“Hmmmm, we’ll see tonight,” I say heading for the bathroom. “Don’t drink all the coffee before I’m out of the shower, please.”
“Well, don’t take a half-hour shower,” he says and sticks his tongue out.
Downstairs, Royce is on the phone with a seating chart in front of him. To give him some privacy, outdoors we watch the town come to life. Cars move slowly down the main street, looking for, what? A diner? An antique shop? A place for the kids? Two mini-vans from a senior citizen’s facility are unloading passengers. The morning air is cool, but it’ll heat up by afternoon, maybe a little less than yesterday but warm enough to make the evening pleasant.
Royce suddenly bursts through the doors.
“I’m sorry, that was a bitch of a reservation. What are your plans for dinner? We may be full.”
“I made reservations at the River Run,” acknowledging his concern. “Don’t think that’s a slur on you, but Phil has never been and with this heat ...”
“No, no, not at all. Are you going to be around for the day?”
“I want to spend time in Stewart’s rooms and in the attics,” I say. “Sheriff Dodson said they were going to take the tape down yesterday.”
“They did, late yesterday afternoon. And if you want to go up into the attics in this heat well, that’s OK by me. Open the windows so you get a little cross-breeze. It’s stuffy up there and there’s no insulation, just the rafters.”
“Do you want to come up with me, or...” I ask Phil.
“I thought I’d spend the morning with you and then take off this afternoon, as things heat up upstairs.” He grins at me.
Will he be a help? It’s going to be hard explaining to him what I’m looking for, since I don’t have an idea. My search is going to be more of a sense of something missing than a discovery of what’s there. Trying to prove a negative is always difficult, as I constantly tell my photographers to stop them shooting empty acreage to illustrate a proposed building.
“Come on, then.” I make for the stairs at the back of the kitchen.
“Stewart wasn’t very tidy. He wasn’t a slob, he just didn’t put things away. Or he wasn’t organized. He was a careful historian and archivist, though. Kept a supply of white cotton gloves in his desk. His bedroom is neat. Probably the hotel staff kept clothes picked up, sheets and towels changed, dusted and vacuumed.”
I open the door and stop.
“Oh my God!”
It looks as though someone took a giant whisk to the shelves. Books knocked off the shelves and replaced haphazardly, stacked up sideways, crammed in backwards. The document boxes are on the floor, their tops pulled off, their contents riffled.
“Well, not tidy is one way to describe this,” Phil says sardonically. “I’m guessing from your reaction that it wasn’t quite like this yesterday morning.”
“It wasn’t. I don’t know how we’ll ever find out if anything was taken.”
I close my eyes, try to mentally catalog the shelves and boxes. On the long wall, two of the bottom shelves were stacked with labeled boxes. Above them, one shelf contained stacks of magazines and journals. The top three shelves on the long wall and all of the shelves on the other wall housed books. Stewart hadn’t followed any Dewey Decimal System, but he had tried to keep like volumes together. Now the individual published accounts of the Gold Rush are on the floor, mixed with Civil War histories, interspersed with sailing, geology, exploring the west, the rise of the Iron Curtain states and the fall of the British Empire.
“If we can straighten the shelves out, I may get an idea of how much is missing,” I say. My latex gloves are packed, so I grab a pair from the desk drawer and move to a shelf. Phil takes the bookcase on the other wall and starts picking books up, shelving them spine-out. Three-quarters of an hour later, I’m ready to begin with the document boxes.
I want to keep the journals, diaries and papers in their correct boxes, which means at least skimming each one. I take the World War II first because there’s more material, leaving the earlier journals to Phil. This collection seems to be primarily diaries written by Robert and William Calvert—a serious violation of military protocol—both of whom were in the Army. If captured, diaries could give troop, movement or battle plans to the Nazis.
