by Andrew Hunt
“I’ll repeat what I said earlier, Art: There’s a lot at stake here that you aren’t aware of. Trust me, we know everything you know, and a heckuva lot more. Don’t start getting cocky and thinking you’re a few steps ahead of us, because you’re not.”
“What about Winston Booker?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“He’s missing,” I said. “His parents want him found. It’s my job to find him.”
Frank shook his head, puffed his cheeks, and blew air. “You mean all of this is going on and you’re honestly worried about a nigger?”
Frank’s words hit me like a punch to the stomach.
“Did you really just use that word?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, trying to hold back my rage. “Negro. Colored. Black.”
“That’s the difference between you and me,” he said. “You’re a naïve idealist. If you want to spend the rest of your life tilting at windmills, don’t let me stop you. Me? I’m a realist. I have to deal with real-world practicalities. Maybe that’s why I’m a contender for assistant director of the FBI, while you’ve spent the last eight years handing out traffic tickets and helming dead-end, go-nowhere squads. Now look at you. You’re another statistic on the unemployment rolls. What do you think Dad would say?”
“I don’t know,” I said, giving Frank a stony stare. “He’s dead.”
“I bet he’s looking down on us, shaking his head in disbelief that his youngest is an out-of-work bum willing to throw everything away over some lowly coon bellhop. That’s what I think.”
“Dad believed everybody deserved justice,” I said. “And that’s what Winston Booker’s family is going to get. Justice.”
Frank sneered, turned around, and left me there, under the tree. When he opened the back door, all of those people squeezed into the kitchen came flooding out, tramping down the porch steps en masse toward me, voices over voices, hands gesturing, eyes wide, all of them determined to give poor, misguided Art Oveson some words of wisdom about what do with his uncertain future.
* * *
Desert Lightning, a polished black arrowhead of a machine, flashes reflections of sun that burn into your retina as it streaks across the crystal landscape. Now airborne, it spins toy-like, crashing into salt encrusted earth. In seconds, it is reduced to a heap of twisted steel and jagged glass teeth. Gasoline leaks everywhere. Little fires send plumes of smoke wafting into the blue sky.
A patrol car races across the flats. Before it stops, I leap out the back door. Sprinting to the wreckage, I plunge to the ground near a broken window. I peer in to find Clive Underhill hanging upside down by safety restraints. He is as dashing as ever, despite his hair dangling down and minor cuts and bruises on his face.
“Help me.”
“Take my hand.”
He extends his arm out as far as it will go, but it is still too far from mine for me to reach it. I struggle to grip his hand. I grunt. I gasp. I flail. I thrust my feet into the salt below me, hoping against hope for some sort of leverage. I inch forward until our fingertips touch. He lunges and grasps my hand, squeezing tightly. But instead of me pulling him out of the burning vehicle, he pulls me into it.
In terror, I strain to break free of his grip. Flames engulf him instantly, his face vaporizes into a blinding yellow-white likeness, and then the fireball comes at me in the form of giant orange flower, consuming me until I can no longer feel or see or think anything.
* * *
My eyes opened. I jerked upright.
A figure stood in the arched doorway. Like a ghost, she glided silently into the dim yellow from a nearby nightlight.
It was Sarah Jane, clutching a clipboard as she came closer. In the darkness of the living room, I could not see her expression, yet I felt her anxiety, which must have come from finding me in the living room, in the middle of a nightmare. She sat on the other end of the couch, next to my feet, squirming to the edge until she felt comfortable. I reached for a nearby lamp and pulled the chain. A soft glow lit our part of the room.
“What are you doing in here?” she whispered. “Why aren’t you with Mom?”
“She needed extra space,” I said, pulling my feet away from her to give her room. “I thought I’d sleep out here on the couch tonight.”
She held up a clipboard. “As long as you’re awake…”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a petition.” She handed me the clipboard. “Will you sign it?”
