Beyond All Dreams (6 page)

It was Friday evening, and there was no need for her to rise early the following morning. “Do you mind if I read?” she asked Mrs. Horton.

The older lady smiled gently as she reached for her sleeping mask. After sharing a room together for so long, they'd developed a routine. All Mrs. Horton cared about was tidiness and quiet, and Anna could provide both. So long as she had access to enough light to read, Anna could entertain herself for years. Anna twisted the dial on the kerosene lamp to brighten the room.

Thoughts of the
Culpeper
had been nagging her all day, and she had a craving to revisit her father's old letters. It had been years since she'd read them. She sneezed from the dust when she dragged the box from its hiding place beneath her bed.

Sitting on the floor, her back against the bed frame, she began skimming the letters. Most were brief, written in simple language a child could understand. Aside from the whimsical sketches, her father's letters were very ordinary, usually consisting of gentle admonitions to study hard and behave for Aunt Ruth.

All except his last letter. She pulled the final letter from the stack. It had been posted only a week before the
Culpeper
disappeared and was different from all the others. Anna unfolded it, and for the first time in her life she read her father's last letter with adult eyes.

With each line she read, the constriction in her chest grew tighter. Something was very wrong with this letter.

As an expert cartographer, her father had been meticulous; his attention to detail was flawless. But it seemed that each line
of this letter contained contradictory information. She read it over and over, her confusion growing as the implications sank in. Her father was trying to tell her something with this letter, but he was careful to disguise his words and she couldn't make sense of what he was trying to say.

One thing was certain, though. The
Culpeper
did not sink in that hurricane, and this letter could prove it.

T
he following morning, Anna was still mulling over her father's confusing letter. She needed help putting this puzzle together and knew exactly to whom she could turn. Neville Bernhard had been Anna's best friend since childhood, and he would help her now.

The seafaring neighborhood of Alexandria, tucked just outside of Washington, wasn't the easiest place for quiet, introverted children, which guaranteed both Anna and Neville were destined to be ridiculed by the confident, well-groomed children of naval officers and shipping magnates. Neville suffered from strange jerks and tics that never left him in peace. He blinked his eyes rapidly and hard, and the muscles of his face twitched. Sometimes the spasms were so bad it was difficult for him to speak clearly, but at least he could speak. For two years, Anna's throat was so badly damaged she was unable to speak at all.

When she was fourteen, she had an operation to remove the scar tissue that lined her esophagus in hopes it would restore her voice. It worked . . . sort of. In the months following her
surgery, all she could do was croak like a bullfrog, but Neville was kind to her as she learned to speak again, while the other children teased and made fun of her.

Often after school, she and Neville would escape to the small public library where they would sit together in silent companionship, a haven where they could open a book and slip into another century, another continent, another world. Those long-ago afternoons with Neville by her side would always be among her fondest memories.

People tended to underestimate Neville because of the twitching, yet his mind functioned with the precision and sharpness of a surgeon's blade, which made him a valuable asset to the US Patent Office. As thousands of patent applications flooded the office each year, Neville could study the design for a new mechanical invention and recall the details of similar inventions or spot anomalies.

It was Neville's eye for detail that Anna needed to search her father's letter for clues she might have missed. She set off to visit him the first thing on Saturday. It was a blustery October morning, the wind sending fallen leaves swirling through the air. Neville lived at a boardinghouse on F Street and had the world's surliest landlady. Mrs. Norquist always looked at Anna as though she were a scarlet woman come to lead Neville into temptation. Which was ridiculous. She and Neville were like two peas from the same pod. If ever she had a brother, she imagined he would be exactly like Neville Bernhard.

She sent a note up to his room:
Want to break into the Library of
Congress with me?

Neville appeared two minutes later, his lanky frame bounding down the staircase. He was so tall and skinny, he looked like all elbows and knees, with straw-colored hair flopping down to obscure his eyes. But nothing could cover his wide grin. She
held up the prized key ring that opened the door to the Library of Congress, rattling it with a satisfying jiggle.

“Are we on a mission or just prowling the world's greatest treasure trove?” Neville asked.

The letter burned in her pocket. “A mission. I need your help solving a puzzle.”

On normal days, over three thousand people streamed into the US Capitol, but it was nearly empty on Saturday, which made the building eerily quiet. Their footsteps echoed across the marble halls and vaulted ceiling, until they arrived at the main floor of the library.

Tucked into the west wing of the Capitol, the library had a formal reading room on the main floor, filled with tables and surrounded by ornate bookshelves. The room was surrounded by two floors of book stacks that soared all the way to skylights cut into the ceiling. Balconies lined the second and third stories and were open to the bookshelves. Was there anything more inspiring than being able to look up and see oneself surrounded by thousands of books all the way to the ceiling three stories above?

The library was empty except for a dozen workmen, who arrived on the weekends to box up thousands of books to be moved to the new library. Anna could hear them thumping around in the floors above as she laid her father's letter on the table at the center of the grand room.

“I need to find out what happened to the USS
Culpeper
,” she said in a whisper, her voice echoing in the cavernous space. “I've noticed details in this letter that don't line up with the navy's official report. The navy says the
Culpeper
sank off the coast of Bermuda in a late season hurricane, but I don't think the ship was anywhere near the islands when it sank.”

