Memory’s Will

“I understand you were a friend of his.” The slow drawl on the other end of the line grated on the ears.

“Whose friend?” Nick stood in his living room, tie loosened, the air conditioning running at full throttle, trying to pay attention to the voice despite an annoying static sounding like rushing water.

The police detective continued in a louder voice, “As I was saying, Craig Major’s. We have identified his remains, and we are contacting the people who knew him in order to put together a possible scenario of what may have happened.”

“What do you mean?”  Nick moved the receiver away from his ear because the static hurt his ear. Yet the sound did not decrease. Was it coming from the air conditioner? No. There was a peculiar unsettling quality to it that was vaguely familiar.  

The detective repeated, “I understand you were a friend of Craig Major. I understand it was a while ago, Mr. Breyer, but we need your cooperation in supplying us information.”

 Homer Hamlin was the detective’s name. He sounded like a Homer, the twang of the Appalachian backwoods resonating in his voice. The word “I” almost pronounced like “Ah,” “friend” like “furned” and “cooperation” like “corporation.” 

“Mr. Breyer, are you there?”

Nick needed to pace, however the detective had unfortunately called on a landline and the short tangled cord limited his movement.

“Mr. Breyer?”

Nick should have been handling himself better. After all, he had always known that it was possible that someone in Homer Hamlin’s profession would appear at his door, flash a badge, and want to ask questions. Nick had prepared the answers to the questions, answers combining believability with consistency. In his imagination he had turned the interrogation into sort of an exam—a dispassionate oral recitation for the satisfaction of the examiners.

“Mr. Breyer, are you still with me?”

The static grew louder. Then he saw the place—in his mind’s eye the rumpled gray water below the rocky outcropping. And he heard it—the thousands of trees on the surrounding mountains acting like vocal chords to the rushing wind creating a human-like wail.

“Mr. Breyer…”

Nick knew he wouldn’t be able to acquit himself well unless he recovered the present and dealt with the task at hand.

“Mr. Breyer…”

“Yes, I’m here.”  That was a lie except in the literal physical sense. He was at the lake twenty years ago. The wind had now subsided. He stood maybe ten yards from the edge of the water. Several minutes had passed. It started to rain. He felt the relentless downpour on his hunched shoulders, the cold water molding his thin shirt to his chest and back. He felt the thumping of his heart and the constriction of his throat holding back the bilious mixture of panic and disgust that rose from his stomach. He felt his fingers digging into the palms of his hands as he gazed at the dead boy. “Sorry,” Nick told the detective pulling himself out of the memory, “I’m trying to place the name and figure out who you’re talking about.”

“Junipero High School…”     

“Yeah, I think I remember now.” Nick made an effort to focus on Hamlin’s voice. He had to keep his cool. This wasn’t a warrant, only questions, and for a long time he had practiced the answers.

“You took several classes with him…”

“Really?  I guess so. He disappeared in my Junior year.”

“Senior year, I believe, Mr. Breyer.”

“Must have been early in my Senior year. How can I possibly help you, Detective Hamlin?”

“I’ve been informed that you knew Craig pretty well. The discovery of his remains has brought up a couple of significant issues that you might be able to render us some assistance in helping explain.” 

“I’m not too sure,” Nick made an effort to sound hesitant. “He was hardly more than an acquaintance, and twenty years is a long time to remember anything.”

“Well, we’d certainly appreciate whatever help you’re able to give. I know it’s quite a trek from Phoenix to here. Of course, we’d compensate you for the traveling expenses.”

“You’re asking me to drive to Junipero? If it is just the matter of answering questions, I can save both of us time and expense by taking them over the phone…”

“I’d like to accommodate you, Mr. Breyer.” The tone of the detective’s voice indicated that he was in no way willing to accommodate. “I know this is all of a sudden, and you must be a busy man with a job and a schedule. Unfortunately, there were some items found with Craig’s remains that I believe you might particularly be able to help us identify. Would tomorrow afternoon at four be convenient?”

“You can’t expect me to drop everything…”

“Well, in my profession we kind of do expect that. You know on account of we can compel it in the end.”

Is this a threat? Nick asked himself. “I have classes to teach. I can’t possibly make it tomorrow.”

“Make it next Friday then, two p.m. Just come to the station and ask for Homer.”

“I have a hard time seeing why you’re in such a hurry. What’s his name, Craig, has been gone for over twenty years.”

“I make it a point to deal with the oldest business first. I also reckon you’d want this over as soon as possible.”

“As soon as it is convenient. Such a short notice isn’t convenient.” Nick let irritation creep into this voice.

