by Tim Wirkus
“The whole thing’s a little complicated at the moment,” I said, feeling a pang of dread at the thought of the Young Religious Novelist Grant.
“Complicated how?” said my dad.
I considered lying or forcefully changing the subject, but the sleep deprivation had rendered me pliant and confessional and I told them everything, from my failure in São Paulo to the latest threatening emails from Wayne Fortescue.
“No,” said my dad. “That can’t be right. Does that sound right to you?” He directed this last question to Sérgio and Harriet.
“It does sound fishy,” said Harriet, folding her empty banana peel and setting it gingerly on the table.
Sérgio nodded in agreement.
I wanted this conversation—this whole breakfast—to be over, but my parents’ line of questioning had gained enough momentum that there would be no stopping it. I started into a third package of Pop-Tarts.
“Have you told them this is outrageous?” my dad said to me.
“Basically,” I said.
“It does sound very irregular,” said Sérgio, who seemed as eager as I was to wrap this conversation up and get moving.
“Irregular nothing,” said my dad. “It sounds criminal.”
“You know who he should talk to?” said my mom, laying a hand on my dad’s arm.
“Craig D. Ahlgren,” said my dad.
At the mention of this name, Harriet looked up sharply from her strawberry Pop-Tart. Though it only lasted for an instant, an intense and unmistakable look of displeasure crossed her face.
“Exactly,” said my mom. “That is exactly who I was thinking of.”
“Do you remember Craig D. Ahlgren?” my dad said to me, then went on before I could answer. “He was our stake president during the last two years we lived in the Miller’s Corner house. Great guy, and a brilliant attorney. Great guy. You remember Craig D. Ahlgren, right, Danny?”
“Yeah, I remember President Ahlgren,” I said, watching Harriet from the corner of my eye. She, in turn, watched my parents warily, waiting, it seemed, to see where this discussion of Craig D. Ahlgren was headed.
My dad said, “I’m going to call him right now.”
He stood up, unclipped his phone from his belt, and walked back to the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
My mom said, “Danny, why didn’t you say anything about this earlier?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that.
Sérgio, head bowed, surreptitiously consulted a road map below the table. Harriet nibbled warily at her Pop-Tart.
A few minutes later, my dad returned with a triumphant grin on his face.
“Danny, you’re in luck,” he said as he sat back down. “Craig will be in Ireland for a month on a family history trip, but he’s not leaving until tomorrow. He said he’d be happy to meet with you this afternoon and see what he can do to help. You all are planning on stopping in Salt Lake, right?”
Harriet had, in fact, made arrangements to meet with an old friend of hers who was on faculty at the University of Utah. This friend—Dr. Petra Robbins—was a major science-fiction enthusiast, and was especially interested in writers who lived, or had lived, in the Intermountain West. Harriet hoped to pick her brain about any science-fiction writers in the general vicinity of Fremont Creek who might have known Salgado-MacKenzie, or better still, who might have been Salgado-MacKenzie, working under a pseudonym. We all knew that a nearly thirty-year-old address might only get us so far, and we’d need all the help we could get.
“Yeah, we’ll be in Salt Lake,” I said. I turned to Harriet and Sérgio. “Maybe you guys can drop me off at Craig Ahlgren’s house while you meet with Dr. Robbins.”
Sérgio folded his map and returned it to his blazer pocket. Harriet nodded, her mouth a thin line. Something at breakfast had knocked her off balance, upsetting her more, even, than my parents’ earlier faux pas had. It seemed pretty directly connected to Ahlgren, but I couldn’t imagine how. What could this guy have done, I wondered, that the mere mention of his name could inspire such a sharp and visceral reaction in the illustrious Harriet Kimball? I was too tired to speculate, but I had an inkling that with Craig D. Ahlgren lay the secret of Harriet’s dark and troubled past.
For that reason, if no other, I looked forward to our meeting.
XII
I woke up in a visitor parking lot at the University of Utah. Exhausted by my too-brief night of uneasy sleep, I’d conked out immediately in the back seat of the Celica and slept for the whole five-hour drive to Salt Lake.
“Awake now?” said Sérgio from the front seat.
He had a notebook open in his lap and was urgently jotting something down.
“What are you writing?” I said.
“Questions for Dr. Robbins,” he said. “I want to be certain that we explore every possible angle with her.”
His eyes shone, his enthusiasm having clearly bounced back since breakfast.
“Great,” I said. “Where are we meeting her?”
Harriet turned around from the driver’s seat.
“Sérgio and I are meeting Petra at her office,” she said, “while you meet with Craig Ahlgren.”
She handed me the car keys.
During my nap, I’d somehow forgotten about my meeting with President Ahlgren.
“You want me to take your car?” I said.
“I think that would be for the best,” said Harriet, opening her door. “I’ll text you when we’re ready for you to pick us up.”
“Wish us luck,” said Sérgio.
Before I could say anything else, they were out of the car. Our abrupt separation left me uneasy. Alone now, I followed the handwritten directions my dad had given me to Hansen’s Grove, a secluded neighborhood south of Salt Lake where multi-acre estates lie hidden away from the road behind layers of trees and iron fences. I turned down Sego Lane, the neighborhood’s main artery, following it as it grew more twisting and narrow, the streets that branched off it becoming more poorly marked the farther I went. It was the middle of the day, but it could have been dusk for all the autumn-colored foliage overhead blocking the sun.
