The Other (32 page)

The next morning, though, there was a longer article in the
Post-Intelligencer,
with a byline and the heading
PARK REMAINS PROMPT QUESTIONS
. It included “evidence of long-term habitation,” “potential foul play,” “National Park Service criminal investigators,” and “Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,” and it reported that the human remains in question were discovered by “park personnel engaged in field research on the South Fork of the Hoh.”

I went to school, but it wasn’t my best day of teaching. And just as I feared, they were waiting for me, outside Room 104, at two-thirty, when the bell rang. There were two of them, a man and a woman, both younger than me by at least ten years, and they didn’t appear threatening, grim, or intimidating. I confessed, “I know why you’re here,” and then, sitting on the table at the front of my classroom, I gave them all the detail they wanted. When that was done, I said, “Can I ask you one question? How did you find me?”

“Your name was in his books,” they said in tandem.

The
Seattle Times
assigned an investigative reporter whose style—and I mean this as a compliment—might best be described as “gripping narrative.” It was rich raw material: the son of so much local wealth, a Lakeside grad, missing for twenty-nine years, turns up in a cave as a mummy who’s been rolled and bound in a cedar mat. One
Times
article begins like true-crime noir, with the discoverers of John William’s cave, two cougar researchers tracking “a radio-collared juvenile female in the lush darkness of the rain forest,” stumbling on a scene so strange—the dug spa and the cave in the wall—“it was as if they were characters in an episode of
The Twilight Zone.
” A forensics doctor comes off like a horror-movie bit player while explaining mummification, adding, “The chemicals in cedar, specifically plicatic acid, are a potent preservative,” and “It’s possible to do an extensive autopsy on mummified remains,” and “Conditions like these even enable us to get fingerprints after more than two decades.” A wilderness-survival expert is quoted: “His gumption was only exceeded by his foolishness.” Lakeside weighs in: John William is described by former teachers as “a conspicuous academic presence,” “one of my top three classical philosophy students of all time,” and—Althea Mastroianni—“brilliant but eccentric and disturbed.” A Lakeside classmate: “He wrote a lot of angry letters to the
Tatler.
People basically stayed away from him.” His Scoutmaster: “He was a wonderful Scout and in so many ways a good example to the younger boys.” The owner of the general store on the Hoh River Road: “I told him not to come in if he wasn’t going to wear shoes.” A former air-force survival instructor who now runs a wilderness school in Oregon: “This guy had to have been highly motivated to stay in the woods that long.”

In Part Two of the
Seattle Times
investigative series, we read that Rand Barry filed a missing-persons report with the Clallam County sheriff in late April of 1977, after finding his son’s “slatternly, dilapidated trailer on the main fork of the Hoh River abandoned.” Rand also contacted the Washington State Patrol and, later, the National Crime Information Center and the Friends and Families of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims. The Bledsoe Agency—Rand’s private investigator—gets a brief mention (but not Vance Reese). The
Times
reporter, sleuthlike, follows the trail to California, where the Highway Patrol impounded John William’s Impala near the San Ysidro border crossing in early April of ’77. “The missing boy’s father,” Part Two tells us, “brought his son’s disappearance to the attention of Senator Henry M. Jackson, whose office contacted the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, but nothing came of this high-profile effort.” Et cetera.

Part Three—this is where I show up, wearing that mustache in my annual picture, and depicted—it seems to me—as Mr. Chips crossed with John Muir. I’m of “North Seattle, blue-collar, lunch pail origin” and “a well-liked high school teacher with twenty-six years of classroom experience under his belt.” I’m the father of two and live in a modest home not far from where I grew up. Jamie is “a real estate appraiser and a volunteer youth advocate with Boys and Girls Club of Seattle.” According to the
Times,
I’m contemplative and answer questions slowly. I ride my bicycle to work and rarely use my car, a ’92 Honda Civic. My friend the classicist says about me, “Neil is dedicated. He never misses a day of work.” One of my former hiking partners from the Mountaineers says I’m “persistent on the trail and knowledgeable in the woods.” My sister: “Neil’s a generous soul and has always been determined.” My mother’s untimely death is mentioned, as is the fact that my father passed away in ’98. There’s plenty from me about the packloads I carried, and the backtracking in snow, and the elk jerky, and so on, but probably the best quote the
Times
reporter got from me, while we sat by the South Fork of the Hoh together, was “I let him down.”