“From time to time, we call on a citizen to make a small sacrifice for the cause of justice.”

“Justice?  So you must think he was a victim of a crime?” Nick made an effort to sound surprised.

“That appears to be the most likely scenario at this point,” Hamlin replied in a dry impersonal voice.

Nick decided to play for time. “I can make it two weeks from Friday. If you want to talk to me sooner, then you’ll have to come my way. Two weeks aren’t going to make much of a difference in a twenty-year-old disappearance. Besides, I really think you are overestimating my contribution.”

“Maybe so, maybe so,” Hamlin drawled. “But it is odd that there are some loose ends that you seem to be uniquely able to tie up.”   

“Well, you have me stumped Mr. Hamlin.” Nick reflected that for the first time in the conversation he was telling the truth. “What are the items you want me to identify?”

“Can’t really go into the details. I’ll show them to you when we interview you.”

“I guess you will. I hope I can help knot your loose ends when I come in two weeks. By the way, where did you find the boy’s body?”

“With all the drought out here, the water level has fallen in reservoirs and lakes to the lowest in forty-five years. Some hikers spotted his remains in the muddy shallows of a small lake in the mountains. Craig took a while to identify. He had been dismembered, and his body was completely skeletonized except for a few clumps of hair. Luckily we had a pretty well preserved mandible with most of the molars. Saved us the expense of DNA analysis and all that sort of lab work. If you’re interested in more details you can perhaps get a back copy from Junipero Weekly a month ago.”

“Dismembered? So Craig must have been murdered. Poor kid!”

“No other explanation fits. Still, bones often can’t tell us as much as we like. We had a forensic anthropologist puzzle over them, give us a few possibilities of how he was killed, but nothing we could absolutely hang our hats on. The fact that he ended up in the middle of nowhere is kind of strange. He didn’t know how to drive, so someone must have driven him. All this is speculation still. But you’re right, he was a poor kid. However his life ended, it seemed he never had a chance. At life, I mean. You know in a case this old it takes some time to put all of the pieces in place, and often we just have what we have. With Craig it’s just his skeleton and a few other odds and ends. I hope you’ll be able to shed light on what these odds and ends mean.”

“Now you have me worried that I’m a suspect. At least, I’ll be able to set you right on that score when we talk.”

At the end of a long pause, Hamlin said, “All we’re asking, Mr. Breyer, is an identification of some items and perhaps an explanation of why they were found with the body.”

After Nick hung up, he tried to steady himself by staring at the familiar objects in the living room. He examined the coffee table with its decades of nicks and scratches, glanced at the bookshelves stuffed with magazines and paperbacks—the overflow from his study—then gazed at the veins on the backs of his hands and his wedding ring. He followed the second hand around the face of the ersatz grandfather clock three times. He saw the light seep around the heavy curtains drawn against the brilliant heat outside. Allison was in the kitchen singing while she cooked. Her son, his stepson, Adam, was in his room with the door closed, either surfing the net or lost in a Civil War history book. This was Nick’s reality—not that other thing. Maybe Hamlin had picked up a clue or two, anyone who poked around in the case could have connected a few dots, but nothing incriminating had been left, much less survive the years. Nick had made sure of that.

When he regained his footing in the present, Nick picked up his briefcase. He had over a hundred tests to correct so he wanted to start early. He went into his study, sat down at his desk and turned on the radio to a classical station. To the preludes of Chopin he began to peruse a High School student’s answer to what she thought the Tariff of Abominations was. He smiled at the answer and quickly went through the next fifteen exams—the safe comfortable routine of hundreds of afternoons. Then he was distracted by a low buzz.  Were the power cables humming? Nick gritted his teeth and corrected three more tests. The sound became shriller and more insistent. On one of the hottest days of the year, in one of the hottest cities in the country, he had started to shiver violently. The wind! He closed his eyes. Helplessly, he was swept back to the lake, far away from the papers lying in the open briefcase on his desk. He saw the stand of Jeffery and Ponderosa pines shake in the teeth of the wind like they were in the teeth of a vicious animal. He saw them quiver, bend, bow, and issue sounds of inconsolable mourning.

And he could almost see the others. Five forms that yet had to take a definite shape, five gaps in the continuity of space. Behind them, bands of rain raked the water of the lake, and further beyond, on the far shoreline, dark gray blue clouds rolled over the head of the dull ugly granite outcropping. The boy was lying on his side, lips open as if he were whispering, his dead body more real than the five shadows that stood around him. Nick felt his own sharp stinging intakes of breath. He recalled perfectly the texture of the bark of a pine spotted with two drops of fresh blood that stood behind the body. Even the pattern of pine needles and leaves on which the Craig lay stood out in memory with startling clarity. However, those five, their shapes and postures and most disturbing their faces stubbornly hid in obscurity.