I drove at a crawl so I could read the obscured street signs, and even so, I nearly missed my next turn, which put me on a gravel path not much wider than my car. I wondered if I was in the wrong place until I came to a serious-looking iron gate with a keypad in a post that I could reach from my window. Craig Ahlgren had given my dad an entry code, so I punched it in and the gate swung open.
I headed down the gravel lane for another five or six minutes before the trees opened up, and suddenly I was on a neatly maintained cobblestone driveway approaching a grand chateau, complete with shuttered windows, stone façade, and a gray, sloping roof. I stopped on the little driveway loop and got out of the car.
To be honest, I was ambivalent about this meeting. On the one hand, I was pretty reluctant to entrust my fate to Craig D. Ahlgren; I had no desire to embroil myself with another powerful figure who could mold my life with his capricious and immovable whims. Because really, I knew very little about Ahlgren and what kind of person he might be. I’d heard him speak in a dozen or so church meetings back when I was in middle school, and that was pretty much it.
On the other hand, there was that morning’s email from Wayne Fortescue—the two-week deadline, the ten thousand dollars. Even if throwing myself at the mercy of President Ahlgren constituted a frying-pan-to-fire situation, I’d at least welcome the change.
I rang the doorbell and steeled myself.
Craig D. Ahlgren answered the door in a pair of gray sweatpants and a blue oxford shirt whose untucked front and tails billowed at his thighs like a minidress.
“Daniel,” he said, a smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes. “So good to see you. Come on in.”
I stepped over the threshold.
“Thanks for doing this,�
� I said.
“Of course,” said President Ahlgren. “Right this way.”
I followed him into a foyer of dark wood floors and clean white walls.
“Are you a sweatpants guy?” said President Ahlgren as he led me past a curving staircase.
“I’m definitely not opposed,” I said.
“I love sweatpants,” he said. “I’ve worn a suit to work every day for the past—boy, how long?—longer than you’ve been alive anyway. But sweatpants? Can’t wait to get into my sweatpants at the end of the day.”
“They do look very comfortable,” I said.
We walked through a vast and tastefully furnished living room, weaving between linen armchairs, past a great stone fireplace, and into a narrow hallway.
“Right here,” said President Ahlgren, stopping at a glass-paneled door at the end of the hall. “Go on in.”
We stepped into his office, a little nook furnished with a broad, classy rug and a wooden desk so simple, sturdy, and elegant that you knew it cost a fortune. A tall, narrow window looked out on a rustic garden, and beyond that a tennis court and swimming pool nestled among a veritable forest of autumnal trees.
The only items not in keeping with the room’s stately décor were two of those big rubber exercise balls that people use for Pilates or whatever. To be fair, though, they were both a tasteful, muted shade of gray. Craig rolled one of them up to the edge of the desk, opened a sleek laptop, and sat down on the ball.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, rolling the second ball in my direction. I sat down on the bouncy surface, vaguely nervous that it would pop beneath my weight.
“I really appreciate this, President Ahlgren,” I said as he removed a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and perched them on his nose.
“It’s my pleasure,” he said. “And at home it’s just Craig.”
We sat there for a moment, both of us bouncing slightly on our inflatable seats as Craig pulled up a document on his computer.
“All right then,” he said, peering through his glasses at the monitor. “I’ve written a letter to the people who awarded you this so-called grant. What it says, essentially, is that you’ve hired a lawyer and you’re calling their bluff—because it is a bluff, I’m nearly certain of that. You probably even have grounds to go after them, if you’re interested. In any event, this letter should get them off your back. I just need their address and the name of the person you’ve been in contact with.”
He handed me the keyboard and I pulled up an email containing Wayne Fortescue’s name and business address. After copying over the information, Craig printed off the letter on some official stationery, signed it, and put it in an envelope.
“I’ll make sure it goes out in tomorrow’s mail,” he said.
I sat there bouncing on my exercise ball, waiting for Craig to add some unpleasant caveat, but none came.
“So that’s it?” I said.
“That’s it,” he said.
And sure enough, a week later I would receive a brief, penitent email from Wayne Fortescue apologizing on behalf of the CAC for any unpleasantness that had passed between us. Of course I owed them nothing—there had been a misunderstanding, and our business together was now concluded. True to his word, Fortescue would never darken my inbox with his presence again.
Craig folded his glasses and tucked them back into his shirt pocket.
“Thank you so much,” I said, laughing with relief.
“I’m happy to help,” said Craig.
With a wave of his lawyerly pen, Craig D. Ahlgren had exorcised a legion of worries from my troubled heart. I felt like a person again, instead of a walking bundle of bad decisions.
“Really,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Please,” said Craig. “It was no trouble at all. Have you had lunch yet?”
“No,” I said.
With a spry bounce, Craig stood from his gray exercise ball. Bracing myself against the edge of the desk, I rose from my own.
“Neither have I,” said Craig. “I’m going to rustle something up in the kitchen. Do you have time to eat?”
