I also couldn’t find any trace of a Matt or Mathias or Matthew Chastain as a cell biologist, although there were dozens of men with that name scattered around the country. It would be a waste of my time and the client’s money for me to start calling them just in the hopes of finding a person who could tell me where Sonia had seen Emerald Ferring a week ago: Were you a graduate student in Kansas in the 1980s? Do you remember where Sonia Kiel saw you the last night you were in town?
I’d left my cashmere blazer on the seat while Peppy and I ran. I put it back on, ran a comb through my hair, and walked up the road to Gertrude Perec’s house. She might have been at the market or the hairdresser or serving in the Riverside Church soup kitchen, but this was my lucky day: lights were on in the back of the house, and she answered the bell within a minute of my ringing.
“Hello,” I said before she could speak. “I’ve just come from Dr. Kiel’s. I know you know that Sonia is in the hospital, since you called to tell him the news. Perhaps you even know that I found her last night in time to get her emergency help.”
“Yes.” Her voice came out in an uncertain whisper. She cleared her throat and tried to speak more firmly. “Dr. Kiel told me.”
“You called him to tell him—warn him—that I had visited you but that you had protected his identity from me. So he returned the favor by calling you just now to tell you I’d found him anyway?”
She nodded. “Because of Sonia.”
“Sonia is such a convenient whipping boy, or girl, isn’t she?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Perec’s tone became belligerent.
“Whatever goes wrong, from Matt Chastain’s dying, or disappearing, or whatever he did, to the grotesque relations between Shirley and Nathan Kiel, can be offloaded onto Sonia, who’s not able to fight back.”
“Fight back? That’s all she’s been doing her whole life. If she could behave herself—”
“When she was fourteen, someone not only diagnosed her with a mental illness but started medicating her so heavily that I doubt she could remember her own name in a well-lit room on a sunny day. Thirty years down the road, I have no idea how much or how little she can possibly remember or know from that time. That’s why I need your help.”
I hadn’t meant to get off on such a confrontational foot. Of course Gertrude Perec didn’t want to help me—she wanted to protect Dr. Kiel. I was an enemy; I’d saved the wicked Sonia’s life.
Gertrude started to close the door on me, so I said quickly, “Sonia told me she’d seen Emerald Ferring and August Veriden—you remember, those are the people I’m trying to find—walking on Matt Chastain’s grave.”
“You spoke to her?” Gertrude poised the door between open and shut.
“Only very briefly. I’m trying to find out where Matt Chastain is buried. Or where Sonia thinks he’s buried.”
“What . . . what did Nate—Dr. Kiel—say?”
“Tell me about the experiment that went so badly that Chastain ran away. Do you know where he ran to?”
“I . . . I was Dr. Kiel’s secretary, not part of his experimental team.”
“Yes, of course. But he clearly relied on you. I’m sure you knew at least the outline of what was going on.” I was almost leering with the effort to seem warm and fuzzy. It was keeping the door open but not making Gertrude more forthcoming.
“It was a long time ago, more than thirty years. I’ve forgotten the details.”
This was so nearly identical to what Shirley Kiel had said that my mouth had opened with a sarcastic comment at the ready when the kaleidoscope turned in my brain and two pieces of glass lined up over each other: 1983, when so much happened—the protest at the silo, the birth of Cady Perec, the death of Jennifer Perec, the disappearance of Matt Chastain.
“Your daughter, Jennifer. Is Matt Chastain Cady’s father? If he is, why don’t you want Cady to know? Surely not because of some long-forgotten science—”
“You know nothing.” Her face shriveled and turned white, transparent, like a petal from a dying narcissus. “You come from up north, you think you’re smarter than us small-town folk, but you know nothing.”
She shut the door on me. I lingered on the stoop, wondering if I should go in to make sure she hadn’t collapsed. After a moment, though, I saw a light come on in the room behind the porch where I’d sat yesterday. The house was too stoutly built for me to hear anything—such as the phone call I assumed she was making to Nathan Kiel—but she was probably okay.
