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THE PRICE SHE'LL PAY: For the secret she never knew she had...

Page 28

by Cara Charles

“I’m down with Kimirov wanting Elise to suffer. Maybe Elise has had training?”

  Iain took back the laptop. ‘Maybe he should contact Janitor.’ “I agree. Or else she’d ask for Federal protection.”

  “Maybe she has. It fits. Charles Larsen was an Eisenhower Republican, but a Californian from Santa Barbara born in Nebraska. Kids usually pick the politics of their parents. Let’s say, Dad was a big influence on Sam until his death. Charles was a closet liberal, kept quiet because of his life with the Alphabets. Her brother Sam and guardian filled in the rest. Elise spent her formative years in Santa Barbara. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill happened creating the environmental movement. Sam and their Dad would have been there for that. That event surely changed her brother and her father, their colleagues and neighbors forever. She was a California kid who’d lived abroad and saw different cultures. Didn’t have much choice other than to become an environmentalist. Of course, if she were a Bay Area kid back then, she’d be more of a radical. But knowing what she knows, gathered during a lifetime of investigating, she’s learned to be a quiet radical and carry a big stick, her brain is her big stick, I’ve read.”

  Iain was taking notes on his computer.

  “Yes. I agree. Got any photos?”

  “Ya. Look at these.” Iain handed over his laptop.

  Mac saw Elise, Tom, Lara, and Sam in a range of photos, formal to causal. Elise was an approachable girl next-door, natural beauty. Her kind eyes, and a sincere smile were touching somehow. Daughter Lara was a clone to her mom.

  “Wow.”

  “She’s a stunner, a very nice people person I’ve read. Dedicated and generous.”

  “Find out about Charles’ early life, pre and post war.”

  “Coming up. Eat. I can hear your stomach from here.” Iain tore into his sandwich and downed his Guinness in three gulps and popped a coke.

  Iain freelanced, called into service often. His intell access open, he tapped into the Interpol finding Charles Larsen’s file.

  “Jackpot. Those Cold War intell guys were investigated back to their college days. I quote... ‘The military intelligence office encouraged by D.D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander initiated an inquiry in November 1945, just after the Berlin takeover. Charles was approved to be Eisenhower’s personal navigator, months earlier just after he’d finished a tour of 40 missions and received a DFC with silver oak leaf cluster.’ “Charles must have been dead meat, thinking his long tour was over, only to have to fly the General around until war’s end.”

  “Ah. Probably til the General’s retirement. Intell was his reward. How’d you feel?” Mac shook his head.

  Iain nodded, “I’d be pissed, but they lived by an honor code back then. They kept his college papers in his file to give administrations reference and concrete insight into who Charles Larsen their trusted man was, and where his values had come from. Charles stayed on as a consultant until he and his wife had disappeared on his Australian vacation in the Outback. Sam, twenty-two and brilliant had just entered USC Law School and was living in the family home, he raised Elise with the Larsen family guardian, Tom’s father, Sloan Andersen. Sam was an attorney when Elise entered UCSB as an undergrad at age seventeen, graduated at age twenty. She’s brilliant. Aced her LSATs and boards. She went to law school at USC and partnered with Sam, one of the first environmental attorneys.”

  “Watched after their parents death. Curious, don’t you think?” Mac asked.

  “Very. The date here on this college paper is just prior to Charles’ twenty-first birthday. His father Peter is now deceased. He’s off on his own in D.C., the big city. The District was humming back then, all those monument building projects, and FDR’s touch on American life, that’s where his liberalism came from. This is touching. Listen.”

  Iain smiled. “Here’s a paper written on his twenty-first birthday. Wow, aye? It is an assignment to write about the most influential person in your life. Charles wrote about his father, Peter. I wrote about Margaret Sanger. My mother had me look her up.” Iain read to Mac.

  When Peder didn’t hear from Alexei again and the GPS earrings on Mavra had stopped functioning, and the news said her plane exploded over a lake in Utah, he left a message on his cellphone, and praised Alexei because it was obvious he had been successful.

