Louisa June and the Nazis in the Waves by Laura Malone Elliott

Author:Laura Malone Elliott [Elliott, Laura Malone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2021-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

After I finished my soup, Cousin Belle gave me one last pill the doctor had left to ease the pounding in my head. I slipped off to sleep again. So it was around twilight when I awoke to Katie gently shaking my arm.

“There’s word that a U-boat has been sunk and that the navy is holding a secret burial of its Nazi crew tonight at Hampton’s National Cemetery. Cousin Belle’s grocery boy told me. About a fifteen-minute walk from here. I’m going. It . . . it could be the crew that sunk Daddy’s tug, the men who killed Butler. Want to come? Think you’re up for the walk?”

I got up out of that bed and into my clothes in two minutes flat.

“Should we tell Cousin Belle?” I asked.

“She’s not here. A neighbor called to say a cat got stuck up her chimney somehow and asked her to come help,” Katie answered. “That’s why we can’t drive.” She took hold of my arm gently. “You sure you’re okay to do this?”

“Positive.”

We found our way down the street past the Hampton Institute to the cemetery as dusk fell and street lamps began to snap on one after the other. I winced a bit as each bulb glowed to life, thinking about Mr. Cooper damning the merchants in nearby Virginia Beach for insisting their lights stay on for business. We were right on the edge of the bay here, right where the James River widens to enormous and joins waves with its little sisters, the Nansemond and Elizabeth, to gush into the bay and surge toward the Atlantic. Right beside the little Hampton River as it splashes in to join them like a toddler chasing after older siblings.

These streetlights would skip bright across all that water, backlighting any freighter leaving Hampton’s port as clearly as a shadow puppet, making it an easy target for any Nazi sub lurking by the bay opening. I couldn’t believe the city officials weren’t dousing them.

Snippets of alarmed conversation bobbed alongside us as we joined the shoal of Virginians rushing toward a chest-high brick wall edging the cemetery.

Nazis? Burying Nazis? Where did they come from?

Were they saboteurs? Assassins maybe?

What if it’s a scouting expedition—for a land invasion?

What if there’re more of ’em?

One voice blared louder than the others. “I’m telling you, we should be heading home and loading every rifle we’ve got,” warned one man as he and a companion bustled past us.

“But we bagged these guys,” his friend corrected him. “This is good. We got their U-boat.”

“How do you know that?” the first man countered. “The navy hasn’t announced anything. There’s no official word of any kind. I only heard tell of this funeral because our cook’s son helped dig the graves.”

“Well, I’ve got a buddy at the Norfolk Navy Base and . . .” His friend lowered his head and his voice so I couldn’t hear the rest.

Katie put her arm around my shoulders to hurry me along. “Let’s get closer to that man. If he has a friend at the base, he’ll know some actual facts.

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