Ancient shores

4

…Glides through misty seas
With its cargo of time and space…
—Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores

Max did not sleep well. He had put on a show of good-natured amusement at Ginny’s fears and her insistence they stay together, as if some demonic spirit had come in off the plains and invaded the barn. But it was he who suggested they leave a few lights on outside. Best that the glow leaking in through the windows be coming from GE sixty-watt bulbs rather than from the whatsis. But he felt a degree of pride that she had turned to him for support.

It was not the presence in the barn, however, that caused his restlessness. It was rather the sense of home, of a family drawing together. He had known this kind of atmosphere as a child but never as an adult. Lasker occasionally joked about the assorted pleasures of Max’s social adventures. Never the same woman twice. And Max played along, because it was expected. But he would have traded it all to get a Ginny in his life.
In the morning they located Tom. The previous evening’s alarms now seemed overblown, and if Ginny had a difficult time explaining why she had summoned help, Max felt uncomfortable at his presence in the rambling farmhouse. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was nervous,” she told her husband over the phone. “But it was really spooky here. I’m in favor of getting rid of the damned thing.”
Lasker was on the speaker. He couldn’t believe that the lights had come on, and he kept asking whether she was sure. Finally he seemed satisfied, although Max knew he would not believe it until he’d seen it for himself. As for getting rid of it: “I don’t think we want to make any quick decisions,” he said. “Let’s find out what we’ve got first. We could throw some canvas over it, if you want. That way you wouldn’t be able to see the damn thing.”
Ginny looked at Max. “I don’t think that’s going to make me feel much better, Tom.”
“Max,” he said, “what do you think about this? Does it make any sense to you?”
“No,” said Max. “I have no idea. But I’ll tell you one thing—that boat hasn’t been in the ground any length of time at all.”
There was a long pause on the other end. “Okay,” Lasker said at last. “Look, I’m on later this morning. I’ll do my stuff and leave right after. Be home this afternoon.”
It was a cold, gray, dismal day, threatening rain or snow. During breakfast a few people arrived and banged on the front door. Could they see the boat? Ginny dutifully unlocked the barn, hitched the trailer to an old John Deere, and pulled it out into a gray morning. Signs posted on the trailer requested people not to touch anything.
“Why do you bother?” asked Max, deeply engrossed in a plate of pancakes and bacon. “Leave it in the barn and all this will stop.”
“I’d do it in a minute,” she said. “But Tom thinks it would be unneighborly. He thinks if people come all the way from Winnipeg or Fargo to see this thing, they should get to see it.” She shrugged. “I don’t really disagree with that, but it is getting to be a hassle.” More cars came while Max was finishing breakfast. “We figure they’ll get bored soon. Or frozen. Whichever.” Ginny’s cool blue eyes touched him. She was still frightened, even in the daylight. “Max, I’d like very much to be rid of it.”
“Then sell it.” He knew she could have her way with her husband.
“We will. But it’s going to take a while. I don’t even know whether we have a free claim to it.”
Max finished off his pancakes and reached for more. He usually tried to be careful about overeating, but Ginny’s cooking was too good to pass up. “I wonder,” he said, “if there’s anything else buried here.”
She looked momentarily startled. “I hope not.”
Max was trying to piece together a scenario that would account for the facts. He kept thinking about the Mafia. Who else would do something this weird? Maybe the boat was a critical piece of evidence in a Chicago murder case.
Someone knocked at the kitchen door.
Ginny opened it to a middle-aged woman wrapped in furs, accompanied by a stolid, gray-haired chauffeur. “Mrs. Lasker?” she asked.
Ginny nodded.
The woman came in, unbuttoned her coat, and saw Max. “Good morning, Mr. Lasker,” she said.
“My name’s Collingwood,” he said.
Her only reaction was a slightly raised eyebrow. She turned back to Ginny. “I’m Emma McCarthy.” She had sharp, inquisitorial features and the sort of expression one gets from a lifetime of making summary judgments. “May I inquire, dear, whether your boat is for sale?” She closed the door behind her, leaving the chauffeur outside on the step.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Ginny. “My husband’s quite fond of it. We’re planning to use it ourselves this summer.”