Why were those faces, which should have been more familiar than any other element in the scene, so difficult to see?

Nick’s head was clear again, so clear that it didn’t seem possible that just a moment before he had been confused and disorientated. He went back to correcting the tests. The Nat Turner Rebellion. King Cotton. James K. Polk. William Lloyd Garrison. Events and names shorn of the chaos and passion that they once evoked and now safely tucked away into books for orderly retrieval. Nick began to scrawl the grades and comments, then caught himself and reverted to his usual neat, precise hand. Seven more tests done.

Perversely, now he wanted to go back. The absence of those faces teased him as if he were a criminal who has lost his wallet and suspects he left it at the scene of a crime.  Nick then realized that that was exactly his situation.

What if one of the others had confessed to an intimate because the purpose of intimates was to help share the burden of your secrets? What if one of the others had gotten into a bragging contest with a drinking buddy about who was more bad. Such secrets once loose seemed to seek out the interested parties. Unlikely, yet that would be a better explanation for the detective’s interest in him than the discovery of items with Craig’s bones.

“Evelyn, Michael, Stanley, Marion, Ian,” Nick whispered their names. If he could see their faces, he half believed he could figure out who slipped up—got religion, or got drunk, or was just very stupid. But the names were only that: names without any physical substance. His memory now seemed to be acting like a selfish child, denying him a thing because he wanted it so badly. Nick willed himself to be calm. He looked over the answers on a test. He corrected eight more. Nine more. A few drops of sweat fell from his forehead on the tenth test. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Come out, come out, he pleaded with his friends, please, so we can talk. We need to talk so we can deal with this situation like we did before. It’s going to be your skin as well as mine.

Nick again returned to correcting the tests. Twenty four were graded. He almost forgot, but then he heard the door to his stepson’s room open and close and his footsteps clump down the hallway. Something dropped. The house shook. The chill went straight down his spine. Nick could see them now.

Homer Hamlin

Homer Hamlin stared at a legal pad which was blank except for the name “Nick Breyer” neatly printed at the top. He usually made meticulous notes, but he was put off during the call for two reasons. He thought it more important to try to develop a rapport during the first conversation. Rapport was better at drawing out information than threats or intimidation. You push a man towards a door and he resists; you open it for him and he walks through. Homer also hadn’t anticipated his own surprise on hearing their voices, and he realized that he needed to listen very carefully. He had lived with those names over four years. He had studied these mostly ordinary men as closely as possible. He was certain he had come to know them in ways more intimately than their closest friends and family. Yet, he had never heard their voices. He had never acquainted himself with the patterns of their speech—measured the words against the vocalization, listen for the anxiety that can frame a phrase, or the smooth cadence of a rehearsed answer.

An old detective, a living fossil, so to speak, who claimed impossibly to be from the era of Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, once boasted, “I can tell whether a man is innocent or guilty just by the way he talks.” 

“Why, Kurt,” an officer four decades his junior and not known for his tact replied, “you’re so deaf  that if a man isn’t in front of you and you can’t see his mouth open and close, you can’t even tell whether he is talking or not.” 

“I hear what I need to hear. It don’t matter what a suspect says. He can read a phone book for all I care. But I can tell.” 

Homer, too young and scientific in approach to appreciate an older man’s experience yet, asked him how he could perform this trick.

“Hard to explain.” 

“I bet it is,” the younger officer said.

“But not impossible,” the fossil raised his voice. “Best way is patterns, I guess. A guilty man will have two speech patterns, one sort of imitating the other. He’ll sound regular, then he’ll sound like he’s trying to sound regular—that’s the part that’s doing the hiding.”  Homer learned that this detective was still drawing a paycheck at eighty five because of his skill that at times bordered on clairvoyance during interrogations.

Much of the information about these six Homer had no business knowing. It didn’t seem right that you can’t search a man’s house without a warrant, but you can search his life. Did he really need to view the transcripts of Ian’s divorce proceedings and learn the secrets of his sexual proclivities? Or the powerful sedatives and antidepressants Michael took to maintain his mental equilibrium? Or Marion’s illegitimate daughter unsuspected by his wife? But despite these doubts, slowly and assiduously, Homer had filled out their dossiers. Did it matter the name of the sixteen year-old girl who had accused Stanley of making improper sexual advances and had almost resulted in the loss of his chiropractic license? Yet, he would have liked to know more.

