Page 5

4

Briar

1942

I stepped into my friend Conrad Schmidt’s house, next door to ours at the farm, to investigate the strange box I had found in one of the cupboards there. The house was a ramshackle old place, completely uninsulated, what he had called “the camp,” built into the side of a wooded hill along the shore. Since Mr. Schmidt had died, his grandson, Tyson, who lived in Mr. Schmidt’s elegant primary residence in Vineyard Haven during his summers home from boarding school, used the house for an occasional visit to the beach.

My footsteps shook the floor as I slipped in through the screened porch. I loved the smell of that old place, of mildew and salt water, but I was still sad every time I walked in. Mr. Schmidt and I had spent so many happy days here, talking war strategy after combing the beach for what we called our treasures and making models together.

I was still reeling from Mr. Schmidt’s sudden death a month earlier, and I’d taken to wearing his green wool jacket most days, despite the heat, to keep him with me still. But I was finally ready to deal with the locked box I’d found. There was probably nothing interesting inside, old papers, maybe, sentimental keepsakes. But I’d never encountered a puzzle I couldn’t solve, and it gnawed at me that I couldn’t figure out how to open it.

I turned on the shortwave radio in the kitchen and a voice startled me. “ Come in, Sailfish Five. ”

Shortwave radios were prohibited for civilians during the war, but the Navy had provided them to fishermen. This included one for Gram, since she had been known to do her share of floundering, and they told her to monitor the airwaves and report any questionable activity. “Get rid of that thing,” Gram had said to me when it interrupted her quiet baking time with staticky bursts of chatter. She much preferred the hulking radio Pastor Harshfield had given her when the congregation gifted him a newer model, which she’d placed in our front parlor.

So Mr. Schmidt had put Gram’s shortwave in his kitchen and set it to receive calls from his friends that he called “the Squad,” who shared information they’d gathered from a variety of sources, mostly from Coast Guard radio monitoring. After Conrad died, I still chatted with them now and then, and carrying that on made me miss him less. I got to know their code names for things. They called subs “red hots” and torpedoes “eels.” And they believed me when I told them things.

Another call came in. “Anyone hear about the U-boat sighted off the Cape?”

I stepped closer to the radio.

“It surfaced and made contact with a Portuguese fisherman out of Falmouth in his two-stroke boat, which had live pots in it—one for fish, one for lobster, to keep them alive until he made it back to shore. He’s out last night making seafood stew, sitting on his boat, when up comes the U-boat.”

“Jesus.”

“So these Kriegsmarine guys board his boat, see he has no radio, take all his lobster and all his fish and his stew that was on his little stove. Give him a case of schnapps and leave.”

“Did he report it?”

“Not with Portugal being neutral. He was afraid to go to the authorities and he just threw the schnapps overboard. Then he phoned it in once he got home.”

“Did he say what model U-boat?”

“Nope. Hey, have you seen something happening on the North Shore beaches? Major deliveries on Lambert’s Cove. Points west.”

I picked up the mic. I’d been all over those beaches, checking out the deliveries. “I got a good look,” I said. “Crates marked U.S. Army. Bales of barbed wire. Last week they were trying to land some sort of amphibious vehicle.”

“Probably practicing for beach invasion down the line.”

The impending event on the island’s North Shore beaches had them all hypothesizing madly. It was widely known to island residents that Martha’s Vineyard would be the site of intense military maneuvers, but when they would happen and the adjacent details were an actual national secret.

I turned the radio down. That was all I needed, Gram knowing I was talking to grown men about war stuff. She would take the radio away in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t tell Gram about the metal box I’d found, either. She’d have me give it to the police or something.

I’d discovered the box in what Mr. Schmidt called his “medicine closet,” a hidden cupboard next to the fireplace that was probably used to hide booze during Prohibition. After he died, I found that the medications had been cleaned out and replaced with that metal box, which was impossible to open.

