I pulled out my laptop and typed in a few search questions. When I’d finished, I showed the page to him. “Spent rods take up way more space than a coffee urn. What is this really?” I tapped on his phone screen.
He shook his head, his mouth a thin line. “You’re showing your ignorance. One set of rods is only about three to four feet high. This is a container holding a couple of spent rods. It’s vandalism or incipient terrorism, but it is not a joke.”
“I’ll just text the picture to my—”
He snatched the phone from me. “No. This is a top-secret item, and I don’t want to find it out on Facebook.”
I squinted at him. “I’m sure photos like this are all over the Web, unless there’s some kind of code hidden in it that you’re afraid I’ll find.”
Baggetto stood. “The stakes are very high, Warshawski. We’d like to believe that the cylinder is still in Douglas County, and we’d like to think you care enough about national security to help, not hinder us.”
“Of course, Colonel.” I stood as well. “I will do my very best.”
He walked out, leaving the pizza carton and the half-drunk bottle of wine on the desk. Of course, at Fort Riley he had Captain Arrieta to clean up his mess. I poured the wine down the sink and took the remaining three slices of pizza out to the garbage.
Peppy followed me, looking wistfully at the vanishing pizza.
“It’s okay. We’ll go over to the organic grocery and get something tasty, like barbecue-flavored tofu, for supper.”
Peppy curled her lip at me but jumped into the backseat.
31
Origin Stories
I was wandering gloomily through the store, trying to summon enthusiasm for steamed broccolini with fish cakes, when Cady Perec called.
“Can I talk to you?”
I stopped in front of organic Cajun salmon with whipped organic sweet potatoes. “Sure. I don’t have anything specific scheduled for tomorrow.” Unless the sheriff or the army decided to detain me, of course.
“I know it’s late, but I kind of meant tonight.”
“I’m really beat, Cady, and I haven’t had dinner yet.”
“Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry. Gram roasted a chicken—I’ll bring you leftovers.”
The fish cakes looked dried out and the broccolini limp, but was homemade chicken enough of a compensation for a late-night meeting? Still, I gave Cady the B and B address and bought a bottle of valpolicella.
Cady pulled up just as Peppy and I were getting out of the car. She bent to fondle the dog’s ears, apologizing again for the lateness.
“It’s Gram,” she said, handing me a foil pan: chicken, green beans, and a salad.
I made encouraging noises while I poured wine and started eating. The green beans were as limp as the store’s broccolini, but the chicken was good and the salad crisp.
“She was pretty witchy last night. She kept making sharp remarks about me not knowing when to keep my big mouth shut, and finally, tonight, I forced her to tell me what had her so wound up. She says you came around and said terrible, really hateful things and that it was my fault for letting you into the private part of our lives.”
She blinked to hide her tears, fishing in her blazer pockets for a tissue. I handed her the box from the bedside table.
“What did you say to her?” Cady sniffled.
“We talked about Sonia Kiel.”
I tried to reconstruct the conversation: so much had happened since I’d seen Gertrude Perec that I had a hard time remembering what we’d said. Sonia, her phantom lover, and yes.
“Every time I ask questions about your mother, or Sonia, or the graduate student who Dr. Kiel says ruined his experiment, people start barking at me. Not just your grandmother.”
“But what did you say to Gram?” Cady insisted.
“I wanted to know more about Matt Chastain—he was Kiel’s graduate student—he’s the one Sonia had the crush on, the one she thinks died. I figured since your grandmother had worked for Dr. Kiel, she’d know about Chastain.”
“She says you said something cruel,” Cady said. “I need to know what it was.”
I shook my head helplessly. “Cady, I wondered if Matt might have been your father. I don’t know what made me say it to her, just that he was there, Jenny—your mother—was there, and then Matt disappeared. They might easily have met—your grandmother was Dr. Kiel’s secretary and I imagine your mother going to Kiel’s lab to see your granny.”
She swallowed her mug of wine in a single gulp. “Ugh. That’s strong.”
I ate more of the chicken, sipped the wine, waited.
