“Yes, Nurse Bell.”
“Mr. Westbrook, please keep it brief.”
“Yes, ma’am. Like I said, there were fifty of us, mostly islanders used to heavy shovel work. They hammered metal rods into the ground to try to locate the truck, but it was no use. There were so many boulders in the dirt that the rods either couldn’t penetrate very deeply or were deflected. Finally, it was a man who’d dropped his tobacco pouch who heard you first.”
“You heard me? Was I shouting?”
“No. You were tapping with something metal inside the tank. He’d been standing right on top of you, yet with all the banging and hollering and general hubbub of our rescue efforts no one heard it.”
A split-second flash of clarity raced across the synapses of Bell’s brain. “My .45? Where’s my pistol?”
“Your stuff is in the bottom drawer of the nightstand,” Marion said as she leaned forward to open it.
Some hospital staffer had laundered the clothes and folded them neatly. Bell’s boots were next to the wooden stand and they’d been cleaned too. Sandwiched between his shirt and pants were his undergarments and holster. She handed him the weapon, and Bell examined it. The magazine was missing. He assumed it had been removed and put in the holster. The butt plate at the bottom end of the grip showed numerous scratches where he’d tapped it repeatedly against the flange around the tank’s filler cap.
He showed the others. “This is what I used. I remember that now.”
“See,” Marion said, beaming. She’d noticed her husband’s disquiet over the retrograde amnesia. “It’s already coming back.”
“The funniest part is, you were tapping out a song, and one of the workers knew it. Pretty soon, he’d taught all the others the lyrics. Darnedest sight I’ll ever see is fifty men, stripped to their waist, in the rain, digging into the muck and mud and singing ‘Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay’ over and over again.” He then sang in a surprisingly good voice, “‘Come on, Nancy, put your best dress on. Come on, Nancy, ’fore the steamboat’s gone.’”
Isaac and Marion joined him, though Tats Macalister stayed quiet, as he’d never heard the tune.
“‘Everything is lovely on the Chesapeake Bay. All aboard for Baltimore, and if we’re late they’ll all be sore.’”
Bell laughed for the first time since regaining consciousness.
“The men swear you kept perfect time for the first hour, though by then a lot of them were joking about you taking requests because the song had become repetitive.” Westbrook turned a little somber. “The jokes dried up when the tune trailed off, and you started tapping out Morse code. I told them that S.O.S. was a dire call for assistance, and, damn, if those men didn’t double their pace. I don’t think if we’d laid track and gotten a steam shovel on-site that more dirt would have been moved.
“We figured out the orientation of the tank as we excavated around it by noting where the mounting brackets had been torn free from the truck. We concentrated where we knew the filler cap would be. The men tore into the ground like savages, and when they came across a boulder that they could wrest out by hand, a few would act as riggers to secure it to ropes, the rest would pull it out like they were draft horses.
“You had become more than someone needing to be rescued, you became an inspiration in a fight they refused to lose. The softer you tapped your gun against the tank, the harder they worked because they knew you were dying and they were failing. In the end it was only a couple minutes after you stopped tapping that we could wrench open the tank and get a man inside to pull you out.”
“I had no idea,” Bell breathed. Everyone had been moved by the story, but him most of all since it was his life that they saved.
Marion clutched her husband’s hand. “We must do something for those men.”
Sam looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“What is it?”
“Once we got you out of the tank, I drove you straight here. The workers scattered. I’m sorry to say I don’t know who any of them were, and there’s no real way to track them down.”
“That’s the canal in a nutshell,” Tats Macalister said. “A heroic task undertaken by faceless men whose effort will be remembered but whose names were never known.”
“I’ll ask around, if you like,” Sam offered.
“Please do,” Bell said and tried to stifle a yawn.
“That’s our signal to go,” Macalister said, straightening up from his chair.
He and Westbrook shook Bell’s hand—Tats looked away at the last moment as if a little overcome by emotion at Bell’s survival—and bade their good-byes to Marion.
“I like them,” she said when they were alone. “Sam has been a real sweetie since he learned I was your wife. And that Tats Macalister—boy, could I make him a matinee idol in no time.”
Bell remained silent, his mind elsewhere.
“Stop thinking about what all those men did for you,” Marion said ardently. “You don’t need to feel that you owe them. They did it because they wanted to and because it was the right thing. You do the right thing all the time and never expect any kind of acknowledgment. You’re not in their debt, so quit brooding.”
He chuckled. “You can read me like a book.”
“One I am particularly fond of, so please stop trying to destroy it. Seriously, you could have died out there.”
“I think that was the intention.”
Her concern deepened. “Do you remember something?”
“No, but you know me and how well I drive. There’s no way I lost control on my own.”
“You were on an unfamiliar road in the middle of a storm in a truck you’ve never driven,” she pointed out. “Even you can make a mistake.”
“But I’m also on the trail of a violent insurgent group whose moneyman I killed a couple days before. I can well imagine they’d like their revenge.”
“Why such an elaborate trap?”
“If there were witnesses, it’s easier to explain away a road accident
