Kiss River

by Diane Chamberlain

  Kenny hesitated a moment, then nodded. “All right. But let me be the one to take her down,” he said, and Clay reluctantly agreed. He knew Kenny was making the suggestion not because he wanted to be close enough to Gina to share a tank of compressed air, but because he was the more experienced diver. It would be better if she was with him.

  Clay moved to the bottom step of the tower and put on his fins. Standing up, he let Kenny help him into his gear, then hooked the clasps together on the front of the BCD.

  “Where’s the buoy?” Kenny asked, looking past Clay to the ocean.

  “Straight out and a little to the north,” Clay said. He searched the water himself, but he couldn’t see the buoy from where they stood.

  Once they were backing into the water, though, he was able to spot the buoy over his shoulder. “Way out there.” He pointed. “Must be about a hundred yards out.”

  “Man,” Kenny shook his head. “Can’t believe the storm whipped that thing way the hell out there.”

  “Well, the beach had a whole different configuration then,” Clay said, letting the smooth surface of a wave pick him up and set him down on the sand again. “And if the lens is in pieces, as I suspect it is, it would’ve been easier for the waves to knock it around.”

  Once past the breakwater, he and Kenny lay on their backs and kicked out to where the women stood in chest-deep water, snorkels in their mouths.

  “How’s it going?” he asked as they neared them.

  The women took out their mouthpieces, and he could see the look of accomplishment on Gina’s face.

  “It’s fun,” she said. Her eyes were hard to see behind the goggles, but she was smiling.

  “Would you be comfortable in deep water, Gina?” He stood up.

  “I can swim,” she said. “But how deep are you talking about?”

  “See the buoy out there?” He pointed toward it again and she turned to look at it. “I’m guessing it’s about twenty feet deep, out that far.”

  “More or less,” Kenny added.

  “Gulp.” Gina turned back to Clay, her smile sweet and sheepish.

  “Get her one of the life vests from the back of my Jeep, Lace,” he said.

  “Good idea.” Lacey caught the next wave and rode it into the beach.

  “You won’t be able to submerge with the vest on,” he said to Gina, “but you’ll feel a lot more secure while you’re floating on the surface of the water.”

  “I haven’t had a lot of experience with ocean swimming,” she said, then added with a laugh, “None, in fact, except for that day I came out here looking for the lens. And there were barely any waves then.”

  “You know, that’s been worrying me ever since you told me you did that,” he said, feeling a little paternal. “Please don’t do that again. Swim alone, I mean. It’s dangerous, okay?”

  She nodded. “Okay.” Looking out toward the buoy again, she said, “What about sharks?”

  He would have liked to reassure her that stumbling across a shark was an impossibility along this coastline, but a man had been killed by one just the previous summer, and there had been other sightings.

  “Highly unlikely,” Clay said.

  “Except for the sand tiger sharks,” Kenny added. “And they won’t hurt you.”

  Lacey returned with the life vest and helped Gina put it on.

  “We’ll head out,” Clay said. “You two have fun.”

  He and Kenny slipped beneath the surface of the water and began kicking in the direction of the buoy. Visibility was even worse than he’d thought, no better than six feet, and he tried to remember how close to the object Dave had managed to drop the buoy. Before he could replay the scene from the plane in his mind, though, he found himself face-to-face with a wall of algae and seaweed. He ran his hand over the wall and felt tiers of glass beneath his fingertips.

  Kenny caught up to him, and Clay could see the awe in his friend’s eyes behind the goggles. Turning on their dive lights, they moved back a few feet to get a good look at the object. It was enormous, dwarfing them. Somehow, even though he’d known its size and weight, he hadn’t expected the lens to tower above him.

