by Orca Various
She doesn’t wait for me to say anything before she knocks on the door. Inside, the old man grunts. Katya pushes open the door.
“You have company, Grandpa.”
Curtis is slumped in a chair beside his bed. He looks smaller than the last time I saw him. Older and grayer too. He peers at me through glazed eyes. I glance at Katya.
“I don’t think he slept well last night,” she says. “I don’t think any of us did. Because of Eric. Maybe I’m stupid or naïve—or both—but I didn’t think he had anything to do with those college kids. I guess I didn’t want to believe it. I’m sorry for what he did to you.” She raises a hand, and for a moment I think she’s going to touch the bruise on my face. “I’m sorry for what Noah did too.”
She slips away, leaving me in the doorway. I hold out the small leather photo album.
“I borrowed this. I wanted to return it before I go back home.”
I take it to him. He doesn’t move. I put it on the bed. He still doesn’t move. I have no idea what to say. What comes out is, “I’m sorry I broke in here. I just had to know.”
“I hated him.” His voice is raspy. “He was a cruel man. He did terrible things, and I hated him.”
What can I say to that? I look at all the stuff crammed into his room: the medals, the uniforms, the flags, the books.
“I was looking for answers,” he says, following my eyes. “I thought I could figure out what made him do what he did. But none of it helped. It doesn’t explain anything.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s time to leave, but I hesitate. “My grandma…she saw a picture in there of you and Mirella. She thinks you were in love with her.”
One of his hands seeks out the album and settles on top of it.
“She never should have married him. Her parents talked her into it. They thought he would provide for her. And when she heard we were going to America—she was so happy.”
“Well, at least she got here.”
He looks up at me. “I thought she would be happy too. I thought we both would.”
It takes a few seconds before I absorb that word. Both. Not all. Both.
“Everything was upside down after the war, not just in Europe, but everywhere. Even in Buenos Aires. There were foreigners everywhere. The Cold War was heating up. People were selling information. Everyone was trying to make money. There were people who knew people, people with connections. So when your grandfather arrived and my father announced that the Americans wanted him, that he was going to work on new weapons for their military…” His hand closes around the small album. “I whispered a few words in an ear. It didn’t take long. Someone approached me.”
He’d told me my grandfather was responsible for what had happened to his father. But that was true only in an indirect way. Curtis was the one who had tipped off the Russians to where Waldmann was. Maybe he wouldn’t have done it if David McLean had never been sent to Buenos Aires. But Curtis, not my grandfather, was the one who’d sealed Waldmann’s fate.
“My father arranged to send all our possessions on ahead of him, with me and Mirella to take care of everything, like a pair of servants. He was supposed to join us in California after the Americans had debriefed him. But he never showed up.” A tiny smile flickers across his face.
“And Mirella?”
“When she found out who my father really was, she left. I went after her, but she refused to see me or talk to me. I lost track of her until she showed up in town looking for work. I was already married.” He picks up the album and hands it to me. “Take it,” he says. “I don’t want it anymore.”
“But—”
He thrusts it at me. I have no choice. I take it.
He’s staring out into space. It’s like he’s forgotten I’m in the room. What can I do? I leave, closing the door behind me. Katya is in the front hall. I give her the album. “In case he wants it sometime,” I say. “Or for you to keep. It belongs here.”
She takes it but doesn’t open it. I can’t tell if she’s ever seen it before.
She opens the door for me, and I step out into the crisp sunshine of a new day and a new year. Ari gets out and opens the rear door for me. Grandma reaches back over the seat and squeezes my hand.
“Do you have your passport, Rennie?” she asks.
I nod. Carver returned it and my driver’s license. They’re both in my back pocket. I’ve got my duffel too. We had swung by Jacques’s place to get it.
As Ari pulls away from the curb, I think about Katya and her fears. Then I think about my grandfather, about David McLean and how little I know about him, about how little his own daughters probably know about him. My grandmother is looking straight ahead. I wonder how much she knew. But mostly, I wonder how much of me comes from him. Like Katya, I wonder what part of me comes from the dead.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A heartfelt thank-you to Eric Walters, Ted Staunton, Richard Scrimger, Sigmund Brouwer, Shane Peacock and John Wilson—gentlemen all—who cooked up the idea of a sequel in my absence. A big thanks to Andrew Wooldridge for going along with the idea. And to Sarah Harvey—thank you for being so sane and sensible.
NORAH McCLINTOCK writes mystery and crime fiction for young adult readers. She is the author of the Chloe and Levesque, Mike and Riel, Robyn Hunter, and Ryan Dooley series, as well as many stand-alone novels. Norah grew up in Montreal, Quebec, is a graduate of McGill University (in history, of all things) and lives in Toronto, Ontario. She is a five-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile Crime Novel. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages. Visit www.norahmcclintock.com for more information. From the Dead is the sequel to Close to the Heel, Norah’s novel in Seven (the series).
SIGMUND BROUWER
TIN
SOLDIER
O R C A B O O K P U B L I S H E R S
To Eric, Shane, Ted, Richard, John and Norah.
Thanks for making the ride so much fun.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day,
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away.