I went to the closet to get it and stopped to examine the framed photos on the wall. One of his beloved wife, Maria, who’d died years ago. Another of Mr. Schmidt’s grandson, Tyson, as a toothless grinning baby. I smiled to think of the now almost-six-foot-tall Tyson as a newborn and wondered if he cried much as a child. He had become a remarkably even-tempered eighteen-year-old.

“Wasn’t I a cute little bugger?”

I turned, startled to find Tyson there behind me, blond and tanned, like something out of a military-uniform catalog, an Army private’s stripe on his arm. A familiar-looking girl trailed him, dressed in a two-piece swimsuit, cherry-red nail polish on her toes. It was the barely literate Shelby Parker of the Boston Parkers, summer West Tisbury residents; like Tyson, she was a Connecticut boarding school student. Miss Porter’s. I had seen her all over the island, hanging around with fellow summer kids, usually looking at herself in the reflection of a shop window or the closest puddle. Not that she was so fantastic-looking, with her flat hair and squinty eyes.

“Oh, wow, is that Briar the Liar?” Shelby asked. “Does she just hang around here in your grandfather’s house all day?”

“I’m right here,” I said.

Tyson barely looked at Shelby. “Hi, Briar.”

Shelby checked her face in the old mirror in the entryway.

“How was Hotchkiss?” I asked.

He smiled. “Good. Enlisted man now, though.”

“Where’ve you been all summer?” I made an awkward wave toward his uniform. “Besides basic training.”

“Traveled all over the country. Arizona. Louisiana. South Dakota, if you can believe it.”

Most of the boys around my age annoyed me, but there was something about Tyson that I liked well enough. He was interested in more than just football and getting drunk at bonfires. He actually knew almost as much about Joan of Arc as I did. It wasn’t anything remotely romantic, but I could talk to Tyson about my brother, and it helped lessen the terrible ache of missing Tom.

“Didn’t know you’d be here today,” I said.

“Shelby wants to swim.”

Shelby stepped out onto the screened porch and looked left along the beach. “I want to ride in that boat.”

“The Tyche ?” Tyson asked. “That belongs to Briar’s family.”

“So?”

“It’s a catboat and kinda hard to sail,” I said, happy to have a little something over her. “My mother named it. Tyche is the Greek goddess of chance. She capriciously dispenses good and ill fortune.”

“Got any chips?” Shelby asked.

We both just looked at her, and then Tyson turned to me. “So Tom shipped out okay?”

Shelby perked up. “Tom Smith? He’s cute.”

“Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment,” Tyson said. Just hearing that made me want to cry.

“Like a forest ranger?” Shelby asked.

“No,” Tyson said. “Like the bravest guys in the military—they go in first.”

Perhaps reaching the limit of words she understood, Shelby moseyed away to the kitchen and came out holding the shortwave.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Don’t touch that, Shelby,” Tyson said.

“Jeez. O kay .” Shelby frowned and shuffled back into the kitchen.

The last thing we needed was Shelby Parker ratting out our shortwave.

Tyson returned his attention to me. “You must miss Tom already.”

I liked his expression—concerned but not pitying. He and Tom had been summer friends for years, but with Tyson going off to boarding school each fall, they were only as friendly as a summer person and an islander could be.

“Yeah. Hopefully he’ll be home on leave in a couple of months. We should have you over to the house if you’re around.”

“I’d walk over hot coals to get to your Gram’s cooking.” Tyson’s gaze wandered to Shelby, who stood again at the entryway mirror, now on her toes and craning her neck to see her swimsuit bottom from behind. Tyson watched, mesmerized, as she bent to roll her breasts up higher in her swimsuit top.

Tyson forced his gaze back to me. “Well, if there’s anything I can do, you have my number. I know you’re shorthanded without him.”

“I’m hungry,” Shelby said as she wandered by us back to the kitchen, the pale half-moons of her fanny cheeks escaping her bathing-suit bottom. She turned up loud dance music on the regular radio.

