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(Seattle, Wednesday, September 24, 2013)
The Emergency Pregnancy Care Center was on the ground floor of an older two-story brick building on 44th. The sign out front was large and white with the Center’s name painted in script letters and edged with blue and white flowers.
Mac opened the door, a heavy metal one, and went in. The room inside looked like the waiting room of a doctor’s office, albeit a comfortable one. The armchairs were blue tweed and overstuffed, rather than the stiff straight-back chairs in some doctor’s offices. Pictures of pretty, happy babies on the walls. The room was empty, however. Apparently, Wednesday afternoons weren’t high crisis times.
The receptionist was a young, smiling woman with blond hair—just like the babies on the wall, Mac thought. She wore a white nurse’s uniform. Mac identified himself, asked to talk to the Center’s director. The receptionist’s smile dimmed a bit, and she reached for the phone.
Mac wandered around the waiting room, looking at the baby pictures—they truly were all white, blonde, smiling babies —and picking up some of the literature.
“Can I help you?” said a voice from the doorway next to the receptionist desk. The voice was cold, stiff. Mac looked toward it.
“Dr. Ryan?” Mac asked, looking at the brochure in his hand.
“I’m not a doctor,” the man said. Mark Ryan was a short, thin man with a regulation military haircut even though it must have been years since he’d been in the military. If he ever had. He was in his 40s somewhere, Mac guessed. Maybe 50s.
Ryan didn’t offer to shake hands. He stood in the doorway with his arms across his chest. Ready to do battle.
“But you are the Director of this Center?”
“Are you doing a story about us for some reason?” the man parried. “Hasn’t your paper tired of attacking the pro-life movement yet?”
Interesting, Mac thought. He hadn’t identified his paper—just said he was a reporter. “Actually, I’m looking for Tim Brandt.”
“Why are you looking for Tim Brandt? And why here?” Ryan asked.
“I want to talk to him about a story I’m working on,” Mac said easily. “Campus Crusade said he worked here.”
Ryan nodded once, as if that confirmed something for him about Campus Crusade people. “He did. Hasn’t lately. Volunteers come and go.”
After the openness of his last two calls, Mac felt more comfortable with Ryan’s hostility.
“What exactly does the Center do?” he asked looking around.
“Is your story about the Center?”
Mac shook his head. “Just curious. Reporter trait.”
“We don’t encourage the press to be curious about us, Mr. Davis. Especially your newspaper. I will be glad to leave a message for Tim if he should come by. But I rather doubt it.”
That was a brush-off. Mac didn’t move. “Do you know where he’s living these days?”
“No.” Ryan was brief. He moved toward the door, expecting Mac to follow. Mac didn’t.
“When was the last time exactly that you did see him?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen him this month.” Ryan held the door open. He met Mac’s eyes. “I think that’s all we have to talk about, Mr. Davis.”
Mac looked at him for a moment, nodded, and started out. “So, he’s still at Naomi Fairchild’s as far as you know.”
“You won’t find him there, Mr. Davis, but I don’t know where he is.”
Mac smiled. “You haven’t seen him recently? Yet you know he’s left the boarding house?”
Ryan glared at him. The door closed in his face. Mac laughed. And don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out, he added to himself.
Something here, he thought with satisfaction. A thread to follow up on.
His next visit was to the UW biology department. It took perseverance, and a fair amount of charm wasted on stern department secretaries before he got to Tim Brandt’s adviser.
“Dr. Osborne?”
The man who occupied the office looked up. “I’m Dr. Osborne,” he said in a soft southern drawl. He looked too young to be a doctor, much less a medical professor. His office looked right, however, piles of books, magazines, journals everywhere. Mac almost sighed out loud.
He identified himself, still standing in the doorway. Dr. Osborne didn’t ask him to sit—no chair was uncovered anyway.
“I’m not sure I can help you,” Dr. Osborne said slowly. “Privacy you know.”
“If you can give me his schedule, I’ll just catch him after a class. Does he have one today?”
He hesitated.
“I talked to Kate Fairchild, at the boarding house where he lives. He moved out two weeks ago. They’re a bit concerned.”
Dr. Osborne smiled with pleasure at Kate’s name. “You met Kate, did you? Have you met her mother? Lovely women. Naomi is a secretary over in math. Her Sunday dinners are to die for.”
Mac smiled. “I’m invited to one Sunday week from now.”
