Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  Billing: Thomas M. and Rose Wallace (pts./s.a.)

  Entered: 9/68

  Major: PolSc

  Graduated: Inv.withd. 1/70

  Woody tried to keep his hands from shaking as he read the information. 5' 10" and 158 pounds was within hailing distance of Keith Aarons's vital statistics at that time. And a poli-sci major would have been ripe pickings for Keith. But what did "Inv.withd." mean?

  "I think I've got my man," Woody told the receptionist. "But what's this?" and he pointed to the enigmatic abbreviations.

  "Involuntary withdrawal," she said. "Seems to fit what you thought. It means that he left school for some reason without making a formal statement. Maybe just stopped attending classes, hit the road, who knows?"

  "Would that information be here somewhere?"

  "Yes, but that's confidential. You couldn't get access to that."

  "It says 1/70," Woody said, pointing at the card. "Would that be when he stopped attending classes, or something else?"

  "Oh, that's probably when he was withdrawn. It would be the end of the first semester. If he left any time during that fall semester, he would have gotten all incompletes, and then been withdrawn if he hadn't re-registered for the spring."

  Woody thanked her, jotted down the boy's parents' names, phone number, and address, and left the building.

  It was only three o'clock, so he drove to the county courthouse and asked the clerk if there was a missing persons file from 1969 or 1970 on a Benjamin Wallace. The clerk looked at him with bored eyes and asked if he was a representative of a law enforcement agency. Woody said he was not.

  "Then what's your interest in this person?"

  Woody gave him the story about the song, but the clerk showed no recognition. "One moment," he said, and disappeared behind a opaque paned door. When he came back in ten minutes, holding, Woody noticed, a fresh cup of coffee, he nodded his head at Woody. "That person is on file, yes."

  "Ah." Woody nodded back. "May I, uh, see it?"

  The clerk made his head go back and forth rather than up and down. "Oh no. It's still an open file. So unless you're a law enforcement official or the representative of a law enforcement agency, you're not permitted access to that file."

  "So he's still missing?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Benjamin Wallace. If the file's open, that means he's still missing?"

  "It means the file's still open. That's all I can say about it."

  It was enough. Woody nodded, but didn't thank the man.

  Back at the Holiday Inn, he called Pittsburgh directory assistance, and learned that Thomas Wallace's phone number had not changed. Over a light dinner in the coffee shop, Woody decided what he would tell the man—that he was a classmate of Ben's who had been thinking about him lately, and wondered if he had ever turned up. Just curious. Curious to know if the loose ends had ever been tied up.

  It was 6:30 in the evening when he called the Wallace home. The phone rang four times, then was picked up by a machine. "This is Tom Wallace," a voice said. "I'm not in, so you can leave your message at the tone and I'll get back to you."

  The beep came, but Woody left no message. He called several times that evening, and tried again the next morning, but the only answer was the dull, mechanical sounding voice of the older man.

  All right then. Woody had to know. So if the man didn't want to answer his phone, he would go see him. He had to drive back to Pittsburgh anyway.

  He reached the outskirts of Pittsburgh in less than an hour, but it took another forty-five minutes to find Park Circle. It was in a suburban area west of the city. Woody thought the ranch style development might have been built in the mid-sixties to house the ever more affluent steel workers.

  The Wallace house was one of five in a cul-de-sac, and Woody pulled into the driveway. There was a car visible through the garage windows. Woody went to the door and rang the bell, but there was no answer.

  "Hey!"

  He turned and saw an elderly man on his hands and knees, digging in a garden. "You lookin' for Tom?"

  "Tom Wallace, yes."

  "He's fishin'. Won't be back till Sunday."

  Woody nodded. "What about Mrs. Wallace?"

  The man shook his head. "Rose died about five years back.”

  “Sorry to hear that."

  "You knew her?" asked the man, as if familiarity was a prerequisite for sympathy.

  "No," Woody said guiltily. "No, I didn't. Maybe you could help me out then."

