The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (25 page)

The woman gave her an odd look but complied. Aurora asked about the
baby and commented on the lovely weather, edging a glance toward the box every
few seconds; it changed not one bit. The same dull finish, the same dark wood
stain. She thanked the woman and went on to her favorite coffee house.

During her meal she found excuses to ask several other people to touch
the box. No one elicited a reaction from it; Charles was the only one. Was it
possible that the box’s enhanced molecular structure made it react only to
people whose own bodies contained more electricity than others? Or was there
some sort of destiny involved?

She shook off that idea—she was not a big believer in fate unless there
was a scientific explanation. Perhaps this morning’s event was a one-time
occurrence. She paid for her sandwich and walked back to the lab.

At Charles’s desk the finished letter to Warren Smith waited. She
picked it up and asked Charles to hold the box again. Once more, it began to
warm and to lighten in color.

“Miss Potts? May I set it down now?” He dropped his voice to a whisper.
“It gave me so much energy this morning that I worry I won’t sleep all night.”

She covered her desire to laugh with a businesslike answer. “Of course.
I shall take it. Perhaps you could put that energy to good use in sorting files
and neatening the drawers.”

In the quiet of her office she closed the door and set the box on her
desk. The fact that the occurrence had now happened twice filled her with
elation. It was extremely rare that their investigations into the paranormal
were validated. She wanted to leap and shout, to tell the world. But that went
against the principles of the Foundation’s code. They were to investigate and
document, not to sensationalize or create a public stir. In fact, of all the
verified mystical artifacts and events they had researched none had been put on
display. Each artifact went back to its owner. The Vongraf Foundation’s mission
was about science, not vulgar publicity.

Still, she would see to it that their documentation was flawless. She
called Charles and another man, the one most proficient with the camera, into
her office. If at all possible she wanted to capture the box’s glow on a
photographic plate and see how well it might print on paper.

The telephone rang as the men were setting up the camera on a tripod.
Aurora reached for it herself.

“Aurora Potts, please,” said a male voice with a slight accent.

“Speaking.” She waved the two men out of her office.

“I represent an organization much like your own,” he said. “We are
known by the initials OSM. I am in the Washington office.”

She waited, working to place the accent. European. Italian, perhaps.

“We understand you are currently investigating a very unusual item,
something far different from the mundane artifacts we see regularly. Our group
requests that we be able to examine it as well.”

Something in his tone and his words caused the hairs on her neck to
rise.

“I’m not familiar with OSM,” she said, hoping the lie sounded
convincing. “Who do you represent?”

“Only ourselves. We are an independent research facility.”

Her mind tried to go back to her old college notes which she had
reviewed weeks ago. The letters OSM, handwritten at the top of a page, and the
vague notion that they had something to do with religion … but none of that
made sense. This man could be behind any number of schemes.

“And exactly what item do you believe we have?”

“A box. An oddly carved wooden box. It has colored stones on it and is
carved in a symmetrical pattern similar to the letter X.”

His voice made her skin crawl. His exact description of the box … she
knew she could never admit to him that she was staring at it this very moment.

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Excuse me, but you do know. You know exactly what item I refer to.”

Something hardened inside her. “I was about to say that I do not have
the item anymore. It was shipped back to its owner this afternoon.”

“Oh, that is too bad. Please, who is it? We would like to contact him.”

But Aurora refused to say. She was breathing hard when she replaced the
receiver. How had this man, this organization if he did represent one, found
out about the artifact?

Her street foray during the luncheon hour came back to her. Someone had
seen her passing the box around, asking others to touch it. Among those who had
spoken with her or someone observing at a distance, someone had reported it to
this OSM. Her hands shook as she picked up the telephone directory and thumbed
through the pages. There was no listing using those initials and as she perused
the lines of type she saw nothing that could conceivably use the initials as
its abbreviation. Of course, the entity could exist anywhere in the world other
than Alexandria, Virginia. She considered the possibilities.

The telephone connection had been very clear, so the man’s assertion
that he was in a Washington office could very well be true. Of course the
organization could be farther away but with a local representative who tracked
the activities of The Vongraf Foundation.

