FOREWORD
The following story is not my own but someone else’s, one that was passed to me under unusual circumstances.
In March 2008, my wife and I drove to Jeykll Island, Georgia, to attend my niece’s wedding. One of the “Golden Isles” on the Atlantic Coast just north of the Florida state line, it’s also—among other things—a wildlife sanctuary. My niece is an avid birdwatcher, so she’d been there many times, and for that reason she’d decided to be married in this place. I was looking forward to a family reunion and also a break from the last days of a hard New England winter, but anticipated nothing else.
Because the bridegroom wanted to have a traditional Jewish wedding, the ceremony was scheduled to begin at sundown Saturday evening. That gave my wife and me plenty of time to wander around. I’d visited Jekyll Island several years earlier, when I was a guest author at a science fiction convention held at one of the island’s seaside resort hotels, and thus was already familiar with the place and its history. Linda had never been there before, though, so we spent the morning exploring the historic district on the mainland side, where the State of Georgia had preserved the “cottages”—small mansions, really—built at the turn of the last century by the millionaires who’d once claimed the island as their winter retreat.
These second homes lay inside a fenced-in compound that surrounded the sprawling manse of the Jekyll Island Club. In its heyday, the Jeykll Island Club had been one of the most exclusive in America, its roster limited to one hundred members and including such notables as John Pierpoint Morgan, William Rockefeller, Marshall Field, Joseph Pulitzer, William Vanderbilt, and Cyrus McCormick, Jr. Their cottages, usually echoing the Victorian architecture of the clubhouse but sometimes also modeled after Swiss chateaux and Spanish haciendas, line the white gravel footpaths that wind through the surrounding pine groves. The club had its own indoor and outdoor tennis courts, swimming pool, eighteen-hole golf course, and other luxuries, and the compound’s isolation was assured by the lack of permanent residences elsewhere on the island. Most of Jekyll Island was uninhabited when it had been the preserve of the wealthy and powerful, and because the first bridge to the mainland wasn’t built until the mid-twentieth century, the only way to get there was aboard a small private steamer from Brunswick, where the winter residents would arrive by train at the beginning of the season.
After walking around the compound for a while, Linda and I paid a visit to the island’s only bookstore, located in what had once been the club’s private infirmary. As usual, I checked to see if any of my novels were there, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of them on the shelves. Since I’m in the habit of signing my books when I’m on the road, I took them to the front counter, where I introduced myself to the proprietor.
This turned out to be a gentleman in his late sixties, George Hess. He was only too happy to let a visiting author autograph his books, and as I did so, Mr. Hess and I got to talking. He told me that he’d been born and raised on the island, and that his late father—who’d also written a few SF stories himself, during the pulp era—had once been the valet of a New York magazine publisher who’d joined the Jekyll Island Club in the early 1930s. His father remained on Jekyll Island after the club closed down during World War II, where he married a former servant who’d once worked at the club.
Our conversation then took an interesting turn. Mr. Hess asked if I thought there was intelligent life beyond Earth. As a science fiction writer, this is a question I’ve heard more times than I like to remember; suppressing a sigh, I responded that, yes, I considered this to be a very strong possibility, and indeed would be surprised if there were no other races inhabiting our galaxy. But when he asked if I thought aliens had ever visited Earth, I shook my head. No, I replied, I rather doubt that; UFOs are little more than modern myths, if not outright hoaxes, and theories of so-called “ancient astronauts” are usually misinterpretations of legends and archeological artifacts. In any case, there is no indisputable proof that extraterrestrials have been to our world, now or in the past.
Mr. Hess politely heard me out, but I couldn’t help but notice his wry smile. What sort of evidence would you need to make you change your mind? he asked. It would have to be pretty strong, I said. Stronger than anything I’ve seen so far, at least.
By then, Linda had returned to the counter with a biography she’d heard about. While I bought it for her, we briefly discussed where to have lunch. Mr. Hess recommended the Jekyll Island Club; now a resort hotel, its restaurant was open to the public, and he said that we’d probably enjoy the menu. Linda and I decided that this would be our next stop, so we left the bookstore and walked across the compound to the hotel, where we got a table on its courtyard terrace.
