7
A Happening Place
Chicago sits on flat land, but skyscrapers and Lake Michigan make us think we live near mountains and oceans. South and west of the city lie the prairies. A lot of them.
As I drove through Iowa, I began to understand how pioneers from the East went mad in the vast landscape. Field follows identical field: brown cornstalks, limp and rotting in the rain; straw stubble standing in rough-plowed soil; farmhouse, outbuildings, a clump of trees; cornstalks, stubble, farmhouse. An occasional horse or cow or tractor.
I began imagining I was driving in circles. The sameness, the unchanging distance from a remote perimeter, the low gray sky glued to the horizon, made me feel like a tiny fish on a large salver, choking for air, longing for a hand to remove the platter cover. It was hard to stay alert; more than once I found myself swerving over the lane dividers, brought back to myself by the goose honk of a passing semi.
I stopped periodically to slog through fields around the rest stops with Peppy. A thin, cold rain had been falling since we left the Quad Cities, turning the ground muddy. After the first stop, I changed my socks and jeans and then had to do it again at our next break. I should have packed more clothes, another pair of boots, newspapers to wrap them in, my espresso machine, a fireplace, my mother’s piano, a case of Barolo, a ticket to Basel.
I drove through eastern Nebraska and took old US 77 south. Late afternoon we reached the Flint Hills in central Kansas. Even though the drizzle continued, at least the rolling hills made the horizon less oppressive. I found a dog-friendly motel on the outskirts of Fort Riley. It didn’t have an espresso machine or a fireplace, but it did have a washer and dryer, and after supper I was able to clean the clothes I’d dirtied during the day.
When I woke early Tuesday morning, the air had cleared; I drove to a nearby national park with Peppy. On a rocky outcropping above a creek, I watched the sun rise over the hills while the dog splashed in the water. It was strange, urban dweller that I am, to be the sole human presence in a landscape. Birds were hard at work, hawks were circling in the vast sky, the dog flushed a rabbit and took off in furious chase, but I was the lone person. I stood still, letting the silence close in on me. At first it felt soothing, but after a time it began to seem ominous. I jumped down, called the dog, and ran along the trail.
At ten, in clean jeans and my good jacket, I presented myself to the base commandant. He proved surprisingly helpful, or at least his secretary did. A brisk woman in khaki whose insignia I was too ignorant to interpret, she was startled by my mission.
“Emerald Ferring? How funny—I never heard of her until she showed up last month, and now here you are, looking for her.”
It was hard to believe the trail was so easy to pick up: I could have done this by phone from Chicago, saved myself a long drive and the client several hundred dollars. “When was she here, exactly?”
The secretary consulted her computer. “Thirteen days ago.”
“Was there a young man with her?” I pulled out my phone and showed her August’s website photo.
“Yes, that’s the man. Ms. Ferring said he was going to film her childhood home, but all those units were torn down decades ago. The whole fort is configured differently now. The general asked Colonel Baggetto to show Ms. Ferring the location. He took them around, then gave them a pass to the base library so that Ms. Ferring could look at the archives and see maps of the fort from when her father served here.”
“How much time did they spend here? Did they give you any idea where they were planning to go next?”
The secretary didn’t know, but she phoned Colonel Baggetto. “I didn’t see them again, but they might have told him where they were going from here.”
Baggetto was in a meeting but could see me in an hour. While I waited, the secretary printed out some maps of the base, a current one and one from 1943, when Ferring’s father had been stationed here before shipping out to Europe.
“I looked that one up for Ms. Ferring when she got here. We don’t have a record of housing by resident going back that far, but Private Ferring would have been living in this general area.” The secretary blushed as she pointed to a place on the map marked as housing for Negro soldiers. “We’ve come a long way since then, thank goodness, but it was an embarrassing thing to have to show Ms. Ferring. We did turn up a record of her birth at the base hospital, though, and that was a help.”