Charles and the photographer came back in when Aurora signaled them. As
they set up the camera and took several images she found herself thinking
furiously. The box would go into the evening mail by Special Delivery to Warren
Smith. She penned a note to him, to go along with the typed report.

Dear Mr. Smith,

It has been our pleasure to
examine the artifact you submitted. Enclosed is the scientific data forming our
conclusions. On a personal note, I would like to caution you about sharing this
information with anyone you do not know. We received a call from an
organization called OSM. I am not familiar with

She stopped with her pen aimed toward the inkwell on her desk. What
could she say, really? The man gave me an uneasy feeling? I don’t know this organization
so you should not trust them either? She balled up the sheet of paper and
tossed it into the waste basket.

“Make those prints for me as quickly as possible,” she said. They would
go into a folder with a copy of her data and the letter to Mr. Smith. The
folder would go into the innermost depth of the Foundation’s vault. She would
ask two of their men to accompany her to the post office and see the box safely
on its way.

Tomorrow she would see to the implementation of security measures for
the building.

Chapter 9

The Great War Rages

The stink of a thousand male bodies—jammed shoulder to shoulder where
they sat on wooden decking, anticipation and fear wafting off them—sent
Patricio Sanchez’s stomach lurching. He looked down at his olive drab wool
uniform, would have taken a whiff at his own armpit had he been able to lift
the arm. No point in that. He knew he smelled as awful as the rest of them.

They had been marched aboard the former cruise liner six days ago and
no one had benefit of more than a damp sponge bath in all that time. At night
they removed their hats, boots, puttees, and tunics so they could stretch out
on narrow bunks, five high, but sleep did not come easily. For days on end the
greatest fear was of a fate like the
RMS Lusitania
three years ago. To
the Germans, the fact that the passenger liner was filled with families, women
and children had made no difference. No one today was under any illusion about
his own destiny should they be spotted by one of the dreaded underwater boats. Patricio
could only hope and pray that they had already reached safe waters—the
transport ship was due to dock within the hour. Otherwise, all he knew was that
they were to be taken to various war fronts in the French and Italian
countryside.

A few weeks of training and he hardly knew any of the men in his
company, much less any of the others comprising the regiment. The one man he
had to keep in his sights was his sergeant, a bulky man named Calloway. The
ship bumped something and faces went a little greener. If a loss of breakfast
felt inevitable you were expected to snatch the hat from your head and make use
of it. He swallowed hard and thought of home, of sweet-faced Emelia who had
given him her lace handkerchief and agreed to wait for him. Nothing of his
former life in the high-desert climate of northern New Mexico had prepared him
for this.

“
Caramba
!
U
na
mala,
” growled the man next to him who looked Latino but had the English
surname of Smith. The poor fellow looked clammy.

Patricio glanced up to see if Calloway was nearby. The two of them had
already been chastised for ‘jabbering away’ when their superior officer
couldn’t understand the few words they exchanged.

“Yeah, that was a bad one,” he agreed in English, perhaps a trifle too
loudly.

“All right, men! To your feet,” the familiar voice shouted from the
other end of the hold. “On deck you’ll go to the gangway. On shore, assemble by
companies and wait for your commanding officer. Transport trains are waiting.”

“Yes, sir!” arose the appropriate response.

Patricio sent the other doughboy a half-smile which he hoped conveyed
encouragement. He didn’t like the idea of the trains. Having his feet on solid
ground for a few days would have been far more welcome. He strapped his canteen
to his belt, picked up his blanket roll and the standard-issue .30-06
Springfield bolt action rifle that practically felt like a third arm now. A
groan escaped him as he stood for the first time in five hours.

Beside him, Roberto Smith, the one man he’d begun to think of as a
buddy, also rose. They exchanged a look that said
here we go
. But the
going was extremely slow as men and gear moved single file up the narrow ladder
to the upper deck.

“Drape it over your shoulder!” shouted a man at the top who handed him
a white canvas bag as Patricio emerged into daylight.

He blinked and looked around, feeling a little like a prairie dog on
the first day of spring.

