Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  She smiled, then slowly lifted herself off the bench.

  “Was that the doctor’s office?” asked Brianne.

  “Yeah,” said Andrea. “They can take me, but I have to go now. Do you mind if I leave the kids with you?”

  “Of course,” they all said.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Andrea pulled into the parking lot of the West Windsor library. She went to the front desk and asked, “Are your newspaper archives hard copy, digitized, or microfiche?”

  The clerk said, “A bit of everything, but talk to him,” and gestured toward the reference desk in the middle of the library, where a lone man sat cataloguing books.

  He wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt with enough pens in the pocket to write the Magna Carta. He was in his late sixties, with wispy gray hair and reading glasses that clung to the precipice of his nose.

  “Hi, my name is Andrea Epstein,” she said. “I’m an associate researcher with the Reclamation Project, which seeks to locate and preserve both Native American and African American burial grounds.”

  “Oh, that sounds like fascinating work,” said the clerk.

  “It is,” Andrea said, smiling. “And it can be rewarding, Mister . . . ?”

  “I can imagine,” said the clerk. “And my name is Harry. Mister is still my dad.”

  She chortled along with him.

  “So, basically, I’m looking for old newspaper articles about remains found on farmland or during any of the construction of the housing developments around here,” Andrea said.

  “Remains?”

  “Well, bones, really,” said Andrea. “The discovery of a bone could indicate a larger burial site. I want a shortcut through the archives if I could find one.”

  “Hmm, the only shortcut I can give you is good ol’ Lady Commodore over there,” Harry said, pointing to the desktop research computer to the right of his rectangular counter-and-desk arrangement. “Search by subject or by paper. It won’t really narrow down dates for you, but it’ll tell you if it’s available digitally, through microfiche, or in hard copies.”

  Sitting down, Andrea wondered if she would need to check with the local historical society for permission to start up the Commodore. She took her notebook out and flipped it open. She touched a key to get the system out of sleep mode and waited for the blinking prompt.

  She typed in: “old bones + found + West Windsor + Plainsboro + New Jersey.”

  She started to add a date range, but didn’t want to miss any possible recent discoveries. She closed her eyes and hit Return.

  The search came up with over three thousand hits.

  “Shit,” she muttered. Had she forgotten the famous mass genocide of West Windsor that no one had ever heard about?

  She removed the “bones” from the search bar and added “fossil.” Fourteen items came up. One looked promising. The search engine screen showed an article with the headline: fossil found on ferris farm?

  She looked at the date. August 1972.

  The article was from the Trentonian. A notification said it was on microfiche. She wrote down the information on her pad and clicked back to the search engine results.

  Andrea read through the rest of the pulls, but found nothing related to her particular prediction. Several articles about local archaeologists, another about shark’s teeth that were found in the Millstone River. She showed her notepad to Harry.

  “Okay,” he said, gesturing toward a solitary microfiche machine. “There’s the machine. She’s gonna moan a bit for you because she doesn’t get turned on too often.”

  “She and I have a lot in common then,” Andrea said with a smile.

  Harry laughed lightly. “I’d say you’ve had a little more fun in the last eight months than she has.”

  He had a peaceful manner about him. The kind of guy Andrea wished her father had been like, instead of what he had been like, which was not the kind of guy who had a peaceful manner about him.

  She found the film she needed in the catalog file. She sat down at the microfiche machine and recalled the ancient days of Columbia, when their archives had just started being digitized and she had to use their antique equipment. It came to her, as most things did, pretty quickly.

  Andrea turned the dial on the July–December 1972 Trentonian film, scrolling past July until she reached August and the week of publication. The article was on page fourteen. There was a photo along with the article showing a husband, a wife, and two tween girls holding a leg bone.

  The caption beneath the photo read:

  Jonathan, Elizabeth, Rosemary, and Frances Ferris holding what they hope is a dinosaur bone found on their property.

  She looked at the happy farm family smiling for the cameras. She didn’t even need to read the article to know that was no dinosaur bone, but she read it anyway. The family were the descendants of its original owner, Jeremiah Ferris, who had started the farm in 1792. Jonathan had been creating a new irrigation ditch to help water their fields when his oldest daughter saw him churn something up with his backhoe. They turned the bone over to the police, hoping that they had found a dinosaur fossil.

  A quote from the recently promoted Chief Bertram Dobeck read, “These things usually turn out to be animal bones, but we asked the Princeton archaeology department for help just in case.”

  The article went on to say it would be weeks before anyone would know the truth, but that the Ferris family had fun speculating anyway. It talked a little more about the family farm, one of the smallest tracts in West Windsor, and how they had proudly run a working farm for almost two hundred years.

  The article mentioned the farm’s location between North Post Road and Penn Lyle Road, and if Andrea recalled her maps at home properly, that would place the farm where the Le Parc development was now. What a coincidence, she thought, that the location of the bone was only twenty yards away from the Duck Pond Run.

