by Lee Killough
She frowned. “Why?”
“It’s complicated.” Make that: impossible to explain. “Please don’t tell Harry.”
“Not until he’s stronger.” She paused. “I consulted I Ching this morning.”
His gut did another lurch. “Did you get the maiden is powerful again?”
She punched his arm. “Hush and listen. Never forget that one...but today’s hexagram was number twelve, Standstill. It says that heaven and earth are out of communion and that all things are benumbed. Confusion and disorder prevail.”
He grimaced. That was certainly true for him.
“Inferior people are in ascendancy but don’t allow yourself to be turned from your principles. There are change lines in the second and fourth places, advising that a great man will suffer the consequences of a standstill and by his willingness to suffer, ensure the success of his principles. However...” Her eyes bored up into him. “...acting to re-create order must be done with proper authority. Setting one’s self up to alter things according to one’s own judgment can end in mistake and failure.”
That sounded like a warning against vigilantism. But he had no plans to take the law into his own hands, just find Lane and see she was arrested. “What else? The change lines make a new hexagram.”
“The second one is number fifty-nine, Dispersion. It suggests success, especially after journeying and, of course, perseverance.” She smiled sadly. “That’s when I knew what you were going to do. Persevere, Garreth, and be true to yourself.” She threw her arms around him, hugging him fiercely. “Stay safe, please.”
He buried his face in her hair, throat tight. “I’ll do my best.”
9
While not dinner-plate flat as Garreth expected, the gold-brown Kansas hills, so unlike the yellow ones of California or those in San Francisco, rolled to an almost unimaginably distant horizon, sparsely dotted with trees and human constructs. The sky arched overhead, a cobalt bowl of infinity broken only here and there by wisps of cloud. The sun burned Garreth’s eyes even behind his glasses. Driving south toward Bachman out of Hays, he felt overwhelmed, a mote crushed between the immensity of earth and sky. He wondered whether it might have been wiser to drive from Davis during the day instead of only at night, sleeping wrapped in his air mattress pallet in the car at public campsites by day. Then he could have gradually accustomed himself to the broadened horizon instead of being suddenly hit by it on this drive.
To take his mind off the unexpected agoraphobia, Garreth thought ahead to Bachman, rehearsing his search strategy and cover story. Knocking on Bieber doors asking if they had a sister, aunt, cousin, daughter named Madelaine would alerting Lane to his pursuit. Instead, he had come purporting to hunt relatives named Pfeifer. Last month before her death, his grandmother had dropped a bombshell on the family, that she was not the natural mother of Garreth’s father. Phillip had been born to a Mary Pfeifer, who roomed with them for seven months...pregnant, though they never realized it until they found a newborn baby wrapped in a blanket on her bloody bed one morning with a note from Mary saying she was unfit to be a mother and she was leaving the baby for someone who would be a good mother. They never saw Mary again. Garreth’s newlywed grandmother raised the boy as her own. She knew nothing about Mary except a mention of Hays, Kansas, and a town name, Ba-something, on the smudged postmark of a letter Mary tore up. Garreth’s father had no interest in the woman who abandoned him at birth, but Garreth had decided to look for this unknown branch of the family tree...and maybe learn what happened to Mary. Among old family photos they had found one of three young women with his grandmother, the back labeled: Me, Bridget, Mary, Kathleen...without indicating which girl was which.
The photo and writing were real, one of Grandma Doyle’s taken in the late twenties when she and the other girls were all sixteen and seventeen and fresh from Ireland. The cardboard square stiffened the inside pocket of his jacket. Feeling it, Garreth remembered three days ago, when she handed it to him.
“May it bring you she who killed you,” his grandmother said, “and then a peaceful sleep.”
She had known what he was the moment he walked in the house that morning. Behind his mother exclaiming in horror, “Garreth, you’re turning into skin and bones!” she reached for the silver cross on her neck.
