Whom Dog Hath Joined (22 page)

I was very fortunate to have my job, and I knew it. Every
day when I arrived at Friar Lake I marveled at the way I’d landed on my feet,
that I had a job that was interesting and challenging and paid enough for roof
and kibble.

The morning was busy, as Mondays often are, but at lunch I
had some free time to think back on the case. I pulled up the list of the ten
members of the renovation committee from the Friends Meeting website and
printed it out. As I remembered, the only three I recognized were Hannah
Palmer, Vera Lee Isay and Eben Hosford. But I was curious about the ones I
didn’t recognize. Could any of them have a connection to the case?

Two of the other members were Realtors in town; two others
were school teachers, one at General Lucius Stewart Elementary and one at
Pennsbury High – both schools I had attended. I couldn’t find anything on the
other three, so I looked them up in the white pages online. They all lived in
Stewart’s Crossing, which made sense.

As I was typing I realized I didn’t know Vera Lee’s address.
I’d assumed she lived in town because she belonged to the Friends Meeting. But
a quick search, and a look at Google’s satellite view, revealed that she lived
in a small stone house in Lahaska, about a half hour north of the George School
campus in Newtown. Why would she be involved with the Stewart’s Crossing Meeting,
when there was another right in her home town?

The quick answer was that she knew more than she was telling
about the body behind the false wall, and that by belonging to the Stewart’s
Crossing Meeting, and serving on the committee, she could keep abreast of any
developments.

I looked up Hannah Palmer’s number and called her. “It’s
Steve Levitan,” I said. “We met at the Harvest Festival.”

“Oh yeah. Rick’s friend.”

Interesting. I guessed Hannah and Tamsen talked a lot. “I
wanted to ask you about one of the members of the renovation committee. Vera
Lee Isay.”

“I don’t know her that well,” she said. “She used to belong
to another Meeting, and she joined ours just about the time we began the
renovation. She volunteered to be the committee secretary, which was a
blessing, because she keeps excellent minutes.”

I thanked Hannah, and hung up. Vera Lee’s recent interest in
the Stewart’s Crossing Meeting House was suspicious, and I sent a quick email
to Rick. I tried to come up with a way I could casually run into Vera Lee,
perhaps with Rochester, who had charmed her. But I couldn’t see walking the dog
around the George School campus, or showing up out of the blue at her home. I’d
have to leave following up on her involvement with the Meeting to the
professional.

27 – The Whole Story

Rick called a couple of hours later. “Arnold Lamprey’s on
his way to Stewart’s Crossing,” he said. “He wants to see where his brother
died. And he wants to thank you for uncovering the remains. You think you could
join us at the Meeting House? He’s going to be there in about an hour.”

“I’m getting ready to leave the office,” I said. “I can meet
you. Did you get my messages, about Eben Hosford and Vera Lee Isay?”

“Yeah. I’m tracking down Eben Hosford so I can talk to him. He
lives off the grid, though. No voter’s registration or driver’s license,
doesn’t own any property. I’ll give Vera Lee a call tomorrow.”

I locked up, and Rochester romped over to my car, tugging me
with him like the tail on a kite, and then stuck his head out the window all
the way down to Stewart’s Crossing. It was chilly but I didn’t have the heart
to pull him in. The sky was brownish-gray, and a skein of Canada geese flew
overhead, heading south for the winter. We passed a building where the first
“S” had been torn away from the “Self-Storage” sign, and I wondered if that was
where Santa kept his elves when he didn’t need them.

At the Meeting House parking lot I saw a dusty pickup with
one bumper sticker that read “My other ride is a tractor” and another in the
shape of an apple with “Support Your Local Farmers.” I figured that had to
belong to Arnold Lamprey.

I hooked up Rochester’s leash and he went for a quick pee.
As we turned the corner of the Meeting House I saw Rick standing where
Rochester had found Don’s sneaker. With him was a big-chested man in his sixties
with white hair, and a younger woman who looked like a contemporary of Hannah and
Tamsen.

Rick introduced us. Arnold wore a faded all-weather jacket
with a corduroy collar, jeans and work boots. His hands were broad and
calloused and his smile was genuine. He had brought along his daughter Lori,
the woman who had created the family tree and given us the connection to the
Lampreys.