  Andrea considered asking Harry if she could print from the microfiche machine, but decided she didn’t need the article, just the names. She finished her notes, lifted herself up, and walked back toward the clerk.

  “Find what you were looking for?” he asked.

  “Let’s call it a good start,” she replied as she headed to the computer desks. She sat down and opened up the Google search engine. She plugged in “Ferris Farm Sale + West Windsor + New Jersey.” The sale was listed in 1981. She followed that up by searching for “Jonathan Ferris + Ferris Farm.”

  His obituary from an Orlando, Florida, newspaper came up as one of the top twenty hits. He had died of a heart attack in 1998, at age seventy-four. His wife, Elizabeth, was apparently still alive, with a last known address in Cherry Hill. The obituary listed the children, Rosemary Murphy of Stamford, Connecticut, and Frances O’Connell of Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

  She looked up the public record reviews for both daughters and found their current addresses and phone numbers. She jotted them down in her notebook. She logged off the system and left the library.

  Andrea sat at the small picnic table to the side of the library. She started to dial Elizabeth’s number but hung up because an Amtrak train rushed by thirty yards behind her. She waited, then decided calling the elderly widow might not be the best option. She dialed the daughter Rosemary’s number.

  “Hi, my name is Andie Epstein and I’m looking for a Rosemary Murphy whose maiden name was Ferris?” she said in an affected polite voice.

  “Speaking,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Hello, Ms. Murphy, I apologize in advance that this call is going to seem extremely odd, but I work for the Reclamation Project; we’re a group that tries to locate and preserve Native American and African American burial grounds.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry, I know that sounds out of nowhere, but basically, I go to diffe
rent towns in the Northeast region and I try to find evidence of possible burial plots,” she said. “I was doing some research in West Windsor and I came across an article in the paper.”

  “The bone?” asked Rosemary. Andrea could almost see the smile of recollection on the woman’s face. “The story in the Trentonian. My God, that was so long ago.”

  “Nineteen seventy-two,” said Andrea. “I was calling because the article mentioned the police would inquire with Princeton University experts about what kind of bone it was, but there was no follow-up story written about it.”

  Rosemary laughed. “Oh, we were all convinced it was a dinosaur bone. My sister and I found it when we were skirting the creek. My dad had run the backhoe over it. We pestered my mom to call the newspaper. Dad was so embarrassed about that. He said it wasn’t a fossil.”

  “Did the police ever tell you what it was?”

  “Oh, yes, they called, like, two months later, apologizing for the delay,” she said.

  “And?”

  “It was just a horse bone, they said.”

  “Who said?”

  “The police.”

  “Do you remember who specifically might have called your house?”

  “Oh, I didn’t answer, but I’m sure it was Chief Dobeck,” said Rosemary. “He was a friend of my parents.”

  “Bertram Dobeck? Who was quoted in the article?”

  “Yes, he was the chief of police in West Windsor for years,” said Rosemary. “His son after that, and I think his grandson does it now.”

  “Did you ever get the bone back?” asked Andrea.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “There’s no fun in finding a not-so-ancient horse bone, is there?”

  “No, I guess not,” said Andrea. “Do you know what they ever did with the bone?”

  “No idea.”

  “Okay, Ms. Murphy, thank you so much for your time and I’m sorry to have bothered you,” said Andrea.

  “We shouldn’t have gotten ourselves so excited about it,” added Rosemary. “I mean, an article in the paper proclaiming a dinosaur fossil seems silly in hindsight.”

  “Not at all, Ms. Murphy,” said Andrea. “Thank you for your time.”

  She hung up and marched back inside, which was kind of hard to pull off since her hips forced her to swivel like she was Mrs. Potts from Beauty and the Beast.

  Andrea returned to Harry’s desk and said, “I’m sorry, I totally forgot, but can I print from the microfiche machine?”

  “No, sorry,” said Harry. “Best you can do is take a picture with your phone and print from that, or check with the paper’s morgue to see if you can find a hard copy.”

  Andrea wiggled her cell phone. “Picture, it is,” she said.

  She loaded the microfiche up again and scrolled to the article. To her surprise, Harry was suddenly over her shoulder. “Oh, Rosie Ferris,” he said.

  “You knew her?”

  “We went to high school together,” he said. “Was a small town back then.”

  “You remember this?” she asked.

  “No, can’t say that I do,” he said. “I’m sure it wasn’t a dinosaur fossil like they thought.”

  Andrea took a picture of the screen.

  “Here, you can blow up the screen image a bit and not lose detail,” he said, finagling the focus dial to enlarge the picture on-screen. Andrea took several more pictures with her phone.

  “Thanks for your help, Harry,” she said.

  She got in her car and started it, letting the air-conditioning wash over her. She looked at her phone and scrolled through the shots she had just taken.

  “Horse bone, my fucking ass,” she muttered. “That’s a human femur.”

