Whom Dog Hath Joined (14 page)

He jumped on the hood of her car and began to kick cracks in
her windshield with his steel-toed boots. She screamed, somebody in the State Store
called the cops, and the vet came out in his white coat to try and calm his son
down.

I hung back behind a column and watched until the cops got
there. Then I got on my bicycle and rode for home as fast as I could. I found
my mother in the kitchen, and I jumped up onto one of the bar stools around the
table and began rattling the story off.

My mother shook her head. “It’s very sad,” she said. “Now
you see why your cousin Harold waited to have that cyst removed from his back
until after he turned twenty-six.”

I had no idea what she meant then, but I could tell she
didn’t want to talk about the incident any more. It was only when I studied
Vietnam in civics class in high school that I realized Harold’s medical
condition had rendered him 4-F and that he had waited until he was over the
draft age to have it repaired. He’d gone on to have a successful career as an
accountant, while Jerry Vandeventer had driven his truck into the Delaware a
year or two later after another drunken binge. I felt bad about what both of
them had to go through – worse, of course, for Jerry. His father had closed the
practice soon after and moved to Florida. I guess those memories were too much
for him.

I went back to the cipher, cracking the second code more
quickly once I understood what Brannigan was writing about. I didn’t find the
information I was looking for on those last two boys – names, ages, hometowns
-- but I learned a lot about the anti-war movement. One page I couldn’t figure was
a list of two-word pairs; one had a third word. I assumed they were proper
names, and they had their own special cipher. Were those the names of the boys?
Or the volunteers who had helped them? I pushed that list aside for the next
day, when I’d be fresh. Deciphering names was a whole lot harder than ordinary
text, because there were so many fewer patterns.

It was after eleven when Rochester nudged me for his bedtime
walk. I knew I should have gone to bed after we returned, but I was too keyed
up to sleep, too intent on looking for information on those two boys. I was
sure there was something in Brannigan’s notes, if I could only find it.

I was staring at the screen around midnight when Rochester
came upstairs with his squeaky piano. He settled beside me and began gnawing on
it, playing discordant notes. “You sound like me when I was studying with Edith
Passis,” I said.

I looked back at the screen. “That’s it! Rochester, you’ve done
it again. If this is a list of  the volunteers John Brannigan recruited, then Edith’s
name will be here. I have to look for the right pattern to break the cipher.”

I wrote E D I T H on a piece of paper, with P A S S I S
under it. Then I looked for a first name of five letters and a last name of
six. There were two matches. The third letter of Edith’s first name was I, and
that should be repeated in the fifth letter of the last name.

But neither of the two matched. Did that mean Edith wasn’t really
one of Brannigan’s volunteers? But why would she lie about something like that?
Or was the list something else? The boys who had passed through his care? His contacts
at other Meetings? People in Stewart’s Crossing who were sympathetic to the
cause?

“Sorry, boy, seems like what I thought was a clue wasn’t really,”
I said, reaching down to rub behind the dog’s ears. “But it was a good try. I’m
going to go back to the regular entries and keep decoding them.”

He rolled over on his side and went to sleep. It was close
to two in the morning by the time I found an entry about picking up two boys at
the bus station in Philadelphia, Pete and Don.

“This is it!” I said, waking Rochester from his snooze.
“This is the first time he’s picked up two boys at once. Either Pete or Don has
to be the dead boy.” I hurried to finish deciphering the rest, then sat back to
read what I had come up with.

 “Each boy’s story breaks my heart,” Brannigan wrote. “Pete
is from a poor family in West Virginia. He’s smart enough for a college
deferment, but his family is too poor to spare him even a penny. Don is a farm
boy, from a small town outside Pittsburgh. He wants to stay at home and work
the land, and he tried for the II C Agricultural Deferment. But he has three
older brothers who work with his father so he was denied.”

