Chapter Twelve Tula
Chapter Twelve
Tula
While Kaitlin taught her mini-camp, I packed up the few items I’d taken out of my bag last night and loaded it into my car. I stopped at a local grocery store and picked up eggs, bread, cheese, tea, coffee, and peanut butter. I also grabbed toilet paper, jasmine soap, and shampoo.
The drive to the flattop house took thirty minutes because traffic was heavy. The tourists who’d dined at the southern end of the Outer Banks were headed north back to their rentals.
I parked on the aggregate driveway in front of the house and sat in my car staring at the low roof, the fading color, and the neatly trimmed shrubs surrounded by a bed of small rocks.
With no aqua lawn chairs, bright planters, or flags, this house, though neat and in good shape, could easily have been missed by a passerby.
This house wasn’t looking for attention.
Juggling my suitcase and grocery bags, I walked to the front door. The old key slid into the lock and easily turned this time.
Inside the house, I flipped on the lights and locked the front door behind me. The sounds of crashing waves drifted through closed doors and windows. The ocean never settled, and it always made its presence known.
I’m still here.
I set my groceries on the kitchen counter, then put the cold items in the small refrigerator and the staples in the cabinet.
Unable to resist, I walked out the back door and climbed the stairs to the sandbank’s perch.
Plumes of sea oats on the dunes wafted back and forth.
A few people still lingered on the beach, walking along the waterline as the waves rolled in and out.
The air was warm but not oppressively hot, and the sky was a vivid blue.
My sheets, dried by the salt air, snapped on the clothesline.
This really was one of the prettiest places on the planet.
“Stop being so beautiful,” I grumbled. “I’m never going to love you again.”
As I turned back toward the house, I imagined laughter rumbling under the waves. You will love me again.
I unpacked my bag, placing my clothes in the simple dresser I’d wiped out earlier. I returned to the clothesline and retrieved the clean sheets and towels, now dry and crisp. I pressed the sheets to my face, inhaling the sunshine.
After remaking the bed, I stocked my soaps in the small bathroom, outfitted with a tub and shower, and placed the toilet paper on the roll. Twisting a stainless handle, I turned on the hot spray.
I stripped and stepped inside. The water pulsed against my upturned face, flooding my body and washing away the day’s salt, grime, and stress. The scent of jasmine floated around me. When the water turned cool, I shut off the tap and toweled off. I dressed in clean shorts and an oversize T-shirt.
I rinsed out a pot and filled it with water before setting it on the stove. Soon the burner warmed. I dropped a tea bag into the water and rustled up a mug from the cabinet. I washed it, and when the tea had darkened to a rich brown, I filled a cup and walked into Dr. Brooks’s office.
When I turned on the light, I sensed I was intruding into a space that wasn’t quite sure it wanted me here. “This wasn’t my idea. I’m operating on orders above my pay grade.”
Settling behind the desk, I set my mug on a pile of papers. I swiveled to the left, and the springs groaned as if dusting off years of lack of use. I grabbed one of the boxes stacked behind the desk. I leaned forward and tossed off the lid.
The papers inside were organized in bent, yellowed file folders. Bold handwriting marked each file tab. Utilities. Rent. Billing. All typical business records for any homeowner.
I opened the utilities file and noted that electricity had cost $7.20 a month in July of 1955. A fraction of what it was now. Nothing earth shattering. Prices had gone up.
Dust kicked up as I thumbed through more files that were just as routine as the first. My eyes watered as my allergies kicked in. I’d never had trouble with allergies when Mom and I had been traveling, but they’d exploded once I’d moved inland.
I set the top box aside and dug into the second container.
This carton was filled with old newspaper clippings and black-and-white photos from the 1940s and 1950s.
The first was of a man standing in front of the Oceanus on a tropical dock, likely Port of Spain.
He wore a light suit and a panama-style hat.
Had to be Dr. Atticus Brooks. He had a slight build and looked, well, ordinary, like his great-nephew, Mr. Brooks.
The family resemblance was striking. Both men wore similar glasses, and both dressed in suits with a white handkerchief in the right breast pocket.
