by Neil Plakcy
“You still growing the stuff?” Rick asked.
“No, sir. Soon after that, Brian left for California, and Charley and me had enough to do keeping the farm going.” He looked at Rick. “I had to come and see this place,” he said. “And to ask you a question.”
Lori took her dad’s hand and squeezed.
“Do you all think Brian could have tracked Donny down here, and killed him?” he asked. His voice wobbled, and in it I could hear the pain and dread that had to be in his heart.
“That’s a big question, sir,” Rick said. “You knew your brother. Was Brian capable of that?”
“Before he went to Nam I would have said no way at all. But the boy who came back – he wasn’t my brother Brian. He wouldn’t talk much about what he did over there, but I know that he killed people. Soldiers, but also ordinary people, old women and little children. He said that you never knew who your enemy was, so you had to protect yourself.”
“You said Brian moved to California. You have a current address on him?”
He shook his head. “We tried to reach him when our pop died, maybe twenty years ago now. Phone number belonged to somebody else, mail came back ‘addressee unknown.’ Didn’t have the Internet then, either.”
“It’s why I started that family tree you found,” Lori said. “I wanted to know what happened to my uncles.”
I looked at her. She wore a simple gold wedding band, and I imagined that she lived near her parents and looked after them. She was that type of woman.
“Did you find any records?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I tried a bunch of places but couldn’t find a trace of him.”
My fingers tingled. Here was a challenge. Could I find Brian Lamprey? Or discover what had happened to him? We all stood up. Arnold and Lori were staying at a motel out near the highway that night, heading back to Zelienople the next day.
“Thank you for meeting with us,” Arnold said. “At least I know what happened to one of my brothers.”
Rick and I watched them walk to Arnold’s truck. Lori got into the driver’s seat and pulled into traffic expertly.
“So Don wasn’t such an innocent kid,” I said as she drove away. “You think his brother could have tracked him down and killed him?”
“The crime scene team didn’t find any traces of marijuana,” he said. “So Don must have sold it before he went into that false wall.”
“Or his brother tracked him down, took the dope and the money, and then killed him.”
“That’s a possibility. I know you – you’re itching to see if you can find Brian Lamprey. But you’ve already screwed up once. Don’t do it again.”
I wanted to argue that if I could find Brian Lamprey, I might be able to give Arnold the same sense of peace that he’d gotten from knowing what happened to Don. But Rick was right – I’d already violated my promise not to hack once. Sure, he and Lili seemed to have forgiven me – but how many mistakes could I make before I lost them both?
It was safer to shift the conversation away from the last missing brother. “Maybe Peter Breaux found that Don had all that money, and killed him for it,” I said. “Or maybe Don tried to sell the dope to someone in Stewart’s Crossing, and that person killed him. And don’t forget Vera Lee or Eben Hosford. There’s something suspicious to me about her joining the Meeting just in time to serve on the renovation committee – and him being on that committee, too, when he’s so opposed to the work.”
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” he said. “I have a whole lot of possibilities to look into and I’m not going to pick any one theory until I have some evidence.”
28 – Living off the Grid
As I drove up Sarajevo Court toward my townhouse, I spotted Bob Freehl, the retired cop, sitting on a folding chair in his driveway. He was a balding guy in his early seventies, wearing flip-flops, plaid shorts, and a T-shirt stretched over his belly that read “I’m Tired of Being My Wife’s Arm Candy.”
I had a flash of inspiration, and as soon as we got home I hooked up Rochester’s leash and walked back down to Bob’s. Rochester strained to rush up to him, and as Bob extended a hand, Rochester dropped to the ground and rolled onto his back so that Bob could scratch his belly.
“Hey, Bob,” I said. “You used to be a cop in Stewart’s Crossing, didn’t you?”
“Long time ago,” he said.
“Were you working here in the sixties?”
“You mean before the town got crapped up with all these city commuters? Sure.”