McCarthy nodded and lowered herself into a chair. She signaled Max for coffee. “I understand perfectly. I’d feel the same way. It is a lovely boat.”
Ginny filled a cup and handed it to her.
“You do want to explore your options, dear,” she continued. “But I can assure you no one will offer a better price. I wonder if you’d be willing to let me look at it a little more closely. I’d like to see the cabins. And the motor.”
Ginny sat down across the table from her. “I must tell you in all honesty, Ms. McCarthy—”
“Mrs.,” she corrected. “My husband, George, God rest him, would never stand for it if I abandoned him now.”
“Mrs. McCarthy.” Ginny smiled. “I’ll be happy to show you around the yacht. But I’m not ready to entertain an offer just now.”
Mrs. McCarthy pushed her coat off and let it fall back over the chair. Let’s talk turkey, she seemed to be saying.
Max excused himself and went to pack. It was time to go back to Fargo. With Tom coming in and the crowd wandering the premises, he could see no reason why he was needed. From the living room, Max watched cars continue to arrive. Rain was beginning to fall. Beyond the driveway, the fields were gray and bleak and rolled on forever.
Where had the yacht come from?
No serial number. No plates of any kind.
Sails that had to have been in the ground, Ginny insisted, for more than twenty years. Crazy. He knew that wasn’t true.
He dropped his bag at the front door and went back out to the barn to look at them. They were neatly stacked in plastic sheaths. He opened one and removed the fabric. It was bright white. And soft. More like the texture of a shirt than a sail.
When Ginny returned, he didn’t have to ask how it had gone. She looked ecstatic.
“She’s in your business, Max,” she said. “Do you believe that? Except that she restores boats.” She held out a business card. Pequod, Inc., it read. Mrs. George McCarthy, director. Boating as It Used to Be.
“I take it she made an offer?”
Ginny’s eyes grew big and round. “Yes!” she said, and her voice escalated to a squeal. “Six hundred thousand!” She grabbed Max and hugged him so hard she knocked him off balance.
A van pulled into the driveway and opened its doors. Its passengers, who appeared to be a group of retired people, hesitated about getting out into the rain.
Max shook his head. “Don’t jump too quickly,” he said.
“What? Why not?”
“Because it’s probably worth a lot more. Look, Ginny, boats are not my specialty. But it’s never prudent to rush into a deal.” He screwed his face up into a frown. Damned if he could figure this out. “I don’t think you stand to lose much by waiting. And, depending on what it turns out to be, you might have a lot to gain.”
Ginny put on her jacket and walked outside with Max, where they stood on the porch with five or six tourists. The rain wasn’t much more than a light drizzle, but it was cold. “Ginny,” he said, “do you have any pictures? Of the yacht?”
“Sure.”
“May I have a few? And one other thing: I’d like to make off with a piece of sail. Okay?”
She looked at him uncertainly. “Okay,” she said. “Why?”
“I’d like to find out what it’s made from.”
“It feels like linen,” she said.
“That’s what I thought.”
She smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.” A curtain of hard rain was approaching from the west. “I better put it away.” She jumped down off the porch, climbed into the tractor, and started the engine. Most of the visitors, seeing the sky, decided to get out while they could and ran to their cars.
She had to back the boat into the barn. It was about halfway in, and she was turned around in the operator’s seat, trying to ease between stalls, when she stopped and stared. “Max.” She waved him forward. “Look at this.”
“It’s raining out there,” he protested.
But she waited for him. He sighed, jammed his hands into his pockets, and walked across the squishy lawn. “What?” he said. The rain got heavier. It drove against him, drilled him, took his breath away.
She was pointing at the prow, paying no attention to the downpour. “Look.”
He looked. “I don’t see anything.”
“I don’t think,” she whispered, “it’s getting very wet.”
A haze had risen around the boat, much the way it will on a city street during a downpour. Max shrugged. “What’s your point?”
“Look at the tractor.”
No mist.
Well, maybe a little. The tractor had been recently polished. It shimmered, and large waxy drops ran down its fenders.
But the boat: The rain fountained off the hull and was shot through with rainbow colors. It was almost as if the water was being repelled.