Several of the other photos featured Dr. Brooks on the Outer Banks in front of this house, with a petite brunette with rounded sexy curves. A small time stamp on the side of the photos read June 1946. The barren yard had no plantings, and the driveway was rough crushed seashells and sand.
The woman had an ample bosom, full lips, and a sharp jawline. She appeared to be wearing a vivid lipstick. Her dress was a light color, and her shoes dark with a slight heel. She leaned into Dr. Brooks, and he wrapped his arm around her waist. His body language suggested he was relaxed and happy.
I flipped the pictures over, but there was no note identifying the woman. In all the images, while Dr. Brooks stared directly at the camera lens, the woman looked down or away from the camera. I couldn’t tell if she was camera shy or it was just bad luck that her face was never fully captured.
Mr. Brooks had implied his great-uncle had left no heirs. If this woman was his wife, they had no surviving children.
The clippings moved through the decades, but there were no more pictures of the couple. I did find an article that covered a high-profile local hit-and-run case. A man vacationing here had been struck by a car. A local doctor had treated the unidentified man, who’d died at the scene.
The next articles featured a local couple who’d purchased a large tract of land in Kitty Hawk.
In the upper-right-hand corner, someone had scribbled “client.” Dr. Brooks wasn’t quoted directly, but a line was attributed to a “local doctor”: “We are glad to have the Millers investing in the community.”
I found more articles like this one. Dr. Brooks was never mentioned by name, but he appeared to be tracking articles mentioning the unnamed doctor.
As I flipped through the yellowing newsprint, I came across an article highlighting a woman in her late teens. She had broad tanned shoulders, dark hair, and a wide grin. She wore scuba gear on her back and had a mask perched on her head.
I sat back on my heels. “Mom.”
Her smiling eyes jumped out at me. Mom could light up a room. The date was 1995, six years before I was born. The article had appeared in the local Outer Banks newspaper, and there was a similar version in The Virginian-Pilot, which covered Norfolk and Virginia Beach news.
The headline read, Local Teen Dreams of Finding Nazi Gold.
The article detailed Mom’s desire to find a shipwreck off the Outer Banks.
She didn’t divulge the name of the ship or where it had gone down exactly, but she was on the hunt for a vessel that had sunk in 1942.
It had to be the Oceanus. The ship’s name wasn’t common knowledge in those days.
Most residents had long forgotten the sunken ships that had gone down in the spring of 1942.
Another piece written days later had another picture featuring Mom and another young woman and man.
The headline read, Teen Surfing Star Wins Local Competition.
The other woman wore cutoffs, a halter top, and long hair drifting over her shoulders.
The man looked like Kaitlin. The woman bore a resemblance to Kaitlin’s mom, and she’d won a surfing award.
Kaitlin’s parents?
I’d never realized they’d all been friends. It made sense, of course—the Outer Banks community was even smaller then, and it wasn’t a surprise that many young people ran in the same circles. I snapped pictures of the black-and-white images.
The doctor’s files followed Mom’s around-the-world adventures that had made it into newspapers.
I found pictures of her in Bermuda, Greece, and Hawaii.
One image was snapped in the Florida Keys, and that one captured a five-year-old version of me in the background.
I remembered that trip. We’d stayed in a pink house, and the woman who looked after me, Cookie, spoke Spanish and made me cheese quesadillas.
On that trip, Mom had been hired by several well-off men to dive a Spanish galleon that had sunk in a storm off Key Largo in 1700.
I remembered Mom explaining to the divers that the wreck had been explored often for the last fifty years, and the chances of finding anything of value were small.
But the men had wanted to dive, and Mom, never one to miss an opportunity, took them down to the wreck.
Cookie’s husband, Bert, laughed at my scowling face when I grumbled that I’d wanted to dive.
He told me stories of his navy days and cautioned me about spending too much time in the sun.
His sun-weathered skin, etched with wrinkles, was covered in tattoos, and I’d worried about tattoos appearing on me if I stayed in the sun too long.
