Harry and the Lewises

           Open-ey’d Conspiracy

               His time doth take.

                —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

~~~

 

The most I’d hoped for out of that day was a bracing morning stroll. It’s a two-mile hike into the office, across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. On a clear morning, the walk is pleasant. On the sort of stormy evening in the day’s forecast, it would pretty much have sucked. I planned to walk home anyway. Rent was coming due, and I begrudged even the subway fare.

Good weather or ill, I seldom took that walk. I am—no, make that was, although I’m getting ahead of myself—a superstringer. In the news biz, that’s like a freelancer on steroids. Only news was a stretch; The National Truth was as fact-free as you would imagine.

Freelancer was equally a term of hyperbole. I was a pieceworker, cranking out articles (called content in the biz) for a scandalous few bucks per. I mostly keyboarded away anywhere but the office, so that the Truth, calling me an independent contractor, could get away with not providing any benefits. Biweekly pitch meetings for candidate stories sufficed to remind me and my ilk who was boss and who the ungrateful, readily replaced, no-talent hacks.

So. I was in the office that day, arrived early to camp out at one of the too-few desks, seeking inspiration before the meeting. Bermuda Triangle? Rumored celebrity peccadillo? Elvis sighting? Elvis love child? Our readers wouldn’t care he’d be in his eighties. We’re talking about the King. Bigfoot sighting? Bigfoot love child? Elvis love child with Ms. Bigfoot?

An addiction to regular meals had driven me to writing such things, but that sort of drivel never appealed to me. (The topics, that is; the meals appealed all too much.) I started surfing for fresh ideas, using office WiFi instead of burning through my own precious cell gigabytes. The rocketry company SpaceX was still flapping around, seeking an explanation for their latest explosion. “ET Destroys Rocket!” perhaps? Not enough. A classic headline in Truth improbably connected several dots. “ET Destroyed Challenger and Columbia; Takes Aim at SpaceX Rockets?” Workable, if wordy, but I wanted at least one fallback pitch for the meeting. I’d just thought to warp a minor climate-change item, the thawing of an obscure German WWII weather station deep within the Arctic, into “Secret Nazi Base Discovered Near North Pole!” when, outside our bullpen doors, an elevator chimed.

And my life ran off the rails.

 

~~~

 

Chatter. Laughter. The clicking of stiletto heels. These weren’t the normal sounds of the office. Then again, neither did Deirdre Olivia Knowlton—bubblehead celeb, and the publisher’s estranged daughter—and her entourage routinely drop by. In Reginald Knowlton’s cluttered inner sanctum, blood pressure would be soaring.

The young women, loudly gossiping, fanned out across the bullpen. None of them could have been older than thirty. Deirdre herself, on impossibly tall heels, in a cloud of perfume, flounced toward me. She was beautiful: oval face with finely chiseled features. Pouting, kissable lips. Wavy, honey-blond hair cascading well below her shoulders. Short, black, leather skirt riding up her thigh as she half-perched on an edge of my desk. In a clingy white sweater, her breasts were like—

But I digress. The point is Deirdre was way out of my league, not to mention that my taste didn’t run to celebrities, much less to the vacuous sort famous for being famous, or to women a decade or more younger than me. Much less to the daughter of my loathsome toad of a boss.

“And what do you do, Mister...?”

“Markson,” I provided automatically.

“Mr. Markson. Are you one of father’s reporters?”

“Close enough.”

“How exciting.”

Similar vapid conversations were transpiring all around. What the hell?

“That’s so exciting,” she repeated. “You must meet the most interesting people. I’d love to know more about—”

A familiar voice boomed out. The boss, the big vein pulsing in his forehead, had burst forth from his fortress of solipsism. “That’s enough, Deirdre. You’re disrupting my staff. I suppose you came to see me...?” He pointed to his den of inanity. “And if your friends would wait outside?”

“Oh, pooh, Father. You’re no fun. I was just getting to know Mr. Markson.”

“In or out, Deirdre,” Knowlton said. “The professor has work to do.” The glower directed my way, as unsubtle as the dig, added, “If he knows what’s good for him.”

“The girls and I were in the neighborhood. I wondered”—and she gestured vaguely, to encompass her posse, I inferred—“would you like to join us for lunch? There’s this new Asian fission place.”

“Fusion,” Knowlton said. “I can’t today. Next time, call ahead.” He gestured toward the exit.

“Oh, pooh.” Deirdre stuck out her hand, gold bracelets jingling. “Good to meet you, Mr. Markson.”

She was halfway out the door before it registered that a folded scrap of paper had been slipped into my hand.

 

~~~

 

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

      —John F. Kennedy / September 12, 1962

 

~~~

 

The note read, simply: Coffee shop at 2:00. O.

The Starbucks in the building lobby? It was a coffee shop, but who called a Starbucks that? The hole-in-the-wall place around the corner, that looked to have been there forever (though no one understood how), also served coffee. Or so, anyway, I assumed. I’d walked in once, found there wasn’t free WiFi, and walked out. 2:00 was hopefully p.m. And O? My vote was on Olivia, the bimbette’s middle name.

The curious visitation had me distracted throughout the pitch meeting, earning me two absentminded-professor gibes. I did stay on task long enough to bring up spacecraft disasters (revised by the boss into “Did ET Kill JFK to Stop Moon Landing?”); afterward, I hung around to start on the story. Near O’s appointed hour—to the utter disinterest of two fellow stringers who’d also stayed—I announced I was heading home.

The coffee shop was all but empty. Two geezers with suspenders and Yankees caps, both hard of hearing, yelled at each other across a table by the window. A tourist family with a gaggle of kids, crumbs on the floor all around their table, was just finishing. No (in)famous blonde. No entourage. No assault by perfume. The brunette with a pixie cut, brow furrowed over a dead-tree newspaper (the Times from its size), in a conservatively cut charcoal pantsuit and sensible shoes, sipping coffee by herself in a back booth, scarcely registered.

But as long as I was there....

“Olivia?”

The brunette looked up. Without a doubt, the boss’s daughter. Utterly transformed. Utterly adult. She smiled. “Thank you for coming.”

I slid into the booth, opposite her, waiting.

“There’s a story,” she began. “I’d like you to track it down. No, make that, I think you’ll find it worth tracking down.”

“There’s a story, right here, to cover first.”

She nodded. “Fair enough. ‘Deirdre,’ the woman you see on the net, the woman Father’s competitors so enjoy dishing dirt about, is a role. Deirdre is how I sell perfume, is how I make a living. Not who I am.”

“Hence, Olivia.”

“No moss grows on you, Doctor Anderson.”

“Markson,” I corrected. “Carl Markson.”

“No, Theodore Carl Anderson, the youngest child of David Mark Anderson. From which: Carl Markson.”

“Sorry, I don’t know them.” I started to slide from the booth.

“Just sit, Theodore. Your picture is on your Facebook page, if not a thing about your employment.”

The bored-looking waiter ambled over to top off Olivia’s coffee. At my nod, he filled another mug. I waved off a menu and waited for him to leave. “I need to make a living, too, although I don’t see how that concerns you. But if we’re going to have this conversation, it’s Ted, not Theodore.”

“Does my project concern you? You decide, Ted. Do you plan ever to be an historian again?”

Talk about pulling off a scab. “I studied to be an historian. Years ago. I never had the opportunity to be one.”

Because in a crappy economy, ancient faculty members clung like barnacles to their tenured posts, and aspiring historians... well, I’ve explained what I’d been reduced to. There had been nothing great about the Great Recession, and little opportunity for lecturing on, much less doing original research into, the Crusades. As for swallowing my pride and teaching at the high-school level, well, a PhD in history wouldn’t cut it. First I’d have needed another degree, this time in education, and a state teaching certificate. All for the low, low price of more years of college debt....

“Ah, life choices. I get it. Becoming Deirdre wasn’t my wisest decision.”

I took refuge for awhile behind my coffee mug, my mind racing. “Setting aside for the nonce whatever you want researched, why me? And why the charade upstairs? You found me on Facebook. You could have just messaged me.”

“But would you have responded?” Reaching across the table, she rested a hand on mine. “You don’t need to answer that. Ted, I began by speaking with university historians—those few who would even meet. It turns out established historians want nothing to do with me, with or without the wig. And as if Deirdre were not toxic enough, well, Olivia is still Reggie Knowlton’s daughter.”

“And your ‘story,’ I’m guessing, isn’t some minor nuance of established history.”

“As I said, you’re moss-free. The couple of times I was able to explain my interest, well, that pretty much ended the conversation. After beating my head long enough against ivy-covered brick walls, I changed tactics. I tried to enlist a reporter. I contacted several”—said glancing at her New York Times—“with similar results.”

“And here you are, reduced to buying coffee for hacks.” At least, I hoped she was buying. If not, there was consolation in spending even a few minutes with someone who understood the subjunctive.

“True: I was stymied.” Releasing my hand, Olivia leaned back. “A more embarrassing admission is that I read Father’s rag. Daily. It’s like driving past a traffic accident: it’s wrong to stare, but you can’t look away. The generic you, I mean. You you might have more willpower than that. Anyway, I have noticed, Truth articles by ‘Carl Markson’ have been known to derive from actual fact. And that despite where he works, he exercised an admirable restraint in his use of adverbs.”

“Making me a slightly less putrid apple than is average for a rotten barrel. Thanks?”

She let slide the sarcasm and the adverb. “Carl Markson the tabloid writer is a cipher even to Google. I flagged down a UPS truck a couple weeks ago, paying the driver to snap your picture when he made a delivery. Facebook’s facial recognition did the rest.”

Thus explaining the empty box with which UPS had interrupted the previous pitch meeting. That disruption had ticked off the boss, and I’d figured it as some coworker’s idea of a prank. Given that everyone but Reggie had snickered, I had had ample suspects.

Regardless, had I known myself worthy of such machinations, I’d also have ordered a slice of pie. “You still haven’t explained today’s charade in the office.”

“The charade, as you put it, wasn’t entirely for you.” She emptied her cup, then blotted her lips with a napkin. “Life is not without its random bonuses. That is to say, an opportunity to tweak dear old Dad is not to be missed.

“When you’ve finished your coffee, let’s go somewhere private to discuss my project.”

 

~~~

 

Deirdre famously partied in a multistory co-op on Central Park West. Olivia led me to a Village walkup. It doubtless rented for several times the rate of the fourth-floor Brooklyn garret I occupied, but still this was someplace a normal person might live. It did, in fact, look lived in.

Did notoriety alone explain past rejection of her inquiries? I wanted to believe that—but then, I wanted to believe lots of things. Such as that I’d outlive my college debt. That a specialization in the Crusades hadn’t been an act of irrecoverable stupidity. That Olivia hadn’t sought me out because of that specialty. If her project was one more pursuit of the fabulous—as in mythical—lost treasure of the Knights Templar, I’d just puke.

In the studio’s living room slash entryway slash mud room slash kitchenette, nothing but framed art posters decorated the walls. The few sticks of furniture were colonial and utilitarian. Her bookshelves were full. As we took opposite ends of the short sofa, I spotted on the tiny end table a framed photo of Deirdre and some preppy-looking guy with an arm around her waist. Inwardly, I shrugged. I was beginning to sense Olivia was further out of my league than Deirdre.

“Lewis and Clark,” she began. “What do you know about them?”

A comedy team in the Fifties? “Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, acquiring a vast expanse west of the Mississippi. Knowing little about what he had so obtained, because no Americans or Europeans did, Jefferson sent an expedition to explore. Lewis and Clark led that expedition. If I recall correctly, for the most part they explored along the Missouri River and returned the same way.”

“And?”

“Tapped out. American history wasn’t my field.”

“That’ll suffice for now. There’s also a family element to this. You know Father, of course, but this has nothing to do with him. My mother, née Nora Cruze, was born in Missouri. Her first husband, John Ball, came from a long line of Virginia property owners, the original land grant made back in the colonial era. Horse country, not far from the Blue Ridge. In those parts, by the way, we refer, in hushed and respectful tones, to Mr. Jefferson. John died in an accident not two years after their wedding, before they could start a family. Reggie Knowlton and my mother met and married several years later, I came along, and my parents divorced soon after. I grew up on the Ball property in Virginia. Any questions so far?”

“Not beyond, might I have a glass of water?”

“Sure.” She got my drink and returned. “I haven’t yet shared anything about myself you wouldn’t find on social media. Here’s something absent from my public profile, because it doesn’t fit Deirdre’s image: I grew up, I won’t say poor, but certainly with constraints. Mother would have no part of Father’s money, which was to say money from readers of the Truth, and the Ball dynasty was wealthy only on paper. Oh, the land was valuable, but no Ball would ever sell any—and so, neither would Mother. Neither, when the choice became mine, would I. Till Mother passed away a few years ago and I sorted her papers, I never understood how tough those times had been. To put me through Yale—with a minor in American history, as it happens—she had mortgaged the family estate to the hilt.”

I nodded, getting her drift: college debt was the great equalizer. “You did better covering your debts than I.”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “Deirdre became necessary, or so, anyway, it seemed, but I’m not proud of her.” As I felt about Carl Markson. “There’s one last aspect of family background to cover. A few generations back, Mother’s family Anglicized their name. It was Cruzatte.” She watched me expectantly.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m aware this was neither your era nor your continent of study. Among Lewis and Clark aficionados, Pierre Cruzatte is known for entertaining the Corps of Discovery and native Americans alike with his fiddle—and for shooting Meriwether Lewis.” Again, she waited for me to comment. I didn’t. “This was late in the expedition, on their return to St. Louis, going downstream on the Missouri. Both men were ashore hunting. After they separated, Lewis was shot from behind. Also, clean through the behind.”

I had to laugh. “I suspect my high-school lesson omitted that. It’s the sort of detail I’d have remembered.”

“There’s no question about the wound; Lewis spent his next few weeks on his belly in a sort of dugout canoe, healing, and everyone in the Corps of Discovery knew about it. Lewis magnanimously allowed as how Private Cruzatte must have aimed at, but missed, an elk. The odd thing was that Pierre, to his dying day, denied shooting Lewis. Curiously, Lewis shouted out after he was hit, and noted that the private did not come. And further in Pierre’s defense, would you have taken him hunting? He was blind in one eye and myopic in the other.”

“I wouldn’t have given him a rifle.”

“When ashore, everyone carried a rifle. Indians, to use the term of the era, were all around, and the ability to communicate was limited at best. Many tribes weren’t friendly, and every tribe coveted the Corps’s arsenal. Anyone who could take this small Army detachment by surprise would, in an instant, have acquired more firepower than any tribe west of the Mississippi. Besides, for the expedition to eat, often they had to hunt. They each ate up to seven pounds of meat per day. Beyond all that, they were in the wilds. When there weren’t bears around, then there were wolf packs, or wolverines, or other dangerous animals.”

“Why bring along a one-eyed man at all?” I asked, “and what was he doing in the Army?”

“He was half French, half Omaha Indian, a fur trader, familiar with the nearer parts of the Missouri River. Lewis hired Pierre as a translator and a boatman, not for anything he might shoot. Taking him into the Army was an honor.”

I deposited my empty glass in the kitchenette sink. “And you’re into all this because of the Cruze family connection?”

“From both families. John Ball’s estate is near the ancestral Lewis acreage and Jefferson’s Monticello.” Perhaps I looked blank, because she added, “Lewis owned a plantation not seven miles from Monticello. The two men had other connections besides. I was into the whole Lewis and Clark thing as a kid, as a matter of community pride. I didn’t know about Pierre’s version of the incident till after Mother died and I went through her papers.”

A hesitant tone had entered Olivia’s voice. She paused. I waited. She sighed. “This is where it gets weird.”

Meaning that the two-century-old whodunit—who shot Meriwether Lewis?—was insufficiently weird? “Okay....”

“Yes, Pierre shot at something. He admitted that. But he insisted he was nowhere within rifle range of Lewis at the time. And....”

“And?”

“And what he shot at wasn’t any moose.”

“Then what was it?”

“He wasn’t sure. He was blind in one eye and near-sighted in the other. But no moose. Man-tall. Hairy.”

“So instead of a moose, he missed a bear,” I said. Or a really big prairie dog. Somewhere out west there’s a twelve-foot, six-ton concrete prairie dog. I remembered it from a family driving vacation. “What does it matter?”

“No bear,” she insisted. “He’d seen plenty of bears on that trek and, anyway, they weren’t near bear country at the time. No, it was something else.”

Something else. Man-tall. Hairy. “Jesus H. Christ. Bigfoot?”

 