  "You sellin' anything?"

  Woody grinned and shook his head. "No. I just wanted to find out about their son. Ben? I went to school with him, and I just happened to be in the city, and was wondering . . ." Woody stopped talking.

  The man's face had gone sour, and he was pushing himself to his feet, brushing off the knees of his dark green pants. "Shame," he said. "A real shame."

  "He . . . never showed up?"

  "No. Never did. He talked about going out to California, so Tom and Rose figured he might've tried to hitch out there. Only thing is, he didn't take a thing with him. All his stuff was still in his dorm room."

  "Didn't that seem kind of strange?"

  The man squinted at Woody. "You said you knew him.”

  “I did. Not very well, though."

  "Well, if you knew him at all, you'd know what kind of communist stuff he babbled about, not believing in private property and all that." The man's eyes narrowed impossibly further. "Hey," he said. "You a reporter?"

  There was suspicion there, but there was also a flare of interest, and Woody decided to capitalize on it. "Ah. You found me out."

  "I knew it. Paper? Magazine?"

  "I'm a freelance, but I hope that Time picks this one up." Time, he thought. Jesus. If you lie, might as well lie big. The man's eyes were alight now.

  "Time, huh? What's it about?"

  "I'm doing a piece on the runaways of the sixties—you know, the kids like Ben Wallace who dropped out, ran away to San Francisco or wherever, and whether or not they ever reunited with their families. In fact," Woody went on, his mind racing, "it was knowing Ben slightly in college that gave me the idea."

  The man was smiling now. "You won't get much out of Tom that I can't tell you. Ben never came back. The cops tried to trace him, but couldn't find a thing. Rose never stopped hoping, though. In fact, every year she took out a couple classified ads in the San Francisco and New York and L.A. papers. Got some responses, too. But it was never Ben. People tried to make her think they were Ben, asking her to send money and things." He shook his head, brushed again at his knees. "Somethin' how cruel people can be."

  "Yes," Woody said. "It is."

  "That's really all there is to tell. I guess you'll want to talk to Tom anyway, though, huh? Human interest and all."

  "No, you've told me enough. And I have other places to go, families to visit."

  "You, uh, want my name? For the article?" Woody smiled and nodded. "It's Edward Mihalick. M-I-H . . . aren't you gonna write this down?"

  Woody tapped his temple. "All up here."

  "M-I-H-A-L-I-C-K," the man said, looking dubious. "You gonna keep looking for Ben?"

  "I don't know, Mr. Mihalick. You think it would do any good?"

  Mihalick twisted his mouth, and shot a spray of spit onto the lawn. "No," he said. "No, I think Ben's dead. Maybe he was murdered on his way out to California, maybe he died out there where nobody knew him. I think he's long dead, though I don't know how it happened."

  I do, thought Woody with a mixture of horror and certainty. I do.

  Chapter 26

  Woody, without solid evidence, still felt certain what had happened. Keith had politically seduced the younger student, talked him into helping blow up the ROTC building, and gotten him to plant the bomb, which had gone off early. Then, weighing the options of being a live convict or a dead martyr, Keith had chosen the latter, taking the chance that Ben Wallace's body would be identified as his own.

  But there was also the possib
ility that Keith and Ben Wallace had changed roles—that Keith had truly died, and Ben Wallace had become Pan. But in that case, Woody thought, wouldn't Pan have existed in the track of existence in which Tracy had died?

  No, because then Ben Wallace wouldn't have gone to the ROTC building with Keith in the first place.

  Would he?

  Jesus. Oh Jesus, it made his head hurt to think about it, and it was the only thing he could think about.

  He had to do one more thing now. He had to find out everything he could about Pan, read every note ever published, examine every act, study every nuance of violence to see if there was anything he recalled of Keith Aarons in them. Deeds, even anonymous ones, could bear signatures of a personality as much as the music he wrote bore the traces of his own character. If there was something Keith had left behind, some hint from when he had been his friend, Woody would know.

