“That’s all I know,” Cady said. “Doris was the only person who would ever talk about my mom, but she never paid attention to who my father might have been. Lucinda might have known if it was one of Dr. Kiel’s students, Doris would say, but it wasn’t something they talked about.”
“I see,” I said, a meaningless phrase, because I saw nothing.
I wondered how Doris McKinnon ever found a market for her crops if they came from soil contaminated with radioactivity. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if the air force invented the contamination just to drive the remnants of the demonstrators away from the silo. Mid-August in 1983, people’s attention had waned; there hadn’t been any action since the Independence Day protest. The air force’s action hadn’t generated additional protests, at least not any covered by the Douglas County Herald or the Journal-World.
Dr. Kiel’s arriving at the hospital in the middle of the night to look in at his technician, that was a surprise as well. Of course, thirty-three years ago he might have been a more active, engaged person than he was today. But why had he claimed not to remember the Ferrings? Protective amnesia? Maybe all the Kiels were given to high drama.
“How could my mother have forgotten me?” Cady was weeping openly now. “I would have died if Lucinda hadn’t found me, you know. How could a woman race away from toxic dangers and leave her own baby to die?”
I shifted unhappily in my chair but tried to find a reassuring strand to follow. “The memories that Doris gave you tell me your mother was a lively and vibrant woman who loved you deeply. She wouldn’t have left you if something hadn’t gone badly wrong with her. Perhaps the air force released some dangerous gas that poisoned your mother. Something like that could have impaired her mind and judgment. She might have had chemicals on her body and didn’t dare touch you for fear of injuring you, so she tucked you underneath the sleeping bag to protect you.”
Cady brightened. “I never thought of that. Maybe she put me under the sleeping bag to save me and went to try to get help. Doris used to say the six weeks she was alive with me, she bragged to everyone how I was going to grow up to save the world. What would she think if she knew all I was doing was teaching social studies to twelve-year-olds?”
“She’d think you were saving the world. She’d know you were raising many children to think clearly about the serious issues we all face on this planet.”
I leaned over to squeeze her hand, knocking the plate of chicken off my lap. Peppy bounded over: Cleanup in Aisle Five? I’m here, ready for work. This made us both laugh, breaking the tension. Cady squatted on the floor to help me pry chicken bones out of the dog’s mouth.
When we’d gotten the mess cleared up and Peppy was sulking in the bathroom, I pulled out my maps and asked Cady to show me where her mother had gone off the road.
“This is another thing that doesn’t make any sense,” Cady said. “See, she was on the old highway, which is maybe a half mile north of K-10, the one you probably drove today when you went out to the silo. They’d just opened the new K-10, so I guess if she was panicking, she didn’t think to go the extra distance.”
Cady pointed to the Kanwaka silo, five miles east of town, and Old K-10, which ran close to it. “But she was going east. If she thought she needed help, she should have driven the other way, back to Lawrence, to Gram or a hospital or something. Maybe you’re right, maybe she had some kind of brain damage or a seizure and didn’t know where she was or where she was going.”
I imagined Jenny covered with chemical burns, racing to the river to bathe herself head to toe, so maddened by pain that it didn’t occur to her to drive to Doris’s house. Or she’d been running after her lover who’d run off without her. I could see that, too, but that vision I kept to myself.
The Wakarusa was a small stream, a tributary from the big Kansas River—the Kaw, Cady told me to call it.
“Only strangers and Google Maps call it the ‘Kansas River,’” she explained. “When I was in my teens and trying to get at the truth—or at least more information than I can ever pry out of anyone in Lawrence, including my own grandmother—I went and asked the sheriff if I could see the file on my mom’s death.”
“Gisborne?” I asked.
“No, he was a deputy back then, when it was only a part-time job. He also sold insurance for the Reingold Agency. It was another deputy, a guy who knew my mom when they were in high school. Probably he had a crush on her. He went down to the basement where they store the old files and found the report on my mom. They had photos of the skid marks and a picture of her car, nose-down, with water all the way over the top of the steering wheel. The Wakarusa looks small on the map, but it’s big enough to drown in. You go look at it, you’ll see.”
“Did you get a copy of the report?” I asked. “I’d like to see the photos.”
Cady hunched a shoulder. “Sure, yeah, I guess, but you know it was almost thirty-five years ago, so there isn’t going to be any trace. That deputy, he copied the whole file for me. Then, when I got my own computer, one I wasn’t sharing with Gram, I scanned it all into my machine. I don’t know why. Every year on my birthday, I look at my mom’s hair, floating over the steering wheel. If she’d taken me with her, maybe the picture would show me floating next to her.”