We were just finishing our Cobb salads when our waiter came to the table and asked if I happened to be Mr. Steele. Since my family didn’t know exactly where Linda and I were, my first thought was that there had been some sort of emergency and that they were desperately trying to find me. But then he produced a thick manila envelope and explained that it had been dropped off at the club’s front desk, with instructions that it be delivered to me. The waiter didn’t know where it had come from or who had brought it to the restaurant; there was no name on the envelope, or any clue as to its origin.
Opening the envelope, I discovered a typewritten manuscript, its ink fading on paper already yellow with age. There was a breeze upon the terrace, so I didn’t examine it then and there, but instead took it back to my hotel, where I read it that afternoon before getting dressed for the wedding. Because Linda and I had to leave early Sunday morning to begin the two-day drive back to Massachusetts, I didn’t get a chance to return the manuscript to the bookstore, where I have little doubt it came from. I suspect, though, that Mr. Hess didn’t want to get it back. Apparently he’d waited a long time for someone like me to come along, and the fact that subsequent attempts to contact him have been met with silence reinforces my opinion that he wishes to have this document made public.
I’ve inserted footnotes for the sake of clarity, but have otherwise left the manuscript unedited. I don’t know whether to believe this story; that, I’ll leave to the reader.
—A.M.S
I. The Millionaire
My name is Solomon Hess, and I was once the personal valet of William Apollo Russell. It was in this capacity that I witnessed the terrifying events of March 1934, on Jekyll Island, Georgia, which have never been made public . . . until now, by my own hand.
As I write, twenty years later[1]
, few people remember my former employer. His name has been largely forgotten, save by historians of American popular culture. In his day, though, William A. Russell was one of the most successful New York magazine publishers. Apollo Publications, Inc., which he established in 1919 upon the foundation of his late father’s printing business, produced more than a dozen magazines every month. Although a few were respectable periodicals like The American Liberty and Apollo Monthly, most of them were cheap fiction magazines that catered to the masses: Private Eye Mystery, Fascinating Science-Fiction, New York Romance, Silver Star Western, and its bestselling title, The Gang Buster.[2]
It was from these “dime novels” that William A. Russell had become a wealthy man. In his late thirties, trim and athletic, with a high forehead beneath jet-black hair, he was a fixture of Manhattan high society, regularly seen in its more exclusive clubs and bistros. His residence was a townhouse just off Gramercy Park, where he regularly entertained the rich and influential, and among his possessions were a private Pullman sleeper car for when he travelled by rail to his 1,500-acre horse farm in the Berkshires. His financial assets were nearly bottomless, or so it seemed to anyone who knew him.
Yet William Russell was not without liabilities. His wife, Edith Russell, was a heavy drinker, and she wasn’t entirely faithful to her husband. She was often spotted in various “speak-easies” on the lower East Side, usually in the company of younger men of less than sterling reputation, and Mr. Russell spent considerable time and money keeping her name out of the gossip columns. It was rumored that he hadn’t gained his fortune entirely from the magazine business, but rather that he’d made an arrangement with a certain crime syndicate to allow them to smuggle liquor into the country inside rolls of paper trucked in from Canada. Indeed, one of the reasons why Apollo Publications produced so many titles was to deter suspicion from the vast amounts of pulp-stock it brought in from north of the border. Furthermore, it was also the subject of hearsay that William Apollo Russell wasn’t the name on his birth certificate, but instead one that he’d adopted in order to conceal his Jewish ancestry, which he apparently considered an impediment to acceptance within certain New York social circles.[3]
But perhaps my employer’s worst problem was money: namely, how to keep it. Almost no one knew it at the time but, contrary to appearances, by the winter of 1933 Mr. Russell’s financial situation had become rather precarious. He had invested heavily in the stock market, and while the crash of 1929 wasn’t quite the disaster to him it had been to others, nevertheless he’d lost a considerable amount of money. Since the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment also caused the loss of his Prohibition-era income, his fortune had come to rely solely upon his magazine empire. And Mrs. Russell’s lifestyle was costly to maintain, although it could hardly be said that Mr. Russell was frugal himself.
I was aware of all these things because of my close proximity to him. Someone such as William A. Russell may be able to conceal the truth from friends, business associates, and even the IRS or the FBI, but there’s little that he can hide from his “gentleman’s gentleman.” And while I can’t consider myself to have been his confidante, there wasn’t much in his household that I didn’t see.