After hugging his mother he reached out to his grandmother...only to have her back away and hurriedly leave the room. “Grandma!” He stared stricken after her.
His mother touched him on the arm. “Please forgive her. I think she just needs time to accept that, for once, her Feeling was wrong.”
Garreth gave silent thanks his mother misinterpreted the reason for his distress. “I understand.” Which did nothing, however, to lessen the pain of being feared.
Dread lay more on his side in telling his father about Harry when his father came home at noon...out in the back yard, away from his mother. He turned the incident in the restaurant into a little dizziness, which he said he had experienced now and again since “the Barber woman” caught him by surprise and slammed his head into the wall, the resulting concussion enabling her to overpower him. In Phil Mikaelian’s opinion, only psychos and wimps had panic attacks. Otherwise Garreth told everything fit for humans to hear, making no attempt to minimize his screw-up. And braced for the reaction.
Jaw tight, his father listened without interruption before exploding. “Son of bitch! Who the hell did you think you were: John Wayne, or Dirty Harry! Of all the stupid, irresponsible — ” He sucked in a breath. “I understand wanting to nail this scumbag, but it’s not like Shane strapping a blown knee and injecting pain-killers so he can play another game. No one’s life is on the line in football. You — ”
He cut his father off. “You’re not telling me anything I haven’t already hit myself over the head with a hundred times. Not even I.A. can make me feel worse than I do already.”
His father’s scowl smoothed. He sighed. “So what are they going to do to you?”
Garreth shrugged. “The review board won’t hold its hearing for weeks, probably. I won’t know until then.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter.” His father slung an arm across Garreth’s shoulders. “You’ll man up and take your lumps without whining, right, even if it means suspension and being busted back to uniform?”
And lots of couch time, which Garreth refrained from mentioning. Shrinks, too, being only for psychos and wimps. “Right.”
“Oh, and you’re going to straighten Judith out about this adoption nonsense, right?”
That mention tightened Garreth’s gut but he said, “Right,” again.
To his relief, after a slap on the back, his father left him alone, heading into the house for lunch.
Garreth sat down at the foot of their big oak tree. The earth welcomed him, easing some daylight’s discomfort. Lying back against the trunk, he had looked up and seen the platform his father built for Shane and him when they were kids. His father still tended it religiously, keeping it safe for Brian, and for Shane’s kids when they visited.
Brian. Garreth sighed. As soon as he went over to visit, the question of adoption was bound to come up again. He closed his eyes wearily. What should he do about it?
Feet whispered down the back steps and across the lawn toward him, but he left his eyes closed. The scent of lavender overwhelming that of blood told him who it was.
The feet stopped a short distance away. “Dearg-dul. Undead,” his grandmother said quietly.
Fighting his eyes open, he saw her lower herself into a lawn chair.
“Why is it you’re walking?”
He sat up. “Grandma, I’m not dead! Look at me. I walk; I breathe; my heart beats. I reflect in mirrors. I can touch your cross, too.”
“But what do you eat? Do you still love the sun?”
Rather than answer that, he said, “I’m still and always your grandson. I won’t hurt you or any of the family.” Then after hesitating: “I don’t drink human blood.”
She
regarded him uncertainly, then, with a quick touch on the cross around her neck, patted the side of the chair. “Come to me.”
She sat in the sun, but he moved to the ground beside her.
She reached out to touch stroke his hair. “Is it to avenge yourself on she who did this to you that you can’t sleep?”
He considered several answers before giving the one she seemed to want. “Yes.”
She sighed. “Poor unquiet spirit.”
While he winced at that, he welcomed the easing of her fear. “I need your help.”
“To find her?”
Garreth nodded. “And get away from here without upsetting Mom and Dad. I can’t stay without giving away that I’ve changed.”
She nodded. “So what will you be wanting me to do?”
At the fierce tone of her voice, he had to laugh. She looked so righteously angry, so ready to go into battle against the fiend who had done this to her grandson, that Garreth regretted needing so little from her: a photograph and abetting his escape. Coming onto his knees, he hugged her.
