Whom Dog Hath Joined (12 page)

But she softened immediately as Rochester resisted my
attempt to get his leash on and rushed over to where she and Rick stood.  “What
a beautiful dog!” she said, kneeling to pet him. Rick raised his eyebrows
behind her as I walked up.

“Sorry,” I said. “Come here, you monster. Get your leash
on.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” she said. “What’s your name, Handsome?”

Boy. First Tamsen Morgan, now Vera Lee Isay. I was either
losing my looks or losing my touch. “His name is Rochester.” And because I
thought she’d appreciate it, I said, “After the hero of
Jane Eyre
.
Though I didn’t give him the name – he came to me with it.” I hooked the leash
to his collar and he looked reproachfully at me.

“Funny, you don’t look dark and brooding,” she said to him.
“More like sunny and charming.” She stood up. “I want your assurance that
anything you do will not blacken Mr. Brannigan’s good name. He was a wonderful
man who did great things for this school.”

“I’m investigating a murder, ma’am,” Rick said. “I can’t
make any promises. But I’m not interested in digging up anything that doesn’t
relate directly to the death I’m investigating.”

“Did you work for Mr. Brannigan back then?” I asked.

She nodded. “I was hired as his secretary right after I
graduated from high school, and I’ve never left.”

“When did Mr. Brannigan start to work here?” Rick asked, as
he pulled a small spiral notebook out of his pocket.

“Let me see,” she said. “He was born in, oh, 1920, I think,
and graduated from Haverford College. He served in the war after that.”

“I thought Quakers were pacifists,” I said. “How could he
have done that?”

“Pacifism doesn’t mean acceptance of violence, or simply
standing by,” she said. “Mr. Brannigan was very passionate about the need to
help people less fortunate than ourselves. He volunteered with an ambulance
corps in England sponsored by The American Friends Service Committee. It was a
difficult time but he was a very brave man.”

 “And then?” Rick asked.

“Then he came here. He married and lived with his wife in
Newtown until she passed. Soon after that the previous headmaster retired, and
Mr. Brannigan stepped in.”

“When was that?”

“I believe that was 1966,” she said. “His secretary retired
two years later.”

I could tell by the way she spoke about Brannigan that she’d
had a bit of a crush on him. I could imagine her as a young woman, working with
a man she admired.

 “Were you aware of the work he did helping draft evaders?”
Rick asked.

She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at us. “We
called them draft resisters,” she said. “It was a moral decision. Mr. Brannigan
couldn’t stand aside while young men were forced to serve in a conflict they
didn’t believe in.”

“Even though he had served himself?” Rick asked.

“World War II was a very different conflict, with the fate
of the world at stake. In Vietnam, we were meddling in a foreign country’s
civil war to protect American business interests.”

She stopped speaking and glared at Rick.  “Maybe this isn’t
a good idea. Mr. Brannigan worked very hard to find alternative means of
service for boys who qualified as conscientious objectors. Helping them leave
the country was his absolute last resort. Those young men have moved on in
their lives, and I doubt they’d want their past dredged up.”

I looked at Vera Lee. Could she be protecting something
other than Brannigan’s reputation? Suppose our victim had discovered what
Brannigan was doing and threatened to expose him. What if Brannigan committed
the murder to protect the boys, and his volunteers, and she’d helped him cover
it up?

There I went again, imagining situations without any basis
in proof. The immediate problem was that Rick and Vera Lee appeared to be at a
standoff. I had to focus on getting us into that Annex.

“I get your concerns,” I said. “Rick and I both grew up in
Stewart’s Crossing, and we had many Quaker teachers. We both understand the
ideals of the Friends movement, and how sometimes those ideals can cause
conflict.”

I could see in her eyes that she was following me.

“But that body belonged to a living, breathing person, who
died, possibly at someone else’s hands. We have a duty to him, to find out who
he is so that his family can know what happened to him.”

A group of teenaged boys ran past, kicking a soccer ball
back and forth between them. I saw Vera Lee watch them, and then when she
turned back to us her demeanor had softened. “The boxes are in the Annex,” she
said, and pointed to a square brick building with a couple of small windows.
“It’s right over there.”