When I was a kid, Stewart’s Crossing was a small town surrounded by farmlands. The Lakes, where my family lived, was the only suburban development. Many of my classmates lived on farms, and when I took the late bus home from Pennsbury High we passed acre after acre of crops and cattle grazing. My parents were amazed, once I learned to drive, at how well I knew my way around those country roads.
By the time I left for college, I-95 had sliced through the hills and valleys, making it easier to dash into Philly. Gas stations and shopping centers sprung up at the interchanges, and hundreds of acres of farmland metamorphosed into developments of single-family houses, the same models repeated endlessly, skinny saplings the only landscaping.
I sat down cross-legged on Bob’s driveway in front of him. The pavement was cold beneath my butt. “The sixties were a pretty wild time, from all I’ve heard,” I said. “Any of that filter down here?”
He shrugged. “We had a couple of anti-war protests at the town hall,” he said. “Used to be a bunch of hippies who camped out in the woods behind the Meeting House, and we rousted them a few times.”
“Any drugs?”
“When the wind was right, you could almost get a contact high from driving down Main Street,” he said. “Pulled a couple of ‘em in for possession but never could find out who the dealers were.”
Rochester got tired of being petted and jumped up. I scrambled to my feet. “Thanks, Bob,” I said. “Always interesting to hear about life before I started paying attention.”
Rochester tugged me forward, and I stumbled over my feet as I tried to keep up with him. “Who’s walking who?” Bob asked.
“Only the dog knows, and he’s not talking,” I called back to him.
When I got back to the house I called Rick and told him what Bob Freehl had told me. “Maybe Don Lamprey smelled the smoke and went back into the woods there,” I said. “Mrs. Holt told us that she’d mentioned that’s where the hippies hung out. He could have tried to sell the dope he had with him, and gotten killed.”
“How’d he get back into the Meeting House then?” Rick asked.
“Hey, you’re the detective. I’m just the idea guy.”
He snorted and hung up.
I wanted to look for information on Brian Lamprey that Lori might not have been able to find, but I knew that if I got started I’d be tempted to hack. Instead, I focused on Eben Hosford. I was intrigued by the idea that he was living off the grid. How could someone do that, in the twenty-first century, in a metropolitan area like the Philadelphia suburbs? I turned on my laptop and started searching.
Rick had checked property records and driver’s licenses so I didn’t bother with those. I also figured he’d looked for a phone account or one with PECO, the power company that supplied Bucks County, so I skipped those, too.
I didn’t expect Eben to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or any of the other social networking sites, but I checked anyway. No results. I sat back in my chair. How could someone live without connections to the modern world? He’d have to be out in the woods somewhere, probably with his own well for water, a garden for food, and some kind of generator, probably solar or wind-powered.
But every inch of Bucks County belonged to someone, either a private owner or a public entity. He could have been camping out in the back of a park somewhere, but I doubted that. He’d have been caught years before.
So that meant that someone owned the property where he lived. A relativ
e? I went to the property assessor’s database and searched under his last name. Sure enough, there were a lot of Hosfords who owned property in Bucks County. I opened a mapping program and started to check each address, looking for a likely spot.
This was a good, legal project for my information skills, I thought. Unfortunately, the Hosfords were a farming family, and there were a half-dozen properties where he could have been living, a crazy old uncle or cousin camping out somewhere.
I sat back in my chair, thinking. Then I looked around for Rochester. He wasn’t in sight, and he wasn’t making noise. Not a good combination. Usually if he slept, he did so somewhere around me.
“Rochester!” I got up and started looking around the house for him, calling his name. He wasn’t in the bedroom, either on my bed or beside it. He wasn’t sprawled on the cool tile of the master bathroom.
I went downstairs, and from the staircase I saw him on the sofa, his gold coat a contrast to the dull brown upholstery. He’d kicked the throw pillows to the floor, and he had his paws crossed. He was licking something brown and square he had clasped between them. “What do you have in your mouth?” I demanded, as I jumped down the last couple of steps and hurried over to him.
