The Railroad (22 page)

I drank a couple of cups of coffee and ate some coffee cake that I’d bought a few days before. McDonald's didn’t seem an option; it would have involved too much time. I was strangely anxious to get about my work which surprised me after weeks of apathy and drunkenness. In a half an hour I was in my car and headed to the library. I parked near the back of the parking lot in some misguided notion that it would make me harder to see if Benoit had someone follow me.

I opened the glove compartment, looking for a pad and a pen in case I needed it. There was a replica of Megan’s Billy Bear that I’d bought on a whim when she was still with me, alone and neglected since some time when I’d put him in there and forgotten him. I’d bought it and never given it to her. I stared at it and shook my head. The sense of sadness felt like a ton of bricks on my back.

Enough of that. I had things to do which might not help either Eileen or Megan, but I knew they’d approve. I took the pad and pen and walked across the parking lot.

The library was thankfully close to being empty and the librarian had guided me to the search machine within minutes. I remembered my days as a child when I’d had to have known which newspaper article I wanted and what issue of what periodical it was in. Now all I had to do was type in a few words and it would bring me an abstract of every article within the last five years that contained those words. Then it was simply a matter of printing the articles

There were more articles that I cared to browse through so, in the end, I picked a few of them that seemed promising. Sally Brodman was mentioned in most of the articles as she’d been the first woman to disappear. I struck out with her; I was looking for any mention of relatives or friends. Sally, it seemed, had emigrated from Canada to marry her husband; there was no mention of anyone connected with her. I wondered who might have cared about her disappearance and what they must be thinking now.

Cassie Jenz turned out to be a better prospect and that made me happy. She had a sister in Pauling who had been quoted in the article. She had mentioned Cassie’s husband as a possible suspect, something that I’m sure had created no end of backlash. I wrote down her name in my pad.

Petra Johnson was mentioned in a few of the articles, but only her husband had been quoted in any of them. Though he’d expressed concern for the safe return of his wife and daughter, he’d been more vocal about libel laws and the type of legal pressure he’d bring to bear on anyone who might consider blaming him for Petra’s disappearance.

Felice Hammon’s mother was quoted in two of the articles. Oddly, she seemed quite supportive of her daughter’s husband, implying that Felice might have made a few wild accusations against her husband in the heat of anger. I wrote down her name and wondered what kind of reception I’d get from her.

That left me one promising possibility and one weak one. Better than nothing.

*

Felice Hammon’s mother came first for the simple reason that she was home and that she was willing to talk to me in person; I got the feeling that it was something she liked to do. Cassie Jenz’s sister Penny was away for a couple of days so that was that.

Jane Hammon wasn’t quite what I expected. That I should have expected anything was ridiculous. Due to her support of her daughter’s husband, I’d formulated a profile of her as a repressed religious woman with an overblown sense of morality. What she actually turned out to be was an aging hippie, complete with incense and more candles than I had ever seen in one room. As I walked through the front door, I got the immediate impression that Jane was trying to impress me in some way. It didn’t occur to me till later that the way she wanted to impress me was sexually.

She motioned me to a couch and offered me herb tea, which I declined; I’d always been an Oolong man myself. She made some small talk and I realized that her skirt was a tad short. Though she wore it well for a woman in her fifties, it made me decidedly uncomfortable. She smiled at me in what I considered to be an attempt to seem coquettish. It seemed out of place considering her daughter was very likely dead.

“So why are you here, Mike?”

Now that I was where I wanted to be, it didn’t seem like it would be so easy to go through with it. “I’m just going to tell you the story. I don’t see any point in being subtle.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You sound like you have a big secret."

“Not really. Let me ask you. Who do you think is responsible for your daughter’s disappearance?”

“My daughter decided to follow a stupid path. She had a good marriage and a good husband. And then she blew it and started to hang around with a strange crowd.”

“And who was that?"

“People who told her that she should be independent and gave her a bunch of idiotic ideas about child abuse and her husband.”

“And why do you think they were idiotic?”

“Felice had a great marriage.” Her eyes strayed to a set of pictures framed and sitting on a glass shelf. I recognized Felice’s pictures from the television. The man who stood by her side was box office quality handsome. I saw Jane’s eyes linger over the photo, a strange look coming over her face. “David was so good to her. And she threw it away.”

That made me uneasy. I’d read some of the claims Felice had made about her husband and they at least deserved some attention. What was worse was that Felice’s daughter corroborated the mother’s claims.

Jane got up and picked up one of the photos. If I had to guess, I’d say she was looking at David and not her daughter. I started to wonder what was driving Jane. “A man like this doesn’t abuse children,” she said with utter finality.

“Of course,” I said woodenly. It seemed that I was in over my head. The best I could do was to get my information and go. “Do you happen to know someone named Robert Benoit?” I asked quickly.

Her eyes unfocused slightly as she considered the question. Then she smiled strangely. “Why do you ask that?”

“I’m just curious.”

“I know that name, I think. He was in the news wasn’t he? For something…Oh yes. One of my daughter’s causes. Another one of those child abuse things. She’d tell me about them as though they were proof that David was a pedophile. I never understood her.”

And you won’t now
, I thought. “I guess that means you don’t really know him personally?”

“No, Mike. I can’t remember ever having seen him or even having heard about him outside the news.”

“Okay. Well I guess I won’t bother you anymore.”

“Oh. Is that it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Could you tell me what it is you’re investigating?”

“Um, I know some people who’ve ... had some trouble with child abuse. I’m not sure if they’ll be affected by these murders, but I want to find out.”