While I waited for Baggetto, I took the maps and walked around the fort. Cul-de-sacs lined with houses set in immaculate yards, cul-de-sacs with barracks in immaculate grounds, swing sets, schools, shops. And soldiers, many soldiers, moving from Point A to Point B with an alert bearing that said they were on important business, although a number stopped to pet Peppy. (“Ma’am, may I greet your dog?”) Maybe I’d move here—long runs in the Flint Hills and then home to streets without any litter, where bright-faced young men and women spoke to me politely.
The Negro barracks had disappeared into a small nature preserve. I walked through it with Peppy, who followed mysterious tracks in the undergrowth while I kicked aside rotting leaves, looking for some sign of the soldiers who’d been housed there. Not even a foundation stone remained.
On our way back to the commandant’s office, we passed a coffee shop, where I took a chance on the espresso: thin, watery, essentially undrinkable, except that I was starting to have a caffeine-withdrawal headache. If I’d gone to Basel, I’d be drinking rich European coffee with hand-knit chocolates, walking along the banks of the Rhine. Alone, without even my dog for company.
Colonel Baggetto reached the commandant’s office just as I did. Like the secretary, he was in khaki, with medals and insignia. Unlike her, he had the kind of heavy beard that needed shaving twice a day.
“Captain Arrieta tells me that Emerald Ferring’s disappeared and you’re looking for her?”
So the two bars on the secretary’s collar meant she was a captain. I guess a general couldn’t have just any Tom, Dick, or Harriet book his dinner reservations for him. Colonel Baggetto sported silver oak leaves and something that looked like lightning bolts from a Wonder Woman cartoon.
I repeated my spiel. “This is the first trace I’ve found of Ferring or Veriden, so I’m hoping you can tell me what they did here and where they were heading next.”
Baggetto’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, took the call, made a few cryptic remarks, and turned back to me. “I’d never heard of Ms. Ferring before, but we’ve ordered copies of the films she starred in. We’ll be showing them at the base cinema next month. While she was here, I got the library to look up her father’s service record for her. He died at the Battle of the Bulge.”
He coughed self-consciously. “He should have been recommended for a Bronze Star, but the times being what they were . . . Anyway, we had a small private ceremony here for Ms. Ferring and awarded the star posthumously to Private Ferring.”
While he was speaking, his phone rang twice more. Both times he took the call and then picked up what he’d been saying to me in midsentence. Field training must focus the brain in a special way.
“I assume August Veriden filmed the ceremony,” I said. “And then what? She said, ‘Thanks, and I’m heading back to Chicago, or Hollywood’?”
Baggetto looked at Arrieta. “Jackie, call over to the library, will you, and see if Ferring or her escort said anything about their next stop.”
Captain Arrieta touched a speed-dial number and asked for the librarian. We could hear her end of the conversation, but apparently she had to speak to someone else and then yet another someone.
I said to Baggetto, “The Chicago and Evanston police departments have a BOLO out for August Veriden. You wouldn’t be holding him here in your fort’s jail or stockade or whatever it’s called, would you?”
Baggetto’s eyes widened. “Jesus, I don’t think so, but—” He touched a number on his phone. “Pluto? . . . Yeah, Baggetto. Have you picked up a civilian male, African-American, twenty-fi
ve, in the last two weeks? . . . Seen a BOLO? . . . Know anything?”
“We’re not holding him,” Baggetto reported after a pause for Pluto to consult his computer or perhaps a crystal ball. “And our MPs haven’t heard anything about him.”
Arrieta, who’d finished with the library, turned to me. “One of the spouses who volunteers there took Ms. Ferring and her escort to supper at the canteen when they’d finished for the day. He said Ms. Ferring told him they were spending the night at a motel in Manhattan and then driving on to Lawrence. She told him she’d grown up and gone to the university there.
“Lawrence is about eighty-five miles to the east,” she added helpfully. “Just an hour or two on I-70, but I can recommend some motels in Manhattan for you if you’d like—the Flint Hills are beautiful this time of year. Your dog would love them.”
