Students flowed around me in a thick stream, texting, scowling, laughing. I’d gone to an urban university, where everyone, even the most affluent—or perhaps especially the most affluent—seemed to think grooming was for the little people. Kansas students looked so scrubbed, so wholesome, that I might have stumbled into a eugenics experiment.
In the administration office, the staff were friendly and polite. They became downright excited when they learned that a film star had been a student there fifty years ago. Ferring had never really been in the public eye, outside the African-American film world, and the young staff in the front office had never heard of her. As soon as I explained what I knew of her history, they were eager to help, but they came up empty. They found a record of her time on campus buried in an old microfiche, but no housing records went back that far. They polled all the offices in the building while I waited: no one had seen or spoken to her in the last few weeks.
The theater building was about half a mile from the administration offices. Perhaps that was what made the kids so wholesome—lots of running miles up and down the campus hills in the fresh air. I jogged over, half my mind worrying about the dog—it had been selfish to bring her with me. I should have sent her to board at Dr. Dan’s with Mitch.
The theater people were like the administration staff: eager to help but unable to tell me anything. The departmental secretary called various faculty and staff and confirmed that no one had seen either August or Emerald. The department chair came out to talk to me personally.
“We’d love to reconnect with Ms. Ferring. She left without graduating when she went to Hollywood to make Pride of Place. We’ve tried writing her—we’d like to give her her degree, and we’d like to talk to her about possibly donating her papers here.” The chair handed me her card. “If you find her, would you see if she’d meet with me?”
Back downtown, I returned to the historical society, but the research associate hadn’t arrived yet. The woman at the front desk apologized.
“She teaches social studies at Central Middle School, and there’s so little call for her here that she doesn’t come in every day. If you want to e-mail her, it’s [email protected].”
I thanked the woman as civilly as I could—why hadn’t she given me the information this morning?—and sent an e-mail to Cady Perec.
Peppy, who’d been totally safe in the car, was getting restless. I drove her over to the Kansas River, which ran along the north edge of town. We spent a happy hour ambling along a river path, with Peppy running in and out of the muddy water, chasing seagulls and ducks, and me answering e-mails from clients in Chicago. One of them included a twenty-megabyte file, the discovery document for a fraud case where I would be a major prosecution witness.
I was so focused on the file that I didn’t realize we’d reached open country. I called Peppy out of a plowed field, where she’d stirred up some gophers, and headed back toward town. It seemed disconcerting to have my head in Chicago and my body in a field, as if I were inhabiting two unconnected universes at the same time.
Yelp directed me to an Internet/office-services café on a side street near the best of the coffee shops I’d visited. I found free parking in a lot. Chicago’s mayor and city council would go berserk if they found out there were towns in America that offered free parking in the heart of their downtowns. How could they overlook such a perfect opportunity to gouge the citizenry?
In the Internet café, I Photoshopped August’s picture together with Emerald Ferring’s. I typed in my cell phone and e-mail, asking anyone who’d seen either August or Emerald to get in touch with me. I printed out several dozen copies, both of August alone and of him with Ferring.
While I wandered around the downtown streets, asking the myriad beer joints and little restaurants for permission to put the photos in their windows, I also showed the pictures to the homeless people squatting on the sidewalks. Life on the streets leaves most people inward-turned and listless: it’s not just physically draining but also really boring, so the mind drifts. However, everyone who passed through the downtown went by the people on the streets—it was worth a chance.
“You get anything if you find ’em?” an older man asked.
“Like a reward, you mean? Absolutely. If the lead pans out, I’ll pay twenty bucks.”
“Twenty-five,” he said.
“Did you see either of them?”
He scratched his head. “I might have. You give me the money, and then I’ll tell you.”
His blue eyes were sunk so deep in their sockets that I couldn’t read his expression, but I was guessing the need for a drink predominated.
“If you might have seen them, when would that have been?”
“My memory would work better if it got some lubricating.”
I knew I was being played, but I handed him a five. “When do you think you might have seem them?”
“He’s a football player, am I right? And the coach wants you to find him and his ma.”
“You’re wasted out here on the street,” I told him. “Go up to the university’s theater department—they’re looking for good screenwriters.”
As I walked away, I heard him chortle, “Got her that time.”
Let him have his triumph—life probably didn’t afford him many. One of the coffee shops where I’d put my flyer told me I should check with the county sheriff—they had their own jail out east of town. The sheriff worked with the town forces, but they had their own forces, too.
The sheriff’s department was in the same building where I’d talked to the police, in a park just south of the downtown business district. I walked over and spoke with one of the deputies. Like the town’s police this morning, the deputy was civil and willing to help; she checked their list of inmates in custody, looked up anyone found dead or injured in the county in the last month, even called the hospitals in the area, but came up empty.
Cady Perec, the very part-time research associate, phoned as I returned to my car. She was breathless, apologetic: if she’d known someone wanted to look at the records, she would have come over straightaway.
“Not to worry,” I assured her. “If this is a good time, I’m nearby.”
This was perfect, she’d be right there, her school was only four blocks away, just give her a moment to organize her papers.