  The lens was deep in the sand, perhaps four or five feet under, and resting at an angle so that the brass couplings cut across the glass prisms at a diagonal. He swam around the lens, touching it, wiping seaweed from the surface of the prisms until he could feel the smooth glass beneath his fingers. One panel of the lens was missing, but he seemed to recall that it had been missing even before the storm. The opening was large enough for him to swim into, and he was quickly cocooned inside the lens with a school of black-and-silver-striped spadefish. From what he could see—with the exception of the missing panel—the lens was entirely, incredibly, intact. He pictured the furious sea grabbing it from the lighthouse, tossing it on the waves as if it were a huge beach ball instead of three thousand pounds of glass, and dropping it to rest here, on this sandy bottom.

  Kenny came into his field of vision. He had the underwater camera to his face and was snapping pictures. They would have something to show Gina.

  Gina. He motioned to Kenny that he was ascending, then inflated his BCD and rose to the surface of the water. Kenny was quickly beside him, and they spotted Lacey and Gina treading water near the buoy.

  “It’s over here,” Clay called to them, and the women swam toward him.

  “You found it?” Gina asked once she’d reached him.

  He nodded. “And it’s in one piece, as far as I can tell. It’s partially buried in the sand.”

  “It has a missing panel, though, right?” she asked.

  “Just one,” he said. “You want to see it?”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Kenny will take you down.” He looked at his sister. “I can take you, Lace, if you like.” Lacey had dived before, but she had never fallen in love with it, as he had.

  She shook her head. “I’ll stay up here with Gina’s life vest,” she said.

  “But how would I breathe?” Gina asked.

  Kenny unclipped the octopus from his BCD and showed her the regulator. “This is attached to my tank,” he said.

  Gina bit her lip, and Clay could see the war going on inside her.

  “I want to,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll panic.”

  “You won’t panic,” Kenny said, moving close to her. “You’ll hold on to my arm, and if you get the least bit scared, you just squeeze my arm and I’ll bring you right back up, okay? It’s not that deep.”

  “All right,” she said. She took off the life vest and handed it to Lacey. Her teeth were chattering, but Clay thought it was more from nerves than from the cold. He would make sure she didn’t stay down there long, no matter how much she loved it.

  Kenny showed her how to use the regulator, and she put the mouthpiece in her mouth and practiced breathing for a minute or two, her hand wrapped around his wrist. She nodded when she felt ready, and in a moment, the three of them were under the water.

  Gina did well. When they reached the lens, she let go of Kenny’s arm to explore the glass with both hands, but Kenny was having none of that, and Clay was relieved when he took her hand and fastened it once more to his wrist. They ascended after a few minutes, Kenny calling for the ascent rather than Gina. Clay thought she could have stayed down there forever.

  On the surface of the water, she was euphoric.

  “How was it?” Lacey was now wearing the life vest, floating on the water as she waited for them.

  “Incredible, Lacey!” Gina said as soon as the mouthpiece was out of her mouth. “Now I want to raise the light more than ever. It’s in one piece! How can we let it just rot down there?”

  “It won’t rot,” Kenny said. “It’s glass.”

  “You know what I mean,” Gina said. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Her wet hair was jet-black, and it was sleek and shimmering, the ends undulating above her shoulders in the water. The sun had turned her che
eks and forehead pink, and she could not seem to stop smiling.

  It’s not nearly as beautiful, Clay thought, as the woman who wants it raised.

  CHAPTER 29

  Saturday, April 18, 1942

  I took some goodies over to the Coast Guard boys today. Sandy was there and he winked at me as I was handing out the fudge I made this morning, but I knew he wouldn’t talk to me with everyone around. I talked to Teddy Pearson and Ralph Salmon for a while, mostly about Boston. They think I don’t know anything because I haven’t ever lived in a big city. Jimmy Brown barely had a word to say to me, as usual, but I don’t care a bit about that these days. He did take a piece of my fudge, though, and thanked me for it.

  As I was leaving, Mr. Hewitt followed me outside. He asked me how I was doing since that terrible night with the German spies in our house, but I could tell he had something else on his mind. Finally he told me, very quietly, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one could hear him, that he needed to talk to me about something serious. He would pick me up along the Pole Road in an hour, he said, right at the entrance to Kiss River. If anyone was there, he would drive right past me, and I should wait and he would return, but he would only pick me up when no one was around. No one must know we were meeting.