My brows went up: I’d left Peppy in the car both times I’d been in her office.
Arrieta and Baggetto laughed. “The base telegraph is way better than any Internet system ever devised,” Arrieta said. “Even before you came in here, I knew that a civilian with a golden was in the fort.”
File for future reference: in a small town, you cannot be invisible. I thanked the officers, gave them my card, and promised Arrieta I’d let her know when I found Emerald and August.
I stopped for lunch at a diner on the outskirts of the fort, gave the dog one last run in the hills, and then headed out. The traffic was thicker than we’d seen yesterday—we were going toward the big cities of the eastern part of the state, Topeka, Lawrence, Eudora.
We passed a sign for a Wizard of Oz museum, everyone’s idea of what Kansas is about: tornadoes and no place like home. Even after we left the Flint Hills, the countryside remained hillier than I’d expected. I guess I thought Kansas would be a long, flat land, like the country I’d driven through yesterday.
“Were they telling me the truth?” I asked Peppy. She had her head out the window, checking the strange smellscape, and didn’t appear interested in the question.
“It seemed odd that the colonel didn’t want to know why there was a BOLO on August,” I told her. “I would: I’d worry that I’d let an ax murderer into my fort. That makes me wonder if they actually did arrest August but didn’t want to tell me. In that case, though, what did they do with Ms. Ferring?”
Peppy pulled her head in long enough to lick the back of my ear. I took it as a sign she was listening and wanted me to go on, but the chances were it was a plea for food.
Even with the thicker traffic, we reached Lawrence before sundown. After I found a B and B that accepted dogs, we walked around the town, getting a feel for the layout. It was warmer here than in Chicago; I needed only a light windbreaker.
The University of Kansas seemed to be the center of the town’s universe: statues of its Jayhawk mascot were everywhere—in store windows, restaurants, on bank lawns. The university itself loomed overhead on top of a big hill. I’d go there in the morning to see what records they had of Emerald Ferring’s student years.
My big discovery of the afternoon was that downtown Lawrence was awash in coffee bars and cafés. I wandered into four, sampling the espresso, and decided I liked a place called the Decadent Hippo best. The baristas doubled as bartenders, making my cortado in between orders for Moscow Mules and Bruised Elbows.
“We could be happy here,” I said to Peppy. She agreed: everyone wanted to pet her and offer her bits of muffins.
My other discovery was the number of homeless people on the streets. I’m used to the sight in Chicago—inured, not a good thing—but it seemed startling in a college town, one that looked affluent, at least on the surface. The street people were young, compared to Chicago’s homeless, and most were white, with the hard, crusty look of people who drink too much and sleep too little.
In the morning, over the first cortado of the day, I looked up Emerald Ferring. She didn’t have family here, at least not relatives named Ferring. I couldn’t find a history of anyone with that name, but of course most pre-1995 public data didn’t exist online. I phoned the local library, but they hadn’t kept old phone books.
Before doing anything else, I went to the police station, which shared space in the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center with the county sheriff and municipal and county courts. In theory a private eye is supposed to check in with the local law before tailing or surveilling anyone. In practice, in Chicago, I figure why bother an overworked force, but in a place where I was a foreigner, it seemed prudent to go to them before they came to me.
Oddly enough, the station was the first place I’d felt at home since leaving Chicago. The jurisdiction might be different, but the desk sergeant, the wanted posters, the anxious mom seeking news about her boy—they were what I’d known since the first time I went to work with my dad, who’d been a Chicago patrol officer for thirty years. I could remember him lifting me onto the high counter when I was four and old Sergeant Reardon pinning a star on my jacket. I’ve never felt so important since.
I showed my credentials to the Lawrence desk sergeant. I repeated my story, which sounded increasingly threadbare with each repetition. The sergeant looked at Emerald’s and August’s pictures and smiled pityingly.