  CHAPTER FIVE -- THE HEART OF A HERO

  “Charles Larsen/Period One

  English Composition 101

  October 5, 1938

  HOW AN IMMIGRANT BOY SHAPED MY LIFE

  One day when I was twelve, my father Peter and I were fishing at our favorite fishing hole. That day, my father told me although he’d become a new American at sixteen, he was not happy and even quite depressed when he arrived here in the States. During this time in my own life, I’d been distracted in school, often disrespectful and moody.

  In the late 1870s my Danish grandfather, Jens Peter Larsen, a farmer from the island of Mon, Denmark and my grandmother Karen had joined the big wave of Danish families immigrating to the United States. My father, Peter said the trip on the steamer Fredricksberg III from Copenhagen had taken ten days.

  They’d landed in New York, tired of the stuffy, smelly life aboard the steamship. My father and his two older brothers made good friends during their crossing. Many were bound for Chicago, Wisconsin, and Utah as some were new Mormons, others settled in Nebraska and Iowa, San Francisco and Seattle. Their two younger sisters were excited to be continuing their adventure. The new friends vowed to write. Most would have taken the train west from Chicago. My twelve year old father, his two older brothers in their teens and two younger sisters stepped from the train in the new train station in Grand Island, Nebraska anxious for their journey to be over. Their new home Dannebrog, Nebraska awaited sixty miles, north. Dannebrog, the name given to the flag of Denmark became Dannebrog America, their little piece of Nebraska made room for all the dreamers from home.

  The seven-member Larsen family arrived by stage in the tiny Nebraska village of Dannebrog, and rented a home in town, attending school with the other Danish immigrants waiting on the government to release the land in sections of 160 acres.

  The Nebraska winters were fierce, long, and cold. Winters weren’t like that in Denmark, father said.

  My father looked deep into his past to remember. His eyes would relax while his smile would soften his features. I could almost see the boy he had been.

  My father told me how much he missed his home in Denmark, seeing the water everyday, climbing the famous white cliffs of Mon, fishing, the town square, and a certain girl who had brown hair and hazel eyes. My father said he had been miserable in America. He’d sulked, which upset his mother and father, terribly. He would set off his older brothers. After waiting a few years in Dannebrog, they moved to their new section of land near Dannevirke, twenty-five miles due north.

  Finally on their hilltop land their dreamed of American life, farm life was nothing but back breaking work from sunrise to sunset. The raw land and the new life they’d wanted so badly and struggled to get was simply miserable and their daily lives, stone-age primitive.

  They all complained bitterly. Times were brutal. His father Jens, tried to keep everyone hopeful.

  My father explained one day, he realized he was the energy of the family. When he was sad, everyone was sad. When he saw how hard his father Jens and brothers worked and how his brothers would sulk having to do things they didn’t want to, he changed his attitude. He became his parents helper whether in the field or the kitchen, or the gardens, he cheered everyone up by singing the old songs from home or making them laugh, remembering old neighbors, telling funny stories, anything to get them happy and break the tension. He discovered that was his gift. He could make people laugh. My father so loved to laugh.

  With these stories, my father taught me his important life lesson -- someone must take the lead in being the peacemaker. When he saw the rift between his brothers and their father grow, he did his best to soften the tensions of failed crops and po
verty, cold and dirt and their hard primitive life in their new sod house.

  Everyday, someone they knew was wishing for home. The struggles they had had in Denmark were pale in comparison to the starving, the unrelenting snow, and the bitter cold. He learned a lot about home from the talks he overheard. They weren’t the only ones struggling. Everyone was struggling.

  The Danes had struggled in the last few years in their island home of Mon in Denmark. There was land in Nebraska, an enticing bit of hope beckoning from across the water. Along with other Mon Island families, they’d sold their farms for far less than they were worth, and set out for America for the promise of a fresh start and a better life. His father, Jens was a farmer and had great plans to be a corn farmer in America.

