4

Déjà Vu

Grace Methodist Episcopal Church

Carrera and Cordoba streets

St. Augustine, Florida

Sunday, 1 July 1888

Please wait! Can’t you leave the church open a little bit longer?”

I’d first heard that dulcet drawl twenty-four years before, on the middle Gulf coast of Florida during the war, when I’d rescued her family and liberated her slaves. I’d last heard it fifteen years earlier, in ’73, at San Juan, on the Spanish island of Puerto Rico. That was when I discovered she’d married one of my former enemies in the war, a man who’d subsequently become a dear friend of mine.

The lady was Cynthia Denaud Saunders. Cynda was the childhood nickname that she still went by. She paused demurely in front of McLean, who was instantaneously captivated by her charm—clergymen are, after all, only male. Seeing his reaction, I smiled. Cynda didn’t even have to try, she just naturally had that effect. I’d seen it happen to other men before. It’d happened to me once. But this time it was different. Still strikingly beautiful, at what I calculated to be forty-three years of age, with a figure that was impossible to ignore, she was dressed differently than I’d ever seen her.

Cynda was clad in somber black bombazine silk from neck to toe. Even her wavy blond hair was gathered up in black mesh. She was obviously in mourning and had a look of despondency in her face—so much so that she did not register my presence, much less my identity.

For my part, I stood there in dumb shock while Reverend McLean recovered enough to reply. “Why yes, of course, madam. The church is always available to those in need. Can I be of assistance to you in some way, madam?”

She was about to cry. I’d seen her do that, too, but this time it looked real.

“Oh, pardon me, sir. My name is Saunders. Cynda Saunders. I wanted to pray, sir. Pray for the soul of my husband and the life of my son.”

Motioning for me to wait, McLean led her to the front pew and withdrew to the rear of the sanctuary to allow her privacy. I didn’t wait and instead headed for Cynda. In the corner, the minister, ignorant of my intentions, looked askance at me as I sat down beside her.

“Cynda, it’s Peter Wake. Is something wrong?”

She turned and noticed me for the first time, her expression transforming from abject distress to joyful surprise. Raising her hands in supplication to the altar, she let out a shriek.

“Thank you, God!”

Well, to say the least, that disconcerted me.

“Cynda, what’s happened?”

Another shriek to heaven. “Thank you, God, for sending my protector!”

This was becoming bizarre. McLean rapidly made his way toward us as I tried again to ascertain her problem, which I was beginning to suspect had a mental component.

“Cynda, please tell me what has happened.”

Her eyes glistened as she spoke. “It’s ordained in heaven. The Lord sent you here to help me, Peter. My husband Jonathan is dead and my son Luke is missing at sea. You can’t help Jonathan, but you can find Luke. They say he is dead and gone, but you will find him, Peter. I know that. You will find him and save him!”

It was too much to assimilate quickly. Jonathan had been a blockade-runner during the war. He had settled with other former Confederates in western Puerto Rico after the South’s surrender. A foe I’d tried to kill during the war, he saved my life from a rabid ex-rebel when I went to assess the ex-Confederate settlement for the U.S. government. We became friends, last seeing each other in San Juan for lunch, years later. That was when I found out Cynda had married him. I hadn’t even realized she’d known him.

“Please calm down, Cynda. What happened to Jonathan?”

“He died at the beginning of the year. Inspecting the sugar cane fields, he just fell down, dead, Peter. They say his heart failed.”

I’d always thought of Jonathan Saunders as a fit and strong man. But then I remembered that he was nine years older than I. The tropics can make a man old beyond his years.

“And you have a son?”

“Yes. Luke. He’s fourteen and the joy of my life, Peter. We have to find him!”

The minister sat down on her other side, listening as she continued her tale.

“Luke wanted to go to sea like his father. Why this strange urge in certain men, I just don’t know. But he kept badgering Jonathan the last couple of years. His father tried to humor him, Peter, and said he could go to sea for a month when he turned fourteen. Just to get a taste—but only for a month, as a cabin boy or steward, or something like that. Of course, Luke remembered his father’s words, and when he turned fourteen in March he turned those same words against me, demanding I honor his father’s promise. Oh, Peter, by then Jonathan wasn’t there anymore. I was weak and I gave in to Luke. I let him go to sea.”

The tears overwhelmed her. I held her hand, trying to steady her nerves.

“How do you know your son’s missing at sea?”

Through wracking sobs she said, “It’s been months since he left on the schooner in April and not a word. I wrote the owner in Philadelphia and his reply said the schooner was reported missing somewhere in the Bahamas, presumed lost in a storm. He wrote that he’d not pay a cent to me for my son’s life. What a wretched thing to tell a mother . . .

“Peter, I never even asked for that type of thing from the horrid man. He thought I wanted money. I only want my son. Then the owner stopped answering my letters.”

“How did Luke get a berth aboard that schooner?”

She was regaining her poise now, trying to help me understand. “Jonathan knew the captain, Frederick Kingston, for years. He’d hauled our molasses and sugar many times. Jonathan and the captain placated Luke with the notion he could sail aboard when he got older. In March, Kingston delivered some supplies to us and told me he had a rich charter party he was to take on a pleasure cruise to the Bahamas. He would take them aboard in Key West.”

She sighed. “Luke wanted to go so badly. Somehow, I thought that a pleasure cruise would be safer for Luke. That he would be exposed to some quality people and after a month, he’d come home to our place in Puerto Rico with some good sea stories. Get it out of his system, I thought. Then he could continue with a normal life.”

Cynda shook her head. “It was those stories he’d heard as a boy. His father, as you well know, told some wild tales from his years at sea. Luke wanted to experience that.”