~~~

 

The apple—although some variety of nut then appeared the more appropriate orchard product—seemed not to fall far from the tree.

Olivia laughed, but not unkindly. “You should see your face. No, this isn’t about some supposed ancient Bigfoot sighting. But because generations of Cruzattes and Cruzes believed Pierre, I am curious why Meriwether Lewis didn’t. Not least of all because much about Lewis’s later history is strange....”

“Strange, how?”

“It’s better that you decide.” She offered me a folded paper from her purse. “No doubt you can Google with the best of them, but I understand these to be the classic reference works about the Corps of Discovery and Mr. Jefferson.”

“You’re making a big assumption here.”

“Only that, for five hundred dollars, you’ll give Lewis’s life an honest, professional look and get back to me. On a moonlighting basis, so it won’t impact your day job. In a week, if you’re interested, we can discuss a longer-term relationship.”

Her father paid less for dishonest looks, research optional, but that was no reason to accept unchallenged an opening offer. “A thousand dollars. In advance. And expenses.” To her arched eyebrow, I clarified, “Books.”

“Do I have your word that you—and ‘Carl Markson’—won’t submit anything for publication about the Lewis and Clark expedition without my prior review and approval?”

Why not? I was sure this was all a dilettante’s fantasy. “Absolutely.”

“Done,” Olivia said, extending a hand to seal the deal. Her grip was firm. “Because Deirdre won’t miss it. And because, if this pans out, I intend to share in the credit. I’d value some respectability, too.”

 

~~~

 

My first stop after Olivia’s apartment was a bookstore. For years, when I could afford to buy any book, I had gone electronic and read it on my cell. That day, I splurged on dead-tree editions. No matter that I’ve developed near-perfect recall (and, as a result, a brain cluttered and clogged with random facts), jotting marginal notes and flagging key passages with Post-Its made me far more efficient. My second stop was for some Ben & Jerry’s. With what Olivia was paying, she got the full, conscientious treatment and I got a treat.

Doing actual research again felt good. I read well into the night—early on, finishing a pint of ice cream—giving my highlighters a workout, going at it full tilt until I caught myself nodding off for the second time. The next morning, I brewed coffee and dove back in. JFK-stalking aliens could wait. As highlighters ran dry and scribbled notes accumulated, I went online and ordered the complete eight-volume compendium of the expedition’s edited journals with related contemporaneous source material. (As a doctoral candidate in the liberal arts, one learns to read fast. It’s that or change majors.) I decided Olivia had sprung for overnight shipping, too.

On Day Six, after a resented hiatus to knock out ET drivel and email that to the boss, I dialed the cell number that half the paparazzi on the planet would pay big bucks—or maybe kill—to know. “Let’s talk.”

 

~~~

 

...And to give more entire satisfaction & confidence to those who may be disposed to aid you, I Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America, have written this letter of general credit for you with my own hand, and signed it with my name.

      —from a letter to Meriwether Lewis / July 4, 1803

 

~~~

 

Lots of individually inexplicable details about Meriwether Lewis took on a whole different aspect when viewed through the filter of a tabloid writer’s mindset. The dots I could not not connect all dealt with Lewis’s death, three years after his return from the West.

Logically, Lewis should have been on top of the world. Lionized as an explorer, in a league with Columbus and Cook. Richly rewarded for his accomplishments by an act of Congress. Elected to the American Philosophical Society, the premier scientific body in the nation, even as scientists the world round eagerly awaited publication of his journals. Protégé of Thomas Jefferson. Promoted from captain to brigadier general. Governor of Upper Louisiana Territory. The most eligible bachelor in America. Basically, a rock star.

Lewis was barely thirty-five years old on the day he—we were to believe—killed himself.

“Suicide makes no sense,” I told Olivia when we reconvened in her Village hideaway. Her legs were folded under her, vaguely catlike, on her sofa. We were making our way through the bottle of Irish Crème she’d set out.

“Depression,” she said, “or hypochondriac affectations, as it was called then. That’s the customary explanation. Mr. Jefferson wrote that the condition ran in the Lewis family, and he would have known.”

Yes, Jefferson would know—and his actions didn’t support the claim. The two men hadn’t merely been Virginia neighbors. President Jefferson’s private secretary for two years was: Meriwether Lewis. Jefferson was by then a widower; his sole companion in the President’s House during those years, apart from slaves and servants, was: Meriwether Lewis. After sealing the Louisiana Purchase, arguably the most consequential action of his presidency, Jefferson entrusted its exploration to: Meriwether Lewis (William Clark was Lewis’s recruit). And so that the expedition might succeed, Jefferson gave an unlimited government letter of credit to: Meriwether Lewis. Were those the responsibilities someone as brilliant as Jefferson would entrust to a dangerous depressive?

“So a politician lied.” That was both the tabloid writer’s facile answer and the historian’s considered opinion of most so-called statesmen. Crusaders did not besiege and sack Orthodox Constantinople because their leaders had forgotten the way to Jerusalem.

Olivia feigned horror. “That’d be considered heresy around where I grew up. Besides, it wasn’t only Mr. Jefferson saying it.”

“Indeed.” I sipped some of her liqueur. “The other person who arguably knew Lewis better than anyone also embraced the suicide explanation.” That man, of course, was William Clark: Lewis’s fellow officer in the Corps of Discovery. For two and a half years and eight thousand miles, the two men had been colleagues, companions, and confidants. “As for Lewis’s mother, she maintained her son must have been murdered. But even she never requested that a doctor examine the body. Because Jefferson, newly out of office and retired to neighboring Monticello, somehow prevailed upon her?”

Olivia shook her head. “Or because mothers think the best of their children and prefer not to be proven wrong. Anything else bother you?”

Where to begin? That rather than kill himself in St. Louis, where he was serving as governor, or in Washington City, where he was headed, Lewis supposedly chose to do himself in at an obscure wilderness tavern between? That neither the innkeeper nor Lewis’s servant, self-proclaimed witnesses to Lewis’s death, admitted to having entered the room where supposedly Lewis was alone and raving—even after hearing gunshots—till the following morning? That at various times the innkeeper had given three separate accounts for that fateful night? That Lewis, famous woodsman and crack rifleman, was said to have shot himself twice, then taken a knife to himself, and even then only slowly bled out?

I went with, “A few years ago, some distant relatives”—descendants of his sister Jane, as Meriwether himself never had children—“wanted the body exhumed for examination. But the National Park Service administers the land where he’s buried. The family’s request was denied.”

“You’ve done your homework,” she said. “I respect that. But, if you’ll allow me to play devil’s advocate, aren’t you cherry-picking your facts? We also know Lewis was feuding with his lieutenant governor. Lewis’s patron in Washington, Thomas Jefferson, had left office, and the new Madison administration had disallowed certain bank drafts written and guaranteed by Lewis. If he couldn’t get that reversed, if he were forced to make good personally on those payments, he’d have been ruined. That’s why he set out for Washington City: to get those payments reauthorized. And we know he had been drinking heavily and using opium. Isn’t it possible he simply despaired?”

“I can’t say no, but is suicide plausible? It leaves unexplained every point I’ve raised.”

“Devil’s advocate again: If you don’t believe Lewis acted rationally, well, depression is biochemical, not rational. It’s at least some kind of answer. Why would anyone kill him? And who’d dare to try? And to repurpose one of your objections, why kill him there, of all unlikely places?”

“Murder or suicide.” Or... was this the musing of the historian or of the tabloid hack? Either way, the dots would connect. I took a deep breath. “What if that’s a false choice?”

 

~~~

 

...The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it as by it’s course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.

      —from Thomas Jefferson’s instructions to Meriwether Lewis / June 20, 1803

 

~~~

 

You think the U.S. is large? Damn right, it is. Growing up, when the family visited my grandparents in the Midwest, the part of the drive across Pennsylvania was interminable. And then there’s my favorite doggerel: The sun has riz, the sun has set, and here we is in Texas, yet.

Now imagine hiking, or paddling and poling—upstream most of the way—across most of the continent. Through untamed and uncharted wilderness: no roads, or facilities of any kind. Toting: an arsenal, emergency rations, scientific instruments, trade goods and trinkets for every new tribe you encountered, and an ever-expanding collection of botanical and zoological specimens. Oh, and climbing over the Rockies. I couldn’t imagine such a trek, so instead, on Olivia’s nickel, I set out to get a feel for it.

The expedition’s route was, in large part, well documented. The Lewis and Clark “Trail” is a set of highways that pretty much parallels the expedition’s path from St. Louis to the Pacific. The Lewis and Clark Historical Trail, while not continuous, preserved, often in their natural state, many segments of the actual route. And so, with my much-annotated copy of the expedition journals at hand, I took a rented car to place after place about which Lewis’s or Clark’s notes had impressed or intrigued me. Frequent opportunities throughout Missouri for barbecue were merely a bonus, as was the short detour to the Truman Presidential Library just outside Kansas City.

Time and again I’d hike, marveling at the sometimes arduous, often spectacular, always beautiful terrain, and on the spot reread the corresponding journal entries. I tried to put myself into Lewis’s mind. It didn’t help that his journal on several occasions went months without an entry. Lewis—who sometimes spent pages describing a newly discovered plant or bird—apparently often delegated to Clark to record lesser sorts of event. And Clark, in a word, was terse. In two words, very terse.

I had hiked and even done some climbing during my college days. Getting paid to do it again? That prospect had been delightful. Between striding around New York and the occasional climbing-wall excursion (as the guest of a less penurious friend, of course. Do you know what city gyms charge for memberships?), I’d prided myself on having kept in shape. And so, across many stops, spanning the first five hundred or so miles of Lewis and Clark’s outbound journey, I did discover one thing: how flabby I had become. Slowly, that would change.

I remained confident the approach was valid, that I would get inside Lewis’s head. And so, atop windswept Floyd’s Bluff, I stood admiring the hundred-foot obelisk that now marked the burial site of the lone Corps member to die during the expedition, replacement for the simple cedar post described in Clark’s journal entry. Turning, I gazed out across the Missouri and Floyd Rivers, tuning out the din of Sioux City, Iowa, grown up around this spot, lost in my thoughts....

 

~~~

 

“My belief,” I’d told Olivia, “is that something Lewis experienced along the way made him do it.” It: the staging of his suicide, in the middle of nowhere, remote from most everyone who knew him. To thereupon disappear, to do... what? “But what could he have seen?”

This had all begun as her quest—her question, anyway—but still she had been dubious. “Lewis wasn’t alone. He was traveling with an Army officer, and each of them with a servant. You imagine they were all in on it?”

“The short answer? Yes. I believe Captain Neelly was involved, and their servants, too. I won’t guess whether this was from personal loyalty to Lewis or for money. Either way, I think Neelly ID’ed the body as Lewis’s, told everyone about Lewis having been depressed, and then had the body buried ASAP without medical examination.”

