“The movie was released right after I was born, so of course I don’t have personal knowledge about all the controversies, but I talk to everyone who was living here then about what they remember.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I’ve watched the movie maybe fifty times. I keep hoping I’ll see my mother.”
“Was she an extra?”
“No. She was at the protest, though, at the missile silo, and then . . . she died.”
She bit her lip, pushing back emotion, tears. I sat quietly, waiting until she felt like speaking again.
“No one knows what happened—I mean, how it happened. She drove her car off the road and drowned in the Wakarusa—that’s a little river near the silo. I was six weeks old, and she’d taken off without me. She’d forgotten me—that’s what hurts the most. One of the farmers found me and brought me to Gram. They say maybe she was smoking dope, which I guess could be true, or drunk—how would I know?”
I’d lost my mother when I was a teenager, and I still missed her. I could imagine the hole there’d be in the middle of my heart if I’d never known her at all.
“I started studying history—it’s what I mostly teach, you know, although there’s general social studies, politics, that kind of thing—and why I work here. I keep hoping I’ll get some whiff of something that will explain my mother to me. Gram, she’s so bitter about everything that went on around Kanwaka, she never talks about it. It wasn’t until I got to high school that I even knew about the protests at the silo—all she ever would say was that my mom died when her car went off the road. First Grandpa—her husband—died in a car crash, then Jenny, my mom. Gram almost wouldn’t let me learn how to drive, she’s so sure there’s some kind of curse. But you can’t really get around in a town this size without a car.”
“That sounds like a tough load for both of you.”
Cady laughed self-consciously. “Some. You should have seen me when I took driver’s ed—it was a month before I could figure out how to keep the car going in a straight line.”
I waited a respectful moment before changing the subject. “Was the protest at the silo connected to the anti-nuke movie?”
“I don’t think so. The protest was a part of the times, you know, people all over the country fed up with the arms race and wanting an end to it. The Day After was more like a reflection, see, of the public mood. My mother, from what I can dig up, she was part of this commune who wanted to try to re-create what the women in England were doing at that same time, protesting nuclear warheads in the middle of the country. At its height the English had almost a hundred thousand women at their air force base. Here in Lawrence they had maybe twenty. Kansas, you know!”
She fiddled with the reader dials, making the text jump in a sea-sickening way. “I’ve read all the local stories—including what the Kansas City and Topeka papers covered—a few dozen times, but I didn’t know who Emerald Ferring was. I mean, that she was a movie star or African-American or anything. I didn’t pay attention to her name all the times I read about the protests. I was just looking for any mention of my mom. Jenny, her name was. Jennifer Perec.”
Cady whispered her name, talking more to herself than to me.
“What does your grandmother say about the commune and the protests?”
“I’ve never been able to get her to talk about it, beyond saying the only good that came out of it was me.” She flushed and glanced up. “That’s nice and all, but it’s always felt to me like Gram is hugely angry with my mom, and I can’t get her to talk about her. Or get any idea of who my father might have been. He wasn’t in the car with my mom, and Gram doesn’t know who he was, or at least she says she doesn’t know.”
I could imagine that deep wound as well: a teenage romance, the boy not wanting to be saddled with a baby when his girlfriend died. He’d had the option to disappear like smoke. “Did she—Jennifer—grow up here? She must have some childhood friends you could talk to.”
Cady nodded. “I have, believe me. And I have her high-school yearbook. She was voted most likely to be the next Marie Curie because she was interested in science, but Gram won’t even tell me if the physics classes she took were what turned her into a disarmament advocate. My mom was only nineteen when I was born, so it’s hard to find people who can tell me much about her. She was good at math, she liked biology, she was an ace soccer player.”
“Your grandmother didn’t have other children?”
“My mom was three when my grandfather was killed. Gram had been putting him through law school, so they were waiting to have more children, I guess, and then she never married again.”
So no aunts or uncles who could talk about the Kanwaka sit-in. I got Cady to let me look at the microfiches from both the Douglas County Herald and the Lawrence Journal-World.
Cady’s focus had always been on a quest for her mother, but I wanted more coverage of Emerald Ferring’s role in the protests. I couldn’t find anything, except for photos that showed a heavy military presence around the missile silo. Any pictures of anti-nuke protesters were obscured by a huge banner that read god bless the united states of america air force, held aloft by people identified as Douglas County Freedom Lovers. It was decorated with pictures of fighter jets and the American flag.
Another story showed people playing softball and barbecuing near the half-moon dome covering the silo.
Americans know the safety of our nation and her citizens is the number one priority of the U.S. Air Force. Douglas County citizens can picnic safely because the Air Force routinely checks radiation levels in the nearby land and water. And they know this missile is here to keep us all safe from the Russian menace.
I wondered how much radiation leakage there was around these old missiles, whether it was really safe to live in one of their silos—assuming your claustrophobia didn’t put you at risk of a mental meltdown first.