“Lucky man.” Dr. Osborne turned to his computer, tapped in some codes. “He’s got a class over in Smithers Hall, gets out at 4 p.m. today. You could try to catch him then.”
Mac looked at his watch. Plenty of time. “Do you know Tim well? He seems to have dropped out of a lot of things lately.”
Dr. Osborne frowned. “Tim is very bright,” he said. “Brighter than most here, and they are all bright. But he lacks....”
“Bedside manner?” Mac suggested.
The professor snorted. “For starters. He has no compassion. He’s arrogant, impatient, and judgmental. He believes people should suffer the consequences of their sins. Alcoholics who injure themselves while they’re drunk. Women who are beaten. He also doesn’t get along with his peers, especially women, no surprise considering his background. In short, he’s the most intolerant human being I have ever met.”
“But other than that...,” Mac said, grinning.
Osborne laughed ruefully. “Other than that, he’s brilliant. He's a sophomore, and he's taking senior level biology classes. If it wasn't for all the other stuff students are required to take—we'd give him a degree and send him on to med school.”
Mac nodded. It didn’t surprise him that Janet’s son was brilliant. He wondered what she would think about the rest of the description. Why had she left her son in Jehovah’s Valley when she’d left with no plan to ever go back?
“Thanks, doctor,” Mac said.
“Give Naomi and Kate my love,” he said. “And you might mention I miss their dinners.”
Smithers Hall was a new, white marble building with tall columns in front. He found the classroom, waited until the door opened and students started pouring out.
He smiled at a young woman, who smiled back. “I’m looking for Tim Brandt,” he said casually. “Can you point him out?”
She rolled her eyes. “Why would you want to find him? But he’s not here today anyway. Hasn’t been all week.”
Mac smiled his thanks and left before she could quiz him further.
Why has Timothy Brandt dropped out of sight? Mac thought as he walked back up the street toward his car. Passing the street of the Fairchild boarding house, he decided to stop in again. He needed a picture of the guy.
And he wanted to see Kate Fairchild again, he admitted to himself. See if the tug of attraction was really there. He couldn’t think of a more unlikely attraction. She reminded him of someone. He pondered that. He was sure he hadn’t ever known a girl like that before. No one in his family was that innocent. None of the girls he had dated.
As he knocked on the door, it came to him. She reminded him of Janet Andrews. Had Janet been like Kate when she’d left home for the University? The thought that they were somehow alike made him uncomfortable. He set it aside.
It was Kate who opened the door again. “You’re back,” she said with surprise. She gestured for him to come in. “Come out back. Mom just got home. We’re sitting in the garden.”
Mac found himself swallowed up again by the warmth of the woman and the house as he tagged behind her to the back yard. It was small, made smaller by all the plants. A round table and four chairs were set up under the shade of a maple tree. An older version of Kate sat at the table and looked up with a smile.
“Mom, this is Mac,” Kate announced. She poured him a glass of iced tea, sugared it to match the way he had before, and handed it to him.
“Kate has been telling me about you,” Naomi Fairchild said. “Did you find Tim?”
Mac sat down, sipped the tea. “No,” he said. “The Pregnancy Center says they haven’t seen him. I talked to his adviser, who said to give you his love and hinted that he’d like an invitation to dinner.”
“Dr. Osborne?” Naomi laughed. “I’ll have to do so.”
Mac sipped more tea. “I went to Tim’s afternoon class, but apparently he hasn’t been to class all week.”
Naomi frowned. “That isn’t like Tim,” she said with worry. “He’s very conscientious.”
Mac looked around the small garden. It was as pleasant a place as he’d seen. Reminds me of Janet’s, he thought ruefully. He looked at Kate. She was sitting quietly, enjoying the warmth and the company. No chatter.
“Do you have a picture of him?” Mac asked. “It would help me find him.”
Naomi nodded, and Kate went off to get it. “My daughter is quite taken with you,” she said when Kate was out of earshot.
“I like her too,” Mac said awkwardly.
Naomi Fairchild looked at him consideringly. Mac met her eyes, wondering what she looked for, what she saw. She nodded as if she were satisfied with what she found.
“Why exactly are you looking for Tim?” she asked, as if the other comment had not been said. “Kate wasn’t exactly clear.”
Mac hesitated. “I can’t answer that,” he said at last.
“Is he in trouble?”
Mac nodded. “I think so. That isn’t why I started to look for him, but I think he might be.”
Naomi looked at the kitchen door as Kate came through it. “Kate, bring the phone with you, will you?”
