October 4 (Tuesday)
In Kaser’s modest Nashville hotel room, he looked over his notes, which filled a large briefcase. The local paper had a picture of his employer, State Senate Candidate Nancy Vernon Durocher, but she’d probably never even heard Kaser’s name. His actual boss was Durocher’s campaign manager, Edward Dillon. So far, they’d just spoken on the phone, and Kaser preferred it that way. There would be a time to meet, but not now.
Kaser kept things extremely close to his vest. Nobody knew his full name, his age—though he figured he looked about forty—or where he was from. All they knew were his results, which were top notch. Kaser was confident and proud. One source of both was his thoroughness. Brutally thorough.
Kaser’s singular assignment was to locate Durocher’s family skeletons before her incumbent opponent could get a whiff of them.
At present, he was interviewing some of Durocher’s Vernon relatives and other ancestral lines to see what they remembered of their preceding generations. He’d been on the phone for hours. He rubbed a cramp out of his muscular shoulders and checked his watch. He’d need time for a workout before supper. Kaser was strong and sturdy, but keeping in shape was as important as being thorough. Slightly below average height, he could take on men who were taller, heavier, younger, whatever. Sometimes, in his line of work, he needed those skills.
But for now, he focused on research.
How many days of this? You can do only so much on the Internet, and then you have to make contact.
He’d begun his search in the Nashville area weeks before, in late July, and followed this assigned ancestral trail back to Shelby County surrounding Memphis. Then, farther back to the client’s relatives in Fulton County, Kentucky—the westernmost tip, just north of the Tennessee border.
For this assignment, Kaser needed mainly to pick the brains of older individuals. If any of the targeted relatives sounded under age fifty, he just asked one question: “The census bureau has a follow-up from last year: How much family history have you done... or are you aware of?” Most knew little or nothing; a portion recalled only back as far as their own grandparents. Kaser just thanked them for cooperating with the census bureau and ended the call.
But nearly every family line had a few individuals with genealogy as their hobby... and those were the ones Kaser needed to talk with. He called them Genies. Kaser explained they’d been selected to participate in a special survey. “It’s for a documentary on public TV.”
For the few who wondered about the connection between census and public television, Kaser replied: “Without federal money, our favorite network would shut their doors.” Most of his contacts readily accepted that premise and many offered additional encouragement to get more federal money so the network could cut back from their frequent on-air fund raising cycles.
Kaser’s next line was, “So they want to know everything you remember.”
Depending on where he was in Durocher’s genealogical charts, Kaser modified his spiel. Over the previous weeks, he’d worked his way back through surviving family of the World War Two generation and those alive during the Great Depression. To learn anything about the ancestors from the Roaring Twenties and before the Turn of the Century, he had to ask for recollections and oral family history... along with any correspondence, diaries or albums they might possess.
It was tedious to walk these scores of phone contacts back through the years to Aunt This and Uncle That... or Grandma Who’s-it. But Kaser’s ambitious political client was paying particularly well and this level of compensation required a considerable degree of precision and thoroughness. Plus, it demanded Kaser’s obsessively meticulous dedication.
So far, rather few of his Genie contacts had possessed much more than scattered letters, post cards, or snapshots. But Kaser had to steer the phone conversations to sift through all that potential memorabilia to get at the heart of his assignment. He’d found that most people’s tongues loosened in direct proportion to how far back the gossip was. So Kaser pretended to be doing research on the westward movement of families in the decades after the Civil War.
Checking back over this complicated contract’s research was Kaser’s second nature. The particular notes in his hand were from a phone call two weeks before—his earliest significant breakthrough. Something to sink his hooks into: the first point at which he knew he’d found something Dillon would truly want. Oh, it couldn’t be taken at face value, of course, but it was enough for Kaser to be certain there was an element of truth behind it. A story.
He re-read his notes.
Tuesday, Sept. 20—Mr. Barkley [related to the Vernons through his mother Faustine]
The voice on the other end sounded feeble and distraught, as though this story had been a burden all his life... A terrible rift had developed between the Vernons and that Slate family. The Slates had become so preoccupied with those ”ugly lies”. The Slates would tell anybody who’d listen or practically anybody who passed through town. They’d even tell gypsies if gypsies could understand English. They’d even told a traveling actress who later went to Hollywood and made it big in silent movies. Those awful Slates would tell everyone they knew—spreading that “terrible gossip”. It was slander, but Mamma’s father [Matthew] never challenged them. He’d tried to quiet them, and even threatened suit, but nothing ever came of it.
This old guy was glad to get out his version to clear the Vernon family name of that terrible slander.
Yeah, that was the story Kaser was hired to find. A terrible, juicy secret about the Vernons. A skeleton that Durocher wanted erased from her ancestral closet.
He placed those old notes back in his special folder... the good stuff. Kaser scraped the knuckle of one thumb with the thumbnail of his other. “Oh, no, my dear old Barkley,” he verbalized to the motel walls, “this tale won’t get out. It will be buried. Along with anybody who knows about it.” The more elderly the contact, the easier it was to arrange for their sudden natural death.
The following morning—September twenty-first—Kaser had scheduled a meeting with Barkley in a gated development of retirement condos outside Memphis.
Barkley’s obituary had appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal two days later. Natural causes—he fell and hit his head