Dark Light

33

I knocked on Chestra’s door. No answer. Placed my ear near the window and heard music, the piano. I tested the knob. Unlocked. Considered sticking my head in and calling her name but decided I didn’t know the woman well enough.

Instead, I took a business card from my billfold, and wrote, “We’re in the salvage business. Back at 9. MDF,” and wedged it at eye level inside the doorjamb.

I’d ridden Tomlinson’s gaudy beach bike, which was now propped against a gumbo-limbo tree. From the basket, I took my foul-weather jacket and walked to the beach.

I’d spent the day on the water, but weather changes quickly in the subtropics and I wanted to have a look at the Gulf. At the lab, I’d listened to NOAA weather while connecting the flask-sized object and the gun-sized object to the electrolytic reduction circuit. The other artifacts—the German coins and the diamond swastika—were already cleaner, more detailed. The cigarette lighter wasn’t much improved—the engraving only slightly more legible. Yes, the first letter was an M.

Marlissa?

As I worked, the computerized voice of NOAA told me that hurricanes near Grand Cayman and Cuba were gaining mass, moving slowly toward the Gulf. The low-pressure system off Nicaragua was spinning eastward toward open ocean.

The hurricane most likely to effect Sanibel had formed a week earlier near the Windward Islands as an unnamed tropical depression. It moved southeast near Grenada, then arched to the west-northwest toward Jamaica with maximum winds of forty m.p.h., vacuuming heat off the Caribbean Sea. The storm was now approaching the western tip of Cuba with sustained winds of more than one hundred m.p.h., and would gain strength once over water.

Only a month after being cross-haired by a category 4 hurricane, Southwest Florida residents were still panicky. The storm that hit us had had steady winds of 145 m.p.h., with gusts of more than 170 m.p.h. This new hurricane was following a similar path, and I knew that lines at supermarkets and gas pumps would be long tonight. By tomorrow afternoon, northbound lanes would be clogged with vehicles evacuating to Georgia and the Carolinas.

Panic triggers herd instincts. Government agencies, fearing post-storm criticism, are quick to overreact. It was a statistical improbability that another hurricane would make landfall near Sanibel. There was no reason to evacuate yet thousands would flee. It was more dangerous, in fact, on the road than to be battened down at home.

The dynamics of wind, heat, and water are indifferent to human thought, irrational or otherwise. But this storm now had a name. It was an entity that evoked fear. The instinct to appease by sacrifice, hording, or flight is ancient.

Traffic was already backed up on the island—which is why I’d come by bicycle. The causeway that connects Sanibel to the mainland had been damaged by the hurricane, so the Department of Transportation was closing it every other hour for repairs. Only emergency vehicles were allowed to cross between midnight and 6 A.M.

Islanders were running in advance.

Not Mildred Engle, though. She was unconcerned, content to play the piano while the world panicked around her.

A woman who loved storms.

I walked to the beach, feeling the thunderous resonance of waves. A tropical cyclone was breathing out there, siphoning heat, and exhaling a water-dense southwest wind.

As I walked, I reviewed details of our dive. What remained among the wreckage of the motor yacht Dark Light? Gold? I’d convinced myself I was imagining things. Gold on a family-owned boat that was being used by Civil Defense for coastal patrols? That was as improbable as…well, as finding a diamond-studded swastika and death’s-head.

Maybe there was gold out there.

Something strange happened that long-ago autumn night, in 1944. What? Key parts of the puzzle were missing.

I stepped into the tree line, sand pliant beneath my jogging shoes, and stopped at the edge of the Southwind estate. The upstairs light was on, balcony doors open. Curtains moved in the wind like shadows dancing. I continued toward the house until I could hear Chestra at the piano. I recognized “In the Still of the Night.”

I turned toward the horizon. The moon was masked by turquoise clouds. The sea was Arctic silver; ice ridges on an oleaginous plain. Inside me, music found tempo in waves as I tried to imagine what had happened the night Dark Light went down. I needed plausible data to assemble workable scenarios.

I thought the whole thing through; tried to keep it orderly.

Supposition: Unaware of an approaching hurricane, two people boarded a thirty-eight-foot Matthews, and ran a 240-degree course off Sanibel Lighthouse. They were investigating a report of suspicious lights sighted offshore, possibly a German U-boat. Coincidentally, there was also one or more boats in the area containing Cuban fishermen—several of their bodies washed ashore the next morning.

Conclusion: If lights were spotted, they belonged to Cuban fishing boats, or an unidentified vessel, a U-boat, or a combination of the three.

Supposition 2: Dark Light sank during the storm.

Observation: The boat went down quickly. Its remains were only a degree or two off the original heading. A vessel floundering in a storm commonly drifts miles before sinking.

Probability: Dark Light sank because of a circumstance or event that was abrupt, not cumulative.

Supposition 3: Aboard Dark Light were Marlissa Dorn and Frederick Roth, secret lovers. They also had at least minor business dealings. Dorn loaned Roth money to buy real estate. Both emigrated from Nazi Germany, so may have come into possession of Nazi medals that were: 1) awards for government service, or 2) acquired independently, perhaps because of their monetary value.

Probabilities: 1) Dorn and/or Roth were awarded, or acquired, the medals found at the wreck site. 2) The medals were placed on board by someone else. 3) Another person or persons came aboard Dark Light that night.

Supposition 4: The body of Marlissa Dorn washed ashore the day after the storm. Roth’s body was never found.

Conclusion: Dorn died during the storm. Roth may or may not have died during the storm. If he did not die, he wasn’t aboard Dark Light when it sank, or he found refuge aboard a vessel capable of surviving 140 m.p.h. winds in open sea.

Probability: A submarine.

Valid so far?

No.

The data was flawed; at least one of the conclusions implausible.

I stretched, and looked toward the house. Chestra was now playing the poignant melody that I recognized but still couldn’t match with a title. I reminded myself to ask again. I also had a more important question: Was she sure her godmother’s body was found on the beach near Lighthouse Point?

It had been bothering me on a subconscious level for a while. I now understood why.

Five hours earlier, when Augie and Oswald had been set adrift, they had been precisely where Dark Light had spent her last minutes afloat. By the time we’d found the two men, half an hour later, they had drifted more than a mile away from Sanibel Island, not toward it. If allowed to drift all night, I’d calculated they would’ve come ashore near Naples—forty miles to the south—or, more likely, they would have been swept out to sea, into the Gulf Stream.

Currents in the Gulf of Mexico are complex but tend to flow either northward or southward, interrupted by circular eddies that rotate like slow, underwater tornadoes.

Even driven by dissimilar weather conditions, the body of a dead woman would not have drifted directly east. She would not have come ashore near Sanibel Lighthouse.

If Marlissa Dorn’s body had washed up on the beach on the morning of 20 October 1944, she’d either gone