  He checked into the Holiday Inn at University Center, and that evening went to the library of the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to trace Pan's career chronologically. He was surprised to find that no books had been written about the shadowy figure except for a few paperback originals the library did not carry, and which, if he could believe the book review journals, were nothing but sensationalistic and relatively worthless chronicles of the crimes and their aftermaths.

  He started with the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for 1972, and worked his way forward in time. He read everything he could find on the murder of Mrs. Thomas Feeley, which seemed to be the first of Pan's acts, but found nothing that linked the act to Keith. What, Woody wondered, had he been doing for the three years between the explosion and the Feeley killing? Priming the pump with hatred? Oiling the engine of destruction with revolutionary tracts and the companionship of others who felt the same animosity toward corporate Amerika?

  Woody read on, feeding rolls of microfilm into the machines, pushing the buttons to make the wheels turn, months and years pass in a monochromatic blur.

  The next act he found that could be attributed to Pan was the slaying of John Reyminster, a True Value hardware store clerk in Aliquippa, a town just northwest of Pittsburgh. Reyminster had been found bound and stabbed to death in an alley behind the hardware store on February 8, 1973. Though Woody read every story listed, none printed the text of the note that had been left with the body. Most, however, reproduced the one-character signature of the stylized hoof print, and stated that the man had been slain because he worked for a store that sold paint manufactured by Thomas Feeley's company.

  Most of the stories and many accompanying editorials condemned the act as something worse than murder, an atrocity committed by a mind directed by an insanely malformed sense of justice. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette stated that it "brings to a new low the already abysmal acts of terrorism that plague modern life." Even the responses in the counterculture press were negative.

  Woody found a detail in several of the stories that bolstered his suspicions. It was a mention of an eyewitness who had seen someone near the alley at the time of the murder, someone the witness identified by name. The witness was not named in any of the stories, but was referred to as a teacher in the Aliquippa School District. The stories further reported that the testimony was dismissed upon learning that the suspect named had died three years earlier "in the process of performing a terrorist act."

  Had someone seen Keith? And if they had, how had they recognized him? The answer was simple—they must have been classmates. Iselin turned out a large portion of western Pennsylvania's teachers, so it was not unlikely that the witness had gone to Iselin with Keith and recognized him three years later.

  Woody read every story, but none named the repudiated witness. He read on until the library closed, grabbed a small pizza on the way back to his hotel room, and slept poorly.

  The next morning he returned to the library and continued his research, appalled at the seemingly senseless murders of store owners, clerks, warehouse workers, secretaries, and others whose connections to corporations Pan (or Keith, as Woody had started to think of him) condemned were absurdly tenuous.

  He's crazy, Woody thought time and again. He's more than a fanatic, he's insane. Such a person would be capable of anything.

  It got worse. The bombings began in 1976. The targets had been corporate headquarters, branch offices, and, in one case, the visitor's center of an oil corporation, in which four elementary school students on a field trip were killed, and seventeen more were injured.

  Going through those three years worth of stories took Woody all day, but that was nothing compared to the stories generated by the string of assassinations that had begun in 1979 with the death of Armand Hammer. The Reagan shooting three years later had inspired so many millions of words of print that Woody despaired of ever finding amidst the celluloid rolls of verbiage any clues that would further link Pan to Keith Aarons.

  He spent two more days reading about the incident. He called Tracy every night, apologized for the time spent away from her, but promised that he would be home soon. And every night she sounded more concerned, upset with him that he would not tell her what he was doing, what was the nature of the loose ends he was supposedly tying up. Tonight her impatience was greater than before.

  "I want to know," she said, and her voice sounded cold over the line. "What are you doing, Woody? What are you looking for?"

  "It's . . . just something I don't understand about what happened."

  "Something about me?"

  "No, not you."

  There was silence for a moment. "It's Keith then." He didn't respond. "Keith. Isn't it?"