“Keep moving!”

He shuffled forward as best he could among the throng of men on deck.
Places along the ship’s rail were already crowded and men stood in clumps or
stood slack-jawed, realizing for the first time that they were far, far from
home. Thirty yards away he found a less-crowded spot on the rail and edged his
way toward it.

From the shore he could hear shouts as sailors handled massive ropes
and the ship edged against the pier. A gangway wide enough for two was being
trundled into place. Beyond the dock, men with smiling faces gathered in masses
and paced about, getting a feel for the earth beneath them once again. A
general air of jubilation floated toward him on the light spring breeze. A row
of buildings led from the dock area then spread out to form a small town. Only
a few curious civilians showed their faces.

“See any of the others from our company?” asked Roberto Smith, coming
closer and fiddling with the strap of the white canvas bag he’d been given.

Patricio looked around and noticed that most of the men had draped the
strap around their necks, diagonally across their chests. He did the same.

“What is this thing?” Roberto muttered, still having problems
untangling the strap.

“Gas mask.” The gruff voice came from a man neither of them knew. “It’s
gonna be your best friend this time next week.”

Patricio felt a new wave of fear. News of the German gas attacks had
even made it as far as New Mexico, and shell-shocked soldiers were already
convalescing in the sanitarium at Albuquerque. The excitement of landing in
Europe dimmed.

The sound of leather boots on wood decking became more organized and he
realized men were moving toward the gangway. Two by two they trooped ashore and
a corporal at the bottom shouted and pointed them in various directions. He and
Roberto joined the tide of movement, slowly making their way. No sense in
rushing; this ship wasn’t leaving until every last man was off.

At the bottom of the slanting gangway the corporal took one look at the
insignia on their tunic collars. “Infantry C, over there.” He vaguely aimed his
arm toward a warehouse where Patricio recognized Sergeant Calloway who appeared
to be checking names off a list.

“Over here! Look sharp!” Calloway said, fierce yet somewhat bored at
the same time. He marked his list and pointed for them to join the others.

Eventually all two hundred fifty men stood in front of the warehouse
which, by the smell of it, once contained damp bales of wool. Calloway ordered
them to stand in rows and a photographer set up his tripod and made fussy
little motions to get everyone in the picture. The men shuffled into place
accordingly and the photographer draped a black cloth over his head and told
them to stand perfectly still. Patricio wondered if his parents would see that
photograph someday. He hoped his hat was straight and his tunic neat.

An hour later they were marching through the streets of some tiny
Belgian town, filling the railroad depot, being herded into train cars with
hard wooden benches.

“At Cantigny, we join the French Army,” Calloway announced. “There’s
been German action in the area so stay together and be alert!” The sergeant
moved on to repeat the information in the next car.

“Any luck, maybe the
Froggers
will already
have the trenches dug,” said a man next to Roberto and Patricio. “My brother
wrote home, said that was the messiest part of the work.”

Patricio tried to imagine digging trenches in the soft sand near home.
He couldn’t see it holding together well enough for a group of men to fight
from such a position. The train started to move and gather speed. He saw
Roberto become drowsy with the rhythmic movement. As for himself, he felt
hungry. He rummaged into the pack at his feet where he had stashed the last of
the empanadas his mother had mailed to him at training camp. The little sweet
packets of fruit filling baked into a delicate crust didn’t always make the
transit intact but even when he had to pinch the crumbs in his fingers to eat
them, they were still his favorite treat from home. These two had survived and
he lifted out the cloth napkin containing them.

Roberto stirred and opened his eyes. “Your mama bakes those too? In
Panama, mine did the same.”

“Have one,” Patricio said. “They’re good.”

Roberto did not have to be asked twice. The crust practically dissolved
in their mouths, and the apple filling was both sweet and tart.

“At home, mama often made them with pineapple,” Roberto said. “Did you
have that?”

“Once. My mother got some tins of it. My first taste—kind of exotic.”

“And plantains—mama made a sweet batter and fried them.” His eyes
rolled upward. “Her family were all local and she really can cook.”

