“Tell Cordelia that she has my sympathies. Tell her that I did something extraordinary. I found my grail in St. Albans, Vermont. Tell her that I will pray for her … her husband.”
“Pray?”
“We all pray, sir, in our way. Unitarians, Congregationalists, even Catholics.”
LINCOLN WAS REELECTED without the help of the lost draft. The forces of history prevailed. The North would win the war.
So George Amory went to Boston and put the map case in a safety deposit box in the Shawmut Bank. Then he bought a steamer ticket for London.
Then he found his way over to the New Lands on the Back Bay. The city had built out four blocks of landfill and fine houses were rising. He waited outside one of them—which the city directory stated belonged to the Stansfield family—until he saw a footman leave. He followed the man back to a North End tenement.
The next morning, after the man had gone to work, George went up the stairs of the tenement and knocked on the door. It opened, revealing the auburn hair and the physical presence that, in a different place and a different dress, would have seemed regal.
“Mother of Jesus,” said Sheila.
George tried to smile. “You once said that your first love had been a footman who worked for the Stansfields of Boston.”
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“I want to say I’m sorry, and I want to ask a question.”
“I accept your apology. What’s your question?”
“That day at the depot you said you were … something … it never came through.”
From somewhere in the little two-room tenement, a baby began to cry.
Sheila went back inside, and George followed her.
A table, a stove piped into a wall, a bed, a crib, a single window—the world of a woman who was poor but proud. Sheila came back holding the baby.
He asked her, “Did you say, ‘I’m pregnant’?”
“To you? By you? I’d never say such a thing.”
He sensed the lie. “Is the child my”—He peered at the baby—”my daughter?”
“Maureen is the child of John Flaherty.” She spoke with sudden ferocity, almost spitting the words in George’s face. “He married me after I lost me job in the mill, after me aunt in Providence wouldn’t take me in.”
George pulled a roll of cash from his pocket. “Take this. My gift for the baby.”
She did. She was not that proud, or that fierce.
“When she grows up, tell her you know a man who owns a first draft of the U.S. Constitution, annotated by the New England framers. It’s my secret. If she ever needs help, she can come to me, and help is hers.”
EIGHTEEN
THE RISING SUN WOKE Evangeline first.
Frost gathered at the corners of the window. Mist rose off the lake.
In late October, in northern Maine, cool mornings were just plain cold.
But Peter and Evangeline were buried beneath a mountain of down in a queen-sized bed.
Peter rolled toward her and swung an arm over her. His naked chest against her bare back was warm and cool at the same time. He slipped a leg between hers.
This was the way it was supposed to be, she thought. Then she said his name.
His voice rose from sleep. “Mmm-hm.”
“What are we doing?”
“Waking up.” He stretched against her. “Waking up naked. Together.”
“One of the benefits of being on the run,” she said.
“No pajamas in the trunk when you go on the run.”
“So … why don’t we just stay here all day? Do it again, maybe.” She twitched herself against him.
“Do it again. Yeah,” he said. “Then we have to go. We have things to do.”
She rolled toward him and nestled into the crook in his arm. “Why?”
“Because we’re good Americans,” he said.
“I wish we were just a normal couple again.”
“We’ve never been a normal couple.”
“No?” She lifted her head.
“Normal couples in their forties don’t do it early in the morning, not after doing it late last night.” He kissed her neck; then he trailed the kisses down….
His unshaven face felt scratchy against her breast, scratchy and good. She twined her fingers into his hair and turned herself toward him.
And then … his lips were caressing, his fingers teasing, and a current was shooting from the tips of her breasts, down, down from there, down right through her, as it always did when she felt the most … alive.
She threw a leg over his hips, pressed him down onto his back, and lowered herself onto him. The comforter draped over her shoulders like a tent. She began to move.
He tried to meet her movement with his own, and she said, “No. Let me do it.”
And she moved steady but not too fast, lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, focusing on herself, knowing that her enjoyment would be his, too….
And when he moved, she squeezed her legs against his sides. “Stay still.”
He tried, but she was moving faster, and he felt himself rising higher.
She dropped her face onto the pillow and cried out against it. This was a small guest house, after all.
And he put his hands on her bottom and squeezed, and he held his own sound in his throat, but he couldn’t hold anything else….
And when they were done and she was still on top of him, she turned her head to his ear and said, “We have to live through this, Peter.”
“We will.”
“I’m frightened,” she said. “More than I let on. Seeing Bindle—”
“It would frighten anyone.” He pulled the comforter over their bodies.
And they lay like that for a long time.
Then Peter said, “You don’t want to quit, do you?”
She shook her head against his shoulder.
“And if we find it and it doesn’t say what you want it to say? No second guessing?”
There was a long pause, then she shook her head again.
“Good. I smell bacon.” He slid his hands down her back and gave her bottom a smack. “C’mon. We can’t do America’s work if we don’t have a good breakfast.”
YOU’RE LATE.” MARTIN Bloom was standing behind the display case when Peter and Evangeline arrived in the Old Curiosity.