She got down on one knee to ruffle Rochester behind his
ears. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it looked like she
wore no makeup—though I’d learned from living with Mary that often meant a
woman was just skilled at its application. In Lori Lamprey’s case, though, I
thought it meant that she was a no-nonsense kind of woman who could castrate a
bull as easily as create a webpage.

“Must have been a long trip across the state,” I said.

“Didn’t matter to me,” Arnold said. “He was my brother, and
we let him go for too long.”

“I insisted that my dad bring me, too, because I know him,
and I knew he wouldn’t tell you the whole story,” she said.

“Now, Lori, don’t go rushing things. Let me have a moment
here where my brother died.”

Rick, Lori and I stepped away. “What’s the whole story?”
Rick asked her.

“I want to see how much my father is willing to tell you.
But you’ll understand when we’re finished.”

A chilly breeze picked up, scattered dead leaves around the
broad horseshoe-shaped lawn. A low-riding car passed by on Main Street, bass
thumping, and high above us a jet left a white contrail across the sky. The late
afternoon had a lonely, almost funereal feel and I was glad to have the comfort
of Rochester’s warm bulk beside my leg.

Arnold spent a few minutes in silent contemplation of the
wall of the Meeting House, and then came back to us. “I’m about dead on my
feet,” he said. “Anywhere in this town we can get a cup of coffee?”

We agreed to reconvene at The Chocolate Ear, where we sat at
a table outside so that Rochester could stay with us. He sat between me and
Lori, and she occasionally reached down to pet him.

“You know I had three brothers,” Arnold said. “Each of us
two years apart. Brian, Charley and Donny. Brian wanted to see the world, so he
enlisted in the Army the day he turned eighteen. He was in one of the first
divisions to leave for Nam, back in 1965.”

“Did he come back?” I asked.

“In 1967, when Charley’s number was coming up. Brian was
healthy enough in body, but something inside him was broken. Had these
nightmares, these black moods. Today they’d call it PTSD, but back then we
didn’t know what to think.”

Arnold drank his coffee while the rest of us were silent. I
thought briefly of Jerry Vandeventer, who’d suffered the same way.

There was a steady stream of traffic down Main Street,
delivery trucks and SUVs, and I wondered where all the station wagons of my
youth had gone. When I was a kid, every family with more than one child had one
of those long wood-paneled numbers, and it was a treat for me to ride along
with someone who had multiple siblings. Those were the days when all I knew of
war came from bits of TV news. Now I was well aware of all its costs—from the
soldiers who didn’t come back, to the ones who did, to the people who reported
on atrocities like Lili.

After a while, Arnold spoke again. “Charley saw what
happened to Brian, and he filed for an agricultural deferment when his number
came up.”

“You said your dad was a World War II vet,” I said. “How did
he feel about that?”

“He came from that generation, said you had to pay your dues
to live in a free country. He didn’t approve when Charley got out of serving,
but there wasn’t much he could do. When Don came of age, he applied for the
deferment, too, but he got turned down because the three of us were on the
farm. Pop was pretty insistent that it was Don’s duty.”

Lori reached over and stroked her dad’s upper arm. “There’s
more to the story,” she said. “Go on, Daddy. Tell them.”

“I hesitated because I didn’t want to admit to breaking any
laws,” Arnold said. “But Lori here said I had to tell you, in case what my
brothers and I did caused some harm to Donny. See, like I told you, when Brian
came back from Nam, he had all those problems, and the only thing that made him
feel better was smoking dope.”

Rick and I leaned forward, listening closely. In the
distance I heard the cawing of a crow and the blare of a car horn.

“Us being farmers, Brian had this idea. He got some
marijuana seeds from a buddy of his fresh home from Nam and started growing
them, first sprouting them in a corner of our greenhouse. Then come spring he
planted those seedlings at the edge of a cornfield. Our pop never knew about
them.”

“But Don did,” I said.

He nodded. “We had a real good crop that year. We harvested
and dried it in big bunches. Then we separated out all the seeds and twigs and
packaged it up. Brian used to take the bus into Pittsburgh every couple of
weeks to sell to guys at the VFW.”