Part Three, though, is mostly about John William’s “Early Years.” There’s a quote from an elementary-school teacher (“Precocious, but I suppose you would say socially inept without posing a classroom behavior problem”), and a carefully written description of Laurelhurst (“architecturally notable postwar ranch houses interspersed with striving Tudors behind foliage”). We’re given some color—that in the sixties the Barry family attended dinners and barbecues at the Seattle Yacht Club; that John William played Pop Warner football and Little League baseball; that his mother, for a brief period, chaired a neighborhood gourmet club; that the family enjoyed summer sailing trips to the San Juan Islands and Desolation Sound; that John William liked canoeing in the Union Bay Marsh, built a telescope from a kit, and joined the American Association of Variable Star Observers at age fourteen. His parents separated and “eventually divorced.” His mother “became prominent in the Taos art scene.” His father’s Boeing career “was highlighted by the test launch, at Cape Canaveral, of BOMARC, a combination pilotless airplane and missile whose development he was largely responsible for.”

Before Part Four could be published, I got a call from an attorney, saying—to my message machine—that he’d read about John William in the paper, and asking me to call him “with due speed regarding important news.” He said his name was Mark Sides. He was terse, I thought, and in his terseness evasive, especially in his reference to John William as “your intimate friend, and I’d guess the term is, uh, uh, my posthumous client.”

I Googled Mark Sides. He was a partner at a Seattle firm called Berman Piper with “extensive experience in civil litigation, land use, and environmental law” and had been named in ’98 by
Washington Law & Politics
magazine, a “Super Lawyer.” There was a photograph of a slim, nearly drawn man about sixty, wearing a blue blazer and graying at the temples; he was a member of the American Water Resources Association, the Downtown Seattle Association, the Planning Association of Washington, and the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties. His undergraduate degree, from Berkeley in ’68, was in the political economy of natural resources. He’d gone to law school at Stanford and had graduated in ’71, Order of the Coif. Sides had clerked for a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in San Francisco and had lectured, in ’03, at the University of Washington on the Model Toxics Control Act. He was on the board of directors for the Vashon–Maury Island Land Trust and provided pro-bono legal services to Powerful Choices, “a nonprofit organization serving women’s empowerment and self-defense needs and supporting witness protection for Bosnian rape camp survivors.” I followed a link to the
Puget Sound Business Journal
and read an article from its November 3–9, 2004, issue on Sides’s successful handling of a lawsuit brought to determine who should pay for the clean-up of contaminated property. I also read his tips for choosing an attorney, written in a dry but striving style, employing the phrase “unvarnished counsel” and warning potential clients that “the law is a thicket demanding careful negotiation.” In sum, his Web page served its advertising purpose: Sides seemed credible and inspired confidence, and his Berkeley degree in something radical-sounding was sufficiently mitigated by his subsequent narrative and by the particulars of his impressive CV.

But how boyishly sixty he was in person, on the seventy-first floor of the Columbia Center—Seattle’s tallest building—in his corner office with its panorama north and east and its immediate view of the rooftop communications array and of the zigguratlike concrete terraces in the upper reaches of the Seattle Municipal Building. It might have been a problem, in the professional sense, to look as young as Sides, or to look so reedlike and easily pushed over; on first impression, he struck me the way I’m struck by photos of adolescent congressional interns who, posing beside senators, peer into the camera looking eagerly pliant and, in proximity to political power, happy to have no point of view. Would this work at the bench, or in the Berman Piper conference room we’d passed on the trek to his office, with its voluminous rosewood table? This vague calling forth of George Stephanopoulos with a shorter haircut? The color of his belt matched his cordovan loafers, and, without a jacket or tie, dressed in chinos and a white pinpoint oxford with carefully rolled sleeves, Sides looked like one of the older models in an L.L. Bean catalogue. There was a framed photo on his office wall of Sides and another man, both in flimsy nylon shorts and sweat-soaked bibs and chips, crossing the finish line at the Seattle Marathon, Sides with his thin arms raised in painful exhilaration in the end zone at Memorial Stadium. There was another, more moody and contemplative black-and-white of Sides trail-running, with the light glinting in the well-defined, if slim, quadriceps muscle of his leading leg as he passed under alder trees in what looked like early evening. Noting my eye turned toward this portrait of a runner—of a solitary man captured in a brooding, poetic training moment—Sides said, “That was taken on the Middle Fork Snoqualmie by my wife, eleven years ago next month.”