Naomi took the phone, dialed the university main number, asked for Dr. Osborne. “Sunday dinner is yours,” she said with a smile when he answered. “You and your wife.”
She laughed at whatever he said. “Bert, I’m worried about Tim. Mac says he hasn’t been seen. Wasn’t in class.” She listened. “Yes, that worries me too. It’s unlike him. Could you check with his teachers? Check his schedule for me? See if anyone has seen him? He’s... innocent... for all his brains.”
She listened some more, thanked him, and hung up.
“I can reach you at the newspaper?” she asked him. Mac nodded.
Kate handed him a picture. “He’s the third from the left,” she said, leaning over his shoulder to point at a tall young man with a hank of light brown hair flopping in his eyes. Kate’s breasts rested against his shoulder. It wasn’t a come on, he realized, but he reacted just the same.
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Looked up to meet Naomi Fairchild’s amused eyes. He shifted, pulled out his wallet and slid the picture inside. Kate sat down in her seat again, unaware. A child, he thought. She’s as innocent as a child.
Naomi Fairchild got up from the table. “Stay for dinner, Mac,” she invited. “There’s always room for another person.”
Mac looked at Kate, who nodded eagerly. “Stay,” she said.
“All right,” Mac said slowly.
Mac pulled into Janet’s driveway, tapped the horn twice. He’d called to let her know he was coming, but he wanted to...to what? Teach her to be more savvy he supposed. Speaking of innocent children.
She met him at the back door. She was in her usual jeans and T-shirt, no make-up, no jewelry. No wonder Kate reminded him of her.
“I have juice, iced tea, or water,” she said.
He shook his head no. He pulled out his wallet, took out the picture and handed it to Janet. He sat down at the table.
Janet looked at it curiously.
“He’s the third from the left,” he said. She swallowed. Examined it more closely.
“Who are the other people?”
Mac shrugged. “People he lived with.”
Janet found her coffee mug, sat down, still looking at the picture. “Did you find him? Talk to him?”
Mac shook his head. “He’s dropped out of sight. No one knows or admits to knowing where he is.”
Mac told her about his trip: about Kate and Naomi Fairchild, the Emergency Pregnancy Care Center, Tim’s classes. Janet took it all in silently.
“What do you think?” she asked when he was done.
“I’m not sure. But the Director of the Pregnancy Care Center made my nerves twinge.”
Janet smiled. “You’re like my dog. Every now and then a person will make his hackles rise, and he growls. I can’t see what Pulitzer sees, but he recognizes something.”
Mac snorted. “Whatever.”
He looked at Janet for a moment and then took a deep breath. “You gotta know, though, that everyone I talked to thinks Timothy Brandt is a brilliant, first-class sexist prick.”
“What else would he be?” Janet said with a sigh. “Given everything.”
“You knew enough to leave there, why did you send him back into it, knowing what it would make of him?” Mac asked the question that had been bugging him all afternoon.
Janet was quiet. Whatever she saw wasn’t the wall she was staring at. “I left at 17, because I couldn’t stay,” she said slowly, sorting it out. “But they were happy being that. Most of the time I was happy being that.”
She paused. “You ever read the long version of Cinderella? The one with the stepsisters?”
Mac shrugged. “I doubt I ever read Cinderella, period.”
She laughed. “Well, in that version, the prince goes looking for the woman whose foot will fit the slipper left behind. And the stepmother makes one daughter cut off her toe to fit, and the other daughter her heel, but the blood gives them away.
“It doesn’t fool the prince, who finds Cinderella, and blah blah blah.” She paused and laughed ruefully. “I have always had sympathy for the stepsisters. Because that’s what it was like for me. I didn’t fit into the shoes, and they kept wanting me to cut off parts of myself to fit anyway.”
Mac nodded his head.
She sighed. “If they’d given me just a bit more space, I wouldn’t have left either. Well, I’d have gone to UW, become a teacher like my mom, and come back. Married Eli, raised some kids.”
“Instead you chewed off a limb to escape, like a wild animal from a trap,” Mac said.
She shrugged. “I recognized that I was different, a freak.”
She paused, thinking back through it all. “By the time Tim was born, I knew a whole lot more women were like me than like them. But I still felt like a freak, you know? Still feel like a freak, at times, I suppose. I thought the damage the right-wingers did was to women. Denying them their full potential. It would be a decade before I realized it damaged men, too. By then it was too late to pull Tim out.”