“We started in Greenville. It’s a long drive.”
“What were you doing in Greenville?”
“What we’ve been doing all week.”
“Treasure hunting?”
“Tracking the movements of people who’ve touched the Holy Grail of American history. By the way, you’re not the first to use that term.”
Doherty came out of the office, as red-faced as if he had just had a three-Guinness lunch at Bull Feeney’s. “Who did you track to Greenville?”
“Not who. What,” said Peter. And he dropped a page from the diary onto the countertop. “Ever heard of Professor Aaron Edwards?”
“From Bowdoin? Wrote books on Congregationalist history?” said Martin Bloom. “Taught Chamberlain?”
“Taught George Amory, too,” said Peter.
Bloom picked it up and read the highlight: “ ‘October 25, 1864: GA appeared at my door … Blah blah … decent match for Cordelia … Blah blah … I asked him why he came and he said to tell her he had found his grail….’ “ Bloom looked up. “In Vermont?”
“We were thinking of picking up Route 2 and heading west,” said Peter. “Right across the top of New England, from Maine to St. Albans.”
“It would take you all day to get there on Route 2,” said Doherty.
“And the Constitution hasn’t been there since 1864,” said Peter. “We think, if George Amory of Portland had it, it must have passed through Portland.”
Doherty turned to Martin. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be watching the Internet. Once a day, go to a search engine and run all the usual suspects. How did you miss this?”
“Searching th
e names of every Bowdoin professor between 1858 and 1862 wasn’t something I considered,” said Bloom. “And no search engine in the world is going to translate GA to George Amory.”
“Stop arguing, boys.” Peter went over and plunked himself down on the leather sofa. “It makes you look like an old married couple.”
Doherty jerked a thumb at Evangeline: “If she wasn’t here, Fallon, I’d tell you to go and fuck yourself.”
“Tell him anyway,” she said. “I’ve told him the same thing a few times.”
“That’s right,” said Peter. “It makes us feel like an old married couple.”
“Then go and fuck yourselves,” said Doherty.
“Not a constructive attitude,” said Peter. “We came here because we promised to share things that we’d learned with you.”
“I appreciate that,” said Martin Bloom.
“You would.” Doherty looked at him as though he had just given away a signed first edition of Catcher in the Rye. “They’re after more.”
“Of course we are.” Peter enjoyed baiting Doherty, even if it was counterproductive. “We’ve brought a bit of intelligence. Just as we agreed.”
“We agreed to nothing,” said Doherty. “Martin gave up more than he should have the other day at the Mount Washington.”
Martin’s eyebrows rose and fell behind his glasses, but he didn’t say anything.
Doherty stalked to the window and stared out.
Peter said, “If the Constitution passed through Portland in 1864, and you heard about it in the 1970s, we’re narrowing things. Give us a name and we can narrow a bit more.”
“We give you nothing. We’re not—” Doherty stopped in mid-sentence and turned. “You have to get out of here.”
“What?” Peter went toward the window. “Who’s out there?”
Doherty pushed him back.
“Who is it?” demanded Peter. “What are you afraid of?”
Doherty told Martin, “Get them out the back. For their own good—”
Peter pushed Doherty aside to get a look: a few pedestrians hurrying along, someone getting out of a car.
But Doherty had seen something that caused his color to rise from red to purple. “They’re in the sandwich shop.”
“Watching us?” asked Peter.
“Buying lunch,” said Doherty.
“Lunch?” said Evangeline. “Who are they? Food critics?”
“They like the clam rolls,” said Martin. “Now, please—”
Peter looked through the plate glass toward the sandwich shop. Yes. There were people there. A crowd of bodies around the counter. Good clam rolls.
“Who are they?” demanded Peter.
“Two bad guys,” growled Doherty. “Now get out of here.”
Before turning away, Peter noticed a black Chrysler Sebring parked down the block. He reached for the door, to step out and get a look at the plates.
Doherty grabbed him, “Listen, I don’t care if those guys kill you, but if they see us with you, they may kill us. So—”
Then Peter saw the big guy in the black leather jacket. He had been at the mill two days before. Now he was standing on a Portland street picking pieces of fried clam out of a toasted roll.
Had Doherty and Martin tipped them off? Had this guy shown up now to finish the job? You couldn’t trust anyone anymore.
Another guy stepped out of the shop. He was wearing a blue blazer. He said something to the guy in the black leather.
“Peter,” said Evangeline, “the one from the Cliff Walk. Digital New England.”
“The same one who was wearing the baseball cap in the mill.”
The two guys stepped off the curb and started across the street.
Doherty said to Martin, “Get them out. Tell them whatever you want, but get them out.”
Martin pulled Peter and Evangeline back through the shop, past the sofas, into the stockroom.
“Who are they, Martin?” said Peter.
“Just go.” Martin pushed them out the back door and into the alley.
“Martin! Doherty said you’d tell us. Who are they? Partners?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“Suckers. We’re playing them,” snapped Martin and those eyebrows closed down to a single line. “Just like we’re playing you.”
