She sipped her drink as she watched from the shadows. Her personal theory was that the American woman had killed them all and had then wormed her way into the aging Cartwright widow’s affection with the intention to inherit the now-childless estate fortune.
The story had been going nowhere, but then one of her friends in immigration told her that Ms. Wilson was suddenly making trips down to South America again, and Camilla’s journalistic antenna had quivered. Wilson was up to something, she just knew it, and she also knew this might be her last chance to find out what happened.
She sipped and watched. Camilla had no proof of anything, but the one thing she did know was that sooner or later, killers always returned to the scene of their crime — just like Emma Wilson had started doing.
Camilla carefully withdrew a notebook and pen from her bag, placing them out of sight on the seat beside her. She pretended to be staring off into space as she faced the group. But her hand moved rapidly as she took notes. There was something else she’d picked up along the way in her journalistic travels — lip reading — and as Emma and the men discussed their plans, she took it all down.
After 10 years, it looked like a criminal mystery was about to be solved. And this time though, Camilla would be right there to scoop it.
CHAPTER 05
Airman John Carter grinned as he sped over the treetops in his Corsair Fighter. The USS Bennington, the huge Essex-class aircraft carrier, was heading back to Bermuda, and he and a few other pilots had been ordered to patrol the eastern seaboard of the South American continent.
Basically, it was a belt-and-braces job. The war had been over for three years, and no more resistant stragglers had even been encountered. After the conflict ended, most of the serving men and women went back to their lives. But not Carter; he loved the Navy, loved flying, and had decided that this was going to be his life. So he stayed.
And this was why — he banked, looping even lower over the dense green jungle below him. He pushed the stick forward, feeling the huge Pratt & Whitney engine call on its 2000 horsepower, and accelerated with ease. Up here, he was free as a bird, and with the world war over, he could enjoy his flying time free of the fear and fury of war.
Carter was a couple of hundred miles in from the east coast of Venezuela, over what was uncharted jungle. He snorted—like just about all of it down here, he thought. But he wasn’t worried, as his Corsair had a range of over 1,000 miles and was as reliable and tough as John Wayne with a six-shooter. Sure, the birds were a bit tricky to land on a carrier’s deck, hence why they were called bent wing widowmakers, but he and his airplane knew each other like an old married couple.
Carter’s Corsair and five others were spread in a line over 250 miles and would continue to zigzag on for another 200 before heading back to the Bennington. So far, the sky had been a clear blue, except for a growing smudge on his horizon.
He squinted; it was strange, and even though it looked a little like a storm, it was only over a small part of the jungle. He’d never seen a weather pattern like that before. He radioed it in and got the okay to give it a little look-see.
Carter rose to 2,000 feet and saw the thick, purple clouds slowly hanging over just one area of the jungle, and as he got closer, he saw that the effect had a type of ceiling, and even more oddly, it rotated, getting thicker and darker at the middle. He closed in on it and decided to rise above it to look down into its eye.
That’s when the shit hit the you-know-what. As soon as he was over the top of the boiling clouds, warning lights flashed and then to his horror, the Corsair’s powerful engine sputtered.
“Don’t you do it to me, baby.”
But she did — the massive Pratt & Whitney engine shut down.
“Mayday, mayday, going down… ” He quickly glanced at his instruments panel to give his bearings, but the dials were frozen, all of them.
Jesus Christ, he whispered. He knew that the radio was also probably dead, but his training took over; it was all he had left.
“This is Lieutenant John Carter, last known position 5.9701° North, 62.5362° West, approximately 240 miles in from the Venezuelan coast. Engine has failed, I am going down, I repeat, I am going down… ”
Carter looked out of the cockpit window as his plane dropped into the boiling cloud. His visibility vanished.
The Corsair was a magnificent and efficient fighter plane, but she was no glider, and very quickly, she started to turn nose down and gather speed.
“What the…?” Outside his cockpit window, he thought he could make out, in amongst the fog-like cloud, other airplanes glide past, but bigger than his Corsair.
Still well over a thousand feet above ground, Carter had no option but to bail out, and just as he reached up to slide his canopy back, he broke through the cloud and saw the jungle below him.
But it wasn’t like the jungle he had just been flying over. In fact, it was a jungle like he had never seen before in his life — strange towering trunks with grass-like fronds instead of leaves, pulpy ferns, spiny-looking cycads dozens of feet around, and in the distance, a glittering lake that caught rays of light from a growing hole in the cloud ceiling above him.
Carter was relieved to see those other airplanes he spotted still soaring over the treetops. But wait, no, they weren’t aircraft at all, but freaking birds, giant freaking bat-like birds with claws on their wings.
I’m losing it, he thought.
“Mayday, mayday,” he yelled again into the mic. Carter gritted his teeth and wrestled with the controls. He was thankful to be low enough to bring it in, but he needed somewhere to put it down. He pushed all flaps up, trying to compensate for the heavy nose of the machine.
There—in the distance, he saw the clearing, close to a cliff edge, and he prayed as he headed toward it. At the last instant, something lifted from the treetops — a head on a neck that must have raised five stories into the air. It turned to glance at him with large liquid eyes, and he yelled his fear and jerked the stick, trying to bank away.
But time was up, and speed and gravity won. Carter came down hard and fast, shearing the tops of trees and then coming down on the gravel-covered clearing. The corsair’s nose was too low, and instead of sliding, it dug in, stopping way too fast for a soft human body to take. The initial jerk slammed him, his face, and his forehead, into the instrument panel.
Hope they find me, was his last thought before darkness took him.
CHAPTER 06
Emma sat at a desk and scrolled through the historical newspapers. The files the university had available were from its own stocks and from obtained collections that stretched back hundreds of years. Now, thankfully, all digitized, so no more squinting into huge microfiche machines and slowly inching along at a single page at a time.
The digital files meant she could set clear search parameters, and to begin with, she confined her search to anything after the 1700s, in both North and South America, and in any year ending in 8.