  My father, Peter had been first in his class while his older brothers didn’t care about books. They were happy working with their hands. He disliked raising their few pigs and vowed his children would not be slaves to the land or the weather or a cruel Mother Nature. They would use their minds and contribute to the world with their knowledge and intellectual skill.

  Grasshoppers had destroyed their meager corn crop when they needed it most, an unheard of plague in Denmark and my grandfather had fallen ill. Young Peter watched his father die just after two years on his new land.

  At sixteen, he’d watch his mother Karen and his sisters cry as their farm was sold at auction on the steps of the new Howard County Courthouse in 1894. Sadly, because they couldn’t pay the $4.94 mortgage. If my Uncles, who I had only seen a few times had stayed to help and not abandoned the family, maybe they could have avoided the foreclosure. Perhaps we’d still be on our hilly homestead that overlooked the north road to Dannevirke and I’d be a farmer and not a student here.

  The railroad bought our little farm for fifty dollars, but then the railroad company decided to take the railroad track another direction. So their farm was sold to the family who owns it to this day, the Dvoracek family. But my father Peter stayed with his mother and sisters in a house in town, working at anything he could find to help support them all. The people of the little town of St. Paul found them a house to stay in rent free for a time, after they lost the farm.

  On my grandparents’ wedding anniversary that following year, after losing his father and their farm, my seventeen-year old father Peter and his sisters had saved a little money and fixed their mother a fine meal. Gathering the left over flowers after the church service from their new church in town, Peter borrowed a rig and the little family paid a visit to the unmarked grave of their father Jens, in the Dannevirke cemetery. They had been too poor to afford a proper headstone, a final indignity.

  Peter surprised his mother with a beautiful carved cross, done by his own hand. When she saw it, my grandmother Karen was so proud and happy. She swept up her three children in her arms and hugged them hard to keep back the tears. My father said he never forgot the intensity of her hug. If she only knew how many times my father had heard her cry in private, trying not to worry him, she would have been surprised. She’d been depressed a long time. They placed flowers on grandfather’s grave as my father placed the little cross.

  Grandmother Karen Larsen walked out of the little cemetery, which held many she had grown to love, and looked south down the road and up at their hillside farm about a mile away. Those hills had been theirs. For the first time since the court house steps auction, she was allowing herself to be drawn home.

  My father held his little sisters back, letting her have a moment with her thoughts. But after she had kept going, he ran to catch up with her, to find her private tears quietly rolling down her face.

  Only then, did she summon the courage to tell my father, a caring boy so selfless so unlike her oldest boys who had abandon them, why she had been unable to recover from losing her husband. She didn’t know where her oldest boys had gone, to Chicago probably. Grandmother Karen told my father, that she and my grandfather had quarreled often about how bad their luck was going.

  She’d told her husband she’d never agreed to “live like a pig or have her children live like pigs and that was what drove their two oldest sons away.” She confessed she had said she hated “living in their sod house, she was sure they would never be able to afford lumber for a proper house and that they would never get out of their poverty.”

  He was crushed she’d said, and realized she’d pressured him too much.

  America had been my Grandfather Jens dream, not my Grandmother’s. She wanted to go home to Denmark, but they had no money for tickets and everyone they had known at home had come to America, except their parents who couldn’t afford to send for them. My father, the natural peacemaking middle child made her understand their life so far was just a series of bad luck and nothing ever stayed the same. My father became a man that day.

  Together as they looked out over the Nebraska hills that were once theirs.

  Young Peter told his mother, “Life is like these hills and valleys, Mother. We have to weather the passing storms we find in the valleys of our lives, because if we believe we can climb back up to those beautiful hills and out of the storm, we’ll find the sun is shining there. Every storm we survive will prepare us for the next series of storms that will surely come. Nothing lasts forever, Mother. Except love.”

