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THE SECRET on the ISLAND
By DORCAS MLADENKA iUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2013 Dorcas Mladenka
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-0057-0
CHAPTER 1
CLARE'S CALL
Zoe and I both jumped when the phone rang. Zoe is my hundred-pound German Shepherd. She was stretched out at my feet, and I was draped within the folds of my Lazy Boy. It was almost 8 o'clock and we were waiting for the Jon Stewart show, but the fact of the matter was that Zoe and I were both dozing away. It had been a hot, steamy day, and now there was a gentle rain falling, a bit strange for June but music to South Texas ears.
Trying to suppress a yawn, I reached for the phone.
"Maggie?" It sounded like my friend Clare. "Maggie? Am I interrupting your supper ...?"
"Clare? I don't believe this. Is that really you?" I muted the TV and we exchanged some genuine greetings for a while. Finally Clare said, "Listen Mag, I really need to talk to you. I think I need your help." I thought I heard an undertone of concern in her voice.
Clare was Dr. Clare Lewis, professor of Social Psychology. She is a nun, actually, whom I met while I was in graduate school at a local university.
"What's up, Clare? What do you mean you need my help."
"Well, we've been having some things happening here at the convent, and I've been trying to sort them out, and, well, I just need someone—someone to bounce things off of. I need to see whether I'm getting paranoid."
"Things? What kind of things?"
"Well, little things at first, but they seem to be accumulating. Stuff being moved around, like the patio furniture, and equipment—like someone is coming on our property. I know it sounds crazy ..." She paused. "We decided not to tell anyone outside the convent at this point. People are so prone to get histrionic about nuns. We don't want rumors starting about 'bizarre things going on at the convent.'"
"Clare, are you-all okay? I mean, is this serious? Has anyone been hurt?"
"No. No one's been hurt, but the nuns are getting spooked—especially the older ones. You see, it's like someone is trying to scare us or something. At times I wonder whether we're scaring ourselves, I mean, maybe these are all unrelated coincidences. But then I think of things like the doll in one of our cars ..."
"A doll in one of your cars?"
"Yes. Some kind of doll, Indian looking, a Kachina I guess, sitting in the driver's seat." She paused, then said, "Why would anyone do that? And how? Our cars are always locked."
I wondered too.
"Listen Maggie, I wish you'd come down to visit. It would be so nice to see you, and I could fill you in. You do research—maybe you could see what this doll is all about ..."
Down meant down to the Gulf Coast. Clare and her nuns lived in an old Spanish monastery in Port Aransas, a coastal town east of Corpus Christi.
"I bet you haven't had a vacation for a while, and I know you love the coast," Clare continued. "Beach time. Free lodging and food."
She knew me. Though I've been to Clare's only once, I've often been down to Port Aransas and various parts of Padre Island. I love it down there so her coaxing wasn't lost on me.
"Mag, are you there? Look, if it's too inconvenient, I'll understand perfectly. I just thought in case you had some time off—well, it would be nice to see you anyway."
"Maybe—maybe I could come." My mind was flipping through my calendar as I registered the fact that Clare wouldn't call me unless she was genuinely worried. She probably should be going to the police, but I did understand her concern about rumors. What the hell was going on down there?
"Listen, Clare," I said, "let me check a few things out. As it happens, I'm scheduled to go to Port Mansfield, off Padre Island, in a week or so. Maybe I can work it out to leave here a few days early and spend some time at your place on the way down."
"Oh Mag, that would be so great. I really ... I really would appreciate that so much."
I thought I heard a catch in her voice and decided I really would try to go.
After I hung up, I sat and thought about Clare and how we met. I had been trying to finish a master's degree in library science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and I was totally stuck. I had opted to do a thesis instead of six extra hours of coursework, an option I soon learned was wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm not a writer to begin with, and I had picked a topic that took me into some theories I really knew nothing about. It was too late to change, and I was in a pickle.
Studying the graduate catalog one day, I saw a course in the social psychology section that looked like it might touch on my topic. It was being offered by Clare Lewis, Phd. Maybe if I went to talk to Professor Lewis, she could tell me what to read—help me get out of the morass I was in.
And she did. After I explained to her my topic, and my predicament, she agreed to give me some guidance, an hour or so a week, if I was willing to help her locate sources for her own research. We worked together that way for an entire semester, and the fact that I finished my thesis at all was due solely to Clare, as I came to call her. She's a dignified, quiet, person, but kind and witty, and very personable, once I got to know her. I came to like her a lot and we've been friends ever since.
I rummaged around in my fridge for something to eat. Futile. The freezer part yielded something wrapped in foil and stuck inside a zip lock bag. No label. As I fingered the frozen shape and felt the sharp edge of a bone, I decided it must be a pork chop.
