by Laurel Dewey
Jane scooted over to the library’s computers and did a search for BAWY but came up with nothing. She tried every acronym tool she could find but nothing made sense. After nearly an hour, she got up and wandered back into the microfiche room, figuring she’d pull up that Time magazine article on the Copelands and re-examine the illustration of Jordan’s neighborhood. But when she opened the door to the windowless room, less than half the boxes remained. She spent nearly half an hour reading the outside label contents but couldn’t find the one that included the Time article. Jane tracked down the same harried librarian from the day before and inquired as to where she could find that specific microfiche document. It seemed that it was one of the first boxes shipped to Denver for digital transfer. Jane returned to the room and stared into the disheveled mess. The only copy she had of the illustration was blurred and streaked, and of little use.
Her eyes drifted across the stacks of brown cardboard, her brain picking up one word or so from each outside label. Suddenly, she spotted, The Millburn Township Register and quickly zoned in on the box. Millburn Township was the area where Short Hills, New Jersey, resided. Opening the box, Jane brought out a series of plastic boxes with microfiche reels, each holding several years of the weekly local newspaper. She located the reel that covered 1967 through 1969. Setting it into the microfiche viewer, she scanned reams of black-and-white pages, starting in late 1967. It was fairly easy to skim through the slim daily offering since the meat of the paper was found within the first five pages and the rest of it was dedicated to advertisements and classifieds. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she figured that there might be some mention of Jordan Copeland in the local rag. By the time she reached the January 1st edition of 1968, her eyes were getting bleary, but she continued the dizzy turn of pages that revolved around holiday events, local awards and town council reports.
Then the headline words, MISSING BOY jumped out at her. Jane quickly spun the reel back to the page and sharpened the focus. It was a short article on page two, but the headline was gripping: SEARCH IS ON FOR MISSING BOY. The date was January 5th, 1968. The child’s name was mentioned at the top of the article but the transfer of the old paper to microfiche had compromised the integrity of many of the words on the page, including the kid’s name. No matter how much Jane twisted the focus button on the reel, the name of the child and many of the words in the short article kept warping so that they were illegible. One thing was clear—the boy was eight years old and was thought to have wandered off three days prior to the story being published. Outbuildings and ditches had been thoroughly searched while his mother prayed for his safe return. Since the paper was a weekly publication, they were a little late in reporting this time-critical event.
Jane quickly jumped to the following week’s edition for any update. On page three, she found another five-hundred-word article titled, “Missing Millburn Boy Feared Drowned.” This article theorized that police felt the boy, who loved to wander, may have fallen into an icy pond and died. The rest of the story was a virtual repetition of the information from the week before. Just as Jane was moving forward on the reel, the door opened and three guys wearing jumpsuits and carrying hand trucks walked in. They seemed surprised to see Jane.
“Hey, ma’am, we got to stack all this up and put it on the truck for Denver right away,” the larger of the three stated.
“I’m in the middle of something kind of important…”
“So are we,” a second man added. “We’re already late on picking up the second load.”
They started stacking boxes one on top of the other. Jane connected the printer. Even though the quality left a lot to be desired, she wanted to have a hard copy document of what she’d discovered. While the men noisily worked around her, she printed off page after page, starting with the initial January 5th edition. When she had a good handful of pages, she scanned the reel to the following week, in search of any mention of the boy. But one by one, the pages became barely readable. This continued for nearly half of the year’s weekly editions.
“Lady,” one of the guys stated in a loud, impatient voice, “we gotta have that reel you’re lookin’ at.”
“Shit!” Jane exclaimed, sitting up and turning off the microfiche viewer. She removed the reel, put it back in the plastic box and handed it to one of the guys. As she turned around, all the men reacted to her holstered Glock strapped across her Groovy T-shirt.
“Whoa, Nellie!” the big guy exclaimed. “Is that gun for real?”
Jane kicked the chair under the table and headed out the door. “No. I just wear it to scare the horses and children.”