“Take it easy,” I started to say, but she cut the connection.
Despite her protestations I waited another ten minutes in the museum lobby before Perec got there. She ran up the steps, dropping papers that she was trying to stuff into a backpack, and apologized again for her delay.
“One of my students, Dougie Mackelson—I didn’t want to turn him away because he’s never asked for help before and he needs it more than most, or I wouldn’t have kept you waiting. Do you have time now, or do you need to come back?”
Cady Perec was a short woman in jeans and a corduroy jacket who hardly looked old enough to be out of junior high, let alone teaching there. Her copper-colored hair kept falling over her glasses as she spoke, and she dropped more papers as she tried to push strands away from her face.
I knelt to help collect the papers—student exams that seemed to be about Kansas in the 1850s. “I think John Brown was a terorist,” someone had written in large letters, “because he wanted to blow people up. He didn’t want to negoshate. He had extrem ideas just like ISIS.”
“Can we sit down, let you catch your breath while I explain what it is I’m looking for?”
“Sorry!” Perec pushed her hair behind her ears again. “Can you tell me your name? I’m afraid I didn’t write it down when I saw your e-mail.”
“V.I. Warshawski.” I explained who I was, what I wanted.
Perec shook her head slowly as I went through my litany. “I know Ferring’s name. We have old VHS tapes of the movies she made with Jarvis Nilsson here, but I don’t think we have any personal papers or records.”
“Old phone directories?” I asked. “I’m hoping to find where she liv
ed.”
Perec brightened: she could produce those. “Lawrence has two newspapers, the Lawrence Journal-World and the Douglas County Herald. I can go through the old indices while you look at the phone books, if you’d like—they didn’t digitize anything before 1990, but we’ve got them on microfiche.”
She sat me down with several boxes, covering 1945, the year Ferring’s mother had left Fort Riley, to 1968, the year Ferring had gone to Hollywood with Nilsson. I found a Mrs. Steven Ferring on Sixth Street from 1945 to 1951, but no Ferrings after that. Frustrating and baffling.
Cady was still busy with the newspaper fiches, but she turned away from the fiche reader to pull a map up on her computer screen. She showed me where the Ferrings would have been living when Emerald was a little girl.
There was a thin sliver of town on the north side of the river, just beyond where Peppy and I had been walking earlier. I had seen a few houses from the river path, but the heavy undergrowth had blocked most of them from view. I’d go back over there in the morning, although I was beginning to think Ferring and August had never made it to Lawrence.
I was brooding over whether there was anyone else I could talk to when Cady Perec gave an excited squeak.
“I found her! At least I found her in 1983. She was at this protest, see: maybe she met my mother!”
I got up to peer over her shoulder at the fiche reader, but Cady printed out the article and handed it to me.
Douglas County Herald
July 5, 1983
We all believe in free speech: it’s the cornerstone of our democracy. But when America is at war, we need to think before we speak. The demonstrations at the Kanwaka Missile Silo yesterday smack more of treachery than patriotism. Those missiles are there for a reason: to protect America from a nuclear attack by our deadliest enemies. Our President is trying to show the Russians that we are not afraid of anything Uncle Ivan wants to bring on. In our humble opinion, decorating a missile site with peace symbols made out of daisy chains, and doing it on the anniversary of our country’s birth, comes perilously close to treason.
It pains us to label someone born and bred in Kansas as an outside agitator, but Emerald Ferring has become part of the flag-burning leftist establishment that runs Hollywood. Communist-sympathizing women in England have turned Greenham Common Air Base into a shameful collaboration with the Russians. That’s what pinkos like Emerald Ferring want to do to Lawrence. It’s bad enough for ABC to film an anti-nuke movie here. Uncle Ivan is going to think America is soft on nuclear war.
Ferring’s presence at the missile silo drew a rowdy crowd from as far away as St. Louis and Omaha. The riot that broke out, thanks to rabble-rousing from her and her friends, was a shameful blot on our county and our city. She should stay in Hollywood with the other red rats who hate America.
9
Red Menace
“Wow. Strong medicine.” I folded the page and put it in my case. “Was Ferring arrested? What happened?”
Cady scrolled through the fiche. She tapped a finger on the screen to show me an article that had run the following day, but she gave me the highlights without looking at it—she’d been through this story more than once.
“The air force was in charge of the silo, so they could have arrested people under military law or something, but they didn’t—they took them away forcibly. I guess they didn’t want any more negative publicity than they already had.”
The Air Force escorted the demonstrators to buses, which drove them to Lawrence, where they were free to go about their business. At the request of U.S. Air Force Col. Malcolm Pavant, we are withholding photos of the protesters. We don’t want people defacing a military installation to glorify themselves in public.
The article concluded with a comment from Colonel Pavant, who said the air force appreciated the support of the local law-enforcement agencies “and also of the many Kansans who understand that when you are facing an enemy like the Russians, you have to be prepared to make sacrifices.” Pavant didn’t spell out the sacrifices, but I suppose they included incineration in a nuclear holocaust.