I walked slowly back to the car, trying to make sense of the story. Shirley Kiel said Sonia had stalked Matt. Say Sonia had seen him with Jennifer Perec, seen her own romantic daydreams ripped apart. What would she have done? Had the psychotic break her parents claimed? And then had she attacked Matt? No, more likely she attacked Jennifer. I felt something cold in my stomach, like a large glacier—had she killed Jennifer? Was the car in the Wakarusa a cover-up for that?
And where had Chastain been when Jennifer died? Was he glad not to be saddled with a baby? No one knew he was Cady’s father, so he could slide out of town, away from Nathan Kiel’s wrath, away from fatherhood. Maybe he’d changed his name and become CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Or he’d dropped off the grid and was living under a viaduct with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 to keep him warm.
Nothing I could imagine made any sense. It wasn’t really my business either. My business was to find Emerald Ferring and August Veriden. I repeated that to myself about a dozen times as I drove over to the Hippo for another nourishing cortado.
16
Down by the Riverside
I’d passed Riverside United Church of Christ, tucked into the northeast corner of the park, when I’d been running with Peppy. You couldn’t see it from the road, so they’d put up a sign on Sixth Street: half mile on your right, all welcome. A bigger, brighter sign stood at the entrance to their drive, where you could see the building, made of local limestone that had aged to a golden gray. Some half-dozen cars were parked in a lot that could easily hold a hundred; it must be a big church.
I stopped to read a historical marker on the front lawn. Gathered in 1855 by antislavery emigrants from the Boston area, destroyed by the great flood of 1893, rebuilt in 1896 farther from the river. Up until the end of the Civil War, Riverside had harbored fugitive slaves in a cellar underneath the altar. Today they were a nuclear-free zone and “an inclusive, new-light community who welcome all to join us, wherever you are on your life’s journey.”
I followed directions on the church door to the office entrance. Laughter and chatter led me to a big meeting room, where some ten women, most in their sixties or seventies, were emptying black leaf bags filled with clothes.
One of them saw me standing at the entrance and bustled over, hand out. “Have you come to help? That’s splendid. I’m Joy Helmsley.”
I shook hands automatically. “V.I. Warshawski, but I’m afraid I’m here to get help, not give it.”
“Oh?” She cocked her head, birdlike, to one side. “If you want to see Pastor Weld, he’s out right now, but Lisa Carmody is here. She’s the associate pastor.”
At the sound of her name, a second woman came over. She was younger than the others, wearing jeans and a pullover turned shapeless from much washing.
“Lisa Carmody. Why don’t we go into the office, have a little more privacy.”
I felt a bit embarrassed. “Not that kind of help—I’m looking for information, something maybe one of you knows, or at least knows someone who knows.”
The group abandoned the pretext of sorting clothes for what was definitely going to be more interesting.
“Ancient history,” I said. “You may have heard that I’m a detective from Chicago, looking for Emerald Ferring.”
“Oh, yes.” Lisa Carmody nodded. “I saw the posters you put up downtown. Ferring and a young man, right? Ferring is one of our local stars, except we didn’t give her star treatment when she lived here, but everyone knows who she is.”
T
here was a murmur from the rest of the group, hard to decipher, but it sounded as though not all agreed with Carmody.
“I haven’t found any trace of them. I was going to go back to Chicago today, but early this morning someone called to say that she’d seen them in the same place where another person disappeared thirty-some years ago.”
“Sonia Kiel.” A woman in a severely tailored navy blazer spoke. “She was picked up from in front of the Lion’s Pride—that bar at Eighth and Rhode Island—we’ve been trying to get them shut down, or at least to close at eleven so that people unfortunate enough to live nearby can get a night’s rest.”
“Yes,” I said. “She called me from the bar, but by the time I got there, she was in a coma. Someone had slipped her roofies.”
