The Sky Beneath Her(37)
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.