of her room. The sight was all the scarier because of the flickering candle illuminating the room, casting its dark shadows everywhere.
The promising physician Jeannie ran to him, and placing the Buster Brown box on the dresser, she pulled a few shirts out of Sandy’s drawer to use as bandages to help stop his hemorrhage.
“Tell the chief to radio for an ambulance,” Jeannie instructed Sandy. The fire chief had been walking into Nellie’s kitchen moments before when they’d left on their mission. With the power cut, they didn’t have a phone to call for medical assistance, so they hoped the chief was still downstairs.
“I’m okay,” Robbie insisted, but he appeared to be a little woozy. A gash on his forehead at the hairline seemed to be the biggest problem, and Jeannie surveyed the rest of him while she held pressure with the shirt.
About to pass out from the sight of blood, Robbie’s brother had stepped out of the room, but now he came back to check on the injuries. Robbie’s hands were cut from trying to break the fall, but other than the gash on his head, he didn’t seem to have suffered from any other injuries. Together, Billy and Jeannie helped Robbie to his feet, then down the hallway and the stairs, where miraculously they met the Tilbury Ambulance crew. They’d been on standby at the entrance to Canal Street.
Candles also illuminated the first floor. At least a dozen reflected in Jeannie’s eyes as they met Sandy’s.
“Can’t you do anything, Doc?” Sandy teased Jeannie after she handed over care to the trained professionals.
“I’m going to do neurosurgery to repair his brain if I can find my needle and thread in this mess,” Jeannie responded.
Suddenly Paul Bennett came into the hallway, squeezing around the ambulance crew. “Sweetie, we have to go. Everyone’s in the car except you.” His voice was kind. He had to know how hard this flood would be on Jeannie.
Sandy’s eyes met Jeannie’s and she tried to convey all of her love and comfort with a smile. Holding her grandmother’s jewelry box with one arm, she hugged Jeannie close with the other. “I love you,” she whispered into Jeannie’s ear.
“I love you, too.”
They pulled apart, except for their eyes, which held until, walking backward, Jeannie stepped out the door and out of Sandy’s life forever.
“Sandra.” Her grandmother’s voice conveyed the stress of the day. “The chief says we have to go, now. The water’s reached the road.”
Sandy’s bag had already been packed and taken to Arthur’s car. She followed her grandmother, still carrying the jewelry box, and took her place in the backseat. It wasn’t until they were on the road, miles from Canal Street, with no opportunity to turn back, that Sandy realized Jeannie had left the Buster Brown box with the money and her grandfather’s watch sitting on the dresser in her room.
Chapter Seventeen
Showdown, June 18, 2011
Washington Square is as quiet a place as can be found in Manhattan. A dozen stories up, Sandy’s bedroom, facing the park and the street below, was quiet and peaceful. The double set of blinds on the windows, installed to keep out the afternoon sun when Diane had been sick and sleeping during the day, worked equally well at thwarting the ambient light of the neighborhood. Hers was the penthouse. The neighbor below was a quiet man who never brought his dates home, and so the overall ambience was peaceful.
Still, sleep would not come to Sandy. She lay still in her bed, but her mind was active as she remembered all she could of the man who had somehow come into possession of her grandfather’s watch. Robbie Burns had been her classmate since kindergarten, a quiet boy, but always friendly to her. He was never the most popular kid, but everyone liked him. He endured the occasional taunting about his father’s job as caretaker at the town’s only cemetery, but in a town as small as West Nanticoke, the kids had no real enemies. Everyone looked out for one another. The same boys who teased him as a child were the ones who covered his back when they all transferred to the junior high school in seventh grade and their small class of forty became a class of two hundred.
It was often said that you didn’t mess with anyone from West Nanticoke, or you’d be messing with everyone.
As they grew from children to young adults Robbie became shyer, or at least it seemed that way. Jeannie had suggested on more than one occasion that Robbie had a crush on Sandy, but she thought it was merely that they had a special bond because of their family ties. His father managed the maintenance for all of the Parker rental properties.
Although they had little in common after they outgrew riding bikes and climbing trees, when he worked at her grandparents’ house, whether in the garden replacing broken stones, painting, or caring for the lawn, he was always very friendly. He and Sandy often worked side by side for hours, talking Phillies baseball, sometimes listening to games on her transistor radio or singing along to the radio in easy companionship. If she needed someone dependable in that time of her life, she knew she could have asked Robbie for just about anything. The boy she knew would not have stolen anything, especially from her.
