A Prayer for the Night (24 page)

Caroline looked him over and shook her head, as if he were the worst variety of scoundrel. She poured his coffee and set it on the bench beside her, saying, “What can be more important than our mornings together, Michael?”

He sat beside her, took up his mug, and said, “There’s no hurry. I predict, however, that you’ll find this little adventure to be worth every second we put into it.”

She sipped at her coffee wordlessly for several minutes, enjoying the peaceful view off the cliffs at the back of their lot. Eventually, she asked, “What gives, Professor?”

“Oh, nothing, really. I thought we might make a little trip in the truck.”

“Will I need to dress like a sodbuster?” she said, laughing at his attire.

“Work clothes would be appropriate,” he answered.

Protesting the interruption of her morning, Caroline got dressed as suggested and found her husband in the garage, loading gear into his short bed truck. Caroline watched, amused, as he stowed two large flashlights, a length of strong rope, a Coleman lantern, a heavy tarp, a pry bar, and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. She got in on the passenger’s side, and he drove without explanation or comment to the house of the late Spits Wallace.

At the back door, he clipped the yellow police tape and unlocked the door to the kitchen. While she waited there, he went back to the truck and brought the two flashlights, the Coleman lantern, the pry bar, and the bottle of champagne in a backpack slung over his shoulder. He handed her one of the flashlights and led the way down to the basement.

Once there, he said, while studying the concrete block walls, “Two things have bothered me about the Spits Wallace affair. One, how did he disappear so handily that afternoon when Samuel White came knocking on his door? Two, why didn’t we find any gold?”

Caroline stood in the middle of the dank basement and watched him skeptically as he traced the electric wires in the basement. After several minutes, he fingered one line and followed it to a small hole between the top of the concrete blocks and the framing joist of the house. He lit a match and held it near the hole through which the wire passed. The flame blew out. He lit another match. Again, it blew out.

Smiling, he lit the Coleman lantern and began to study the grouting between the blocks. Soon he had marked off a narrow rectangle. He wedged his pry bar into one of the seams, and the rectangle pivoted toward him as if it were on hinges.

What he had discovered was a small wooden door, fronted by a thin layer of fake blocks, leading to a crouching tunnel. With a smile, he stooped, entered the tunnel, and held the lantern so that Caroline could follow. Inside, there was an electric switch and a string of lights down the tunnel. The professor turned them on.

In the yellow glow of the string of light bulbs, the tunnel led slowly and gently down for about a hundred feet and terminated in a small cave. Branden shined his flashlight upward, and they saw overhead, fallen partway into the cavern, the tumbled logs of the decrepit old cabin that sat on the Wallace property.

An opening to their left widened to a larger cavern with a steep, rocky slope. They carefully helped each other negotiate the slope, and came out on a flat underground table of rock. There they found an old blanket, a rusty shotgun, a kerosene lantern, and cans of food. And in the corner, there was a large stack of canvas moneybags.

The professor opened one and pulled out a handful of heavy gold coins, dating from the nineteenth century. Astonished despite his earlier reckonings, he knelt beside the pile of coin bags and started to laugh.

Caroline said, laughing too, “This is the famous Wallace coin collection?”

Unable to reply verbally, the professor nodded in the affirmative.

“What made you think it was here?” Caroline asked, and took one of the coins to admire it in the white light of the hissing Coleman lantern.

“He was too dirty,” the professor said. “Both times we saw him he was covered with dirt and mud. And I knew he had his daddy’s coins, despite what he said.”

“You noticed his dirty clothes?”

“That’s it, really. I figured he had been working in a tunnel or a cave, and then I remembered he said he made himself scarce when Samuel White came up his drive.”

As astonished with him as she had ever been, Caroline said, “What are we going to do with it?”

The professor grinned at her like a grade-schooler who had caught his first snake.

Caroline exclaimed, “You wouldn’t dare!”

The professor said, “I never told you much about Spits Wallace and me. Spits Wallace has few relatives. His wife and parents are all dead. He had no children. No brothers or sisters. And, here sits his gold.”

Caroline cautiously repeated, “What are you going to do with it, Michael?”

“Spits Wallace’s father was old Earl Wallace. And old Earl didn’t trust the banks. But I got to know him pretty well, and he showed me once where he had rigged up booby traps for anyone who might try to steal his gold.”

“Seems like a strange connection for a college professor,” Caroline said.

“When I was a kid, my dad used to bring me along to visit old Earl. He kept trying to sell Wallace insurance on his gold coin collection. I’d play with little William.”

“You may be the only person alive who knew Spits Wallace’s given name.”

“Could be.”

“So you knew his father from those trips with your dad.”

“That, yes, but after my parents were killed, my lawyer got me involved with his old man. I was in college and pretty sour, I guess, so he thought it would do me some good to meet this guy. Henry DiSalvo was the lawyer. Anyway, Henry told me to come along on a call with him. Out to the Wallace place. Earl Wallace was dying of lung cancer, and DiSalvo was his lawyer, too. Henry thought it’d be good for me to meet Earl, and in a strange way it was. I came out here every other day or so that summer, and I got to know the old man pretty well. William, Spits, was living with his mother then, in Youngstown, and I’d sit and talk with Earl for hours. That’s when I learned about his coin collection and the booby traps he had set up to protect it. He was a hardscrabble porcupine of an old goat, but I liked him. My grandfather had known him growing up, and they both belonged to the muzzle-loader club back then. Earl could hit a walnut at a hundred paces. Long story short, he died that summer, and William moved back home.”

“How is this related to anything now, Michael?”

