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As soon as he was out of the cab and standing on the sidewalk, Bones hugged his arms across his chest and grimaced. “Frigging Maddock.”
Willis looked back at him. “What are you whining about now?”
“‘I should stay with the boat,’” Bones said, in a mocking falsetto. “‘Bones, you’re the adventurous one. You should go.’ You think he didn’t know it was below freezing here?”
Willis shook his head. “Man, first of all, it was your idea to come here...” He took out his phone and tapped the screen a couple times to bring up a local weather report. “Where it’s actually forty-one degrees, which ain’t below freezing. Second...that’s about the worst Maddock impersonation I’ve ever heard.”
Bones rolled his eyes. “Kiss ass. Where else were we going to go to do research on an artifact from the French and Indian War? Honolulu?”
“Fine. Let’s get inside. I know how sensitive you are to cold temperatures.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? And don’t say a thing about shrinkage.”
Willis just grinned and started up the walk to the front doors of Park Hall, where the History Department of University at Buffalo was located.
Despite Bones’ comment, they had not come to the upstate New York locale simply because of its proximity to the battlefields of a war that was even older than America. During the long flight from South Africa, Bones had put in a call to Avery Halsey. Avery was Maddock’s half-sister and Bones’ ex-girlfriend—one of many—and worked for a special CIA task force, which he and Maddock sometimes moonlighted for, but before she had taken that job, she had been a college history professor. Avery didn’t have any particular insights for them, but she had recommended a colleague, and arranged a meeting for them.
As they entered the History Department offices on the fifth floor, Bones spied an attractive red-haired thirty-something woman behind the reception counter. He stepped forward quickly to beat Willis to the introduction. “Hi,” he said, leaning one elbow and the counter, which brought him down to her eye-level. “I came here to see Dr. Greer, but it looks like I saw you first.”
The woman burst out laughing. “Oh my goodness. Does that line ever work for you?”
Bones grinned. “You tell me. No, wait. How about you tell me tomorrow, after breakfast. I’m from out of town, so...your place?”
The woman was still laughing, but the twinkle in her hazel eyes told Bones that she wasn’t laughing at him. Not too much, anyway. “Well, that’s quite an offer,” she said. “But I think you skipped a couple meals. I haven’t even had lunch yet.”
“Great. Me either. Let’s go.”
The woman grinned. “Tempting. I was supposed to be meeting someone here to talk about some boring old history, but hey...why not?”
Willis finally broke his silence. “You wouldn’t happen to be Dr. Greer, by any chance?”
“My students call me Dr. Greer,” she replied, turning her warm and slightly mischievous smile in his direction. “You can call me Rose.” She glanced back at Bones. “If you behave, you can, too.”
“When you say behave...?”
Rose shook her head in mock-despair. “My goodness. Avery wasn’t kidding about you.”
Bones winced. Even though his post-relationship-relationship with Avery Halsey was amicable, she was still an ex. There was no telling what she had done to poison the well.
“All kidding aside...” He slid his backpack off his shoulder and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle. “We should probably get down to business.”
Rose’s eyes flashed with anticipation, but she shook her head. “Let’s do this in my office.” She came around the counter and led them down a short hall to a small perfunctory room with an uncluttered desk and a row of utilitarian plastic chairs against one wall.
“This is your office?” Bones remarked. “I would have expected a history professor to have more... stuff.”
Rose shrugged. “I keep my stuff elsewhere. This is mostly just a place for advisory meetings.” She gestured to the desk. “Well, let’s see it.”
Bones set down the bundle and unwrapped it to reveal the axe head. Rose’s forehead immediately creased into a frown. “Is this a joke?” Her voice had gone several degrees colder than the air outside.
Willis came forward. “If so, the joke’s on us, ma’am. Is there a problem?”
“It’s widely known that I’m looking for the hatchet that belonged to Captain Steven Thorne. I’ve seen plenty of decent fakes, but that looks like something you picked up from a hardware store on the drive over.”
“I can assure you, it’s not,” Willis said. “I can’t speak to its authenticity, but we found it in a sunken aircraft. At the very least, it’s nearly a century old.”
“Sunken aircraft?” Rose looked up suddenly, her eyes widening in surprise for a moment. Then she shook her head again. “No, I’m sorry. I simply don’t believe you.” She held her hand over the axe head, but seemed reluctant to touch it. “You can’t actually expect me to believe that this has been immersed in water for decades.”
Bones shrugged. “Believe what you want. If you aren’t interested, maybe you can recommend someone who might be.”
Willis held up his hands. “Let’s all just take a step back, okay? You’ll have to pardon us ma’am. We’re a bit jet lagged. I promise you, we’re not trying to shine you on. This is what we found, but we don’t understand what it means. Or how it ended up where it did. We were hoping you could shed some light on that.”
