by Neil Plakcy
Back at the office, I was wiping the dog’s paws and drying his fur once again when my cell rang. “Yo, yo, Rick,” I said, putting on my best Jersey accent. “How’s it hanging?”
“I got the results back on the bones. From damage to the skull, it looks like the cause of death was an impact with a blunt object. The victim was a Caucasian male of between seventeen and twenty-one, which fits the profile of a boy trying to avoid the draft.”
“Nothing more than that?”
“Height was between five-eight and five-ten. Good dental care, including exposure to fluoridated water. Once we find a record of someone missing who fits that description, we can compare dental records. Now that I have that information, I’m going to dive back into the missing persons reports. How are you doing with decoding that diary?”
“I’m working on it. But Brannigan changes his code every couple of pages so it’s going to take a while to crack it all. I’ve found one clue, though. Brannigan mentions 'the two last boys' they helped. I’m thinking that if there is a connection to the Vietnam era, then the bones have to belong to one of those two.”
“It’s a working hypothesis,” Rick said. “I’ll keep looking on my end. Let me know as soon as you find anything.”
I promised that I’d get back on it as soon as I got home. I felt the same kind of thrill I had when I was on verge of breaking into a protected site. At least this was legal work.
16 – Breakthrough
I closed up the office and drove home. The streets were littered with downed leaves, and the bare trees showed the first signs of the approaching winter. River Bend smelled fresh, after the wash of negative ions from the rain. After dinner, I sat at my desk with the pages of Brannigan’s cipher in front of me and thought about his determined opposition to involvement in Vietnam. Part of it came from his Quaker faith, but an equal part arose from his work as a teacher and headmaster. He could see no sense in educating young boys only to send them off to die.
I was fascinated by his passion, and by this brief exposure to a part of history I had lived through, but been too young to understand. I remembered the last traces of the anti-war movement in the 1970s, and the conflicts, even in a small town like Stewart’s Crossing, between veterans’ groups and hippies. Headlines about people spitting on men in uniform, songs like “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Jerry Vandeventer, the son of the local vet, had gone to Vietnam and come back with what today we’d diagnose as PTSD. His father’s office, Crossing Critters, was at the far end of the shopping center in downtown Stewart’s Crossing, between the State Store -- Pennsylvania’s state-run monopoly on liquor sales— and a little card and knickknack shop called Gertie’s Gifts, where I often spent my allowance.
I remembered coming out of Gertie’s once and seeing Jerry Vandeventer blast out of the State Store, yelling an inventive stream of curses about their refusal to sell him the vodka he wanted. Now I realize he must have been drunk, but back then I was amazed to see an adult act that way.
A heavyset black woman came out of the Laundromat on the other side of the State Store toting a packed basket of clean clothes. She shook her free hand and told him to shut the F up, because he was just a g-d baby killer.
He jumped on the hood of her car and began to kick cracks in her windshield with his steel-toed boots. She screamed, somebody in the State Store called the cops, and the vet came out in his white coat to try and calm his son down.
I hung back behind a column and watched until the cops got there. Then I got on my bicycle and rode for home as fast as I could. I found my mother in the kitchen, and I jumped up onto one of the bar stools around the table and began rattling the story off.
My mother shook her head. “It’s very sad,” she said. “Now you see why your cousin Harold waited to have that cyst removed from his back until after he turned twenty-six.”
I had no idea what she meant then, but I could tell she didn’t want to talk about the incident any more. It was only when I studied Vietnam in civics class in high school that I realized Harold’s medical condition had rendered him 4-F and that he had waited until he was over the draft age to have it repaired. He’d gone on to have a successful career as an accountant, while Jerry Vandeventer had driven his truck into the Delaware a year or two later after another drunken binge. I felt bad about what both of them had to go through – worse, of course, for Jerry. His father had closed the practice soon after and moved to Florida. I guess those memories were too much for him.
I went back to the cipher, cracking the second code more quickly once I understood what Brannigan was writing about. I didn’t find the information I was looking for on those last two boys – names, ages, hometowns -- but I learned a lot about the anti-war movement. One page I couldn’t figure was a list of two-word pairs; one had a third word. I assumed they were proper names, and they had their own special cipher. Were those the names of the boys? Or the volunteers who had helped them? I pushed that list aside for the next day, when I’d be fresh. Deciphering names was a whole lot harder than ordinary text, because there were so many fewer patterns.
It was after eleven when Rochester nudged me for his bedtime walk. I knew I should have gone to bed after we returned, but I was too keyed up to sleep, too intent on looking for information on those two boys. I was sure there was something in Brannigan’s notes, if I could only find it.
I was staring at the screen around midnight when Rochester came upstairs with his squeaky piano. He settled beside me and began gnawing on it, playing discordant notes. “You sound like me when I was studying with Edith Passis,” I said.
I looked back at the screen. “That’s it! Rochester, you’ve done it again. If this is a list of the volunteers John Brannigan recruited, then Edith’s name will be here. I have to look for the right pattern to break the cipher.”