“Old man Earl didn’t like his son. Didn’t like people in general, but didn’t like his son in particular. Said his son was too much like his mother. He used to say that his son wasn’t good enough for all his gold. None of his relatives was good enough. ‘Ain’t any fool gonna get my gold.’ Said that more than a few times.

“Gold was the only thing he liked. It took him a lifetime to collect it all. Started buying and trading gold coins while he was still a teenager, back when gold hadn’t shot up like it did. He got hooked on it, and started selling off household goods to buy more coins. Spent all his savings and spent all of his wife’s savings, too. He didn’t care that he lived in a shack and drove a rusty pickup. Spent every dime he made on coins. His obsession with gold cost him everything he had. It’s why his wife eventually left him. But Earl didn’t care about her by then at all. He settled up with her in the divorce by selling off some of his collection, but her lawyers never really knew how much he had, so I suspect he got off easy. I’d sit with him on his old porch, and he’d talk for hours about how he wished he had never met the woman. Other days it’d be the other way around. He’d reminisce about their younger years, when he had first met her. What a looker she had been. Wondering what went wrong.

“And he felt guilty for some reason about the way Spits turned out. Earl had been too hard raising the boy, and something had happened between them. So, he didn’t like Spits at all, but he also couldn’t just cut him out of his will altogether. He wasn’t willing to disown him outright. Anyway, Earl wrote out a will and left his gold to his son. Didn’t like the idea, really, but we talked it through, and old Earl came to accept the idea that it was the right thing to do.”

“You’re not really getting to the point, Michael.”

The professor gave a satisfied smile and a bemused shake of his head. In the harsh light of the Coleman lantern, he popped the cork on the champagne bottle. The cork thudded against the rock ceiling of the cave, and the champagne foamed out over the lip of the bottle. The professor held the bottle at arm’s length to let the foam spill out onto the floor of the cave, and then he poured a glass for Caroline and one for himself.

“The point is, Caroline, unlike his father, Spits Wallace never wrote a will. So I’ve had Henry DiSalvo checking on who his closest blood relatives are. The people who will inherit this gold.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Rabers, for the most part. About thirteen Rabers. There are a few distant relatives on his father’s side, but Spits Wallace’s mother was Bishop Irvin Raber’s oldest sister. She took up with young Earl Wallace in her first year of the Rumschpringe and never went back to Amish ways.”

“Sara made the right choice, didn’t she, Michael?”

“She did indeed,” said the professor, smiling, and clinked his glass to Caroline’s.

Wednesday, April 18
5:15 A.M.

 

 

LITTLE ALBERT ERB, four years old and dressed Amish to match all the men of his congregation, tackled the steps to the back porch of his house one at a time in the dark, with his most serious frown in place. In his nostrils there lingered the confusion of an unfamiliar odor. Was that how the English smelled, he wondered? Never mind. There were more urgent things to worry about.

Albert stopped to catch his breath on the porch landing, pushed through the heavy back door, and pulled off his blue denim waist-coat in the mudroom. He hung his coat and round-brimmed black hat hastily beside the door, on one of the low hooks for children, and marched into the busy kitchen, thinking he needed to ask again about Mattie.

Why wasn’t he allowed to play with her anymore? Something had changed. He wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but he wasn’t supposed to see her anymore, and he didn’t like that at all. And did they know about the woods—how he went there every day to play with her? Yes—remember to ask about Mattie, he thought.

How could it be wrong to play? Was it the secret they kept that made it wrong? Is that why his father spoke so? Why he felt so ashamed? Albert’s thoughts wandered to the woods where they met to play. Mattie always brought one of her puppies. They had fun. He stood in the kitchen, surrounded by family, and puzzled it through in his mind. Why did he have to be secret about playing with her? He knew he did, but why?

Then Albert remembered his uncle Benny, and his puzzlement about Mattie retreated from his thoughts. Uncle Benny was the more important problem right then. Yes—Uncle Benny. Talk to
die Memme
about Benny.

At his mother’s side, Albert gave a soft tug on her dress and looked up with innocent brown eyes, searching for her acknowledgment. When she turned to look down at him, he waited for her to speak, as any youngster should.

“Yes, Albert?” she said. “You can see I am busy with breakfast.”

Albert nodded gravely, swallowed his consternation, and said, “
Benny vill net schwertze. ”—
Benny won’t talk.

His mother said, “We’re all busy with chores, Albert. Go wash your hands, now, and mind the stove.”

Albert kept his gaze on her for a spell, and then shrugged and moved off to the low sink, skirting the wood stove. He was both perplexed about Benny and unhappy with his mother. She didn’t have to remind him like that. He’d been burned once, when he was a baby, but he wasn’t a baby anymore. He knew about baking biscuits for breakfast. So
die Memme
really didn’t have to warn him about hot stoves. He should tell her that, he thought, but when he turned back to show her his pout face, he lost his grasp on his reasons for complaining.

At the sink, he put all of his little weight into pulling down and pushing up on the black iron pump handle, and he rinsed his hands in the cold well water. There, he thought, drying his hands on his pants. Good enough to pass
die Memme
’s inspection.

Albert turned from the sink and went over to his Aunt Lydia at the long kitchen table. He popped up onto the chair beside her and watched her spoon butter into a bowl of fried potatoes.

When she glanced at him, he said, “
Benny kan net laufe.
”—Benny can’t walk.

Lydia chided, “You know his legs are stiff, Albert,” and got up to pour whole milk from a pail into the dozen glasses set out the night before.

Albert watched her work with the pail, thought about his problem, and decided to tell one of his older brothers. He found Daniel coming into the mudroom with another pail of milk, and he told him,
“Benny kan net tseine.”—
Benny can’t see.