CHAPTER 30
Outside, the sky darkened with rain clouds, seemingly converging solely over Midas. The air had an ominous tang that did little to settle Jane’s churning gut. She secured the pages from the Millburn Township Register under her T-shirt. Pellets of rain began to fall as she headed back to the B&B. But the wind whipped up suddenly, driving the rain harder and forcing Jane to make a quick detour to Town Hall, where she took refuge under the front awning. She heard a knock on the glass behind her and saw Vi motioning her to come inside. Once inside, Vi handed her a roll of paper towels to absorb the dripping water off Jane’s T-shirt. The place looked vacant, with only Vi and two tech guys in the background setting up more equipment. Jane carefully turned to Bo’s office.
“Don’t worry,” Vi assured, “he’s not here.”
“You heard what happened between us?”
“I knew it would happen before it happened,” Vi said with a smile.
That basically said it all. Vi knew what Bo was feeling before Bo even felt it. She really was his right arm, left arm, and everything in between, just as Bo told them on their first day in Midas. “I probably shouldn’t linger not knowing when he’s coming back.”
“He’ll be gone at least another hour. He’s at his house packing boxes.”
Jane was never one to pry into people’s lives unless it was in regard to a pending case. But since she was standing before the woman who knew everything about anything, she figured she’d pose a question. “Did Bo have a son?”
The rock steadiness that defined Vi cracked ever so slightly. Others would have missed the momentary freezing of her eyes and unconscious twitch at the corner of her lip. But Jane saw it. “A son?” Vi repeated. “No.”
“You’ve been with him since he came to Midas, right?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he had a son before that.”
“No. I don’t think so.” Vi turned back to her desk.
Jane noted a change in Vi’s movement. Instead of the confidence that she normally exuded, there was a halted progress in her gait. Jane had observed the same preoccupied behavior from others during an interrogation when something had come up in the course of conversation that made it impossible for them to continue business as usual. The fact that Vi turned away only personified her need to turn away from the subject as well.
Since Jane didn’t want to ostracize the woman, she changed the subject. “You have that video handy of Jordan’s lie detector test?”
Vi turned back to Jane, her confidence resurrected. “Sure.”
There was a moment in that tape Jane actually wanted to review. As Vi set it up in Bo’s office, the rain continued to pour outside in an unremitting deluge. A crack of thunder broke overhead, jarring Jane. Vi cued the tape and hit the PLAY button.
“Is your name Jordan Richard Copeland?” the man asked Jordan.
“Yes.” Jordan answered quietly.
“Do you live in Midas, Colorado?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a beard and mustache?”
Jordan shifted slightly in his chair. “Yes.”
Jane leaned forward. “Could you rewind it to that last question?”
Vi rewound the tape and resumed playback.
“Do you have a beard and mustache?”
Jane focused on Jordan’s feet as he shifted in his chair.
<
br /> “Yes,” Jordan replied.
“Okay, pause it,” Jane quickly instructed. If Jordan was going to beat the box, he would do it during the control questions, creating a false baseline response that would make the peak comparison values for later, more important questions, not equate. The two most common ways to alter the stress response was to squeeze one’s anus or place a tack in the toe of your shoe and press down on it to cause a moment of pain. The shift Jordan made in his seat concerned Jane. “Is there anyway to highlight his feet?”
“It’s a video. Not a computer. Sorry.”
Jane asked Vi to replay that five-second section ten more times, each time with Jane moving closer to the monitor so that she was almost flush with the screen. Jane shook her head. “I don’t know. Keep going.”
Vi resumed playback.
“Are you the son of Richard and Joanna Copeland?”
Now Jane was really interested and she watched Jordan carefully.
“Yes.” Jordan said, staring straight ahead, his voice exceptionally modulated.
“Play that part again,” Jane asked, leaning closer to the monitor.
Vi backed up the tape and started the playback.
“Are you the son of Richard and Joanna Copeland?”
Jane focused on Jordan’s feet. There was slight movement from his right foot. This was a control question to the man running the test, but in actuality it was a question requiring Jordan to lie. However, the stress factor would also need to be seen on the chart in order to throw off the results. “Play that question again, please,” Jane said. The thunder rolled loudly down Main Street, followed by a crack of lightning that sounded as though it was directly overhead. Vi rewound the tape and replayed that part. Jane still wasn’t positive and asked to see it again, but just as Vi was hitting the remote control, a deafening bolt of lightning rang out and the power blew. “Shit!” Jane exclaimed.