Homer sensed the beginning of rapport with Nick. That was good because Nick presented the greatest challenge. Nick had been the ringleader, the linchpin. He was likely the only one capable and thorough enough to cover up the murder. It also took smarts to disappear completely for years, which Nick had done after he graduated from High School. Absolutely no trace until he suddenly appeared as an undergraduate at Arizona State University. Nick made up for lost time by graduating with a master in education three and a half years later.

Evelyn, the other boy he considered bad seed, was an additional problem. The best Homer could do in locating him was to narrow his whereabouts to the three Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, or Chihuahua. A month before graduating, Evelyn had done the community a favor by removing himself to Mexico. He possibly earned his living running drugs or people across the border, but that was just an educated guess because there was little else that someone with Evelyn’s talents and predilections could do. He occasionally resurfaced in Junipero to visit his grandfather. Evelyn’s reckoning would have to wait until an arrest order was issued and he unknowingly returned to Junipero or ran afoul of the Federales and could be extradited.

In his zeal for accumulating information, Homer had forgotten the old detective’s reliance on the tone and pattern of speech. Few men were good enough actors to mask their feelings in the voice. Homer would now have ample opportunity to study this aspect of these mostly ordinary men who had murdered. As he would also have the opportunity to look into their eyes and at their hands and learn their body language as they answered his questions. Even how they breathed could betray the words they were saying. Homer imagined himself slowly peeling off the layers of deceits and lies that they had wrapped around their secret. He would do so gently like a doctor peeling gauze off a wound, gently peeling, all the while anticipating the fresh vivid pain in his subject as the last layer is lifted and the wound is exposed to air and light.

Homer took a sip from a cup of coffee, his seventeenth of the day, stood up and stretched, his belly not quite flattening out when he raised his arms. He had never remembered working so hard. He would have to call Teresa and explain again that he needed to stay late. She would put a good face on it and ask whether truly the investigation was almost at an end. Although she came from a large family and life in an empty house was particularly trying for her, Teresa did not want to make the final push for adoption until this case was over, Then they would visit that orphanage in Thailand and meet the child that would become their son or daughter.  He had three months of vacation time built up. Maybe they’d decide to adopt to two babies right off—orphaned siblings. Presto!  Instant family! Imagining how he could please his wife had become a regular afternoon fantasy for Homer. But their recent reconciliation with its not entirely mended wounds made making promises based on fantasy a high risk activity.

Homer walked over to the window, which looked down on faded lawn that was named Civic Park because of presence of a shabby city hall and the slightly more respectable court building facing two sides of the square. A collection of pawnshops, Mexican fast food joints, and bail bond firms took up the third side directly across from the police headquarters. The afternoon was still hot in a humid greasy way, which was uncommon for this usually dry part of the country. The few pedestrians ambled slowly down the sidewalks like cows suffering from heatstroke. A fat girl, dressed to kill in a miniskirt and halter-top—maybe a pro, maybe someone’s babysitter just trying to keep cool—sat wilting on a park bench. A dark skinned young man and a blond young woman, contrasting as sharply as light and dark checkers, were ensconced side by side underneath an umbrella at a table in front of a taco shop. An old man sunned himself in his wheelchair in the middle of the plaza. His caretaker smoked a cigarette in the thin shade offered by a billboard a dozen feet away.

This view was too familiar for it to hold his interest long. Homer looked beyond to the rows of elms and oaks that lined the quiet orderly streets where the ordinary people lived. No man who desired to excel in a profession or career, who wanted to make a mark in the world, or who even possessed a greater than the average curiosity about other places, would ever choose to live in Junipero. The citizens here were people whose ambitions didn’t extend beyond the personal and local. Homer had made a point of walking down Junipero’s streets to get a feel for the neighborhoods.

In one sense, the neighborhoods could be a suburb from anywhere—the same sort of children riding their bikes, the same kind of men fiddling in their garages, the same kind of women gardening and taxiing children. The illusion was that nothing could ever happen on those quiet streets. Though a thousand lives could be summed up neatly and concisely by statistical categories, nothing was so unpredictable as the course of a single life. That was what gave police detectives work. Particularly, the unpredictability of evil. Unpredictable because no statistician had ever categorized evil correctly: as a subset of the ordinary. Twenty years ago on those ordinary streets was where it all began. Sixteen years later when those that committed the evil surely felt safe from discovery of their crime, Homer would make an acquaintance that opened the door into the secret lives of those ordinary evil people.