“Poor Shirley,” the tailored blazer said. “She’s always worried about Sonia. If only she could have made a success out of Boston instead of coming back to Lawrence.”
“This morning Shirley seemed more bitter than worried,” I said.
“You’re a stranger, and Shirley is awkward around strangers,” the blazer said. “I worked with her for twenty years at Emigrant Bank and Savings. She was tireless, committed to the well-being of our clients and to her co-workers.”
Joy Helmsley nodded emphatic agreement. “It’s not easy having a child with the kind of problems Sonia does. Maybe it seems cruel to you, putting her in a group home, but she’s forty-something. Shirley and Nate are eighty or so. How can they take care of an adult child!”
I held up my hands: stop sign. “I’m sure you’re right. Mrs. Kiel only presented one face to me, anger, but you all know her and I don’t. I had about thirty seconds on the phone with Sonia at two this morning before the bartender took the phone from her. Sonia said she’d seen Ferring and August Veriden at the place, maybe a cemetery, where Matt Chastain was buried.”
“Oh, she was making that up!” Helmsley burst out. “We all know she lives in a daydream about—”
“Sonia knew a detail I hadn’t included in my flyer,” I said. “That’s why I believe her, despite any emotional problems she may have.”
“What is it you want to know?” Lisa Carmody pulled the conversation back onto the main track.
“Does everyone know who Matt Chastain is?”
Most of the women shook their heads, so I gave the thumbnail of what I knew, or at least what I’d been told, leaving out my guess that Chastain was Cady Perec’s father.
“Oh, yes. That was about the time that they had the big demonstration out by the missile silo,” a woman who hadn’t spoken before said. “Jenny Perec was marching with the anti-nuke people. I know Gertrude agreed with her in principle, but she hated it when Jenny started camping out with them on the missile site.”
“That’s right, Barbara,” Joy said. “I remember Gertrude thought you encouraged her to take part in the protests.”
“I never camped out there,” Barbara said. “Too chicken, I suppose, but it’s true she came to me when Gertrude was giving her grief over the commune.”
“Did Dr. Kiel’s experiment have something to do with the missile?” I asked.
“No, no,” Barbara said. “It’s just that’s the last I can remember of talking to Jenny. Until she died, I was . . . quite close . . . to her mother. After that it . . . well, we’re cordial at coffee hour.”
“It turned out Jenny’d had a baby, little Cady,” Joy said. “Someone actually left Cady on Gertrude’s doorstep, as if it was a movie, with a note saying, ‘This is Jenny’s little girl. Please look after her.’”
“It didn’t happen like that,” Barbara said. “Jenny drove off without the baby. One of the local farmers rescued her and turned her over to Gertrude.”
The room was quiet as we all imagined the scene. What had led Jenny to take off in that dramatic way, abandoning her baby? She’d been nineteen; was she racing after her baby’s father? If I’d been looking for Matt Chastain instead of Emerald Ferring, I would have asked those questions.
“It sounds as though I need to go out to the missile silo, see the remains of the commune,” I said.
“There’s nothing out there,” the woman in the blazer said. “Really nothing. It’s in the middle of farmland. The air force compelled the sale of land from farmers, not just at Kanwaka but all over the Midwest. Then, when the commune burned down, the air force found that the land was contaminated and they seized about fifteen more acres so farmers wouldn’t plant where there was a radiation danger. It was hard on the farmers. I can’t remember whose land they took—”
“Doris McKinnon’s,” Barbara supplied.
“Anyway, the air force took the missile away after the disarmament agreements,” the blazer continued. “Someone came into the bank wanting to borrow money to turn it into a condo, but there were too many issues with the site. It couldn’t be done.”
“Pity,” Barbara said. “My niece clerks for the federal judges in Topeka. She says a lot of those abandoned silos have been taken over by meth makers, and God knows we have enough meth in the county already.”
“You think meth contaminated the land around the silo?” I asked.