“Sonia,” Cady said. “She used to babysit me, can you believe that? Why they tortured her, not to mention me, by making her do it, I have no idea. She used to go on about my mom, how she saw her with Matt at the Diamond Duck—that doesn’t exist anymore. It used to be a bar on Massachusetts Street.
“‘He looked miserable,’ she’d say, ‘trapped. You could tell he didn’t want to be with her, but he had such exquisite good manners, he wouldn’t tell her to go away.’ Finally, one day when I was about six or seven, Gram overheard her and told her never to come back. I asked who Sonia was talking about, and she said Sonia couldn’t tell truth from imagination if it hit her with a two-by-four and Gram should never have let Dr. Kiel push her into hiring Sonia. I guess Sonia couldn’t hold down any kind of job, and the Kiels wanted her out of the house.
“Of course, my whole life I’ve wondered. But whenever I’d ask Gram, she’d shut me up—pretty much like she was hitting me with a two-by-four. Well, you saw her the other night.”
She poured herself another splash of wine. “‘Why you would want the most incompetent student who ever walked into Dr. Kiel’s lab to be your father is beyond me.’ Then I’d ask who it really was and she’d say, ‘I don’t know, punkin,’ and that would be the end of it. I wish you had real proof. Or do you, and you’re just not telling me, like every other goddamn person in Lawrence old enough to know?”
“I really don’t know,” I said gently. “Unless we can find his DNA, or his family, or something about him, I don’t think you’ll ever prove it either.”
Cady’s mouth twisted in a guilty smile. “When I was a teenager, I snuck into the microbiology department office—Gram was still working for Dr. Kiel, and I’d sometimes go up there after school. Anyway, she was off doing something, so I went and looked at the microbiology-student files. I wanted to find Matt Chastain’s home address. I had this plan where I was going to borrow the car and drive to wherever his family lived.”
She blushed. “I saw the whole scene, me interrupting the family at dinner. ‘Where’s my daddy?’ I’d cry, and then, while they were all flabbergasted, I’d announce who I was. I’ve never told this to a single soul, not even my best friends, because it sounds so crazy, something Sonia Kiel would do, not sober, reliable Cady Perec.”
She laughed with embarrassment and turned her head aside.
“I take it you never went?” I asked.
“There wasn’t any record of him,” she said. “All the graduate-student files were there, people who I knew had been students even before him, but not one word about Matt Chastain. Then I began to wonder if he’d ever even existed. Maybe Dr. Kiel made him up to cover for a mistake he’d made himself.”
I was as bewildered as Cady, but I shook my head. “Although Sonia could have imagined a lot of different things emotionally, she saw him with your mother. Whatever she imagined Chastain saying to your mom is a fantasy, but not his existence. Maybe he wasn’t a student, though, maybe a lab tech or something.”
“I don’t think so. There’d have been some file on him, whether he was staff or student.”
I couldn’t fit a narrative over it. Whatever Chastain had done had been so outrageous that he had to be put down the memory hole. And that had happened long before Emerald Ferring and August Veriden—and I—showed up and rattled everyone.
“Tell me more about your m
other’s death,” I said.
“I can’t—I wasn’t there.”
“Tell me what you’ve been told about it.”
Kansas, August 1983
It’s always hot in Kansas in August, temperatures climbing to three digits, humidity high. The wheat harvest came in two months ago, but the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye, the tasseling silky cream, everything as it should be, more or less.
Doris was doing her third alfalfa mowing for the season. She took the tractor down to the southeast edge of her land, where the missile silo dug an ugly gouge in the field.
She hated weapons of every kind, nukes most of all. Her older brother had served with the Army of Occupation in Japan after the Second World War. He’d written about the cancers the children had, the deformities of babies born in the fallout regions around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then he’d died of leukemia himself. Of course she’d said yes when Jenny Perec and the others had come and asked if they could camp out next to the silo.
Jenny was pregnant. Lucinda Ferring noticed it right away, even though she wasn’t showing. “It’s in the face, Dorrie,” Lucinda had told her.
