Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3)

by Thomas Hollyday

  “All right. You sit down. I’ll be there soon,” came a soft male voice from behind a purple curtain drawn from wall to wall in the back.

  A tall black man with white stubbled hair came in, pushing back the curtain and stooping to clear its suspension line. He smiled at the pastor, who introduced Harry.

  “Don’t get many white folk in for my haircuts,” he laughed. He seemed the opposite of the dour pastor, a perpetual grin on his face as he talked. Yet in his eyes he had little humor and Harry felt the sadness in his grin.

  “No,” said Harry, smiling and shaking hands.

  “Well, I’m glad to meet you, Mister Harry.”

  “Jack Bob’s the coach of our Mulberry basketball program for kids,” said the pastor.

  Jack Bob motioned to them to sit. “My boys and their own children plays some basketball in the winter. They’re mostly baseball now, though.”

  Harry grinned, “I play a little ball.”

  The barber nodded at Harry’s interest in sports.

  “Jack Bob was one of the Vietnam Veterans who helped start up General Store,” said the pastor.

  “General Store?” asked Harry.

  “He wants to know about Walker,” said Pastor Allingham. “I figured we might tell him about the other fire that summer.”

  “What other fire?” asked Harry.

  Jack Bob nodded. “Three Terment canneries were here in River Sunday and that summer two of them burned. You know about one that still stands down the street form here at the harbor. One of them was a building that Henry Terment rented to us where we had set up General Store. When it burned, we lost everything we had invested in that business. The other one burned in the fire Walker was blamed for setting. The space where it stood is now a marina.”

  “What was General Store?” asked Harry.

  The pastor said with pride in his voice, “We called it General Store, but it wasn’t a store as such. It was instead like a cooperative, a place that had all kinds of local labor and talent.”

  Jack Bob continued, “In the beginning the Store worked out of the pastor’s church in a back room. I’d paint in the morning and cut hair in the afternoon. Folks who wanted to hire me went to the pastor’s church office to set up the job through General Store. Then they paid General Store when I finished the work. General Store paid me.

  “My profit and overhead went to General Store. I got my wages same as always and my profit was invested in the company. Trouble was, that was part of the problem.”

  “Why?” asked Harry. The men were sitting in the wicker chairs facing each other.

  “We had stock and the stock increased in value,” said the pastor. “The company got to be worth a lot of money and that money was in the hands of people of color.”

  The barber added, “It was a problem because it changed the way business was done in River Sunday, changed how some of the whites who’d always run things around here looked at the blacks and the other minorities, even those whites who worked with us.”

  “Pastor said you were about to get a good sized money grant from the federal government,” said Harry.

  “That’s true,” said Jack Bob. “It was supposed to come to help us with development. That is, until we got burned out.”

  “You say, burned out?” said Harry.

  “Our people know better than to talk too much about it,” said Jack Bob.

  “I see,” said Harry looking at the barber’s face which had lost its humor.

  “Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. It don’t matter much. Folks who didn’t like what we were doing, they burned down the place where we did business, finished us just when we were making some changes around here,” the barber said.

  “Who?” asked Harry. He was driving for facts, for a story.

  “Some blamed the Terments,” said the white haired pastor.

  Jack Bob nodded, “Some say it was the same ones burned down the town buildings too.”

  “Terment destroyed his own warehouse?” asked Harry. “Why?”

  Pastor Allingham interrupted, “People got different theories about that. Most folks think he wanted the insurance. Some say he was concerned about the success of the black people. I don’t know. Jake Terment’s widow is the only one of them left and some say she knows the truth of it, but she won’t tell anyone, never has.”

  “She don’t count, Pastor,” said Jack Bob.

  “You mean because she’s crazy. Nossir, they all count,” said the pastor.

  Harry looked at the now quiet faces and asked, “So how do I figure out about Walker?”

  “You can understand that figuring him out has to do with all of us. That’s why I brought you here,” said the pastor.

  Jack Bob said, “You ask me Walker could have cared less about all our causes. As much as I like to agree with people he did it for all of us, he set that fire for his own reasons. Walker never had anything to do with General Store. He was a loner.”

  “If he was that way, a loner, then why did your church members come out in the street when the boat was pulled in?” asked Harry.

  “The Prodigal Son,” said the pastor.

  “He’s not in your family,” said Harry.

  “That’s not true. More than anything he’s in my greater family. We’re all in this together whether we want to be or not,” the pastor said.

  He went on, “Did you know that only thirty years before those fires in 1968, a man of color was lynched in a town near River Sunday?”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Harry.

  The pastor nodded, “It took place in the middle of what your compatriot newspaperman Mister Mencken called the Bible Belt, a place inhabited by white Christians.”

  “Christians?” asked Harry, his eyes lifted. He could see Jack Bob nodding too, as the pastor spoke, as if he were in his church and agreeing with a sermon.

  “Walker had something in common with that dead man,” said the pastor.

  “He was black,” said Harry.