Mac looked at her, thinking that through. He nodded. “Is that when you set up a scholarship fund for him?” he asked. “Everyone mentioned his full ride. You did that.”
Janet hesitated, then nodded. “He is really bright,” she said. “But I set up the fund to give him his chance to get out. Most of the money is from scholarships that he’s earned. The private one just makes up the difference.”
She’d been thinking ahead, Mac realized. Made it happen without letting her son know. If he had known, so would her father. “Does your father know?”
Janet shook her head. “He would have refused it,” she said bitterly. “Just as he refused to let anyone tell me my mother was dying and wanted to see me.”
Mac winced. “Someone at the high school must have known about the money,” he guessed. “Someone who could steer Tim in this direction.”
“The teacher who helped me escape,” Janet said. “She knew the money would be there. God will provide, she told him.”
Mac smiled. “What’s her name? I’m thinking of driving out to Jehovah’s Valley Friday. She could probably help answer some questions.”
“Roberta Brooks, Union High School,” Janet said. “Are you sure you want to go way out there?”
“There’s nothing publicly available on your father,” Mac said. “Isolationist that he is, it isn’t surprising, I guess. If I’m going to find out what is going on, I need to go out there myself.”
Janet hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll reimburse you for your expenses.”
“Sure, boss. I’ll send you a bill.” He wouldn’t, but it would make her feel better to think so. “I’ll come in Friday, make my calls. Leave early. It looks to be a long way out there on the map.”
“Eight, nine-hour drive,” she agreed. “Or centuries out, depending on how you figure it.”
He stood up to go. She looked at the picture in her hand. “Can I keep this?” she asked, not looking at him.
“Sure. I know what he looks like now.” Mac let himself out. Janet sat at the table, gazing at the picture.
In the car, he called his best friend on his cell.
“Yo.”
“Well that’s an improvement over ‘speak’,” Mac grumped.
“You call to give me a lesson in phone manners?” Shorty said. Shorty, a small, compact half-Filipino man, was a friend dating back to the days when the two of them had run the streets together. Now he taught math in an upscale high school and drove a Lexus.
“No, I’m leaving town for the weekend, you want to go?” Mac filled him in on the problems.
“I do not want to go to bumfuck middle of nowhere,” Shorty said firmly. Then he hesitated. “Unless you seriously think you need someone to watch your back.”
“Bunch of hayseeds,” Mac said with a snort.
“Don’t discount hayseeds.”
Mac conceded he’d known some pretty rough hayseeds in the Marines. “What do you know about Wallingford Christian School?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Good school, private, religious but emphasizes learning not just values,” Shorty summarized. “Why?”
“I met this woman today,” Mac began.
“Big surprise.”
“She teaches biology at Wallingford. Working on her master’s in biology at U-Dub.”
Shorty whistled. “Bright.”
“I suppose.”
There was a sigh. “Mac, let me explain how things work in education. You get your degree. You start teaching, get a Master’s in Education because it is easy and means more money. Your girlfriend is doing it the hard way, a degree in her subject, not in education. And at U-Dub. That means she’s really bright. The kind who become professors one day.”
“Oh.”
“She’s religious or she wouldn’t be teaching at Wallingford,” Shorty continued. “Tell me she’s like Episcopalian or something.”
“Christian Missionary Alliance,” Mac said reluctantly. “Her family comes from a long line of Mennonites, she said. But she’s more liberal.”
“Relatively speaking,” Shorty said dryly. “In the way that Pat Robertson makes Billy Graham look liberal.”
“I like her,” Mac said defensively. “We’re going to a concert Friday night, with some of her friends.”
“I thought you were going to eastern Oregon Friday,” Shorty said.
“I guess I’ll go Saturday morning instead.”
Shorty sighed. “What kind of concert?”
“Rap,” Mac said, then added, reluctantly, “Christian rap. If there is such a thing.”
Shorty was silent. “Mac, my friend,” he said finally, “This is a woman who is going to fuck up your head big time. Do me a favor will you? Stay away from her.”
“That’s not fair, you’ve not even met her,” Mac protested.
“She is what we call a good girl. She’s probably still a virgin for God’s sake. When was the last time you took out a virgin? Well?”
“Never,” Mac said reluctantly.
“Never?” Shorty thought that over. “Point made, then, I guess. You and I do not date good girls.”
“First time for everything,” Mac said, pulling back from the conversation.
“Shit, Mac,” Shorty sighed. “Shit oh dear.”