“Like old John Harmon,” I said without thinking.
“Who?” said Todd, turning to me with a pen poised over his notebook.
“Uh, From Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend,” I said sheepishly, vowing never to randomly allude to a book again. No point in reinforcing the nerd stereotype I already personified.
There wasn’t much else John could tell us. The nurse came in with his dinner, so Todd thanked him for his information and we left.
On the way back to the police station, Todd asked me about how things had gone the other day when I went to help my friends with the foster kids. I regaled him with tales about the amazing Cole family, and he told me about a policeman friend of his who also fostered kids. We swapped horror stories we had heard from the world of child services and then, feeling a little depressed, changed the topic to happy endings we’d heard of from the same system.
He gave me the diary when we got back to the station and told me to have a good weekend, and I went home to begin my work as an official police consultant.
Saturday morning was destined to be spent mostly on the phone. First I called my parents and my brother. I had texted them about the murder the day after it happened but hadn’t really updated them on everything since. It took an hour for me to talk through all the details with them. I was glad I could discuss it without so much emotion. My family is one of the least dramatic clans I’ve ever met, and while I would not have been blamed for weeping on the phone with them, it made it much easier on all of us that I could converse about it sensibly.
The next phone call was to my friend Becky. She co-teaches the preschool Sunday School class with me, and I didn’t want to have to cram a rapid explanation of the week’s events between a lesson on Noah and snack time. I hadn’t known Becky before we started teaching together a few months ago, but she was becoming a good friend. She was also single and about ten years younger than me. I was glad I called her. She was horrified by my experience and made me feel like I had coped with the whole thing admirably.
I had just hung up the phone with Becky and gotten ready to settle down with the diary when the phone rang. It was Kim.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” she said.
“What?”
“You didn’t tell me about Todd Mason.”
“The detective? What was I supposed to tell you about him? I did tell you about him, remember? He’s the guy in charge of the investigation.”
“You didn’t tell me he was interested in you.”
“What?” I’m sure my voice rose by at least an octave. “He’s not! At least, I don’t think he is.”
“Hmph. That’s not what Ed says.”
“Ed? When did he…oh, yeah, he told me he talked to Ed to clear me when I was a suspect. But he had to check up on me, you know.”
“That’s not what I mean. He called Ed this morning. Wanted to know if Ed could round up a couple people to help him clean the crime scene. He said he didn’t want you to have to deal with it.”
“Really? That’s so nice of him. I was dreading that. But I was going to find some people to help me.”
“He said he was afraid you wouldn’t want to bother anyone about it and would just try doing it yourself.”
“Oh, that’s…” I was going to say ridiculous, but it came to me that I might very well have done that. “That’s perceptive,” I finished.
“He talked to Ed for at least fifteen minutes about you.”
I could feel my face growing warm. “He seems like a very nice guy, but honestly, Kim, he might just be a bit of a flirt. I’m sure he knows he’s good looking and successful… he’s probably one of those guys who like women to be attracted to them and just flirt enough to give the woman some hope, but not enough to be accused of leading her on.”
There was silence for a moment and then Kim added, “He wanted to know if you are seeing anyone.”
“Oh.”
“He also asked a lot of questions about the church and where you stand on certain doctrinal issues. I don’t think he’s just flirting.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“Well?” prompted Kim when I didn’t say anything else. “Do you like him?”
I took a deep breath. “Well, yes. I haven’t let myself think about it, because he hasn’t said anything, but he seems like Our Kind of Person.” That was our phrase for what Anne of Green Gables called a kindred spirit—someone who has the same outlook and knowledge base, who seems like someone you’ve known a long time.
“That’s exactly what Ed said. Our Kind of Person. And I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about it.”
“Like I said before, he hasn’t said anything. You know my rule. I don’t let myself imagine anything, let alone tell someone else, unless he says something.”
She sighed impatiently. “I know. And it’s a good rule. Usually. But just this once I think you ought to have told me.”
“You’re impossible, you know that?”
“I know. I won’t bother you about it anymore. But if he does say something, you had better be on the phone to me within the next five minutes! And I’ll have Ed do some checking on him. Don’t want some shady character trying to woo our Katrina.”
“I think I can safely say he’s not wanted by the police,” I said drily. “Now don’t bring it up again. I’m having a hard enough time not thinking about it as it is!”
And if I had been struggling before, it was nothing to the battle after Kim’s phone call. He wanted to know if I was seeing someone, did he? Ed and Kim approved of him already—that was unprecedented. He had organized getting my store cleaned up to save me from the stress of doing it myself. Every smile he’d given me was brought up for review in my mind. Every flattering thing he’d said, especially when he’d told me he wouldn’t say he was tired of seeing me, was replayed.
I realized that I had been sitting with the diary in my lap, unread, for half an hour. I gave myself a firm shake, opened the book, and forced my mind to concentrate.