There was no mention of a last name for either boy. Either
Brannigan was being overly careful or he just didn’t know that information. He wrote
of leaving them in the Meeting House in Stewart’s Crossing overnight. He showed
them the space behind the false wall, telling them to hide there if anyone came
looking for them.

“When I returned to the Meeting House on that cold morning,
Pete was waiting for me in the main room. He told me that he and Don had stayed
up long into the night, talking about Canada. Don had decided he couldn’t live
in a strange country, and left at first light to hitchhike back home.”

Brannigan continued, “I had a small amount of money put
aside to buy the boys tickets on the train from Trenton to New York, and give
them each a few dollars for food. But with only one boy to send on, I had
enough to buy Pete a ticket straight to Montreal. I hope God will be with him,
and the news we have heard about the ease of crossing the border is correct.”

I was so excited that I had to get up and pace around the
house for a few minutes. Brannigan had met Pete in the worship area of the Meeting
House, which implied that Brannigan hadn’t checked the space behind the false
wall himself. Two boys had gone into that space – but only one had come out.
The dead boy had to be Don.

Rochester must have thought I was going to eat something, or
take him for a walk, because he kept following on my heels. I couldn’t sit back
down for a few minutes—that finding had electrified me and I had to wait for
the aftershocks to fade – similar to what I felt when I’d committed a great
hack, breaking in somewhere on line I wasn’t supposed to be. I drank some water
from the refrigerator and gave Rochester a tiny T-bone treat.

I walked over to the sliding glass doors that led out to my
courtyard. A pair of headlights raked across the glass as some night owl passed
by. The motion-sensor lights on the house across from me clicked on.

I stood there in the momentary glow. It was possible, of
course, that Pete was telling the truth, and that once I found out Don’s last
name I would discover that he had left that Meeting House alive, and Rick and I
would be back at square one. But something in my gut told me we were on the
right track at last.

Rochester sat on his butt and woofed at me once. “I know,
boy, it’s late, and we ought to go to bed. I can look for Pete and Don’s last
names tomorrow.”

Suddenly I remembered the list of two-word pairs. Would Pete
and Don be listed there? I galloped up the stairs to the second floor, two steps
at a time, Rochester right behind me. I slid into my desk chair and pulled over
the list. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a match for Pete,
Peter, Don or Donald.

I looked at the clock above my computer. It was way too late
to call Rick, even with news this important. There wasn’t anything he could do
until the morning, so I ought to let him sleep. Instead I composed a quick
email to him with Brannigan’s entry about the two boys, and hit
send
.

17 – Friends and Colleagues

Though he knew I’d been up late the night before, Rochester
wanted to go for his regular morning walk, and he wouldn’t stop licking my face
until I got up to take him. As we returned, my cell rang and I had to scramble
to get it out of my pocket.

“This is great, Steve,” Rick said. “And you got all this
information from Brannigan’s notes?”

Was he worried that I’d hacked in somewhere? But where? Would
he always assume the worst of me? I tamped down my irritation and said, “Yeah.
The guy kept a pretty detailed journal. Do you think you can do anything with
that information?”

“It’s not enough to move forward, but it’s a start,” he
said. “We know he was from a small farm town near Pittsburgh, with three older
brothers.”

“And you have a date of disappearance.”

“Unfortunately there’s no match to any of the missing
persons reports I went through, even ones from years later.”

“Are there any records from the Selective Service of guys
who didn’t report for induction?” I asked.

“Not that I’ve been able to find. Since those guys may still
be alive, it might be a privacy violation to list them somewhere. Jimmy Carter
issued an executive order in 1977 that terminated prosecution of any violators
of the Military Selective Service Act and granted amnesty to any draft dodgers
living in other countries. So there might not be any legal justification for
the existence of such a list.”

“But the list must exist,” I said. “Even it’s not public.”

“Don’t even go there,” Rick said. “You are not hacking into
any government database.”

“Actually I was thinking of the Freedom of Information Act,”
I said. “But it would probably take too long to get the records that way.”