By some accounts, Lewis’s servant at the end, a man named John Pernia or Pernier, afterward insisted he was due back pay. Pernier tried to collect from, among others, Jefferson, Clark, and James Madison. Not long after, also supposedly despondent, Pernier, too, committed suicide. Coincidence? Guilt? Or paying the price for having crossed powerful people, for meddling in affairs he did not understand...?

“And Clark and Mr. Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis’s two best friends in the world, simply accepted the death as suicide.”

Lewis had been putting on a show of despair, ostentatiously threatening suicide, since before he had set out from St. Louis. “I just can’t buy a quarrel with auditors pushing him over the brink. Look at everything Lewis had accomplished. No one could consider him was a quitter, and ultimately, the government did pay the contested expenses. I don’t see Lewis giving up without even trying to make his case first in Washington.

“In fact, I just don’t accept that money worries weighed very heavily on him. He was sitting on a gold mine: his journals, eagerly awaited worldwide. If money were his concern, prepping his field notes for publication would have been a far more productive use of his time than, say, founding, and serving as the first Master of, a Masonic Lodge in St. Louis.”

(Lewis dithered until his death over those journals. Upon returning from the West, he brought them to Washington. Confirmed as territorial governor, he returned with them to St. Louis. They were among his personal effects on that final, abortive trip traveling again to Washington. The journals passed to Clark, who eventually hired an editor to see the project through. Lewis’s journals saw their first publication, in abridged form, in 1814—five years after Lewis’s death. More complete versions, like the one upon which I relied, appeared after.)

“Here’s what I do believe. Lewis advised both his good friends, by letter, perhaps, what he intended to do. He had to. If the ex-president or Lewis’s fellow conquering hero were to question Lewis’s death, there surely would have been an investigation—and that, Lewis couldn’t have risked. What were the chances the body, exhumed any time near to his supposed death, could have been passed off as his?”

And I saw a second, more subtle hint of pre-coordination. Without Jefferson signaling to his successor a certain unhappiness with Lewis’s free-spending ways, and a willingness to cut loose his longtime friend and protégé, would the Madison administration have dared to make a fuss about the national hero? Lewis needed an excuse to leave St. Louis. Jefferson, behind the scenes, made possible that travel.

“Because the DNA wouldn’t match?” Olivia asked dryly.

Today, that would be a problem. Plenty of labs could compare DNA from the body to DNA samples from his sister’s descendants. Not even my tabloid-supercharged imagination could—as yet—fathom some conspiracy underlying the denial of the family’s exhumation request. Bureaucratic aversion to making a decision would more than suffice. Alternatively, as my father had liked to caution: never attribute to malice what can as easily be attributed to stupidity.

I said, “Because, in Washington City, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, to name a few places, Lewis was well known. Because Charles Willson Peale”—one of that era’s most prominent artists—“had painted Lewis’s portrait. Because his body would have had the scars from that famous hole shot through his ass.”

“So you do remember what I asked you to research. But what can that accident and Lewis’s disappearance years after possibly have to do with each other?”

“I don’t know... yet. But if the two events are linked, if there is something underlying both strange behaviors, then by understanding either we may understand both.”

As she silently pondered that claim, I sensed my new job going pfft. She asked, “Then who is in Lewis’s supposed grave?”

Would Lewis have killed someone to cover his escape to... whatever? The more I learned about the man, the less I could believe that. “Someone who’d recently died somewhere along their route, the corpse then stolen. Or some brigand with the monumentally poor judgment to have set upon one of the greatest woodsmen of the age. Or possibly no one at all. The proprietress, as likely as not, was paid off. She simply wasn’t as good a liar as Neelly, and got rattled under questioning.”

“A conspiracy among Thomas Jefferson, for God’s sake, William Clark, and Meriwether Lewis. Feigned suicide, bribery, and perhaps a bit of grave robbing. You want to sort that out, on the premise it will, somehow, also explain Lewis disbelieving Pierre Cruzatte about the shooting. Have I got everything straight?”

Cruzatte and Lewis agreed that no one else was around. The spent ball Lewis wrote he’d taken from his leather pants, after it went through his butt, was a .54-caliber round for the latest model Army rifle. Plains Indians had guns, obsolete muskets, mostly, but nothing to have fired that modern round. Under oath, my considered opinion would have been Cruzatte lied out of embarrassment. Happily, I wasn’t under oath—or hooked to a polygraph. As for the rest, well, Olivia had my analysis spot on. “That’s the theory,” I said.

Lewis must have told Clark and Jefferson something truly amazing for them to agree to keep his secret. I had to know what....

 

~~~

 

If Reginald Knowlton ever possessed a drop of the milk of human kindness, it had long since dehydrated.

I was scarcely a week into my leave of absence, staying with a desperately ill, widowed mother. Telling that whopper was in no way tempting fate: my parents had died years earlier in a car crash.

But Olivia’s father? Scant days into my leave, Knowlton began harassing me by email to send in an article or three. And so, tuning out the roar of falling water, I set aside Lewis’s journal to knock out something on my iPad. My first idea, doubtless a synaptic misfire from my current activities, was to throw together something about the Jefferson-Hemings controversy (“Sex Slave in the White House?”). I as quickly discarded that approach as needlessly hurtful for real, live people: Sally Hemings’s descendants of whatever lineage. Then I toyed with a loosely fact-based piece on radio-frequency ID chips in apparel labels (“Are Your Sneakers Ratting You Out?”). I settled on a wendigo sighting in Wisconsin (“Monster Prowls the North Woods”). It didn’t matter whether the boss liked the piece (although how could he not like a cannibalistic spirit, looking freshly disinterred), only that he believed I had tried. Nothing thus far on my odyssey offered any hope I’d be quitting the old job.

With three hundred words of fact-free purple prose plus a wendigo sketch I’d found online for the Truth to infringe upon, I hoped I’d earned myself a few days respite. While I was at it, I wrote a short email to Olivia. Great Falls of the Missouri both impressive and disappointing. Dams and power lines have ruined the view.

But what a spectacle this must have been in Lewis’s time! Five separate waterfalls in the space of ten miles. Between the first cascade and the last, the river dropped more than six hundred feet, the main cascade alone towering eighty-seven feet. A print of a famous nineteenth-century photograph was in one of the books I toted in my backpack, and I riffled pages till I found the image. Then I reread Lewis’s journal entry for the day he discovered the first falls; for almost seven hundred words, he had rhapsodized about the sight. I hiked upriver to an overlook for Crooked Falls—resting, winded, twice along the way—the lone cascade Montana Power Company had yet to despoil.

The mere idea of portaging around such obstacles, of lugging canoes and cargo up that six hundred feet, had me awestruck. What men these had been! To the growl of Crooked Falls, I lost myself for awhile in Lewis’s journal entries of June 1805—

And was jolted back to the present. Something didn’t add up....

 

~~~

 

Many rivers and streams empty into the Missouri. The farther upstream the Corps traveled, the less clear it sometimes became, where watercourses met, which was the main channel. Sometimes the Corps would split, each group scouting a separate possibility.

On June 13, Lewis was leading a small party up a branch he and Clark felt sure was the Missouri—and almost everyone else in the Corps believed was not. As the men fanned out to hunt, Lewis, scouting alone, came upon a mighty waterfall. More than two months earlier, in the Mandan Villages in what is now central North Dakota, visiting Hidatsa had reported that such a waterfall was on the main channel.

Lewis hiking alone wasn’t unusual. He was the expedition’s chief naturalist, and while others paddled and poled mightily against the onrushing current of the Missouri, he had often walked along the shore, the better to observe and collect local flora and fauna.

But on the day after his discovery of the falls, his solo excursion was exceptional. He sent one man with a letter to update Clark, struggling upstream in the boats with others of the Corps. He set the rest of his small group to drying meat. And then, alone again, Lewis went off.

That’s the point at which my Spidey sense began to tingle.

Hiking upstream of the falls, per Lewis’s lengthy entry for June 14, 1805, he came upon five uninterrupted miles of rapids. Then a second waterfall. Lewis continued on to discover a third falls, a fourth, and a fifth, and yet more rapids upstream of those. Nor did he reverse course when, after twelve miles of whitewater, he had finally reached a navigable stretch of river. Instead, he shot a buffalo, planning to leave the animal to scavenge for his dinner upon return from a yet farther excursion—whereupon a quite extraordinary adventure began.

As he stood on a great, empty plain, watching his dinner expire, he neglected to reload his rifle. Meanwhile, a “large white, or rather brown bear,” crept up on Lewis, unnoticed until a mere twenty steps separated them. (And yet, Lewis also records there being “not a bush within miles, nor a tree within three hundred yards.” This was one crafty chameleon of a bear.) With the animal in pursuit, Lewis ran into the river, where the bear might have been at some disadvantage. Waist-deep in the water, Lewis prepared to defend himself with his pike, and the bear, reconsidering, left. Lewis waded ashore, reloaded, and watched the bear hastily retreat for three miles.

Whereupon Lewis encountered what at first seemed to him a wolf, but upon closer examination was a cat “of the tiger kind,” crouched as though to attack. Soon after he fired his rifle, chasing off the cat (and not certain he’d hit it), three bull buffaloes separated from a nearby herd to charge at him. After closing to within a hundred yards, the bulls, like the bear, lost interest. Only after this third encounter did Lewis elect to rejoin his men where they had camped. He arrived after dark.

 

~~~

 

Lewis’s account for that day was ludicrous. How had I not noticed it before? How had no one noticed it before?

Not only would it have become abundantly clear early in his hike that the portage would be awful, but the Hidatsa had said nothing about a second cascade. Lewis must have at least considered the possibility this was, in fact, not the correct waterway. And yet he did not turn back, did not send a second courier hurrying after the first to keep Clark and his party from continuing to struggle, perhaps needlessly, up what might after all be the wrong tributary.

From there, the narrative only became less credible. The experienced woodsman and famous marksman—as a boy of nine, Lewis had shot and killed a charging bull—became careless. The great naturalist couldn’t say whether a bear was white or brown. He saw a tiger (in Montana!) and its “burrow.” This from someone who had studied with the leading savants in Philadelphia, who carried a copy of Linnaeus’s taxonomy in his traveling library, and who discovered and described in detail many new species of plants and animals. And every animal participating in this sequence of events behaved oddly.

The day’s entry had to be a work of utter fiction. With punchier prose, it would have been at home in the Truth. Without a doubt, Lewis had encountered something truly extraordinary—and he had chosen not to mention that something in his journal.

Leaving me utterly without clue what the great explorer had seen....

 

~~~

 

Increasingly puzzled, I continued for a week, with recourse as necessary to car and highway, following more or less in Lewis’s footsteps and canoe wake. (The less said, the better, about other hours wasted in fabricating a follow-up wendigo sighting. The first piece had garnered slews of Facebook shares, with attendant ad views and click-throughs. Knowlton demanded the follow-up, my sick mother notwithstanding.) All the while, I studied the expedition journals with a newly jaundiced eye.

Lewis’s entry for July 4, 1805, amid the month-long epic portage around the falls, mentioned distant noises, “...precisely like the discharge of a piece of ordinance of 6 pounds at the distance of three miles.” On earlier readings, I had attributed that passage to Lewis’s exhaustion and then to Independence Day whimsy. In my newly bewildered mood, the same passage brought something else to mind. But sonic booms seemed no more plausible in 1805 than tigers in Montana, and I chalked up that anachronistic association to my own exhaustion.

Beyond the great portage, finally completed on July 14th, the Corps’s route continued upstream to Three Forks: the source of the Missouri. Led by a Shoshone guide, they trekked on foot across range upon range of snow-capped mountains, the likes of which none of them had ever seen, over the Continental Divide—and so, out of the United States. They built canoes for the final outbound leg: down swift-flowing rivers (ignoring Indian advice about dangerous rapids) to the Columbia River itself and, at long last, to the Pacific. Apart from returning home to report, Lewis had achieved his every goal. Neither success nor the sight of the ocean moved him to write in his journal.

After the bear/tiger/buffalo day, each decision Lewis made somehow came across as rasher than the last. After wintering on the Pacific coast, the return trip was yet more precipitous. By then running low on trade goods, Lewis, who had until then scrupulously followed Jefferson’s orders to treat Indians fairly, stole canoes from the Clatsops for the return up the Columbia. With the Nez Percé reporting snowpack in the Rockies too deep to cross, and their guides late to arrive, Lewis led his men into the mountains without guides. (The Nez Percé were correct; Lewis was forced to turn back.) Once finally back east of the mountains, the Corps briefly split into five groups, each group dispatched to explore a separate region. Lewis took three enlisted men up the Marias River, deep into Blackfoot country—and into the expedition’s first battle with Indians. Leaving behind two Indian dead, after a hundred-mile flight on horseback lasting through most of the night, the explorers made camp—and Lewis set no sentinel. Fortunately, they remained undisturbed, and soon reunited with another Corps detachment.

A few days later, with the Corps still somewhat scattered, Olivia’s forbear and Lewis went out hunting....