It was not a diary remarkable for its literary qualities. Matthew Wilkes recorded neither flora nor fauna, nor did he bother to explain his motives for anything he did. He was, however, rather obsessed with the weather. Every entry started with a statement about whether the day had been cloudy or sunny, if it had rained or snowed, and how hard the wind had blown. He was also a master of understatement. For example on June 14, 1848, the entry read, Sun. Warm. No wind. This day m. Sarah Rochester of Port. Imagine the man that spells out all the words relating to weather and then abbreviates “married” and “Portland”! I could, however, understand why the police were having a hard time figuring out what the journal said; between his abbreviations and his messy 19th century handwriting, it might very well have seemed like a secret code.
I read through all the entries for the first year of the diary. It faithfully chronicled the weather, of course, and sometimes what he ate (fish was a frequent meal). He was some kind of storekeeper, it seemed, and he gambled with “Roch” frequently. I figured out eventually that Roch was short for “Rochester,” and was his brother-in-law. It didn’t seem like he would win any husband of the year awards (“Sarah cross” showed up in the entries at least once a week), but I didn’t see anything that the Wilkes family would be desperate to possess the book for.
Sunday morning was a welcome interlude of normalcy in my extremely tumultuous week. Word of my traumatic event had filtered through the congregation, and I got as many hugs as I could have wished for. The preschoolers were blissfully ignorant of murders and trauma and listened with rapt attention to Becky’s lesson on Noah. Over the goldfish crackers and juice I made plans with Becky to go to her house for lunch after church. I had a feeling that if I went straight home I would spend the evening thinking about Todd and speculating about what he might be thinking—a singularly fruitless pastime.
Becky had inherited her grandmother’s house. It was a charming little place with a yard that she was slowly transforming into an English count
ry garden on the weekends—her weekdays being taken up with teaching third grade. We ate clam chowder and had cherry popsicles for dessert, a treat left over from the last visit of her young nephews. I volunteered to help her plant the trays of marigolds she had bought the previous day. She loaned me some sweats and garden gloves and we both got to work digging in the raised bed she had already spread with mulch.
“So you’re helping the police now?” she asked. “Did they give you your own desk or anything?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m just reading through an old day-book—like a journal—and seeing if there’s anything interesting in it that may pertain to the case. It was written by the man who founded the town.”
“Matthew Wilkes?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. So far there’s nothing very interesting in it.”
“Well, I’ll bet it gets more interesting when you get to the part where he saved people from the flood. They used to have a re-enactment every year. I think they only stopped because the guy who was the driving force behind it got sick, and no one else wanted to take it on. Besides, it was a sort of patriotic thing—being proud of your hometown and all that, and patriotism has gone out of fashion.”
“Too true,” I said, popping a partly-grown marigold out of its plastic pot and fitting it into the hole I had dug for it. “Although one of my students is a Matt Wilkes, and he seems to still have the old home-town spirit. He wrote a paper that mentioned that incident, but I didn’t take care to memorize the details. I didn’t know I would keep hearing about it.”
“Oh, it’s a marvellous story. The river, you know, goes right past the town. Matthew Wilkes had moved here from Seattle with his family to set up a general store—kind of an outpost in the wilderness. It’s at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, and he thought trappers would appreciate something in the area. A few other families settled there, too, as they could do some farming and trapping and even logging, and send their goods down the river to Tacoma. The story goes that one night, after seeing smoke coming off one of the mountains, Matthew went out for a walk by the river and found that it was rising fast. People think now that it was a small eruption on Mount Rainier that melted a glacier, and the water gushed down the mountain into the river. He jumped on his horse and got a gun and rode around the settlement shooting into the air.” Becky tossed aside the empty flower tray she had been using and looked around. “I thought I had another flat of flowers here.”
“You do,” I said. “It’s over there.”
“Ah, there it is. Thanks. Where was I?”
“Matthew shooting a gun into the air. Was that a signal?”
“Not exactly. People had been afraid of Native American attacks, so that woke them up and he shouted to them to get onto the boats and rafts they used to ferry their goods down the river. In ten minutes they had gotten themselves and what they could carry to the boats and rafts and were headed down the river. When they came back a few days later, everything had been washed away. I think only one person ended up dying—a guy who fell off one of the rafts. They rebuilt their homes, a little farther away from the river, and decided to call the town Wilkestown in his honor. He said he wanted it to be named for both him and his wife, and since her maiden name was Rochester, they came up with Wilkester.”
“Oh yes! I said. “The name Rochester is in the diary. I have to say, so far the character in the journal seems very un-heroic—rounding up the neighbors in the middle of the night to save their lives isn’t what I would have expected him to do. Perhaps he was one of those people that just ends up rising to the occasion.”
“Yeah, sometimes you read about famous people who did something great in the second half of their lives, but when you look at their early life you’d never think they would have done that.”
I finished with my tray of flowers and took off the gardening gloves. I wondered if that would be me: unremarkable for the first forty years of life and then had a missionary career where I did something astounding—although teaching at a mission school was unlikely to present an opportunity to be astonishingly heroic.
“I wonder if that will be me,” I said. “Not the heroic bit, really, but just the second half of my life looking different than the first half.”
