Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
T hankfully, Hemingway answered his phone when Jenny called with the news and was eager to join them at the Brickhouse. Wyatt was being overly cautious and wanted Hemingway to hang out at the Brickhouse bar all afternoon to be on the lookout for indication of a setup. It would be easy for HistoryGeek to know what Jenny looked like because her face had been on a newscast when the grove got plowed under last February, but he probably wouldn’t recognize Hemingway.
Jenny waited with Wyatt in the public library on the other side of the town square, monitoring periodic messages from Hemingway. There’d been no sign of any strangers arriving at the Brickhouse all afternoon, but the text they were waiting for came exactly ten minutes before six o’clock.
A dweeby guy just showed up and asked for the HistoryGeek table. No sign of companions.
“Let’s go,” Wyatt said and propped his arm out to escort her to the restaurant.
Nerves created an ache in her gut. As always, it was crowded at the Brickhouse. She instinctively surveyed the crowd, spotting Hemingway at the bar as Wyatt asked the hostess to point out the “HistoryGeek table.”
She did, and Jenny scrutinized the skinny guy with thick glasses at a corner booth. HistoryGeek caught her gaze and sent her a goofy grin and a wave.
“Okay, let’s go,” Wyatt said.
Something about the gangly man looked familiar, though she couldn’t place him. He stood as they drew near. He had a buzz cut and horn-rimmed glasses, but mostly she just noticed how short he was. Really short.
Recognition dawned. “You’re the guy who trespassed on my land,” she burst out, and he winced. This idiot nearly got her convicted of a felony gun charge because he wouldn’t leave when she asked him to.
“To be fair, I wasn’t actually trespassing,” HistoryGeek pointed out. “I was standing on the path leading to the river, which is an easement recognized by the state for public use, so I was technically within my rights to be there.”
True, there was a tiny easement on Summerlin Groves. It gave her a break on property taxes to allow public access to the river, but hardly anyone except a few county officials knew about it.
Jenny lowered her voice because half the town was here tonight. “You got me charged with a felony.”
“Hold on,” Wyatt said, grabbing her arm. “This is the guy you shot at?”
“ I shot in the air ,” she hissed. “He was poking into my business and wouldn’t leave when I asked him to.”
The dweeby guy held up both hands, palms out in the universal call for peace. “Hey, I didn’t want to report it, but the postman saw it and told the sheriff, so I was kind of backed into it. Can we sit down and talk? There’s something I want to show you.”
HistoryGeek had already caused her way too many problems to want to break bread with him, but she needed to pick his brain about Svetlana. She slid into the booth and Wyatt sat beside her.
Hemingway left the bar and strolled over, extending his hand toward HistoryGeek. “Can I join you?”
“He’s with us,” Jenny told HistoryGeek. “And yes, he is joining us.”
As soon as they were all seated, HistoryGeek placed a slim leather wallet on the table and flipped it open. An FBI badge gleamed up from the table.
She sucked in a quick breath. The other side of the wallet had an identification card with his photo and name.
“Special Agent Robert Crenshaw from the Tampa office of the FBI,” he identified himself.
Wyatt took the badge, examining it closely. The badge must have passed muster because he set it back on the table and introduced himself as Captain Wyatt Rossiter of the Department of Agricultural Law Enforcement.
Special Agent Crenshaw looked awfully puny for a hefty job in the FBI. On television, FBI agents were always brawny guys who wore their bulletproof vests and shoulder holsters with a manly confidence. This guy could be the captain of a high school chess club.
“You don’t look like an FBI agent,” she said, and the guy sagged.
“I get it,” he said grimly. “All my life I’ve been five feet tall with bad eyesight. That’s not easy for a man. It doesn’t matter how fit or how smart I am. I speak Russian, German, and Kazakh, but all you noticed about me was that I was short.”
“I’m sorry,” she admitted, a little embarrassed because it was true. “I don’t understand why you’re interested in this or why you showed up at my grove right after my brother died.”
He looked directly at her. “Ma’am, I have an interest in FBI history. The Summerlins and Wakefields represent a fascinating chapter in the FBI’s involvement in the Cold War. I really did just want the chance to ask you about some old family photographs.”
The first time he barged onto her property had been two weeks after Jack died, and she had no interest in anything he said. Now her only interest was the woman in the cypress tree.
“Where did you get that picture of Svetlana Markova?”
“I bought it from your brother,” he replied. “He sold stuff from your grandfather’s storage barns on eBay. I kept careful watch, and anytime he sold something that dated from the 1950s, I bought it. Old farm registers and outdated technical equipment. I bought an entire crate of broken old cameras and video machines. One of the cameras still had a roll of undeveloped film inside. Svetlana was in a lot of those photos.”
“How did you learn her name?” Wyatt asked.
A waitress arrived before Crenshaw could answer. “Hi, y’all,” she said, setting tall glasses of ice water on the table. “Can I get you started with some appetizers? We’ve got Cajun-dipped alligator tail on special.”
Crenshaw looked a little repulsed at the prospect and ordered fried mushrooms for the table.
“Are you really a vegan?” she asked him after the waitress left. It looked like he could use a little protein and a few days in the sun.
“Yeah, I really am. I wish we could have met out at your grove because you’ve got some really interesting things out there.” He dug into his jacket pocket and removed a photograph that he tossed down onto the table.