“Barbara always imagines the worst,” the blazer said.
“Maybe because the worst happens so often,” Barbara said dryly.
Lisa Carmody tried to change the subject before the fight got out of control. I helped by asking about Emerald Ferring.
“Her father was in the army,” I said, “killed at the Battle of the Bulge, and her mother moved here with Emerald after that. They lived across the river until the big flood drove them away, although I think they stayed in the area: Emerald went to the university here but didn’t live on campus, and there’s no record in the old phone books. Who would know where the family moved?”
Lisa Carmody, the associate pastor, said, “They weren’t part of the church, so I don’t think anyone here could help you.”
I looked at her in astonishment. “How do you know?”
She flushed. “It came up. Someone mentioned it, I think when they saw your flyer. Someone asked Pastor Weld. Our secretary checked.”
She was like an inexpert gambler, covering a mistake by playing card after card on top of the first bad one.
“We weren’t very welcoming to people across the river,” Barbara said, “at least not in those days.”
“You can’t be accountable for how your grandparents behaved in the past,” Joy Helmsley said bracingly. “You were only a child.”
“I was ten. I remember the language,” Barbara said. “I don’t know where Ferring’s family moved after the flood, but there’s an old woman who still lives over there. I got to know her when we were doing joint worship services with St. Silas a few years back—that’s where she worships, St. Silas AME.”
I’d forgotten St. Silas, where Lucinda Ferring’s funeral had taken place. I told Barbara I’d head over there next.
“It’s a small congregation. There may not be anyone in the church office on a weekday,” Barbara said. “But the woman I met is named Nell Albritten. She’s African-American herself, and she knew most of the black families that used to live in North Lawrence or on the old east side. Back when we thought indoor plumbing was a luxury a black schoolteacher didn’t need to have. I think Emigrant Savings was the mortgage lender who tried to make that point.”
“Barbara, there are many forms of ministry, and they don’t all involve beating our breasts over race,” the blazer said. “I’m only a few years younger than you, and my memories of this church and its outreach are very different.”
“They would be, wouldn’t they?” Barbara said. The words were mild, but the delivery sounded perilously close to contempt.
“Ministry is always a balancing act.” The associate pastor hurriedly tried to end the conflict. “We all have to be careful not to think we have the only right answer or the only right understanding of God’s call.”
Barbara pursed up her mouth in an ironic smile. “True enough, Lisa. The te
en reading group is arriving in a few minutes. I’m called right now to get the library set up.”
The associate pastor put a hand on my sleeve, as if to keep me from following Barbara. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to visit Nell Albritten. You’re a detective, which is often alarming, especially to an African-American. Mrs. Albritten is old, she’s frail. It would be kinder to leave her alone.”
“That’s right,” the blazer said. “Barbara has a good heart, and she means well, but she has a distorted sense of race relations. She caused a lot of friction, both here and at St. Silas when we were trying to worship together.”
“That’s unfair!” a woman who hadn’t spoken before cried out. “Barbara did a lot to smooth out decades, maybe centuries of ill will between Riverside and the African-American community.”
The blazer turned stony-faced. “We haven’t been here for centuries, Alison. Speaking for myself, I have to be back at work in half an hour, so I’m going to do the job I came here to do.” She marched over to the row of tables again and upended another plastic bag.
I headed for the exit, but Carmody stopped me again at the door. “You can see there are a lot of different views here on our history in Lawrence and on race. You should stay away from Nell Albritten. You’re a stranger, and you could undo years of bridge building by going to talk to her.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said politely.
A buzz, like swarming bees, rose behind me as I left. Was Barbara sanctimonious, always thinking she was more righteous than the world around her? Did Riverside have a responsibility for some of the violence of the seventies? It was a challenging discussion, one that I lacked the history or theology to take part in. Conflict always interests me, however, and I would have liked to hear more.
17
Junkyard Dogs
Fallout Page 11