Whom Dog Hath Joined (23 page)

“Don’t let your imagination run away with you,” he said. “I
have a whole lot of possibilities to look into and I’m not going to pick any
one theory until I have some evidence.”

28 – Living off the Grid

As I drove up Sarajevo Court toward my townhouse, I spotted
Bob Freehl, the retired cop, sitting on a folding chair in his driveway. He was
a balding guy in his early seventies, wearing flip-flops, plaid shorts, and a
T-shirt stretched over his belly that read “I’m Tired of Being My Wife’s Arm
Candy.”

I had a flash of inspiration, and as soon as we got home I
hooked up Rochester’s leash and walked back down to Bob’s. Rochester strained
to rush up to him, and as Bob extended a hand, Rochester dropped to the ground
and rolled onto his back so that Bob could scratch his belly.

“Hey, Bob,” I said. “You used to be a cop in Stewart’s
Crossing, didn’t you?”

“Long time ago,” he said.

“Were you working here in the sixties?”

“You mean before the town got crapped up with all these city
commuters? Sure.”

When I was a kid, Stewart’s Crossing was a small town
surrounded by farmlands. The Lakes, where my family lived, was the only
suburban development. Many of my classmates lived on farms, and when I took the
late bus home from Pennsbury High we passed acre after acre of crops and cattle
grazing. My parents were amazed, once I learned to drive, at how well I knew my
way around those country roads.

By the time I left for college, I-95 had sliced through the hills
and valleys, making it easier to dash into Philly. Gas stations and shopping
centers sprung up at the interchanges, and hundreds of acres of farmland metamorphosed
into developments of single-family houses, the same models repeated endlessly,
skinny saplings the only landscaping.

I sat down cross-legged on Bob’s driveway in front of him. The
pavement was cold beneath my butt. “The sixties were a pretty wild time, from
all I’ve heard,” I said. “Any of that filter down here?”

He shrugged. “We had a couple of anti-war protests at the
town hall,” he said. “Used to be a bunch of hippies who camped out in the woods
behind the Meeting House, and we rousted them a few times.”

“Any drugs?”

“When the wind was right, you could almost get a contact
high from driving down Main Street,” he said. “Pulled a couple of ‘em in for
possession but never could find out who the dealers were.”

Rochester got tired of being petted and jumped up. I
scrambled to my feet. “Thanks, Bob,” I said. “Always interesting to hear about
life before I started paying attention.”

Rochester tugged me forward, and I stumbled over my feet as
I tried to keep up with him. “Who’s walking who?” Bob asked.

“Only the dog knows, and he’s not talking,” I called back to
him.

When I got back to the house I called Rick and told him what
Bob Freehl had told me. “Maybe Don Lamprey smelled the smoke and went back into
the woods there,” I said. “Mrs. Holt told us that she’d mentioned that’s where
the hippies hung out. He could have tried to sell the dope he had with him, and
gotten killed.”

“How’d he get back into the Meeting House then?” Rick asked.

“Hey, you’re the detective. I’m just the idea guy.”

He snorted and hung up.

I wanted to look for information on Brian Lamprey that Lori
might not have been able to find, but I knew that if I got started I’d be
tempted to hack. Instead, I focused on Eben Hosford. I was intrigued by the
idea that he was living off the grid. How could someone do that, in the
twenty-first century, in a metropolitan area like the Philadelphia suburbs? I
turned on my laptop and started searching.

Rick had checked property records and driver’s licenses so I
didn’t bother with those. I also figured he’d looked for a phone account or one
with PECO, the power company that supplied Bucks County, so I skipped those,
too.

I didn’t expect Eben to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or
any of the other social networking sites, but I checked anyway. No results. I
sat back in my chair. How could someone live without connections to the modern
world? He’d have to be out in the woods somewhere, probably with his own well
for water, a garden for food, and some kind of  generator, probably solar or
wind-powered.

But every inch of Bucks County belonged to someone, either a
private owner or a public entity. He could have been camping out in the back of
a park somewhere, but I doubted that. He’d have been caught years before.

So that meant that someone owned the property where he
lived. A relative? I went to the property assessor’s database and searched
under his last name. Sure enough, there were a lot of Hosfords who owned
property in Bucks County. I opened a mapping program and started to check each
address, looking for a likely spot.

