Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3)

  POWERBOAT RACER

  A novel by

  Thomas Hollyday

  Copyright

  Copyright Thomas Hollyday 2009

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Solar Sipper Publishing with Lightning Source Division Ingram Books. This publication is designed to be environmentally neutral using electronic means of distribution and a download to paper system that can use recycled paper at the reader’s discretion.

  Version 10

  First E Book edition: August 2009

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  The author has long desired to write about daredevil race drivers and the mechanics who tune their machines and engines since his days managing a snowmobile race team at New England racetracks. For this novel, he drew on his experience of similar personalities at power boat regattas in St. Michael’s, Maryland. In addition, publications of the American Power Boat Association and William W. Mowbray’s Powerboat Racing on the Chesapeake, have been helpful in filling out gaps in the author’s understanding of the sport. James Barry’s Hackercraft, contributed much information about Hacker boat design and the early days of power boat racing. The Super Stock Racing Series Website at www.superstockracing.com is also filled with much useful background on the Super Stock inboard boat racing class and is recommended for those readers who wish to learn more about the modern boats and drivers. Songs quoted in this story include the following: “We Shall Overcome,” written by Charles Tindley, 1900, and derived from the African-American spiritual “I’ll Overcome Some Day;” “Maryland My Maryland,” written by James Ryder Randall, April 1861; “Sailing Down the Chesapeake,” written by Jena C. Havez and George Botsford, 1913.

  Dedication

  To Henry Hollyday and Lowndes Johnson who patiently taught the author how to build a good boat.

  Chapter 1

  Wednesday July 29, 3:30 PM

  Marty Sol, the deputy sheriff, who had called him with the tip, said he ought to get out there. Some kids had found an old boat and he might be interested. Marty didn’t say any more even after Harry Jacobsen asked him why he should cover the boat for his newspaper. Granted, the paper sure needed a good story. Harry shook his head as he steered his truck, suddenly regretful at his thoughts of selling a lot of copies, and remembering at the same time his pledge to himself, that owning this weekly paper was going to be a new career, devoted to news for news sake, not for profit.

  He was entering the parking lot of the Great Wilderness Swamp, his tires crunching the gravel as he stopped. Something was very important about this boat wreck. He could see that right away. Why else was the Sheriff’s black sedan here with two well-polished and glimmering State Police pickup trucks with racks for scuba and other underwater gear? Maybe he was on to something after all. The stink of the swamp combined with the hot July sunlight almost halted Harry as he climbed out of his van. He was dressed in shorts and a polo shirt but he was still not used to the Maryland heat.

  He pushed back his windblown hair from over his weathered stubby face, almost the face of a boxer and not handsome, and reached back into the truck to get his camera, pushing aside the stuffed and falling piles of newspapers still unsold from last Saturday’s edition. He winced as his shoulder hurt from the recently healed shoulder wound he had received in Africa on his last assignment before he was fired from the network.

  A pair of black ducks, the male brown with silvery wing linings, the female a little paler, got up from the marsh and winged over fast, then disappeared into the far reeds. This was the much-admired mascot of local duck hunters.

  Wiping another attack of black gnats from his eyes, he started towards the Ranger’s office a few hundred feet ahead. As tough skinned as Harry was, he couldn’t fight the little creatures. He’d learned the same thing in Africa. The bugs got under his shirt, in his hair. Harry could handle other men, either with his fists or his smile, but he couldn’t slap the little flies fast enough.

  As he walked, he looked up at the hot, cloudless sky. Already, he felt the swamp stench saturating his neck and arms. Birds were shrieking and calling, gulls and turkey buzzards circling and investigating Harry’s truck. Besides the scavengers, haughty crows and hawks dove and darted, at war with each other among the loblolly pines.

  Even though he had been living in River Sunday since the spring, this was Harry’s first trip to the great wetland. The Wilderness was an appropriate name for a place where intense natural beauty resided side by side with sudden danger, where beneath the sunlit tops of trees were acres of shaded and treacherous mud islands. It stretched several hundred square miles from the end of Allingham Island on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay, part of the general region known as the Eastern Shore. He’d been told the early English settlers in River Sunday burned women suspected of witchcraft and scattered their ashes in these dark marsh waters.

  In front of the Ranger’s office was a large sign, white on black, at the edge of the lot, stating that, in the Wilderness National Wildlife Sanctuary, Federal law prohibited hunting. It further stated that muskrat trappers were excepted and must apply inside to get a special permit. The building itself was a low white cinderblock structure, with a long wooden porch with two doors, one into the office on the left and one for the residence on the right. Behind was a storage yard with two big steel sheds. A chain link fence surrounded the yard which held several large wheel trucks and tractors, as well as all manner of boats for roving in the swamp. The great cleated wheels of the amphibious, Vietnam military surplus, swamp vehicles were coated with dried orange and red clay and black mud, with traces of their painted out Army white star insignia still visible on their rusty metal sides.