Peter looked at Evangeline. “See what I told you. Talk face-to-face with some guys, you learn more.”
The doorbell jangled at the front of the shop. The two guys had just come in.
Martin looked over his shoulder.
Peter put out his foot so Martin couldn’t close the door. “A name, Martin. Give us a name. Who told you about the draft?”
“Ryan,” said Martin Bloom. “Mike Ryan. He worked for the B and M Railroad. He’s been dead since 1974.”
Clunk. Thunk. The door closed in their faces and the bolt was thrown.
Peter waited a moment, put his head against the door to try to hear something.
Evangeline was tugging at him. “Let’s go.”
THEY HURRIED UP the alley to Middle Street.
Peter turned right, back to Exchange, and peered around the corner. The row of bookstores was on the right side, the sandwich shop and the black Chrysler on the left. The street sloped from here three blocks to the waterfront.
He asked Evangeline, “How good is your memory?”
“I remember what the guy in the black jacket did to Bindle.”
He said, “I need to get the plate off that Chrysler. Can you remember it?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t get it when I drove off in it the other day.”
“I couldn’t believe you got into it. Now … you can wait here or meet me at the other end of the block.”
“I think we should stay together.”
So they fell in with a clump of young women—office workers—who were gossiping about a wedding as they walked down the street. Good cover, thought Peter.
They passed Books, Etc. on the right, then Emerson’s, then—
“Rhode Island plate.” Evangeline said the numbers.
Peter glanced over his shoulder at Old Curiosity. He could see a face in the window, not red, not owlish … a flash of white in the shadowed light.
“Keep walking,” he said. “Just faster.”
“Should I run?”
“Not yet.”
The door to the Old Curiosity Bookshop was opening.
“When?” she said.
“Just … about”—At the corner, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the black jacket moving toward them, the blue blazer appearing— “now!”
They turned the corner and were running … past restaurants and plate glass storefronts, in and out of gangs of tourists and office workers hurrying along or reading menus or stopping to photograph the restored Victorian architecture, all gray granite and gleaming silver in the sunlight.
Peter and Evangeline turned onto Market Street just as the black leather jacket appeared at the corner of Exchange. The guy look right, then left, then came after them.
“Hurry!” said Peter.
“I’m in cowboy boots,” said Evangeline.
“My favorite. Don’t scuff them. Just run. And don’t trip on the cobblestones.”
Another block, and they were at Commercial Street.
An enormous white ship rose behind the waterfront buildings like an iceberg that had drifted into Casco Bay. A mob of tourists was melting out of it, filling the street, flooding up the hill.
“Looks like the leaf-peeper cruise just pulled in,” said Peter.
“Maybe we could grab a ride to Boston.”
“Next trip.” He turned her to the left and they ran for half a block along Commercial Street, then he said, “Jaywalk!”
Horns blared. A refrigerator truck almost hit them. A car almost hit the truck. Not the best way not to attract attention, but they made it across four lanes with the container of the big truck blocking them from view.
“Are they stil
l behind us?” asked Evangeline. “Doesn’t matter,” said Peter. “We’ll lose them now.”
He pointed her onto the Portland Pier. They ran a short distance out over the water, then turned and went along the backs of the buildings on Commercial Street.
This was lobster country. There were lobster boats tied up and lobster traps stacked up and orange lobster bodies piled up in trash cans outside lobster restaurants where tourists were lined up to eat lobster all day long. And everything smelled of lobster—the steam pouring from the restaurant vents, the barrels, the boards of the pier, even the seagull shit.
From the air, a working waterfront looked like a logical thing, a series of piers at right angles to main street. But from ground level, it was a maze of buildings and alleys and pathways, a good place to get lost or to lose someone else. So Peter and Evangeline ran down an alley between two restaurants, then along the back of another restaurant. Then they crossed to the Custom House Wharf and kept going.
When they finally popped out at the corner of Franklin and Commercial, they saw no black leather jacket, no blue blazer.
“Either a good sign or a bad one,” said Evangeline.
“Let’s assume it’s bad and keep moving away from the downtown.”
A train whistle squealed.
At the end of the waterfront was the museum of the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad. The train was preparing for its hourly mile-and-a-half tour along the Eastern Promenade, “with views of Casco Bay and all the railroading excitement of yesteryear.”
Peter bought two tickets and they jumped onto the last car, an open-air gondola carrying a crowd of tourists, field-tripping schoolkids, and babysitting grandparents.
“Welcome aboard!” shouted the engineer on the PA. “Once, there were trains like this all over Maine, small engines and small cars, running on tracks just two feet apart, taking the sharp turns and riding the long straightaways as far as the Canadian border….”
Peter kept looking back to see if they were being followed.
Just as the little train rounded the bend at Fort Allen Park, he saw the blue blazer approach the end of Commercial Street. The guy looked left, right, back, forth, confused … then the train swung round the bend.
“I think we just lost them,” said Peter. “Kick back and enjoy the view.”
The Lost Constitution Page 34
