Carol Sue Ravenel

Finding Cyn. . .: Second Tenant of the Kersey Cottage Carol Sue Ravenel

1994. While diving off the coast of Jekyll Island, Georgia, retired FBI agent, Neal Park, finds a rusty, metal box wedged between two large rocks. The contents of the box, marked with a Nazi swastika and a German officer's name, take him on a search to England and Germany for the intended recipient of the box's contents. **********1939. From Sudbury, Suffolk County, England, Cynthia Stiles and Margaret Overstreet, bestfriends since childhood, and now on holiday with their families at the Ostee Resort on the Baltic seacoast of northeast Germany, meet Gerhardt Prien, son of a farmer, as he finishes delivering fresh vegetables from the farm in Schmiedekamp, north of the resort. They speak for a few minutes and he asks if they will join him that evening at the lodge dance. Reserved Margaret is apprehensive about fraternizing with a German, but gregarious Cynthia accepts his invitation. ********** Gerhardt, now in military service, and Cynthia, have one meeting in Kersey while he is on special assignment in Lavenham. He is abruptly sent back to Germany when England withdraws from The Kleiner Spion, Little Spy project, realizing a war is imminent. Cynthia does not hear from Gerhardt, does not know he is still actively training on the project, now based in Neustadt, Germany. As part of Admiral Karl Donitz's Operation Drumbeat, Gerhardt is assignedto U-352, sailing across the Atlantic. His little reconnaissance plane, stored in the conning tower, is waiting to be catapulted off the submarine when it surfaces off the United States eastcoast. U-352 is sunk by a United States Coast Guard cutter on May 9, 1942, near the coast of Cape Lookout, North Carolina. Gerhardt's box of letters and special mementoes for Cynthia go down with the boat and for fifty years drifts southward. **********Neal's life and marriage to Louise Prentice was orchestrated by his frequent Bureau assignments taking him to cities from coast to coast.