Yet someone had robbed the Parker house on the night of the flood; there was no question about that. The watch had been there, in the box of money, on her dresser, when the house was abandoned as they fled the rising river. Jeannie, Billy, and Robbie were the last ones down the staircase that night. Sandy remembered a
solitary flashlight as they descended the huge marble stair, the gleam reflecting like a mirror in the darkness behind them. No one was carrying a shoe box. Billy, on Robbie’s right, held the light in that hand and supported Robbie with the other. Jeannie held Robbie with her right arm as she held the banister with her left. It was slow progress down all those stairs, with nothing to guide them but the narrow beam of Billy’s light and Robbie’s weight to throw off their balance.
After finding the chief, who was helping Arthur carry something to his car, Sandy entered from the rear of the house and met the trio on the stairs. She waved her own flashlight on the stairs to guide their way. As they reached the bottom, the ambulance immediately took Robbie, and Mr. Burns and Billy followed. Mr. Bennett came in for Jeannie. Her grandmother came in for her.
Sandy blew out the candles and left through the front door behind the Bennetts. The house was dark and deserted as they left. As they pulled away from the house in the pouring rain, the world was dark save for the headlights of that parade of automobiles, led by the ambulance, with Arthur’s car pulling up the rear. As they drove the short distance along Canal Street that night, the car tires were already underwater. It would have been impossible for anyone to go back, unless by boat.
That, she realized, was what had to have happened. After they left, someone who knew about the money must have gone back with a boat to steal it. Her grandfather’s watch was just a bonus.
Remembering the night they had fled West Nanticoke, Sandy found it hard to imagine that Robbie could have taken part in a robbery at her grandparents’ house later that night. He had suffered deep wounds to both hands, and Sandy figured it would have been at least a week or so before they were working well enough to use them. He might have been able to commit a robbery if the head wound was his only injury, but as Jeannie and Billy had walked with him on the stairs, Robbie had looked shaky. A concussion was likely. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had been admitted to the hospital because of his injuries.
It wasn’t only the injuries that convinced Sandy of Robbie’s innocence, though. She had seen him just the week before, when he had shown her the watch. He had shown no fear, no hesitation to hand over the watch for her inspection. He had been so proud of the watch and what it represented. His grandfather really was a hero, and she had no doubt that Robbie truly believed the watch in his possession belonged to him.
If it wasn’t Robbie, then who had robbed the house? It certainly could have been anyone. There was no police presence guarding the house; all someone would have needed was a boat with a powerful motor and enough guts to challenge the current of the rising river.
How had Robbie gotten the watch, then? The answer to that question would answer the first, and it was just the first question she had for him when she met him later that day.
She had another question as well. If someone had risked their life in the swift current of the Susquehanna, would they have settled for a single box of cash? Might they have also stolen the artwork? Between the cash and the art in the house that night, a thief could have walked away with close to a million dollars. And while the cash wasn’t traceable, the Rockwell, the Wyeth, and the Remington certainly were. On today’s market, the paintings alone were worth four or five million dollars. As her daughter had pointed out the night before, keeping the theft of the Parker art a secret could certainly be a motive for murder.
*
Less than a mile away on a beat-up couch much too small for him, Danny stared at the ceiling of his friend’s apartment. Unlike the luxury apartment that Sandy owned, this place was far from quiet. It wasn’t the noise on the streets of Greenwich Village that was keeping him awake, however. The noise in his head was deafening. The things he had learned in the past few days had his head spinning and his heart pounding.
No way could he tell Sandy the location of her stolen art. If things weren’t already bad enough, she’d divulged the existence of yet another piece of art that had probably been stolen as well. Of all the pieces in his father’s collection, the Rockwell was by far the most valuable. If Danny could twist his thoughts to rationalize Dan stealing the pieces that had been Cowboy’s, treasures he perhaps thought were rightfully his, Danny couldn’t apply the same thinking to the theft of the Rockwell that hung in his dining room. That piece had never been in the Parker family; it was purchased for Sandy’s grandmother to celebrate the birth of her son. Why—except pure greed—would his father want that piece of art?
Danny had no idea what the hell had happened during the flood, and until he did, he planned to keep his mouth shut about what little he did know. He’d already discussed with Sandy a plan to drive to West Nanticoke on Saturday morning, and both of them were so anxious to meet with Robbie Burns that if it weren’t for too many margaritas, they’d have left Friday evening.