This was a good, legal project for my information skills, I
thought. Unfortunately, the Hosfords were a farming family, and there were a
half-dozen properties where he could have been living, a crazy old uncle or
cousin camping out somewhere.

I sat back in my chair, thinking. Then I looked around for
Rochester. He wasn’t in sight, and he wasn’t making noise. Not a good
combination. Usually if he slept, he did so somewhere around me.

“Rochester!” I got up and started looking around the house
for him, calling his name. He wasn’t in the bedroom, either on my bed or beside
it. He wasn’t sprawled on the cool tile of the master bathroom.

I went downstairs, and from the staircase I saw him on the
sofa, his gold coat a contrast to the dull brown upholstery. He’d kicked the
throw pillows to the floor, and he had his paws crossed. He was licking
something brown and square he had clasped between them. “What do you have in
your mouth?” I demanded, as I jumped down the last couple of steps and hurried
over to him.

“That’s my wallet!” I said, tugging it away from him. As I
did, my driver’s license and credit cards spilled out to the floor. “You
weren’t planning to order some doggie treats online with my credit cards, were
you?”

He hadn’t hurt the wallet, just covered the leather with a
thin layer of spit. I wiped it off on my pants, and leaned down to pick up the
scattered cards.

Nobody’s driver’s license picture ever looks good, and mine
was no different. My eyes were wide open, as if someone had poked me, and I had
a five o’clock shadow and a cowlick. With my name beneath my picture it looked
like a booking mug shot.

I rarely used my full name, Steven Jeffrey Levitan. I had
been named for my mother’s father, whose name in Hebrew was Shmuel Chaim. As
was the custom then, my parents only used the initials of his name to provide
me with an English one. And somehow, the “ch” in Chaim had translated into a J.

I was glad; there wasn’t a single H name I liked. Howard?
Hubert? Horatio? I was glad to have Jeffrey. One year when I went on a travel
camp, I’d told everyone my name was S. Jeffrey Levitan – call me Jeff. Didn’t
seem like me, so I went back to Steve.

Brain flash. Had Eben Hosford done the same thing, discarded
his first name and used his middle? I hurried back upstairs to the computer,
after petting Rochester a couple of times and thanking him for the inspiration.

There were five Hosfords who owned an acre or more, where
someone could live off the grid. One was in a woman’s name so I skipped that
for a moment. The other Hosfords were Jacob, Franklin, William, and Moses.

I did a quick experiment, searching for information on each
man with the middle name Eben. The only match was Moses Eben Hosford, whose
property was about a mile outside Stewart’s Crossing, on the road to Newtown. I
switched to the satellite view in the map application and zoomed in on the
property address.

It was overgrown and I could barely make out the shape of
the house in the middle of all the trees, a rectangle with a front step and a narrow
driveway. What was visible, though, was a solar panel on the house’s flat tin roof.

I was so pleased with myself. I’d found Eben Hosford without
doing any hacking, just using my instincts and my basic knowledge. To keep from
gloating, which I knew I’d do if I spoke to Rick, I sent him an email with
Hosford’s full name and address. I thought briefly about searching for Brian
Lamprey, since I was on a roll, but Rochester wanted to play, and the urge
passed.

When I woke up Tuesday morning, I was still curious about
Eben Hosford. I dressed for dog-walking and let Rochester have a quick pee in
the front yard, then loaded him into the car. “Change in routine, puppy,” I
said, scratching his head. “But you’ll like it, I promise.”

I drove into downtown Stewart’s Crossing, the streets full
of early morning commuters, moms on school runs, and the elderly, who always
had to have the first doctor’s appointment, the first slot at the garage. I
never understood that; why worry about waiting around when that’s all you had
to do anyway?

I turned inland at Ferry Road, passing the old Victorian library,
long since converted to a community center; the pharmacy where we’d gotten our
medications; and the Women’s Exchange, where my father had once threatened to
trade my mother in for a pair of twenty-five-year-olds (she told him at fifty
he wouldn’t know what to do with even one of them.)