“Don’t tell my mom,” Jenny begged when Doris went to talk to her about it: she didn’t want Jenny going into labor out here in a tent, miles from any medical help. “She’s already having ten fits, me out here with the hippies.”
The baby came a little after the big July 4 protest. One of the protesters was a nurse-midwife; the delivery went uneventfully. “I’m naming her Cady for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She’s going to grow up to be a strong woman, just look at her.”
Jenny insisted on staying on the land, even after most of the other protesters went home. “My baby is going to grow up knowing she helped keep all the world’s children safe from nuclear war.”
Oh, Jenny, precious young idealist. Lucinda had driven her into town for postpartum medical care, and to show little Cady to her grandmother. Gertrude tried to keep the baby—it wasn’t safe for a child to be camping out right next to a military installation—but Lucinda reswaddled her and helped Jenny back to the car.
That morning Doris had brought a care package with her on the tractor, as she did once or twice a week. Cheese for Jenny, who was nursing, fruit, things that wouldn’t go bad without a refrigerator.
This morning she saw the signs posted on her land without word one to her about putting them up or what was going on. danger: highly toxic, hazardous waste, keep out. Skulls and crossbones, the familiar radiation-hazard trefoil. She jumped down from the tractor and ran to the side of the silo where the tents had been. They were still there, but as Doris opened the flaps, she saw they’d been abandoned, including Jenny’s.
She marched to the silo’s front gate and confronted the soldier standing guard. “Who posted these notices on my land? When did they go up?”
The soldier couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, but he did summon someone with more authority. “Routine tests, ma’am, confirmed a hazard here. I’m sorry you weren’t notified. We were so concerned with getting the demonstrators out of harm’s way that we forgot to let you know. I’ll make sure Major Schreiber comes to see you as soon as he returns to the base. Just don’t try to pick any crops inside the posted area.”
She’d fought and railed and called them names: “pick crops,” as if alfalfa were apples growing on trees? They were condescending, they were ignorant.
“Yes, ma’am,” the junior officer said. “I’ll make sure Major Schreiber comes to see you.”
It was Lucinda who found Cady. When she came home from work that afternoon, home from injecting some bug into Dr. Kiel’s mice, and Doris told her what had happened, she drove down to the silo herself.
“I heard the baby. She was tucked under a sleeping bag, dehydrated and worn out, poor little mite. Best get her to a doctor and try to find what’s happened to Jenny.”
After that, everything blurred together in Doris’s mind. When they got to the car, Lucinda came over faint, a chill, she said, she’d be fine, just needed some water after running around in the hot sun. Doris drove Cady to the hospital, and while they were checking her into the pediatric unit, Lucinda fainted. She was dead by morning. Doris never left her side, lying next to her in the bed as she shivered and sweated her life away in the ICU.
“Did you see the cans, Dorrie?” she muttered once through her cracked lips. “Cans behind tents.”
Sometime in the middle of the night, Dr. Kiel had looked in. He’d been distraught, a surprise, since he didn’t seem like the kind of man to care about his technician. When the nurses took Lucinda out of Doris’s arms, they gave Doris an injection, told her to come back at once if she started feeling sick, come back in a week for a recheck.
Doris hadn’t bothered. What difference would it make? She didn’t want to put one foot in front of another on a morning where Lucinda wasn’t next to her in bed, waiting for her morning coffee. You’re up with the birds, farm girl. You can pamper me in the mornings. I’ll take care of you at night.
Sometime in that hard first week alone, alone except for Emerald coming back for the funeral, Doris had heard that Jenny Perec was dead. She’d driven off the road, off K-10 where it crossed the Wakarusa and landed in the river. People said she’d remembered she’d run away without her baby and was making a U-turn, going back to find Cady, and lost control of the car. And then the fire burned down the hippie tents. Probably set by Major Schreiber; he’d seemed like that kind of bully.
Doris didn’t believe in Jesus or heaven or any of those things. Lucinda was ambivalent, but she went into town to worship at St. Silas most Sundays—the music refreshed her spirit even if the pastor was a narrow-minded old fool.