  With those inspiring words from her favorite son, Grandmother Karen hugged and kissed him hard having softened her heart. She called her girls to her and kissed them all. Together they raced down the road and up the hill to their old homestead. They had a memorable reunion with their land. The flowers they had long ago planted welcomed them home.

  The Dvoraceks were building a new house on the south side of the hill and the corn crop was flourishing. My father would visit them a couple of times a year and Mr. Dvoracek and my father would walk the land together. The Dvoraceks never had the heart to pull the cultivator through the hilltop where the sod house had once stood.

  I’ve seen the land a few times and it is beautiful. I can imagine them standing on their hilltop watching the wagons going north to Dannevirke for church, a new church the immigrants had raised money for and built for meetings, dances, christenings, and weddings. Their spirit is there. Grandmother Karen died before I was born. She’s buried next to her husband.

  My father had taught his family motto to all of his ten children. He chose to sell insurance as his first job as an adult wanting to prevent the suffering of other widows and their children. He taught his clients this motto.

  “Life is a series of hills and valleys. Nothing lasts forever, except love.”

  My father met my mother Carrie at the Loup City, Nebraska dance in 1898. With no thought of staying in America, my mother Carrie had been a young city girl of twenty coming to visit her sister, Minnie. Mother Carrie and her sister Minnie were city girls from Copenhagen, apartment manager’s daughters used to living in fine apartments all over the city. My mother Carrie’s strong love for my father kept her in America when she could have easily returned to her comfortable life in Copenhagen. When my father and mother and four other friends with their new wives founded their tiny three street village of Cotesfield, and when my father was elected Sheriff of Howard County and then elected Judge of Howard County, a version of our family motto was his campaign slogan.

  “Nothing is forever, except love.”

  The people Peter Larsen, as the Sheriff arrested were basically good, but had strayed. Soon everyone was living by his motto. St. Paul and Cotesfield, Nebraska were very happy places to live.

  My father’s success made sure his promise of higher education came true for me. Not one of his ten children would farm the land. But it was the Depression. The older boys shunned book learning, loved sports, especially baseball, and all the brothers but one, have taken any job that had come their way. The WPA gave them the opportunity to become laborers on road gangs and in steel, the older sisters became diner cooks, my oldest brother became Post Master of Cotesfield and delivered the mail come hell, high water, or drift
s of snow.

  Quickly, my older sisters became wives, factory workers, liquor storeowners and cafe cooks. They came of age right when the Depression broke out and any job was a blessing. Once supporting themselves and out in the world there wasn’t time to educate themselves, so in their roles they stayed.

  The youngest three Larsen children now fulfill our father’s dream for us. We will use our brains to make a living. The three of us went to St. Paul’s Business College, right after high school, and worked hard to be the fastest typists and stenographers in our class. We were ready to come to Washington. We are so grateful Civil Service gave us this opportunity. Even though I lost Dad the day after my Business College graduation, I knew he was proud of us. He taught kindness, love, loyalty, dedication, and perseverance overcome most obstacles.

  Peter Jens Larsen, my immigrant father is my personal hero. You should have seen his funeral. I think the entire county attended. Friends as far away as Kansas came. That is when I found out how a man lives his life would be reflected in others. What they said about him, things I never knew he had done for people, I was so proud of him and proud to be his son. That was the day I really learned to respect the teachings of the immigrant boy who overcame personal adversity, and who supported a mother and two sisters when he was sixteen. This boy got up every time Life knocked him down. He sold insurance to alleviate the pain and poverty widows and their children face when they have lost their husbands, their home, and their land because he and his family suffered a similar hardship.

  Peter Larsen became a leader in the County that had given him a life. Peter Larsen, this immigrant boy who had been forced from a home he loved to follow his parent’s dream of America, survived the shattering of his parent’s dream, to create a new dream for himself, his family, and his children.

  I love being at GWU and in the District, learning and contributing to this great country and helping this wonderful President. I am honored to be part of this government and part of the President’s solution to restoration.

 

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