  A woman sat on the porch step. She was a small black woman with sharp features, her hair coming out under her black and orange baseball hat. She was dressed in tee shirt and ragged overalls, her feet in worn plastic sandals, and sat on the edge of the porch on the residence side sorting crabs from a slatted basket into white plastic buckets. As Harry approached, she put the crab she was examining into one of the buckets and looked at him.

  “Hi,” said Harry.

  “Yessir,” she said, smiling hesitantly at Harry while she picked up another crab from the basket and held it up to the sunlight. The crab moved its legs wildly as she squinted at it.

  “You flared up them black ducks,” she said, as if this were a major occurrence.

  Harry nodded and said, “I didn’t mean to.”

  She asked, “They’re all up there,” she said pointing to the police cars. “You too, I guess. You come up to look about that sunken motorboat them kids found?”

  “Yes,” Harry said.

  “You don’t talk much for a reporter,” she said.

  “No,” he smiled. He didn’t talk much. He’d learned a long time ago that the best reporters smiled a lot and listened even more; not many people liked to listen to him talk.

  She looked at him as if deciding whether to trust him.

  “Well, of course I know
about them finding that raceboat sunk up there,” she finally said. “I’m the Ranger’s wife. I know who you are, too, Mr. Jacobsen. I remember things, like I remember your picture in the paper when you bought the paper. You’re not too handsome are you?”

  “No,” Harry said, grinning. He was short and muscular; someone looking at him might have thought he was a prizefighter with his build. His face wasn’t much to look at either, with its strong nose and blunt forehead. He wasn’t handsome but he wasn’t ugly. He was the kind of man that weaker people liked to stand beside. He gave the impression that he could win fights and people liked to be on the winning side.

  “You got a pleasant face though. Bettern’some. That up North accent don’t bother me either. Want I should take you into the swamp?” she asked.

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said.

  “My husband,” she said, covering the crab pails, “He likes to think he can run out in the swamp better than me. Ain’t true.”

  She scuffed ahead, carrying the pails, as he followed her across the yard. Around him were the ever-present Eastern Shore yellow and green cornfields, entrancing with their fresh sap smell and their orderly rows. Then the growth became random lush foliage overcome with the pestilent stink and with wild cattails and tall green and brown grasses.

  He had also learned that the wetland, after a few hundred yards inward, was a place where few humans and only those species of hardy and careful land animals, like muskrats and snakes, ever ventured. The wet areas were extremely difficult to cross except by boat, but even a knowledgeable and experienced local waterman, one of the men who were allowed to make their living harvesting crabs or oysters inside, or even one of the muskrat trappers, could easily get lost in the mazelike Wilderness. Harry heard tales from the locals, stories of people dying in there, runaway slaves many of them from back in the days of slavery, and as the old black or white town historians stated wisely, most of these people, for sure, were sucked into the bottomless mud holes that abound, treacherously hidden by reeds.

  He followed her down a steep ten foot embankment to a pier which jutted out into the reeds and black water. A State of Maryland bronze historical marker reminded visitors that this was the spot where the witches were burned. The sign listed the names and dates of execution of several women.

  “Ain’t no women of color listed,” she said, noticing his gaze. She put the sorted crabs into different pots and lowered them into the marsh water to keep.

  “Just thought I’d say,” she continued. “Northern people enjoy asking me that.”

  At the end of the pier was a long gray-planked rowboat with a brand new outboard motor, its propeller swung up, but with some seaweed still hanging off the shiny lower unit.

  “You get in the bow,” she ordered. The engine caught and purred quietly in the sunlight. She shifted the gear and stood in front of the rear seat, her hand holding a tiller extension so that she could steer the boat while remaining standing.

  Harry reached out to untie the restraining line, removed it from the crooked sapling pole that bent up out of the dark water, coiled it, and put it in the bottom of the boat. Then he sat down facing her. She smiled, not at him, Harry noticed, but at the marsh, as though the mass of reeds was a friend, or that she and it were compatriots.

  “You know why I’m taking you?” she said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  She bent down and adjusted the throttle to speed the engine. “I read in your paper you’re talking about you being from up North,” she said, talking over her shoulder, her louder words hitting him like spray, over the splash and roar.

  “Yes,” he replied, raising his voice, too.

  “I like people from up to Boston,” she said, facing him again. “They come down in a Trailways bus in the late Sixties. They was like angels to a little girl like me back then, singing songs about voting, singing in front of the River Sunday Courthouse.”

  “This boat the kids found. You say it is a raceboat?” Harry asked.

  She heard him and looked around. “You know about Walker John?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “Lots of big stories back in the Sixties,” she said. “You woulda had many things to write about in those days.”

  She put her finger on her lips and said, “Now, look, don’t you start figuring me as no source of information, you know, because my husband, he’s politically appointed. Don’t pay to talk too much.”