An hour later the P—38J rolled down the runway at Fort Moxie International Airport and lifted into a gray, wet sky. Max watched the airstrip fall away. The wind sock atop the lone hangar was around to the southeast at about twenty knots. North of the airport, frame houses and picket fences and unpaved streets mingled with stands of trees and broad lawns. The water tower, emblazoned with the town’s name and motto, A Good Place to Live, rose proudly above the rooftops. The Red River looked cold.
He followed Route 11 west, into the rain, flying over wide fields of wilted sunflowers waiting to be plowed under. Only a farm truck, and a flock of late geese headed south, moved in all that vast landscape. He cruised over Tom’s place. The driveway was almost empty now, and the barn was shut against the elements. He turned south.
The rain beat on his canopy; the sky was gray and soupy. He looked over at his starboard tail boom, prosaic and solid. The power plant consisted of two 1,425-horsepower liquid-cooled Allison engines. White Lightning had been manufactured sixty years ago by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation of Seattle. It was magic, too, like the boat. But this was real; it was magic held aloft by physics. There was no room in the same world for a P—38J and a buried yacht with working lights.
None at all.
He climbed to seventeen thousand feet, his assigned altitude, and set course for Fargo.


Max dropped the fragment of sail off at Colson Laboratories, asking that they determine the composition of the material and, if possible, where it might have been manufactured. They promised to get the results back to him within a week.
Stell Weatherspoon was his executive assistant. She was an overweight, bright-eyed, matronly type with three kids in high school and an ex who was constantly delinquent with his payments. Her prime responsibility at Sundown was to handle the administrative details of the operation. She wrote contracts, scheduled maintenance, hired subcontractors. She was also a born conservative who understood the difference between risks and gambles, and who thereby exercised a restraining influence on Max’s occasional capricious tendencies. Had she been along, Kerr would have had his Lockheed Lightning, no questions asked. “Don’t get emotionally involved with the planes,” she warned him now and then. “These are business ventures, not women.”
She greeted him on his arrival at the Sundown offices with a disapproving stare. “Hello, Max.”
“He wasn’t the right guy for the P—38,” he said.
Her eyes drifted shut. “Our business is to restore and sell airplanes. Not find homes for them.”
“He was a jerk,” Max said. “No good comes from that kind of money.”
“Yeah, right. Max, the world is full of jerks. If you’re not going to sell to them, we are going to eliminate most of the population.”
“The male population,” said Max.
“You said it; I didn’t.”
Max picked up his mail. “I was up on the border last night.”
“Really?” she said. “Doing what?”
“I’m not sure. Tom Lasker dug up a yacht on his farm.”
“I saw it on TV,” she said. “That’s Lasker’s place? I didn’t realize that.”
“It is. I spent the night up there.” Max drew a chair over beside her and sat down. “I need your help, Stell.” He opened his briefcase. “Ginny gave me some pictures.” He handed over six nine-by-twelve glossies.
“It’s in pretty good condition,” she said, “for something that was buried.”
“You noticed that, huh? Okay, look, what I’d like you to do is find out who made the damned thing. There’s no ID on it of any kind. Fax these around. Try the manufacturers, boat dealers, importers. And the Coast Guard. Somebody’ll be able to tell us something.”
“Why do we care?” she asked.
“Because we’re snoops. Because your boss would like to know what the hell’s going on. Okay?”
“Sure. When do you want it?”
“Forthwith. Let me know what you find out.” He went into his office and tried to call Morley Clark at Moorhead State.
“Professor Clark is in class,” said his recorded voice. “Please feel free to leave a message at the beep.”
“This is Max Collingwood. Morley, I’m going to fax you some photos. They’re of a yacht, and there’s a piece of writing on the hull. If you can identify the language, or better yet get a translation, I’d be grateful.”


Everett Crandall came out personally to usher Lasker into his office. “I saw your boat the other day, Tom. You’re a lucky man, looks like to me.” Ev was more or less permanently rumpled—both he and his clothes.
“That’s why I’m here,” said Lasker.
“What’s going on? Whose boat is it?”
“Don’t know.”
“Come on, Tom. You must have some idea.”
Ev’s office was packed with old law books, framed certificates, and photos, most of which had been taken during his tenure as county prosecutor. Prominently displayed on his desk was a picture of Ev and Senator Byron Glass at last year’s Fourth of July celebration.
Lasker sat down. “Ev,” he said, “I’ve got a prospective buyer.”
“For the boat?”
“Yes. Is it mine to sell?”
Ev nodded, but his dark eyes said no. He took off his glasses, wiping them with a wrinkled handkerchief. “Hard to say,” he said.
“It’s on my property. That should make it mine, right?”
Ev’s hands were in his lap. He looked down at them. “Tom, if I left my RV over at your place, would it be yours?”
“No. But this was buried.”
“Yeah.” Ev considered that. “If I chose to hide my family silver by burying it out back of your house, would it be yours?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “I don’t guess it would.”
“Have you heard from anyone? I mean, has anybody put in a claim for the boat?”
“No. Nobody.”
“Have you exhausted reasonable means to establish ownership?”
“Is that my responsibility?”
“Who else’s? Listen, for all we know it could be stolen. The thieves hid it in your ground. For whatever reason. In that case, it would belong to the original owner.” Ev was a careful man, a model of caution. He took pride in not committing to a view until all the facts were in. Which meant, of course, that he was never quite on board. Or in opposition. “The question here, as I see it, is one of intent. Was the property abandoned? If so, then I think your claim to ownership would be valid. And I believe that claim would be substantiated in court, if need be. If someone challenged it.”
“Who would challenge it?”
“Oh, hard to say. A relative might claim the owner was not competent when he, or she, abandoned the boat. Burying it might constitute a sound argument in that direction.”
“So how do I establish ownership?”
“Let me research it, Tom. Meantime, it would help if we could find out how it came to be where it was.”