I was turning the wheel faster when Emerald’s name jumped out at me. I scrolled slowly back through the pages until I found the story. It didn’t have anything to do with the missile or the Greenham wannabes: Lucinda Ferring, Emerald’s mother, had died of pneumonia at age sixty-four, about six weeks after the protest. Emerald had returned for the funeral, held at St. Silas AME Church. There was a photograph: by 1983 an African-American actor was a celebrity. Emerald was wearing a hat with a veil that covered the top half of her face, so I couldn’t see what she’d looked like without stage makeup.
A cough from the doorway startled us both. The woman from the front desk gave an apologetic laugh. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but it’s six, Cady. I need to leave. Will you lock up?”
“Good grief, we’ve been talking our heads off in here, Melanie. I didn’t even hear you come in. Sorry! You go on, but we’re leaving now, too.”
She leaned across me to pull the microfiche from the reader. She fiddled with the plastic sheet, waiting until we heard Melanie’s footsteps heading down the hall, and then said shyly, “Maybe you could come over to the house with me, talk to Gram. She might say more to you than she does to me. Maybe she did know Emerald Ferring but didn’t want to talk about her.”
10
What Big Teeth You Have
And so I ended up on Gertrude Perec’s front porch, watching moonlight shimmer on the slice of river we could see from her house. I don’t know how Cady had advertised my visit or how her grandmother had reacted, since I’d been following in my own car, but the elder Perec didn’t treat me like visiting royalty.
“Gram, it’s dark and getting chilly. Shouldn’t we go inside?” Cady had asked when her grandmother greeted me on the porch stairs.
Gertrude Perec said with a thin smile that it was a pleasant evening. “It will be winter soon enough, when we’ll all be longing for an evening like this where we can sit outside without three sweaters and our down coats.”
She hadn’t been overtly rude—she told me to make myself comfortable in one of the wicker porch chairs—but she didn’t offer anything to drink: I wasn’t supposed to sta
y. And Peppy was to remain in the car, an edict that startled her granddaughter.
“Gram! You let Melanie bring in that terrier of hers, and it pees in the corners.”
That was the first time in our conversation that Gertrude squeezed her granddaughter’s shoulder in a kind of warning.
It was Cady who took a bowl of water out to Peppy; she also brought me a glass of white wine to go with the one she was drinking herself.
While Cady was inside dealing with Peppy’s and my refreshments, Gertrude said, “Cady tells me you want to talk about that damned commune out by the Kanwaka silo.”
“No, ma’am,” I said, my voice neutral. “I’m trying to find Emerald Ferring. We came across a news story that Emerald was part of one of the protests out there, and I hoped you might have known her or her mother, since they’d lived here for quite a long time. As you have yourself.”
“That commune, that’s how I lost my daughter. Cady is obsessed with finding out what made Jenny take part or who she might have been dating, but I don’t want those old scars cut open.”
“I’m not looking for your daughter’s lover,” I said, although I wondered if it would cross Cady’s mind to try to hire me and what I would say if she did. “Emerald Ferring set out on a road trip two weeks ago. She went to Fort Riley, where her father was stationed during the war, and she told people there she was coming to Lawrence. So far I haven’t found anyone who’s seen her here, although I plan to visit the church where her mother’s funeral was held. Then, this afternoon, when Cady was going through records with me at the historical museum, I saw that Ferring had been at the same protest as your daughter, so I wondered if you knew her or her mother.”
In the dim light of the porch’s single weak bulb, I couldn’t read Gertrude Perec’s expression, but I could tell that her muscles tightened. “When Ferring came here in ’83, she was famous, at least for Lawrence, Kansas, so of course I saw her. Anyway, she’s black, and since that’s such a small part of our town, she stood out. But I didn’t know her when she was a child.”
“She didn’t live that far from here, just across that river, if I’m reading the maps correctly.”
“Ah, that river.” That was when Perec told me about her grandfather’s vanishing act.
I waited patiently for the end of the anecdote and the end of the discussion on disappearing grandfathers.
“The listing in the phone book for Ferring’s mother ends after 1951, when Emerald would have been about seven, so I guess they moved away, but still—”
“In 1951?” Gertrude interrupted. “They probably had to move, if they were living in North Lawrence.”
“Oh. The flood,” Cady said. “People still talk about it. We had a bad flood when I was eight, but everyone told me it was nothing compared to ’51.”
“And they were right, missy,” Gertrude said. “I was twelve, and I still remember water lapping at the curve in the road there.” She pointed toward the road, but it was too dark for me to see anything. “I had nightmares for months after, sure the water would get into my bedroom and sweep me away before my father could rescue me. During the day my brother, Clarence, and I would wade in the streets, which drove my mother wild—she was sure we would come home with cholera.”
“North Lawrence,” I prodded her. “The Ferrings were living on Sixth Street.”
“I don’t know the streets on that side of the river—not well, anyway—but many of those houses were completely underwater. The land is flatter on the north side and the houses a good deal closer to the river than we are here. And then many of them are built level with the ground. You drive over there in daylight and you’ll see what I mean.”
“So maybe the river forced Emerald and her mother out of town. Any thoughts on who might remember them, know where they went?”
Gertrude Perec finally seemed to give me her full attention. “It’s such a long time ago. You need someone who was an adult then, who still is . . . well, mentally alert today, and someone who knew that part of town.”