  PART TWO

  Pieces of Hate

  19

  KENNY parked off Canal Road in the gravel lot along the Delaware and Raritan Canal towpath. The mayor’s Lexus was there. Six thirty in the goddamned morning on a Sunday. He was astounded anyone would choose to punish themselves this way.

  He walked on the narrow shoulder along Alexander Road and across the canal to the packed-dirt towpath. Mayor Jiaying Wu was ahead of him, stretching. She wore a Dri-Fit shirt and exercise leggings. She was in excellent shape and played to the stereotype, easily looking twenty years younger than her sixty-four years.

  “Good morning, Madame Mayor,” he said.

  “Li Jie,” she said, using his Chinese name, which he had never used in his entire life. “You get ten seconds right here or one hour if you walk with me.”

  “How far do you walk?” he asked, balancing her offer against his exhaustion.

  “Five miles in one hour,” she said.

  “That’s, um . . . you have to walk pretty fast to do that?” he asked.

  “Your ten-second window is up,” Wu said, as she started walking north on the trail.

  He caught up to her and she asked, “How’s your mother?”

  The non sequitur caught him off guard, but he should have been ready for it. Wu had held power in West Windsor for two decades because she was good at playing people. And she’d started this meeting by playing him.

  “She’s . . .” Kenny hesitated. Though he was used to talking fast, he wasn’t used to walking fast. Plus, he had absolutely no idea how to answer that simple question. “She’s . . . my mother,” he finally said, thinking, hoping, that would be enough.

  “Oh, how well I know,” Mayor Wu replied. “Because your mother is your mother is the reason our friendship fell apart.”

  “I always thought it was because you wouldn’t give her the liquor license for that restaurant she wanted to open,” said Kenny.

  “No, it was because as a real estate agent she knew that particular retail space would not be zoned for alcohol sale,” she replied with zero-to-sixty anger coming through her short, disciplined breathing.

  “Hey, the last person in the world who is going to defend my mother is me, so don’t take her stubborn sense of entitlement out on me,” said Kenny.

  “No, from what I understand, Kenneth, you have your own issues to contend with.”

  He had no response. Wu was an immigrant. There was a schism between the Chinese like her and those who had been in the country for decades like his family.

  “I understand you are pushing Bennett’s buttons a bit?” Wu said.

  “I think they need to be pushed, ma’am.”

  She laughed. “Bennett is, always has been, and always will be a complete asshole—and you know that’s off the record.”

  “What’s on the record, then?”

  “When it has to do with the police department, very little.”

  “What if it involves your daughter?” he asked abruptly. He was nervous to have said it, but also excited that he’d been set up for a T-ball home run.

  “Nuan made it clear when she started the job that she didn’t want me meddling in her affairs,” Wu said, using her daughter’s Chinese name.

  “Even if it turned out that she was being coerced into a police cover-up?” he asked.

  “No more questions, Kenneth,” she snapped in Mandarin. “I want answers.”

  He told her. In English.

  “Have you talked to my daughter about this?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “She is a grown woman. I don’t speak for her,” the mayor said. “She can build her own mountains or dig her own grave.”

  Nothing was said for several paces, until Kenny filled the silence. “I don’t know if Michelle did something wrong or if Dobeck told her to lie. I don’t know if Dobeck is covering something up or if it was a robbery. I do know I trust my source.”

  They reached the Dinky train overpass that connected downtown Princeton to the Princeton Junction train station.

  “Why would Dobeck want anyone to lie about the motive for the mu
rder?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Bennett’s father was the one that always truly scared me,” she said.

  “Bradley Dobeck lives in Windrows, where my mom is.”

  “He made my first term in office a nightmare,” said the mayor. “The thought of a woman, much less an Asian woman, presiding over his final years before retirement was not easy for him.” After twenty yards of silence, she continued, “In Bradley’s defense, the town was changing all around them.”

  “Sure, not just all the development, but watching so many Indians and Chinese coming in,” he said. “What was it like for you? You came in the early eighties, right?”

  “My husband and I came in nineteen eighty-three,” she replied.

  “And you barely spoke English, right?”

  “I guarantee you, we were more fluent in English than the average American is in Mandarin,” she said, smiling.

  “Probably more than the average American is in English,” he said. “So, you opened up the restaurant?”

  “If it only had been as easy to do as it was for you to say,” she replied. “Leasing the space wasn’t an issue, but getting a liquor license, which is hard enough in West Windsor as it is, was nearly impossible for us.”

  “But that process led you to meet all the players in the local government and your frustration eventually made you decide to run for town council, right?”

  “Nice to know someone’s read our website,” she said.

  “Do you think things are better now?” Kenny asked. “I mean, I’ve spoken to fifty Indian families about the murder and every single one of them cited instances that I would categorize as systemic, institutional bigotry.”

  “Traffic stops, police citations over noise, complaints about cooking smells, complaints about what they wear, how they talk, how they pray, how they are smarter than my little Johnny, how they’re not smarter than my little Ji-an,” she rattled off. “Should I continue?”