Pointing to the final drawing her father sent to her, she said,
“Look at this sketch.” It showed Anna leaning against a palm tree, a row of simple houses in the background. “My father's letter says he's writing from Bermuda, but Bermuda was a British colony, and those houses look like Spanish architecture.”

Neville listened as Anna recounted other details that had struck her as odd. His brows lowered as he took the letter from Anna and read silently. “I see what you're getting at,” he said. His intelligent eyes scanned the letter and sketch.

It seemed as if every line they pulled apart revealed something odd. Her father mentioned listening to the native people singing in the Arawak language. It took some hunting, but Anna found a book about the native tribes of the Americas, which told her the Arawaks were indigenous to Cuba.

Her father mentioned eating tropical fruit that couldn't be grown in Bermuda's temperate climate. He included a drawing of a starfish that lived only in the Caribbean. She didn't want to follow where the evidence was leading. Despite the heading at the top of the letter declaring he was writing from Bermuda, everything else in the letter pointed to Cuba, located more than a thousand miles from where the navy insisted the
Culpeper
had sunk. The hurricane that battered Bermuda in 1882 never came anywhere near Cuba.

“The
Culpeper
didn't sink off the coast of Bermuda,” she said quietly. “Something else happened to that ship, and the navy is covering it up.”

It hurt to open up these old memories. As a child, she had been miserable living with her aunt and uncle, and for years she prayed that one day her father would come striding through the front door after his long adventure, his arms open wide and his sack full of presents. She'd clung to that fantasy for years, until it became too painful to keep manufacturing implausible explanations for the
Culpeper
's long absence. Anna accepted
that her father was dead, but she still wanted—needed—to know what really happened.

“Why are you digging this all up?” Neville asked. “Ripping the scab off the wound again.”

“Because I
can
,” Anna asserted. Knowing how to find answers was the only thing Anna was really good at, and she loved the hunt.

“Anna, do you remember the summer you were convinced that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Francis Bacon?”

She smiled at the memory. They were sixteen when Anna read an article suggesting Shakespeare couldn't have been the author of his plays, triggering her imagination and launching them both on a quest, scouring the public library for corroborating evidence. They spent months searching for clues buried in Shakespeare's plays and tracing the history of aristocratic rivals in Tudor England, until they were finally satisfied that the exotic theory attributing authorship of Shakespeare's plays to someone else was hogwash and they needed to accept the plain, boring truth.

“You have to admit,” Anna said, “that was still a fun summer.”

“It was glorious,” Neville agreed. “But it's proof you've got an overactive imagination eager to pounce on farfetched ideas. The truth is probably something as mundane as your father writing that letter in Cuba, but he didn't get around to posting it until he reached Bermuda. Maybe you should let this one go,” he said gently. “No matter what we find, it won't bring your father back.”

Neville's words were meant to be kind. Neither one of them had had an easy childhood, but this letter was seeping into her blood, resurrecting memories of a bold, daring cartographer who had traveled the oceans to better understand the world around them. Her father had been a hero, and she wanted to be worthy of his legacy.

“All my life I've ducked and hidden and avoided, but I don't want to run from this. I think my father was trying to communicate something in this letter, and I need to know what that was.”

Anna leaned back in her chair and stared up at the skylight in frustration. On the floor directly above them, a worker leaned against the railing with his ear cocked toward them. His face was in shadow, and there was something sinister about the way he hovered directly above them.

“Is that man watching us?” she whispered to Neville.

He followed her gaze. When the man noticed, he pushed away from the railing and went back to packing up books. Anna kept her eyes trained on him. Over a dozen men came to the library every weekend to crate the books, but she couldn't recall ever seeing this one before.

“He was probably just taking a break,” Neville said. “Your imagination is running away with you again.”

She forced her muscles to relax. Neville was probably right that these little clues didn't hint at some grand conspiracy about the disappearance of the
Culpeper
. The truth was surely far more mundane. But just like she had to investigate the farfetched claim that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays, she was going to need proof before she would abandon her quest to find out what really happened to the
Culpeper
.

On Monday morning, Anna went back to slogging away at Luke Callahan's immense stack of research. No congressman ought to get special treatment merely because he'd barged into Mr. Spofford's office and demanded it. But some people felt entitled to special privileges, and it appeared Mr. Callahan was one of them. It was especially galling since he'd always been the
library's harshest critic. Why did he need all this information that wasn't even related to fish?

Anna pushed her frustrations aside as she delved into the research. He wanted decades of taxation rates compiled for all states, broken out by industry and municipal zone. After three hours of poring over minuscule text, her back ached, her hand was cramped from writing, and her vision was cross-eyed. She'd be useless unless she had a break.

She wandered out of the stacks to the balcony, where she could rest her eyes on the most glorious sight in Washington—three floors of books circling a scholars' reading room on the first floor. There was a certain shabbiness to this library she would miss when they moved into their new building. Resting her forearms on the balcony railing, she breathed in the comforting scent of leather bindings and old paper.

Then the vision was ruined.

There he was, ensconced in his customary alcove near the west window. Mr. Callahan was engrossed in a book, his head bent a little, completely oblivious to the world around him. The tourmaline cuff link winked as he fiddled with a page and . . . she gasped.