“It’s still Genevieve. Come on, Cassie. In a different world, if I wanted to know what was happening with one of your cases, I could have called you.”
I opened my mouth, impulsively reaching for the first adolescent retort that came to mind—Whose fault is it that you couldn’t call me?—but before I said the words, I remembered that it was arguably mine.
“I don’t need your help,” I said. “This might turn out to be a simple fact-check. If it doesn’t, you’re not going to make it any easier. I’m guessing open-and-shut historical mysteries don’t sell a lot of reality-TV pitches. Is that really what you’re in this for?”
“As always, I’m in it for the truth. I’m also in it for my custody case, if you need a better reason. James wants primary custody and it’s hard to fight that without a reliable income, so, unless I want to be stuck in LA waiting for my alternate weekends and watching him raise my daughter with his pageant-queen fiancée who can’t wait to get a tiara on her, I need to come up with something fast.”
“You grew up in tiaras. I was there, remember?”
“Cassie, I couldn’t possibly speak to what you remember and what you don’t.”
Genevieve had worn a tiara at her own wedding, I wanted to say, but of course I did not actually remember that, not having been there. I had only seen it in the photographs. When I was feeling uncharitable, I allowed myself to think that Genie and Genevieve weren’t so different; both versions of the girl I grew up with wanted most of all to be the center of attention. Then I thought of Octavia, whom I’d last seen as a child who could barely stand to be parted from her mother, whom Genie spoke to and of with a tenderness I’d never heard in her voice in any other context, and I felt cruel for imagining Genevieve would let a mere performance cost her as much as it already had. Whoever she was these days, she believed in it.
The front door opened with a bell chime, and I recognized Andy Detry from his description of himself—he’d said he was a big guy with a big beard and would be wearing a Brewers cap. I’d expected I might find a dozen men fitting that description, but he was the only one in the coffee shop this morning. He introduced himself with a firm handshake. I introduced Genevieve as merely Genevieve, and although she had no idea who Andy was or why he’d come to meet me, she pulled out an official-looking notebook and pen and leaned in as though she too had been waiting for him.
I’d wanted to see Andy in person for a better sense of what I was dealing with—an honest concerned citizen, or a man trying to find the loophole that would get his grandfather off of a list of public shame. Once he started talking, I decided I liked him. He had a nervous laugh, the kind that bubbled up at his own jokes and also when nothing was funny at all, but he seemed genuinely horrified by both versions of what might have happened to Josiah Wynslow.
“I grew up here as a husky gay boy,” he said. “Not saying it’s the same as knowing what it would have been like to be him back then, or hell, to be me back then, but I know something about how it feels to have a whole gang of people wishing you didn’t exist, ya know?”
Most of his story was already in the file: when he saw his grandfather’s name on the plaque, he’d decided to do something about it. He ran a bar now and made a decent living and wanted to find out whether Josiah had any next of kin to whom he might deliver an apology or some meager reparations. By all accounts, Josiah had been unmarried and childless when he came to Cherry Mill, but Andy wondered if perhaps there’d been siblings, cousins, anyone. Someone had sent in an obituary, after all. He’d reached out to an amateur genealogist friend and started with vital records, which is where he’d come upon a puzzle: there was a 1937 Wisconsin death certificate for Josiah Wynslow, listing no next of kin, but there was also a 1950 marriage certificate for a girl in Kenosha whose father appeared to be the same man, though it was hard to be completely sure—the 1937 Josiah didn’t yet have a Social Security number. He’d gone digging and turned up an Illinois marriage certificate for Josiah and the mother of the woman in Kenosha, and then an Illinois death certificate reporting Josiah had died in Chicago in 1984. His wife had also died years ago, but the daughter who had married in Kenosha still lived there, with one of her daughters and two of her grandchildren. That was how he’d found the relatives I was scheduled to talk to later in the afternoon. They’d told him they knew Josiah had run into trouble in Wisconsin and been run out of the state, but he had certainly run out alive. Andy threw up his hands.
“So, it’s a mystery,” he said. “I’m not saying they weren’t trying to kill him, but it doesn’t seem they managed.”
I pulled the photograph of the arsonists out of the file.
“What can you tell me about who took credit for it?” I asked. “Anything it might be helpful to know about the people in this picture?”
“Not much I can think of. Everyone in the picture’s long dead of course, except the baby, and she’s almost ninety. I’d say there’s maybe ten people still in town related to someone in the picture somehow. Me. Susan behind the counter there. Susan’s mother—she’s the baby. Susan’s fool nephew. Two of the Piekowski grandkids. And Ronald Bunch’s son, but he’s on home care and good luck getting past his nurse.”
Andy laughed his nervous laugh again. He shifted back in his chair and gripped the edge of the table. I looked over at Susan, round faced and gray haired. She had greeted me with a smile and offered me a muffin on the house because she didn’t want me having coffee on an empty stomach, and I’d had to promise her I’d already had breakfast before she let me walk away empty-handed. “They’re not bad people, mostly,” Andy said. “But they don’t talk about it much and probably wouldn’t much appreciate me bringing it up again. If anyone knows anything that’s not already in the records, they sure haven’t told me.”