  I could hardly speak as he said all this to me. I just kept nodding and nodding, wondering if he, like Dennis Kittering, knew about Sandy and me. If he did, I was going to be in a heap of trouble, but it would be even worse for Sandy. I went home, but didn’t stop in the house before walking out to the road. I didn’t want to have to explain to my parents where I was going.

  Well, I don’t think Mr. Hewitt knows a thing about Sandy and me. At least, that was not what he had on his mind. He picked me up on the Pole Road, which was, fortunately, deserted, and we drove north toward Corolla. Mr. Hewitt is someone I trust completely, so I did not feel afraid being with him. I just wished he’d get to his point, so that I could stop stewing. He was very quiet as he drove, though, looking around us as if he was afraid someone might see him with me. I decided I’d better keep quiet myself. Remember, right then, I didn’t know if he was mad at me about Sandy or what. I had no idea what to say, anyway.

  We drove all the way up the Pole Road, almost to Poyner’s Hill, and he pulled the jeep off onto a little rutted trail leading into the woods, where it probably couldn’t have been seen by anyone on the road. My heart started beating hard then, and I began to wonder if maybe Mr. Hewitt was planning to hurt me after all. Or, at the very least, yell his head off at me. But he just turned to me and smiled.

  “You must be wondering what on earth I brought you out here for,” he said.

  I nodded, waiting for him to say something about Sandy.

  “This is extremely serious business,” he said, “and I need your promise that whatever we talk about right now will be kept completely confidential. Completely secret,” he added as if he was afraid I might not know what he meant by confidential.

  I was confused, but I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be about Sandy and me, so I relaxed a bit. “I won’t breathe a word,” I said. I crossed my heart and then felt stupid. That seemed like a little-girl thing to do.

  “The German who was killed by the boar did not die right away,” Mr. Hewitt said.

  I nodded again. “I know that.”

  “But you think he stayed unconscious, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Didn’t he?” That’s what everybody had said. That he’d hit his head on a rock or something and never woke up.

  Mr. Hewitt shook his head. “No, but it’s important that people keep thinking that he did. Okay?”

  Why, oh why, I kept wondering, was he telling me something no one else was supposed to know?????

  “You mean, he was able to talk before he died?” I asked. “You could ask him questions?”

  Mr. Hewitt nodded. “The authorities questioned him,” he said. “Only a few people know about this. I’m the only person on the Outer Banks who does. And now you.”

  My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “Why me?” I asked.

  “You’ll understand in a minute. I just need to make you understand how important it is for you not to talk about this.”

  “Mr. Hewitt,” I said, “I can keep a secret.”

  “Okay.” He looked out the window behind us, and I started getting nervous again. “Okay. Here’s what the German said. He said that he and the other men on the U-boats were getting classified information from someone in this area, someone onshore.”

  “Classified information about what?” I asked him. Even though I know everyone is supposed to be on the lookout for spies, Dennis had told me there was really no need for the Germans to get information about the merchant ships they were attacking. Nobody needed to tell the Germans where those ships would be or what they would be carrying or anything like that, because there were so many of them, just sitting out there on the ocean, ripe for the picking.

  “We don’t know, exactly,” Mr. Hewitt said. “Our best guess is that someone here is helping the Germans plan to come ashore and sabotage our power plants and railroads and such. Maybe give them fake identification cards and money and that sort of thing.”

  “No one around here would do that,” I said, shocked.

  “Well, someone has, I’m afraid. They couldn’t get any more information from the German sailor before he died. He just said they were supposed to meet up with the informer the day after they got to shore, but of course that never happened. Since they came ashore near Kiss River, our best guess is that the man—or maybe even the woman—they were supposed to meet is in that area.”

