By Margaret S. Hamilton
Initially written for a historical anthology, Level
Best Books accepted “Black Market Baby” for Masthead: Best New England Crime
Stories 2020. I drew heavily from family stories and letters to create a
World War Two home front setting in an isolated Cape Cod community in June,
1943.
As I started writing the story, I focused on
the Chatham ship-to-shore station, which intercepted encrypted U-boat messages
from the Atlantic and forwarded them to Washington, D.C., but couldn’t shape
the technical information into a short story. Instead, I focused on sugar and
gasoline rationing. During World War 2, Camp Edwards was a busy Army training
facility at the western end of Cape Cod. Civilian employees might steal sugar
and gasoline from the camp and sell them on the black market.
I set the story on Forest Beach in South
Chatham, where my grandparents had a small cottage in the pine woods up the steep hill from the
beach. During the war, they spent part of every summer at the Cape, arriving by
train and making a daily walk to the combined grocery store and post office at
the end of the beach road. My grandmother’s blackout curtains were still neatly
stacked in an upstairs cupboard, her cobwebbed canning jars on a shelf in the
garage. My grandfather did nightly U-boat patrols on the beach and read his
collection of Rex Stout, John Dickinson Carr, and Earle Stanley Gardner
paperbacks (when I out-grew Nancy Drew, I read them, too). As a child, I heard
family stories about gas stickers, sugar and meat rationing, and the lack of
silk stockings and car tires.
I open the story with the image of a young
woman lying at the high tide line, a baby at her side and seagulls swirling
overhead. Betsy Butler, an introverted eighteen-year-old who lives with her
grandparents, discovers the body and rescues the baby:
Dashing
back and forth, the dogs chased the gulls away from a human-sized bundle of
yellow oilskin, lying next to a smaller form wrapped in a blanket. Betsy stood
in a daze, staring at flecks of sunlight glinting on the water. Small craft
warnings had been posted for Nantucket Sound last night and early this morning.
Had a fisherman washed ashore or been caught on the beach during the storm?
Betsy tumbled down the dune and approached the larger mound. Shouting, she
waved her arms to shoo the herring gulls away. [Her black labs] Jinx and Jasper
sniffed the small bundle and whined as they tugged the blanket. A small child
or large baby, wearing a jacket and rubber boots, struggled to sit up, crying
“Mama” before it burst into tears.
Through Betsy’s intrepid sleuthing and quick
action by the local police, MPs from Camp Edwards, and the Coast Guard, members
of the black marketeering ring are arrested:
Betsy
spent her evening reading Pa’s collection of English detective stories. What
would Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey do? In one of the books, Harriet had found
a body on the beach. She and Peter had figured out a very tricky time of death.
Braiding strands of dune grass, Betsy considered the situation. Last night
after dinner, she and Pa had listened to the weather report on the radio and
checked the barometer. Darkness fell late this close to the solstice. They had
walked the beach with the dogs around nine, on Pa’s usual U-boat patrol, before
the overnight rain and wind set in. Low tide at eleven o’clock last night, high
tide at five this morning. The woman’s body lay at the high-water line, so
she’d probably washed ashore sometime before dawn, when the rain stopped. Or
had she been killed and left at the water’s edge around dawn? Betsy started to
shake. Was a killer loose on the beach?
No worries, the baby is returned to his
parents unharmed.
I submitted the story in February 2020, before
COVID. After it was accepted in the fall, I realized how relevant the story is
to our current circumstances. We’re dealing with an unseen enemy—COVID-19—which
lurks everywhere. We don’t have food rationing, but do have restricted access
to grocery stores, where we buy what is available. We grow our own vegetables
and have learned to be inventive, creating dinner out of whatever is in the freezer
and pantry. Instead of waiting for the war to end, we’re waiting for mass
vaccinations. We’re learning patience and caring for family, friends, and
neighbors.
WWK blogger Debra Goldstein’s “Forensic Magic”
also appears in Masthead.
Masthead:
Best New England Crime Stories: Detection, Dames of: 9781953789181: Amazon.com:
Books
Congrats to you and Debra on writing strong stories accepted for this anthology. Great work.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to you and Debra for having stories in this anthology. I was on the edge of my seat reading this excerpt, now I need to read the rest.
ReplyDeleteInteresting analogy between WWII and COVID. I too remember hearing stories of rationing, in my case from my parents.
Thanks, Jim. I published two Cape Cod stories in 2020 and am working on a new one.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kait. It was a startling realization after eight months of COVID shortages.
This excerpt has me on the edge of my seat! Congratulations to you and Debra. Looks like a terrific anthology.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Shari! I haven't received my copies, but I'm looking forward to reading the whole collection.
ReplyDelete