 

~~~

 

In Astoria, Oregon, close by Lewis and Clark’s 1805-06 winter camp, I retreated to a comfy hotel room. (Astoria, it turned out, was founded in 1811 to expand John Jacob Astor’s already sprawling fur-trading enterprise. JJA the First, that is. It was JJA the Fourth who famously went down with the Titanic.) A local indie bookstore dedicated an entire shelf in its history section to that ill-fated, and ultimately disastrous, expedition. I bought both Washington Irving’s 1836 account and a more modern volume. I had a decision to make. Would retracing Lewis’s return to St. Louis, the specifics of which I had meticulously studied, reveal anything more? Or would continuing along the expeditionary route only obscure an enlightenment that tantalized from just beyond my mental grasp?

If ever justification existed for a forest-for-the-trees metaphor, the puzzle of Meriwether Lewis’s story was it.

Olivia settled the matter. In her impatience, she showed herself to be more her father’s child than she might have wished to believe. I turned in my rental car and flew to Minot. Her flight to North Dakota was delayed and, killing time at the airport, I started into the Astoria history. Interestingly, Astor had consulted on the expedition plan with Thomas Jefferson.

When Olivia’s flight did arrive, she was as fetching in hiking garb (that gave evidence of heavy use, I was relieved to see) as in any other outfit. We drove a new rental to the region, near the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, where, scarcely a month from a triumphant return to St. Louis, Lewis had been shot. I’d pored repeatedly over that entry from his journal. Meandering back and forth, because the exact location of the mishap was unrecorded, I reread that text an additional few times. We both did. Olivia was strangely subdued.

Enlightenment continued to elude me.

After hours of this, Olivia said, “Back to St. Louis, then? From here, it was a quick canoe ride downstream, and all familiar territory. Right?”

“Yes and no.” I didn’t want to ask if she was channeling my doubts or cutting her losses. “From here, Lewis was about six weeks out from St. Louis. Yes, it was retracing their steps. But I suggest one more stop, at the Mandan Villages.”

Her forehead crinkled. That must not have been a part of the journals she had studied.

I explained, “Outbound, in the winter of 1804-05, the Corps wintered with a friendly tribe, the Mandans. Homebound, they stopped back. The Missouri long ago washed away the camp the Corps built, what they called Fort Mandan, but there’s a reconstruction you might find interesting.”

She looked dubious.

I said, “It’s on the road to Bismarck. We can fly from there to St. Louis.” And I wanted one last chance to commune, had one last oddity to consider. Lewis, soon after his hunting accident, and not yet reunited with Clark, encountered two American fur trappers who had set off on their own up the Missouri. The two tagged along with Lewis (who, soon after, met up with Clark and the remainder of the Corps), and went back down the Missouri to the Mandan Villages. The traders solicited Private John Colter to join their venture as a guide. At the Mandan Villages, Lewis gave his permission, mustering Colter out of the Army despite the two months remaining on his enlistment.

Olivia considered, agreed, and we made the short detour. She explored the fort, which I’d done on my outbound leg, while I... again came up empty. Colter’s early departure seemed to be yet another never-to-be-understood quirk of the expedition.

That evening, we landed in St. Louis.

 

~~~

 

Olivia got us rooms at a downtown Hilton, and we went out to dinner. Barbecue, of course. Our table offered an unobstructed view of the Gateway Arch. She found the sight breathtaking, but neither the vista nor the excellent meal distracted her. Was the project done, she wanted to know, and what had I concluded?

“Concluded? That I disbelieve some of the journals. That other parts, while likely true, aren’t the whole story.”

She’d been nibbling daintily on a sparerib; now she dabbed her lips with a napkin. “And Pierre Cruzatte? Did he shoot Lewis? And did Lewis later kill himself?”

“Let’s start with the former. It’s still one man’s word against another’s. But”—and I fortified myself with a long swallow of beer—“matters leading up to that shooting are, well, strange.”

I counted off the anomalies on my (greasy) fingers. “One. Lewis’s entry after he explored the Great Falls of the Missouri? Complete nonsense. He must have found, or seen, something important to justify fabricating an entry in his journal. Two. Whatever that was, it made Lewis hasty, even careless. My best guess was that he was in a hurry to report back to Jefferson.”

“If it were so important,” Olivia countered, “why not turn around? He’d have gotten back a year earlier.”

Over and over, I’d asked myself that. “I suspect we’ll never know. My bet would be Lewis couldn’t bring himself to violate his orders.” More than president and personal mentor, Jefferson, thirty-one year’s Lewis’s senior, was a father figure. Lewis’s own father had died when he was five, his stepfather when he was seventeen. “I suspect Lewis made his way to the Pacific as quickly as he could, maybe expecting to hitch a ride back East on some passing ship. If so, that was a bad gamble, because the Corps went that entire winter without spotting any ships.”

She nodded, looking unconvinced.

I resumed my count. “Three. On the way home, hastier than ever, he split the Corps into five parts. Hostiles could easily have overwhelmed any of the small groups. It’s as if he were desperately looking for something—or as if he wanted most of the others elsewhere while he looked for something.” And either way, splitting up had almost gotten him killed.

“Looking for what? The thing he’d seen outbound, your first item?”

“Maybe. And in support of that, there’s number four. When Lewis met trappers headed upriver, why did he permit John Colter to join them? Why did Colter then lead the trappers up the Yellowstone River, and not continue along the well-explored route? Maybe because Lewis didn’t want to risk anyone else seeing what he’d seen, what had affected him so deeply.” Just as, while governor, charged with opening up the new, western lands, the great man of action found endless ways to impede the settlement process.

“And number five? Does it support the notion of a faked suicide?”

“No number five,” I said, “and no new ideas about the curious circumstances of Lewis’s death.”

“I hate to say this....” Olivia trailed off, staring into the distance at the arch gleaming under many spotlights. “You once joked about Bigfoot. Suppose that is what Lewis saw, and Pierre Cruzatte, too.”

Her father’s child, I thought. “I can’t disprove that possibility”—apart from the detail that there is no such thing—“but I don’t see why a Bigfoot sighting would have scared Lewis into recklessness, or trying to keep his countrymen from moving west—or to kill himself.”

“Fair enough,” she said, “I don’t see why, either. I get that he and his men hunted grizzlies. But assume he knew something about Bigfoot we don’t. My sense is Meriwether Lewis was an honorable man. If he did lie about something he’d seen, perhaps the shame of it got to him. Maybe that’s why he killed himself.”

Why do it in the wilds of Tennessee? “Maybe,” I said, and turned my attention to flagging down our waitress for another beer.

 

~~~

 

The next morning, Olivia and I rode the tram six hundred feet up the Gateway Arch: monument to western expansion. Tourists jammed the observation deck. We picked a side and looked down. At our feet, a kitschy riverboat paddled slowly down the Mississippi. Beyond the river and a strip of parkland, sprawled East St. Louis. When the crowd thinned a bit, we found windows on the deck’s west-facing side and admired St. Louis proper. To the south, Busch Stadium was empty. The old courthouse, now an historical museum, was straight ahead. A few miles out, in glistening white limestone, stood the Masonic Temple. Everywhere: skyscrapers.

Nothing remained, of course, from Meriwether Lewis’s time. I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have thought of the metropolis into which the little frontier town he’d known had developed, or about the great Arch commemorating his opening of the West.

Abruptly, Olivia said, “I guess it’s over.”

The project, she meant. With it would go any prospects for making an historically significant discovery, of turning respectable, of leaving behind my job as a hack.

“You’re the boss,” I said.

Wistfully, “Maybe there never was anything to be found.”

“Maybe.” The concession, against my wishes, came out petulant.

Right there in the observation deck, she took out her checkbook and started writing. “This will cover you through week’s end, plus airfare back to New York.”

As though I wanted to be back in New York. Committing actual research had felt good. “How about, instead of airfare, you spring for extending the car rental and a couple nights in motels? Maybe another five hundred? I’d like to swing through Tennessee on my way back.”

“Tennessee. Grinder’s Stand?”

I nodded. “You want to come along?”

“I do, but I can’t. Deirdre has a par-tay tonight at which she simply must be seen.” Olivia rolled her eyes. “Tomorrow is something with Derrick.” (Recalling the preppy guy from the photo in her Village flat, I felt an inane twinge of jealousy.) “And then I’m off with the entire posse to Beverly Hills.”

“But you’re okay with me going to the Stand?”

“What the hell,” Olivia said, reopening her checkbook. “Go for it.”

 

~~~

 

Like Fort Mandan, Grinder’s Stand was a reconstruction. I stood outside the modest log structure, hands jammed in my pockets, wondering how I’d imagined I’d learn anything here. This restoration didn’t begin to resemble its historical descriptions. I doubted the interior would be any more authentic or instructive, but I’d never know: door and windows were bricked up. At least this cabin had been built close by where the original inn once stood, a few steps off the pioneer trail called the Natchez Trace.

My final stop, a short walk from the reconstruction along a preserved section of the Trace, was to a simple broken column—emblematic of a life cut short—atop a tiered base. Almost thirty years after Lewis’s death, the State of Tennessee had erected this memorial over his resting place. It was later declared a national monument, and the National Park Service administered the site.

For what seemed an eternity I stood there in silence. What a great man Lewis had been. What a shame no one would ever know what had happened nearby at Grinder’s Stand. At long last, I turned to leave—and a sun glint caught my eye.

Something gleamed high in a nearby tree. I ambled closer. Peering up through leaves I couldn’t be sure, but I sensed the glint came off a curved piece of glass. Making a slow circuit around the monument, I caught more such glints in other trees. On several of those trees, the bark struck me as... disturbed. As if... as if... as if the bark had once been slit to run something beneath, and the bark had since grown back.

The penny dropped.

Tiny security cameras guarded this remote site. Tiny and disguised security cameras. The obvious way to power cameras at this remote site would have been with solar panels—but the native trees were deciduous. Fall, winter, early spring: when these trees were bare of leaves, solar panels would have been obvious. I inferred that buried electrical cables (originating I knew not where) ran up beneath the bark.

I remembered how the Lewis family had not been allowed to exhume the body. I remembered the burial plots for Harry and Bess Truman, in the courtyard at the Truman Presidential Library. Unless I were greatly mistaken, those graves were not so closely monitored.

Still strolling about, I hoped casually, I spotted aerial motion from the corner of my eye: a quadcopter drone. No one within my sight was operating it. Either the drone was illegal, or a licensed pilot flew it.

It appeared I was not yet done researching Meriwether Lewis.

 

~~~

 

Everything had begun with the Cruze/Cruzatte family oral history. Another family might have preserved its own stories, might even have stayed in the area. Long shot that it must surely be, I began sifting through the public records for Lewis County. The name felt auspicious.

Slowly, I made my way through the records to modern-day Griner descendants. (The old Stand to the contrary, the family name was Griner, not Grinder, but the inn had been so misnamed even in Lewis’s day.) Most of the family had dispersed, but Google did show me one nearby relative. The daughter of a Griner daughter, her last name was Smith.

I found her house, a modest bungalow, on the outskirts of Hohenfeld. A dusty old Chevy pickup sat parked in front, lights shone inside, and I could hear, faintly, a twangy C&W ballad. The doorbell didn’t do anything, so I knocked.

“Don’t want any,” a woman yelled from inside. She also had a twang.

“I’m not selling anything,” I called back.

“I’m not giving anything, either.”

“I’m from the university.” Years ago, but I was from one. “I’m an historian. Could we speak for just a few minutes about the Griner family?”

The steel-guitar noise stopped. I heard footsteps, and the door opened. The woman who answered was short and curly haired, with a dour face. She wore an apron over khaki slacks and navy shirt.

“Mrs. Delia Smith? I’m Doctor Anderson, from New York City. May I come in?”

She eyed me skeptically, considering whether I might be a serial killer. “For a couple of minutes.”

“Thanks.” In her parlor, we each took one of the battered recliners. “My specialty”—of late, certainly—“is the Lewis and Clark expedition.”

“And Meriwether Lewis died at Grinder’s Stand.” She sounded impatient. “Yeah, I know. Most everyone around here knows.”

“I wondered if there’s any family lore, tradition, about that event.”

She shrugged. “Everyone says he killed himself.”

“Historians, too... mostly. But is there any family tradition?”

In another room, a timer beeped. “Excuse me. I’ve got something in the microwave to flip over.”

While she was gone, I looked around the parlor. A TV and, in front of her recliner, a mound of TV Guide issues. Past her recliner, a floor lamp with its shade askew. On the chair’s closer side, an end table with a vase of plastic flowers and a candy dish full of M&Ms. And on the faded plaid loveseat across the room, leering from the front page of a tabloid (I’d almost forgotten the Truth still had a print edition), a corpselike face. The wendigo glowered at me, and I smiled back.

She returned. “Five minutes till my dinner’s done. I can spare that long. What did you want to ask about?”

“Is there any family tradition about that tragedy?”

“You mean like someone murdering Meriwether Lewis?” She snorted. “I suppose you favor the version where Priscilla Griner was having a quickie with her famous lodger, and her husband came home earlier than expected. The family has never been too taken with that.”

“I don’t favor any version, other than what happened. Still, you may know that Mrs. Griner related different, um, details, over the years. I thought she may have shared some things just with her family.”

“Different details? Yeah, from what I heard, that’s a polite way of putting it. So?”

“What have you heard?”

“Like you say, it was for family.”

I had an unexpected ace up my sleeve, and I played it. I grabbed the Truth from her loveseat and tapped the cover-story byline. “See this wendigo article? I’m a good friend of Carl Markson. I can assure you, he’s also interested. Very interested.”

Correcting the historical record did nothing for her, but the chance to be mentioned in the Truth opened the floodgates. What a world we live in!

She leaned forward, confidentially. “Well, there is a family legend....”

“Yes?”

“On her deathbed, Priscilla, they say, was delirious, raving. It could mean nothing....”

Or it could be everything. “Please, what did she say?”

“No one could make it all out.” I nodded encouragement, waiting. “Maybe no one died.”

“Maybe? What did Priscilla say?”

“I can only tell you what the family at her bedside made of her ramblings, not whether that’s what Priscilla meant, or if it was all in her imagination.”

“Go on.”

“Here’s what’s been passed down. She’d been told, and paid well, to report that Lewis killed himself. The morning on which she was to say he’d died, four men dug a grave, lowered in a casket, and filled the hole. For long years after, the site was unmarked.

The four would have been Neelly, Lewis, and their servants.

“There’s another odd thing... the casket they buried that day was already dirty.”

Odd, indeed! To me that suggested a body robbed from some nearby graveyard. I recalled that Captain Neelly had been the last among Lewis’s traveling band to reach Grinder’s Stand, arriving, it was said, after Lewis died. Neelly later explained he had been retrieving a horse that had strayed the day before. Had Neelly gone, instead, to acquire a body?

The supposed self-inflicted wounds, two gunshots and a variety of cuts, had from the first struck me as implausible—for Meriwether Lewis. But the suicide of some man unskilled with gun and knife? Some victim of a murderer or highwaymen? Either such might have died so messily, and a tale of “Lewis’s” death concocted to match that body.

As it happened, there was no record of anyone examining “Lewis’s” body till thirty-some years after. When a country doctor had a look, he deemed the death suspicious—without further explanation. By then the narrative of Lewis’s suicide was well established, the great explorer’s memory tainted by the manner of his reported passing. The doctor’s conclusion was widely ignored and generally forgotten.

I asked, “What happened next?”

She hesitated. “Remember, Priscilla was raving. Besides, this story was passed on many times before I heard it. But the way I was told, after the burial, she snuck into the woods near the inn, following the men. They opened baggage that Lewis had come with, and one of the men filled his knapsack with papers.”

My heart pounded. Might those papers be long-lost journal entries? “Which man? And did what with those documents?”

“I have no idea. But the way the story came to me, anyway, the end of it was that three men rode east up the Natchez Trace. One walked the other way.”

“Who was that one? Lewis?”

She shrugged.

Eastbound: likely Neelly, Neelly’s servant, and Pernier. They’d have brought with them the parts of Lewis’s journal that ended up with Clark, that were published years after. But headed west? Delia Smith didn’t know, and so neither could I, and yet I was sure that had been Lewis.

“Went where?” I asked.

She shrugged. “West.”

As I sat in contemplative silence, her microwave beeped.

She stood. “And you’ll tell Carl Markson? Have him call me for the details?”

“I promise, Carl will know everything you told me.”

 