Generally speaking, Sides’s office was in disarray, with document boxes and a pair of shoe rubbers under his desk, wine gift-bags stuffed into a corner, and, in the slant of morning light through his southeasterly window, food crumbs and dust on the small pedestal table holding down the center of the room. This was no show office. Instead, it had the feel of an air-traffic-control tower, with its banks of uninterrupted floor-to-ceiling windows, treated with antireflective glare, about a thousand feet off the ground. Sides was frank and said that sometimes, gazing out, he wanted to be mayor of Seattle. He couldn’t see the Rainier Valley, the Industrial District, or the port, but otherwise he was poised like Zeus above the city, and from his desk took in not only Puget Sound but the rooftops of lesser towers, four lakes, two mountain ranges, and the eastward suburbs installed in their low green hills. We were literally twice as high as the Space Needle, that erstwhile symbol of Seattle’s quaint ambitions, which from here looked like one of the extraterrestrial tripods in the 1953 version of
War of the Worlds
—in other words, from the vantage of the Columbia Center, the Space Needle resembled a B-movie prop.

Sides’s guest chairs, in vinyl, weren’t ergonomically correct, as I found when he invited me to sit in one. From this lower perspective, my view was of the sky and of Sides swiveling in his lounger. “Okay,” he said. “So why are you here?”

I said, “Right.”

Sides chuckled, crossed his arms, and stuffed his fingers in his armpits. He even leaned to his left a little and affected a look of rank skepticism. “You’re Neil Countryman,” he observed.

“True.”

“What’s your birthdate?”

I told him. Then Sides produced, from a desk drawer, a small tape recorder, at which I nodded. “This is new,” he said. “I’m not good at it yet. I lost the old one in Atlanta last month. I’m lazy about longhand and tend to dictate.” Another chuckle as, looking stumped, he fiddled with his recorder. “Yep, it’s true—I tend to dictate,” he said. “You can verify that with my wife.”

“I think you have the wrong guy,” I told him. “I’m a teacher.”

“You’re a teacher,” he said, “but not a teacher in trouble. In fact,” he added, “it’s the opposite of that—you better hold on to your chair.” And he held on, demonstratively, to his own chair.

This was toward the end of my twenty-sixth year of teaching, thirty-four years after I’d met John William, and twenty-two years since he’d died in his campfire. This was on an April morning during spring break, so cloudless and promising that I’d pedaled my bicycle downtown and locked it to a rack in front of the Columbia Center before coming up to see Sides. My plan, at that point, was to pedal home in stages, visiting used-book stores along the way and stopping somewhere for a sandwich. I also planned to go to Trader Joe’s and Rite-Aid. In other words, my day had a shape I looked forward to. But now here was Sides in his Naugahyde saddle with his fingers linked behind his head, seated under his six tall windows and at the intersection of his two wall-desks with their law books, brown accordion folders, and three-ring binders. Here was Sides before a sky of cobalt blue, vastly spread, saying, “Did you ever think you’d be rich, Neil?”

“No.”

“Well, you are,” he said. “In fact, right now, as we speak, you and I, you’re the nineteenth-richest person in Washington State. Give or take,” he added, “your net worth is four hundred forty million dollars.”

I said, “Who’s the joker?”

Sides chuckled a third time. “Your friend Barry,” he answered. “He named you in his will.”

I didn’t answer. I sat there thinking, like an English teacher, that even $440 million didn’t stand between me and annihilation. “Feature this,” urged Sides. “Right now your projected investment income for ’06, from dividends and interest alone, is twenty-two million.”