  “That too, but you’ll note that neither man had a fair trial,” said Pastor Allingham. “Same as if he’d been lynched. That’s what a lot of black folk think, too.”

  The use of the word lynch had brought a solemnity into all their faces as if they had moved into a discussion of something so evil that it was infecting them.

  “No Christian who loves Jesus can hate his fellow man,” said Jack Bob, finally breaking the silence.

  Harry looked at them, Jack Bob cleaning his brushes and scissors at his bench behind the barber chair, the pastor standing with his hands behind his back.

  The pastor led Harry back to the street and shook hands. “I hope this information will be useful to you as you investigate the crime. I’ll be staying for a few minutes to talk with my friend.”

  “I’m glad you asked me to visit with you,” said Harry.

  “That question I asked you about buying the paper,” said the pastor.

  “What about it?” asked Harry.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me that you were looking for another good story to write,” the pastor said, smiling.

  Harry looked into the old man’s eyes, seeing the youthful energy still there, as the pastor said. “We always want one more chance, don’t we?”

  The pastor turned to go back inside the barber shop. He said over his shoulder, “I hope you do find out the real story about Walker. I hope for all of us you do, that’s all.”

  Harry walked back along the street, towards his office. The word lynch stuck in his mind, the ugliness of its sound bouncing in his mind, in time to his steps. The huge oak trees, planted when the town was started, overhung the streets blocking the hot sunlight. Old red handmade brick showed through under sections of the worn out concrete sidewalk.

  As he went by the courthouse, he looked through the openings in the great overgrown box bushes and saw Marty Sol working at his desk behind the first floor corner window. The twelve paned sash was half open in the heat and through the multiple colonial munt
ins of the panes, he observed Marty bent over his desk working on a pile of computer printouts and photographs.

  The heat was overwhelming. As he approached the New Jesus Temple he saw Reverend Blue getting mail from his postbox which was fastened to a pole at the street edge. A few feet behind was the shiny neon sign proclaiming that his sermon for the weekend was called, “The Evil that Has Come Among Us.” The Reverend waved to Harry as he came closer. A smell of baking bread wafted outside from the church building up the hill above them.

  “Quite a name for a sermon, Reverend,” said Harry. Harry had met Blue several times and the meetings had always been friendly. Blue came by the newspaper office once a week to deliver his specially written advertisements for bingo night at Lulu’s.

  “Maybe you’ll write about the evil of the Devil in your paper,” said the preacher.

  Harry didn’t answer and instead looked at the signboard. “Weather’s a little too hot for that kind of burning,” he smiled.

  The Reverend didn’t smile but leaned forward and spoke solemnly in a low voice as if he were confiding to Harry, “None of us have much time left.”

  Harry stopped. He knew he was trapped, that he couldn’t proceed down the sidewalk without listening to the man’s fervency.

  “Come inside,” the man commanded, starting up the hill toward his church and pulling Harry by his arm. His grip was strong, pressuring Harry. Harry went along, not trying to break away. He wanted to know more about this mysterious man who controlled a sizable segment of the town population with his sermons.

  The air was stifling as they went inside. The windows were shut tight and the room was very dim. In the far corner in the direction where they were headed, a slightly ajar door let in a shaft of light. The light reflected off the furniture of the room, long bare rows of pews with only wood flooring to kneel on, and walls with cavities strangely filled with what looked like paper copies of oil paintings of men and women in various stages of being on fire. Beneath each piece of art was the single word, Hell. The Reverend’s pulpit was as expected directly at the front of the church and Harry could see his table with a great Bible, almost three feet wide and a foot high, opened to a reading.

  A little girl attired up to her neck in a floor length dress came from the back of the church carrying two glasses of iced tea, the sweat streaming down her tiny forehead matching the water trickling down the side of the glasses.

  Harry took one of the offered glasses. “Would you like some too, little girl?” Harry said, thinking the child must be very hot in her full and billowing dress.

  “Oh, no, sir,” she replied.

  Harry looked at Blue who took the other glass and smiled. “We teach our children to restrain themselves. Fasting helps them do well,” he said.

  Harry nodded. “Where do they play?”

  “The girls do Bible studies and cooking, but when they play, it’s in the garden at the back of the church.”

  Harry said, “People from your church seemed very interested in the boat that was found yesterday. I watched them as it passed by.”

  Blue said slowly, “We witness all sin. We pray that man’s memory is forever washed clean off the red brick of this town. All of us know the old boat is an idol of Satan.”

  “Is it Walker you hate or is it all people of color that you preach against?” asked Harry.

  The preacher did not look directly at Harry. Instead he said quickly, “I was here in 1968, right in this spot and spared from the great fire, from the evil of that man. I preached all that night and the fire did not reach us. We withstood the assault of the Devil.”

  Blue’s eyes glared. “Douglas was evil incarnate, a vicious killer who turned against all who knew him and who was put on this earth to harm us.”