The next article was from 2019, and it was about Mom and me. Her bright smile contrasted to my moody teenage grimace. Local Returns to Find Gold. We’d been in town a couple of weeks when the reporter, Mr. Lex Green, had tracked us down on the boat dock in Wanchese.
I wondered if this was one of the last articles Dr. Brooks clipped before he died in 2019. He would have been close to 118, and I still couldn’t imagine anyone living to be that old.
Why would Dr. Brooks care about Mom’s career?
She wasn’t from the Outer Banks, and though she was known in diving circles, she’d never had a national or international reputation.
Maybe Dr. Brooks had been a sort of fan of a good treasure hunter and someone else had shared his interest. Many of the people on Mom’s dive expeditions were lawyers, accountants, and real estate agents.
All shuffled paper behind a desk, and all longed for a grand adventure.
The next series of articles were far more sobering. They headlined basically the same news: Local Diver Lost at Sea.
I hadn’t read any of these pieces when they’d first appeared, but I’d heard the kids at school talk about them. That was the spring of whispers, long stares, and a few snide remarks about Mom and about my failure to save her.
High school. If God really wanted to punish me, he’d send me back to high school.
I read the first article, printed in 2019. It detailed Mom’s life, her adventures around the world, and her fixation on the Oceanus. The reporter, who’d interviewed Mom just before the last dive, noted that Mom had said the only reason she’d returned to the Outer Banks was for the Oceanus.
The next piece detailed the accident again and was a rinse and repeat of Mom’s background. The last line mentioned that Mariah Cassidy had left behind a daughter, Tula. The website for my trust page was listed.
I checked the author’s byline. Again, it was Lex Green. I grabbed my phone and searched his name. He was still living in the area but had retired to the town of Manteo on Roanoke Island. He was the author of several books about Outer Banks history, but nothing more about Mom or the Oceanus.
Suddenly very tired, I closed the box. I sipped my cooling tea and leaned back in the chair. I pressed the mug to my temple, trying to cut off an emerging headache.
Rising, I shut off the lights, left the office, and crawled into the double bed. The mattress was firm and the bed frame solid, saving me a night of endless squeaking. I pulled the sun-soaked sheets up to my chin and rolled into a ball.
The Outer Banks were a long, thin strip of land.
Nothing was close to anything, and a forty-five-minute drive for groceries or supplies wasn’t unheard of.
But the population was small. And though full-time residents could be spread over a hundred miles, gossip, if it wasn’t buried deep, traveled fast.
This fascination with Mom appeared to be one of those bits of information no one spoke about. Dr. Brooks and Mom might have both lived briefly on the Outer Banks at the same time, but she had never mentioned him.
My eyes drifted closed. Despite my exhaustion, my mind buzzed. I wanted nothing more than to sleep and forget about the doctor, his lawyer great-nephew, the flattop house, Mom’s death, and Nathan’s offer to dive the Oceanus.
Even as questions prattled in my head, sleep floated around me. Images appeared of me struggling against a dark current as I swam away from the Oceanus and toward my last dive boat.
My hand slipped once off the dive platform’s handrail, but I regripped it and hauled myself up. I’d stared at the choppy waters, searching for Mom. She didn’t surface.
I wiped the water from my eyes and adjusted my mask. I clamped my teeth around my mouthpiece and sucked in a breath. I still had enough air to get down and back to the surface. In what couldn’t have been more than seconds, the sea’s churning sped up, and the boat rocked violently.
“Mom!”
More choppy waters splashed my face.
“Come on, Mom.”
Then the waves grew higher. Even if I reached Mom, then what?
The boat might not survive the rising waves.
I scooted back onto the boat and wrestled off my tanks.
I shrugged on a life jacket and stumbled to the wheel and radio.
I called in a distress message to the coast guard.
Mom wouldn’t like me calling for help. She’d always gotten herself out of dangerous situations before.
But at that point I was too terrified to care.
“Mayday, Mayday.”
And then, just like that, I jostled awake. I was back in Dr. Brooks’s bed and sucking in a lungful of air.
I’d known coming back here was going to be hard. And it was.