“Send it to me, okay? The report and the photos and everything.”
Cady collected her handbag and jacket, found her car keys on the floor under the desk. “Vic, I really appreciate your taking the time tonight. I feel better about my mom, my birth—everything—than I ever did before. You’re so . . . so sensible. You don’t jump on the first wild pony of an idea that gallops past you. Thank you.”
“Sensible” wasn’t a romantic word. Solid, sensible V.I.? I’ve been called worse, though.
“The cans that Doris mentioned, the ones Lucinda claimed she saw—did she ever say anything about them? Had she gone back to look for them?”
Cady shook her head. “I don’t even know why I remember it, except it’s a weird thing to say when you’re dying. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
I walked out with her so that Peppy could relieve herself one last time. The canister holding spent rods that Baggetto said he was looking for. The container that Doris had found when she was digging in the field. The cans that Lucinda saw lying around. Hard to believe they weren’t all the same. Maybe there really was radiation poisoning out by the silo. Maybe that’s what had killed Lucinda as well as Jenny Perec.
“Cady, I found photos that August Veriden took of Doris McKinnon digging in a field.” I was startled to hear myself blurt this out.
Cady stopped in midstride and turned to face me. “August who? Oh, that black guy you’re looking for along with Emerald Ferring. Right. What field? When was this?”
I explained as much as I knew. “I have to believe it’s the field adjacent to the silo, the one Doris was forced to sell after your mother died, when the air force found such high levels of radioactivity in it. That’s also the place where your mother and her friends camped out all those years ago. I want to inspect it, but I might need help.”
Her teeth flashed white in the dark. “The Cady Perec Memorial Birthplace: I know it well. I can show you just where to look.”
“They’ve built sophisticated security into the fences,” I warned her. “If you come with me, it could mean you’d have to find some other way to save the world when you get out of prison. I’ll take a look in the morning and see what we might need to bypass it. Of course, if they’ve buried cameras in their sorghum stubble, we’re out of luck.”
Cady laughed, then turned impulsively to hug me before getting into her car. I called to Peppy and walked slowly back into our rented room, feeling better myself for Cady’s friendship.
I climbed into bed and started going through my photo album to look at pictures of the people I was missing. Sal, with her head thrown back, laughing, her four-inch feather earrings brushing her shoulders. Lotty, deep in conversation with Max. Mr. Contreras at the lake with Mitch and Peppy. Even Bernie, skates on, a look of ferocious concentration on her face.
And Jake. Playing onstage at Ravinia, at Symphony Center in the Logan Center for the Arts. In my apartment, his face alight with music and the joy of connecting to me through it.
Jake wasn’t a coward or a grudge holder. If he wanted to break up with me, he’d tell me directly, not play a cruel game of silence. If he was out of touch, I was guessing he’d done something he was ashamed to report—sleeping with another woman came to mind first. It was a hurt but not a disaster.
I took a deep breath and tried to put Jake not out of my mind—I couldn’t—but in a corner where that little wound beneath the diaphragm wouldn’t keep me from working.
I came to the pictures I’d been taking since arriving in Kansas: Peppy running freely in the Flint Hills our first morning here. Had that been only last week? It felt like a lifetime ago. The copse at Fort Riley where the quarters for Negro soldiers used to stand. And on to Lawrence.
I had forgotten the pictures I’d taken at the Lion’s Pride when I was waiting for an ambulance to collect Sonia Kiel. I stopped to look at her, poor little bundle of rags under the iron staircase, and then at the frames of Naomi, the college student, comatose on the concrete stairs, her pink cami straps slipping from her shoulders.
I’d photographed a trio of young men who’d been gawking and making crude jokes about Naomi, taken a couple of shots of them emptying their little bags in the gutter when the cops arrived. I wondered now if their stash had included the roofies that knocked out Naomi and Sonia, but of course those pills would be long gone.
I was about to move forward to the pictures I’d taken at Riverside and St. Silas Churches when a face behind the trio of punks jumped out at me. It wasn’t quite in focus, an observer behind them in the street who’d faded from sight when the EMTs showed up.
That was why I’d thought I’d met Marlon Pinsen when I met him at the hotel last night. First introduced to me as a student cadet up on the hill, identity changed tonight by Colonel Baggetto to computer hotshot at the army college in Fort Leavenworth.
I put his name into every database I subscribe to, but none of them had ever heard of him.