Doris had wanted cremation, to spread the ashes over the garden where they’d sat on summer evenings smelling the honeysuckle, but Emerald was Lucinda’s daughter. She wanted a proper burial for her mother, and the daughter’s wishes trump a friend’s, every time. They did the whole thing, Doris in a hat that Emerald had chosen for her, the choir singing Lucinda’s favorite hymns, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “Amazing Grace,” the pastor preaching about Jesus and how our sister was in his arms, in glory, today.
Doris thought life was like a high-speed train where you kept leaving friends and brothers and lovers at stations along the route. Maybe when you died, you walked back down the tracks until you met each of the people you’d lost. You collected them all, brother Logan, mother, father, Lucinda, and you got to find a quiet garden where you sat and watched the sun go down, the huge red-gold Kansas sun sinking behind the waves of wheat, while you sipped a little bit of a martini that your beloved had mixed for you.
32
Carrying the Can
“That’s all I know,” Cady said. “Doris was the only person who would ever talk about my mom, but she never paid attention to who my father might have been. Lucinda might have known if it was one of Dr. Kiel’s students, Doris would say, but it wasn’t something they talked about.”
“I see,” I said, a meaningless phrase, because I saw nothing.
I wondered how Doris McKinnon ever found a market for her crops if they came from soil contaminated with radioactivity. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if the air force invented the contamination just to drive the remnants of the demonstrators away from the silo. Mid-August in 1983, people’s attention had waned; there hadn’t been any action since the Independence Day protest. The air force’s action hadn’t generated additional protests, at least not any covered by the Douglas County Herald or the Journal-World.
Dr. Kiel’s arriving at the hospital in the middle of the night to look in at his technician, that was a surprise as well. Of course, thirty-three years ago he might have been a more active, engaged person than he was today. But why had he claimed not to remember the Ferrings? Protective amnesia? Maybe all the Kiels were given to high drama.
“How could my mother have forgotten me?” Cady was weeping openly now. “I would have died if Lucinda
hadn’t found me, you know. How could a woman race away from toxic dangers and leave her own baby to die?”
I shifted unhappily in my chair but tried to find a reassuring strand to follow. “The memories that Doris gave you tell me your mother was a lively and vibrant woman who loved you deeply. She wouldn’t have left you if something hadn’t gone badly wrong with her. Perhaps the air force released some dangerous gas that poisoned your mother. Something like that could have impaired her mind and judgment. She might have had chemicals on her body and didn’t dare touch you for fear of injuring you, so she tucked you underneath the sleeping bag to protect you.”
Cady brightened. “I never thought of that. Maybe she put me under the sleeping bag to save me and went to try to get help. Doris used to say the six weeks she was alive with me, she bragged to everyone how I was going to grow up to save the world. What would she think if she knew all I was doing was teaching social studies to twelve-year-olds?”
“She’d think you were saving the world. She’d know you were raising many children to think clearly about the serious issues we all face on this planet.”
I leaned over to squeeze her hand, knocking the plate of chicken off my lap. Peppy bounded over: Cleanup in Aisle Five? I’m here, ready for work. This made us both laugh, breaking the tension. Cady squatted on the floor to help me pry chicken bones out of the dog’s mouth.
When we’d gotten the mess cleared up and Peppy was sulking in the bathroom, I pulled out my maps and asked Cady to show me where her mother had gone off the road.
“This is another thing that doesn’t make any sense,” Cady said. “See, she was on the old highway, which is maybe a half mile north of K-10, the one you probably drove today when you went out to the silo. They’d just opened the new K-10, so I guess if she was panicking, she didn’t think to go the extra distance.”
Cady pointed to the Kanwaka silo, five miles east of town, and Old K-10, which ran close to it. “But she was going east. If she thought she needed help, she should have driven the other way, back to Lawrence, to Gram or a hospital or something. Maybe you’re right, maybe she had some kind of brain damage or a seizure and didn’t know where she was or where she was going.”
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