Vi checked the lights and the phone and found nothing. She went to the door and called out to the tech guys, asking how long it would take to get the backup power running. They needed her to unlock the upstairs room where they had previously installed the equipment. Vi quickly excused herself, unlocked the side drawer in her desk, removed the keys and hustled out the far back area and up the stairs with the techies. Jane leaned back in her chair and noted the opened desk drawer. Without hesitating, she quickly moved to Vi’s desk in the semidarkness and slid the drawer open all the way. The first thing she found taped to the inside of the drawer was a worn sheet of paper, frayed at the edges. On it were symbols, each relating to a word. But it was nothing like the usual cop codes she already knew. Jane heard footsteps above her and wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be alone. Checking the symbols again, Jane caught a fairly good grasp of their obvious meaning. A single key that looked like it would fit into a file cabinet lay in the front corner of the drawer. Jane grabbed it, turned and used it to open the file cabinet behind Vi’s desk. The footsteps moved across the upstairs floor as she found Jake’s thin file. She removed it and stared at the front cover sheet. “What in the hell…?” Jane whispered to herself. She quickly stashed it back into the file and removed Jordan’s file, only interested in the front cover sheet. She stared at it, taking in what she saw before returning it to the file cabinet. She grabbed two more files, one having to do with Christmas decorations and the other office acquisitions. She saw what she expected on the cover sheets. Opening the file having to do with office acquisitions, the puzzle pieces started to come together. Jane quickly stuffed the files back into the cabinet, locked it and returned the key to Vi’s desk drawer. She made sure the drawer was exactly as Vi left it before quickly walking back into Bo’s office.
Jane spied the stack of file boxes lined up in his office, each sporting either a ?, an !,a thumbs up and a thumbs down drawing. Darting to his desk, Jane canvassed the cluttered paper strewn across the top. Opening Bo’s front desk drawer, she removed an appointment book. She flipped it open and stared at the entries for the first several weeks of the year. “Oh, Bo,” Jane murmured.
Her eye caught the bright yellow folder on his desk, still hidden under several sheets of paper. She opened the folder and quickly read the cover letter. The clip-clop of feet could be heard descending the stairway. Jane slid Bo’s appointment book back into the front drawer, slipped the yellow folder under the pages on the desk and jumped back into the chair within seconds of Vi returning to her side.
“I figured you’d be gone,” Vi said.
“I wasn’t sure if the power was going to come back on and we could keep watching the video.”
“Doesn’t look like it. We’ll have some backup power but we have to reserve it for only the essential equipment. Town’s probably down for at least a couple hours.”
Jane left Town Hall and sprinted through the falling rain back to the B&B. She was soaking wet again by the time she crossed the threshold. Upstairs, she removed the pages she’d copied from the Millburn Township Register and laid them on the carpeting one by one to let them dry out. Jane showered in an attempt to warm up and changed into a clean pair of jeans and another one of Mollie’s shirts—this one a three-quarter sleeve T-shirt with the proclamation, I Must Be Trippin’ ‘Cuz You Look Cute! in bold letters.
As she towel-dried her hair, she caught sight of the black-and-white photo she’d found of her mother and Harry Mills standing outside The Hayloft. She picked up the photo and looked at the two lovebirds. She’d never seen her mother look so content. “A cool drink of water.” That’s what her mother said the night before about Mr. Mills. Yes, he was that. But according to Anne, he also suffered from depression, killing himself and leaving her to feel it was all her fault. “I couldn’t tell a soul,” she told Jane, her voice clearly emotional.
Jane looked out the window at the still pounding rain. What were these unconscious patterns that operated in our lives, she wondered. Up until last night, Jane had no idea that Harry Mills existed. Nor did she know he killed himself. But as uncanny as it seemed, somewhere on the ethereal waves, that buried secret replicated itself in Jane’s own life and played out to its tragic conclusion nearly at the same age that her mother experienced her lover’s loss. Patterns. It was something Jane always looked for in criminal cases. But could patterns within a family emerge and repeat throughout the generations on an unconscious basis simply because the stories remained untold and, thus, the secret needed a physical vehicle for its manifestation? To Jane, it seemed preposterous on one hand and, yet, on the other hand, she couldn’t deny this enigmatic mirroring of events that she and her mother unknowingly shared.