I examined it. Not a single signature. Just blank lines. I’d be the first. S.J. handed me a pencil. A WE THE UNDERSIGNED statement appeared at the top explaining it, but I shot S.J. a quizzical glance, hoping she would fill me in.
“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the Civic Club to hear Dr. Henry Wachtel.”
“Who?” I asked.
“He’s from New York City,” she said. “He gave a speech on the need to create a colony in the Lower California peninsula of Mexico where Jews can go live in peace, and not have to worry about being terrorized, and fearing for their lives, and having their belongings and their shops and their houses taken away. All of those things are happening now in Europe, but nobody’s doing anything to stop it. He recited a quote by an Englishman named Burke.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “How did it go?”
She closed her eyes. “He said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’” Her lids fluttered open. “I asked Mom to sign it, but she refused. She called it a fool’s errand. Is she right?”
“There’s always hope.” I drew a deep breath and held up the clipboard. “So what does the petition say?”
“It calls for the creation of a homeland for Jews in Lower California,” she said. “It asks the Mexican government to set the land aside for that purpose.”
I lifted the pencil S.J. gave me and wrote my name on the first line, where it said PRINT NAME, and signed where it said SIGNATURE. I handed her the clipboard and the pencil. She beamed when she looked down at my John Hancock. Her joy was short-lived. She became pensive again.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Why is she so unhappy?”
“She’s not. Sometimes she just comes across—”
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Be honest with me.”
S.J. could see right through my platitudes.
“It’s complicated,” I finally said, itching the back of my neck.
“Try me.”
“A few years ago, when Emily was still a toddler, lots of people kept pressuring your mother to quit her job.”
“What people?”
“Your aunts and uncles, and various relatives and friends. Your mother put her whole heart into her teaching. She loved everything about it—the students, the work, the smell of fresh school supplies. I think she even loved grading papers. But she relented under all of that pressure. She resigned. She regretted her decision, and has ever since.” I rubbed my burning right eye with my knuckle. “I feel bad.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t stick up for her. I should’ve defended her choices. I didn’t.”
“How come?”
“I hate conflict. Always have. I’m always so dang busy trying to make other people happy. In trying to do that, I failed her.”
We shared a silence, as we both took in what I’d just said.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“What are you going to do, now that you’re no longer a policeman?”
“I don’t know.”
S.J. yawned and stretched her arms. She picked a sleepy cinder out of the corner of her eye. Then she flicked it away and raised her clipboard to her chest. “I’m going back to bed. I’m tired.”
“I could use a hug,” I said.
Sarah Jane rose from the couch, stepped closer, and wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her back, patting her gently, and I gave her a soft peck on the temple.
She eased back and inspected me with sleepy eyes.
“G’night, Dad,” she said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I listened to my daughter’s footsteps fade down the hallway into silence. A door closed in the distance. I was alone again. Alone with my thoughts.
Twenty-nine
I pulled up to the Oveson homestead in American Fork at quarter past seven in the morning, after driving an hour to get there. I shut off the engine and climbed out of the car. My white-haired mother looked up from her newspaper when I closed the car door. She was sitting on her favorite rocking chair, on a day when gray clouds delivered a welcome breeze giving the first hint of fall. Mom greeted me on the front porch with an embrace, led me inside the house, and offered me a glass of ice-cold lemonade. I thanked her and said I knew she was an early riser, and that’s why I dropped by at this hour. She sized me up through wire-rim glasses, smiling at the small, handpicked bouquet of colorful flowers I held in my hands, and she knew what I needed without me even having to tell her.
I followed her out the back door, down the steps, under a canopy of leafy tree branches. We headed south, beyond the barn and the tractor, the chicken pens and the canal, through an open area of grassland, until we arrived at the Oveson family cemetery. Mom unlatched the white picket fence gate and the door hinges squealed when she opened it. The grass inside was freshly cut, and I knew that one day my remains would end up here, along with Mom Oveson, Clara, and my brothers and various sisters-in-law. Mom waved her hand in the direction of the solitary headstone, in the shade of a towering tree that predated the earliest pioneers by a long shot.