  “I won’t quote you,” said Harry. “Tell me who Walker John was.”

  “Walker John Douglas,” she said. “You talk to Pastor Allingham. He knows all about them days and Walker.”

  She steered through the swamp. They were going through high imposing reeds, which enveloped the boat to its gunwales, gave way like rubber to open water, then compressed again around the craft. All this appeared to Harry as a green blur, a continuation of foliage that was almost jungle, rather than dozens of independent mud islands. Some were very large aggregations of land and grass, occasionally sporting small observation platforms of weathered boards that Harry suspected were used by her husband as he monitored wildlife, while some were so tiny that one push with a foot or an oar and the island would disappear under the stinking water. Harry was completely disoriented. With the boat moving first to the right then back on itself, he lost track of direction, and above him, the hazy cloudless sky was of no help. He could understand why this swamp was so dangerous. The ranger’s wife, on the other hand, quietly competent and moving her head from side to side, watching the waterways, seemed perfectly at ease, a feeling that Harry, knowing he was separated from the bog water by only a half inch of wooden planking, could not easily share. He noticed with trepidation that the small pools of vibrating and oily water on the boat floor were getting larger.

  Rounding a bend the boat almost slammed into a looming state police motorboat, the side of the bigger boat emblazoned with the black and orange Maryland seal, stark and high above the gunwales of Harry’s boat. Up on its deck two heavy set officers in well fitting dark uniforms looked down at them. One took a megaphone in hand and began barking to them to turn back.

  She stopped the boat, idling the engine and called out, “What’s the problem, officer. I’m the Ranger’s wife.”

  “We’ve got orders, Ma’am,” he said. “No boats allowed up here.”

  Harry said, looking up as he held the sides of the boat, “I’m from the newspaper.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the policeman was adamant. He was slender, his face showing an arrogance that Harry had seen all too often in policemen. When he opened his mouth he showed a space for a missing front tooth, and Harry smiled, finding himself hoping that the broken tooth meant someone had once put a fist into the policeman’s too assured face.

  “Sheriff says no information,” the toothless policeman said. “You’ll have to turn back.”

  Harry saw three young boys, eleven or twelve years old, standing a few feet behind the officers and holding fishing rods. “Can I talk to the boys?” Harry asked, leaning forward.

  A small black boy, dressed in a white tee shirt, jean shorts and dirty sneakers that poked over the edge of the police boat deck, said, “We got rights, officer. You made us get up on this boat, but we still got rights.” Harry smiled at the boy’s voice which was rough and strong as if he were already a man and not used to being pushed around.

  The officer looked at his associate, who said in a weak reply, “Sheriff Good didn’t say nothing about them talking.”

  “Make it quick,” the first man said curtly.

  “Hi,” said Harry. “Why are you on the police boat?”

  “Cheeks said we might get hurt,” said the boy.

  Harry knew that Cheeks was the popular nickname for Sheriff Good. “Why would you get hurt?” asked Harry.

  “Cause of the big crane they got to get the boat out of the water,” the boy explained. “Wouldn’t hurt me though.”

  “Who found the boat?” asked Harry.

  “I saw
it first. I was up on the hill,” said the boy.

  “His name is WeeJay,” said the larger boy, freckle faced with fat arms and stomach, dressed in brown shorts, a Yankees baseball cap on his head. His chest was bare and Harry could see the toes of his bare feet on the edge of the police boat deck.

  The other boy, skinny, his white skin red from the sun, dressed in cut off jean shorts and a blue striped tee shirt, spoke softly. “My name’s Steve. Do you know when we can start fishing again?” The boy’s attention was on the refastening the lure to the tip of his fishing line.

  “When they get the boat out, asshole,” said the freckled boy, his voice high pitched. “’Course that old barge stirring up all the mud has ruined the fishing. Won’t be nothing left to catch.”

  “Can you tell me what you saw when you were up on the hill, WeeJay?” asked Harry, looking up at the boys from the smaller boat.

  “We going to be in the newspaper?” asked the freckled boy.

  “His name’s Chuckie,” said WeeJay.

  Harry touched his camera. “Pictures and all,” he smiled.

  “You should hold out to get on TV, Mouseface,” said Steve, still engrossed in his fishing pole mechanics.

  “Get in both,” suggested Harry.

  “Sure,” said Steve, hardly audible and not sounding convinced.

  “Let me get a picture of all of you,” said Harry. “I’ll point out in the caption who discovered the boat first.”

  The boys assembled in a line, each with his fishing rig held in front like a rifle. Harry snapped the photo.

  “Tell me how it happened,” he asked.

  WeeJay pointed across the water. “I was going to see if any fish were around here so I went up to the top of the hill,” he said. As he spoke, Harry heard a large engine start up. Among the brush he noticed the boom of the crane that began to buck up and down as if it were pulling on something that was anchored solidly and would not give way. He heard gears scream and then the engine shut down. One of the policemen looked at the other.