ALSO BY CURTIS PARKINSON
Storm-Blast
Sea Chase
Domenic’s War
Death in Kingsport
To Anne, Geoff, and Jane
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The best stories, as someone wisely said, are not created; they are discovered by the author as they unfold on the page. I’m grateful to those who helped so much along the way as I was discovering, sometimes to my surprise, this story.
Particular thanks to Kathy Lowinger, Sue Tate, and Anne Carter. My thanks, too, to the staff at Tundra, who so skillfully made this book a reality.
PREFACE
The castle towered menacingly over the bottle green pines and the royal blue waters of the St. Lawrence River. It was said to be cursed.
Built by an American millionaire on Deadman’s Island in the early years of the twentieth century its picturesque setting was unequaled. But at the party to celebrate the opening, a prominent guest fell off the dock and drowned. Then, in 1929, the millionaire owner lost his fortune overnight in the stock-market crash and leapt to his death from the tower.
When the young son of the next owner disappeared mysteriously from the castle one day, never to be seen again, the curse of the Castle on Deadman’s Island was entrenched forever in local lore.
ONE
_
Neil Graves was convinced that someone was after his friend. Yet Graham was making light of it. “Did you get the license number?” Neil asked.
“The car was gone before I had a chance,” Graham said. “I only saw the color – dark green – and the driver’s hat. Anyway it’s my own fault. I was thinking about something else and I wasn’t looking.”
They crossed the street and headed for the high school. Neil noticed that Graham looked carefully both ways this time. He’s more concerned than he’s letting on, he thought, and he’s not telling me the whole story. Typical Graham. I’ll have to pry the details out of him.
“But the girls said the car swerved right at you,” Neil said. “Like it was trying to run you down….”
Graham sneezed. The ragweed season was back and so was his hay fever. “Those girls hab a tendency to drabatize.”
The mysterious note in the library book, the man spying on Graham, the careening car … to Neil, it all sounded sinister and threatening. “I don’t like it.”
Graham pulled out a large red handkerchief and blew his nose. “I didn’t look where I was going, that’s all – I was pondering the future of television.”
“Telewhat?”
“Television. It’s a new invention – like radio with pictures. They say it’ll be in every living room after the war. Forget radio.”
Neil was skeptical. Forget radio! Forget The Shadow; Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy; Jack Benny; Bob Hope! “Who says so?”
“I read all about it in Popular Mechanics,” Graham said. Neil could almost smell the chalk as Graham switched into professor mode. “Quite simple, really. The pictures from the television camera are turned into electrical impulses called pixels, which are beamed through the air to a picture tube in your living room, and –”
“The man driving the car,” Neil interrupted, not caring about pixels right now, “he was the same guy who was spying on you in the library?”
“No. What I said was, the driver of the car wore a gray fedora, like the guy in the library. I didn’t say he was the same guy.”
“Come on, Graham. Someone’s secretly watching you in the library, and half an hour later, someone’s trying to run you down in the street. And they have the same hat. Funny coincidence.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s lots of gray fedoras in Kingsport. Besides, why would anyone want to run me down?”
Right then and there, Neil decided he’d better stick close to Graham for a while. If his best friend wasn’t going to watch out for himself, then he, Neil, darn well better. Without letting on to Graham, of course.
TWO
_
It had started in the Kingsport Library the day before. The library’s polished walnut woodwork lent it a warmth that invited you to sit and read a novel, or browse through the latest issue of a magazine-perhaps Time, with its eyewitness account of the thousand-plane bombing of Germany the week before; or Life’s action photos from the deck of an American aircraft carrier, with guns blazing at Japanese kamikaze planes hurtling towards it.
Graham Graham, however, wasn’t interested in a novel or a magazine on this June afternoon in 1942. He was in the library’s reference room, looking for a book on castles.
Miss McKnight, the librarian, had been surprised. Graham’s usual requests were for some obscure book on mathematics, or physics, or geology that most teenagers would never have heard of. His vocabulary wasn’t what you’d expect to hear from a teenager, either – it was peppered with words like “tome” for book or “dilatory” for late. Not that he was trying to impress anyone – that was just the way he was. At school he was generally shunned, except for his friend Neil.
“There’s a book on castles in the reference room,” Miss McKnight had said, giving him the Dewey decimal number, “but it can’t be taken out. You’ll have to read it here.
“That’s odd,” she said to her assistant, as she watched Graham trot off to the reference room. “That book on castles has been sitting on the shelf for years, untouched, and now Graham is the second person today to ask for it….”
As Graham was taking the thick book down from the top shelf, a creepy feeling overwhelmed him. The back of his neck tingled. He knew someone was watching.
He turned. Through one of the slits between the rows of shelved books behind him, he caught a glimpse of steely eyes peering intently at him. Just a glimpse and they were gone.
He had an uneasy moment, then shrugged and went back to the book. He was interested in it because his aunt Henrietta had just inherited a castle, or rather, one-third of a castle. Until then, the only castle Graham ever had anything to do with was the one in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He’d had a small part in the play when the high-school drama group recruited him to be one of the castle flunkies.