Half my mind focused on getting together a meal. Baked potato? Easy. Open a can of peas. Nuke the meat a bit to thaw it—must start remembering to defrost things in the morning, a resolve I made just about every evening. I washed the biggest potato I could find, jabbed it with a fork, and set it on the wheel in the micro. After a few seconds of de-frosting the pork chop, I doused it with salt, pepper, lemon pepper, and garlic powder and smothered it with flour.
An Indian doll in the car? What was that all about? Little did I know that 'what it was about' was about to become a big part of my life.
CHAPTER 2
MY JOB
Clare was right. I do research—it's my regular job. I work for an investigative agency, and my title is 'research assistant.' Clyde Tanner, the owner, doesn't think of us as primarily a detective agency but rather as a locator service. The bulk of our business is locating missing information and missing things: missing records, missing kids, missing husbands or wives. Our "in-house" motto is "we can find anything or any one." Our company title is a bit more formal: Tanner Investigative Services. I don't have to tell you that it's pretty much possible to find anyone, or anything about anyone. In spite of privacy laws, there's actually very few places to hide. Sometimes the San Antonio police asks our business for help, I suppose because one of the employees, Bernie Younger, is a retired SA detective of many years, and because Clyde, our boss, is always glad to help.
I got into this fascinating line of work as a result of my former profession as reference librarian. Being a reference librarian in the public library wasn't that bad. Some of the research for library patrons was challenging and satisfying. But many of the job hours were spent in helping school kids do their assigned papers. 'Could you help me find information on iguanas?' It got pretty boring at times.
And then there were the kooks. The lonely, the disconnected, and the disturbed: they seem to gravitate toward public libraries. Like the "giraffe man" who called every library periodically to ask about giraffes, calls that always ended up as intimate questions about the necking practices of giraffes. The giraffe man's call was always handed to the new person on the staff and the rest of us waited to see her eyes widen in disbelief.
At any rate, after staying in the public arena of dishing up information, the noble, the sublime, and the macabre, I followed up one day on an offer from a patron. I had helped him find several bits of data that became valuable clues in a case he was working.
"Why don't you consider working for us," he said. "You're good and we could use you. And of course I'm sure we could pay you a bit more than the city."
His name was Clyde Tanner, and after our initial visit, I went through the usual sense-of-security jitters that go with changing jobs. The city, with its proliferation of policies and red tape often made one crazy, but it was, after all, a rather steady kind of employer, especially if you've been on its payroll for ten years or so. Of course, I talked to Kate about it. She was in the library system but she was a branch manager. Her trials had to do with employee ups and downs: hiring, firing, fighting with the people above. Nevertheless she and I have been friends since my first job in the library system.
"Why not?" she finally said, as we finished a Bertoli frozen dinner for two. "Take the plunge. You're single, unencumbered, and you're nearly forty."
"Forty!" I threw a book at her. "I'm a youngish 30!" Kate was still 39, which she had been for five years now.
"The pay is good," I said.
"Is it?"
I knew she was making more than me—as a branch manager. "Yeah, I told you. With a couple of good raises it'll be almost double to what I'm making now."
"A couple of raises? I wouldn't hold my breath for a couple of raises."
"No, I'm not. I mean, the main thing is, well, will I like the work?"
"Have you visited the place? Gotten a feel for it?"
"No."
"Well, for heaven's sake do it."
So I did. And I liked everything about it. A small business. Lots of research work. Including me, three employees and the boss. The place had a nice 'intimate' feeling as I met the other two members of Clyde's team. Eddie Donner, probably my age, and Bernie Younger, a retired cop, probably sixty something. Eddie had a "nerdy" look about him. He was a tech person. He had 'mussed up' hair and a preoccupied look about him. Bernie was a big teddy bear with gray hair, gray mustache, and an easy smile. He looked like he "knew something" that the rest of us didn't. And I liked Tanner, the boss man, instinctively.
That was two years ago, and I haven't had a minute's regret.
On the way to work the next morning I stopped at Rosa Sombrero and picked up some fajita tacos for my lunch. I live in San Antonio, and as far as I'm concerned, there's no cuisine better than Mexican food and no spot on earth that does it better than good old San Antonio.
The trip I told Clare I had scheduled to south Texas wasn't really "scheduled" with my boss yet. It was a personal trip, a kind of vacation-adventure opportunity that I had been planning to talk to Clyde about.
I was putting it off for no real reason, except that I'm a workaholic and a people pleaser and I hate to ask for days off. But so far June had been a slow month, and Clare's request gave me new resolve. I could combine the two trips. So as soon as I got to my office, I picked up the phone and dialed Clyde.
"Can I come by and chat with you about something, Clyde?"
"Sure thing, Maggie. Come on."
Clyde is a quiet, somewhat introverted man. He has a gentle way about him that I find attractive, and he's nice to look at. He has a receding hair line, which seems to emphasize long lashes and kind, dark eyes.