“He’s waiting for you.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll be inside, if you need me.”
The gate whined again and its latch clanked shut behind me as I faced his headstone. WILLARD JOSEPH OVESON read big letters at the top, and I stooped to run the tips of my fingers over the words and numerals etched below:
OCTOBER 1, 1864—JANUARY 23, 1914
LOVING FATHER, HUSBAND AND FRIEND.
AND JUSTICE FOR ALL …
I got down on one knee and placed the bouquet on the grass, near the foot of the monument. Its stone surface was warm to the touch, despite the darkening skies and chill on the morning breeze. Collecting my thoughts, I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs full of clean pine scent. Returning to my childhood home comforted me, but it was not enough. I felt a deep inner need to share my troubles with my father, whether or not he was listening.
“Sorry it’s been a while since my last visit,” I said. “I quit my job yesterday. You probably already know that. I can’t explain why. I guess I was fed up with the bureaucracy and the red tape. I was sick of worrying all the time about stepping on the toes of other detectives who’d get sore at me for trying to rob them of their glory. And I didn’t care for the indifference that my superiors were showing to this young man—a boy, really—who went missing the other day. If I’m being truly honest, I guess what really got to me the most was standing in Frank Oveson’s shadow. I’m a free man now. But freedom comes with a price.”
I straightened the bouquet in the grass, so it touched the headstone: “I’m not sure if I did the right thing. I’m beginning to doubt myself. Clara’s not teaching, so we have no other income. We don’t have much money saved. There’s a recession on—well, at least that’s what the newspapers call it, to put people’s minds at ease. It still feels like a depression to me, if you want me to be honest. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I considered taking out a loan and starting my own private investigation business. I’d be an operative for hire, like the fellow in the Dashiell Hammett stories. You don’t read him, I guess. He’s a detective yarn writer.”
I was silent for a long moment, surveying the scenery around me. My gaze shifted to the Wasatch Mountains on the east side of the valley. I shifted my focus back to the headstone. I imagined my father’s long, lean face, a smile tucked away under a mustache showing its first hint of gray. There were moments—now being one of them—when I could not picture everything about him with precise clarity, and it bothered me when his features were not distinct in my mind’s eye.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I wish you were here. I wish I could talk to you. I’m scared. I’m just some puny little David who thought he could take on Goliath. I guess I was wrong. I feel so alone, and I don’t have the faintest idea of where to go from here. I’m not sure what you’d tell me if you were still alive. I remember you always used to say, ‘Choose carefully which hill you want to die on.’ I’ve spent my whole life avoiding those hills. Now that I’ve gone and picked one, I don’t know if I selected wisely.”
I leaned forward, pressing my palm against his tombstone, hoping to feel something—anything—from the beyond, even a faint stirring. I kept my hand there a long time, but nothing came. Not even a distant vibration. What was I expecting? He was gone, and I was here—still walking this earth, tormented by doubts.
“I’ll take anything,” I whispered. “Is it selfish to wish for some small sign?”
No reply came to me, at least not a direct one. But the wind changed direction, and ruffled my hair like fingers, and I looked up at the western skies, where the slate-gray heavens sent bolts of lightning dancing across the dusty horizon. Maybe rain would come today, I thought, as I closed the cemetery gate behind me. The air sure smelled of it. I went inside the house and said farewell to my mother, and we embraced once again, and I got back in my car and headed north, to Salt Lake City.
Some small sign, I thought, speeding up the highway, listening to the Early Bird Serenade on KDYL.
* * *
I had nowhere to go. I did not want to return home, where I knew there was a good chance Clara might not be speaking to me. No more going back to Public Safety, my workplace of the past eight years. My mind was a swirling kaleidoscope of thoughts as I motored around downtown, contemplating my next move. Turning onto Main Street from North Temple, I glanced at an enormous brick building with steep steps climbing to a columned classic portico. Stately white words floating above the entrance caught my eye: GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF UTAH.
