Second Chance (29 page)

Woody held his breath, but the woman's face gave no response to the mention of the date. The bombing had, after all, been more than twenty years before. It might linger in campus legend, but who this girl's age would draw a connection?

Woody went on. "I thought I might be able to get the names of the students who left school around that time. Then maybe check against the pictures you have on file here. We all had photos taken as freshmen, I think."

"Oh yes. They're stapled to all the files. Before 1975 we just have student cards with photos, addresses at the time, height, weight, that kind of thing. There's also a space that shows when they graduated or left the school. But since you don't know what class this student was in, someone would have to check every single card from several years." She shrugged helplessly. "And we just don't have the manpower to do it. It could take hours, even days of digging to come up with your name."

"It's not computerized or anything?"

She shook her head. "Not that far back."

"I'd be willing to do the digging. Unless, of course, there's some regulation against it."

"Well," the woman said, "the grades are kept elsewhere—they
are
all computerized because of transcripts. There's really no confidential information on the cards, so I don't see why you couldn't go through them. Would you mind waiting for a moment while I check?" she asked, gesturing with her head to the chairs in the waiting room.

Woody walked back into the room, but was too nervous to sit down. Instead he stood and listened as the woman pressed a button on her phone and spoke softly into the mouthpiece. He tried to overhear what she was saying, but could not. So he walked around the room, looking at the black and white framed photographs hanging on the wall, photos taken as long as fifty years before, showing different sides of student life.

There was a picture dated 1956 of ROTC pledges standing at attention in what Woody recognized as the Haines Hall parking lot. Another was dated Homecoming 1944, and showed a young woman with wavy hair waving from a float laden with paper flowers. Behind her was a cutout of an American Eagle with the legend, "V for Victory."

Unofficial campus activities were pictured too. Woody smiled at the photo of a thirty foot long human chain hanging from a balcony of Coombs Hall, which had been torn down in the seventies. There were even a few shots from Woody's era—a candlelit campus protest, with three students' faces visible. He recognized one of them, an English lit major even more flaky than most of them had been. He didn't know the other two.

There was also a shot of the Student Union coffee shop, scene of so many political and/or jock discussions. It seemed to be the only place on campus where everyone from football jerk to ROTC creep to math nerd to semi-pro radical could get together and not call each other commies or faggots or pigs. In the foreground of the shot were six students, three men and three women. He recognized a couple of them—the black student who had been his freshman lab partner in bio, and the girl, a year younger than himself, who he had come on to once at a party just for the hell of it and could have easily slept with if he hadn't remembered Tracy.

He drew closer to the picture and squinted, trying to make out the title of the books that sat in piles on the table in front of the students trying to look oh so mature and sophisticated with their too relaxed postures and cigarettes that drifted smoke into one another's faces. Maybe, Woody thought, that's why their eyes were half closed.

The photo was too grainy for him to make out the print on the book covers, but by drawing close to the picture he saw something else. There were two male students sitting at the next table. One had his back turned, but Woody recognized him anyway. There was a certain way the boy held his long-haired head, cocked to one side, chin thrust toward the other student like a spear.

It was Keith Aarons. Woody had no doubt of it.

But it was the other boy that gripped his attention, a boy with long dark hair much like Keith's, but parted in the middle. His face was only a small blur, but there was enough of it to make out the expression of awe, of intense concentration on whatever it was the student across the table was saying.

No
, Woody thought,
Keith wasn't saying. Keith was pontificating, preaching, proselytizing. Keith was making another convert to the cause, a follower who would be willing to follow him into
. . .

Into what? Into the hell of a bomb blast that would rip him apart, make him unrecognizable, sear the flesh off his fingertips, destroy his face, even shred the teeth blasted from his jaw?

And Woody remembered, remembered in this life, the boy he had seen Keith talking to, not just in the coffee shop, but at some of the rallies. He thought that one time Keith had even introduced him to the boy, but he couldn't recall his name.

Woody hissed air between his teeth. It was hard enough to remember the details of things that had happened twenty years before in his original track of existence, let alone in a life that had happened only vaguely, in remote and seemingly manufactured memory. But at least now he had a face, if ever so obscure, and the frail thought that the boy had been younger.

"Mr. Robinson?"

He turned around guiltily, and saw the receptionist standing in the doorway smiling at him.

"It's all right for you to go through the photo cards if you like. There are thousands of them, though."

He smiled back gratefully. "That's all right. I think I can remember what he looks like. Could I start with the class of '71?"

It took Woody four hours to find Benjamin Wallace, three of which were spent in futile
roamings
through the class of '71. When he started looking through the class of '72, he covered the A's and B's, then went backwards, flipping from Roberta Zielinski toward the front. When Wallace's moony face looked into his, Woody knew he had his man. Beneath and beside the photo the data read:

BENJAMIN THOMAS WALLACE

Ht. 5'10" Wt. 158

335 Park Circle Eyes: Brown Hair: Brown

Pittsburgh PA 15219 PH: 412-555-5398

Billing: Thomas M. and Rose Wallace (pts./
s.a
.)

Entered: 9/68

Major:
PolSc

Graduated:
Inv.withd
. 1/70

Woody tried to keep his hands from shaking as he read the information. 5' 10" and 158 pounds was within hailing distance of Keith
Aarons's
vital statistics at that time. And a
poli-sci
major would have been ripe pickings for Keith. But what did "
Inv.withd
." mean?

"I think I've got my man," Woody told the receptionist. "But what's this?" and he pointed to the enigmatic abbreviations.