He leaned forward again and started to say more, but seemed to lose the words, instead raising himself from the table and saying his goodbyes. He offered a beer on him if we made it by his tavern. I thanked him and watched him walk out into the sunlight, squinting and shielding his eyes with his palm.
“Not bad people,” said Genevieve after he’d left. “What would a white person actually have to do to lose the benefit of the doubt? How many murders would they have to cover up?”
“Six, I think. But we might not even have one here.”
“You’re talking to Josiah’s family next?”
“It’s none of your business what I’m doing next. This isn’t your case. It’s not even appropriate for you to be here. Take a breath. Have brunch. Let me do my job.”
“Do you know how I ended up here in the first place? Originally, I mean. I was in Madison catching up with an old colleague. We went to brunch. Cute little place with sunny windows and red-checked tablecloths and cocktails and mocktails and home-style breakfast foods with ample vegan options. Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it’s true. So I’m sitting at my adorable checkered table, minding my business, drinking my basil mimosa, and under the glass I see this photograph. All these smiling faces you see before you. And a burnt building, so that’s weird. So I slide the photo out from under the table glass and I see this bit about fire and purification and Cherry Mill and now I’m guessing it’s nothing good, and it’s such small news, really, just one life out of so many, that I can’t even figure it out on my phone at first, I have to go digging in the archives to find the controversy from the ’90s, and it’s only because someone went digging then that the rest of what I was looking for was even there to be found, and all that’s with so much evidence that a whole town knew what happened and a year after it did, the motherfuckers took a group photo and signed their names. That’s how easy it is to think you’re a person having brunch and realize you’re actually a hunting trophy. So, I will wait if you want me to, but come back when you need me, because
like it or not we are always all we got.”
“Do you think I don’t know by now how to be careful?” I asked.
“You know how to be careful and you know how to do the right thing, but you’ve never known how to do both,” Genevieve said.
“Neither have you,” I said. “Both may be undoable.”
“Strength in numbers,” said Genevieve.
I was searching for the way to most emphatically tell her that this was not an argument, that our discussion had in fact concluded, when I heard a commotion outside and looked out the window, where Nick was gesturing frantically. I waved him in. He had gone into a used bookstore at the end of the block and when he reemerged there was a commotion at the end of the block. He said we needed to see it. While he was explaining, Susan at the counter’s cell phone dinged; she propped up a wooden be right back sign near the register and walked outside to see what was happening. We followed her, back toward the candy shop and the parking lot where we’d left Nick’s car. The sun had picked up and I felt pinned by it even before I saw what everyone was looking at.
Where not an hour earlier there had been an unmolested sign, there was now an enormous red X covering it in spray paint, with we will erase you written and underscored beside it. A smaller, stylized tag beneath the graffiti read white justice in jagged capital letters. To the right of the lettering was a nearly person-size rendering of the Free Americans’ elk symbol, in the same virulent red. The display covered most of the side of the store.
The woman we’d met at the candy store earlier was at the front of the small crowd, shaking her head and smoking a cigarette. Up close I could see her name tag read kim. Susan joined her and asked for a light.
“Stupid kid,” Susan said, after her first drag.
“You know who did this?” I asked.
“I mean, I didn’t see it, I was inside same as you, but I wouldn’t need three guesses,” said Susan. “Though he’s not really a kid anymore—twenty-seven, but for all the sense he’s got, he’s been sixteen for over a decade now, my mother would say. You heard of Free Americans?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Well, there’s less for them to do around here than when they first got started up. So they got worked up about the sign when it went up and had a protest outside of the store. Seven of them, marching around in a circle looking stupid. A few years back they had enough of them to look impressive, but like I said, it’s died down. I haven’t heard much about it since, but outside of them, well, some people didn’t like it, but no one else was really angry enough to do this. The guy who calls himself in charge of the group here is my idiot nephew. His real name is Chase.”
“Your nephew?”
“Don’t hold it against me. I didn’t raise him.”
“But Ella Mae was his grandmother? Yours too?”
“She was, may she rest in peace. I didn’t know about that picture or anything with the store until the first sign went up, which wasn’t until after she died, so I don’t know what to make of it. To me, she was kind. He was young when she died, and I don’t think she has anything to do with whatever Chase is up to. The family reputation has never really been his calling. Kind of killed that the first time he went to juvie. His dad—my uncle—died when he was a kid and hadn’t been around too much before that, and his mom—well, she does the best she can. Both of them have a lot of ideas about politics that we don’t talk much about to avoid the arguing. We’ve been thinking for a while he might outgrow it. But doesn’t look like he’s planning on it.”
“It would seem not,” I said.
“I better get back to the counter,” said Susan, finishing her cigarette and grinding the butt into the asphalt.
“Are you OK?” Nick asked.