I wrote E D I T H on a piece of paper, with P A S S I S under it. Then I looked for a first name of five letters and a last name of six. There were two matches. The third letter of Edith’s first name was I, and that should be repeated in the fifth letter of the last name.
But neither of the two matched. Did that mean Edith wasn’t really one of Brannigan’s volunteers? But why would she lie about something like that? Or was the list something else? The boys who had passed through his care? His contacts at other Meetings? People in Stewart’s Crossing who were sympathetic to the cause?
“Sorry, boy, seems like what I thought was a clue wasn’t really,” I said, reaching down to rub behind the dog’s ears. “But it was a good try. I’m going to go back to the regular entries and keep decoding them.”
He rolled over on his side and went to sleep. It was close to two in the morning by the time I found an entry about picking up two boys at the bus station in Philadelphia, Pete and Don.
“This is it!” I said, waking Rochester from his snooze. “This is the first time he’s picked up two boys at once. Either Pete or Don has to be the dead boy.” I hurried to finish deciphering the rest, then sat back to read what I had come up with.
“Each boy’s story breaks my heart,” Brannigan wrote. “Pete is from a poor family in West Virginia. He’s smart enough for a college deferment, but his family is too poor to spare him even a penny. Don is a farm boy, from a small town outside Pittsburgh. He wants to stay at home and work the land, and he tried for the II C Agricultural Deferment. But he has three older brothers who work with his father so he was denied.”
There was no mention of a last name for either boy. Either Brannigan was being overly careful or he just didn’t know that information. He wrote of leaving them in the Meeting House in Stewart’s Crossing overnight. He showed them the space behind the false wall, telling them to hide there if anyone came looking for them.
“When I returned to the Meeting House on that cold morning, Pete was waiting for me in the main room. He told me that he and Don had stayed up long into the night, talking about Canada. Don had decided he couldn’t live in a stran
ge country, and left at first light to hitchhike back home.”
Brannigan continued, “I had a small amount of money put aside to buy the boys tickets on the train from Trenton to New York, and give them each a few dollars for food. But with only one boy to send on, I had enough to buy Pete a ticket straight to Montreal. I hope God will be with him, and the news we have heard about the ease of crossing the border is correct.”
I was so excited that I had to get up and pace around the house for a few minutes. Brannigan had met Pete in the worship area of the Meeting House, which implied that Brannigan hadn’t checked the space behind the false wall himself. Two boys had gone into that space – but only one had come out. The dead boy had to be Don.
Rochester must have thought I was going to eat something, or take him for a walk, because he kept following on my heels. I couldn’t sit back down for a few minutes—that finding had electrified me and I had to wait for the aftershocks to fade – similar to what I felt when I’d committed a great hack, breaking in somewhere on line I wasn’t supposed to be. I drank some water from the refrigerator and gave Rochester a tiny T-bone treat.
I walked over to the sliding glass doors that led out to my courtyard. A pair of headlights raked across the glass as some night owl passed by. The motion-sensor lights on the house across from me clicked on.
I stood there in the momentary glow. It was possible, of course, that Pete was telling the truth, and that once I found out Don’s last name I would discover that he had left that Meeting House alive, and Rick and I would be back at square one. But something in my gut told me we were on the right track at last.
Rochester sat on his butt and woofed at me once. “I know, boy, it’s late, and we ought to go to bed. I can look for Pete and Don’s last names tomorrow.”
Suddenly I remembered the list of two-word pairs. Would Pete and Don be listed there? I galloped up the stairs to the second floor, two steps at a time, Rochester right behind me. I slid into my desk chair and pulled over the list. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a match for Pete, Peter, Don or Donald.
I looked at the clock above my computer. It was way too late to call Rick, even with news this important. There wasn’t anything he could do until the morning, so I ought to let him sleep. Instead I composed a quick email to him with Brannigan’s entry about the two boys, and hit send.
17 – Friends and Colleagues
Though he knew I’d been up late the night before, Rochester wanted to go for his regular morning walk, and he wouldn’t stop licking my face until I got up to take him. As we returned, my cell rang and I had to scramble to get it out of my pocket.
“This is great, Steve,” Rick said. “And you got all this information from Brannigan’s notes?”
Was he worried that I’d hacked in somewhere? But where? Would he always assume the worst of me? I tamped down my irritation and said, “Yeah. The guy kept a pretty detailed journal. Do you think you can do anything with that information?”
“It’s not enough to move forward, but it’s a start,” he said. “We know he was from a small farm town near Pittsburgh, with three older brothers.”
“And you have a date of disappearance.”
“Unfortunately there’s no match to any of the missing persons reports I went through, even ones from years later.”
“Are there any records from the Selective Service of guys who didn’t report for induction?” I asked.
“Not that I’ve been able to find. Since those guys may still be alive, it might be a privacy violation to list them somewhere. Jimmy Carter issued an executive order in 1977 that terminated prosecution of any violators of the Military Selective Service Act and granted amnesty to any draft dodgers living in other countries. So there might not be any legal justification for the existence of such a list.”
