by Neil Plakcy
“Sure. Despite what Rick said, I’m going to see what I can find out about that kid who went to Canada.”
She looked up at me. “Have fun and play safe.”
“I will.” I went upstairs to the office, but Rochester chose to stay on the kitchen floor beside Lili. I couldn’t blame him—there was a greater chance of getting a treat down there than with me.
23 – Like Alaska
I hadn’t done much to decorate the townhouse’s small second bedroom; I was still using the desk that had been in my bedroom as a kid, which my dad had brought with him. I had added a collection of books about computers and technical writing, which I never used because the information was out of date; a golden retriever bobblehead Rick had given me; and a light-blue Wedgwood cylinder filled with pencils and pens, which my mother had always used for the same purpose.
I sat down at the desk and turned on the laptop I’d inherited from Caroline Kelly. It was nice not to have to crawl up into the attic and keep all my activities hidden. I’d discussed this with some of the other hackers in my online group, and we all felt that when we could be honest about what we were doing, we were less likely to get into trouble.
I started searching all the public databases for Peter Breaux. A few times I thought I’d hit something, but then I’d click through to the full record and realize it didn’t match the teenager who had crossed the Canadian border in 1969.
It was frustrating to find nothing legal, yet I knew there had to be some records of this guy. He couldn’t have disappeared into the air. It was nearly impossible to live without a driver’s license, an electric bill, a cell phone, or some other connection to the rest of the world. And how could a nineteen-year-old in a foreign country have managed to leave no trail behind him?
Had he changed his name? A woman could have married soon after arriving in Canada, and then all the records would be in her new name. But a guy? If Peter Breaux had done that, there had to be records. Why weren’t there?
I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the tingling in my fingertips, the temptation to pull out my hacking software and launch a cyber-attack on the government of Canada. That was a stupid idea, to start with, and I doubted I had the skills for it. But what could I do?
What if I was Peter Breaux’s age, a smart kid from a poor place, on my own for the first time in Canada?
I went back to Brannigan’s notes. He had bought Breaux a ticket to Montreal. Rick had already had the Mounties check legitimate databases for any record of him, but there must have been a network of draft resisters in Montreal. Brannigan wasn’t naïve enough to send a kid there on his own. I went back to the headmaster’s notebooks, but there was no name, no organization, no contact number.
Well, that’s what the Internet was for. I Googled American draft resisters in Canada in the 1960s and got about seven million hits. Brannigan was a Quaker, though, so it was logical he’d have connections to the Friends in Canada. I added that to my search terms.
I discovered that Quakers had been going to Canada as far back as the Revolutionary War to avoid conscription, and that over 100,000 Americans had fled there during the 1960s, either out of conscience or fear. Canada was attractive to draft dodgers and deserters because it was easily reached and had no extradition treaty. Some resisters settled in rural areas, as part of the “back to land” movement popular at the time, while others worked for social justice in urban centers.
But what had happened to Peter Breaux? He must have gotten off the train and used whatever contact information he had for Montreal Friends, then disappeared underground. No matter how much I searched, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get any farther than that. It was incredibly frustrating.
Rochester came upstairs and sprawled on the floor beside me. “Any ideas, boy?” I asked, reaching down to ruffle his fur. “Because your daddy has hit a dead end.”
He thumped his tail against the floor twice and whimpered. Had he reacted to the word dead? Did he even know what that meant?
But wait. What if Peter Breaux was dead, too? That might explain why he had disappeared so quickly. Suppose there was a serial killer preying on draft dodgers, picking them up at the train station and then taking them somewhere to be murdered?
The idea of a Quaker serial killer was far-fetched. But suppose something had happened to Breaux. People died in big cities all the time, by accident, suicide or murder. And if someone had stolen his ID from his body, then he might have never been identified.
But what about his mother’s obituary? It indicated she was survived by her son, Peter. He had to have been alive then.
It was a conundrum. I needed to get up and stretch, talk out my ideas, so I went downstairs to find Lili, who was in the kitchen preparing dinner.
“I hope chicken piccata is all right,” she said. “I knew you had chicken breasts in the freezer, and I brought lemons and capers.”
“Sounds delicious to me.” While she sliced lemons, I explained the problem I’d come up against. “So how could he have disappeared in 1969, popped back up in 1973 and 1985, and then disappeared again?”
She dropped capers over the dish, then slid it into the oven. “How do you know he was alive in those two years?” she asked.
“He’s mentioned in his parents’ obituaries.”
“That’s it?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t meant he was alive. It just means his mother thought he was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I knew this photographer once. We were both working on stories in Uganda then. His uncle was MIA in Vietnam, and his grandmother refused to believe he was dead. She kept hoping, right up until she died, that he’d come back one day.”
I remembered my father’s friend Des, and his refusal to admit his son was dead. “So maybe that’s the way Peter Breaux’s mother felt,” I said. “Too bad the Lampreys didn’t feel the same way. It sounds like his parents wrote him off after he disappeared.”
My regular search had come up empty and there was no way I could legally get into Canadian death records to look for a John (or in Quebec, Jean) Doe. Rick could do it, I thought. He could call someone in Montreal and have them look through the records of bodies that had never been identified.