It was unusual for both brothers to join the Army because the elder Calverts had no other children. But many brothers joined the service, and sometimes even served together, during the war. In addition to Robert’s and William’s diaries, which recorded reactions about the terrain they were in and personal reflections, journals written by the elder Calverts and letters back and forth were preserved. It doesn’t look like anything is damaged, but it’s clear that all this material had been sorted and stored by date. The notebooks that Robert and William used for their diaries are mixed with tissue-thin V-Mail and censored letters home, meaning I have to read some. Both of the younger Calverts were writers.
William had finished two years at Cal and Robert was still in high school when Pearl Harbor was bombed and William volunteered for the Army. In his diaries, William wrote about the strangeness of boot camp at Fort Ord, wrote about learning to shoot in the sand dunes ringing Monterey Bay, wrote about learning to march in the foggy mornings and to find his way around the camp at night in the blackouts. In his letters, he wrote about learning to eat Army food and complained that he missed the hotel cooking, about learning to make a bunk and reminisced about the maid making his bed at home, told how the coastal fog obscured all the stars that he saw in the Sierra.
Their parents’ journals were filled with fears for his safety and hopes that the war would end before he was sent overseas. Their letters to William were chatty, telling of daily events at the hotel and recapping news about Marshalltown.
Half way through 1942 archives, the tenor changed. William was tapped as a possible OCS candidate and sent to German language school. Robert, a senior in high school, wrote long letters to his idolized older brother.
The second box covered the period from Robert’s high school graduation in June of 1943 through D-Day. I sit back on my heels.
“Are you ready to take a break, maybe for lunch?” I ask. Phil is moving fast through his boxes and about to start World War I.
“Yep, that sounds good. I’m getting dry with all this old paper,” he says, dusting his hands on his jeans.
As we’re finishing lunch, Henry Blomberg comes in, deep in conversation with Royce. Phil raises a hand and catches Henry’s eye and the older man nods to Royce and walks over to us.
“Good afternoon my dear,” Henry says to me and turns to Phil. “How have your labors been this morning? I’ve had a wonderful tour.”
Phil smiles. “Well, Amy did have me laboring, but it was a labor of, maybe not love, but certainly interest and curiosity. We’ve been tidying up in Stewart Calvert’s rooms. It seems as though someone didn’t like the way he was filing his books.”
I look astonished. Why is Phil being so open and chatty with this man whom we’d just met? Stewart is a probable murder victim and I believe his belongings were ransacked, probably, possibly, by someone involved. Besides, what business is it of an elderly Jewish German if someone is tearing apart the rooms of a California historian? Phil is acting decidedly un-Phil like.
“Are you planning to labor some more this afternoon?” Blomberg asks.
“I think Amy is going to go back to the mines, but I’m open for other suggestions.”
Open for other suggestions? This is not like the Phil that I’ve known for years; that Phil is decisive, organized, carries around a day-planner in his head and can guide people to the correct (his) decision with a minimum of effort and discussion.
“I’ve always wanted to see if there was much left of Mokelumne Hill,” Blomberg says. “I know it was one of the richest towns in the Mother Lode, was founded in 1848 and was the county seat of Calaveras County for about 15 years.”
“That’s quite a bit,” Phil says. “I just know the name on a map. I
s there some specific interest?”
“It’s one of those habits I’ve developed over the years, looking through old records and tracing families. It’s a lot easier in Europe where people stayed in the same place for generations. In the states, and particularly on the West Coast and in the Gold Rush areas, people moved around so much that it’s hard to track them. Plus, a lot of these towns caught fire. I think Mokelumne Hill burned down two or three times and then, with the San Francisco earthquake and fire, well it’s a really intricate puzzle and not always one that I can solve.
“People have been moving west for a long time and a lot of them came to lose their past; to reinvent themselves.”
He’s right, I realize with a start. One of the quirks about the Calverts is that when they hit California, they stayed put. That, coupled with their family trait to write and keep diaries and letters, makes tracing their history relatively easy.
“If you wouldn’t mind the company, I’d like to go with you this afternoon,” Phil says. “I’ve never been down that section of Highway 49. Can we leave now? I know Amy has plans for us for dinner tonight.”
