Cards in the Cloak

by Jeremy Bursey

  ***

  If there was one thing he’d learned from his trip to Independence, it was that thirty years’ time had infected his mission with disease, and every day that he allowed to pass without digging into this mystery was a day that another family would come closer to fading out of his reach. So, when he searched the next home, and the next home, and the next home, he did not stop, but he kept going to the next home, and the next home, and soon he had not only explored all of Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the major checkpoints in between, but he had traveled all the way up to Seattle, and all the way east to Boise, and then came back down to San Francisco, where he got back onto the remnants of the old Lincoln Highway, and took it clear back to Chicago. And when he got home, he was three weeks overdue, no closer to solving the mystery than when he’d started, and had a lot of making up to do to a pissed-off Nancy. But he did manage to cross more than twenty names off his list.

  And he was also able to locate the Geirgard name in the Iowa census during his trip back to Chicago. When he was in Des Moines, he had checked with the register and found that the parents of Samson Geirgard had been living in Iowa City since at least 1940, but based on what the old farmer had told him, he assumed they had actually been there since about 1931. When he had visited the home listed as their most current residence, the actual current resident, a younger gentleman in his thirties, had explained that Eleanor Geirgard, matriarch of the Geirgard family, had passed away in 1947, and any surviving memory of Samson Geirgard would have passed away with her, as she was the last of that older generation. When Norman had asked whether the gentleman had ever met Eleanor Geirgard, he simply smiled.

  “She’s my wife’s grandmother,” he said. “So, needless to say, I stayed far away from that old witch.”

  When Norman asked him if the name Maxie McWalter sounded familiar, the man shook his head and frowned. Norman had treated that as the confirmation that he could check Samson Geirgard off of his list.

  It would be ten years before he’d get the chance to strike off the next name.