~~~

 

If Lewis did walk away from Grinder’s Stand, where would he have gone? If he kept, rather than destroyed, the retrieved papers, where might they have ended up?

I had thoughts—incomplete, admittedly—about both. Before I acted on them, I owed Olivia an update.

Happily, she answered her cell. Unhappily, I could barely hear her for the blaring music. “How was the inn? And where are you calling from?”

“Nashville. Are you free to talk?”

“Hold on.” The phone muted for a few seconds, and then, the music reduced to a dull background throb, she returned. “Nashville. You don’t strike me as the Grand Ole Opry type.”

Fair enough. “Listen, I might have a lead on some long-lost papers of Lewis’s.”

“In Nashville?”

“In St. Louis.” I was taking a somewhat circuitous route. Memphis was my next stop. “It’s complicated.”

“If you can wait a week, I can fly back out.”

If I were right, it would be a huge deal. But if my “lead” turned out to be only the babbling of a dying woman? If Delia Smith had been having a bit of fun with the gullible city slicker? I’d look quite the fool—or worse. “Let me just say these aren’t public records. It might be best, till I know more, for you to stay clear of it.”

“Okay,” Olivia said. “Consider yourself back on the payroll.”

 

~~~

 

By gloom of night, the moon presenting as the narrowest of slivers seen dimly and obscurely through thick overcast, a ghostly white structure loomed. I was no architect, and no one had asked my opinion, but it was a monstrosity. Fourteen levels—six full stories and eight mezzanine levels—arrayed in three stepped tiers like some geographically impaired ziggurat. A mini-Parthenon at the top, complete with Ionic columns and sculpted pediment. The interior was reputed to be yet more ornate, with grand marble foyer, great swooping staircases, and a mish-mash of architectural styles. Six million cubic feet.

The Masonic Temple of St. Louis.

Suppose Meriwether Lewis had sequestered a portion of his journals. Where would he have kept them? If he were hiding from the world, would he have kept those papers with him, or entrusted them to someone? I’d found nothing to suggest such documents had ever been found among the personal effects of Thomas Jefferson or William Clark. Anyway, Lewis (it seemed) had headed west with the papers.

Even before I’d departed Lewis County, I had formed a theory. Lewis founding the Masonic lodge in St. Louis had not been random. Lewis inducting Clark into the order after the expedition was not a mere act of camaraderie. Where better to stash precious documents than with his lodge brethren? After Lewis left the frontier town where so many people knew him, while he sneaked off to do....

I still had no idea what. But if Lewis’s papers were inside the temple, perhaps I’d learn.

What would I find? Where should I look? Not on the lowest two levels—the public was allowed inside them on days meetings were held. Only members of the appropriate orders within the Masons were permitted on upper floors. If my supposition held, Lewis’s secret papers would be found in one of those upper levels—which, perhaps, reduced the building volume to be searched to three million or so cubic feet.

This wasn’t Lewis’s temple, of course, but a newer, far grander, structure dedicated in 1926. If the St. Louis Masons had taken custody of Lewis’s secret papers, I had to believe the stash had been moved to the new temple.

And so I came to be waiting, in the deep shadow between the temple and the next-door art museum, as prepared as I knew how to be. The St. Louis Temple hadn’t offered public tours, but I had toured the temples in Nashville and Memphis. That experience might help me spot anything out of the ordinary in this temple. I’d pored over the images and other records I could find online. I’d surveilled by daylight, from the ground and from upper floors of the nearby cathedral, spotting security tape only on windows of the temple’s two lowest levels. And I had brushed up on my wall climbing, as best I could, on the side of an old East St. Louis warehouse. Following in Lewis’s trail had done wonders for my physical condition.

The cell vibrated in my pants pocket: two in the morning. It was time. Still in denial that I was actually going to do this thing, I took the pair of suction-cup lifters from my backpack.

And I began to scale the wall....

 

~~~

 

...Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy... several copies of these as well as of your other notes should be made at leisure times, & put into the care of the most trust-worthy of your attendants, to guard by multiplying them against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed. A further guard would be that one these copies be on the paper of the birch, as less liable to injury from damp than common paper.

      —from Thomas Jefferson’s instructions to Meriwether Lewis / June 20, 1803

 

~~~

 

I don’t know what part of the ascent more terrified me: the first several feet, during which I was most at risk of being spotted, or up higher, from where any fall would maim or kill me. But somehow, my chest heaving, for entire seconds at a time attributing to myself the sort of derring-do Meriwether Lewis might have respected, I did clamber onto the building’s inset middle tier. There, with my back pressed against the wall, between two dark windows, I caught my breath.

I gripped a window with one of my suction-cup lifters while, using my other hand, I wielded a glasscutter. Finally, a chunk of the window came loose. I gently set the glass onto the ledge/roof and climbed through the opening into a night-darkened room.

My backpack held the best night-vision goggles I could afford—which put them one small step above toy-grade. (It wasn’t that Olivia hadn’t been paying me. She had, but I’d as regularly been applying those windfalls to my debts. Just then I wished I’d been a lot less responsible. I’d held back only a few hundred dollars.) I was in a small and mundane office, its door shut. Holding my breath, I listened. Everything was as quiet as a tomb. I lowered the mini-blinds, twisted them closed, and taped the bottom rail to the sill. The wind, unless it picked up, ought not to rattle them. A night-shift cleaning crew popping in might not notice my intrusion.

I crept about, guessing and second-guessing in the dimness what, apart from in scale and splendor, differed from the temples I’d toured in Tennessee. With each step, I was attentive to the slightest scuff of sneaker on floor, the slightest motion of air, the least glimmer that might warn of a night watchman’s flashlight. Wherever my Spidey sense tingled, I’d take a longer look about, peer behind doors, more closely study the ornamentation.

To properly search even one level would take hours I didn’t have. When the vibration of my cell signaled that a quarter-hour had passed, I went up a level in the building. A quarter-hour later, another level. On the ninth level, a draft chilled my ankles. Backtracking the unexpected flow to beneath an unassuming flight of side stairs, I heard a faint drone from behind a door labeled Electrical. The rumble sounded to me more like a running compressor than the sixty-cycle hum of a transformer. The door felt cool to the touch; cold air seeped from beneath it.

The door opened into a wide, windowless, high-ceilinged—and frigid—room, its side and back walls lined with bookshelves. Along the front wall, on opposite sides of the door, were a huge roll-top desk, paired with an even more massive leather chair, and a glass-front cabinet with loose papers on its shelves. A long table, narrow but tall, with banker’s lamps down its centerline and barstool-style chairs on both long sides, occupied much of the room. The walls, where furniture did not obstruct my view, showed ornate wooden paneling. A private library, if ever I had seen one.

I closed the door behind me, releasing the knob slowly to avoid any noise, then covered the gap beneath the door with a towel from my backpack. Only then did I dare switch on a penlight and remove my goggles.

The papers inside the glass-front cabinet looked old. Gingerly, I picked up a loose sheaf and set it on the table. Shining my penlight on the top sheet, my pulse quickened. I doubted this was paper at all. Whatever the material, its letters faded with age, I read:

 

[Sept. 6, 1805] I was awaked this day by the mirth of the enlisted men, Clark’s laughter the loudest. I wondered what they were going on about. They were....

 

Clark clearly hadn’t written this. Some enlisted men were known to have kept their own journals, but would one of them have referred to themselves that way? This seemed like an entry of Lewis’s—and written during one of the periods for which no entries were known!

No matter my burning curiosity, I didn’t dare stop to read. I spread out this first group of “papers” and started taking pictures. I finished the first batch, and swapped them for another stack. I shot pictures of those pages, and of a third batch (starting to worry my cell would run out of charge or memory), and a fourth batch, and....

I couldn’t help but notice snippets of the text as I labored, but the haphazard order of the pages doomed any hope I had for an immediate epiphany. Here, Lewis feigns a drug problem. There, he is saddened that what must be done will shame his family. All in a jumble, he: finds excuses to delay dispatching a big new expedition up the Missouri; describes some bizarre zoological specimen; ruminates about the Montgolfier brothers of France aloft in their balloons, and Ben Franklin’s lightning experiments, and what marvels might someday arise from such beginnings. It all tantalized, but one random passage leapt out at me:

 

...Cruzatte helped me stanch the bleeding. I told the private I must ask a terrible favor of him. He needs must....

 

But I dare not take the time to read more! As I gathered up these pages—

From well above my head, in an impossibly gravelly voice, someone growled, “Hands up! Back away from the table.”

 

~~~

 

Light spilled from an open doorway in a rear corner of the room. The door, disguised as wooden paneling, had escaped my notice.

Furry as a Wookie, built like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle—and more alien, somehow, than either—a good two feet taller than me, with baleful red eyes, something glowered.

“You’ll have to excuse Harry,” someone said in a more mellow voice. “He’s quite protective. He and Gramps were good friends.”

I hadn’t noticed the man standing beside the apparition. In silk pajamas, matching robe, and slippers. About my height, six feet, and broad-shouldered. Thirty-ish. Five o’clock shadow, but otherwise clean shaven. Apart from heavy eyebrows and a sharp nose, his facial features were delicate. His short, straight brown hair had begun to recede. I had never met him, and yet.... “You seem familiar to me.”

“You made your way this far. Think about it.”

Gramps, the man had said. Also, that the... whatever... was being protective. Protective of the Lewis papers I had been copying? The man resembled... a Peale portrait! But Meriwether Lewis sat for that portrait back in 1807! My jaw dropped.

“Ah, good. You’ve taken notice of the resemblance. There are far too many ‘greats’ to recite, so within the family everyone just calls him Gramps.” He pulled one of the tall chairs out from the table and sat. “By the way, I’m Geoffrey Lewis. You can call me Geoff.”

“And your big friend is, umm, Harry?”

Harry rumbled, “You couldn’t pronounce my real name, and after so many years, I almost don’t remember it anyway.”

Geoff said, “I believe it’s your turn to volunteer some information.”

 

~~~

 

I named myself. In bare-bones fashion, omitting Olivia (for her protection) and Carl Markson (out of sheer embarrassment), I enumerated various of the curiosities in the Lewis record that had led me here. Geoff nodded along with the narration until, as I commented upon the security cameras surrounding the Meriwether Lewis memorial column, he raided the desk for paper and pen to jot himself a note. Hide cameras better?

“It was quite a leap,” Harry offered in gravelly basso tones, “from seeing unexpected security at the gravesite to coming here. To looking for”—and he gestured expansively, encompassing the old pages strewn across the table—“Meriwether’s private journals.”

“There’s a legend in rural Tennessee that, after the burial, a man left Grinder’s Stand hiking west on the Trace.” In the tabloid biz, passive voice and vague circumlocution were central to not being sued, and I’d been tutored in both dodges by the best. Or worst. Either way, I thought my explanation vague enough to leave Delia Smith in the clear. “If Meriwether Lewis’s death had been staged, if he walked out, I guessed that whatever records he’d kept or later written might have been entrusted to his Lodge brothers. I figured any such would be pretty interesting.” It was my turn to gesticulate at the papers. “From the glimpses I’ve had, they are.”

“Would have been,” Harry corrected, growling, more ominous than ever. If this creature had indeed, somehow, been Meriwether’s friend, I well understood Pierre Cruzatte taking one look—and then taking a potshot at him!

“Indeed, Harry,” Geoff said, “there is the small matter of how to proceed. Doctor Anderson has proven himself to be a competent historian. We could perhaps find a use for such talents.”

Was there a hesitance? A subtle vocal emphasis? A furtive look exchanged between my captors? Whatever, I sensed more in that we than these two. Than Mutt and Geoff. I swallowed the hysterical giggle yearning to be free: once permitted to start, I didn’t think it would stop.

“Why would I help you?” Suddenly weak in the knees, I pulled out a chair and sat. “The way you’ve tampered with the historical record is scandalous. And who, exactly, are ‘we?’”

Geoff said, “Why cooperate? Because we work for the common good. And because, I will venture to guess, you’re desperate to know what happened to Gramps.”

 