She paused, thinking it over. “The local Congregational church, Riverside—it’s United Church now—they were doing service work in North Lawrence. I know I helped my mother make up care packages after Sunday school—clothes, canned goods, that kind of thing. Check with the church secretary. She may be able to find someone who goes back that far.”
Cady said, “What about Dr.—”
“Absolutely not.” Gertrude’s voice was a band saw, cutting her granddaughter’s sentence in half. “That episode was as painful in his life as it is in mine. You brought this detective in here and let her pick at my scars. I will not have her doing it to anyone else.”
She turned to me. “I’ve told you I know nothing about Emerald Ferring, and I’ve extended myself to give you a suggestion of people at a church who might help you. It’s time you were on your way.”
“Gram!” Cady expostulated. “I know you don’t like talking about my mother, but honestly, this is—”
“She doesn’t get to invade my privacy, however much you want her to invade yours, Miss Cady. I have dinner waiting in the oven, and it’s likely a shriveled bit of casserole by this time.”
“It’s okay, Cady,” I said as she stared openmouthed at her grandmother. “Your grandmother’s right: she gets to protect her privacy. I’ll check with the Riverside Church people, and drive over to North Lawrence to the church where Lucinda Ferring’s funeral was held. If that doesn’t lead anywhere, I’ll head back along the interstate toward Fort Riley to see what I can figure out.”
A statement that just went to prove that old bromide about the best-laid plans.
11
Rabid Fans
It was starting to mizzle again when I got back to the car. I put on my poncho and walked with Peppy toward the river. It wasn’t as close as I’d thought, sitting on Gertrude Perec’s porch, and it turned out there was a ravine between the river and the road. On the far side, a train’s whistle hooted, a melancholy wail in the wet dark.
I drove back to the parks that bordered the center of town and let Peppy root around in the lamplight. She was annoyed at having been left in the car for too much of the afternoon and showed it by breaking away to greet other dogs and refusing to come when I called her.
I’d been sitting too long, too. I grabbed her leash and ran the length of the park five or six times, until Peppy was panting loudly. The rain was still falling, not hard, but we were both damp by the time I bundled Peppy back into the Mustang.
Although I saw some interesting restaurants, I didn’t feel like changing into dry clothes, nor like leaving the dog in the car again. I went to a co-op grocer on the town’s west side that had organic carry-out meals and took a salmon dinner back to the B and B with me. The owner provided a common room, an alcove, really, with a microwave and a small refrigerator.
“Who do you think the doctor is that Gertrude Perec was protecting from my scar picking?” I asked Peppy when we were in our room and dry again. “And what painful episode was she talking about? Do you think it has anything to do with Emerald Ferring?”
Peppy didn’t look up from the peanut-butter bone I’d bought her, not for a question that could be answered only by consulting a medium. I tried texting Cady to ask if she’d tell me the doctor’s name, but she said her grandmother would know I’d gotten it from her and she didn’t want to cause any more domestic friction.
Was Cady afraid of her grandmother? Probably a little, but maybe she was protecting her, too. I didn’t really need to know—I was grasping at straws, after all, looking for clues about Emerald Ferring at a protest camp that had disappeared almost thirty-five years ago. Anyway, it’s impossible to persuade people via text to tell you something they want to keep to themselves.
Gertrude Perec didn’t rate a Wikipedia entry. My subscription databases said she was seventy-eight, retired, owned her own home, had a modest pension, collected Social Security, and owned two apartment buildings on Louisiana Street. Cady had s
aid her grandmother had lost her husband in a car crash; that had happened long before the digital age, so there was no mention of his death. Gertrude’s brother, Clarence, who’d taken over the grandfather’s farm, had died ten years earlier; he’d never married and the farm had been sold when he died.
I couldn’t find any record of Gertrude’s only child, Cady’s mother, either. Nothing about Gertrude and a doctor. Had he been Gertrude’s boss? Her lover?
Time I dealt with my in-box. Predictably, I had several urgent messages from Bernie, wanting to know why I hadn’t been in touch and where was August??? Since she’d already texted me four times today, I wrote a snarky reply, then deleted it: no reason to take out my frustrations over my lack of progress on Bernie. I wrote jointly to her and Angela: “It’s a slow business, and I’m having trouble picking up a thread in a strange town, so hang tight for a few more days, okay?”
One thing I’d like someone on the ground in Chicago to do was canvas August’s neighbors in the evening, when people would be home from work, but that was a job for the Streeter brothers, not two impetuous young athletes. I sent Tim Streeter a long e-mail with the details of what I wanted and then turned to the hardest message, the no-progress report to the client.
For help with that, I poured myself a generous shot of Johnnie Walker while I explained to Troy Hempel what I’d done and who I would talk to in the morning.
“If the churches and her childhood home prove dead ends, I could retrace the road back to Fort Riley, to see if anything happened to Ferring and August on the way. It’s eighty miles with a lot of small towns in between and might take several days to cover. My opinion—it’s a needle in a haystack, but if you want me to do it, I’m game. Let me know.”
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