Saltram-on-Sea, please contact the retrieval team, and a phone number to call.
Only the message would be in code, like, Mike, all is forgiven. Please come home, or something. He picked up the Herald whose crossword he’d been working and began reading through the personal column: Wanted, country home willing to take Pekingese dog for duration of bombings. L. Smith, 26 Brown Street, Mayfair. No. Lost in Holborn Underground Station. Brown leather handbag. Reward. No. For sale, garden sets. Iris, lilies, poinsettias.
Poinsettias. Right before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy’d intercepted a phone call from a Tokyo newspaper to a Japanese dentist in Honolulu: “Presently the flowers in bloom are fewest out of the whole year. However, the hibiscus and the poinsettias are in bloom.” It had been a coded message telling Japan that the battleships and destroyers were all in port, but not the aircraft carriers. And the retrieval team would know he was scheduled to go to Pearl Harbor next.
But the address in the ad was in Shropshire, and there was no phone number. And five ads below it was a nearly identical one for “dahlias and gladiolas.” All the other ads were standard Found and For Sale’s. No Wishes to Contact or Anyone having information regarding the whereabouts of messages. But this was only the Herald. They might have put a message in the Times or the Evening Standard. Tomorrow he’d have to talk Mrs. Ives into getting him the other papers. And find out how to go about putting a personal ad of his own in: Dunworthy, contact Mike, War Emergency Hospital, Orpington. Time is of the essence, or maybe just R. T., contact M. D.
He scanned the Herald to see how much an ad cost, and then remembered his money was in his jacket. The jacket he’d left on the deck of the Lady Jane. And if he asked Mrs. Ives to help him, she’d ask all kinds of questions. He’d better wait till he was out of the hospital.
But he couldn’t get out till he could walk. Which meant his first priority was to get back on his feet. He wangled a postcard from Mrs. Ives—it took him fifteen minutes to talk her out of writing it for him—and wrote to the poinsettias address, requesting more information and giving the hospital’s address, just in case it was a message, and then tried to talk his nurses into letting him up.
They refused to consider it, even with crutches. “You’re still mending,” they said and handed him the Times. He combed it for messages, but the only Please Contact was Will the young lady in the red polka-dotted frock at the dance at Tangmere Airfield last Saturday please contact Flt. Lt. Les Grubman.
There were several more garden sets ads, and on Friday a letter arrived from the poinsettias address, with an attached price list and seed catalog.
Mike decided to take matters into his own hands and get up on his own, but Sister Carmody caught him before he was even out of bed. “You know you mustn’t put any weight on that foot till it’s completely healed,” she told him.
“I can’t stand to stay in this bed another minute,” he said. “I’m going crazy.”
“I know just what you need—”
“A nice crossword puzzle?” he asked sarcastically.
“Yes,” she said, handing him the Herald and a pencil. “And some fresh air and sunlight.” She went out and returned in a few minutes with a cane-backed wheelchair and took him and his Herald up to the sunroom, though it wasn’t very sunny. It had tall windows, but there were black Xes of tape on the panes, sandbags were piled against them, and their green net curtains gave an underwater look to the room. The high-backed chairs were wicker, but they’d been painted dark brown and had darker green velvet cushions. In one of them sat a red-faced man with a neck brace, reading the Guardian.
In between the chairs were massive oak tables and bookcases and curio cabinets and equally massive and dark potted plants. There was barely room for Mike’s wheelchair as Sister Carmody pushed him over to the sandbagged windows. She parked him next to a massive table and opened the window. “There, some nice fresh air for you,” she said.
The red-faced man cleared his throat irritably and rattled his newspaper.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” she whispered.
“No,” Mike said, looking speculatively at the heavy furniture. If he were alone in here, he might be able to lean