“‘Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,’” he remembered the witches in the play chanting, foretelling the bloody events to come in that gloomy Scottish castle. Not a good omen for his aunt if that was any indication of what went on in castles, he thought.
Now, searching through the book, he found that most of the castles in it were ancient, like Macbeth’s, and situated in strategic places for defense against invaders. His aunt’s castle, however, was relatively new as castles go and was originally built as a millionaire’s summer retreat. It was, in fact, just down the river from Kingsport.
“Her castle probably won’t even be in here,” Graham muttered. Then he turned a page and there it was.
The Castle on Deadman’s Island, he read, is one of several castles built in the Thousand Islands, on the border between the United States and Canada, by American captains of industry in the early 1900s. This was followed by some statistics on the number of rooms (53), how many skilled tradesmen it took to build (145), and ended with During the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, the castle changed hands several times. At the time of writing, it is vacant, as buyers of multimillion-dollar castles are hard to find during a depression.
A bit out of date, Graham knew. For he was well aware that the castle had been bought in 1938 by Major Tripe, a wealthy Kingsportian who’d made his fortune prospecting for gold in Northern Ontario. But after only three summers enjoying his castle on the St. Lawrence, Major Tripe died there, suddenly, of an illness that baffled the doctors. “The curse of the cas
tle,” the locals said, nodding wisely.
The major had no immediate family and his will left all his assets to an animal shelter – except for the castle. Coveted by many Kingsportians, the castle was left to three of the major’s friends to share jointly.
The major’s present to his three friends would not have seemed unusual except that the three hated each other with a passion, as everyone in Kingsport knew. The major had always been a joker, and when his will was read, some people laughed and said this was his last practical joke.
Others, however, found the major’s will appalling. Among these was Graham’s mother. For one of the three new owners of the castle was her sister, Graham’s aunt Henrietta.
“Practical joke, indeed!” Mrs. Graham had said to her husband at the dinner table when the news broke. “Mark my words, Alex, that will is going to lead to a heap of trouble. I just hope Henrietta isn’t the one to suffer.”
Her remark had aroused Graham’s interest, leading him to the library to read up on the castle.
Now, having learned what he could, Graham reached up to slide the book back on the shelf. A piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor like a wounded bird. Curious, he picked it up and turned it over. There was a handwritten note.
Have important news about you-know-who. Urgent we act immediately. This is our chance. She suspects nothing. Meet me at the usual place – coal pile end. Tomorrow night at eight.
THREE
_
Graham read the note over several times. The ink looked fresh. It could have been written that very day.
As he was examining the note, he again got the feeling of being watched. He looked around quickly. Only two other people were in the reference room – a woman searching the stacks in the far corner and a man in a gray hat hurrying away.
He replaced the note and shelved the book. Not really his business if people wanted to swap notes in library books, like they were secret agents in a Hollywood spy movie. More likely, he thought, the note was written by some local guy – a rotter, as his mother would say – cheating on his wife and arranging a secret get-together with his girlfriend.
Back in the main library, Graham noticed the man in the gray hat he’d seen leaving the reference room. The man appeared to be absorbed in a newspaper.
Curious now, Graham turned away and strolled to the magazine rack. Then he wheeled around. Sure enough, the man was watching. His hooded eyes were leveled at him over the top of his newspaper.
The man rattled his paper and disappeared behind it again. Two can play at this game, Graham decided. He went out the front door of the library, waited a moment, then turned around and scooted back in. The man was already up and hurrying to the reference room. Aha, thought Graham.
He followed the bobbing gray fedora, keeping a row of metal shelves between himself and the wearer. Sure enough, the man took down the very book that Graham had been looking at – the book on castles.
As Graham watched, the man riffled through the pages until he found the note. He stood reading it, deep in thought. “So,” Graham said to himself, “the note was meant for this man, not for someone’s sweetheart.” This was more than a romantic tryst. But what? He thought back to the note: Urgent we act immediately. This is our chance. Was he a Nazi spy?
He noted the man’s stocky build, his confident stance, his chest thrown out, his loud green sports coat, yellow tie, and highly polished maroon brogues. Sharply dressed, though without any color sense whatsoever, more like a gangster than a spy. Not as Graham visualized a spy anyway, someone shifty and unobtrusive, keeping in the background, like, say, Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon, which he’d seen a few weeks ago at the Capitol Theater.
Besides, a Nazi spy in Kingsport was about as likely as a palm tree in the Arctic. Graham dismissed that idea. Who else, he wondered, would use a seldom-read book in the library as a safe place to pass notes back and forth? Bank robbers? Bootleggers? Smugglers? There had been a lot of the latter during Prohibition in the United States, smuggling whiskey across Lake Ontario.
Whoever it was, Graham did not want to get mixed up with them. He smiled to himself. What a shock the man in the gray fedora must have had when he saw someone else looking through that book, reading the note meant only for him.