Homer looked at his watch. The second hand crawled slowly around the dial as if it was also affected by sunstroke. He suddenly had an absurd fear that time would continue to slow to the point of stopping just before he reached his goal. Sighing, Homer picked up the legal memo pads and  put them in the folders with six neatly printed names on the tabs—Nicholas Breyer, Ian Connally, Marion Tanner, Michael Smith, Evelyn Foss and Stanley Wright—and not without satisfaction said, “Time to come home, my boys. Time to come on home.”

Craig’s Father

Four years before, while Homer sat at his desk trying to focus his eyes on the third part of a triplicate form, a small voice interrupted the tedium saying, “I’d like to report a crime.”

Homer, startled, reverted to his Baptist preacher uncle’s vocabulary, “Who in the tarnation are you?”

This visitor seemed to have materialized out of nothing, giving him the impression that his senses had blind curves or secret tunnels that intruders could utilize to sneak up on him.

“I’d like to report a crime,” the man repeated, fastening on Homer a pair of unblinking blue eyes.

“Did anyone direct you to see me?”

The visitor was silent. On the downward slope of middle age, on the small side with narrow tapering shoulders, balding head, and the pointed face of a possum, the individual wasn’t exactly physically intimidating. Yet, he wore that ominous expression of a man out to get even. Homer couldn’t believe he was the object of this man’s ire. Three months with the Junipero Police wasn’t a long enough time to make enemies harboring personal grudges.

“You can fill out a report at the front desk,” Homer continued after concluding that what he had here was likely a specimen of those worthy citizens who are so outraged that they have had their car stolen or pocket picked that they hold the entire police force responsible.

“What I want to report is a murder.” The man closed his eyes as if it took all of his concentration to form the words of this declaration.

“You want to report a homicide, you say?  Who murdered whom?”  Homer maintained his professional demeanor because in his experience that was the best way of dealing with crackpots, although he sensed the man wasn’t quite that. From the quavering voice and the strain in his neck muscles, Homer wouldn’t have been surprised if his visitor had produced a bloody knife or a revolver with a warm barrel and blurted out a confession.

“My son’s murder. I want to report it to you.”  The man bowed his head again, the tendons in his neck increasing their definition as if he were butting his forehead against an invisible barrier.

“You should have phoned us from the scene of the crime, or from the nearest safe place. In that way, we can often stop more harm from being done.”

“I don’t know where the scene of the crime is.”  The visitor raised his eyes again, unblinking eyes like a hawk’s, and looked directly at Homer.         

“Don’t know?  Where’s the body?” Homer returned the stare and wondered what this strange individual was going to say next.

“I told you I don’t know.”

“Who murdered him?”

“I don’t know,” his visitor insisted.

 Homer rose from his chair in order to better aim his anger from his six-foot-three-inch vantage point down at this absurd little man. “Is this a joke?” The visitor shrank slightly but showed no sign of having been found out in a prank, and the personalities of policemen usually didn’t lend themselves to practical jokes. “You are reporting a murder with no body and no suspects. How can you even be sure your son is dead?”

“Craig would have come back.”  The man fidgeted and lowered his head.

“Are you certain he won’t?”

“He won’t. Craig was murdered sixteen years ago.”      

With the heat and the tedious paperwork that should have been finished a week ago, Homer wasn’t in the mood to play the straight man in this grotesque comic routine. “I’m sorry I can’t help you. Fill out a report at the front desk. I’m sure your report will get all the attention it deserves.”  He circled around the desk with the intention of escorting the visitor personally out of his office, by physical force if necessary, then locking the door. How this crank was ever able to penetrate this far into the station was an issue he’d have to take up with the front desk. When Homer clamped his hand on the visitor’s thin shoulder, the man reacted by grasping the edge of the desk in a desperate gesture to resist. 

“Come on, now.”  Homer withdrew his hand, deciding that a few questions might help ease this intruder out. He was starting to feel pity. “Did your son have any history of mental illness?”

“You already asked those questions,” the small man replied clinging to the edge of the desk.

“’You? You!’” Homer let his temper show.  “What in the hell do you mean by ‘you?’  What you’re telling me is that you have already filed a report, and we’ve already investigated his disappearance. When was that?  Sixteen years ago?”

The man nodded, battling with gravity, cringing, straightening, and then hunching again as if expecting a blow.

“And we didn’t find anything, right?” Homer took a step back, not sure whether  his prevailing feeling was disdain, anger, or pity. “What makes you think we’d find anything today?” 

The visitor clung to the edge of the desk for dear life.