I checked my phone. Harriet hadn’t texted yet.
“Absolutely,” I said.
We walked around the corner to the kitchen, an open, airy space with a bank of windows on one side and a stone wall on the other that contained, within matching niches, the stove and the refrigerator.
“All right,” said Craig, opening the fridge. “I’m leaving town tomorrow, so we need to take care of as many of these leftovers as we can.”
He handed me a plate, which I loaded with roast beef, a spinach salad, and something with quinoa. Then we both settled in at the heavy wood table in the adjacent dining room.
“This is delicious,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I’d tell you to thank Bev,” said Craig, “but she’s out running a few errands before we leave town tomorrow. She’s the cook around here.”
He opened a bottle of mineral water and poured us each a glass.
“So,” said Craig, screwing the lid back on the green glass bottle, “your dad tells me you’re on some kind of road trip with Harriet Kimball?”
“That’s right,” I said and then explained a little about our search for Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie—who the man was and why we hoped to find him. I told Craig about the unpublished novel and the series of clues pointing us toward Idaho.
As I described our search, it became clear that Craig had no interest in Salgado-MacKenzie—not surprising, since no one ever did—but he did keep circling back to Dr. Kimball: How had she become involved in all of this? and What exactly had she been up to in Southern California? Stuff like that. And my answers to these questions seemed, somehow, not to satisfy him at all. He was obviously fishing for something specific, but I had no idea what.
Finally I asked, “Do you know Dr. Kimball?”
He chewed thoughtfully on a piece of beef.
“I used to,” he said carefully.
He took a drink of mineral water as if that were a sufficient answer.
“But not anymore?” I said, prodding him on.
He shook his head, looking uncomfortable in this shift in roles from questioner to questioned.
“How did—”
“Wait,” said Craig, waving his hand at me like he was erasing a chalkboard. “I need to tell you . . .” He paused, considering. “What I mean to say is, I want you to be careful.”
This caught me completely off guard.
“Careful of what?” I said.
Craig pushed his plate back. Now we were getting somewhere.
He said, “I think I can understand, Daniel, the appeal that Harriet Kimball’s work might hold for a bright young man like you. Her whole smarter-than-thou approach to Mormonism can make you feel like you’re in on a secret that the rest of us are too naïve to pick up on. So I see the attraction there. I really do.”
Did Craig think I was some dewy-eyed acolyte of Harriet Kimball’s? If so, he was barking up the wrong tree. I had zero interest in Harriet’s scholarship.
“Actually,” I said, trying to set him straight.
“No,” said Craig. “You need to hear me out.”
“But—”
“No,” he said. “Please?”
He said it like he was really asking. I nodded and he went on.
“I know I might seem like the bad guy to you—I don’t know what Harriet’s already said—but, for your own good, you need to listen to me.” He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, hands reaching imploringly toward me. “You’re at a pivotal moment in your life right now; I can see it in your eyes. You’re just drifting along, still figuring out what kind of person you’re going to be, where your allegiances lie, and to a certain extent that’s fine, just a natural stage in life. Sooner or later, though, you’re going to have to
decide whose side you’re on: the Lord’s or the world’s. And there are certain people who will try to make those two sides seem much more muddled than they actually are.
“I can tell you, though, Daniel, that the contrast is actually quite stark. This might sound dramatic, but the truth is, you can either hold to the iron rod and follow the Lord, or stand in the great and spacious building and mock what’s good and holy in this life. Those are your options.
“And do you want to know how to be sure you’re always on the side of the Lord? The answer, Daniel,” he said before I could respond, “is absolute obedience to God’s chosen servants. It’s that simple. Whatever happens, whatever we might think to the contrary, we follow the leaders of the Church. No matter what.
“Now, certain people might make arguments to the contrary, arguments that may be well intended, but I can assure you that these arguments will ultimately lure you away from the safety of the strait-and-narrow path. And the people who make those arguments . . .” He sat up straight and looked away for a moment. “Let me explain it this way instead,” he said, looking me in the eye again. “Let me tell you about the most important decision I ever made.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And please,” he said, “listen carefully to what I have to say.”
“Of course,” I said, putting on my best listening face.
“This experience is sacred to me, Daniel,” said Craig, lowering his voice. “It’s a decision that has served as a template for every subsequent decision, big and small, that I’ve had to make in my life. A watershed moment. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding attentively.
“Good,” he said.
He took a sip of mineral water and cleared his throat.
• • •
I had just turned seventeen (he began) and the one thing I wanted most in the world was to go to college. I know that for a lot of kids these days, college is no big deal, it’s a given, but for me? Neither of my parents had ever even set foot on a university campus. We lived in Valley Park, out on the west side of—well, you’re from Salt Lake, right? So you know where Valley Park is. And you probably know it’s not the nicest neighborhood, very working class. That was the case back when I lived there too. Dad worked out at Kennecott, and there were nine of us kids, so we kept Mom pretty busy and the money spread pretty thin. We had to work hard—all of us did. Both of my parents had that work ethic, though, that salt-of-the-earth, pioneer-stock grit, which I didn’t appreciate then like I do now.