by Jack Du Brul
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 labe
led 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 calle
d 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.”
18
In the next moment, Mercer’s world went from bad to worse.
A piercing alarm blared from the radio. It was the nerve-jangling sound of the emergency response system, that annoying tone most people switched away from when listening to the radio or watching television. But in parts of the country where residents understood that nature had not yet been tamed, they heeded these signals as life-or-death alerts.
When the awful honking ended, a mechanical voice replaced it and started rattling off county names. They meant nothing to Mercer until Roni Butler suddenly tensed. Whatever was happening was happening here.
The voice then said, “It has been reported that Army Corps engineers have initiated an emergency release of water from the Wilbur Berry dam reservoir on the upper reaches of Blair Creek. Anyone who has not followed the evacuation order and lives in the Blair Creek watershed, the creek is estimated to crest a further five feet above its current level.”