There was a knock at the door. Jane tucked the photograph under her laptop and opened the door. It was Sara.
“Thought you might need this,” Sara said, handing Jane a flashlight.
“Thanks,” Jane tossed it onto her bed. When she turned back to Sara, it was apparent that the woman looked apprehensive. “Is something wrong?”
“Aaron told me about the conversation you had with him,” she whispered. Guilt covered her face. “I know you and Mollie...” she caught herself, “Liora, are talking…”
“It’s crazy about her choosing that name, isn’t it?” Jane asked, genuinely intrigued now by the strange whispers of awareness that bleed through the generations.
Sara nodded. “It’s beyond crazy.” She turned, making sure that nobody else was around. “What’s even crazier is that when she starts talking in Yiddish, she has the same tone as my grandmother, Liora. Every time she does it, I can almost hear the ghost of my grandmother begging me to tell Mollie the truth.” She held her hand to her face. “God, you must think I’m half-cocked.”
“Oh, Sara,” Jane said, shaking her head, “that sounds fairly reasonable to me.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. You should tell her. Because if you don’t, I think your grandmother’s ghost will have a field day with you.” Jane turned and retrieved the box of photographs she stole from the kitchen cupboard. “I
borrowed these when I took the photo album.”
“I wondered what happened to that.”
“This place has gone through a lot of incarnations, hasn’t it?”
Sara smiled. “Oh, yeah. It’s got quite the history.”
“It was a boardinghouse for women, you said?”
“Yeah. Single women. Somewhat wild, I’m told.”
“Wild in what way?”
“Spirited. They weren’t forging the paths that were expected of them. This place attracted decades of women who wanted to experience life on their own terms and I guess the town let them do that. It actually served a good purpose in the later years when it was a boardinghouse, especially in the late sixties.”
Jane looked at Sara. “What do you mean?”
“It became a secret retreat for unwed, pregnant women.”
The floor felt as if it was about to fall away from Jane’s feet. She leaned against the doorjamb, not quite sure she heard Sara correctly. Her mouth tasted like cotton. “They weren’t all unwed and pregnant, right?”
“From ’66 on, yeah…every single one of them.” Sara saw the sheer shock in Jane’s eyes. “Are you okay, Jane?”
“I need to go.” Jane closed the door and slid down to the floor. The incessant rain pelted the bedroom windows and swelled into another stormy downpour. That familiar pain in Jane’s pelvis started to flare up as the nauseating scent of gardenias permeated the room. Jane pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs. “Go away!” she murmured with an acid pitch. This wasn’t happening. It was insane. She had to be dreaming. “Leave me alone!” she said with more vitriol. The full throttle comprehension of what Sara told her slammed into her heart. The ramifications also became blisteringly apparent.
She had to get out of there. The walls were caving in and her mind was moving toward scenarios that seemed improbable. Jane grabbed her leather jacket and bolted out of the room. She walked outside into the diagonal downpour and kept walking for four blocks. The late afternoon had turned into a queasy nighttime scene as the blackened clouds suffocated any light that should have still existed at that time of day. Coupled with the power outage, the streets took on an eerie quality, which only served to deepen the collision of restless thoughts within Jane’s head. The pain subsided in her pelvis, but nothing quelled her mind. She walked up and down the blocks that framed Main Street, oblivious to her surroundings or the ruthless storm overhead. It was moments like this in her past where she’d kill the chaos with a bottle of Jack Daniels and half a pack of cigarettes. But now, with nothing but doubt to comfort her, the rawness of sobriety stung. A surge of debilitating helplessness engulfed her. Thoughts of the warm amber liquid overwhelmed her senses. She could feel herself falling again, like she’d fallen before. Jane turned and ran hard and fast. The thunder rolled, shaking the pavement beneath her soaked boots. That desperation demanded to be served—to anesthetize what she couldn’t face. Loneliness and desolation, her two steady companions, entwined her body and urged her to feed her addiction. Soon, the voices would start their cacophony and she would plunge back into the void from which she thought she’d escaped.