“Just so you know, we’re selling the place,” Tyson said to me over the music. “So if you have any stuff around the house, you might want to take it home.”

Something close to panic flashed in me. If they sold the camp, I would lose my last connection to Mr. Schmidt. And I needed to get the box out of the medicine closet. “Sure,” I said. “Where are your parents?”

“They just left. Traveling until Thanksgiving, so I’m stuck with it all.” Tyson looked about the room. “They’ve got realtors coming by soon.”

“I can help you box up your grandfather’s things. I have six twelve-by-twelve boxes, and that should fit a little over seventeen hundred cubic inches, so altogether just over ten thousand. That should handleit.”

No wonder I had no friends. I’d somehow become old “Popcorn Harry” Collins, who would recite multiplication tables and Bible verses while he strolled the Oak Bluffs beach selling Darling’s popcorn bars from his baskets.

“Thanks.” Tyson leaned in. “And I haven’t told Shelby yet, but I’m shipping out soon, too.”

I felt a warm gush of pleasure through my arms that he’d told me before Shelby. And then the shifting sands of despair. Everyone was leaving.

“When?”

“Waiting to hear, but I’ll keep you posted.”

Shelby turned off the music, wandered back to the porch door, and tapped her painted toe. “Can we just go, Tyson? I have to be at Seven Gates for a parental clambake at five.”

Her father worked in Detroit for Ford Motors, and the Parkers spent their summers at Shelby’s mother’s ancestral home in West Tisbury, boarded up for the season when I’d checked it out during my winter wanderings.

Tyson nodded my way. “Briar should come, too, right?”

Shelby seemed puzzled by that and, for the first time, addressed me directly, training her squinty eyes on me. “I guess. If you want. My parents don’t let us drink anything but wine, but my brother has some scotch in his golf bag.”

It felt kind of good to be invited somewhere by a summer kid, if you could call that an actual invitation, but I itched to get back to opening my metal box.

“No, thanks.” I nodded toward the beach. “Tide’s coming in. You’d better get down there.”

High tide was the best time to swim on the North Shore, before low tide turned the beach into a vast plain of rocks and seaweed.

Tyson sent me a little wave, the couple made their way to the stairs, and I breathed freely again. That was a perfect example of why I didn’t have friends my own age. It was all too complicated. I envied Tyson’s relationship with Shelby, though I didn’t get what he saw in her, beyond the extra helping of estrogen and the bathing-suit stuff. I accepted the fact that I’d never have a soulmate. Joan of Arc never married, and she led a productive life.

I watched Shelby and Tyson descend all fifty-two concrete stairs to the rocky beach, and a shiver went through me. The same stairs Mr. Schmidt fell down to his death. If only I’d been there to lend an arm like I always had, it might have been different.

I hurried back into the house, pressed the panel next to the fireplace, and the door swung open with a satisfying little spring action. I slid out the box, the smooth metal cool in my hands, and set it on the table for a good look. It was dark brown, the size of a small shoebox, and pretty heavy. I’d tried every numeric permutation I could imagine, sliding the combination-lock numbers with my thumb, but the lock wouldn’t release.

It was German-made, of that I was certain. I ran my fingers over the embossed words on the lid. Buro des Zahlmeisters . Purser’s Office. It looked relatively modern and, if from a ship’s purser’s office, had probably been used to hold military paychecks aboard a German ship. I shook the box and felt something move around inside.

I itched with curiosity. Surely Mr. Schmidt put it there? Maybe one of his friends gave it to him? I never saw it when he was alive. If he were here, he’d tell me to use my resourcefulness and intuition to puzzle it out.

I took a knife from the drawer, slid it into the seam between the base and lid, and pressed, but the metal was too strong. I could take it to an auto-repair or boatbuilding shop and have them pry it open, but then they’d see the contents. What if there was something of a sensitive nature inside? I needed to protect Mr. Schmidt’s legacy.

I slid the box back into the cabinet and pressed the door closed. I wanted that combination so badly. And there was only one place to getit.