He looked at us. “It wasn’t about the money, you know. Just
about helping those boys feel better after all they went through. We couldn’t
even spend the money, because all of us still lived at home and we didn’t want
raise any suspicions with our kin. Then come January, Donny disappeared. He had
taken all the money we had, close to a thousand dollars, and all the marijuana,
too. Brian was spitting mad. Took off on the bus to Pittsburgh after him.”

Up to that point, Don Lamprey had been fairly anonymous to
me. I thought of him as a teenaged version of myself, wondering what I’d do in
his shoes. But hearing his brother speak, Don became more of his own person.
Not a person I thought I’d like – but still a human being who had died.

Arnold drank some of his coffee before he continued. “Pop
was plenty mad that Donny had run off, and even madder that Brian went after
him. Brian didn’t come back for a week, and he was a mess – drunk and high and
I don’t know what all. Had to keep him out in the shed for a day until he dried
out.”

“Did he eventually tell you where he went?” I asked.

“Just said he’d gone to Pittsburgh, looked around for Donny
but couldn’t find him. So he stayed with some friends til he ran out of money. When
we never heard anything from Donny, we thought maybe Pop was intercepting the
mail, or maybe that the boy was embarrassed about what he’d done and couldn’t
face us.”

“You still growing the stuff?” Rick asked.

“No, sir. Soon after that, Brian left for California, and
Charley and me had enough to do keeping the farm going.” He looked at Rick. “I
had to come and see this place,” he said. “And to ask you a question.”

Lori took her dad’s hand and squeezed.

“Do you all think Brian could have tracked Donny down here,
and killed him?” he asked. His voice wobbled, and in it I could hear the pain
and dread that had to be in his heart.

“That’s a big question, sir,” Rick said. “You knew your
brother. Was Brian capable of that?”

“Before he went to Nam I would have said no way at all. But
the boy who came back – he wasn’t my brother Brian. He wouldn’t talk much about
what he did over there, but I know that he killed people. Soldiers, but also
ordinary people, old women and little children. He said that you never knew who
your enemy was, so you had to protect yourself.”

“You said Brian moved to California. You have a current
address on him?”

He shook his head. “We tried to reach him when our pop died,
maybe twenty years ago now. Phone number belonged to somebody else, mail came
back ‘addressee unknown.’ Didn’t have the Internet then, either.”

“It’s why I started that family tree you found,” Lori said.
“I wanted to know what happened to my uncles.”

I looked at her. She wore a simple gold wedding band, and I
imagined that she lived near her parents and looked after them. She was that
type of woman.

“Did you find any records?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I tried a bunch of places but couldn’t
find a trace of him.”

My fingers tingled. Here was a challenge. Could I find Brian
Lamprey? Or discover what had happened to him? We all stood up. Arnold and Lori
were staying at a motel out near the highway that night, heading back to
Zelienople the next day.

“Thank you for meeting with us,” Arnold said. “At least I
know what happened to one of my brothers.”

Rick and I watched them walk to Arnold’s truck. Lori got
into the driver’s seat and pulled into traffic expertly.

“So Don wasn’t such an innocent kid,” I said as she drove
away. “You think his brother could have tracked him down and killed him?”

“The crime scene team didn’t find any traces of marijuana,”
he said. “So Don must have sold it before he went into that false wall.”

“Or his brother tracked him down, took the dope and the
money, and then killed him.”

“That’s a possibility. I know you – you’re itching to see if
you can find Brian Lamprey. But you’ve already screwed up once. Don’t do it
again.”

I wanted to argue that if I could find Brian Lamprey, I
might be able to give Arnold the same sense of peace that he’d gotten from
knowing what happened to Don. But Rick was right – I’d already violated my
promise not to hack once. Sure, he and Lili seemed to have forgiven me – but
how many mistakes could I make before I lost them both?

It was safer to shift the conversation away from the last
missing brother. “Maybe Peter Breaux found that Don had all that money, and
killed him for it,” I said. “Or maybe Don tried to sell the dope to someone in
Stewart’s Crossing, and that person killed him. And don’t forget Vera Lee or Eben
Hosford. There’s something suspicious to me about her joining the Meeting just
in time to serve on the renovation committee – and him being on that committee,
too, when he’s so opposed to the work.”