I hit the brakes. My car screeched to a halt. The air smelled of smoking rubber.
Some small sign.
Peter Insley’s words from Saturday night at the Coconut Grove echoed through my mind: “You know, Nigel here is quite the family history buff. He’s already spent a fair bit of time up at the Genealogical Society on Main Street. Isn’t that so, Nigel?”
I found a parking spot and hurried up to the building. Mormons like me had been genealogy enthusiasts since the founding of the Church over a century ago, embracing the practice for a variety of complex reasons. Spiritually, tracing our family roots, we thought, brought us closer to our ancestors, drawing us together into an eternal family. We performed baptisms for the dead for men and women and children who did not have that option during their lifetimes. We believed these souls were waiting in the afterlife for this gift, and once they received it, it would enable them to spend an eternity with their loved ones.
There were other reasons, more secular, for our championing of family history. Regardless of your religious views, learning about one’s forebears—their dates of birth, their histories, when they died—connects us with the past and deepens our bonds with our kin. This is one of the reasons why the LDS Church has encouraged non-Mormons to work on their genealogy. It’s also why the institution has devoted so much of its resources and armies of volunteer researchers to collecting data from far-flung locales around the world—including census figures, city directories, ship passenger lists, draft cards, birth records, marriage records, death records, cemetery and almshouse and hospital records, wills and probate records, newspaper clippings, photographs, the list goes on—and compiling them all systematically in one place, the Genealogical Society of Utah, and making them available to the public, Mormon and non-Mormon alike. The collection had gotten to be so e
normous over the years that nowadays the Society uses the latest technology—microfilming—to catalogue, in an orderly fashion, millions of pages of documents.
Knowing all of this, I raced up the steps of the Society’s headquarters, the hub of all this humming activity. I flung open one of the heavy doors and charged inside, running across the high-ceilinged front entry hall to the information counter up front. Lowell Bendix, an aging gentleman in a dark three-piece suit and bow tie, looked up at me from his work behind the counter as I stopped to catch my breath. Lowell’s thinning white hair was combed over the bald top of his head, thick spectacles rested at the end of his nose, and his expression conveyed a gentle quality. He knew me from all the times I’d been in here working on my genealogy, and he probably recalled me trying to show Myron the ropes, too.
“Arthur! How are you?”
“Lowell, as I live and breathe—”
“Which you’re doing pretty hard now, I might add.”
I laughed. “How’s every little thing?”
“I can’t complain,” he said. “Well, I can, but I won’t. May I help you?”
“You certainly can,” I said. “I was wondering if you knew anything about an Englishman who came in here several times last week? Name of—”
“Nigel Underhill?”
“You know him?” I asked, hanky-dabbing my brow.
“Hard to forget,” Lowell said. “He left quite an impression. Hasn’t been in for several days, though. What about him?”
“He was in here doing research,” I said. “I was wondering if you’d mind telling me what he was digging into?”
“That’s confidential, Art. There are privacy issues to take into consideration.”
“Sure, I understand, Lowell.” I looked around, then switched my gaze back to him. “Look, what I’m about to say is strictly confidential. Nigel Underhill is dead.”
“Oh my heavens.”
“And the research he did here might help me figure out what happened to him.”
Lowell nodded. “Of course, I see what you mean. Yes, I’ll show you. Follow me.”
He opened a drawer, searched about, and fished out a key. Then he walked to the end of the counter, opened a waist-high door, and stepped out to the area where I was standing. He went past me, and I tailed him across the Grand Central Terminal-like room, through a set of arched doors, and down a hall to an area where the walls were covered on either side with green lockers. He stopped at one numbered 308 and inserted his key into the lock, opened it, and pulled out a cream-colored dossier. He closed the door, pocketed the key, and passed me the file.