—FROM THE SONG “ONE TIN SOLDIER,”
BY DENNIS LAMBERT AND BRIAN POTTER
ONE
Lying was wrong. Webb knew that.
Still, he wanted to lie to the old woman in front of him. Her name was Ruby Gavin, and he’d knocked on her front door, with flowers in hand, and spent about half an hour making pleasant small talk in her front parlor. It was just the two of them, late in the morning almost a week past Christmas. Webb sipped on his third teacup of hot cider, pretending to be hungry as he nibbled at her homemade shortbread cookies.
Ruby sat in her rocking chair across the parlor from Webb, a contented smile shaping the delicate wrinkles of her cheeks. A few wisps of fine white hair escaped the tight bun that was tied in place by a ribbon.
Webb had first met Ruby a few months earlier, here in her small hometown of Eagleville, Tennessee, some forty miles south of Nashville. Then she had been wearing a long dress with pink flowers against a white cotton background. Now her dress was dark brown and of a thicker material, with yellow and white flowers. Ruby was also wearing a heart-shaped ceramic pendant that hung from her neck on a gold chain.
Ruby had made the pendant when she was a little girl. She’d used the end of a wire to draw her initials on one side of the clay while it was still soft and damp, and on the other side she scratched the phrase I love you forever, Daddy. She had painted it with colored glazes, and after the teacher baked it in a kiln, she had given it to her daddy. When he’d gone off to war, he’d strung it on a gold chain and kept it close to his heart.
Webb knew this because he’d been the one to find it near a desolate trail in the Northwest Territories, and he’d been the one to return it to Ruby decades after her daddy had not come back from the war.
“Jim, I’ve sure enjoyed your company,” Ruby said, “and you’re so polite, it might take you
another hour of listening to an old woman like me before you get around to what you want to ask, so let me help you out. Go ahead and tell me what’s on your mind.”
What was on his mind was a reunion with four of his six cousins the day after Christmas at their grandfather’s cottage north of Toronto. The accidental discovery of a hidden compartment behind a log beside the fireplace. Fake passports, a mysterious notebook, cash in a dozen currencies and a Walther PPK pistol—James Bond’s weapon of choice, as Spencer, one of his cousins, had pointed out.
“I was hoping you would introduce me to one of the veterans who attended your father’s funeral,” Webb told Ruby. “Someone who fought in Vietnam.”
His answer wasn’t technically a lie, but rather a deflection. Still, he felt a degree of guilt about deceiving Ruby Gavin. Webb drew a breath, waiting for the question that would force him to decide how much more of a lie he’d need to tell the old woman.
“I can do that,” she said. “It’s as easy as a phone call. Care to tell me why you need the introduction?”
This was the question he’d feared. Because he didn’t want to explain. To her or to anyone else. Not until he’d found out what he needed to about those passports and military identification cards.
Webb was ready with a lie. He’d planned to tell Ruby he was taking an online course to upgrade for university, that he was doing research for a paper on the Vietnam War.
He hesitated. Lying was wrong.
“I’d like it,” he said, “if I didn’t have to answer that.”
“After all you’ve done for me, it’s not my business to ask why you want help. I’m going to call Lee Knox right this minute. He’s a stubborn man, but a good one, so try to look past his prickliness. Then I’m going to send you in his direction, but you’re not leaving until you take a tin of shortbread cookies. Understand?”
“Understood.” Food didn’t interest him much these days, but Webb wasn’t about to be rude.
“Tell me this though,” Ruby said. “Are you in some kind of trouble? ’Cause if you are, I’ll move heaven and earth to help you. It’s the least I can do for you after you lifted the burden from me.”
“No,” Webb said. “I’m not in trouble.”
That wasn’t quite a lie, but close.
She cocked her head and examined him. He felt like flinching but didn’t look away.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “it’s weighing heavy on you, isn’t it?”
So heavy, Webb thought, it was almost enough to make him forget about the Nashville producer who had ripped him off a few months earlier. Who’d taken the songs Webb had recorded in his studio.
“I’ll be okay,” Webb said. And wondered if this was the real lie.
TWO
It took Webb five minutes to walk to the one traffic light in Eagleville, where the post office sat kitty-corner to the town hall. Five minutes of thinking about the two military identification cards and the fake Canadian passport in the back pockets of his jeans.
From there, guided by Ruby’s directions and the maps on his iPhone, Webb reached a turnoff for Cheatham Springs Road and kept walking. The road was a couple of miles of narrow pavement, up over the crest between two small valleys and partway down again, to where thickly wooded and winding gravel driveways led to houses screened by trees. That gave him plenty more time to think about the two laminated military ID cards and the two fake passports and why he was now looking for a mailbox with the name of a Vietnam veteran, Lee Knox, on it.
Both ID cards were on faded white stock with light blue borders, the words ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES printed in bold blue ink across the top. Some information on the cards, including a nine-digit military identification number, was typed. No computers back then. Hard to imagine a time when the Internet didn’t exist.