“I’ll put Rochester in the car,” I said.

“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” she said. “You can take
him into the Annex. We’re only using it for storage right now.”

At least she still liked the dog, I thought. Rochester
stopped to pee on a tree as Vera Lee led us to the Annex. She unlocked the door
and flipped on the light switch. “I’ll pull out the right boxes for you.”

We stepped into the cool, dim room, lined with rows of metal
shelving, and each shelf groaned with cardboard storage boxes. I could see why
Rick had thought he could use some help. A long aluminum table rested against
the wall by the door, with two folding chairs leaning beside it.

Ancient wood file cabinets took up one wall. “Those are
student records in there,” she said. “All those are off limits.”

“Of course,” Rick said.

She walked over to one wall and started scanning the boxes.
“Here they are,” she said. “When Mr. Brannigan passed, I boxed everything up by
decade. There are six boxes for the seventies.”

Rick began taking boxes off the shelf and handing them to
me, and I placed them on the folding table as she supervised. Rochester sat on
his haunches beside her. “The door will lock behind you,” she said. “Make sure
to turn out the lights when you’re finished.”

We agreed, and Vera Lee let the door close as she walked
away. I assumed that we had convinced her she didn’t have to supervise us the
whole time we were there.

“What exactly are we looking for?” I asked Rick, as he
pulled the lid off the first box.

“Anything related to moving those draft dodgers through
Stewart’s Crossing. Their names, where they came from, where they went. Anybody
who helped Brannigan, had contact with the boys, or might have known about that
false wall at the Meeting House.”

Rochester sprawled on the concrete floor beside me. I lifted
the lid off the first box and began flipping through faded bills and copies of
personal correspondence. Brannigan had been a social studies teacher, like my
own Mrs. Shea, and I wondered if that was a field that attracted Quakers. In
addition to running the school he had taught a senior seminar each year,
focusing on the Civil War, and I scanned through his syllabi and class notes.

The bottom of the box was lined with books. I pulled the
first one out of the box, an  ancient text Brannigan had annotated. I quickly
went through a few more, then lifted them all out and stacked them on the
floor.

Rochester got up from beside me and began prowling around the
room. He stopped beside a box on the far wall, and kept nosing at it and
scratching it.

“What is it, boy?” I asked. “Is there something in that
box?”

“Probably dog biscuits,” Rick said.

“You never know with this dog. Could be a clue to the
identity of the dead body.” I pulled the box, from 1992, off the shelf and
popped it open. “We won’t tell Vera Lee that we looked in here.”

Rochester was right on top of me, sticking his big nose into
the box. “Back off, dog,” I said, elbowing him aside.

I found a folder of Brannigan’s research on the Underground
Railroad, particularly those stops in Pennsylvania. He had written several
pages about the Meeting House in Stewart’s Crossing and how it had been a way
station for escaping slaves. At the end of the folder was a diagram of the
Stewart’s Crossing Meeting House – including the location of the false wall.

“You think Vera Lee would let us use the copy machine in her
office?” Rick asked.

“Don’t need to.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket.
“You have one of these, don’t you? She said we couldn’t take anything away. She
didn’t say we couldn’t take pictures.”

“You’re awfully sneaky,” Rick said. “But you’re right. She
gave us access to the building, didn’t stick around to watch us, and didn’t say
we couldn’t take pictures. I could make that argument with the D.A. Of course,
my only witnesses are an ex-con and a dog.”

“Take the pictures,” I said.

There was nothing else of use in the box, and after Rick
photographed the diagram and the pages of Brannigan’s notes, I repacked the
box. “At least we have evidence beyond Edith’s word that Brannigan knew about
the existence of the wall,” Rick said.

The bottom was scattered with dry crumbs, but I wasn’t going
to let Rochester eat them. Who knew what they could be. He stared at the box as
I put it back, but then padded back to my chair and settled behind it.

“You didn’t believe Edith?” I asked Rick.