“But the list must exist,” I said. “Even it’s not public.”
“Don’t even go there,” Rick said. “You are not hacking into any government database.”
“Actually I was thinking of the Freedom of Information Act,” I said. “But it would probably take too long to get the records that way.”
“And it makes sense that our victim is not showing up on any missing persons reports,” Rick said. “His family thought he was going to Canada. They wouldn’t have reported him missing to the police.”
“You get anything else?” I asked.
“Nada. I spent yesterday talking to members of the Meeting, but no one knew anything about the false wall or about Brannigan’s group.”
I heard him talk to someone away from the phone, then he said, “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
As I drove to work, I wondered if there was more information I could find based on what I’d learned from Brannigan’s notes – legitimately. Don had come from western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Suppose he had been helped by Friends out there?
When I got to my office, I checked online, and there was a Friends Meeting in Pittsburgh, with a phone number. I knew I ought to ask Rick to follow up with them – but would they respond well to a police investigation, especially one so far removed from their own Meeting?
Before I could think too far ahead, I dialed the number. As the phone rang, I thought about what I could say that would get someone to talk to me. By the time a woman answered, I had an idea.
“I’m a professor at Eastern College in Leighville, outside Philadelphia,” I said. “I’m doing some research on the involvement of the Society of Friends in the anti-war movement in Pennsylvania. Is there anyone in your Meeting who might have been there during the 1960s who I could speak to?”
“That was a long time ago.” The woman’s voice quavered, making her sound like she was about Edith’s age, which was good – she might know something about the past.
“Were you involved with the Meeting back then?” I asked, my hope rising.
“Yes, I was. But I didn’t have anything to do with those protests. I was already married and had my first child by then.”
Oh, well, I thought.
“Amos Carter, though, he was a young firebrand back then. He might be able to help you. Let me see if I can find his number.”
My hope soared again. “Here it is,” she said, when she returned to the line. She read me the number, which had a 267 area code. “He retired a few years back and moved to the eastern part of the state to be closer to his son.”
“Thank you very much for your help, ma’am,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
I turned back to the computer and Googled the phone number she had given me. I got a long list of websites that indicated it was a cellular number assigned to a carrier in the Philadelphia area.
When I added “Amos Carter” to the search, only one result came up, but it was good enough. It was a list of the members of the Bristol Friends Meeting with their emergency contacts, and it was dated earlier that summer. That meant Carter was nearby, because Bristol was about a half hour south of Stewart’s Crossing, along the Delaware. It also meant he was probably still alive.
It wasn’t up to me to talk to him, though. This was Rick’s case, though I hoped he’d keep me in the loop. So I called him. “I found a lead for you to follow,” I said when he answered. I told him about Amos Carter, and the possibility that he’d been involved in helping the boy from western Pennsylvania escape the draft.
“Good job, buddy,” he said. “You say he’s in Bristol somewhere?”
“Think so.”
“I’ll call him right now.”
“Great. Let me know what you come up with, all right? And if I can do anything else for you.”
I had a committee meeting at the Eastern campus at three, so I bundled Rochester into the car and drove down to Leighville, following a Saab wagon with the bumper sticker “Caution: Farting Beagle.” I made sure to stay a good distance behind it.
Even though I was an administrator, and wasn’t working on campus anymore, my contract required me to participate in at leas
t one college committee. The previous year I hadn’t been hired full-time until January, so I had been placed on the graduation task force. This year I got to choose for myself, and I picked the technology committee, which worked with the instructional technology staff on questions like new computers for the lab, new software for testing, and so on.
I didn’t mention my criminal history to anyone else on the committee, though I did say that I’d worked in high-tech in Silicon Valley for ten years before returning east. I’d kept up to date with new developments, eyeing faster processors and expanded RAM with envy. And of course I was hyper aware of any new anti-hacking software, developments in protection, peer-to-peer file sharing, and the latest iteration, torrents. Since so many of these developments came from college kids, staying involved with technology at the college level was an opportunity to ride whatever tide was rising.
Lili was out at a class, so I got the key to her office from her secretary. Harrow Hall was a modern building, donated by an alumnus who’d made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, and at his request was shaped like a giant capsule, with wrap-around windows. Behind her desk, Lili had hung a montage of photos she had taken. A young Afghan girl played jacks with a female U.S. soldier in camo gear; the Baghdad skyline was lit by a tracery of what looked almost like fireworks; a tiny monkey, looking almost human, stared at the camera from the safety of a tree in a tropical rain forest. The grim beauty of a panoramic shot of a refugee camp in Darfur, taken from a helicopter.
Student artwork rested on easels and stands -- a woven tapestry, a rain-smeared photo of the college chapel, an iridescent black ceramic pot. I left Rochester there with an admonition to behave. Then I walked over to Fields Hall, where my office had been, feeling nostalgic for all that had happened since I returned to Eastern. I opened the door to the conference room for a lovely dark-skinned woman wearing a white jacket with a pleated back that hovered just above the waistline and snakeskin high heels. She was Marie-Carmel Etienne, and she taught in the computer science department.