"Involuntary withdrawal," she said. "Seems to fit what you thought. It means that he left school for some reason without making a formal statement. Maybe just stopped attending classes, hit the road, who knows?"

"Would that information be here somewhere?"

"Yes, but that's confidential. You couldn't get access to that."

"It says 1/70," Woody said, pointing at the card. "Would that be when he stopped attending classes, or something else?"

"Oh, that's probably when he was withdrawn. It would be the end of the first semester. If he left any time during that fall semester, he would have gotten all incompletes, and then been withdrawn if he hadn't re-registered for the spring."

Woody thanked her, jotted down the boy's parents' names, phone number, and address, and left the building.

It was only three o'clock, so he drove to the county courthouse and asked the clerk if there was a missing persons file from 1969 or 1970 on a Benjamin Wallace. The clerk looked at him with bored eyes and asked if he was a representative of a law enforcement agency. Woody said he was not.

"Then what's your interest in this person?"

Woody gave him the story about the song, but the clerk showed no recognition. "One moment," he said, and disappeared behind a opaque paned door. When he came back in ten minutes, holding, Woody noticed, a fresh cup of coffee, he nodded his head at Woody. "That person is on file, yes."

"Ah." Woody nodded back. "May I, uh, see it?"

The clerk made his head go back and forth rather than up and down. "Oh no. It's still an open file. So unless you're a law enforcement official or the representative of a law enforcement agency, you're not permitted access to that file."

"So he's still missing?"

"Pardon?"

"Benjamin Wallace. If the file's open, that means he's still missing?"

"It means the file's still open. That's all I can say about it."

It was enough. Woody nodded, but didn't thank the man.

Back at the Holiday Inn, he called Pittsburgh directory assistance, and learned that Thomas Wallace's phone number had not changed. Over a light dinner in the coffee shop, Woody decided what he would tell the man—that he was a classmate of Ben's who had been thinking about him lately, and wondered if he had ever turned up. Just curious. Curious to know if the loose ends had ever been tied up.

It was 6:30 in the evening when he called the Wallace home. The phone rang four times, then was picked up by a machine. "This is Tom Wallace," a voice said. "I'm not in, so you can leave your message at the tone and I'll get back to you."

The beep came, but Woody left no message. He called several times that evening, and tried again the next morning, but the only answer was the dull, mechanical sounding voice of the older man.

All right then. Woody had to know. So if the man didn't want to answer his phone, he would go see him. He had to drive back to Pittsburgh anyway.

He reached the outskirts of Pittsburgh in less than an hour, but it took another forty-five minutes to find Park Circle. It was in a suburban area west of the city. Woody thought the ranch style development might have been built in the mid-sixties to house the ever more affluent steel workers.

The Wallace house was one of five in a cul-de-sac, and Woody pulled into the driveway. There was a car visible through the garage windows. Woody went to the door and rang the bell, but there was no answer.

"Hey!"

He turned and saw an elderly man on his hands and knees, digging in a garden. "You
lookin
' for Tom?"

"Tom Wallace, yes."

"He's
fishin
'. Won't be back till Sunday."

Woody nodded. "What about Mrs. Wallace?"

The man shook his head. "Rose died about five years back.”

“Sorry to hear that."

"You knew her?" asked the man, as if familiarity was a prerequisite for sympathy.

"No," Woody said guiltily. "No, I didn't. Maybe you could help me out then."

"You
sellin
' anything?"

Woody grinned and shook his head. "No. I just wanted to find out about their son. Ben? I went to school with him, and I just happened to be in the city, and was wondering . . ." Woody stopped talking.

The man's face had gone sour, and he was pushing himself to his feet, brushing off the knees of his dark green pants. "Shame," he said. "A real shame."

"He . . . never showed up?"

"No. Never did. He talked about going out to California, so Tom and Rose figured he might've tried to hitch out there. Only thing is, he didn't take a thing with him. All his stuff was still in his dorm room."

"Didn't that seem kind of strange?"

The man squinted at Woody. "You said you knew him.”

“I did. Not very well, though."

"Well, if you knew him at all, you'd know what kind of communist stuff he babbled about, not believing in private property and all that." The man's eyes narrowed impossibly further. "Hey," he said. "You a reporter?"

There was suspicion there, but there was also a flare of interest, and Woody decided to capitalize on it. "Ah. You found me out."

"I knew it. Paper? Magazine?"

"I'm a freelance, but I hope that
Time
picks this one up."
Time
, he thought. Jesus. If you lie, might as well lie big. The man's eyes were alight now.

"
Time
, huh? What's it about?"

"I'm doing a piece on the runaways of the sixties—you know, the kids like Ben Wallace who dropped out, ran away to San Francisco or wherever, and whether or not they ever reunited with their families. In fact," Woody went on, his mind racing, "it was knowing Ben slightly in college that gave me the idea."

The man was smiling now. "You won't get much out of Tom that I can't tell you. Ben never came back. The cops tried to trace him, but couldn't find a thing. Rose never stopped hoping, though. In fact, every year she took out a couple classified ads in the San Francisco and New York and L.A. papers. Got some responses, too. But it was never Ben. People tried to make her
think
they were Ben, asking her to send money and things." He shook his head, brushed again at his knees. "
Somethin
' how cruel people can be."

"Yes," Woody said. "It is."

"That's really all there is to tell. I guess you'll want to talk to Tom anyway, though, huh? Human interest and all."