Nameless Night

by G. M. Ford

  The paper was stiff, the creases folded tight and flattened, as if it had been a long time since anyone had opened whatever it was. He handled it gently.

  “…a pivotal period in my life. You know where a person…you know, puts childhood behind and…”

  It was a birth certificate. Polk County, Arkansas, thirty-seven years ago next month. Randall Michael James, son of Harold P. James and Elvira Ann Scott. And then it came to him. Randall. It was Randall’s wallet.

  “…you know, kind of strike out anew and…”

  Poor guy must have stuffed it in the jacket as Paul was heading for the back stairs.

  “…gotta mend a few fences back home before I can…”

  The remainder of the wallet contained a tattered Department of Social Welfare ID card, a Queen Anne County Library card, and a Hollywood Video rental card, all in Randall’s name.

  “…that is assuming they can be mended.” She heaved a sigh. “I’ve been gone a long time.” She looked over at him. Sadness filled her eyes. “Been years since I talked to my family.” She sighed again. “We parted on real bad terms.” Her eyes rolled in her head. “About as bad as terms can get.”

  He sat back in the seat. The horizon was flat. A dirty sun was rising. “So…” he began. “What is it you’re looking for? What’s back home that’s not someplace else?”

  “Home,” she said. “You know what they say about home.”

  “No place like it” was out of his mouth before he thought about it. He searched for something else to say but came up empty. He covered his eyes with his hands. He could feel something or maybe someone inside of him, someone who knew there was no place like home, but who always stayed in the shadows, someone who—

  Her voice hit him like a slap in the face. “So…what am I gonna call you?”

  His head swirled. “Randy,” he said after a moment. “Call me Randy.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he replied.

  “Okay, man, then it’s Randy you are.”

  He allowed himself a wry smile. “It’s that easy, is it?”

  She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

  The sun was a hazy halo on the horizon. Infrequent trees and low-growing thorns dotted the barren ground here and there. A blue-and-white sign announced an impending rest area. A minute passed before the mercury vapor lights became visible.

  “So how come you left home on such bad terms?”

  “’Cause I was young and stupid.”

  He watched as she went back over it in her mind. He wondered how accurate the movies of memory were, wondered if the pictures became increasingly self-serving with the passage of time, as the stories themselves became more and more embedded in the fabric of our being, to the point where the line between fact and fantasy disappeared altogether, and it was the telling that mattered rather than the facts.

  The rest area flashed by. She was somewhere else.

  “I was weird,” she said after a minute. “Every little town’s got one, and I was it.”

  The sound of her own voice seemed to encourage her. “I just didn’t want what the rest of them wanted.” She threw a quick glance his way. “You’re supposed to grow up, marry somebody else from the county, and start popping out fat little babies.” She heard her voice getting brittle and took a couple of breaths. “Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, mind you.” She waved a hand in the air. “It just wasn’t for me.”

  “What was for you?”

  “Anything but that,” she snapped.

  “And your family didn’t approve?”

  She laughed. “Wasn’t a single solitary thing about me they approved of,” she said. “They hated the way I looked, the way I dressed…they hated my friends.” She waved a hand again. “You name it, they hated it.”

  “So you left?”

  “Might’ve been better if I had. Problem was, I finally gave in. I just couldn’t stand being the outcast anymore,” she said. “I was gonna marry Danny Leery. I cut my hair…cut off my nails…Mama ordered me a dress from a catalog. I was really gonna do it. Don’t ask me why.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I just wanted to be loved, I guess. All I knew was Airhart, Alabama, and my family,” she said. “I spent my whole adolescence telling myself and anybody who’d listen how much I didn’t give a shit and then it turned out that I did.” She read the question in his eyes. “The closer the big day came, the crazier I got. Then somethin’ in me just snapped,” she said. “Thursday before the Saturday wedding, I finally lost it. Danny and me already bought furniture, moved the stuff into a house on his daddy’s farm. Relatives from all over Alabama were fixin’ to pack and head for the wedding.”

  “And?”

  “And I walked into town that Thursday morning and I got on the first bus that showed up at the Trailways station.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I got on that bus and never looked back.” She said it like it had long been rehearsed. “Later that day I called home…you know, so’s they wouldn’t think anything bad’d come to me. My papa answered.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He hung up on me.” She swallowed hard. “Said I wasn’t his daughter anymore.”

  A faded billboard announced BIG HARVEY’S TRUCK STOP, YUM! YUM! a mere thirty-nine miles distant. A pair of eighteen-wheelers roared by in the opposite lane, shaking the little car with the power of their passing.

  “What about you?” she said, without taking her eyes from the road.

  “What about me?”

  “I showed you mine.” She smiled. “…so to speak, anyway. It’s your turn. Guy don’t know his own name gotta have a heck of a story.”

  “It’s not much of a story.”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that.”

  He told her everything he could remember.