The historian drew her hand back, folded her arms across her chest in what might have been a defiant pose, but then just as quickly reached out for the tomahawk blade and picked it up. She tilted it so the overhead light was shining on the engraving. “Steven Thorne was an officer in a colonial militia company. Rogers Rangers.”
Bones and Willis exchanged a grin. “Ma’am, we’re former military,” Willis explained. “We both attended Ranger school. They made us memorize Rogers’ Rules. Rule number two: ‘Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured.’ Some Ranger units still carry tomahawks to this day.”
Bones added, “My favorite was always: ‘Let the enemy come till he's almost close enough to touch, then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with your hatchet.’”
Rose smiled despite herself. “I’m afraid your instructors did you a disservice. Those ‘rules’ were actually adapted from the novel Northwest Passage, written in 1937. I’m afraid Major Robert Rogers’ actual Rules of Ranging are quite a bit more prosaic, but you are correct about the importance of the hatchet.” She glanced at Bones. “Or tomahawk, if you prefer.
“Captain Thorne fought with the Rangers during the French and Indian War, and probably carried several hatchets over the years, but according to family legend, he passed one down to his son, who carried it during the Revolutionary War. It was handed down through the family for several generations, and through several wars.”
Bones and Willis exchanged another look. “One of Thorne’s descendants was on that plane,” Willis said. “We figured it had to be something like that. What we don’t have is a name.”
Rose frowned again. “You say you found this in a wrecked plane? Underwater?”
Bones nodded. “A couple hundred miles off the coast of South Africa. The plane was one of the old Clippers from the 1930s but we haven’t been able to find a record of a crash.”
Rose pursed her lips together as if still trying to make up her mind about her visitors, then took a deep breath. “In 1867, the wife of Colonel Zane Thorne—a veteran of the Civil War—gave birth to a daughter—their only child, whom they named Rosalyn. Rosalyn was a bit of a tomboy, and while she couldn’t carry on the family tradition of military service, she did earn quite a name for herself as a war reporter for a New York newspaper. I’ve always entertained the notion that she carried the old Ranger hatchet with her on her adventures, but if she did, she didn’t advertise the fact.
“Rosalyn Thorne eventually married a man named Jack Falcon—actually, he was born Giacomo Falcone, but he Americanized it before he and Rosalyn married. Their son, Zane Falcon, carried the hatchet with him during World War I, where he commanded an infantry company. As far as we know, he was the last member of the Thorne family to hold it.”
“Did he die in the war?” Willis asked.
“No.” Rose sounded less than certain. “What became of Captain Zane Falcon after the war is a matter of some debate. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.”
Bones immediately recognized the name. “Wait. Captain Falcon was a real dude?”
Willis now fixed Bones’ with a questioning stare. “You’ve heard of this guy?”
“Yeah. I mean, sort of. He was a character in some of those old adventure pulp novels.”
Willis just blinked at him, uncomprehending.
“You know, like Doc Savage or Brock Stone?”
Willis shook his head. “Sorry. Never heard of any of those guys. Pro wrestlers?”
“Jeez, did you grow up under a rock?” He turned to Rose. “When I was a kid, my uncle—Crazy Charlie—had a big box of them in the garage. Captain Falcon. Hurricane Hurley. The Padre... Oh, man. What a blast from the past. I devoured those things. And he was a real guy?”
Rose inclined her head slightly. “Just like Buffalo Bill Cody or Wild Bill Hickok—actual historical figures whose exploits were exaggerated and fictionalized in the dime novels. It’s unlikely that any of the stories of Captain Falcon’s adventures are true, but yes... he was a real person. And this isn’t the first time someone has ‘found’ Captain Falcon’s legendary hatchet.”
Bones looked at her sideways. “Rose...Rosalyn. That’s not a coincidence, is it? You’re family?”
“Actually, it is a coincidence. No relation, at least none that I’m aware of. Rose was my great-grandmother’s middle name. That particular branch of the Thorne family tree died with Captain Falcon.”
“How did he die?” Willis asked.
Rose drew in another breath. “As I said, it’s always been rather difficult to separate fact from fancy when it comes to Captain Falcon. My great-grandfather wrote those stories believing it was all a fiction. It was only later that he learned the truth. Or what he believed was the truth.”
“Wait, Dodge Dalton was your great-grandfather?” Bones turned to Willis. “That’s the guy who wrote the Captain Falcon stories.”
“Great-grandad Dodge wrote a story he claimed was a true account of his search for the real Captain Falcon.” She hesitated a moment. “That book, In the Shadow of Falcon’s Wings, ends with Falcon’s death. Aboard a plane that crashed into the sea after leaving Antarctica.”
“Antarctica?” Willis shook his head. “That’s at least two thousand miles from where we found the wreck.”
“The aircraft in the story was a prototype for a long range seaplane. Would that match your wreck?”
Before Bones could answer in the affirmative, he saw Rose’s gaze suddenly shift to the door behind them. He turned, curious to see what had distracted her, just as the grenade came flying into the office.