“This is a college town, miss. Look out the window, or at least go over to Ninth and Massachusetts, and you’ll see dozens of kids just like him. We don’t pay attention to them unless they’re drunk and disorderly or beating each other up, and even then, unless we need an ambulance, we just tell them to go home and sleep it off.”
I wondered how true that was, especially with a black youth, but all I’d get if I pressed him would be a boatload of bad will. Not the way to start off in a new place.
“Ms. Ferring, the older woman he’s traveling with, supposedly hired him to make a documentary about her life and work. She went to school here back in the sixties, so I’d like to find where she lived, check if they’ve been to her dorm or apartment or whatever to film. They don’t have old phone books at the library—where else can I look?”
The sergeant shrugged, but an older officer who’d stopped to listen said, “The city has a historical society just a couple of blocks away. You might try there.”
There was something to be said for a small city: the library, the police station, the historical society, and bars and restaurants were all within about a six-block area along Massachusetts, the main north-south street. The historical society was in a massive Victorian building at Tenth and Massachusetts. It had been built as a bank, apparently, with all the opulent fittings that nineteenth-century financiers liked in their temples of mammon. Funny that today’s moguls, whose real net worth is about seventy-five times the Morgans’ and Carnegies’, operate inside minimalist glass-and-steel walls.
The woman at the entrance told me that while I was free to look around the three floors of the museum, I needed an appointment to use the archives. She gave me a form to fill out, but I persuaded her to let me talk to the archivist. I followed her to a back room, where we ducked around an antique wedding dress hung just inside the door.
The archivist was an elfin woman, barely big enough to appear above the stacks of documents on the desk in front of her. She nodded briskly as I explained what I wanted to know, told me to fill out my forms and she’d make sure that one of her research associates would get back to me as soon as possible. I couldn’t persuade her to let me look at their old phone books right now, while I was in the room.
“If I let everyone come back here without an appointment, I’d never get any work done. Melvin or Cady will get back to you, I promise.”
Short of lying on the dusty floor and holding my breath until my face turned blue, I couldn’t think of any argument to budge her. I left with as much grace as possible—if I argued every point with every obstructor, I, too, would never get anything done. At the gift shop by the front desk, I bought maps of the town and the surrounding county: I always do better in a strange place when I can see the whole place laid out, instead o
f the bits you get from computer apps.
I also picked up a history of Lawrence. Much of it dealt with the antislavery fights of the 1850s and the Civil War era, when many of the men in town were slaughtered in a raid by some pro-slavery guerrillas, but it covered a miscellany of other topics—chief crops (sorghum, alfalfa, wheat, corn) and other notable events in the town’s history—such as the creation of basketball as a game and Wilt Chamberlain’s arrival in the early fifties. A happening place indeed.
8
On the Hill
Frustrated by my lack of progress downtown, I went up to the university. The police and the people I’d encountered in the coffee shops had talked of “going up the hill” or “being on the hill” when speaking about the campus. This had led me to believe that if I drove to the top of the hill, it would be easy to find the offices I wanted. Instead I arrived at a town within a town. A guard at the entrance told me I couldn’t drive onto the campus, but he gave me a map and showed where the administration building was: they could direct me to other departments if I needed them. He also pointed out nearby streets with student apartments where I could leave my car.
Like Fort Riley, downtown Lawrence had been clean and well tended, but the area bordering the campus looked less like a storybook town, more like the dilapidated streets of my childhood—small houses whose foundations had settled at rakish angles, apartment buildings put together with the barest nod at building codes, trash mixing with weeds along the verge.
I hated leaving Peppy in the car in such a ratty area, especially since the day was unusually warm for November, which meant the windows had to stay open.
“Bite anyone who tries to grab you,” I said.
When I walked past the guard station onto the campus, I saw Jayhawk statues sprouting everywhere, but it was a beautiful campus, with rolling hills and open spaces, a bell tower on one of the high points, overlooking a little pond.
Fallout Page 5