It was a photograph of the concrete slab, pipes, and doorway leading to her grandfather’s fallout shelter. Very few people would even recognize it as a fallout shelter, but Crenshaw’s face had a knowing expression as he waited for her to speak.
She returned his stare. “If you think I’m going to be the first one to talk, you’re wrong.”
“Have you ever been down there?” Crenshaw asked.
How did the government find out about this? Her grandfather had been so paranoid about people finding the location of his fallout shelter that he’d hired an out-of-state crew to help him build it. He warned them never to tell anyone about it lest desperate people try to take possession of it after Armageddon. Embarrassing, but true.
“It stinks down there,” she said. “I haven’t been down in ages.”
“Stale air always smells bad,” Crenshaw said. “I would love to get inside and have a look around.”
Wyatt was completely baffled. “What on earth are you people talking about?”
“My grandfather’s fallout shelter,” she said, wishing she didn’t come from such an odd, paranoid family. “I want to know why it’s any business of the FBI.”
“This fallout shelter was used for years as a rendezvous where confidential information was handed over to the Soviets,” Crenshaw said.
She snorted. Her grandfather built that bunker because he feared the Soviets, not because he was working with them. Her grandfather couldn’t have been a spy . . . could he? Her mind still grappled with the question as Crenshaw continued talking.
“I’ve got a stack of old photographs of Svetlana with your grandfather. There are a lot of other fascinating pictures of the Summerlins and the Wakefields that might have clues to what happened in 1952. I’ll show them to you in exchange for getting down into that bunker.”
It was tempting, but Wyatt refused to budge. “Why is the FBI interested in this? You showed up at the grove right after Jack died, and long before Svetlana’s body surfaced. I want to know why.”
“The FBI monitored old Karl Wakefield for decades,” Crenshaw replied. “We believed he was more than just a Soviet sympathizer, but was an actual spy. Whenever he went to Moscow on World Famine Commission business, our government had eyes on him and he knew that. We bugged his homes in New York and Florida. We even bugged his private airplane and his apartment in Moscow. Decades went by and we couldn’t find out how he was slipping information to the Soviets. We eventually learned he was passing his information to your grandfather, who met with the Soviet contact in the Summerlin fallout shelter to trade information. It was the only place they were certain wasn’t bugged or could be spied on.”
It was hard to even draw a full breath. Her brilliant, paranoid grandfather had been part of a spy ring ? Disillusionment swirled and it was hard to keep concentrating as Crenshaw continued speaking.
“The plan worked for years until the Soviet handler flipped.” Agent Crenshaw removed a photo from inside his jacket and tossed it on the table. It was the photo of Svetlana, smiling while sitting on the farmhouse porch.
“She was one of ours,” he said, a look of unabashed admiration on his face. “Her name was Svetlana Markova. She came to this country as a Soviet representative to the World Famine Commission, and the Kremlin ordered her to get information out of Karl Wakefield. She offered Karl all sorts of Russian treasures in exchange for confidential information. Sometimes she brought things for Gus Summerlin, too.”
Jenny’s mind whirled with the implications. Could that explain the Bronze Age spiral pendant she mistook for a coaster?
Crenshaw gazed into the distance as he explained. “Svetlana was a loyal communist when she arrived, but over time, that changed. She became disillusioned with the Soviet worker’s paradise. She rejected the atheism that was force-fed to all good communists, and started attending church. She was even baptized. Then she contacted the FBI, wanting to defect, but we convinced her to maintain the status quo so we could control what she sent the Soviets. We promised to help her defect in exchange for spying on Karl Wakefield. She agreed and risked her life in doing it. Everything was working perfectly until she stopped communicating with us. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth . . . until the day a skeleton turned up on Summerlin Groves.”
Agent Crenshaw pierced her with a probing stare. The face Jenny initially thought looked goofy and weak had transformed into grim and determined.
She didn’t want to ask but had to. “Do you think my grandfather killed her?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out. Show me his bunker, and I’ll show you everything else I have on your grandfather and the Wakefields. It’s interesting stuff.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why would my grandfather be so paranoid about a Soviet attack if he was helping Karl pass messages to them?”
“Everyone feared the Soviets back then,” Hemingway said. “Maybe he wanted a foot in both camps.”
“If you can’t beat them, join them?” she asked.
“Something like that,” Crenshaw said. “The frustrating thing about history is that we’ll never really know for sure. We get these tiny glimpses into the past and try to piece them together into some semblance of meaning. Some of those puzzle pieces might be down in that bunker.”
She exhaled a frustrated breath. “I think you’ll be disappointed. My brother already cleaned it out of anything valuable or interesting.”
Agent Crenshaw’s face softened into a wistful expression. “I want to see the room where it happened. It would be like stepping into a time capsule from a different world . . . a more dangerous, uncertain world when two superpowers stood on the brink, eye-to-eye, waiting for one to flinch. That bunker on your grove was part of the equation. How about it? I’ll bring my stack of old Summerlin family pictures in exchange for getting a peek at that bunker.”
“Agreed,” she said instantly. She had to know if her grandfather had any role in this, and with each new detail, she feared he did.
Wyatt still seemed suspicious. “Why are you so fired up about all this? What’s your goal?”
Agent Crenshaw picked up the photo of Svetlana, a charming woman smiling on the Summerlin porch swing.
“This woman was one of ours,” he said in a voice vibrating with passion. “She didn’t deserve to end up dumped in a cypress tree, and I intend to find out who did it.”