Phil gathers up his stuff and they walk out together, leaving me wondering what’s gotten into Phil. Is he just tired of my company? Maybe he doesn’t like the quirky search I’m on and thinks it’s a waste of time. Whatever it is, I’m determined to keep reading, keep looking, until it’s clear that I’m either skidding down a dead end or I find some answers to Stewart’s death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The sun hasn’t baked the attics yet. By later in the afternoon, it’ll be stifling even though I open two of the grimy windows. Layers of dust coat most things stored here. In the areas around the chimneys and one of the windows at the side of the space—the one that Stewart fell from—the fine, silty dust sweeps into long feathery trails. Smudges of fingerprint powder mark the window’s frame, sill and glass. I squinch up my eyes, thinking I can see footprints in front of the window, but imagination is what I see.
Turning from the window, I scan the rooms. Mostly boxes, mostly cardboard, interspersed with a few trunks and three wooden chests. Aging sports equipment—three pair of wooden cross-country skis from the 1930s are tall against a wall—wooden tennis racquets, moldering track shoes; baseball bats and cracked mitts, flat basketballs and a cobwebbed croquet set. Tucked between a blanket chest and a stack of boxes labeled “Baby Clothes” is a duffle bag. A U.S Army duffle bag. To my not-quite professional eye, a duffle bag from World War II.
I race across the attic and tug it out from the space, raising a cloud of dust and what looks like a black widow spider as I do. The spider brings me up short and I stop as a cold rush of reason swamps me. Of course there are spiders, and certainly black widows, hidden away in the dark places and under the undisturbed things in the attic. I’d better do this search a little more systematically and a lot more carefully or I’ll spend the weekend with hospital staff instead of with Phil.
Grabbing the duffle bag by its strap, I hold it at arm’s length and swing it against the blanket chest, hoping that any residual spiders get knocked senseless, or at least scared off, then drag the bag closer to a window. The bag had been locked but somewhere over the past half-century the lock, still in the hasp, had rusted open. I wiggle the lock out and gingerly pull the bag open hoping to find...what?
What I find are hotel guest registers and accordion files of invoices and paid receipts dating from 1945 to 1962. Well, damn. The floor at that spot is too filthy to sit on so I haul out a guest register—January 1948 to September 1954, apparently not a lot of people visited the Mother Lode or stayed at the hotel after the war—spread it open and sit down on the chest. What can all this tell me? Not a lot, unless I’m going to piece together a financial history of the Claverts.
I remember that Ben Nevell is in the photo taken when Robert Calvert ran for office. I pick up the last two guest ledgers and begin leafing through. I’m a little surprised when I find Nevell registered as a guest eleven different times in late 1961 through 1962. Almost once a month. If he was a close friend of Robert’s, and he must have been to be included in that family picture, was it really unusual that he visited a lot?
I spend a quarter of an hour riffling through a few other registers and find Nevell’s scrawling signature only once or twice a year prior to 1961, when Robert actively began to seek statewide offices. Maybe Nevell was acting as a campaign adviser to his old war buddy. Maybe he was working with the family to plan strategy or develop ways to raise funds. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the city. I mentally note to ask Phil about Nevell in the early 1960s.
Disappointed, I stuff the ledgers and files back into the duffle bag, stick the lock back through the hasp and wrestle the bag back to its resting place.
I don’t want to bother with the “Baby Clothes” or “Photos, 1938 – 1942” or “Pauli’s Things” boxes. I open the blanket chest and find stacks of yellowing sheets, pillowcases and blankets, probably used by the hotel. The Calverts had surely been savers. Maybe if Royce ever has the time, I think, he can come up here with an antiques evaluator, maybe like that “Cash in the Attic” show. I try to envision a TV crew trailing cable and lights through all the dust and clutter, looking for some valuable things. I fail. This looks like the average suburban garage, a catchall of stuff that’s going to be thrown away “someday” but in the Calverts’ case, the “someday” is more than 100 years too late. The attics may not be the treasure trove I’d hoped, but there are still document boxes to finish in Stewart’s room.