  I shook my head, sorting through everyone I knew who lived anywhere near Kiss River. “I can’t imagine it,” I said.

  “I know. One thing I’m concerned about is that this person must be in a position to let the Germans land. It might be…” Mr. Hewitt seemed to have a hard time getting this part out, and I couldn’t blame him. “It might be one of my men,” he said.

  “Someone in the Coast Guard?” I asked. It seemed crazy. Everyone I know in the Coast Guard is patriotic and working hard to protect the coastline. I keep thinking of how angry Sandy would be if he thought for a minute one of his buddies would do something like that.

  “It’s a terrible thing to think about, isn’t it?” Mr. Hewitt said. “But we have to face reality. Are you willing to help me?”

  “How?” I asked, still confused.

  “Through your friendship with the men at the Coast Guard station,” he said. “They all like you. Most of them have crushes on you. They love it when you come around. You’re the last person in the world they would suspect of being in cahoots with me. You’re only fifteen, you’re a girl. But you’re smart as the dickens.” He got a faraway look in his eyes. “Look, Bess, this is a huge thing I’m asking of you. I thought long and hard before asking you, too. I told the man who interviewed the German about you, and he said they would never ask a child to take on such a dangerous role. So they don’t know I’m asking you to do any of this, and all you have to say is no, Bess, and I’ll never ask you again. But the very fact that you’re a fifteen-year-old girl is what makes the plan so perfect. If you do this, though, you will have to be extremely careful. Absolutely no one can know what you’re doing.”

  It’s hard to describe how I felt right then. Honored is the best word, I guess. Mr. Hewitt trusted me more than I ever would have imagined. He and I would be the only two people on the Outer Banks to know what was going on. Except for the culprit. I am certain it will turn out to be someone other than the Coast Guard boys, but who, I have no idea.

  “I’ll help any way I can,” I said. “What should I do?”

  “Just keep bringing goodies to the boys. Maybe more often than you are. Maybe just stop in to say hello now and again. See if you can—very carefully, mind you—find out if any of them might have relatives in Germany or if one of them suddenly seems to have a lot more money than he should.”

  “Why
would he have more money?” I asked.

  “Most likely he’ll be getting paid by the Germans for his help.”

  Of course. I felt stupid for asking the question.

  “You must tell no one what you’re doing,” Mr. Hewitt said again, just in case I didn’t have the message yet. “Not even your parents. I’m sorry to put you in that position.”

  I told him I didn’t mind. I had seen firsthand the death and destruction on the beach and I would do all I could to find the person who was helping the Germans make that happen.

  I wanted to ask him if I could tell Sandy what I was up to. First of all, he could help. He knew the other men very well and might know who could possibly have some sympathy for the Germans. Plus, I was worried he would think I was flirting if I started spending more time with the other boys. But I caught myself just in time before I asked the question. If I asked if I could tell Sandy, Mr. Hewitt would guess about Sandy and me for sure.

  “No one must suspect that you and I are talking about this,” Mr. Hewitt said. “We have to work out a way of communicating so that no one can possibly know. Otherwise, the men will be careful what they say around you.”

  I thought for a moment, suddenly remembering the way my cousin Toria and I used to communicate when she lived nearer to Kiss River. I reached in my pocket and handed Mr. Hewitt the key to the lighthouse. “Here’s what we can do,” I said. “Once a week, or however often you think we should, I can leave you a note in the lantern room of the lighthouse, telling you anything I find out.”

  Mr. Hewitt frowned at the key. “Someone would see me go up there, though,” he said. “And your parents go into that room, I’m sure. They could find the note.”

  I had already figured this out, thanks to the system Toria and I had worked out. “I’ll crumple up the note and tuck it in the brass coupling near the bottom of the lens, on the side closest to my house. That same night, you’ll come after dark, let yourself into the lighthouse, get the note, and leave me another one if there’s something you need me to know. How’s that?”

  He looked thoughtful. “You’re sure your parents won’t stumble over the note somehow?”