~~~

 

Geoff and Harry abandoned me, after commandeering my cell, wallet, and backpack, in an ordinary, windowless meeting room. For them to take time contemplating my future, or me to? The door had closed behind them with a pronounced click, and I didn’t bother to try the knob. Geoff was correct. More than anything, I needed to understand.

I hadn’t learned much for all my trouble—apart from Harry, of course, and I had yet to see how he fit in. Still, I could infer a lot: that Meriwether Lewis had faked his death that day, had carried off selected records from the expedition. That he had subsequently married and had children. That the Masons, if only some order within this temple, had accepted and hidden Lewis’s private papers—as William Clark, at his friend’s urgings, also a member of his lodge, must have known. That to this day Lewis’s descendants—as opposed to his sister’s descendants, suing to have the body exhumed—continued to guard Meriwether’s secret, and had the influence to make the National Park Service cooperate. If the NPS, how much more of the government?

Cans of warm soda sat on a sideboard, presumably left from the last meeting here. I popped open a Coke and chugged. It would be morning soon; a caffeine jolt couldn’t hurt. The caffeine didn’t seem to help, either, as I struggled to understand what secret still needed protecting. Harry, obviously, and others like him. Bigfeet. But why?

I had had the forethought to carry only a disposable cell, in case I’d get caught, so Olivia wasn’t in the call log or contacts, but just about then I would have liked to call her. Or at least to have a clock! It felt I had been alone for hours, but that might have been only nerves. More for something to do than from optimism, I looked about the room for a phone. I found a wall jack, but the handset itself had been removed. Of course.

With a perfunctory knock, the door opened. Geoff Lewis came in with a tray. A carafe, cups, sugar and creamer packets. Either my future prospects weren’t entirely dire, or this was the meanest last meal for the condemned man, well, ever. He kicked the door shut behind him, set the tray on the sideboard, and plopped into a chair.

The coffee came out steaming. I took a fortifying long drink. “You’re not having me arrested for trespass.”

“You’re too modest. It’d be easy enough to slip some gewgaw into your backpack, and promote you to burglar. But you’re correct. Having you arrested isn’t my first choice.”

“Then I’m free to leave? I’d like my things back.” Not that I’d expect the pics I’d taken would still be on the cell.

He poured and doctored a cup of coffee for himself. He took a sip, made a face, and added sugar. “You can see why we wouldn’t consider either a good idea.”

I blurted out, “Just as John Pernier asking for money was not a good idea?”

“Pernier.” Geoff’s brow furrowed. “Oh, I see. You have been busy. Why do you ask? Did you intend to blackmail us?”

“My intent, and I’ve told you this already, is historical research. I’d hoped to get a scholarly paper out of this.”

“Again, you can see why we wouldn’t consider that a good idea.”

I only maybe saw why Harry might feel that way. What secrets hadn’t I read yet? “So, what happens next?”

Geoff stood, grinned, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Next, after we both grab a few hours of sleep and have at a big brunch, is this: I explain why these secrets are secrets.”

And if I found the sudden amity unconvincing? It seemed impolitic to comment.

 

~~~

 

Geoff delivered me to a sumptuous guest suite, again without windows. Again I was locked in and sans phone, although my wallet and backpack—minus the climbing gear—had all been returned. The cash I had had remaining from my last advance was all there.

For a long while, lost in thought, I stood in the shower with hot water beating down. It failed to relax me. If I remembered correctly a final insomniac glance at the bedside clock, I managed almost three hours of fretful, restless sleep. I was shaved and dressed when, just after eleven, the suite door opened. A white-coated steward rolled in with a linen-covered cart, followed by Geoffrey Lewis. The latter was nattily dressed in khakis, dress shirt and tie, blue blazer, and tasseled loafers. In my blue jeans, dark sweatshirt, and sneakers, all begrimed by my wall-hugging climb up the side of the temple, I felt like an utter slob. The steward withdrew, closing the door behind him.

The cart offered two covered plates, a tray of assorted pastries, glasses of orange juice, coffee service, heavy silver utensils, and linen napkins. Geoff carried one plate to the room’s small, round table, where he dug into fried eggs, bacon, sausage links, hash browns, and buttered toast. After a mere sip of OJ set my gut roiling, I knew to avoid all that fat and grease. Caffeine, however, was a necessity. I filled a mug with black coffee, then took for fuel the blandest item on the cart: a plain cake doughnut.

Geoff said, “You’ll have many questions, of course, but this will go faster if you tell me what you’ve already ascertained of the family’s undisclosed history.”

Would such admission seal my fate, or qualify me for a job with the family? I had no idea. I gathered my thoughts, stalling with a bite of doughnut. “Back in 1805, near the Great Falls of the Missouri, Meriwether encountered Harry. He kept the incident from his official journal and from the Corps of Discovery.” I hazarded a bit more of the doughnut. “Well, he told Clark. I don’t know whether that happened immediately, or later.”

“Later,” Geoff offered vaguely. “And Harry is?”

Meriwether had mused in his private journal about the Mongolfier brothers’ balloon flights. Unless it was a random comment, he’d seen an aircraft. And Lewis and many of the men had heard mysterious booming noises, as from a cannon, in the area. “An alien. His craft had been flying over the area for days.”

“Go on,” Geoff encouraged.

“Also, Bigfoot. At least he and his kind are the source of the legends.” And to think how often I’d mocked Bigfoot sightings in the Truth.

“Clearly.”

“Here’s something I’m not certain of. After meeting Harry, the Corps continued west, but often recklessly so. They came back east, even more hurriedly.” I had in mind the foolhardy effort to recross the Rockies without guides.

Geoff took a few seconds to slather jam on his toast. “Was there a question?”

“My guess is that, despite the initial encounter with Harry, Meriwether couldn’t bring himself to disobey Jefferson’s mission directives—but he was also frantic to return to Washington City and report about Harry to the president.”

“TJ, everyone in the family calls him, and yes, you’re right. If you had had the time, in dark of night, to read more of the old papers, you’d have seen as much. What else?”

“Splitting up the Corps once back across the Rockies? That seemed strange. Did Meriwether have an appointment with Harry on his way back? Did he rationalize splitting up the Corps to have fewer men with him to evade before that meeting?”

“Truly, Ted, you amaze me.”

Was an ability to amaze my host/captor for good or ill? I still didn’t know. Well, as they say, in for a penny, in for a Euro. “I doubt that meet-up happened. Your gramps was late, or the Blackfeet chased him away, or both.”

“The former, and the failure to link up had Gramps in a tizzy. Anything more?”

“This final inference is yet more of a stretch.” Here I lied, out of some chivalrous impulse toward Olivia’s forbear. “Harry and Meriwether somehow met up a few days later. I won’t guess who caught up with whom. One of the Corps took a shot at Harry but hit Lewis instead. Lewis must have convinced the man he had not only missed his shot but mistaken what he’d shot at. Didn’t he, the shooter, that is, have poor eyesight?”

“So much for your perfect score.” Geoff took one final forkful of egg and slid back his plate. “It was an alien, but not my friend Harry, who wounded Gramps. Private Cruzatte did indeed take a shot at the alien, although he missed. Still, the unexpected attack saved the captain’s life. But you’re correct, Ted, that persuasion was in order, to obtain Cruzatte’s silence about Harry and the dead alien, and to convince the private to accept the blame for the hole through Gramps’s derriere.”

Which made Olivia’s ancestor the hero, not the myopic goat. Would I be set free to tell her? And did I even want to leave, while Lewis’s long-lost journals remained unexamined?

Geoff said, “You know a great deal, and yet not why these secrets were secret. Why the secrets remain secret still. Are you certain you want to know?

My gut lurched anew. “Yes!”

Geoff stood. “Then you have a good deal of reading ahead of you.”

 

~~~

 

[June 14, 1805]...As I proceeded along the shore, around a great bend of the river, a brilliant glint, as from a large mass of metal, caught my eye. Stranger still, the object appeared to be receding from me, and at such a pace that the swiftest horses could not begin to match it. More peculiar still, the glint seemed to travel above the ground. After surveying in all directions lest any danger catch me unawares, and seeing naught but a herd of buffalo in the distance, I gave my eyes a thorough rubbing. I soon decided that I must have been mistaken. Something shiny did lie ahead, upstream—but it waited on land, beside rushing rapids. I struggle now for words to describe the thing. It was as if a giant’s kite and a Montgolfier balloon had, somehow, conspired to produce offspring.

With rifle in hand, I crept closer to investigate....

 

~~~

 

The library, better lit, was charming. (If still nippy: fifty degrees, tops, was my guess. Were I as thickly furred as Harry, I imagine I’d also have cranked down the thermostat.) A plethora of sconces—small and discreet, mounted well above Harry’s eye level, the fixtures had entirely escaped my notice during my abortive intrusion—bathed everything, especially the fine-grained wood paneling, in a warm glow. (And with proper lighting, the door that gave access to Harry’s adjoining suite was evident enough. The repeated flash of my cell camera, glimpsed beneath that door, had awakened Harry.) A sylvan fresco adorned the tray ceiling. Imagining beeswax candles instead of the bulbs in the many sconces, I could well see this space having been designed as an homage to a certain famous Virginia plantation owner and explorer.

Wearying of Harry looming over my shoulder, I had persuaded him to sit. From his great leather chair, rolled to an end of the library table, he still followed along with my reading: from a good ten feet away, and viewing the text sideways.

“That was our initial encounter,” Harry offered. Two hours into my studies, his deep rumble had ceased to startle.

I was just beginning a second, and thorough, pass through Lewis’s private journals, following a familiarizing skim, and my eyes felt breaded and deep-fried. If I hadn’t been exhausted and sleep-deprived, I would still have struggled with antique script and age-faded ink. With relief, I looked up: one eyewitness account might serve me as well as another. “Tell me about it.”

Harry pointed at the old journal. “My attention on final approach was on the rapids and the herd of buffalo nearby. I hadn’t noticed any humans, but Meriwether had noticed the shuttle. He crept up while I waited for the ground to cool beneath the shuttle.”

“Shuttle,” I echoed. “As in some short-range vehicle. A landing craft.”

“Yes, but if you’re going to interrupt—”

“Implying a larger vessel. A mother ship, with other beings like you aboard. Interstellar.”

He blatted: the noise I’d come to believe denoted impatience. “Whose story is this?”

“Sorry. Please continue.”

I suppressed questions for a while through the simple expedient of stuffing my face with sandwiches. Rapt in my first read-through, I hadn’t even taken notice of the food tray’s delivery. And Harry talked....

He had emerged that day from the shuttle for an up-close examination of the whitewater. Too late, he had noticed the native—Meriwether Lewis—behind a tall shrub not twenty yards distant, aiming what was obviously a weapon. When Lewis twitched the rifle barrel, once, twice, to the side, Harry got the message: step outside.

“Good thing I didn’t hit the panic button,” Harry said. “Meriwether could have put a bullet between my eyes, even at three times that distance, faster than the hatch would have closed. Anyway, I stepped from the air lock.”

“You’re fortunate he didn’t just shoot. Do you know why he didn’t?”

Harry leaned back, and the oversized chair groaned in protest of his weight. “I assumed he’d seen the shuttle land—he hadn’t—and known it for an artifact and, by implication, realized I was an intelligent being. Luckily for me, I had on hiking boots and a belt with water bottle, binoculars, and the like. Grizzlies don’t wear shoes or belts.”

“So you and he spoke. How was that even possible?” One thing I did know was Harry hadn’t studied English from Sesame Street broadcasts. Not in 1805. “Some sort of high-tech universal translator?”

His answering blat added a pronounced tremolo. That seemed to be laughter. “You’ve seen too much Star Trek. Yes, I had a translation device, but it didn’t yet handle English. On an earlier visit to Earth, it had been trained on several languages, including Indian languages. Meriwether had picked up a smattering of those. It was only once Meriwether came back west, after his supposed death, that he and I interacted enough for the translator, and later me, to master English.”

To judge by Harry’s fluid conversation, he had a gift for language. Or was such skill common among his kind? I had more pressing questions. “What did you talk about that first encounter?”

Again, Harry shifted his weight. Again, his chair creaked. “You’re getting ahead of things. Read.”

 

~~~

 

[June 14, 1805, continued]...this hairy creature that I have described said something indistinct in a loud, low rumble. A moment later, another voice boomed out. I had learned few enough words of the Hidatsa tongue, but that this creature spoke at all astonished me. Had I not theretofore disbelieved such Indian legends as Sasquatch, I would never have imagined one to be a reasoning being. But capable of thought this creature surely was: clothed, if but in boots and a belt, carrying tools, offering and answering speech. Just as surely, I trusted that it would have seen—from my fine rifle, if naught else—differences between me and the Indians it had met.