He was trying to understand what had happened the night of the flood. Had his family orchestrated the robbery, using the rising waters of the Susquehanna as a cover for their crime? It was possible, but it really didn’t seem likely. Although it was predicted that Agnes would be a record flood, no one knew the house on Canal Street would be swept away. If not for that fact, the crime would have been detected quickly. Even if the muddy waters of the river had washed away any evidence that would have incriminated those responsible, it would have been a much more dangerous scenario to display the art if it was known to be stolen.
His great-grandfather Dale, or whoever was responsible for the theft, would have recovered the family heirlooms but would have had to sequester them in a closet to prevent their discovery. There would have been no point, and that certainly hadn’t been the case. Dale had proudly displayed the pieces as long as Danny could remember, and more recently they had been prominently in view in his father’s study. They had to know the pieces were stolen; yet it didn’t seem to bother them. The question was why? And was there some connection to the stolen art and the stolen land? Most worrisome of all, as Angie had asked a few hours before—was there some connection between the theft of this art and the bullets fired at Sandy’s back?
*
“Would you like coffee or a doughnut?” Robbie asked them as they seated themselves on the metal folding chairs in front of his desk.
Danny appeared squeamish at the prospect of eating here in this anteroom of the dead, but Sandy had spent her childhood doing just that. “That would be wonderful,” she replied, then watched as he prepared the Keurig.
At seven a.m., the earliest hour Sandy felt acceptable to call a near stranger, she’d dialed Robbie’s number. Two funerals had consumed his morning, but now at nearly two o’clock he was finally free to talk with them. The cemetery was deserted, visitors and workers long gone, allowing them to speak without interruption.
In spite of his morning duties, Robbie appeared clean and fresh, wearing jeans and a T-shirt rather than coveralls as he had at their last meeting.
Sandy courteously waited for him to complete the task at hand, and when he was seated at his desk she began to talk. Like an actress on the stage, she had rehearsed her dialogue into the wee hours of the morning. Her dress rehearsal had been for Danny’s ears only on the ride from New York. Now, seated in front of Robbie, who looked as nervous as she felt, she had a difficult time beginning.
“I came to see you about the watch,” she finally explained. Leaning forward in her seat, she rested the coffee on Robbie’s desk, suddenly too nauseated to drink. Before she could say anything more, Robbie interrupted her.
“Ms. Parker, I wish you’d just told me that on the phone. I could have saved you a long trip.” Robbie’s nerves appeared to calm as he spoke, and he looked at home behind the beat-up desk in the old cinderblock structure. Surrounded by the tools of his trade, he was literally in his element, which showed in the confidence that grew as he spoke. “It’s true that the Burns family isn’t quite as well off as the Parkers are, but this watch is our family’s greatest treasure. It is not for sale, at any price.” He leaned back in his chair
when he finished speaking, his body language the exclamation point telling them that he’d made his mind up and his decision was final.
Sandy’s script hadn’t allowed for Robbie’s candid interruption, and she wasn’t sure how to proceed as she studied his face. Even more convinced than before that he had nothing to do with the theft, she understood now that this conversation would be more difficult than she’d anticipated.
Saved from a reply by Danny, Sandy watched him hand Robbie a copy of the nearly one-hundred-year-old receipt for the watches. After pausing for a moment to allow Robbie to glance at the paper, Danny began to speak. “We’d like to show you this document, Mr. Burns. This is a copy of the receipt for the purchase of your grandfather’s watch, and all the others. No others were ever made except the ones you see documented on this paper.” Danny’s tone was respectful, and even though he was dressed in another tight-fitting shirt and well-worn shorts, his carriage and demeanor bespoke the lawyer he would one day become. He handed Sandy a copy of the document so she could follow along, and even though she knew the details, knew what the paper said and what it meant, she concentrated on Danny’s every word.
“See the top line, here?” Danny pointed to his own receipt so Robbie could follow. “This is the charge for forty-eight watches. They were very nice watches, made of gold, but they had plain stainless-steel faces and no diamonds. They cost the company about forty dollars each, which was expensive in 1918. This type of watch was given to the mine foremen and officers of the company, and to men like your grandfather who were exceptional employees.”
Robbie interrupted him, the anger in his voice evident. “My grandfather was a hero, Mr. Parker. He saved seven men from drowning. He was more than an exceptional employee who did the company’s bidding.”
Danny nodded in agreement, and Sandy found herself doing the same. She had to suppress a smile when she realized she looked like a bobble-head doll. “You’re right, sir. I don’t mean to trivialize the heroic act your grandfather performed. I’m merely showing you this paper to explain the differences in the watches the Parker Coal Company gave out in 1918 and the following years.”
