against the fiend who had done this to her grandson, that Garreth regretted needing so little from her: a photograph and abetting his escape. Coming onto his knees, he hugged her.
She hugged him back and then, to his dismay, began sobbing. He knew he was hearing her cry over his grave.
He held her until she quieted, wondering…could she be right? Was he nothing but a temporarily animated instrument of revenge?
It made a hell of a thought to take with him when he visited Brian that afternoon. Thinking it, he stood back a mental distance from himself and the boy. For the first time he saw the formality in his son’s attitude toward him, so different from Brian’s easy behavior with his stepfather. Logic told Garreth it was natural; Brian saw Dennis every day, whereas, for six years, since the boy was two, Garreth had been no more than a visitor. How much less would he be from now on?
“Judith,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about the adoption.”
She looked quickly at him. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I didn’t know then what happened to you.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. If you and Dennis want — ”
She shook her head, cutting him off. “It can wait. You’ve got enough already to deal with.”
He had regarded her with surprise, but nodded, and for once, a visit went amicably. So amicably he regretted having to dodge Judith’s dinner invitation.
“Mom’s probably planned something special at home.”
Yes…stuffed porkchops, one of his favorites growing up. Walking into the house, he smelled them with dismay. Evading lunch had worked by waiting until his father left, then claiming loss of appetite over confronting Judith about the adoption issue. His mother accepted that. He needed more to finesse his way out of dinner. Saying he had already eaten, taking Brian out for hamburgers, did not cut it.
“You’ve always had room for my porkchops,” his mother said.
His father fixed him with a hard stare that said:
Grandma Doyle jumped to her feet.“The phone.”
His father frowned. “I don’t hear it.”
“It’s going to ring.” She hurried into the hall. They heard her pick up the phone and talk, then she peered back around the diningroom door. “It’s for you, Garreth. Someone named Chris Murdock.”
Grandma to the rescue! Now he needed to play his part.
Before driving home, he had spent hours considering escape plans. Any visit was always too short for his mother, so the trick was getting around his father, finding an excuse for leaving which Phil Mikaelian not only accepted but encouraged in the face of maternal objections. Eventually he approached the problem as he would cracking a suspect. Use what pushed the subject’s buttons.
He stood in the hall talking to the dial tone. “Hey, man, what’s up? … Sure I remember. … Yeah, of course I would. When — …
Envy lit his father’s eyes. “Of course. When is it?”
“That’s the kicker.” Garreth grimaced. “His father’s flying into Sacramento tomorrow to pick up Chris and a cousin who lives there. If I want to go, I have to meet them at the airport.”
“Tomorrow!”his mother protested. “No! You just got here!”
He sent a look of appeal at his father and watched the wheels turn: guns, big game, testosterone party.
“This is pretty last minute, isn’t it?”
An expected question. Garreth nodded. “Another guy had to cancel and Harry told Chris it would be good for me to go.”
Like him, his father thought the world of Harry, and Garreth shamelessly played to that. For Harry, struggling back from near death, to worry about Garreth tipped the scale. As he knew it would.
Hunting had occupied the rest of the dinner conversation…reminisces about past hunting trips of his father’s and ones father and sons took together…advice on outfitting himself once he reached Montana, since there was no time to do so here. While his mother scowled at the two of them.
Garreth welcomed that. Tears of disappointment would made him feel truly rotten. The tears came the next morning, saying goodbye, but the feel of the photo in his jacket pocket helped him steel himself and focus on what he had to do.
10
Lien, Harry, San Francisco, and his family seemed a universe away from these Kansas plains. Just
The highway entered Bachman. After asking directions, Garreth found the high school. Climbing out of the car, warm wind struck him. It had some qualities of a sea breeze…pushiness, an aggressive wildness, a singing contempt for the land and what crawled there. It buffeted him, bringing the scents of fresh-watered grass and dusty earth, and pushed him up the steps into the building.
He located the office and the principal, a Mr. Charles Dreher, who listened to his story with interest. “Every since
Which consisted of taking Garreth to the small Board of Education building and down a steep set of stairs to a dim space less basement than cellar. Smelling and feeling wonderfully of the earth. While Dreher apologized for the conditions, Garreth sucked in a long, contented breath and wanted to stay forever. It took a hard mental shake to refocus.
They hunted through file envelopes stacked together on metal shelves and through ancient metal and wooden file cabinets. A secretary joined them eventually. “Graduation pictures? I know I’ve seen a whole pile of them somewhere.”
Which turned out to be on a top shelf, still framed, the glass so dusty it rendered the sepia-toned photographs all but invisible. Dreher returned to the high school, leaving Garreth and the secretary to bring the pictures up into the light and clean the glass. But when all that had been done, and Garreth compared the picture of the girls in the 1930 to 1940 classes with his mental image of Lane Barber, while pretending to compare them to his photo, he found no match.
The secretary wiped at a smudge on her nose. “Who is it you’re looking for?” When he gave her his story she said, “You know, a postmark here doesn’t mean the family lived here. Rural mail gets our postmark, so they could have had a farm, or lived somewhere like Dixon, that’s too small for its own post office and also gets our postmark. Then she’d probably have gone to a one-room school. Those are pretty much all gone now, though, and I don’t know where you’d find their records. Why don’t you sit down with a phone book and call Pfeifers in the area?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to go busting in on people’s lives until I know we’re related. Besides, being pregnant out of wedlock, Mary Pfeifer might not have been her real name.”
The secretary considered that and nodded.
She had a valid point about Lane going to school elsewhere. The postmark meant only that the correspondent lived here now, not necessarily then. Which meant he needed to check other high schools in the area…assuming if the correspondent moved, it had not been far, staying in the comfort zone of the ethnic area.
Now he needed to sneak in Lane’s name. “My grandmother’s diary mentioned something she didn’t tell us — maybe forgot — that another girl came to visit one time, a Maggie Bieber, or maybe Maddie — the ink smudged — and Mary hid in her room, asking my grandmother to say she wasn’t there. I’m wondering if it was the person who wrote her. It sounds like a name from here.”
“Maybe your grandmother wrote down the name wrong,” the secretary said. “We have Biekers, but I don’t