  Picking up the rhythm of the preacher’s voice, the little girl began to sing in an off key voice,

  “Evil is from the Devil.

  You should fear.

  The Devil is from evil.

  Fear you should.”

  Blue added his voice to her song. The little girl finished the stanza, bowed to the preacher, turned and ran back into the room from which she had come. Blue repeated the stanza several more times, staring at Harry as he did so. When he finished his chant, he swallowed the last of his cold iced tea. He began on the ice, his teeth, which Harry noted were crooked and stained, making a popping sound as they broke each cube. As he chewed, he continued to look at Harry, his eyes aflame with excitement.

  Harry put down the drink on a nearby chair and thanked him. He turned away from Blue and walked out into the sunlight. Behind him, he heard the preacher calling, but didn’t turn around to look at him.

  “You should pay attention to God’s word,” Blue shouted, increasing his volume as Harry neared the exit door. “The Evil that has come among us should be burned until it crumbles back into the hell it came from.”

  Harry thought back to the Park Ranger’s wife and her comment, “Always been too many questions about Walker John, about them murders he supposed to commit,” He wondered how far this story would go and how many people would be involved before he got to the truth.

  Chapter 6

  Friday July 31, 11 am

  From the street, the newspaper building was stark white compared to the dull red brick of the buildings on either side, as its clapboard reflected the intense sunlight of midday. Inside, the light penetrated the tall windows with their wooden cakework décor and sent curved shadows out over the sagging planked floor and its patches of linoleum. The observant reporter in the old Civil War painting still cast his painted stare. Except for Chauncy shuffling papers back in his room, the office was quiet. Harry sat at his desk working slowly down a pile of spider web encrusted folders that he had retrieved from Lloyd’s file boxes.

  So far he had found no notes from Lloyd about General Store or the visit of Lyndon Johnson to River Sunday. He had also revisited the folder covering fires of the town and the information about Walker but had still come up empty about Pastor Allingham’s OEO project.

  “You think someone cleaned out the files before you bought the paper?” said Annie, coming over from her desk and sifting through the folders Harry had already finished.

  He shook his head.

  She said, “Lloyd would have done something like that. He’d be the only one who could find anything in these files.”

  “Why would he go to the trouble?” asked Harry.

  She looked directly into his eyes and said, “Fear.”

  Harry said, “You think somebody in town wanted to wash away the visit of the President and the project he had come to honor?”

  Annie nodded. “Lloyd might have regretted even printing an article about the visit or the fire. Or, he might have been warned.”

  “Warned?” asked Harry.

  “He might have got the same kind of note you got,” she said.

  She sat down near his desk, a polished mahogany railing on carved banisters between them. In her left hand she held up the coverage of team arrivals for the regatta. Many of the competitors came, several days before their trials began, to check out engines and do practice runs on the harbor circuit. She had been doing interviews, prior to the coming of the city newscasters who would then preempt the available interview times so that locals like herself would not be able to get to see the best drivers.

  “You think I should quit this story,” he said, scanning her feature material. “Maybe I’m risking too much, spending too much time on Walker. We’ve got to keep on the motorboat story.”

  She tapped his desk with a pencil. “No, you’re not. I was wrong.”

  He looked at her. She was smiling.

  She said, “Ask Chauncy about General Store.”

  Harry nodded with a grin and called him. Chauncy came up to the front, his tee-shirt with the words “God Saves” hanging loose over his thin bones, his jeans baggy.

  “Still like my old linotype,” he said in a voice that almost duplicated the chatter of the o
ld fashioned typesetting machine when it was running. He sat down in front of Harry’s desk. In his right hand was a printout of the front page of the new edition.

  Harry said, “Chauncy, what do you know about a business that was burned out back in the Sixties, a company called General Store?”

  “Want to sell ads you might better know that folks around here didn’t like that business,” said Chauncy, his face screwing up like he smelled something bad.

  “Go on,” said Harry.

  He waved the front page. “I got to live here, you know. People at the boarding house where I stay. They’re talking about you doing too much about Walker. We got a lot of bad feeling about what the black pastor and his people did to this town.”

  “Chauncy, that little neighborhood bar up near your boarding house is filled with the most conservative men and women I’ve ever met on the Eastern Shore,” said Annie.

  “You say that just cause they go up to Reverend Blue’s church,” Chauncy answered.

  “You a member of that church, Chauncy?” asked Harry.

  “Every weekend and some nights during the week too,” said Chauncy. “You should come up there, do a story on our congregation, all the charity we do.”

  “The Reverend makes a lot of money with his bingo out at Lulu’s,” said Annie with a grin.

  “That’s his ministry to the tourists traveling the big highway,” said Chauncy.

  “Oh,” said Annie.

  “Chauncy, tell me what you know about General Store,” said Harry.

  “Some black troublemakers set up a business that put a lot of white folks, hard working men and women, out of a job. The Lord wouldn’t stand for it, that’s all. Bad things come to pass to them who’s evil,” he answered.