  16

  Kirsten Kane set the phone receiver down and leaned back in her chair. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and began to rock. After a few minutes, she sat forward and pushed herself to her feet. She was halfway to the door when her phone began to ring. She ignored the call and stepped out into the hall.

  The offices hummed with the muted buzz of low voices, of keyboards clipping away and messages being sent and received. At the end of the hall, his door was closed, usually a sign he was in a meeting. She kept walking anyway.

  Gene Connor, his private secretary, smiled as Kirsten approached. She set her phone back into the cradle and folded her hands on the desk in front of her. She was fifty-seven and had been Bruce Gill’s right hand since he was a fledgling lawyer. Divorced and comfortable that way, she had twin sons, Aaron and Harlan, who were in their final year of Princeton Law.

  “He with somebody?” Kirsten asked.

  Gene shook her Margaret Thatcher hair. “He’s alone,” she said. “Desperately trying to get someone on the phone.”

  Kirsten was slightly taken aback by the unsolicited information. Gene Connor took the “private” part of private secretary quite seriously and generally provided little or no information above and beyond what was absolutely necessary. One courthouse wag suggested it was easier to get through to Jimmy Hoffa than to Bruce Gill.

  “Really.”

  “You,” she said with a bemused grin.

  Kirsten returned the smile. “I take it I can go in.”

  She made a sweeping movement with her hand. “By all means,” she said.

  Her phone rang. She picked it up. “Office of the district attorney.” She gestured Kirsten onward with her eyes. “I’m afraid Mr. Gill’s in a meeting right now. Would you like to leave a message or can I connect you to his voice mail? Yes. Yes. Thank you very much.”

  The door read BRUCE W. GILL. Underneath: DISTRICT ATTORNEY. Underneath that: QUEEN ANNE COUNTY painted in gold. By the time Kirsten pulled the door open, Gene had fielded and disposed of yet another caller.

  “Just the woman I wanted to see,” he said as Kirsten crossed the carpet and sat down in t
he green leather chair.

  “Gene says you were trying to reach me.”

  “You’re not answering calls these days?”

  “I was on my way here.”

  “Apparently great minds do think alike.”

  “Guess who just called me.”

  He leaned out over his desk. He smiled his real smile, not the photo-op special, but the grin that escaped when he was actually amused. “Pray tell,” he said.

  “The U.S. attorney’s office.”

  “Really?”

  “Seems they have an opening in the Bay Area that would be just perfect for me.”

  He pushed out a low whistle. “Expensive place to live.”

  “They’d be tripling my present pittance,” she said.

  “There’s a great breakfast joint down by Washington Square.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Quite an honor.”

  “I’d have to start the first of next week.”

  He spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I can’t imagine what it would be like around here without you…but I sure as hell won’t stand in your way.” He got to his feet and offered a congratulatory hand.

  She stayed seated. “Something about it doesn’t feel right,” she said.

  He gave her a wolfish grin and eased himself back into his chair. “Which brings us to the reason I was looking for you a few minutes ago.”

  “Which was?”

  The grin got wider. “Guess who called me.”

  She checked him for irony and came up empty. “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his big head. “The Democratic National Party.”

  “Really.”

  “Seems all of a sudden they want me to be more of a player. They didn’t come right out and say it, but they danced around a promise that the president might see his way clear to campaign for me next election year. Might even find a place for me in the AG’s office.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  “They need me in Washington for the next few weeks”—he made an expansive gesture—“…to talk about my future with the party.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Out of the wild blue yonder.”

  “These are the same people who are always trying to get you to tone it down.”

  “The same folks.”

  “The same folks who’ve been all over us like white on rice about our unwillingness to cooperate with government thug squads.”

  “The very same.”

  “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  “I’m thinking somebody wants the two of us diverted for a while.”

  “Diverted from what?” Kirsten asked.

  “Gotta be that affair with the”—he snapped his fingers—“…the house thing…”

  “Harmony House.”

  “Yep.”

  “What do we do?”

  He thought it over. “I’m thinking we sit tight and wait to see what happens next.”

  “Always a good plan,” she said.

  “Always.”

  “SEE.” HELEN POINTED at the computer. The expression on her face said, “I told you so.” Ken pushed his glasses to the end of his nose and leaned in closer to the screen.

  “I don’t see any difference,” he said.

  “The column on the right.”

  “Dates.”

  “Birth dates.”

  Ken sat back in the chair. “Oh” was all he said.

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “I see how it’s going to help, if that’s what you mean. What I don’t get is what it is you think we’re accomplishing by all of this.”

  “Maybe we can help him.”

  “Help him what?” Ken asked.

  “Find himself.”

  “Find Paul?”

  “There is no Paul.” She waved an impatient hand. “That’s the whole point.”

  “And you think we’re going to be able to help him by finding this Howard guy.”

  “Find the right Wesley Allen Howard and you’ll find Paul.”