How I came to be Mr. Russell’s valet is worth noting. It wasn’t my intent to be hired as such when I first visited the midtown offices of Apollo Publications in the summer of 1931. I was eighteen years old then, a recent graduate of DeWitt Clinton High in the Bronx, and it was my life’s dream to become a writer. My family couldn’t afford to send me to college, though, so I couldn’t afford the benefits of a higher education. Thus I hoped to land a job at Apollo Publications, perhaps as an editorial assistant, and eventually work my way into the position of being a staff writer for The American Liberty.
A letter of introduction from my high school principal, a hand-me-down suit from an older cousin, and stack of clips from the school’s literary magazine managed to get me an interview with William A. Russell. He greeted me cordially enough, but gave my stories and poems from The Magpie only a brief perusal before informing me that his company had no job openings, not even in the mailroom. However, he himself needed someone: a personal valet, a manservant who would lay out his clothes, remind him of appointments and social engagements, greet dinner guests at the door, bring him a cup of hot chocolate at bedtime, and all the other things for which a busy person needed assistance. I seemed to be a bright and eager young lad: would I be willing to take this job?
It wasn’t what I was expecting, to be sure, but I immediately accepted the offer. My father was a tailor, so making sure that a man’s clothes fit him well wasn’t beyond me. The salary was generous, and since the job also included room and board in his Gramercy Park townhouse, I was intrigued by the prospect of rubbing elbows with New York’s social elite. And I had my own private agenda as well. I believed, perhaps naïvely, that if I did well for Mr. Russell, he might be impressed enough by my performance to reward me with that position at The American Liberty I so dearly wanted.
In hindsight, though, I believe the real reason why Mr. Russell hired me to be his valet had less to do with what I could do than with who I was. If he was, indeed, a Jew himself, then my background mirrored his own. Although one might suspect that he was fulfilling some unconscious desire to have a young Jewish kid from the Bronx whom he could boss around, I rather believe that he simply wanted to give me a leg up in the world. Mr. Russell could be arrogant on occasion, but he was never capricious or unkind, or at least not to me. At the very least, he treated me with far more respect than Mrs. Russell, whom he’d come to regard as little more than a hopeless drunk.
Indeed, I think her “delicate condition” was the reason why Mr. Russell joined the Jeykll Island Club. Climbing the social ladder was not something he had to worry about; he’d already been accepted into New York high society, and regularly saw many of the club’s members in the salons and grilles of Manhattan. Instead, I believe that he simply wanted to get away from her. By then, he and Mrs. Russell were married in name only; they no longer slept in the same room, let alone the same bed, and it was only the likelihood of a costly and very public divorce that prevented him from throwing her out of the house. But Mrs. Russell hated to travel—unless it was to Paris, where she’d spend her days buying expensive outfits that she’d wear only once and her nights at the cabaret—and she was horrified by the prospect of wintering on some mosquito-infested island. Which suited my employer just fine; he’d go down south to Jekyll Island, while she . . . well, Mrs. Russell didn’t know it at the time, but her husband had plans for her.
During the ’20s, the Jekyll Island Club was still exclusive enough that it would have never admitted William A. Russell as a full member. By 1933, though, the situation had changed; most of its founding members had either died or were too old to travel, and the Depression had taken its toll on the fortunes of others, causing many to resign. So when its Board of Directors quietly announced that it would begin accepting applications for “associate memberships”—that is, people of wealth and means who were not necessarily among the hundred richest men in America—my employer leaped at the chance.
There was no question as to whether his application would be accepted. But just as he thought he’d have to settle for a clubhouse apartment, he chanced upon an opportunity that he couldn’t ignore. Riverside, the waterfront cottage that had been the winter home of Manhattan bank magnate Eliot Sloan, came up for sale following his death earlier that year. His family no longer wanted his place on Jekyll Island, and although the asking price of $180,000 was a severe pinch on Mr. Russell’s finances, he dug deep into his bank account and bought the house virtually sight unseen. Next to that, his membership dues of seven hundred dollars were little more than pocket change.
