Читать книгу Buried Memories - Irene Pence - Страница 9

THREE

VALOR

Valor . . . is the fire fighter entering a fire area or burning building to protect life or property. . . . Valor is a nebulous virtue. Sometimes it is observed and recognized; probably more often it is not—but make no mistake, it is the common bond that forms the foundation for the Dallas Fire Department. It is the heart of our emergency organization.

—1980 Medal of Valor Yearbook

At the first crack of daylight, a caravan of cars, pickups, and vans snaked its way down Highway 175 from Dallas. Over fifty fire fighters had learned of Captain Beets’s empty boat and were coming to search for him.

The firemen came because they were like family. Having spent twenty-four hours a day eating and sleeping together, they had myriad hours of conversation where they learned about each other’s families, the names of their children, and how they got along with their wives. So when one of the firemen died, a brother had died.

The one hundred boats of the bass fishing contest quickly turned into a search party for Jimmy Don. Overhead, wealthy residents in private planes crisscrossed the clear blue sky scanning the lake. Coast Guard and privately owned helicopters slowly hovered over the lake’s surface. Never had there been so many people on the lake at one time.

Captain James Blackburn of the Dallas Fire Department lived in Mabank, one of the lake-hugging towns, so he was chosen to set up tactical headquarters at the causeway between Seven Points and Gun Barrel City. Blackburn’s commander appointed him, knowing he had been friends with Beets since their rookie days on the fire department switchboard. Using maps of the lake, Blackburn penned a detailed grid—a framework that formed the basis of an organized, complete search. He initially calculated the acres of lake separating Jimmy Don’s home from the marina where his boat had been found—an awful lot of water to investigate, but if necessary he’d explore the entire lake.

He glanced from the map to the lake. Water stretched as far as the eye could see. The boundless reservoir was created by damming five creeks into one giant body. The largest, Cedar Creek, ran through terrain overlaid with large stands of cedar trees.

In coordination with the Coast Guard, boats were dispatched hourly to various parts of the lake. And hourly they returned with the same report—no sight of Captain Beets. The Red Cross parked a mobile food center by the search headquarters and busily dispensed cold drinks, sandwiches, and watermelon to the heat-exhausted volunteers throughout the day, a day that saw temperatures climb to over a hundred degrees with rarely a breeze to break the smothering warmth.

While they searched, the throng of local volunteers jabbered to each other about their church activities, and eagerly gloated over their children’s and grandchildren’s achievements. Family was a priority to these people. And the vast majority of them never doubted for a minute that Jimmy Don’s disappearance was anything but an accident. They accepted that one of their own had simply been out night fishing and encountered motor trouble, and the anxiety of trying to make repairs brought on a heart attack. Not even nitroglycerin had helped as Jimmy Don probably stumbled and fell overboard.

The old man sat in his red Chevrolet pickup watching the Coast Guard drag the lake. Every few minutes he’d reach up with a wrinkled handkerchief and blot a tear before it tumbled down his lined cheek. He stared at the dragging mechanism that looked like a big rake attached to a barge. The rake scooped down into the water, rumbled across the bottom, then picked up its findings and dumped them onto another barge. Pieces of old furniture, uprooted tree stumps, and all sorts of rubbish surfaced, but no body.

As the old man observed the Coast Guard’s efforts, he glanced toward Captain Blackburn’s search headquarters just as a red-and-white Silverado pulled up. His heart leaped when he saw Jimmy Don’s truck. He hurriedly sent up a prayer of thanks. Had Jimmy Don gone out of town without telling anyone? How would he explain his absence to all these people?

Then he saw a fluffed-up, perfumed Betty Beets open the driver’s door and place her foot on the curb. He doubled up his fist and hit the worn rim of his steering wheel.

“That damn woman,” he said aloud to the empty cab of his truck. “Jimmy Don ain’t in this lake. No, sir, that bitch of a woman has done something really bad to my son.”

As the frantic search continued, everyone had a constant reminder of Jimmy Don’s drowning. Motorists coming down Highway 175 from Dallas or Athens, or crossing the bridge on Highway 85 that spanned the blue waters could see the activity. Hordes of boats still cruised the lake while grappling hooks continued dragging the lake’s muddy depths.

Shorts- and T-shirt-clad parents loitered outside their houses, wringing their hands and staring at the water’s edge. They vowed not to let their children swim in the lake, even in water right by their own docks. Visions of a bloated corpse bobbing up around their offspring was a nightmare too horrible to contemplate.

JoAnn Blackburn wouldn’t soon forget the search. She had been planning a party for several friends and relatives to celebrate her twenty-five years of marriage to Captain Blackburn, but because of his role in the search, they had to cancel the party.

Officially, the search lasted thirteen days in the brain-burning heat. Captain Blackburn never missed one of those days, for his supervisor had relieved him of all his other duties to oversee the search personnel. He tried to put aside his personal feelings over the loss of a friend; however, he couldn’t help but experience a hollowness every time a boat crew returned with its report of finding nothing. The captain kept stuffing crafts with volunteers and the Red Cross mobile unit kept stuffing volunteers with nourishment.

With firemen working shifts of three days on, three off, Blackburn always had fresh recruits, and those who continued the quest were just as fervent to find Jimmy Don as everyone who had been there earlier.