  He sighed. "Yes. Keith. I think . . ." He was going to have to tell her eventually, but he wouldn't tell her about Pan. Not until he was sure. "I think he's still alive. I think we brought him back."

  There was silence at the other end of the line. He didn't even hear her breathing.

  "What I'm doing now is checking, trying to find out, to come across some trace of him, to prove that he's still here." Her voice was no more than a whisper. "And . . . is he?"

  "I'm still looking. But I'll only be here a few more days. I promise. I'll come home to you very soon."

  At the end of the next day Woody found what he was looking for. In August of 1989, Pan had planted an explosive device at a ribbon cutting ceremony outside of Denver, Colorado. The ceremony was held to begin the development of condominiums on seventy acres of wilderness. The state senator who had helped to push through the development was also present, and was also killed when the developer cut the ribbon, releasing the slack to make the fatal connection.

  Only one Denver paper, the one that had been opposed to the development, ran the note that it and the other papers had received the day of the explosion. Among other things, it read:

  It's time to make a little room on the crippled earth. Depopulate it of men like Senator Schindler and Gus Violetto so that the grass may grow again.

  Woody's breath caught, and he freed it with a barking laugh of triumph that made the other researchers in the room turn their heads with glares of annoyance. He ignored them.

  All he could see was the paraphrased quotation from Steppenwolf, Keith Aarons's favorite book then, and maybe now.

  "Hello, Keith," he whispered. "It's really you, isn't it?"

  He read on, but he was sure now, and the near joy he had felt in his discovery turned to melancholy as the thought came over him that he was responsible, he and no one else, for what Pan had done.

  By the end of the day the melancholy had turned to depression. Pan's crimes filled Woody's mind, a blazing chronicle of twenty years of violence, so that by the time he rewound the last roll and gave 1992 back to the librarian, he almost prayed that the whole thing had been self-delusion. But it wasn't, and he knew it.

  Now there was only one loose end, and that was the Aliquippa school teacher. If he or she could positively identify Keith Aarons as being in the vicinity of John Reyminster's murder, there would be no doubt whatever th
at Keith was Pan, and then Woody could either live with the guilt of what he had released into the world, or . . .

  Or what? Find him? Track down a man no law enforcement agency had ever been able to find?

  Maybe. At least Woody knew something they didn't. He knew who Pan was.

  ~*~

  Woody found the last chip in the mosaic of proof unexpectedly. That evening, on the way back to his hotel, he passed a large used book store, and went inside on the off chance that they might have one of the critically maligned paperbacks written about Pan. A half hour's search and fifty cents procured him a dogeared edition of PAN—Nature's Terrorist!, held together with a rubber band.

  Back in his room, he ate a Burger King supper and began to read the book. In the second chapter he came across what the more respectable media had ignored, the name of the eyewitness in the Reyminster murder.

  Her name was Kathy Scavullo, and she was a first year teacher at Aliquippa High. The name wasn't familiar to Woody, but he figured that if she was a first year teacher in 1973 she must be several years younger than he. He read on:

  Miss Scavullo told police that she saw a man resembling a student with whom she had attended Iselin State University near the alley where the body was found, but police dismissed her account when it was discovered that the man she identified had been dead for over three years. Even more bizarre was the fact that the man, whose identity was never revealed by authorities, had been killed in an unspecified terrorist act.

  That was all. There was no follow-up, no revelation of Keith Aarons as the man who was identified. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, but Woody thought he might as well contact Kathy Scavullo and ask her if it was indeed Keith she thought she had seen. That way he would know for sure.

  After so many years, he had not expected to find Kathy Scavullo still in the Aliquippa exchange, and did not. But there was a Scavullo, Paul J., and Woody called the number, thinking that it might be a relative who could tell him to what town Kathy had moved, or give him her number. When the man who answered admitted to being Kathy Scavullo's father, Woody found it hard not to smile at the success of his amateur sleuthing.