“And it makes sense that our victim is not showing up on any
missing persons reports,” Rick said. “His family thought he was going to Canada.
They wouldn’t have reported him missing to the police.”

“You get anything else?” I asked.

“Nada. I spent yesterday talking to members of the Meeting,
but no one knew anything about the false wall or about Brannigan’s group.”

I heard him talk to someone away from the phone, then he
said, “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

As I drove to work, I wondered if there was more information
I could find based on what I’d learned from Brannigan’s notes – legitimately. Don
had come from western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Suppose he had been helped
by Friends out there?

When I got to my office, I checked online, and there was a
Friends Meeting in Pittsburgh, with a phone number. I knew I ought to ask Rick
to follow up with them – but would they respond well to a police investigation,
especially one so far removed from their own Meeting?

Before I could think too far ahead, I dialed the number. As
the phone rang, I thought about what I could say that would get someone to talk
to me. By the time a woman answered, I had an idea.

“I’m a professor at Eastern College in Leighville, outside
Philadelphia,” I said. “I’m doing some research on the involvement of the
Society of Friends in the anti-war movement in Pennsylvania. Is there anyone in
your Meeting who might have been there during the 1960s who I could speak to?”

“That was a long time ago.” The woman’s voice quavered,
making her sound like she was about Edith’s age, which was good – she might
know something about the past.

“Were you involved with the Meeting back then?” I asked, my
hope rising.

“Yes, I was. But I didn’t have anything to do with those
protests. I was already married and had my first child by then.”

Oh, well, I thought.

“Amos Carter, though, he was a young firebrand back then. He
might be able to help you. Let me see if I can find his number.”

My hope soared again. “Here it is,” she said, when she
returned to the line. She read me the number, which had a 267 area code. “He
retired a few years back and moved to the eastern part of the state to be
closer to his son.”

“Thank you very much for your help, ma’am,” I said. “I
appreciate it.”

I turned back to the computer and Googled the phone number
she had given me. I got a long list of websites that indicated it was a
cellular number assigned to a carrier in the Philadelphia area.

When I added “Amos Carter” to the search, only one result
came up, but it was good enough. It was a list of the members of the Bristol
Friends Meeting with their emergency contacts, and it was dated earlier that
summer. That meant Carter was nearby, because Bristol was about a half hour
south of Stewart’s Crossing, along the Delaware. It also meant he was probably
still alive.

It wasn’t up to me to talk to him, though. This was Rick’s
case, though I hoped he’d keep me in the loop. So I called him. “I found a lead
for you to follow,” I said when he answered. I told him about Amos Carter, and
the possibility that he’d been involved in helping the boy from western
Pennsylvania escape the draft.

“Good job, buddy,” he said. “You say he’s in Bristol
somewhere?”

“Think so.”

“I’ll call him right now.”

“Great. Let me know what you come up with, all right? And if
I can do anything else for you.”

I had a committee meeting at the Eastern campus at three, so
I bundled Rochester into the car and drove down to Leighville, following a Saab
wagon with the bumper sticker “Caution: Farting Beagle.” I made sure to stay a
good distance behind it.

Even though I was an administrator, and wasn’t working on
campus anymore, my contract required me to participate in at least one college
committee. The previous year I hadn’t been hired full-time until January, so I
had been placed on the graduation task force. This year I got to choose for
myself, and I picked the technology committee, which worked with the
instructional technology staff on questions like new computers for the lab, new
software for testing, and so on.

I didn’t mention my criminal history to anyone else on the
committee, though I did say that I’d worked in high-tech in Silicon Valley for ten
years before returning east. I’d kept up to date with new developments, eyeing
faster processors and expanded RAM with envy. And of course I was hyper aware
of any new anti-hacking software, developments in protection, peer-to-peer file
sharing, and the latest iteration, torrents. Since so many of these
developments came from college kids, staying involved with technology at the
college level was an opportunity to ride whatever tide was rising.