“It’s time to turn this project over to Frank Hardy,” I said to Rochester. He looked up at me, and then rushed to the front door, barking madly.
“I guess he knows who you mean,” Lili said, as we heard a set of answering barks. I walked over and opened the front door to Rick and Rascal.
“Hey,” Rick said.
“Hey.” The dogs rushed past me, heading for the lemon-smelling kitchen.
“Listen, I’m sorry I snapped at you this morning,” he said.
I shrugged. “I made a stupid joke. But I appreciate that you’re looking out for me. It’s what Frank Hardy would do for Joe, right?”
“I don’t think the Hardy Boys have gotten into computer hacking yet,” Rick said. “Though I admit I haven’t kept up with the series since I was about thirteen.”
“Let me guess,” Lili said. “That’s about the time you discovered girls?”
We both laughed. “So we’re chill?” Rick asked.
“Like Alaska.” I made a fist and raised it to him, and he bumped his fist against mine.
I noticed Lili was looking closely at Rick. “Wait right there,” she said, and she hurried toward the kitchen.
“What’s that about?” Rick asked.
“No idea. But hey, I did come up with something. Maybe a wild goose chase, but you never know. Think back to when we were nineteen—not very worldly, right? We could have made a single bad decision back then, changed the whole course of our lives.”
“Teenagers are still doing that. Where are you going with this?”
“Imagine Peter Breaux getting off the train in Montreal. He had to have a phone number or an address or something—Brannigan wouldn’t have sent him forward without a contact in Canada. But let’s say somehow he got off track, and h
e got hurt.”
“Ah. Or died.”
“Exactly. And if someone stole his ID, or he’d already ditched it, then nobody would know who he was.”
“That would explain how he dropped out of sight so quickly,” Rick said. “But what about the obituaries?”
I explained what Lili had suggested, and he nodded in agreement. He had clearly dressed up for dinner with Tamsen – a white linen shirt with embroidery down one side, untucked, and dark dress slacks with a crease. But he’d kept his small notebook in his rear pants pocket. He pulled it out. “I’ll get back to the Mounties on Monday. See if they have any unidentified bodies from that time who match Breaux’s characteristics.”
Lili returned with a damp towel. She walked up to Rick and pressed it against his hair. “You have a cowlick,” she said. “Don’t want to look like Dennis the Menace for your first date.” Then she kissed his cheek. “You’re a great guy, Rick. If she doesn’t see that, then she’s not worth bothering with.”
His face reddened and he said, “I’ll be back for Rascal by ten.”
“No rush,” I said. “We can keep him overnight if you need.”
“She has an eight-year-old,” Rick said indignantly. “And a babysitter.”
He left, and I turned to Lili. “That chicken piccata smells great.”
“You can make some garlic bread while I put together the salad.” I opened a bottle of white wine and poured two glasses, and we drank as we ate, the dogs curled around our chairs hoping for scraps.
I felt the question of Lili moving in with me hovering around us, but neither of us said anything. I knew that if she did, we’d have dinners like this often, and that was certainly good. But I was still stuck on all the freedom I’d have to give up.
After we cleaned up, we took the dogs out for a long evening walk around River Bend. “It’s going to be cold soon,” Lili said, rubbing her upper arms as a chilly breeze swept past us. She’d put on a light sweater that obviously wasn’t warm enough, so I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
“You don’t mind the cold, do you?” I asked. We had met in February, but we hadn’t begun dating until the spring.
“I don’t love it, but I like being able to stay in one place and watching the seasons change. I’m happy here and I don’t think I’ll leave, at least not for a long time.”
Rochester tugged me ahead, in pursuit of a squirrel, and I yanked on his leash, but he still pulled me away from Lili. “As a department chair, you’re administration,” I said. “So you’re not eligible for tenure.”
“I don’t care about that. I have some money put aside, and I can always freelance again if I have to, or pick up adjunct work somewhere.” She looked over at me. “How about you? You think you’ll stay in Bucks County?”
I knew there was a subtext to her question. If we moved in together, would our futures match? I thought carefully before I spoke. “I like the countryside, feeling like I belong here when I see people in the grocery store or at The Chocolate Ear that I went to school with. I’m happy here. Especially since I met you.”
“You’re such a sweetie,” she said, and kissed my cheek. I felt a glow in the pit of my stomach that certainly wasn’t heartburn.
“I look at Tor’s life in the city, and one part of me says it’s cool – the big apartment, taking Town Cars everywhere, eating out in fabulous restaurants. But the reality is that I’ll never make enough money to afford that, and I don’t think I’d want it even if I could.”
“A lot of people age out of city living,” she said. “It’s great when you’re young, and you don’t mind a dumpy apartment, taking the subway and scrounging for change for a Saturday night. But I’ve done that, and I lived the adventurous life for ten years. I’ve seen enough third-world bazaars and gotten enough food poisoning to last a lifetime.”
“But you still want to travel, don’t you? Anyplace you’d like to go with me?”
“I want to visit those places I never got sent on assignment – Paris and Vienna and Sydney and Cape Town. And I think you’d be a great person to be with.” She looked down at Rochester, sniffing around the base of an oak tree. “You think you could leave Rochester long enough to take a trip with me sometime?”