She hugged him back and then, to his dismay, began sobbing. He knew he was hearing her cry over his grave.
He held her until she quieted, wondering...could she be right? Was he nothing but a temporarily animated instrument of revenge?
It made a hell of a thought to take with him when he visited Brian that afternoon. Thinking it, he stood back a mental distance from himself and the boy. For the first time he saw the formality in his son’s attitude toward him, so different from Brian’s easy behavior with his stepfather. Logic told Garreth it was natural; Brian saw Dennis every day, whereas, for six years, since the boy was two, Garreth had been no more than a visitor. How much less would he be from now on?
“Judith,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about the adoption.”
She looked quickly at him. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t know then what happened to you.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. If you and Dennis want — ”
She shook her head, cutting him off. “It can wait. You’ve got enough already to deal with.”
He had regarded her with surprise, but nodded, and for once, a visit went amicably. So amicably he regretted having to dodge Judith’s dinner invitation.
“Mom’s probably planned something special at home.”
Yes...stuffed porkchops, one of his favorites growing up. Walking into the house, he smelled them with dismay. Evading lunch had worked by waiting until his father left, then claiming loss of appetite over confronting Judith about the adoption issue. His mother accepted that. He needed more to finesse his way out of dinner. Saying he had already eaten, taking Brian out for hamburgers, did not cut it.
“You’ve always had room for my porkchops,” his mother said.
His father fixed him with a hard stare that said: I don’t care if you’ve eaten a whole cow; you will eat what your mother’s cooked!
Grandma Doyle jumped to her feet.“The phone.”
His father frowned. “I don’t hear it.”
“It’s going to ring.” She hurried into the hall. They heard her pick up the phone and talk, then she peered back around the diningroom door. “It’s for you, Garreth. Someone named Chris Murdock.”
Grandma to the rescue! Now he needed to play his part.
Before driving home, he had spent hours considering escape plans. Any visit was always too short for his mother, so the trick was getting around his father, finding an excuse for leaving which Phil Mikaelian not only accepted but encouraged in the face of maternal objections. Eventually he approached the problem as he would cracking a suspect. Use what pushed the subject’s buttons.
He stood in the hall talking to the dial tone. “Hey, man, what’s up? ... Sure I remember. ... Yeah, of course I would. When — ... When? ... Just a minute.” He came back to the diningroom. “I’ve been invited to go hunting in Montana on the family ranch of this narcotics officer Harry and I know. What do you think, Dad? Do I say yes?”
Envy lit his father’s eyes. “Of course. When is it?”
“That’s the kicker.” Garreth grimaced. “His father’s flying into Sacramento tomorrow to pick up Chris and a cousin who lives there. If I want to go, I have to meet them at the airport.”
“Tomorrow!”his mother protested. “No! You just got here!”
He sent a look of appeal at his father and watched the wheels turn: guns, big game, testosterone party.
“This is pretty last minute, isn’t it?”
An expected question. Garreth nodded. “Another guy had to cancel and Harry told Chris it would be good for me to go.”
Like him, his father thought the world of Harry, and Garreth shamelessly played to that. For Harry, struggling back from near death, to worry about Garreth tipped the scale. As he knew it would.
Hunting had occupied the rest of the dinner conversation...reminisces about past hunting trips of his father’s and ones father and sons took together...advice on outfitting himself once he reached Montana, since there was no time to do so here. While his mother scowled at the two of them.
Garreth welcomed that. Tears of disappointment would made him feel truly rotten. The tears came the next morning, saying goodbye, but the feel of the photo in his jacket pocket helped him steel himself and focus on what he had to do.
10
Lien, Harry, San Francisco, and his family seemed a universe away from these Kansas plains. Just I Ching lingered with him. Persevere. Yes, he would, to the end of the earth and time...whatever it took to find Lane. That threat of failure if he set himself up as judge kept ringing in his head, however. Reminding him that even without a badge, he must act as lawfully as though he carried it.