The first card showed Private Jesse Lockewood’s black-and-white photo, centered between two circular Army emblems, also in light blue ink. The photo showed a crew-cut soldier barely older than Webb. Even though it didn’t list a birth date, the card had a typed expiry date: 23 March 1976. Lockewood would be in his mid-to-late-fifties now, about four decades older than Webb.
What was strange was that the photo on Private Jesse Lockewood’s military card matched the photo on the other military card in Webb’s back pocket. Except the other card had a different identification number and declared the same crew-cut soldier to be Corporal Benjamin Moody.
Both ID cards looked genuine, but obviously, unless the pictures were of twins, one man could not be two soldiers in the same army at the same time.
Something strange or even illegal had happened at the end of the Vietnam War that involved Jesse Lockewood and Benjamin Moody. Since Webb had found the cards with his grandfather’s fake passports, it probably meant his grandfather had been been involved in the same illegal activity.
He didn’t expect to find out everything from Lee Knox, but he had to start somewhere.
THREE
Lee Knox was a widower with grown kids who lived in a clapboard house on the other side of the hill on Cheatham Springs Road. That’s what Ruby Gavin had told Webb. When he admitted he didn’t know what clapboard was, she told him it was the thin slats of wood that made up the siding. Any clapboard house these days was probably thirty or forty years old, because vinyl siding been around for years and didn’t ever need painting. She said you could tell a lot about a person by how their clapboard looked.
As Webb walked up the long oak-lined driveway to Lee’s house, a mockingbird—the size of a robin, gray with flashes of white in its tail—hopped along in front of him. The mockingbird finally got tired of Webb and flew away, and Webb reached a wide clearing from which he could see Knox’s white clapboard house. It was on a hillside, overlooking the valley to the south. Beside the house was a double garage with its doors up, revealing a large motorcycle with gleaming chrome and an older, bright red Camaro. The two-story house was large, with two rocking chairs on a wide front porch and an American flag waving in the breeze. The clapboard was freshly painted, matching the clapboard on the exterior of the garage. If Ruby was right about clapboard houses revealing things about their owners, Lee Knox was a person who took good care of things and cared about details.
The flower beds in front of the house confirmed Webb’s impression. He stepped onto the porch and was about to knock when the door opened, and the large man in the doorway studied Webb through round, frameless glasses. He had a few wrinkles, and the beginning of jowls under his close-cropped beard. The man’s hair was shaved so short that the coal-black skin of his head contrasted sharply with the gray stubble.
He was wearing sweatpants and an orange jersey that said UT. University of Tennessee. Now there was some major branding. Webb saw those letters everywhere in Nashville, on everything from bumper stickers to coffee cups.
The man in front of Webb held a magazine, as if Webb had interrupted his reading.
“Hello,” Webb said. “My name is Jim Webb.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because Ruby Gavin—”
“I know Ruby Gavin sent you here. She called, asked me if I would mind somebody coming by to ask me a few questions about the army and Vietnam. What I want to know is what questions you have. More to the point, I want to know why you put garbage down at my mailbox as you walked up.”
“Garbage?” Webb asked.
“Garbage. I’ve got a surveillance camera on my driveway. It showed you clear as day putting something down and walking away. Makes me wonder, too, why you’d park your car somewhere on the road and walk in like some long-haired punk trying to sneak up on me.”
Long-haired punk? Webb wanted to punch the guy. Normally, he could handle insults, but for the last while, he’d been getting angry at little things that usually didn’t bother him. “I don’t have a car,” Webb said, forcing a flatness into his voice as he swallowed the anger. “And what I put down by the mailbox is the same thing I’m going to pick up on my way back. A tin of cook
ies that Ruby baked for me. I set it down because I thought it might look strange knocking on your door with cookies, and I didn’t want to have to explain them.”
The answer softened Lee’s face a bit. “An old gal like Ruby bakes you cookies, that tells me something else, doesn’t it?”
So does freshly painted clapboard, Webb thought, and a perfect flower garden even though the flowers and bushes won’t be in bloom until spring. It tells a person something. So when could you believe what it told you and when couldn’t you?
Lee pointed at a rocking chair. “We might as well sit. You want tea?”
Webb had been in the south long enough to know that Lee meant iced tea. Down here, if you wanted it hot, you had to ask for hot tea. In Canada, when you ordered tea, unless you said iced tea, it came hot and steeped. More than once, he’d wished Tim Hortons would set up in Nashville.
“Yes, please,” Webb said. “Unsweetened.”
That was the other thing. You had to make sure you said unsweetened, or it would be so thick with sugar it was hard to drink. Webb had already filled up on cider, but tea wouldn’t hurt. He’d just have to make sure he used the bathroom before getting on a bus back to Nashville.
“Then set yourself down,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”
Lee took a half step and paused, looking at Webb’s shirt, and said, “Saskatchewan Roughriders. College team?”
“CFL,” Webb said. In Nashville, if he wasn’t wearing his usual black T-shirt, Webb liked to wear different CFL shirts. He liked being reminded of Canada when he looked in the mirror. Today it was green and white—Go Riders. The T-shirt had been a real find, only five dollars from a surly ten-year-old at a garage sale in Toronto.