So while Mrs. Russell was sent off to Connecticut for a winter vacation,[4] Mr. Russell and I packed up his wardrobe and boarded his private coach for the long train ride to Brunswick. I was his only servant to go with him; the rest stayed behind in New York. We arrived in the first week of January 1934, where we boarded the club’s private launch, the Sylvia, for the final leg of our journey, a quick trip across St. Simons Sound and down the Jeykll River to the club’s boat dock. A Ford flatbed truck was waiting for us there—one of very few automobiles on the island—and its colored driver loaded our trunks and suitcases before carrying us the short distance to Riverside.
II. The Compound
As it turned out, Mr. Russell had gotten a bargain for his money. The cottage was built in the Cape Cod style, painted white, and quite handsome, with bay windows, an enclosed wrap-around porch, and a third-floor widow’s walk. There was a lovely old willow tree in the front yard, its limbs draped with Spanish moss, and from the living-room windows we could see the Jekyll River just a couple of hundred yards away. The house had come completely furnished, and although most of the couches, chairs, and tables were unfashionably Victorian, Mr. Russell was charmed by their quaint luxury. However, upon visiting the kitchen, he made a point of reminding me to acquire the new Sears catalog: the fixtures were embarrassingly out-of-date, including an old-fashioned icebox instead of a modern refrigerator.
Once he settled in, though, it wasn’t long before Mr. Russell became a fixture of the Jekyll Island social scene. He kept up with his business by mail and telephone; his mornings were usually spent in long-distance conversations with his associate publisher and various editors[5] , and every day I’d visit the island post office, sending letters to New York and picking up the same in return. Mr. Russell would knock off work around noon, at which time he’d leave me with the household chores and walk up the road to the clubhouse for lunch. His afternoons were devoted to one of any number of activities. When the weather was fair, he’d join a foursome on the club golf course, located a short distance inland from the compound. When it rained, he’d play tennis in the indoor courts or find partners for a few hands of bridge in the recreation center. Once the weather grew warm enough, he swam laps in the club pool. Although he wasn’t a hunter, a couple of times he joined a party that would venture into the wooded marshlands in search of deer, quail, or even the occasional alligator unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Late in the day, Mr. Russell would return to Riverside. A brief nap, then I’d help him into his tails for dinner at the club (white tie was always required in the main dining room). Once there, he’d take a seat at his assigned table with other associate members, where they would dine on oysters, sea turtle soup, venison, grilled steak, and fresh greens from the club’s vegetable garden, to be followed by brandy and cigars in the drawing room. Once or twice a week, he would have dinner at the cottage; he’d hired a couple of part-time cooks from the club’s staff, a young Negro by the name of Robert and his wife Lilly, both of whom were wizards in the kitchen, and he’d invite over a few friends for an informal get-together.
For the most part, though, once he returned from the club, it was to spend a quiet evening at the cottage: smoking, reading, listening to the radio. By then, I had finished my chores for the day, and would use the time to pursue my own interests—that is, writing short stories on the Remington portable typewriter Mr. Russell had recently given me as a holiday present. Over the course of the last three years, I’d gradually come to realize that my prospects of joining The American Liberty’s editorial staff were slim or none, and that my best chance of “breaking in” was to write stories for his pulps. Besides, I’d lately come to enjoy reading and writing science fiction; perhaps I wasn’t destined to become the next Robert Benchley, but maybe I could share a contents page with Edward E. Smith or Jack Williamson. So I worked in my little room next to the pantry, sitting on the edge of my bed with my typewriter on a folding table.
I had no intentions of showing my work to my employer—frankly, I was a bit embarrassed by the space adventures I was now writing—but he gradually became interested in what I was doing, and finally asked to see my stories. Mr. Russell was a businessman, but I think that he fancied himself to be an editor as well; he admitted that he didn’t like science fiction very much, though, and had started Fascinating only because “that junk” made money. He read my work and offered critiques that, while not always valuable, nevertheless gave me an insight as to what he wanted from his writers. This continued to give me hope that he’d eventually come around to giving me an editorial job, even if he seemed to be more impressed by my talent at ironing his shirts.
In this way, the winter of 1934 was passed in a state of blissful indolence. Picnics on the beach, tennis matches on the outdoor courts, card games at the club; for the privileged few who made the island their second home, it was easy to pretend that life was free and easy, and forget that men and women were standing in line outside soup kitchens or a fanatical regime had risen to power in Germany. For a few months, Mr. Russell was as happy as I’d ever seen him; sometimes he even spoke of moving to Jeykll Island permanently, even though he knew that the club closed down after Easter, at which time all his friends would return to New York, Chicago, and Boston. But I think that he was relieved to be away from the burdens of both a struggling business and a failing marriage, if only for a short time.