“You grew up in Panama? How come you’re in the US Army?”

“American by birth. My father and grandfather were both with the Corps
of Engineers on the Canal project. It was expected of me, to do part of my
schooling in the States and to enlist.”

Patricio nodded. “It’s a little strange for me. New Mexico wasn’t even
a state until 1912, barely six years ago. We were a territory the whole time I
was growing up. But my
abuelo
, he tells
stories of traveling
el
camino
real
, walking
beside a donkey cart all the way to Mexico City and back. It’s open desert
country. Parts of it, they call it the
jornada
del
muerto
where it weaves away from the Rio
Grande … he remembers Apache attacks being a real danger.”

He reached into his pocket and extracted a flat piece of silver, nearly
an inch long, stamped with an old-fashioned symbol.

“A Spanish
real
that’s been in my family since the 1680s.
Someone brought a few of them back then and mama insisted I carry it with me
for luck.”

Roberto examined the coin and handed it back. “Mine made me carry her
personal crucifix.” He pulled back the high collar of his tunic to reveal a
silver chain. “I suppose all mothers are alike.”

“I heard there are ten thousand men arriving in France every day,” Patricio
said after awhile. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it? There probably aren’t that many
living in my home state.”

“What’s it like?”

“New Mexico? Well, not like here,” he said as they chugged through a
countryside of green farm fields and entered a town where an ornate cathedral
dominated the surrounding one-story stone houses with thatched roofs. “Up
around Taos a lot of buildings are made of adobe—you know, mud with grass mixed
in and dried in the sun. Our house has an
horno
out in the back where my mother bakes the bread and the empanadas. Up at
the pueblo, just outside town, the Indians always did it that way too. There’s
a few Anglos, but everyone is just now starting to get along. The Indians
didn’t want the Spanish governor telling them what to do. Pretty much the same
with the American governor, too.”

“Panama changed a lot with the Canal,” Roberto said. “They put in
theaters and clubs and things to keep the workers occupied. Otherwise, all they
did was drink—at least in my grandfather’s day. It’s better now. Lots of
families. Pretty good schools.”

They watched as the French village disappeared behind them. Neither one
commented when they passed through miles of burned forest. The sight of towns
with crumbling buildings and people picking through rubble became more frequent
as the hours passed. With every mile, their buttocks increasingly felt the
unforgiving surface of the wooden bench, and they knew they were coming closer
to the war.

* * *

Mud, everywhere, mud! A rat scurried into the trench, not pausing as it
ran over Patricio’s shoulder and down his leg, poking its nose among papers on
the ground but finding only inches of water that had turned the muddy bottom
into a bog. The rat ran on.

Patricio undid the top twelve laces on his knee-high right boot,
getting down close to his foot, poking the fork from his mess kit inside to
scratch at the itch that never went away. He wiped the tines on his tunic and
put the fork away. But the itch was still there.

“Don’t scratch if you can help it,” Roberto said, lowering himself to
sit on the wooden crate beside his friend. “My sores have started bleeding.
Maxwell says he’s got pus coming out of his.”

Patricio stared at the narrow strip of sky, wishing for a scrap of sun
to dry the intolerable, never-ending wetness. He smiled at his naïve comment
about France being different from New Mexico—if only he’d realized just how
very different. Dark clouds scudded by. Four days since they’d seen a shred of
blue above.

“Think these sandbags will hold?” he asked.

Roberto patted one of the fat, once-white bags. “Seems solid enough. If
these walls give way, we’re cooked. In more ways than one.”

The good news about the constant rain was that the Germans had slacked
off the shelling. Patricio hoped they were every bit as miserable in their own
set of trenches less than a mile away. The rat had come across a candy wrapper
that someone had carelessly forgotten to stow inside a container. Its happy
squeal was barely audible to the men but five more rats ran down the reinforced
wall and skittered across the wooden crates the men were using as seats,
joining their lucky pal. Within moments, another dozen joined the fray.

“Quick! They’ll overrun us!” Four men grabbed their shovels and began
whacking at the rodents. Blood splattered Patricio’s boot.