But that was the end of it, as far as Graham was concerned. Nothing more than an amusing incident to tell his friend Neil, when they walked to school together in the morning.
It never occurred to Graham that the subject of the book – castles – could have anything to do with the note he’d found. Far-out speculation was for day-dreamers – like Neil. Graham’s mind dealt only in hard facts.
On the way home, Graham caught up with three girls from his high school, walking arm in arm, pleated knee-length skirts swinging, saddle shoes stepping in unison. He hesitated. He wanted to pass them, but he was awkward with girls – he couldn’t seem to stop babbling in their presence. Still, he couldn’t dawdle along at their pace either, or they’d think he was following them. One of them glanced back and said something to the other two, which made them giggle. Graham decided to cross the road.
Traffic was light – with the war and gas rationing, traffic in Kingsport was always light – and Graham was preoccupied with the piece he’d read in Popular Mechanics on the new technological marvel, television. He stepped blithely onto the road.
One of the girls screamed. Graham looked up and saw the grille of a car bearing down on him. He jumped back, felt a fender brush his hip and something whack him on the elbow. Then the car sped away in a flash of green. The driver was hunched over the wheel, his gray fedora pushed back, as the car disappeared around the corner, tires squealing.
Graham stood stunned. The road was now empty, and he wondered for a moment if he’d imagined the whole thing. The throb in his elbow told him he hadn’t.
The girls clustered around him. “Are you all right, Graham?” one asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Something hit me, though – the door handle or the mirror – right on the funny bone. My arm’s all numb and tingly” He rubbed his elbow. “It’s not the bone that causes the tingling sensation actually, it’s the ulnar nerve. That’s the nerve that runs down the arm and controls the third and fourth fingers of …” He stopped, seeing the girls glance at each other as if confirming that he really was weird.
“The car didn’t even slow down,” another girl said. “It swerved right at you. Good thing Jennie screamed.”
“Thank you for alerting me,” Graham said. “I wasn’t paying attention. I was cogitating.” Seeing them frown, he worried that they thought he’d used a dirty word.
The girls continued up the street, shaking their heads, while Graham, carefully looking both ways, crossed over and took the shortcut home through MacDonald Park.
It had been a strange day, he reflected. When he saw Neil in the morning, he’d tell him about finding the note in the library book and about the man trying to hide behind a newspaper while he spied on him. But he’d downplay his near miss with the car. Neil was too much of a worrier already.
FOUR
_
Neil waited until after school to make one last try to convince Graham that he should take his close call with the car more seriously.
“So what do you want me to do?” Graham said. “Run whenever I see a man in a gray fedora?”
“Look, the guy saw you reading the note meant for his eyes only,” said Neil. “I figure he’s worried that you’ve twigged to their scheme, whatever it is, and he can’t take any chances.”
“I suppose you could be right,” Graham conceded.
“He’s worried enough to try to eliminate you, or at least scare you off. So whatever it is they’re up to, it must be something shady.”
Graham stopped to pick up a pebble, sparkling in the sunshine. “Sedimentary limestone,” he said, examining it. “With embedded quartz crystals. Paleozoic era.” He tucked the pebble in his pocket. “Anyway don’t worry, I can easily find out wh
at he’s up to. Then I’ll know whether to take it seriously or not.”
“How can you find out?”
“Simple. I’ll eavesdrop on the meeting they arranged in that note. ‘Meet me at the usual place – coal pile end,’ the note said. You know where that is, don’t you?”
Neil’s brow knitted. There were coal piles all over town – coal warmed Kingsport’s homes and fueled its factories. “Ward’s Coal, down by the bridge?” he guessed. He liked the slogan painted on the fence. He read it every time they went by in his father’s old Ford: WARD KEEPS COAL, AND COAL KEEPS WARD.
“Ward’s Coal?” Graham shook his head. “Unlikely. They’d be too conspicuous there. Think of a place where there are benches for people to sit and talk.”
“I get it now,” Neil said. “The waterfront!” It was his favorite place to go and watch the waves roll in. At the far end of the waterfront walkway was a dock where boats unloaded coal for the hospital power plant.
“Exactly,” Graham said. “The perfect place for a rendezvous. They’d blend in and nobody would give them a second glance. Except yours truly. I shall just happen to be strolling by at eight o’clock tonight.”
“You can’t,” Neil said.
Graham looked up sharply. “What do you mean? You’ve been urging me to take this seriously, and when I do …”
“I mean they know what you look like. One of them does, anyway – the guy who tried to run you down.”
“I’ll go in disguise then,” Graham said. “Glue some bristles from my father’s shaving brush on my lip, borrow his fedora, and –”
“Graham,” Neil interrupted, “that’s not good enough. Chances are the guy will still recognize you. Then he’ll know he hasn’t scared you off, and he’ll really be after you. No, I’ll go instead.”
The Castle on Deadman's Island Page 1