“Okay, let’s assume for a moment there has been a crime. If a crime were committed sixteen years ago, the perpetrator would be long gone; the witnesses, if there were any, wouldn’t be able to remember the event with sufficient accuracy to give credible testimony; the crime scene would be compromised beyond the ability of an investigator to make sense out of it; and any other physical evidence would be beyond recovery. The lack of a body and credible witnesses, the absence of suspects, and the corruption of the evidence, if it happens to exist, you must realize creates what appears to me insuperable barriers to solving the crime.”

The whole body language of the man from the hard glaze over his eyes to his hunched shoulders to the tension in his forearms as he gripped the desk gave the impression that he was resisting comprehending what Homer had just said.

“What gave you the idea that the investigation wasn’t thorough?”  Homer asked, gentle now because he wanted to give gentleness one last try before resorting to force.

The intruder mashed his lips together, but didn’t reply.

“We can’t possibly get anywhere if you refuse to answer my questions. Why do you believe we can solve your son’s disappearance now?”

The intruder let go of the desk. A sob arose from deep inside his chest and was strangled in his throat. “I can’t put it into…” He stopped. “Just look into Craig’s file, please.”

The anguish in his voice was so raw that Homer shivered involuntarily. Despite the passing of sixteen years, this man’s grief was as fresh as if his son had died yesterday. What harm would it do to go through the motions of gathering information?  “Okay, tell me your son’s full name?”

“My son’s name is… was Craig. Craig Richard Major.”  Mr. Major’s voice rose briefly, then trailed away. He seemed to be fighting with the sentences as they came out. “All of a sudden Detective Peterson lost interest. Just when he seemed to be getting somewhere!  On Monday he told me he had several good leads. Tuesday morning when I called him, he told me that none of them had panned out. How could he have followed up all those leads so fast? But I only thought about that later. I still believed he was working hard on the investigation. He then kept telling me that I was in the way, scaring off witnesses and making his life difficult, so I did what he said and kept my distance. You know how hard that is to do when your own son is gone?  It was nearly a month later before I discovered he had closed the investigation just after a week. He had been lying to me all along!  He didn’t even give me the courtesy of returning my phone calls. I came down here to try to meet with him. He was too busy to see me. For three days he was too busy to see me as if Craig’s life wasn’t worth the trouble. He was treating the whole thing about Craig’s disappearance as if I had been complaining about a parking ticket.

“Finally, not him, but the secretary in his office, she told me Peterson wasn’t working on the case anymore. Why didn’t he have the decency to tell me face to face?  What was he scared of?  What was he trying to hide?  What was more important than a boy’s life?  What could I do then?  Forget about my son because Mr. Peterson had given up?  I had no choice but to take the investigation into my own hands. I went around asking questions. It was as if everyone had been told to avoid me. I could see it in their eyes: ‘Here comes Craig’s father, the big pain in the neck!’  I understand people wanting to get on with their lives. But this was more than that. They had been warned about me. It had to be that they had been warned about me.

“They figured out a way to stop my investigation. Detective Peterson visited me, not to talk about Craig but about what I was doing. He was angry. He said a lot of people had complained about me snooping around, asking questions. Some parents were afraid I was going to molest their kids because I was hanging around the High School too much. He said I’d likely get an injunction leveled against me if I kept acting the way I was. He then tried to throw me off the track by saying that if anything bad had happened to Craig, his body would have shown up by then. He said kids get funny ideas in their head and just take off to see the world. ‘I have a feeling,’ he said. These were his exact words. ‘More than a feeling—a premonition. I promise Craig will come back.’  He said that just to make me feel good and make me stop trying to figure out what happened. And I believed him just to keep from going crazy. I had a wife, two other kids, Doris and Dave. I hadn’t been to work in a long time, and I heard they might try to fire me. I had to put food on the table. I had to still be a husband and a father. I knew in my heart Craig wasn’t coming back, but if I had accepted that as a fact at the time, God knows what I would have done. I can barely stand it now.”

“Why have you singled out me?” Homer asked.

“I knew you would help.”

“What makes you think that?”

“There was an article about you in the Junipero Weekly,” Mr. Major said, not bothering further explanation.

“Two paragraphs on the fifteenth page. You read a lot into very little.”

“You’re smart.  It said you went to Harvard Law School.” 

“Dropped out. Couldn’t make the grade.” Homer realized that he was avoiding Mr. Major’s gaze now.

“It said you spent two and a half years there before you decided to go into police work. I know something about colleges. I am the librarian at Junipero Community College. I know that if you can’t make the grade, you don’t last two and a half years.”

“Let’s cut the bull. You didn’t settle on me because of my special abilities. You’re here because I’m the new kid on the block who hasn’t heard your story before. Now tell me, how many other officers here have you talked to about your son?”