  “I thought there was no Paul?” he said. Before she could answer, he said, “It’s not like you were going to be able to keep him around here much longer. One way or another, he was about to go. Either he was going to set out on this quest of his on his own, or somebody was going to find out he didn’t belong in this place and the state was going to send him packing.” He showed his palms to the ceiling. “What’s the difference? Either way, he’s gone.”

  “Because…” she sputtered. “…because I don’t like being pushed around. I don’t like being handcuffed and dragged off to jail. Because I don’t—”

  “So this is about you,” he interrupted. His voice was sharp

  The tone brought her up short. “If you don’t want to help…” she began.

  “I just want to get the ground rules straight,” he said quickly.

  “The ground rules are that I want to find out what’s going on here, dammit. I want to know how an Internet search could possibly bring that bunch of crooks to my door.”

  He sighed and made eye contact. “People’s so-called rights are mostly an illusion,” Ken said. “Soon as things get tough, rights go out the window.”

  She opened her mouth, but the look on his face swallowed her objections. Pain had taken root in his black eyes. All the stuff with his parents…the relocation camps…losing everything…all of it…didn’t take Dr. Phil to figure it out…their recent indignities at the hands of the government had loosened the cork in his bottle. His normal reserve had evaporated. He was more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him. She put a hand on his shoulder and left it there.

  Ken leaned forward again. He gestured toward the screen. “And this is with everything factored in?”

  “Everybody between thirty and forty, male, Caucasian named Wesley Allen Howard.”

  “There’s…” He scrolled down the page, and then again and again. “There’s two hundred seventy-three names,” he said finally.

  “Apparently it’s a pretty popular name,” she said.

  “Ya think?” he joshed.

  “I can’t think of any other way to pare it down.”

  “Me neither.” He shook his finger at the screen. “And that’s assuming this is all of them. It’s not like the Internet is a perfect source or anything either. There could be another few hundred of them out there, for all we know.”

  “What we’re really looking for is somebody who was reported as a missing person about seven years ago.”

  “Is that public information?” Ken asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Helen Willis folded her arms across her chest and stared out the window.

  “We could call them all,” she said finally.

  “And ask them what? Are you missing?”

  “We could…” She paused.

  “Think about it,” Ken said. “If they answer the phone, then they’re not the person we’re looking for. If they don’t answer…”

  “Then maybe…”

  “Then maybe they’re on vacation,” he finished.

  “You’re so negative.”

  “What I am is realistic.”

  She walked back and forth in front of the windows. A wind-driven mist hissed against the windowpanes, creating an impressionist landscape of dots and blots and wavering edges.

  Ken got to his feet. “You’ve narrowed it down as much as possible. I don’t see how anybody could do better.”

  “Unless we got some help.”

  “From who?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she crossed the room, all the way to the sink at the opposite end. “We could approach it from two directions at once,” she said.

  Ken ambled her way. “How so?”

  “We could try to find out if anybody by that name was reported missing in that time period.”

  “From the whole country?” He shook his head.

  “And I’ve got this,” she said.

  “This what?”


  She pointed to a pint glass on the windowsill. “This.”

  The glass was old. The Coca-Cola logo on the side was beginning to fade. Half an inch of clear liquid filled the bottom. She tapped it with the tip of her finger.

  “What about it?” Ken asked.

  “The other night. The first time he ever spoke to me. Paul…” She made a face. “I don’t know what else to call him.”

  “What about the other night?”

  “He helped me up here. He got me a glass of water.”

  Ken’s eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking fingerprints.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s not something we can do without official help either.”

  “I’ve got an idea about that,” she said.

  “I’m all ears.”

  She told him.

  “It’s worth a try,” he said.

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “First thing tomorrow.”

  17

  He awoke to the sound of water. He imagined the gentle patter of rain on the roof above his room, the whistle of wind in the eaves, and the scrape of spring branches on the shingles. He smiled and nestled deeper into the covers. After a minute, however, the noise didn’t sound quite right. He opened his eyes, and then he recalled how they drove all the way to Alabama. Thirty-three hours straight. He remembered checking in to the cheap motel in the wee hours of the morning when she just couldn’t drive anymore.

  He pushed himself up on his elbow and looked around. Cinderblock walls painted a dull gray. The nightstand between the beds was scarred with ancient cigarette burns. The windup alarm clock read 7:35. The air smelled of old sweat and new mildew. He pulled his feet from beneath the covers, swung them over the edge of the bed, and set them down on the orange shag carpet.

  The shower stopped running. He could make out the muted sounds of Brittany moving around inside the bathroom. She was humming to herself. He found his jeans and his socks on the floor and slipped them on. He was bent over tying his shoes when the bathroom door opened. She had a towel wrapped around her head and another around her body. The former appeared to be a good fit. The latter exposed nearly as much as it covered. He found himself staring at the gentle curve of her hip.