“Oh really? Are you thinking about doing something different?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I have a couple opportunities I’m considering. One idea is taking a teaching job in Papua New Guinea at a mission school.”
“Whoa. That would be a life change, all right. Would you have to raise support and everything?”
“Yeah. Although I suppose I could sell the bookstore and use the proceeds to pay my own way.”
“Well, that’s an idea. What’s the other possibility?”`
“Foster care. I could keep doing editing and maybe teach just one class and then also foster one or two kids.”
Becky finished putting the last of her plants in the ground. She sat upright on the grass and pulled off her gloves. “You know, I’ve wondered if I should be doing that. I teach school, and if the kids were school-aged, we’d be gone together and home together at the same time.”
“That would be convenient,” I said.
“And if we were both doing it we could babysit each other’s kids if we needed a break or something.”
I laughed. “I can just see us a year from now, exchanging ideas for birthday parties and clipping coupons for pop-tarts.”
“Actually, I could see us doing just that,” said Becky.
“That’s what Kim said when she talked to me—that she could see me doing it. Well, maybe we should find out more about it. I’m sure there’s some kind of informational meeting we could go to. I could ask Kim about it. No commitment, just looking into it.”
“Good idea. Ask Kim.” She heaved herself up off the lawn and offered me a hand to help me stand. “I think we deserve another popsicle.”
We had our treat, and then I changed back into my own clothes and went home, eager to finish off reading the journal. I wondered what sort of laconic comment Matthew Wilkes might make about the tragedy. Something like “Skies clear, much wind. Town wiped out by a flood. Ate fish.”
As it turned out, Matthew got much more verbose as the months and years went on. I read the entries about how the Wilkeses and “Roch” moved to Seattle, and then inland beyond Tacoma. It was made fairly clear that Mrs. Wilkes, who was now a mother, was eager to get her husband and brother away from the saloons and other unsavory spots in Seattle.
July 12, 1854 Storm in the eve. Sarah gives me no peace night or day about moving east. She says it is unwholesm. here for the child. I told her we would go if Roch comes. I am not lv. here to enjoy gd. life without me. Why do women cry so much?
I resisted the editor’s impulse to add a question mark to the last sentence. The journal followed the travels and business establishment of the trio and I read about how a few other families settled nearby. Hour after hour I waded through the entries. Roch appeared to mature quite a bit as time went on; he was the one who fetched supplies from Tacoma every month, and Matthew frequently complained that he had not brought enough whisky.
Just when I had decided that I was getting too tired and would need to finish the journal the next day, I noticed that there was a gap of about a week in the journal, and the next entry was April 30, 1855. I could tell it was an important one: it was three times as long as anything Matthew had written before and had very few abbreviations. For once it did not start with a report on the weather.
Thurs last in the aft we saw smoke from the top of a mount and a noise like thunder. In the night Roch went out of the house because he could not sleep. He walked toward the river and soon saw by the full moon that the water was rising. He thought we would be in danger. He came and woke us. I did not believe him, being very tired but Sarah said we should make haste and go to the raft. She saw a river flood in Portl and many who were in boats were saved alive when others were swept away. She made a bundle of food
and blankets and took the child and I followed her with my day-book and clothes. Roch said he wd. warn the others. He took my horse and my gun and I could hear him firing every few minutes. We got to the raft and saw that we were none too soon for the raft was almost loosed from its moorings. We waited for Roch. Other families came down the river on their boats, the Ferndales and the Smiths and the Poultens and others and at last Roch came back and said he had told them all. We untied the raft and went down the river swollen in the dark with the child crying all the while. It was almost dawn when Roch who had fallen asleep was pitched off the side of the raft having struck a rock and was not seen again. My wife cried and cried again and said we will see him no more.
I re-read it twice. I was sure I’d been told repeatedly that it was Matthew Wilkes who saved the community, but by the man’s own account, it had been his brother-in-law who had been the hero. I looked at the clock—it was after midnight and I needed to go to bed. I could find out tomorrow how the wrong man got the credit for his act of bravery. One thing I could tell the police for sure: it was not a story the Wilkes family would have liked being known.
Chapter 7
I left a message for Todd the next morning, telling him I might have found something in the journal and asking him to call me back. He didn’t, though, and I decided he must be pursuing some other lead, or even some other case. I dismissed it from my mind. Over and over again.
It was a very busy afternoon. I taught American Lit and then had to rush home and finish preparing for the book club that night. I try to be prepared well in advance for these meetings, but with the craziness of the week before, it hadn’t happened.
I checked my email halfway through the preparation and found the editing job I had been expecting: a novel by an author who uses me frequently for her work.
“I decided to write a historical fiction novel this time,” the email read. “Tell me what you think.” I clicked on the document she had attached, curious about which time period the story was set in. Ancient times are actually easier to write as far as details go: so little is known about the dim past, and those who have studied it in depth are so few that you can make any number of mistakes without a single reader knowing the difference. On the other hand, Regency England buffs are legion and knowledgeable, and writers wade into those waters at their own risk. And the editor is supposed to catch the inaccuracies.
Brought to Book Page 7