“I asked them all the same thing. None of them ever did what I asked. I’m asking you now: look into my Craig’s file.”

“How do you know they never reviewed your son’s file?”

Mr. Major didn’t respond.

“If there were a conspiracy to cover up your son’s death, the last place I would find it would be in the file.”

“Just look,” Mr. Major said.

“How did you get past the front desk?”

Mr. Major stared. Obviously, he treated unwanted questions by pretending they were never asked.

“Mr. Major I’ve done a tour of duty with several police forces, all of them until now the big city, big budget, high visibility sort. The professionalism here in the Junipero Police Department is on the par with any place I’ve ever worked. I’m sorry about your son. I’m not a therapist. I can’t tell you how to deal with his disappearance, but sixteen years is a long time to suffer the type of grief you’re suffering. I strongly suggest counseling. But if you are so convinced that we have failed you and there are leads still out there we haven’t pursued, then you always have the alternative of hiring a private investigator. There are some good ones but I doubt a PI will get to the bottom of anything except your checkbook.”

Mr. Major shuffled his feet embarrassed. “I ran out of money.”

“Before he took all of your money what did the private detective tell you about the results of his investigation?”

Mr. Major whispered, “No results.”

“And you still believe that I can come up with something different?”

“He was never allowed to see my son’s file. You can.”

“I tell you what: I’ll have a chat with Detective Peterson. You must be aware that he’s still working here.”

“He’ll just say I’m crazy. I don’t expect you to believe me, and I know you got to talk to him, but look at the file first.”

“Okay, Mr. Major, you’ve made your report. Now, if you’d be so kind, please leave.”

“I beg you. Look into the file.” Mr. Major retreated to the door and turned back. His small bald head bowed slightly, his unblinking eyes, the coiled tension in his stance made him seem viperous and dangerous.

“Good day, Mr. Major.”

“Look at the file, please, look at the file, look at the file, look at the file.”

As soon as the intruder stepped out into the hallway, a passing janitor exclaimed, “Mr. Major, oh my Lord, how did you get in here again? What are we going to do with you?  How you complicate my life!  Hurry!  If you come with me you can get out the back way so there won’t be any trouble like the last time. Hurry, before you get yourself seen. Yes, yes, we can talk about your son another time.”

Later that day Homer talked to Detective Peterson—on the surface a competent officer with a hard edge and brittle cynicism that is perhaps the inevitable result of years on the street —and confirmed what he had suspected. Mr. Major was a perennial nuisance who always found a way to corner a new hand at the department and make his plea.

“Listen, Homer,” Detective Peterson said with not a little bitterness. “I know at least five officers here who have looked at the file. Ask them. Look for yourself if you want to. You ain’t going to find nothing! And when you find nothing, call my friend Major and tell him. See if he believes you.”  

To the next question, Peterson replied more angrily, “He’s wrong!  Quit after the fourth day! My God, I spent over a month on the case! The file will bear that out, at least. You know there’s a point in an investigation when you realize you’re not going to get anywhere. I pushed myself way beyond that point. I wanted to find that kid more than anything that I’ve ever wanted to do on this job. The whole thing was eating me up. Craig was one of those miserable teenagers who can’t do anything right and takes everything hard and who you want to sit down and say to him, ‘It’s bad now, but hey, your whole life isn’t going to be like this. Just wait it out for a few years.’ I was so wrapped up in the case that I got into arguments with my wife and kids over it. I even dreamed about poor Craig. I just had to quit at a certain point. Cold turkey.” 

Homer decided then that he had enough of madness and grief. His life especially at the moment didn’t need those complications.

Practice Flight

One thing became clear to Nick as he thought through the detective’s call: Hamlin had enough evidence to arouse his suspicion, but not enough to make an arrest. As for the others, Hamlin would have also contacted them, probably using the same line about mysterious  items needing to be identified, and requesting them to come in for an interview. How would have they reacted? Caught off guard and frightened, maybe one of them stumbled—it wouldn’t take much: a slip of the tongue, the tremor of fear in the voice to add kindling to Hamlin’s suspicion.

Nick’s first job was to find out how the others had fared with Hamlin. Thanks to Ian’s need for money, locating them wouldn’t be difficult. Ian had appeared at Nick’s home a week before he was to marry Allison asking for a loan of a thousand dollars. “For old time’s sake, considering how much we’ve suffered and shared together.”

Nick ignored the feeling that Ian was making an implied threat to reveal what he knew about Craig’s murder and gave him five hundred dollars.

