Whom Dog Hath Joined (19 page)

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 he 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_ _
_.