The highway entered Bachman. After asking directions, Garreth found the high school. Climbing out of the car, warm wind struck him. It had some qualities of a sea breeze...pushiness, an aggressive wildness, a singing contempt for the land and what crawled there. It buffeted him, bringing the scents of fresh-watered grass and dusty earth, and pushed him up the steps into the building.
He located the office and the principal, a Mr. Charles Dreher, who listened to his story with interest. “Every since Roots was on TV, more and more people are hunting theirs. I’m happy to help.”
Which consisted of taking Garreth to the small Board of Education building and down a steep set of stairs to a dim space less basement than cellar. Smelling and feeling wonderfully of the earth. While Dreher apologized for the conditions, Garreth sucked in a long, contented breath and wanted to stay forever. It took a hard mental shake to refocus.
They hunted through file envelopes stacked together on metal shelves and through ancient metal and wooden file cabinets. A secretary joined them eventually. “Graduation pictures? I know I’ve seen a whole pile of them somewhere.”
Which turned out to be on a top shelf, still framed, the glass so dusty it rendered the sepia-toned photographs all but invisible. Dreher returned to the high school, leaving Garreth and the secretary to bring the pictures up into the light and clean the glass. But when all that had been done, and Garreth compared the picture of the girls in the 1930 to 1940 classes with his mental image of Lane Barber, while pretending to compare them to his photo, he found no match.
The secretary wiped at a smudge on her nose. “Who is it you’re looking for?” When he gave her his story she said, “You know, a postmark here doesn’t mean the family lived here. Rural mail gets our postmark, so they could have had a farm, or lived somewhere like Dixon, that’s too small for its own post office and also gets our postmark. Then she’d probably have gone to a one-room school. Those are pretty much all gone now, though, and I don’t know where you’d find their records. Why don’t you sit down with a phone book and call Pfeifers in the area?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to go busting in on people’s lives until I know we’re related. Besides, being pregnant out of wedlock, Mary Pfeifer might not have been her real name.”
The s
ecretary considered that and nodded.
She had a valid point about Lane going to school elsewhere. The postmark meant only that the correspondent lived here now, not necessarily then. Which meant he needed to check other high schools in the area...assuming if the correspondent moved, it had not been far, staying in the comfort zone of the ethnic area.
Now he needed to sneak in Lane’s name. “My grandmother’s diary mentioned something she didn’t tell us — maybe forgot — that another girl came to visit one time, a Maggie Bieber, or maybe Maddie — the ink smudged — and Mary hid in her room, asking my grandmother to say she wasn’t there. I’m wondering if it was the person who wrote her. It sounds like a name from here.”
“Maybe your grandmother wrote down the name wrong,” the secretary said. “We have Biekers, but I don’t know any Biebers.”
Checking her phone book confirmed Bachman had listings for only Biekers. Garreth felt a lurch of dismay. Had the reference librarian in San Francisco telling him Bachman had telephone listings for Biebers heard him wrong? Yet Lane called herself Bieber and he clearly remember the letter being addressed to Madelaine Bieber.
Back in his car, Garreth pushed dismay aside. Maybe Pfiefer had Biebers.
He headed east on a county road. A few miles out of town it took him through the Dixon the secretary mentioned. Not just a small town, he found. Dead...two houses, with overgrown foundations all that remained of several others, a gas station-come-general store, and a grain elevator — a fascinating row of huge, melded columns...a giant tombstone marking the town’s passing.
In Pfeifer, he stopped at a gas station and checked the phone book before going on to the high school. It listed Biekers, no Biebers. Still, he pushed on to the high school and was handed over to their school librarian, who showed him to the shelves holding almost a century’s worth of yearbooks. He went through those from 1930 to 1940...where he found Biekers and some Pfeifers, but no Biebers. And none of the faces were Lane’s.