“Not that I didn’t believe her. But it’s always good to have
corroborating evidence.”

I went on to the next box. Rick and I worked in silence
until we had each gone through three boxes.

“You find anything at all?” he asked me.

“Nothing.” I stood up, dislodging Rochester from his
position behind my chair, and stretched. “What they were doing was illegal,
after all. It wouldn’t surprise me if he destroyed all the records after the
war. If he even kept any records at all.”

“Crap. Another dead end. We’d better get these boxes packed
up again.”

Rochester was nosing around the stack of books on the floor,
and he swiped his paw at them, and they tumbled into a haphazard pile.
“Rochester!” I said. “How are we going to know which books go back into which
boxes?”

“I doubt it matters,” Rick said.

I leaned down and picked up the book closest to me. It was a
personal journal, the first few pages filled with newspaper clippings about the
Vietnam War. “Look at these,” I said. “Maybe there’s something in one of these
articles.”

“You read while I pack,” Rick said.

I sat and began to read. It was fascinating to see the news
through the lens of history, and I admit I got too caught up in the articles.

It must have been a half hour later when Rick said, “All
right, professor. I’m ready to go.”

I flipped through the rest of the articles. After the last
one, the next page was  written in what looked like a foreign language. “This
is weird,” I said, showing it to Rick.

“What language is that?” he asked.

It took me a moment to figure out that what I was looking at
was a substitution cipher, a means of encrypting information by substituting a
different letter. I had done some of those puzzles as a kid, and enjoyed them.

I explained the basic principle. “This looks like a simple
one, because he’s maintained the integrity of the units,” I said. “See here?
This single letter? Probably either ‘A’ or ‘I.’ And the three letter word there
– maybe it’s ‘and,’ or ‘the.’”

“Why go to all this trouble?” Rick asked.

“It was the sixties, and people were paranoid back then,” I
said. “Remember, they were smuggling kids out of the country to avoid the
draft. I’m not surprised he was careful.”

“If we have to solve this cipher, we’ll be here all night,”
he said.

“Time for the camera phone again,” I said.

I held the book flat while Rick took high-def pictures of
each of the ten encrypted pages, then emailed them to himself and to me. We
replaced the journal in the last box and walked outside. It was full dark and
the air had cooled. Rochester hurried to a bush to pee again, dragging me
behind him.

“Do you think you can decipher Brannigan’s notes?” Rick
asked.

“I can try. It’ll be easier if I print the pictures out and
then write on them.”

We walked back to where we had parked. “Do you ever think
about what you’d have done if you’d been eligible for the draft back then?” I
asked.

“I probably would have gone. Maybe even volunteered, because
that’s what my Dad did for Korea. You know I wasn’t the greatest student in
high school. So it could have been a real option. How about you?”

“My parents were determined that I go to college, so I’d
have done that, and had a deferment for four years. But after that? I don’t
know. My great-grandfather left Russia to avoid serving in the Czar’s Army, so
I have that heritage of draft resistance.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t a cop in the sixties,” Rick said. “Talking
to Bob Freehl about it, there were a lot of problems in families, between
neighbors, everything from drugs to the war to guys with long hair.” Bob was a
retired cop who lived down the street from me, and I’d spoken to him
occasionally about his work.

“Looking back, it’s easy to see that the whole conflict was
one big blunder, but back then? Would we have known?” I asked. “Would either of
us had the strength of conviction that these boys did?”

“Don’t forget fear,” Rick said. “The guys who went to Canada
were the ones who couldn’t get CO status. They may just have been afraid of
dying.”

We walked the rest of the way back in silence. For one of
those boys, that fear had been realized.

15 – Decoder Ring

I stopped at a drive-through on my way home, picking up a
couple of plain burgers for Rochester and one of the pre-made salads for
myself. He couldn’t wait until we got home, though, and kept nuzzling at me, so
I gave him one of the burgers when we were stopped at the single traffic light
in Stewart’s Crossing, at the corner of Main and Ferry.

“That’s all you get,” I said, snatching my fingers back
before he chomped on them. “You can wait til we get home for the rest.”