Every now and then Betty Lou visited the search area to check on progress. Her presence particularly grated the tired, hardworking crews after they had finished probing their section of the lake. They’d drag their sunburned bodies ashore and see a cool-appearing, freshly dressed Betty Lou acting like she didn’t have a care in the world. The smile on her lips seemed out of place, and when she said, “I can’t thank y’all enough,” she sounded insincere.

Serious questions began bobbing to the surface like dead fish.

“This beats the hell out of me,” one experienced Coast Guard volunteer said. “The water’s not cold, and unless the body’s weighted down, the gases expanding the body should have brought it to the surface long before now.”

Captain Blackburn admitted that he had questioned the circumstances from the beginning. “I bet if we ever find him, he won’t have drowned in the lake,” he told fellow rescuers. “He could have been killed somewhere else and dropped here. Just like that boat. Looked like a setup to me. I went over there that first day. Something wasn’t right. The broken motor, those spilled pills. I noticed on that prescription that the pills were over two years old. And that business about the motor was just plain peculiar. Jimmy Don could make a motor out of a pile of scrap metal. A missing rotor blade wouldn’t give him a heart attack.”

As the official search wound down, Captain Blackburn wrote his report from the thorough records he had kept. Two hundred boats had been involved, two helicopters, four airplanes, and hundreds of volunteers. In all, he computed there had been 3,020 man hours logged into looking for Jimmy Don’s body.

After thirteen days, the official search ended, but unofficially people continued searching. They couldn’t get Beets off their minds. His friends still visited his favorite fishing spots, just in case. Whenever people were out on the lake they couldn’t help talking about him or looking for him—just in case.

Closure for Betty Beets came a little quicker. Two days after she reported her husband missing, she waltzed into a funeral home in Segoville, Texas, chose a white casket lined with blue satin, and picked out a cemetery plot. The next week, she asked that a memorial service be held for her late husband. His family dismissed the idea because they were still looking for his body.

In desperation, people turned to whatever means they could to find Captain Beets. One source was psychics. They more or less appeared, with no one taking credit for calling them. Although the sheriff’s office was blamed for hiring at least one, they firmly denied that they had.

One psychic, a four-hundred-pound woman in her sixties, began orchestrating her magic near the site where Jimmy Don’s boat had been found. She stood at the water’s edge with her eyes closed, inhaling the lake air. Then she asked to be driven to Glen Oaks, where Beets still owned a pretty, frame house painted robin’s egg blue. The pleasant three-bedroom, two-bath home had a “great room,” which consisted of a combined den, living room, and dining room, all braided together to form a large room where Jimmy Don had loved to entertain.

The home nestled under soaring oaks across the street from the lake, so after visiting the house, the psychic strolled over to neighbors fronting the lake. On the neighbor’s dock, she squeezed her massive frame into a chair near a spreading magnolia tree, and tried to sense Beets’s presence. After much deliberation, she declared that he was in the water with brown moss on his face. A current siege of Hydrilla, a greenish-brown, moss-type plant held areas of the lake hostage, and the newspapers ran continuous stories about the problem. Any psychic worth her salt could have learned that from the local press.

A Dallas newspaper reported on another psychic, a short, matronly woman from Georgia who had coal-black hair. To see visions, she also closed her eyes and then gently rocked back and forth as she concentrated. After that, she returned to the lakeside search headquarters and stroked a photograph of Captain Beets. She saw him buried somewhere near a castle, adding that he had sand on his face.

The Coast Guard, eager to try anything to find Beets, slowly cruised the shoreline with her on board looking for a castle. They discovered one house on the lake built of stone with turrets at each end of the roof in castle fashion. The eager men docked their boat and went ashore to investigate the structure and its grounds. The puzzled owner let them examine her yard, but they found no freshly turned earth or any indication of a grave. With their attention directed on dwellings at the water’s edge, the Coast Guard overlooked Betty Beets’s wishing well that may have symbolized a castle.

Beets’s two nieces, Jackie Collins and Diane Hodges, piled into their car and drove to Arlington, Texas, just west of Dallas. They had heard about a psychic there, and found her in a small eerie house that smelled of incense. Her head was wrapped in a silk scarf, turban style.

Without their mentioning their uncle, the psychic said, “I see that you have a relative you’re worried about. It’s someone who’s lost that you’re trying to find.”

When they heard her accurate description, they immediately hauled the woman back to the lake. There she asked questions and walked through Beets’s home in Glen Oaks. She fingered his clothes and touched his comb and sunglasses. Then she walked to the water and for a long time stood staring at the lake.

Finally she revealed, “He’s not in the water.”

Diane and Jackie, thinking that meant their uncle was still alive, grinned enthusiastically, but their enthusiasm faded as the psychic continued.

“I see a young man in a white shirt. He’s in a struggle with a woman.” The psychic frowned and placed her fingers to her temple. “He’s near the water, but I’m afraid he’s in a grave.”

Diane and Jackie glanced at each other through tear-fogged eyes. After a few moments of digesting the psychic’s words, they swamped her with a stream of questions, but she could give them nothing specific about their uncle’s whereabouts. However, she did tell them something that later would send chills through their young bodies: “Mr. Beets will be found on July 8, 1985.” She had the day and year right, and only missed the month by one.