I gave my usual speech of greeting, and of the Great Father in Washington who wished only for peace with his children in his newly acquired lands. When the creature gave no sign of comprehension, I tried to make myself understood in the various Indian languages of which I had acquired a smattering, and by the sign language common among many of the tribes the expedition had met, that I might know what manner of being this was, and from whence it came. It responded in a few of the tribal tongues, but seemed unfamiliar with the sign language. I learned only, after considerable time, that it wanted urgently to parley. Were we not already at parley? As for its apparent warning, if danger were any impediment, the expedition could never have departed St. Louis. When I made to rejoin the men I had left hunting—if only to keep any from seeing and taking a shot at this wondrous creature—it made a bellow for me to remain further.

As I insisted in taking my leave, it asked when I would return. I had already that day seen sufficient cascades and rapids to know that the portage to the next navigable portion of the Missouri would be arduous. We needed urgently to get on with our explorations. At length, with words and gestures, I proposed to meet a year hence. Repeating the Mandan word for secret, the creature went back into its metal structure.

Even as I strode toward camp, a prodigious roar burst forth behind me. I turned to see the creature’s structure leap high into the air! Quickly the airship (as I chose to name this wondrous device) vanished into the sky....

 

~~~

 

Meriwether Lewis’s private journals were fascinating, as were my interactions with Harry. By dinnertime (porterhouse steaks, loaded baked potatoes, and steamed vegetables for Geoff and me; a platter piled high with only the veggies for Harry), much that had troubled and confused me had been clarified.

In the months following the dramatic first encounter, contemplating the amazing “airship,” Meriwether had come to accept a bitter truth. Harry’s technology was at least as superior to America’s as America’s was to its Indians—and Meriwether well knew how Indians were faring as settlers streamed westward into Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Befriending the creature was urgent, and Meriwether became frantic to recross the Rockies and keep his appointment. Snowpack in the mountains made that impossible, but once finally across, he kept an ear alert for sonic booms and an eye open for fast-moving glints in the sky.

Almost fatally, he spotted one.

Harry, at their first encounter, had had no way to communicate that many more aliens were near Earth, much less that the others would seek to detain him. The aliens were still searching for Harry when Meriwether spotted an “airship” streaking north. (My theory that the aliens called themselves Sasquatch was only the latest among my many errors. Hroath, they named themselves, or Hroa in the singular. Neither word, as Harry pronounced it, had precisely one syllable or two. Perhaps the odd effect lay in multiple sets of vocal cords.)

On the pretense of maximizing their explorations, Lewis divided the Corps. He led six men—few enough that he might hope to elude them before any second close encounter—up the Marias River into Blackfoot territory. Desperate to reconnect with Harry, he proceeded despite knowing of the Blackfeet only that other tribes greatly feared them.

Rather than a Hroa, Lewis came upon a band of Blackfeet warriors. A stealthy nighttime effort to steal American rifles turned into a deadly skirmish. After a desperate, hundred-mile ride, the small Corps detachment shook off its pursuers. Meriwether, expecting more Indians to take up the chase, his heart heavy with disappointment and worry, abandoned his search for the alien. It was time to reunite with the Corps’s other detachments and bring everyone home.

Scant days later, back along the Missouri River, Meriwether would be shot. To my hosts’ evident amusement, I gulped my food, decanted a generous after-dinner brandy, and, snifter in hand, hurried back to my reading.

 

~~~

 

[July 29, 1806] As we proceeded downstream, I espied something shiny within a tangle of fallen trees. Already on our journey, we had encountered all too many such snarls. This one, at least, had come to a halt at a river bend. Careening downstream, their submerged branches oftentimes obscured by silt-laden waters, untethered tangles had much bedeviled us. The tangles came about, apparently, when the rushing currents, swelled to flood stage by snowmelt, undercut and collapsed a wooded stretch of riverbank. In any event, the curvature and metallic glint I had this day noticed reminded me of the airship of the previous summer. And so, that afternoon, on the pretext of hunting for our dinner, I made to leave the men at camp while I investigated.

The men, remembering our recent mishap with the Blackfeet, grumbled that I should not go off alone. I agreed to bring along Pvt. Cruzatte—him being blind in one eye and seeing but poorly at a distance with the other. If, before I could send away Cruzatte, we should happen upon my hairy acquaintance, I hoped I might convince the private he had mis-seen.

The private ventured without protest to hunt in the direction I suggested, leaving me to return to the riverbank. The shiny thing beneath the tangled tree limbs indeed seemed to be of a kind with the airship, only smaller. I had only begun to speculate that I had found a fragment of the airship, shattered by some unimaginable disaster, when a sharp pain pierced my buttock!

Somehow, the gunshot had been silent. Beside me, a shrub had burst into flames. As I flung myself to the ground, twisting as I fell, I saw the creature taking aim for another shot! It seemed my last thought would be bewilderment, wondering why he had turned against me. A red beam sprang from its weapon, setting grass smoldering, scything toward me—

A loud gunshot rang out! Cruzatte? As the creature turned toward the noise, the red beam from its weapon swept over me. From behind a nearby tree, a second red beam appeared—and my assailant crumpled. A second creature emerged from behind the tree. In English, it bellowed, “You are safe.”

 

~~~

 

After a more leisurely completion of his own more modest meal, Harry rejoined me in the library. Reading upside down, he made note of my place in the private journals. “Good friend though Meriwether became, I must admit: he could be verbose. Lest you disturb my sleep for a second night, here’s the quick version.

“I had gone AWOL. Tomorrow we can discuss why. Today I’ll leave it at my shipmates didn’t want me to stay, and that even after a year, they still had hope of finding, if not me, the gear I had taken with me. Likely, they expected only to find the latter. You see, to cover my tracks, I had abandoned my shuttle in a rapids upriver. The day I’d met Meriwether, in fact, I’d been surveying places for staging such a crash. I wanted somewhere with whitewater, into which it would seem I’d slipped getting clear of the wreck, hit my head, and been carried off downstream. If searchers never found my body, well, the battering it would have taken in all those rapids and waterfalls would explain it. Right?”

I sipped brandy, considering. “Even after your encounter with Meriwether, you wanted to fake your death?”

“Then more than ever.” Harry plopped into his chair, and it protested his weight. “Again, that’s a topic for tomorrow. But you’re reading about the day, much later, when Meriwether was shot. There was much he didn’t know till well after these journal entries. Trust me, you’ll sleep better tonight if you hear the back story.”

Hard as it was to imagine ever sleeping again, I knew I needed sleep—badly. I saluted with my snifter: please go on.

Harry said, “If my people weren’t willing to leave me behind, they certainly weren’t willing to abandon my shuttle. For my own reasons—again, that’s a topic for another day—I didn’t want it left there, either.”

“Some sort of Prime Directive?” I guessed. “Like in Star Trek?”

“Yes and no. Tomorrow, I remind you. Anyway, after my first encounter with Meriwether, I stayed clear of the river until the Corps had completed their arduous portage around the Great Falls. When no one was nearby to observe, I set down my shuttle in the rapids above the first cascade, shorting out some key electronics to suggest an in-flight emergency. I gave myself a small cut, smearing some blood on a console, as if from a banged head.

“With sparks arcing and crackling on the bridge and the hatch left open, as I carefully made my way to shore, I heard behind me this great scraping and a clang. Either I had underestimated the force of the current, or some freak wind gust hit the shuttle just wrong. Maybe some of both.

“In any event, the shuttle had begun to slide. I watched, helpless, as the shuttle slipped downstream, faster and faster, bouncing and bounding in the rapids, to tumble over the first cascade. Quicker than I could run to that first waterfall, the wreck was in several pieces, those rushing down the next stretch of rapids, breaking into smaller pieces. My shipmates were a long time collecting it all.”

That was quite the picture, if not yet any kind of explanation. “So that’s what Meriwether saw, beneath the logjam? Debris from your broken shuttle?”

Harry interlaced his fingers (strangely jointed), whether as body language I couldn’t read or as something to do with his hands. “Yes, and my shipmates were still tracking down and collecting the key bits. They were after anything that might, even years later, reveal technological secrets. It was Meriwether’s misfortune to have gone close for a look at the wrong time. Hence my former shipmate, we’ll call him Esau, attempted to kill him.”

“By laser,” I offered, remembering the red beam from the journal.

I got another dose of blat plus tremolo. Laughter. “Careful, my young friend. Knowing too much about our tech isn’t healthy.

“Meriwether’s quick reflexes saved his life. Indeed, Pierre Cruzatte had been tracking something: Esau. The private’s shot missed, but the loud clap of the rifle or the bullet zinging past was sufficient to disrupt Esau’s aim long enough—

“For you to kill him,” I offered. “But why were you there?”

Blat plus tremolo, again. “It’s like you were there. Since Meriwether and I had missed our early summer appointment, I’d been wandering up and down a stretch of the Missouri. Whenever he did return, I hoped to find an opportunity to speak privately with him. His calm, thoughtful reaction to our first encounter had proven him to be exceptional.”

I remembered another detail from the private journals. “And during that time, you’d mastered English. How, if I may ask?”

“My translator had learned a little, not me. But mastered? Not even close. Regardless, since my defection I’d been interacting with the locals, the Indians. Some had learned scraps of English from the Corps on its way upriver and, more recently, from trappers following. It was enough that when Meriwether and I did next speak, we could each get some points across.” Blat plus tremolo. “Yet another a topic for tomorrow.”

Belatedly, guiltily, I remembered my benefactress. “And Cruzatte? What of him?”

“For a critical few seconds, frantically, he was reloading. Meriwether shouted out that he should approach slowly—and desist from shooting at his furry friend. As Meriwether and I hastily consulted, it being clear that he required more medical attention than Cruzatte’s improvised bandage, he limped off toward his camp. Cruzatte then helped me carry Esau’s body to his shuttle—”

“I’d been wondering how Esau had gotten there.”

“Stop interrupting, please. I, for one, am ready for bed. So: Cruzatte and I put the body into the nearby shuttle. I disabled its transponder, then set the autopilot to fly west over the mountains and then go down in the deepest part of the Pacific. A second feigned crash would be one too many. A mysteriously vanished shuttle was the best I could improvise. Then Cruzatte headed back toward camp, and I went as far away as I could. It would be more than three years until I next saw Meriwether.”

From poring over the Corps’s published journals, I pictured what ensued: The alarm as Lewis stumbled back to camp. The search in vain for an Indian shooter. Cruzatte, by default, taking the blame.

“Why so long?” I asked. “I mean, three years?”

“Playing it safe,” Harry said. “I couldn’t predict how long my shipmates might search for Esau and me. Meriwether needed to find ways to discourage trappers and settlers from getting into the likely search area. Had there been a third incident, my people might have concluded you people were already too dangerous.”

Ways like withholding publication of the expedition’s journals. Like getting himself nominated by Jefferson and confirmed by the Senate as territorial governor. In that office, Lewis had delayed westward expansion, not least through conflict with tribes whose good graces he had once cultivated.

I said, “Oh, and I see another reason for delay. Before rejoining you, Meriwether had to stage his financial problems, depression, death, and burial. That couldn’t have been easy. But what was that about ‘already too dangerous?’”

“That’s enough,” Harry decreed, standing. “Tomorrow is another day.”

 

~~~

 

The camouflaged library, not my guest quarters, was to be locked overnight. That left me free to slip away with the scoop of the millenium—but neither any explanation for these incredible events, nor proof. As Geoff, Harry, and their undisclosed... colleagues? cronies? coconspirators?... had anticipated (by bedtime that first night, my closet and dresser offered several changes of clothes in about my size), I stayed.

I had to know the why of everything. Why had Harry defected, and why had his people been so determined to stop him? Why had Gramps and TJ kept his secret? What, if anything, did they (and, I was all but certain, William Clark) conspire to accomplish? And why did the family still protect secrets more than two centuries old?

Perhaps Harry slept that night. Certainly I didn’t. Around two in the morning, I went for a ramble about. Geoff had told me to remain on the ninth level, much of which was dedicated to the “Lewis family project.” For a time I did, but mysteries barely glimpsed up and down the grand central staircase got the better of me. By penlight, I explored. I don’t claim to understand the square-and-compass symbols all over the temple, or the altar in the third floor lodge room, with its velvet-covered kneeler and anachronistic electric candles, or the mindset behind the incongruous art-deco touches. I didn’t need to know anything about the Masons to appreciate the massive marble columns, the cathedral ceiling of an unfinished auditorium, and the grand, two-storied, marble-tiled lobby—or to put a name to the larger-than-life statue that dominated said lobby. Without doubt, that was Thomas Jefferson.

Before I could survey even a small portion of the temple’s wonders and excesses, a short, barrel-chested man rushed out of a dim side corridor. He was unmistakably a Lewis, notwithstanding the sagging, St. Bernard jowls of old age. He said, “I must insist you come upstairs with me.”

“I’m merely admiring the architecture, Mr. Lewis,” I rebutted. “Anyway, the public is allowed on this floor.”

“On particular occasions, scheduled and well monitored. As for my name, it’s Doctor Wilson. It’s Vincent, if we can skip being so formal. But indeed, I am a Lewis on my mother’s side. Geoffrey is my nephew. Come with me, please.”

“Maybe later. Or feel free to walk with me.”

Vincent shook his head. “You have been afforded a rare glimpse of secrets little known even among the orders permitted broad access to the temple. That privilege doesn’t make you a Mason, nor does it entitle you to wander wherever you wish, much less to do so unescorted.”

“So escort me. I need to stretch my legs after sitting all day.”

We compromised on walking circuits around the unfinished auditorium. Apart from several stacks of chairs against the side walls, the vast space was empty. Vincent raised the lights enough to walk about safely and, incidentally, to reveal vibrant stained-glass windows. Thick carpet swallowed the pad of our footsteps.