I guess Clyde finds me attractive too, but he's so socially shy he can hardly muster up the courage to ask me to lunch. He usually finds some job reason that helps him out: "Let's have lunch and discuss so and so," he'll say. I've always felt that I'm socially shy, but life has made me just brittle enough to fake my way around.
Clyde was sprawled out comfortably in his large chair, waiting for me. "Hi. Sit down. What's on your mind?"
"Clyde." I fumbled with a pencil. "I was wondering whether I could have three days off next week—actually Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday,"
"Three days off!" he pretended to be shocked. Or maybe he really was.
"Well, yes. See I've been meaning to ask you. Well, the thing is, a friend of mine has invited me to go on sort of an adventure trip down off Padre. Island."
"Adventure off Padre Island. Well, well." Clyde said softly as he studied my face to see whether he could make me blush.
"Really, Clyde, it's not that kind of adventure. It's academic actually.... I trailed off and allowed myself, just for a moment, a very brief moment, to look at him with an intimate, open gaze. His return look cost me what seemed like a heartbeat, but I got back on track quickly.
"My friend Mando, that is, the history professor who was killed, worked with a colleague of his on researching the provenance of one of the sunken Spanish galleons in the Gulf of Mexico for the Texas Antiquities Committee. They've been in Mexico, Portugal, and Spain digging through library archives in an effort to identify the shipwrecks of 1554, and Mando had invited me to go on one of the diving sites down on the Gulf."
Although Clyde doesn't refer to himself as a detective, that's what he is, in the true sense of the word. He is a professional investigator, and as I spoke, I saw his interest grow.
"You never told me this before," his voice was animated. "This is incredible."
"It is, really," I said. "While I was in the public library I helped them on several occasions during their preliminary research. Now that Mando is gone, I wasn't sure what my chances were, but I called Mando's colleague, a Sister Anne Marie Branson, and she assured me that Mando would have wanted me to come. I gather the diving site is totally off limits to outsiders, so this is a rare chance. The Antiquities Committee has archeologists with diving crews working during June, July, and August."
"Well, in the first place, I'm terribly jealous," Clyde said. There was a gleam in his usually-dreamy eyes.
"Why don't you come too? I'm sure Anne Marie can arrange it. That's Mando's friend's name. Let me give her a call ..."
Clyde sat back in his chair. "Slow down, Mag. I'm not going to barge in on ..."
"It won't be 'barging in,' Clyde, I'd simply ask her ..."
"No, no. It's all right. I can't go anyway, not this time. But man!
I'd love to get in on that sometime ... when is it? When are you going?"
"So I can go."
"Well of course. You only have about twenty leave days accumulated. You never take any time off. When is it?"
"The dive, it's off of Port Mansfield, is on Thursday. But I'd have to get to Port Mansfield on Wednesday. Since it's on my way, I'd like to make a stop in Port Aransas and check in on my friend Clare at the convent, there on the island. So I guess I'm asking for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off. I lowered my head and mumbled, "I'm sorry I'm so late bringing this up. But I wasn't even sure I should go."
"Maggie, for Christ's sake. Miss something like that? You really do have a distorted work ethic."
I made a face at him. "I'll tell you what made me decide, and why I want to leave early. There's another part to this."
I proceeded to tell him about Clare's call and her plea for me to come down. "I know this is sketchy, but it's all I have. She didn't seem to want to go into detail over the phone, I believe because she really wants me to come. I have no idea whether this is serious, Clyde. But Clare seems a bit worried."
"Not enough to go on, really," Clyde observed.
"Right. But I have to respond. She's my friend."
"Sure—," he said somewhat distractedly. I could tell he didn't put too much weight on it. He was still seeing sunken Spanish treasure in his mind's eye.
CHAPTER 3
ZOE TO KATE'S
I didn't have a lot of time to arrange for my two trips because I had waited so long to talk to Clyde, but now my mind went into high gear. Between jobs at work I planned my itinerary. First I was going to drive down to Port Aransas to see Clare. Then I was going to proceed southward, along the Gulf, to Port Mansfield to meet Anne Marie.
Kate had agreed to babysit my Zoe. Zoe was a good companion and a great body guard. But I didn't think going along on a diving trip would work too well. So after work on Tuesday, Zoe and I drove over to Kate's place a couple of subdivisions away.
"Maggie Hi. Hi, Zoe! Mmmm." Smooch. Smooch. "You wonderful dog."
Zoe's tail was wagging like crazy.
"Look how happy she is to see you. You don't come over often enough, Kate."
"Yeah, well you know, I've been trying to survive . . ."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SECRET on the ISLAND by DORCAS MLADENKA. Copyright © 2013 Dorcas Mladenka. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
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