I use his bathroom to scrub my hands before I put gloves on and begin the dairies and letters again. I’d left off reading the one leading up to D-Day. I pick up the first diary in the box and read that Robert joined the Army in the fall of 1943. He went through boot camp at Fort Ord, like his brother, but wasn’t tapped for OCS. He was assigned to the infantry and shipped to the East Coast to wait for further orders. With the January 1944 Allied landing on the beaches of Anzio and invasion of Italy, Robert’s unit was held as one of the many in reserve for the push up through Italy.
His diaries and letters during this period mostly revealed teenage boredom with military life and an itching to prove himself in action. He wrote that he and his buddies played cards, told jokes and tried to keep busy by playing catch. The tenor of his diaries changed when the full Allied forces landed at Anzio on May 22, 1944.
As the Americans made their way up the Italian peninsula, Robert began to see the action he was looking forward to, and the action scared him. He never showed his fear in his letters home, writing about the food, the marching and, occasionally, about the beauty of the Italian countryside.
“It’s really beat up,” he said in a letter from late July, “but still it’s summer and the Italians are trying to harvest what they can. They have grapes and tomatoes and we can sometimes get a couple of eggs. Once, we even caught a chicken. I felt kind of bad, but it wasn’t near a farm or anything so we didn’t know where it belonged. Sure do miss the fried chicken and gravy on the Sunday menu at home. Nobody here can cook like that.”
The troops in Italy had been ecstatic when they learned about the D-Day landings in France. Robert even got a letter from William, now a major and a participant in the landings, and wrote about both his pride in his brother’s accomplishments and his overriding terror that they both might be killed.
Williams’ diaries were more harrowing, and contained more sadness and anger than fear. He wrote about seeing the cliffs of Normandy loom up above the landing ships and how gut-wrenching it was to order his troops ashore, knowing that many, most of them, would be killed. By the third week in June, he was able to begin a letter to his parents, “From an apple orchard somewhere in France...” and he, too, talked about how the local farmers were trying to bring some sense of normality back into their lives.
He told his parents that he’d written to Robert and urged them not to worry, the troops in Italy were safer than the ones headed through Franc
e and into Germany. In his diaries during the fall, however, he privately worried about Robert. He hadn’t had any letters, but had surreptitiously put the word out and heard back that Robert was safe, slogging his way north.
By late fall, Robert was in Germany and now complaining to his diary about being tired, cold and fed up with the action. He was hoping for a rotation and some R and R—maybe in Paris? It had been liberated during the summer—but somewhere, anywhere where there weren’t guns firing and Germans trying to kill him.
I reach the end of that box and come to with a little shake. These are odd diaries. Robert was a decorated war hero. How could the scared young man writing in these diaries, barely more than a boy, have become the brave soldier? I carefully replace the last diary in the box and pull the one labeled “1944-1945” toward me.
December 1944 and January 1945 were bone-chillingly cold in Germany. Robert now added freezing to his list of complaints, but the diary entries were getting shorter and shorter. There were days when he wrote nothing and days when the highlight was “Got some warm water. Able to wash a little and shave.”
By the middle of February he was in the heart of Germany, just south of the old university city of Heidelberg. There was one diary entry describing the city climbing up steep hills beside the River Nekar and how the ruined castle stood over the city, but nothing else until the first week of April, when the litany of complaints about the weather took up again.
These ended with a spate of entries in early May after Robert was assigned to a unit, ironically led by William, which helped liberate Dachau, outside of Munich. Both brothers wrote of the overwhelming horror of what they’d seen, heard and smelled, and suddenly Robert was knocked out of his personal despair. Anger at the inhumanity perpetrated there rolled off the pages when he talked about “walking skeletons” and “piles of corpses” and “bodies frozen where they’d been shot”. And he vowed then that he would find some way of making sure this would never, could never, happen again.
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