I smiled while remembering Jonathan’s accounts of his life as a sea captain. He was a good spinner of yarns. But sailors’ sea stories are rarely realistic, omitting the privations and boredom and uncertainty. Naval life is even more difficult. Many a man and boy has gone to sea to learn, far too late, that the life of a sailor is nothing like what they’d heard around the fire on a cold winter’s night.

The reverend asked, “How did you find your way to Saint Augustine, Mrs. Saunders?”

“Trying to get to Washington. I got a steamer to Havana, then a Plant company steamer to Tampa, where I boarded the train to go up north. My plan was to head to Washington,” she turned back to me, “—to find you, Peter. I knew you would help me. You’re the only man I know in the States that can help me find my baby.”

She paused, staring at me with awe. “But I never dreamed you’d be here. The train stopped at Palatka on the St. Johns River—some sort of trouble with the engine—and they brought the passengers here to find lodging for the night while they repair it.”

“You can stay with my wife and me, Mrs. Saunders,” offered McLean.

Cynda never heard him. She was still looking intently at me, unnerving me with those blue eyes I remembered so well. “Did you move to St. Augustine, Peter? Your last letter years ago said you had an island down on the Gulf coast. I almost tried to find that, but you wrote that you were only there when on furlough, so I thought I’d find you at Washington. Didn’t you get my letter? I never got a reply.”

“For the last four months Rork and I have been in transit, Cynda. My private mail hasn’t caught up to me yet.”

“Rork! Is he here too?”

When I nodded in the affirmative, she let go another shriek toward the altar. “Thank you, dear Lord, for sending them both to me in my hour of need!”

McLean tried again. “Madam, my wife and I would like you to stay with us for however long you may be in our area.”

She nodded to him. “Yes, I will. Thank you so much, Pastor.”

Then she turned back to me. There were no more tears, no weakness in the voice. It was the Cynda I’d known, a woman who wasn’t frail or afraid of anything, the female who could turn grown men into devotees with a single glance.

“Luke is not dead. I know that absolutely, Peter, as only a mother can. And Divine guidance has brought you and me together, here in this church. You will help me find him.”

The last wasn’t said as a request, but as an assumption of fact. After what seemed a long time, I heard myself say, “Yes, Cynda. We’ll find him . . .”

Her eyes softened and she slid her hand delicately over mine. “Peter, I must apologize for my self-absorption. I haven’t asked about your current life. You’re not in uniform—have you left the navy? And have you found a lady to share your life? It must be, what, six years since your dearest Linda passed on. And your children! How are Useppa and little Sean?”

So much had changed. “Well, yes, I’m still in Uncle Sam’s Navy, Cynda. In fact, I’ve got twenty-five years in now. I do special assignments, keep pretty busy. Useppa is twenty-three now and headmistress of the school for black children in Key West. Little Sean isn’t so little anymore. He’s at the naval academy and due to graduate in two years.”

Holding the worst until last, I tried to hide the ache inside. “And it’s been seven years now since Linda passed on.”

Those words were so hard to say, even after all that time. “No, there isn’t a special woman in my life. I’ve occasionally gotten to know some nice ladies, but nothing lasted—usually because I had to leave to go somewhere and that angered them. I guess Rork and I are resigned to our fate as bachelors.”

I shook my head in wonderment at my friend. “Although, Sean Rork still never ceases to amaze me. He finds female companionship wherever we go on assignment. That Irish rogue has the gift of attractiveness to your fairer sex. Ladies simply adore him. One told me once that he makes them want to cuddle and protect him. Imagine that, cuddling up with a big brute like him.”

“I can, indeed, Peter. And I imagine they think the same of you, but you probably don’t even notice. You’re not open to them. You can be very distant, Peter Wake. Like your mind is far away. That scares women.”

“Really? Well, I never got that impression. How so?”

She cast me that look I remembered so well. A combination of sultry jest and innocent interest. “Because they know that if your mind is far away, they can’t hold you under their spell. Women don’t like that sort of competition—the kind they can’t see to defeat.”

“Cynda, I don’t think of companionship on adversarial terms.”

It dawned on me that she was free now, as I’d been for seven years. She slowly patted my hand, or was she caressing it? The blue eyes had deepened to indigo in the dark church, and no longer looked so innocent. “I know you don’t, Peter. That’s why women like you. You’re a good decent man, and you deserve to be happy.”

Hearing someone clear his throat, I realized the pastor was still beside us. Reverend McLean sat there, visibly perplexed by the two strangers who’d entered his life on a quiet summer Sunday. I understood his confusion completely. My best laid plans had just crumbled, replaced by a commitment to accomplish what I knew was a daunting, probably impossible, task. With a woman who always made me feel uneasy.

***

I never doubted that Rork would support my decision and join the endeavor. Cynda joined us for lunch and explained the situation to him as the preacher and bishop looked on. Rork sounded far more confident than I had when he looked at her and said, “Aye, we’ll find the lad. An’ no worries ’bout that, me dear.”

Over dinner that evening at the parsonage, the chief topic was how to go about the search. It was decided that we would begin at the last place Luke was known to be, Key West, and go on from there by whatever means available. The search would be expensive. I found myself insisting on sharing the cost with Cynda.

Another unpleasant aspect was that the next day my friends from Washington would arrive in Saint Augustine, happily bound for their fishing holiday in southwestern Florida. They were en route already and out of communication. At the station depot, I would have to tell them the grand expedition was cancelled and they should turn around and head north.

Walking back to the Saint Francis Inn later that night in the patter of soft rain, Rork asked, “You’re thinkin’ that poor lad’s dead an’ bleached by now, ain’t ye?”

Remembering the scene when Cynda had poured out her dilemma to McLean and me, I shook my head with misgiving. Rork was right, that’s precisely what I thought, but I couldn’t say those words.

“Not sure. I just know we’re honor bound to find out, Sean.”