She cocked her head. “A woman friend of yours?”

I saw an out. “Yes.”

“Is it serious?”

“I think so.”

“Oh. I thought you might want to stay and have dinner.”

“I appreciate that. But I have someone else to meet.”

“Oh. Well…I know it’s not considered the thing to do but,” She picked up a napkin from her dining room table and a pen from a rolling tray and wrote down her phone number. “This is my cell phone number. It’s easier to reach me on this than my house phone.” She watched me for a moment, waiting for a reaction. “Something to think about at least,” she said softly, her eyes on mine.

“Well once the complication in my life dies down I’ll certainly think about it.”

“That’s fair.”

As I left, I wondered if her son-in-law had turned her down. Not a very worthy thought, but it seemed a reasonable one.

*

A few hours later I got another silent call. I’d developed a rhythm with those calls, one where I waited at last 30 seconds through the initial silence. Then I’d recite a limerick or read something out of the literature on my ratty bookshelves. I thought it might confuse Benoit; anger him or at least edify him.

This time I was so disgusted that I ran out of patience after only ten seconds of silence.

“What a pedophile does with his time when he isn’t terrorizing children. I’m impressed.”

Silence. I hung up as usual.

It was three A.M. before I was forced to realize that I wasn’t going to sleep. I had gone lighter on the booze, though my insomnia had convinced me to take a drink every couple of hours in the hopes that it would put me to sleep. I finally gave up.

I walked out of my bedroom and turned on the light. I was about to turn on the TV when something caught my eye. Of course I wasn’t much on putting anything
away
in my present state of anomie. So it was no surprise that I found the movie Moskowitz had given me.
Fahrenheit 451
. I had seen it years before and I seemed to remember that I liked it. It was an old movie, with a cast and director that had once been famous, but now were relegated to the arena of film arcana for the few that coveted such things. On a whim I pulled it out of its case and stuck it in the awful old DVD player that had lived in chez Moosehead for years.

The film began as I remembered it: edgy music and a view of a fireman’s pole. We are introduced to Montag, a stoic fireman, ambitious and ready for promotion. Only Montag and his colleagues aren’t any regular firemen. In this alternative future, firemen burn books.

Why? Books are the seeds of discontent; they make people ponder the meaning of their existence, they force us to seek something greater and more divine. In short, they make us dissatisfied and are therefore illegal.

Montag, our fireman, has in him the seeds of discontent. During a raid on one house where thousands of books are kept, he steals one, too curious about their content to pass up the chance of reading one. Seconds later he is setting the house and its contents on fire with a special torch.

Back at home we meet Montag’s wife, Linda, a pretty woman who is part of the fabric of the times: self-centered, child-like, and emotionally numb. She spends her waking hours watching an enormous wall screen television, being lulled by hypnotic images and prescribed drugs. The television is a tool of socialization, promoting a sense of belonging to a surrogate family of characters, eclipsing the real world.

This bland world stifles Montag. He begins reading steadily and soon makes the acquaintance of a young woman who is a criminal: she keeps and reads books in secret. Montag falls in love with her and with the rich world of books, in contrast to his empty life. It’s she who tells him about
The Book People
, a small band of rebels living in the woods, far outside of the city. Each of them has made it his or her life’s work to memorize the text of one book, keeping it safe for posterity, until the world embraces books once again.

Montag’s life eventually falls to shreds; he is turned in as a criminal by his wife to the very people he works with. In the end he turns his torch on his own colleagues and runs off to join
The
Book
People
. We watch as Montag is welcomed into the community, in turn, by each solitary book person, each consumed by memorizing a single book. In some cases, the books are handed down from father to son. Others memorize their books alone, looking forward to the day when they have committed them to memory and are ready to burn the books themselves. Each introduces him or herself as the book they’ve come to love.
I am The Martian Chronicles…I am War and Peace…I am Dante’s Inferno.

As the movie came to a close, we watched scores of
Book
People
walk by the camera, crossing each other’s paths. Each is speaking lines from their own personal book. I found myself being drawn into the montage of faces, the movement of their mouths, and the certainty of their purpose. I felt a tear fall. Watching it, I could understand easily why Moskowitz would call books the defenders of civilization. In that story, in a time of darkness, a small spark of human divinity was being kept alive. I did my best to think of anything in my life that had ever been that important, but I drew a blank.

It all came crashing in on me. I saw my years at Crabtree and Dain, my superficial predatory existence, and my love of the game. I’d been trying to cheat my mortality and for a while it had seemed like I succeeded. I was on my way up.

But posterity isn’t something you could buy or climb on the backs of other people to achieve. I thought of
The
Book
People
and I knew it was something you had to earn, something you had to make sacrifices for. It took a greater goal, something I’d never had. Something I could never dream of in my small addictive world. So there it was. I was in an ugly house, depressed and alcoholic. I had nothing to lose. What would I do then that was worth more than all of my big wins at Crabtree and Dain?

I’d come close to finding it. But I hadn’t gone with Eileen and Megan. It seemed sensible at the time. But so had a lot of other things I’d done. Maybe I needed to be less selfish, sacrifice something to be worthy of posterity. Moskowitz wanted to save the world; maybe he had the right idea. I could see why this movie appealed to him.

I thought about posterity. Suddenly those handbills came to mind, the ones that plastered every inch of open wall in the days after 9
/
11. Those people were all dead, all those faces. But someone cared and would continue to care. It occurred to me that posterity is what you leave behind.