“Oh, sure. The old guy who takes care of Rascal takes dogs in overnight, too. I’d leave him there. And I’d be delighted to go traveling with you.”
I took her hand in my free one, and we circled back to the townhouse. She and I curled up on the sofa to read, with the big dogs sprawled beside us on the tile floor. I gave them a couple of the biscuits I’d made, and they chewed happily.
I was happy too, I thought. I loved Lili and enjoyed spending time with her. Wasn’t all of life a give and take, a compromise? If I was an adult, couldn’t I do that? Sacrifice some of my freedom to do what I wanted in exchange for Lili’s company?
Around ten, both dogs started to bark, and a moment later I heard a brisk knock at the door. I opened it to see Rick grinning broadly, and Rascal rushed past me, eager to jump on his daddy. “How was your date?” I asked, as I stepped back to let him and Rascal into the house.
“Great. We went up to Le Canal in New Hope. Talked for a long time, then went for a walk along the towpath before I took her home.”
Lili joined us. “What’s she like?” she asked. His cowlick had popped up again, but she made no move to smooth it down.
Rick looked like that was something he hadn’t considered yet. But he said, “She’s smart, and she’s kind, and she has a great sense of humor.”
“Those are good things,” Lili said. “I’d like to meet her sometime.”
“I assume you will, whether she ends up dating me or not.” Rick reached down for his dog’s collar. “Come on, you Rascal. Let’s go home.”
“I’m going to read for a while,” Lili said when they were gone.
“I still have one page of Brannigan’s diary that I haven’t been able to decipher yet. I might take a crack at that.”
I walked upstairs, followed by Rochester, and sat at my desk. Beside it was a low table piled with a jumble of papers to be filed, a collection of headphones, charger cables and other computer crap, and, to remind me of all I had lost, a framed photo of Mary and me, taken in Monterey, California right before our wedding. The two of us posed against the rocky shore in a photo snapped by a Japanese tourist. We both glowed in the fading afternoon light like God had special plans for us.
The cipher used on that single page didn’t match any of Brannigan’s others, and I was stumped. Rochester must have sensed my unrest, because he stood up and started pacing around the room, wagging his big tail. A moment later I heard a crash and looked over to see that he’d knocked down the photo of Mary and me.
“Thanks for the clue, puppy,” I said. “But I know for a fact Mary was nowhere near Stewart’s Crossing in 1969.”
He woofed at me, then stared with doggie devotion. “What? Is there something else about the picture? There couldn’t be. I haven’t touched it in years.”
He kept staring at me, so I unbent the clips that held the picture in place and slid it out. There was nothing there but the picture. I flipped it over and saw that Mary had written the date and both our names: Steve Levitan and Mary Schulweiss.
“Rochester, you’re a genius!” I said. “Of course. Edith wasn’t married to Lou Passis then.” I’d helped Edith the year before when someone had committed bank fraud against her, and I had her maiden name filed somewhere on my computer.
Rochester curled around behind my chair, as if he was going to keep me at the computer until I finished my work. I hunted through a couple of files until I found that Edith’s maiden name was Fox.
There was only one two-word pair with a 5-3 pattern. I filled out all the letters in her name, discovering that Brannigan had used the letter Y for E, and so on. Then I converted all those letters in the word pairs on the list.
The name below Edith’s was the one with three words. First word _ e
_ _; second one _ ee; third one i_ _ _.
It only took me a moment to realize it was Vera Lee Isay, Brannigan’s secretary. How long had she worked for him? She told us that she’d been out of high school for two years or so before she became his secretary. She’d have been at least eighteen, old enough to drive boys around, get them supplies for their travels, or whatever else Brannigan asked. And if she’d been part of his group, no wonder she had been reluctant to help Rick and me once she learned what we were looking for.
I kept going. The rest of the names were unfamiliar to me, though since they were all female it was possible that I knew one or more of them but under a married name, as I’d known Edith. There were a couple of letters I couldn’t figure out, but I thought I’d show the list to Edith and see if she could help.
I picked up the photo of Mary and me. It was time to put it away, I thought, along with all the memories it represented. Maybe that was why Rochester had knocked it over in the first place.
“You are one smart puppy,” I said to him. He rolled on his back, and I clambered down to the floor to scratch his belly as a reward.
24 – Confession
Sunday morning, I made veggie omelets for myself and Lili, and we lounged around eating and reading the paper. Around noon, Lili decided to go back to her apartment in Leighville because she was eager to scan some of the photos she had printed and begin working with them. I kissed her goodbye and promised to see her during the week.
Neither of us said anything more about her moving in, but I knew that her deadline was approaching. I just couldn’t open the subject up, one way or another.
I spent some more time online, looking for information on Peter Breaux, but I kept drawing a blank. The only clues I had were his hometown and his parents’ obituaries. I wondered if he had been at their funerals, or if he was only remembered in those notices.
Several of my high school friends had showed up at my mother’s funeral, even though I was living in California and we’d been out of touch for years. Small towns were like that. People read the obituaries and paid their respects.