“I’m fine,” I said reflexively, though I felt shaken. I thought I should call the office and alert them that there might be press after all, but I felt like I’d screwed up already, even though I knew, rationally, that it wasn’t my fault. I wanted to blame Genevieve, to imagine that her insistence that this job was controversial and worthy of TV had conjured up the danger and made it newsworthy, but I also knew it wasn’t her fault she was right.
“Should we start looking for this guy?” asked Genevieve. “Do you think it’s worth talking to the cops?” I assessed her, in her bright yellow sundress and camera-ready makeup. I wanted to laugh, but she seemed dead serious, as though she expected that not only was this now a joint mission, it also included fighting crime.
“I am not going to go chasing a villain who calls himself White Justice. Either a town is going to let a person run around goddamn calling himself White Justice or it isn’t,” I said. “The police will investigate the graffiti and I will investigate the facts on the sign.”
I pressed my fingertips to my temples and closed my eyes. When I opened them again the crowd was thinner, but the graffiti was still in front of me, violent and wet. I felt bad for snapping at Genevieve. Her eyeliner was smudged, like while we had been taking things in, she had been blinking away a tear. I wasn’t used to thinking of Genevieve as desperate. I could judge her for courting publicity only because I knew my rent would be paid no matter what happened here, and it wasn’t exactly my doing that she couldn’t say the same, but I didn’t feel good about my role in it. I filled Genevieve in on why I was actually there, and told her I was tracking the past and not the future, so if she wanted to wait for the cops and focus on this part of the story—the present—I’d stay out of her way. I asked if she was going to call the news, hoping I could at least give the director a warning, and when she was sheepish, I realized she wasn’t going to call anyone yet—right now there was nothing she had to make herself central to the story, so no reason she’d hand it to a reporter. I retracted my flicker of sympathy.
I walked with Nick to his car, where he put his arms around me and leaned his forehead into mine and asked if I was all right. The intimacy felt startling, a shock and not the fabled spark. I was afraid, and my fear indicted the idyllic morning we’d had, reminded me why I had come here and why I had left him. I had not wanted to be tricked into thinking I was safe—not with men like him, not in towns like this, not in crowds of good white people. I pulled away and got into the passenger seat.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Nick asked once he’d settled into the driver’s side. “I don’t like the idea of this guy being around. He’s obviously pretty close, and he may have seen us earlier. That show was probably for your benefit. I can drive and we can get your rental car later.”
“What are you going to do if he’s following me? Distract him with chitchat about the bylaws of the master race?”
“Do you know anything about whether or not this guy is dangerous?”
“Maybe he’s the kind of harmless white supremacist who threatens genocide for fun,” I said.
“Cassie,” said Nick.
I shushed him in the interest of answering his question through an internet search. It took a few tries combining keywords, but I summoned the right monster to my phone. White Justice had apparently been posting weekly videos for years. Considering the time he must have put into it, he had a sparse number of followers, but judging from their comments and upvotes they were mostly adoring. The top-rated video was from a year ago, just after Genevieve’s sign had gone up. I pushed play. White Justice’s large face filled the video window. He had panicked hazel eyes and patchy facial hair and a face that seemed like each individual feature could be attractive, but they somehow didn’t work together. His voice was booming, even with the volume low. The video zoomed out; he had given the phone camera to someone else. He stood in front of the sign, in the place where we had just been standing, wearing the trademark ascot and a fedora that appeared to be his own doing. A crowd of about a dozen people in the same getup was gathered near him. He gestured to the sign and ranted at some length, his speech punctuated by cheers. “The point of t
his is shame!” he continued. “Shame for white people! But we built this city! We built this state! We built this whole country! These people don’t build things! These people don’t love themselves! If death makes them so sad, where are the memorials to Milwaukee’s dead? What about Chicago’s? They kill their children! They don’t love their children! They hate us and they want us to hate us too! We do not! We are proud! We will fight back! We are the future!”
At that, the crowd joined in—this was one of the Free Americans’ rallying cries—We are the future—a cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn’t genocide or terror but the fact that it hadn’t completely worked yet. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans and their claims on being the only Americans transcended facts and time and progress, the way they always seemed to be around the corner, the way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the Do they know I’m human yet? the way they took delight in saying no, the way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.
* * *
• • •
The Robinsons, Josiah Wynslow’s nearest living descendants, lived in a modest split-level ranch across from a strip mall between Racine and Kenosha. Though the drive was over an hour, I was still an hour early, so I waited in my car in the strip mall parking lot, contemplating the dollar store’s window display. I had done my best to downplay that the morning had made me afraid, but now the fear had settled. The whole drive down I was worried that someone was following me, and that if someone was following me, I wouldn’t know what to look for, wouldn’t count on help to come if I asked for it. Now that I felt certain I was alone, the tension broke into quiet panic, a general anxiety replacing the specific. The bright yellow dollar sign in the store’s window appeared to be floating toward me the longer I stared at it, and I looked back and forth between it and the scrolling red marquee of the check-cashing place next door, as if what I was really looking for would present itself in the juxtaposition, like in one of those 3-D images where you had to find the angle that would reveal a picture that made sense.
The Office of Historical Corrections Page 17