I didn’t share any of Mr. Russell’s pastimes, of course. Servants weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, save for the club’s own employees, nor did we have permission to enjoy its facilities. The servants and staff members lived in what was called Red Row, a collection of cabins and boarding houses located in the rear acreage of the compound. Practically a village in itself, it included a one-room school and playground for their children, along with its own general store and laundry. Once I got to know Robert and Lilly a little better, they invited me over to their place for dinner. The club’s seasonal employees were a mixed bag of colored people, white Southerners, and working-class Irish from the cities of the North, so the lines of segregation were observed on Red Row, but no one made an issue of a white man visiting a Negro home. And I found that they had their own simple pleasures, such as employee picnics during their days off, and it wasn’t long before I was invited to join them when Mr. Russell didn’t need me.
It was during one of those picnics that I met Elizabeth Marley, an unmarried young woman whose family had escaped the Kansas dustbowl to resettle in Georgia. Elizabeth—or Betty, as she preferred to be called—worked as a housekeeper at the club and lived by herself in the women’s dormitory. She was very shy about me at first, until I let her know that I had harbored no dishonorable intentions, and she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with her.
In that, I was more fortunate than Mr. Russell. From time to time, while on one errand or another that would take me through the clubhouse grounds, I’d spot him in the company of women. There were a few single ladies among the members of the Jekyll Island Club, most of them the elder daughters of wealthy families but also the occasional gay divorcee, and Mr. Russell saw them regularly on the tennis courts or at the poolside. Yet he was all too aware of the fact that he couldn’t pursue any of them seriously, or even indulge in a furtive affair. Many of the club members were from the same social circles as the ones he belonged to in New York, and gossip travels as fast as a telegram among such people. If it became known that George A. Russell was courting another woman, it would only be a matter of time before the news reached his estranged wife. Mrs. Russell may have been a drunk, but she knew a few prominent lawyers, and the inevitable divorce would deprive him of what remained of his fortune. So however much Mr. Russell might have liked otherwise, I can attest that he always went to bed alone, and never spent a night away from Riverside.
So he and I spent our winter months on Jekyll Island in a relaxed sort of way, far from the cold streets of New York. And our sabbatical may have ended as little more than a memorable vacation were it not for the strange occurrences of one Saturday night on the last weekend of March, and the horror that soon followed.
III. The Mystery
I was walking back to the cottage from Red Row when it happened. It was a warm evening, and Mr. Russell had let me off work early so that I could have dinner with Betty at her dorm. We’d sat out on one of the picnic tables for a little while afterward, but since she had to get up early the next morning for her job at the club, I’d kissed her goodnight before heading back to Riverside. So I was outside, and thus saw the whole thing.
An abrupt boom from somewhere high above caused me to stop and look up. My first thought was that it was thunder, yet the sky was clear, with no signs of an approaching storm. As it so happened, I was on one of the footpaths between the cottages, out from beneath the trees that would have otherwise interfered with my view, and thus I was able to see the fireball that raced across the starlit sky.
I’d seen meteors before, of course, on those rare occasions when my family escaped from the city for a weekend in the Catskills, yet what I saw was nothing like that. Larger and brighter than any falling star, it raced westward across the heavens. In less time than it takes to tell, the object vanished behind the trees . . . and yet, in the instant before I lost sight of it, I had the distinct impression that it slowed down, almost as if it was somehow braking its descent.
From somewhere nearby, I heard voices raised in astonishment. I’d barely realized that I wasn’t the only person to witness this phenomenon when, in the far distance, another sound reached my ears: a second boom, not as loud as the first but nevertheless quite audible, as if something had impacted the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the island. Then nothing, save for a soft, warm rush of air that stirred the tree limbs, as if the object had caused a strange wind to fall across the island.
Again, I heard voices. Looking down, I noticed for the first time a number of people standing in the gardens of the nearby Crane Cottage. Apparently the incident had drawn the attention of those attending an outdoor party. Against the cottage’s lighted windows, I saw several silhouetted figures gazing up in amazement, with some pointing to the sky.