Cady moved aside while I read through the next several days’ worth of the paper, but she was right, there was no further mention of Emerald, or indeed of any other protesters, by name. The Douglas County Herald was doing its duty as diligent guardians of the First Amendment by keeping people who peaceably assembled out of the paper.
“Does the missile silo still exist?” I asked. “Where is it?”
“Out east of town about five miles. They took the missile out after the Cold War. We used to have thousands of them in the Midwest. There were a bunch of talks, and then treaties, between us and the Russians, and then the air force started taking missiles out. Anyway, the Kanwaka silo, out east of town, some developer wants to buy it from the air force and turn it into survivalist condos.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
Cady made a face. “You’d think, but it’s happening around the country. Some people are buying them to live in right now, because they’re cheap and they think it’s cool, but some of the big ones, developers are turning them into hugely expensive shelters for surviving the worst.”
She turned from the fiche reader to a computer, bringing up some sites of missile silos–turned–homes. A man in Texas had created the ultimate bachelor pad somewhere out in the bare, bleak stretches of the state, but the most eye-popping was one Cady showed me in Montana, labeled “The Great Escape: Fifteen underground levels of peace of mind.” A subhead, with lightning bolts flashing off and on around it, screamed that “Fortune Favors the Prepared.”
I bent over Cady’s shoulder for a better view. The website showed a cutaway of the underground part of the missile silo, fifteen stories of condos, with five stories even deeper underground for the mechanicals, swimming pools, water and air filters, and so on. Units started at $1.5 million and came with a five-year supply of freeze-dried food. The silo had massive generators, updated from when they’d only had to power a Titan missile over the pole to Russia. There was also dedicated Wi-Fi—assuming the Internet would function post-Armageddon. Your choice of views from your windows—a computer would give you seascapes or mountains or amber fields of grain so you didn’t have to stare at concrete walls.
I felt as though spiders were crawling up my arms: locked underground, no escape hatch, waiting for the end of the world with a few dozen other people, in units with the granite countertops, German dishwashers, under-the-counter refrigerators, and surround sound that all upscale buyers are looking for in their second home. The Great Escape had sold five units; thirteen more were available but going fast, so make an appointment today.
The slide show on the screen showed an artist’s vision of the exterior, with trees and a heliport surrounded by rosebushes. I wondered if the real deal would include bunkers for snipers to shoot any of the 99 percent trying to flee nuclear winter.
“Is that what’s happening to your silo, the— What is it called?”
“Kanwaka. It’s from some Indian names,” Cady said. “It’s like everything else in Kansas. It used to be Indian land, and we took it and turned it into something bigger and better—namely, a huge bomb site. I haven’t paid that much attention to what they’re doing at Kanwaka, but last I heard, there was some question about the land. One of my grandmother’s friends was trying to broker the conversion of Kanwaka into condos, but the deal fell apart.”
“When Emerald and the others were protesting out there, there must have been pretty tight security,” I said. “Did they camp out on the perimeter, or were there houses or trailers?”
“Tents in the field, is what I was always told,” Cady said. “It’s really hard to find anyone who remembers anything about it—details, I mean. You can talk to people in town, and they all remember the demonstrations. Depending on their politics, it was either a wonderful example of grass-roots activism or a horrendous display of mob violence. Of course, that was way before smartphones, so it’s not like people
were posting photos to Instagram or anything. And then the commune burned down about two months after the protest, so there’s not anything left out there to look at.”
“Burned down?” I echoed. “How?”
Cady hunched a shoulder. “They say one of the hippies was probably smoking—dope, they mean—and let a fire get out of control.”
She turned back to the microform and found the story in the Douglas County Herald.
After we and the rest of the Fourth Estate took the spotlight away from the demonstrators at the Kanwaka silo, the hippies evaporated, proving what Air Force Col. Malcolm Pavant suspected all along: these were bored publicity seekers. Apparently they didn’t put out their campfires before they took off. Douglas County Sheriff Milt Julkis reports that about ten days ago a fire took out most of the tents and shacks the protesters left behind. The news was kept quiet until Col. Pavant was able to confirm that there was no damage to the silo and no radiation leakage as a result of the fire. He also confirms that there was no loss of life.
“It’s really hopeless,” Cady said. “The only person I know who really remembers the missile part is one of the math teachers at my school. She’s about ten years older than me, and she grew up out near Kanwaka. She went to this two-room school out by the silo and said it totally spooked her and her friends, going past it every day in the school bus, knowing the U.S. thought we were expendable. Like, we could be a first-strike target because we didn’t count.”
I nodded absently, wanting to know more about Ferring’s involvement. “What was the movie, the anti-nuke movie that they made here? Did Ferring star in that?”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t think she had anything to do with it, but I’d have to look at the credits. The Day After, it’s called. It was made for TV and showed the kind of radiation poisoning you could expect after a nuclear war, if you weren’t killed right off, and how there wouldn’t be food, that kind of thing. It was pretty controversial here in town, some people thinking the mayor should be thrown out of office for letting the Russians believe that Lawrence was scared of nuclear weapons. Of course, there was pretty strong support for disarmament here as well, but Reagan—he was president at the time—he tried to get ABC not to show it.
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