“Thanks bro. You know for the longest time I thought you dropped off the face of the earth. Looked for you for years, and when I did collections, the manager said nobody was a better skip tracer than me. But here you are as if you’ve never left, and a friend still.”

Nick asked Ian if he had seen the others.

Ian complied with a self-conscious grin that clearly said he had touched them up for loans also. Marion was an immigration lawyer in Sacramento. Stanley was a chiropractor in Atlanta, and Michael was an accountant at a large firm in Seattle. “As for our good friend Evelyn, as far as I could find out, he has renounced his citizenship and become a full-blooded Mexicano. He hasn’t been seen north of the border for the last decade.” Ian then offered Nick their phone numbers. Nick refused, but he did make a note of Ian’s cell.

Nick found the scrap of paper in his desk drawer and picked up the phone. What would he say? If one of them had confessed—stupidly, accidentally, or out of thoughtless remorse—then an attempt to deny the murder would be futile. If it were a matter of deflecting suspicion, trust would be the crucial issue. Except for Ian and, briefly, Evelyn, he hadn’t seen his friends in over twenty years. They would likely detest the sight of each other. Yet they would have to cooperate closely. Detective Hamlin would probe for the weakest link—the most vulnerable, the one with less to lose in keeping up the alibi—and cut a deal. Nick had made plans in case of that contingency. Was it still possible? Nick wondered. He gathered up the stacks of homework and put them back into the briefcase. He walked out of the study and into the kitchen.

“How long to dinner?” He asked Allison.

“About forty minutes.” She smiled a trifle insecurely. She had always lacked confidence in her cooking. She usually started with a recipe with the full intention of following the instructions and going from point A to point B. Like a character in a work of fiction she inevitably ended up at point C, which could be much better than the original conception or much worse. Nick’s heart fell when he saw how anxious she was.

“I left some papers at school. I need to pick them up. I should be home in about forty-five minutes.”  Without looking either right or left Nick walked out the door and got into his pickup truck and started off. He noticed in his rearview mirror a black Toyota Camry pulling out into the street as he turned the corner. A few signals later Nick was on the freeway heading south into the Sonoran desert. Again in his rearview mirror, he saw a black car. He wasn’t sure of the make, but it was definitely keeping pace with him. Pressing his foot to the floor, he accelerated until he was whizzing along at ninety. He exited, then immediately got back on the ramp going in the opposite direction, exited again, repeated the maneuver. Even though he knew that his actions were guided more by paranoia than reason, he had to be certain that the black car a quarter mile back wasn’t following.

Well, if that black car is tailing me, it had better had good suspension. Nick smiled to himself at the thought.

He took an off-ramp, which led after a mile to a dirt road, almost exclusively used by motocross bikers. It was a nasty little rutted trail, consisting more of small boulders than gravel, which wound up, over, and down a hill to a parallel highway. At the highest point Nick could observe the freeway and the road he had taken. His heart plunged when he saw a black car take the same exit. Then, however, it stopped and a little boy got out and peed in the cactuses.

Nick drove back to the freeway and was soon again heading south into the Sonoran desert again. Ten minutes later, he exited the freeway onto one of those roads that seemed to have no discernible reason for their existence except for the convenience of drug or human smugglers. He turned off on another dirt road and drove a quarter mile until he was behind a hill, part sand, part rock.

He parked, walked up to a Saguaro cactus too small and stumpy to have branched out yet, and took six strides towards three flat rocks piled together. He dug with his hands and penknife a foot or so and fished out a satchel. Inside he found a driver’s license not quite expired with his picture and the name Paul Ferris, a passport, technically not false, with his photo and the same name, five thousand dollars, an ATM card, and a number to a bank account with a balance of twenty thousand dollars. There were even letters of recommendation for Paul Ferris from several large international construction firms. He would need to cut his hair shorter and grow a moustache—the first would take an afternoon, the second two weeks. He had everything in his hands necessary to disappear, slip from his role as a High School history teacher, then emerge into a new life as Paul Ferris, the construction supervisor. He could find employment most anywhere in the world. Hamlin would have to alert the police forces in two dozen different countries, and still he couldn’t be arrested. According to the United States government, Paul Ferris was just as much a real person as Nick Breyer. The others could shift for themselves, deal with the detective’s questions, the issues of mutual trust and distrust, and try to keep their lies straight. He would be free.

Nick stared at the passport photo. Paul Ferris had never met Allison. Paul Ferris had never murdered, nor had he loved. How had Nick Breyer come to do both? 

He then heard Evelyn’s harsh voice telling him: “You’d

be dead without me, bro.