“Why the Navy?”
“Because the boat my grandfather saw that night was a U-boat. I think you may have found it. They killed my grandfather because he saw them and the submarine. Before grandfather was shot, my grandmother said he told her he’d seen the two Japanese men leave the Germans and walk toward Highway A1A. Don’t know what happened to the guy that came out of the bushes. Maybe he shot granddaddy. Maybe one of the Germans did. The U.S. Government never even acknowledged what he reported that night. He was the first and only American soldier in World War II killed on U.S. soil. His murder has gone unsolved for more than sixty-seven years. There’s not a day that goes by that my grandmother doesn’t think about him. She was pregnant with my mother when he was killed. My mother and father were killed in a car accident when I was twelve. Grandmother raised me. Maybe, before she passes, you could help her … help her by finding out who killed him. It would bring closure to a patriotic, old woman.”
O’Brien was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the gray head in the car, eyes peeking above the console. “Please, you and your grandmother, come inside.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Susan Schulman stood from behind her desk in an alcove of the Channel Nine newsroom and walked toward the restroom. Nicole Bradley looked up from the computer on her desk, her first assignment as an intern-searching through digitally-stored stock footage-and watched Susan disappear down the hallway.
“How are you coming?” asked the five o’ clock news producer, a no-nonsense, prematurely balding veteran of television news.
“Oh, fine,” Nicole said. “I found some shots of alligators for the story Rod’s doing on habitat destruction.”
“Good, punch in the reference numbers for Sam to pull them in. He’s in editing.”
“Okay.”
The producer looked at his watch. “I’ve got a story rundown meeting now.” He crossed the newsroom to sit with the executive producer.
Nicole walked down the hall to the restroom. She entered and saw Susan Schulman applying lip gloss. “I’m Nicole Bradley. I just want to tell you I’ve always thought you did great work. I watched you a lot before heading up to UF. Still watch you when I come home. You’re one of the reasons I’m studying journalism.”
Schulman didn’t miss a beat applying lip gloss. “You’re the new intern, right?”
“Third day.”
“So you want to get in the news biz?”
“Absolutely.”
“Lots of people do now. It looks like a sweet job, but you’ve got to work hard at it. To get to a larger market, the networks, CNN or Fox, you’ve got to really stand out, and that usually comes by finding a breakout, killer story.”
“Have you ever found that story?”
“Close, but no Emmy yet.” Susan picked up her purse and started for the door.
Nicole said, “Wait a sec. What if I had that killer story for you?”
“Excuse me?”
“The kind of story you could ride to the network.”
“This is your third day as an intern and you think you have a story of national significance?”
“I think it’s of international significance, and I’ll share it … if-”
“If what?”
“If, wherever you’re going, you promise to get me hired, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
O’Brien sipped a cup of coffee on his back porch and listened to Abby Lawson. She said, “My grandmother used to talk about what Florida was like in the days before, during and after the war. She said it was in the summer of ‘42 when the man who would become my grandfather decided to join the Army. He made the decision when he and my grandmother, and dozens of other people, witnessed a German U-boat blow up an American tanker a few miles off the coast of Jacksonville Beach. Right, grandma?”
Glenda Lawson smiled. “Right, honey. I’ll never forget that night.” Her white hair was combed neatly, parted off center and pulled back. Her face was pale, eyes the color of a budding leaf, pastel skin smooth for a woman in her eighties. She wore a trace of rose-colored lipstick. O’Brien thought she possessed a quiet dignity, and yet a sadness as faint as the small blue veins beneath her opaque forehead.
“Grandma told me it was horrible, bodies floated in with the oil slicks, right here on Florida beaches. It wasn’t long after Pearl Harbor was bombed. A lot of people don’t even know that kind of thing was going on so close to our shores until the Navy put a stop to it. The irony is that my grandfather went to war in Europe because of what he saw close to American shores. It infuriated him that the Germans had taken out some of our ships. He went over there, fought them, got shot, and came back here to see a U-boat in the summer of ‘45.”
O’Brien asked, “Why’d the authorities think he’d been killed in a mugging?”
“We don’t know,” Abby said. “They say they found him with his wallet scattered. What little money he had, gone. Or so their reports said. And this was after my grandmother told them everything he told her before his death.”
“If it was some kind of cover up, what would have been the reason?”
“We don’t know that either. It could have something to do with that mystery man who met the men from the submarine. Maybe it’s because they never caught the Japanese. Or maybe it’s because they did catch the Japanese.”
“I wonder what two Japanese men were doing riding in a German sub. Why didn’t they return to the sub?”
“Those are all good questions, Mr. O’Brien-”
“Please, call me Sean. What did the Germans and Japanese bury?”
“We don’t know that, either? Grandma, tell Sean what granddaddy told you.”
The old woman folded her hands, took a deep breath and said, “Billy told me they dug near the fort … you know … Matanzas.”
O’Brien nodded. “Yes, I fished there as a kid.”
She slightly smiled and continued. “He said it was when the light from the St. Augustine lighthouse comes across the fort’s tower, it shines through an opening, makes a line. Billy said they buried some cylinders in the path of that line of light.”
O’Brien said, “The lighthouse is about twenty miles from the old fort.”
Glenda Lawson smiled and said, “Yes sir, it is.”
“Today,” said O’Brien, “the area of Matanzas Pass is a national park. There hasn’t been development. Did the authorities find what was buried?”
Glenda Lawson’s eyes grew wide and she leaned forward. “If they did, nobody bothered to tell me! I asked and they said they’d dug up dozens of sea turtle nests and could never find the hole Billy said was covered up.” She reached in her purse, her hand trembling, blue veins visible under milky skin. She retrieved a folded piece of newspaper, faded yellow. She carefully unfolded it and handed the paper to O’Brien. “They printed this the day after Billy died. There were a few other stories, but they stopped writing when police found nothing.”
O’Brien scanned the story. The sound of a boat came from the river and mixed with the full throttle of a mockingbird in a live oak. “Glenda, the night your husband called you, when he was shot … how many gunshots did you hear?”
“Three.”