“That’s my wallet!” I said, tugging it away from him. As I did, my driver’s license and credit cards spilled out to the floor. “You weren’t planning to order some doggie treats online with my credit cards, were you?”
He hadn’t hurt the wallet, just covered the leather with a thin layer of spit. I wiped it off on my pants, and leaned down to pick up the scattered cards.
Nobody’s driver’s license picture ever looks good, and mine was no different. My eyes were wide open, as if someone had poked me, and I had a five o’clock shadow and a cowlick. With my name beneath my picture it looked like a booking mug shot.
I rarely used my full name, Steven Jeffrey Levitan. I had been named for my mother’s father, whose name in Hebrew was Shmuel Chaim. As was the custom then, my parents only used the initials of his name to provide me with an English one. And somehow, the “ch” in Chaim had translated into a J.
I was glad; there wasn’t a single H name I liked. Howard? Hubert? Horatio? I was glad to have Jeffrey. One year when I went on a travel camp, I’d told everyone my name was S. Jeffrey Levitan – call me Jeff. Didn’t seem like me, so I went back to Steve.
Brain flash. Had Eben Hosford done the same thing, discarded his first name and used his middle? I hurried back upstairs to the computer, after petting Rochester a couple of times and thanking him for the inspiration.
There were five Hosfords who owned an acre or more, where someone could live off the grid. One was in a woman’s name so I skipped that for a moment. The other Hosfords were Jacob, Franklin, William, and Moses.
I did a quick experiment, searching for information on each man with the middle name Eben. The only match was Moses Eben Hosford, whose property was about a mile outside Stewart’s Crossing, on the road to Newtown. I switched to the satellite view in the map application and zoomed in on the property address.
It was overgrown and I could barely make out the shape of the house in the middle of all the trees, a rectangle with a front step and a narrow driveway. What was visible, though, was a solar panel on the house’s flat tin roof.
I was so pleased with myself. I’d found Eben Hosford without doing any hacking, just using my instincts and my basic knowledge. To keep from gloating, which I knew I’d do if I spoke to Rick, I sent him an email with Hosford’s full name and address. I thought briefly about searching for Brian Lamprey, since I was on a roll, but Rochester wanted to play, and the urge passed.
When I woke up Tuesday morning, I was still curious about Eben Hosford. I dressed for dog-walking and let Rochester have a quick pee in the front yard, then loaded him into the car. “Change in routine, puppy,” I said, scratching his head. “But you’ll like it, I promise.”
I drove into downtown Stewart’s Crossing, the streets full of early morning commuters, moms on school runs, and the elderly, who always had to have the first doctor’s appointment, the first slot at the garage. I never understood that; why worry about waiting around when that’s all you had to do anyway?
I turned inland at Ferry Road, passing the old Victorian library, long since converted to a community center; the pharmacy where we’d gotten our medications; and the Women’s Exchange, where my father had once threatened to trade my mother in for a pair of twenty-five-year-olds (she told him at fifty he wouldn’t know what to do with even one of them.)
About a mile from the center of town, I pulled into the parking lot of a strip shopping center on the right side of the street – karate dojo, beauty supply shop, Peruvian restaurant. It was too early for any of them to be open so I had my choice of spots.
“Let’s go for our walk,” I said to Rochester, and he tumbled out of the car. We waited for a break in traffic, then scooted across Ferry Road. Rochester sniffed and peed as we climbed a block of cracked sidewalk, skirting squashed osage oranges and downed maple branches.
At the first corner, we turned left into a neighborhood of old houses, two and three-story clapboard with broad front porches, hundred-year-old oaks and maples in the yards, the occasional Big Wheel or skateboard propped up against a wall. As we kept walking, the lots got bigger and the houses smaller. After about a quarter of a mile we got to our destination, the single-story bungalow owned by Moses Eben Hosford.