About a mile from the center of town, I pulled into the
parking lot of a strip shopping center on the right side of the street – karate
dojo, beauty supply shop, Peruvian restaurant. It was too early for any of them
to be open so I had my choice of spots.

“Let’s go for our walk,” I said to Rochester, and he tumbled
out of the car. We waited for a break in traffic, then scooted across Ferry Road.
Rochester sniffed and peed as we climbed a block of cracked sidewalk, skirting
squashed osage oranges and downed maple branches.

At the first corner, we turned left into a neighborhood of
old houses, two and three-story clapboard with broad front porches,
hundred-year-old oaks and maples in the yards, the occasional Big Wheel or
skateboard propped up against a wall. As we kept walking, the lots got bigger
and the houses smaller. After about a quarter of a mile we got to our
destination, the single-story bungalow owned by Moses Eben Hosford.

It was surrounded by a chain link fence with a padlock on
the gate. Nobody had mowed the lawn for years. Small bushes and saplings had
sprung up, and I could barely see the outline of the house behind a screen of
trees. Fading paint that had once been green, broken downspout, one shutter
hanging askew. An old bicycle leaned against the front wall of the house, and
off to the side I saw what I’d always thought of as a wishing well – a stone
cylinder with a hand crank and a peaked wooden roof.

I was looking through the chain-link when the door to the
house popped open and Eben Hosford stepped out on to the porch with a shotgun
in his hand. He raised it and it looked like he had me in his scope.

29 – Buried in Work

“Just walking the dog!” I called and waved, and urged
Rochester forward. When we were far enough away I muttered, “Not exactly a
friendly neighbor, boy.”

 We kept walking until we came to a cross street we could
turn down, and then another that led us back to Ferry Road. As long as I was
near downtown, I decided to stop at The Chocolate Ear for a café mocha to go
and a biscuit for Rochester.

 I turned on my Bluetooth and called Rick while I drove, and
told him I’d done some recon on Eben Hosford’s house.

“When are you going to recognize that you don’t have a
badge?” he demanded.

“Anyway, he’s home now, if you want to talk to him. Looks
like he gets around on a bicycle. Oh, and by the way, he’s got a shotgun.”

Rick grumbled a few more epithets as I pulled up a block
from the café. “You talk to Tamsen since Saturday night?” I asked.

“I don’t need your help, Levitan,” he said. “Tamsen comes
with a lot of baggage – the dead husband, the kid, the whole Quaker thing. We
had a good time together, but I’m having second thoughts. I’m not sure I’m
ready to jump into the deep end of the pool.”

“You know how it was when we were kids,” I said. “You close
your eyes, hold your nose and jump.”

Good advice for me, I thought. It was time I jumped into the
pool with Lili. Close my eyes, reach for her hand, and jump. I loved her, and I
could be myself with her, not always trying to be the person she expected. I
had the benefit of cell phones and email and social media posts, things my
father hadn’t had access to when he was away from my mother, to let Lili know
she was in my thoughts. And I didn’t have to worry that she was sitting by the
phone, waiting for me to call, for me to show up for dinner or drop by her
office. She had her own life, and I liked that about her.

I just had to find the right time, and the right way, to
tell her how I felt.

I left Rochester in the car and walked into the café. The
lemon-yellow walls never failed to cheer me up, and I loved sounding out the
names on the Art Deco posters for French foods: Orangina, Pates Baronis, Beurre
de Normandie and Chocolat Escoffier. She’d ordered her pastry display case from
France and chosen the chairs, tables, even the floor tile to recreate the
ambiance of the cafés she loved.

Gail was manning the register, and there were a half-dozen
patrons ahead of me. No one came in behind me, though, and I could see the
relief on Gail’s face when I got to the register.

“No minions this morning?” I asked, as she started making my
coffee. She had a part-time waitress and help from her best friend as well as
her mother and grandmother.

“Grandma has the flu and Mom’s taking care of her. Ginny’s youngest
has pinkeye, which is contagious. And Mindy’s back in school this term.”

“How was your dinner with Declan on Sunday?”

“It was great. Too good, in fact, because it made me realize
that I don’t have time for a relationship. I’m up early every morning baking
and by the end of the day I fall into bed.” The door behind me jingled and a
group of the red hat ladies trouped in, waving and calling hello to Gail.