Yet I thought little of what I’d seen, other than to consider myself lucky to have spotted a larger-than-normal meteorite on its way to the earth. I made a wish—that Betty and I would somehow stay together, as I recall—then continued my walk back to Riverside. At least I’d have a story to tell Mr. Russell when I saw him again in a few minutes.
Once I reached the cottage, though, I found that my employer wasn’t around. His hat and coat were missing from the rack by the front door, so I figured that he must have stepped out for the evening. Perhaps he was at the party I’d seen. So I puttered around in the kitchen for a few minutes, straightening up a bit, then fetched a bottle of beer from the brand-new refrigerator and took it to my room. The night was still young, and I decided to write a couple of pages before Mr. Russell came home, when he’d want his customary hot chocolate before bedtime.
Yet I’d barely written more than a few paragraphs when I heard the front door bang open, and a moment later Mr. Russell rushed into my room. Wild-eyed and out of breath, it appeared as if he’d run all the way back to the cottage.
“My God, Sol,” he exclaimed, “did you see that?”
I didn’t need to ask what he meant. “I certainly did, sir,” I said, calmly smiling at him from behind the typewriter. “Wasn’t that a hoot?”
“A hoot?” He regarded me with astonishment, as if I’d just witnessed a herd of wild elephants stampeding down Fifth Avenue and could only say, Well, isn’t that a stitch? “Is that all you. . . ?” Then he shook his head as he cast his eyes around the room. “Never mind. Isn’t there a flashlight around here?”
“Yes, sir . . . in the utility closet.” I pushed aside my folding table. “I’ll find it for. . . .”
“I’ll get it myself.” He turned away from me, darting in the direction of the closet where I kept the household tools. “Go upstairs and pull out my outdoor clothes. That includes the swamp boots and my cap. Hurry!”
I’d seldom seen him quite so impatient, not even when running late for some social event. And never before had he ever rushed out at this late hour, save perhaps the time Mrs. Russell had been found by the New York police sitting astride one of the Public Library lions with a bottle of Scotch in hand. But it wasn’t my place to ask why, only to do what I was told. So while he turned the utility closet upside-down searching for the flashlight, I went up to his bedroom and laid out the canvas trousers, denim shirt, waterproof knee boots, and fisherman’s cap that he wore when hunting. I’d scarcely placed them on the bureau when he jogged up the stairs and, throwing off his evening clothes, put on the outdoor gear as hastily as if the house was on fire.
When he sat down on the bed to pull on his boots, I ventured the obvious question. “Mr. Russell, if I may ask. . . ?”
“It came down on the other side of the island,” he snapped. “Of that, we’re quite positive. You mean you didn’t see . . . I mean, hear . . . it?” Before I could respond, he went on. “Renny, Phil, and I are going out there at once. If it’s a meteorite and it hit the beach, we may be able to locate it while the tide is still low.”
I couldn’t help but smile when he said that. Perhaps I hadn’t gone to college, but I’d learned enough about meteorites during my high school science classes to know that their chances of finding a newly fallen space rock were remote at best. Even if the meteorite had hit dry land, and not simply been swallowed up by the ocean, in all likelihood it would be so small as to be indistinguishable from any other random object one might find on a beach.
Yet I didn’t say anything. Mr. Russell and his friends—Arleigh Renwick, Phillip Sidwell, perhaps a few other club members he’d neglected to mention—were obviously spoiling for an adventure. Over the last few months, they’d whiled away the time with golf games and tennis matches, and perhaps they’d become bored with all that. So here was something new: a late-night sortie to the island’s uninhabited Atlantic side, in search of a trophy more exotic than another buck head. Far be it from me to ruin their fun with some inconvenient facts.
An automobile horn honked just outside the cottage. Mr. Russell yanked his left boot the rest of the way on, then snatched up the flashlight and bolted from the room. “No need to wait up for me, Sol!” he yelled over his shoulder as he dashed down the stairs, taking the risers two at a time. “I’ll be back late!”
“Very good, sir,” I replied, but I don’t think he heard me before he charged through the front door. When I went down to close it behind him, I caught a glimpse of the headlights of Mr. Renwick’s old Model-T “island car” heading down Riverview Drive.