It was surrounded by a chain link fence with a padlock on the gate. Nobody had mowed the lawn for years. Small bushes and saplings had sprung up, and I could barely see the outline of the house behind a screen of trees. Fading paint that had once been green, broken downspout, one shutter hanging askew. An old bicycle leaned against the front wall of the house, and off to the side I saw what I’d always thought of as a wishing well – a stone cylinder with a hand crank and a peaked wooden roof.
I was looking through the chain-link when the door to the house popped open and Eben Hosford stepped out on to the porch with a shotgun in his hand. He raised it and it looked like he had me in his scope.
29 – Buried in Work
“Just walking the dog!” I called and waved, and urged Rochester forward. When we were far enough away I muttered, “Not exactly a friendly neighbor, boy.”
We kept walking until we came to a cross street we could turn down, and then another that led us back to Ferry Road. As long as I was near downtown, I decided to stop at The Chocolate Ear for a café mocha to go and a biscuit for Rochester.
I turned on my Bluetooth and called Rick while I drove, and told him I’d done some recon on Eben Hosford’s house.
“When are you going to recognize that you don’t have a badge?” he demanded.
“Anyway, he’s home now, if you want to talk to him. Looks like he gets around on a bicycle. Oh, and by the way, he’s got a shotgun.”
Rick grumbled a few more epithets as I pulled up a block from the café. “You talk to Tamsen since Saturday night?” I asked.
“I don’t need your help, Levitan,” he said. “Tamsen comes with a lot of baggage – the dead husband, the kid, the whole Quaker thing. We had a good time together, but I’m having second thoughts. I’m not sure I’m ready to jump into the deep end of the pool.”
“You know how it was when we were kids,” I said. “You close your eyes, hold your nose and jump.”
Good advice for me, I thought. It was time I jumped into the pool with Lili. Close my eyes, reach for her hand, and jump. I loved her, and I could be myself with her, not always trying to be the person she expected. I had the benefit of cell phones and email and social media posts, things my father hadn’t had access to when he was away from my mother, to let Lili know she was in my thoughts. And I didn’t have to worry that she was sitting by the phone, waiting for me to call, for me to show up for dinner or drop by her office. She had her own life, and I liked that about her.
I just had to find the right time, and the right way, to tell her
how I felt.
I left Rochester in the car and walked into the café. The lemon-yellow walls never failed to cheer me up, and I loved sounding out the names on the Art Deco posters for French foods: Orangina, Pates Baronis, Beurre de Normandie and Chocolat Escoffier. She’d ordered her pastry display case from France and chosen the chairs, tables, even the floor tile to recreate the ambiance of the cafés she loved.
Gail was manning the register, and there were a half-dozen patrons ahead of me. No one came in behind me, though, and I could see the relief on Gail’s face when I got to the register.
“No minions this morning?” I asked, as she started making my coffee. She had a part-time waitress and help from her best friend as well as her mother and grandmother.
“Grandma has the flu and Mom’s taking care of her. Ginny’s youngest has pinkeye, which is contagious. And Mindy’s back in school this term.”
“How was your dinner with Declan on Sunday?”
“It was great. Too good, in fact, because it made me realize that I don’t have time for a relationship. I’m up early every morning baking and by the end of the day I fall into bed.” The door behind me jingled and a group of the red hat ladies trouped in, waving and calling hello to Gail.
“Poor Aunt Gail,” I said to Rochester, when I slid back into the car next to him. “She works too hard. And now my matchmaking is falling apart. Aunt Gail, Uncle Rick, even Mark.” I looked over at him. “You understand what I’m doing, don’t you, puppy? I love Mama Lili and I feel so blessed with the way my life is going, I just want all my friends to be as happy.”
He nosed me, whether in sympathy for my plight or because he wanted the biscuit. I wouldn’t give it to him in the car because I didn’t want to have to vacuum up all the crumbs, which put him in a mood. I left him in the kitchen with his bowl food, which he refused to eat as long as there was a biscuit in the neighborhood.