I went to bed shortly after that, and didn’t hear Mr. Russell return. But when I rose early the next morning, I found him in the living room. He’d fallen asleep on a couch, still wearing his clothes; his boots were caked with moist sand, as were the knees of his trousers. He’d apparently been too exhausted to go upstairs to bed, so I laid a blanket across him, then went to the kitchen to make coffee.
He slept through the better part of the morning, and when he finally woke up, he said very little to me, but instead went upstairs to take a bath. I had just made a late breakfast of bacon and eggs when he reappeared. Wearing only his robe, he took a seat at the dining room table and wolfed down his food. He said nothing about where he’d gone or what he’d done. Figuring that he was in one of his moods, I went about my chores without trying to make conversation.
I’d just collected his soiled clothes and was about to add them to the laundry hamper when he stopped me. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll be wearing them again today.”
“Very well, sir.” I turned to carry them back upstairs, then my curiosity got the better of me. “Did you find the meteorite you were searching for?”
Mr. Russell said nothing for a moment. “Sol . . . how well can I trust you?”
That stopped me. This was something he’d never asked before, perhaps because he’d never had reason to question my loyalty. In the four years that I’d lived and worked in his household, I’d become privy to most of his secrets: his underworld connections, his wife’s bad behavior, the rocky state of his finances, even the rumor that he was actually a Jew. But I’d never revealed anything that I’d learned about his private life, and there was an unspoken agreement between us that I never would. So it was odd—and, yes, a bit of an insult—that, after all this time, he’d actually come right out and ask whether he could trust me.
“Implicitly, Mr. Russell,” I replied, looking him straight in the eye. “You should know that by now.”
He slowly nodded, apparently satisfied by my reply. “I thought so,” he said. “I think . . .” Another pause, as if he had some final reluctance that he needed to overcome. “I think I need your assistance,” he went on. “A matter of a rather . . . well, unusual nature.”
My curiosity became greater. “The meteorite, sir?”
The slightest of smiles. “There was no meteorite. We found something else entirely. I’m going back there today, and I’d like you to come with me. I think you may . . . ah, be able to offer certain insights as to what we’ve discovered.”
He wouldn’t tell me more, though, but instead asked me to put his outdoor clothes back where I’d found them, and instructed me to dress in the same fashion. So I returned his clothes to his room, then went to put on the clothes I usually wore for cutting the grass or trimming the hedges. I’d just put together a picnic lunch when he came back downstairs, again dressed the same way as he had been before. As an afterthought, he added a notebook and a couple of pencils to my picnic basket, and then we left the cottage.
I’d assumed that Mr. Renwick would be picking us up in his car, so I was surprised when we set out on foot instead. An unpaved automobile road led across Jekyll Island to the Atlantic side, but once we reached the golf course, we left the road and cut across the fairways. At one point, we spotted a couple of club members on the ninth hole green; although Mr. Russell recognized them, he quietly insisted that we cut through the woods to avoid being seen. I followed him through the thickets until we reached a bridle path that eventually brought us to the dirt road that ran parallel to the beach.
Noticing fresh tire tracks, I figured that this was the way Mr. Renwick had driven the night before. But Mr. Russell didn’t say anything about this as we followed the road for a couple of miles, heading toward the island’s remote southern tip. We’d almost reached Jekyll Point when the tire tracks abruptly left the road, leading into the scrub-covered dunes that bordered the beach. We followed the tracks, and fifty feet from the road came upon two automobiles—Mr. Renwick’s Model T and a Chrysler roadster I recognized as belonging to Cecil Hadley—hidden behind a dense wall of brush.
“Damn,” Mr. Russell murmured upon seeing them. “The others are already here.” He turned to me. “Remember, Sol . . . no matter what the others may say, you’re with me. You’re here as a consultant, not as my valet. Understand?”
Mystified, I nodded. “Understood, sir.”
He hesitated. “And one more thing . . . what you’re about to see is a secret of the highest order. You’re to never, ever, speak or write about this without my express permission. Can I count on you to be quiet about this?”
“Yes, sir, you can.”
He must have noticed the nervous tremor in my voice, for a smile crossed his face. “If this works out, your silence will be amply rewarded.” I nodded again, and he gave me what was meant to be a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Very well, then . . . come with me.”