Midway through our second circuit, I burst out, “Why? Why did Harry stay on Earth?”

“Are you sure?” Vincent let out a deep breath. “The answer goes beyond family lore, into matters that reverberate even today. There will be no going back once you know.”

“I’m sure.”

“Well,” Vincent said, pointing to the nearest of the chair stacks, “I think it’s best you sit some more.”

 

~~~

 

The bottom line: Hroath civilization was paranoid and murderous. Their saving grace—in the most minimalist possible meaning of the phrase—was a trace of conscience. Not every intelligence encountered by their starships merited reflexive genocide.

“How?” I shivered.

“They have a variety of tools,” Vincent said. “Biotech plagues. Dropping big rocks. Erupting a supervolcano, like Yellowstone. I don’t understand all the possibilities. Maybe no human does. It’s enough that Harry knows. And that, fortunately, he had his doubts humanity needed to be hurled back into a stone age.”

“Is he helping us progress faster, to protect ourselves?”

“Quite the opposite.” Vincent cleared his throat. “You’re certain you want to know?”

“At this point, I couldn’t stand not knowing.”

“I understand.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “The Great Silence spooked the Hroath. You know about that?”

Occasionally it paid to work for the Truth. “On the one hand, there are stars and planets all around. So why not life, and intelligence, and radio chatter? On the other hand, after decades of listening, radio astronomers have yet to hear any alien transmissions. And so what? Maybe we’ll hear something tomorrow. There are lots of possible explanations, starting with we are alone.” I laughed nervously. “Okay, having met Harry, I know that possibility doesn’t hold water.”

“Exactly one candidate explanation for the Great Silence matters: the belief that drives Hroath civilization. Preemption. It would take only a single advanced but genocidal civilization to stomp out the rest. For centuries, the Hroath have been in a panic that whoever caused the Great Silence will, sooner or later, come after them. So, Hroath technology is optimized to not draw attention. No high-powered radio, for example.”

“And what has that to do with us?”

Vincent said, “Hroath silence won’t suffice if their neighbors are shouting. Any civilization they come across with radio or interstellar travel, or even with the near-term potential to develop either, they squash.”

Squash. As one would a bug. “J-jeez.”

“Jeez, indeed.”

I willed my voice steady. “And Harry disagreed?”

“In our case, anyway. He thought it wasn’t too late to redirect us.”

“I guess I’m not following.” That was seriously understating my confusion. “Steamboats and hot-air balloons were high tech when Harry met Meriwether Lewis.”

“Hroath look for habitable worlds. If they find one unoccupied, they might settle it. When a world is inhabited by an intelligent species, they monitor for signs of dangerous progress. The more developed a civilization they find, the more frequently they return to... assess it.”

And maybe squash it. I shivered.

“Technology had advanced considerably in the thousand or so years since Earth had last been visited. Humanity wasn’t yet announcing itself to the cosmos—no radios or starships!—but the pace of inspections would be stepped up. Before Harry defected, his shipmates were considering whether a follow-up visit was in order in as little as another hundred years.”

My aptitude for trivia kicked in. The Titanic sank in 1912 and—for all the good it had done—she had broadcast a distress call. And that wouldn’t have been the first use of radio! “A hundred years after Harry met Meriwether, Earth had radio. Why weren’t we stomped flat?”

Vincent yawned into his hand. “A hundred years on their home world. That’s more like 140 years on Earth. Let’s just say humanity dodged a bullet—but you can see why the Lewis clan does what it can to discourage certain kinds of tech.”

The divining of Meriwether Lewis’s hidden past had sometimes come maddeningly slowly, like the drip... drip... drip of Chinese water torture. This conversation came at an opposite aqueous extreme: like trying to drink from a fire hose. Questions—some half-formed, many far less—filled my brain, jostling for egress one against another. I managed to get out, “If the point is to assess Earth’s technology, why inspect the western Louisiana Territory in 1805? It was hardly a center of civilization.”

“Have you seen Harry?” Vincent yawned once more. “A Hroa doesn’t exactly blend into a human crowd. So, they visited rural areas, found natives in isolation, learned various languages, and observed and inferred what they could about our native technology. Besides”—elaborate, jaw-unhinging yawn—“scientists and inventors generally work in population centers. The Hroath never want to inspire a native inventor by flying shuttles anywhere near cities.”

“But why inspect in the Americas at all? In Meriwether’s day, the Old World had far bigger cities and its share of undeveloped regions.”

“Harry can’t explain that.” Vincent leaned forward in his chair. “I mean, he has an answer, but it involves his people’s theories of social and technological development, neither of which was his field. But the fact of the matter is, the Hroath were right. I mean, the United States did soon become a technological leader, then the technological leader, on Earth. If Harry can’t explain how his shipmates predicted that outcome, perhaps Napoleon did.”

I knew exactly two Napoleon quotes. The one about taking Vienna couldn’t possibly have applied, so I tried the second. “Geography is destiny?”

“Maybe so.”

Among my many remaining questions, I chose, “So why did Harry defect?”

“Because he...,” Vincent yawned yet again. Glancing at his wrist, he winced, then stood. “Come with me.”

I tried again. “But why did Harry—”

“You can ask him tomorrow.”

Only I never saw Harry again.

 

~~~

 

Back in my temporary quarters, exhausted and exhilarated, I struggled to piece together all I’d read and heard that past few hours. It was too much, too fast. I couldn’t pull it off, at least until I slept. So I lay down, pulled the extra pillow over my head, tossed fitfully—and bolted upright.

Harry and Lewis met in 1805. “About 140 years,” Vincent had said of the likely next Hroath inspection. About. Make it 142 years, and you came to 1947. The year that, for anyone who read or wrote for any tabloid, screamed: Roswell UFO incident. Had American armed forces shot down a Hroath spacecraft?

Olivia had posed a neat historical mystery, safely two centuries past. Only it wasn’t past, was it? Roswell wasn’t very long ago, not really, and Harry was quite in the present.

Another Harry, uninvited, elbowed into my thoughts. The president in 1947 was Harry Truman. Near the entrance to the presidential library I’d toured near Kansas City, just a couple weeks earlier, a road sign pointed to Truman’s home—and yet then-Senator Truman had been grandmaster of this Masonic lodge. In St. Louis. Coincidence? I’d ceased to believe in them.

My thoughts skittered back to discussing the death of Meriwether Lewis’s servant, John Pernier. How casually Geoff Lewis had responded, “Why do you ask? Did you intend to blackmail us?”

In full tabloid, dot-connecting mode, my mind took another leap. Are your sneakers ratting you out? I’d never gotten around to pitching that article, but I recalled the surfing that had led to its premise. Radio-frequency ID chips, RFIDs, were sewn into expensive apparel for inventory control and to deter shoplifters. Vets used the tech to “chip” pets who might stray. Approach an RFID scanner and an RFID chip identifies itself with a short-range radio signal.

Vincent Wilson had never explained how he’d happened upon me as I prowled the night-empty temple. Had I been chipped? If yes, so much for the possibility I was free to leave whenever I chose.

The clothes I’d had on were in a heap beside the bed. I examined them carefully, peering beneath care instructions and labels, flexing every inch of seam. Nothing. My only footwear was the sneakers I’d worn here, and I imagined them too cheap to be tagged. I turned off the bedside lamp, lay down, closed my eyes—and groaned. Geoff had had my wallet and backpack.

An inch of seam gaped open between cloth liner and leather casing of my wallet. The area beneath the seam felt oddly stiff. I ripped more of the seam to work in a finger—and pulled out a plastic square covered in fine metallic traces. An RFID chip. I dropped it like a hot potato.

Obviously they didn’t trust me. What else could chipping me signify? And yet, Harry and both Lewis men had shared secrets with me. Because, having intruded, I was a guinea pig to see how a modern audience discovering the truth would react? Maybe. Plausibly. So, once the experiment concluded, then what? The John Pernier treatment for me?

It was time to get out.

I checked my own, dirty clothes before putting them on. No chips. I emptied out my backpack, searching its many pockets and compartments, and going through the miscellany and detritus I’d been carrying. No chips. I double-checked my wallet: no hidden RFIDs this time, but my single, usurious credit card had its own built-in chip. Could someone follow it through the building? I didn’t know and didn’t care to perform the experiment.

I also didn’t want to leave behind the card. The detritus from my backpack included two empty candy wrappers. The foil wrapper of a Hershey bar nicely enfolded the card. If it wasn’t quite a tin-foil hat, it should suffice.

The bedside clock showed 3:52 A.M. Wait any longer, and I’d have to wait another day—assuming, that was, I’d be allowed another day. I dressed, slipped on my backpack, turned out the room light, and slipped out the suite door.

 

~~~

 

A uniformed guard sat at the security desk beside the main door. No good. The first emergency exit I found was alarmed—and doubtless, every exterior door would be. Casing the joint, I’d seen sensor tape on the first- and second-floor windows. With neither rope nor suction-cup lifters, breaking a higher-story window wouldn’t help me get out. I was trapped unless....

Perhaps it was for the best that one of my questions had gone unposed.

This building dated only to the Roaring Twenties. So how, I had been wondering all day, had Harry gotten inside this temple? By dark of night, hoping no one would see? I had taken that risk for my climb—but I wasn’t part of a centuries-old conspiracy. I couldn’t see the Lewis cabal taking that same chance.

The Truth had written often enough of hidden passages and secret chambers in Masonic temples. I’d become sufficiently desperate to believe it, and sufficiently stressed to have a wild theory where an entrance might be found. And so, in the darkened main lobby, I poked, prodded, and patted the Thomas Jefferson statue. Faint traffic noises made themselves heard as the city began to stir. Stymied, I was on the verge of retreat when on a hunch I climbed onto the statue’s pedestal to shake TJ’s right hand.

In the wall behind the statue, a wooden panel silently slid open.

 

~~~

 

An ordinary switch plate just inside the secret passageway started the panel closing. I had entered with my penlight in hand, but I needn’t have bothered: lights came on overhead the moment the disguised panel had shut.

The secret, brick-lined tunnel would have made any medieval Knight Templar proud. Whether from foolishness or sleep deprivation, I summoned the whimsy to wish that flaming torches, and not dust-encrusted incandescent bulbs, were beckoning me onward. By the bulbs’ dim glow, I glimpsed side tunnels branching off the passageway I had entered. I ranged ahead about a hundred yards, peering down the openings. Which paths led only to culs de sac and arcane Masonic artifacts? Which led back to elsewhere in the temple? Which—if any—was the route by which Harry had made his way into the new temple, unseen? I chose the most traveled path, where my shoeprints would be least noticeable. Down and up uneven stairs I went, and along a meandering path, until my way came to an abrupt end.

Slowly, I retracted a rusty bolt, with only spit for lubricant as it squeaked. The heavy oaken door opened into a cavernous space, eerily silent. Cardboard cartons stacked high, wooden pallets leaning against the walls, and a musty atmosphere all suggested a warehouse. Exit signs glowed on three walls. Choosing the nearest exit, unable to disarm the clearly labeled alarm, I was outside like a shot. To the east, the sky showed traces of pink.

Ten minutes and several blocks later, as police sirens converged upon the warehouse, I flagged down a cab—it’s hard to Uber without a cell—and made my getaway to the nearest 24-hour diner.

 

~~~

 

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

      —John F. Kennedy, at a 1962 White House dinner of Nobel Prize winners

 

~~~

 

Coffee, waffles, and more coffee lifted my spirits. I was out. Safe. Prepared to let bygones be bygones, sleeping dogs (and Hroath) lie, and go home.

That plan lasted for about six seconds beyond the diner’s vestibule.

The weathered newspaper boxes outside the diner vended two tabloids, plus the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and USA Today. The Truth box offered nothing to catch my eye, not even a wendigo, but the competitor’s latest issue held me transfixed: Perp Walk! It’s the Truth! Beneath that screaming headline, Reginald Knowlton—my boss, Olivia’s father—stood, with head bowed, among grim-faced men in suits.

I bought a Star Inquisitor and a USA Today, then returned inside. “My meeting got held up,” I told the waitress. She couldn’t know otherwise, or that I had no cell on which to be contacted. I reclaimed my booth. “More coffee, please.”

On an inside page, USA Today reported Reggie’s arrest on charges of tax evasion. My newfound, coincidence-disbelieving worldview offered up another headline: Did ET Kill JFK to Stop Moon Landing?

I couldn’t picture Harry himself taking potshots, unnoticed, from the grassy knoll, but one of his Lewis friends? Absolutely. The cabal, Vincent had made clear, was all about holding back spaceflight. To suppress such capability—for humanity’s own good, admittedly—had to be why Harry had defected.

My hand, suddenly quaking, sloshed coffee over the newspapers.

Was the cabal murderously ruthless? Indeed, yes, even from the start—and that conviction drew upon more than the fate of John Pernier.

Jefferson had handpicked Meriwether Lewis for that famous first trek across the continent. Jefferson had consulted extensively with Lewis, overseen his training, and written detailed orders for the expedition. The result: but a single casualty, that due to illness, and complete success.

A few years later, Jefferson advised John Jacob Astor on what was to be the second transcontinental expedition, with far different consequences. Jefferson egged on Astor—whose ambitions for a western fur-trading empire were already grandiose—into expanding that expedition’s size and complexity. No matter that Astor’s plans, in part, anticipated following Lewis’s route west, no veteran of Lewis’s team came along. Yet more tellingly, two years after Meriwether Lewis’s “death,” Corps veteran John Colter made a cameo appearance in the Astoria saga. (In 1806, as I’ve related, Lewis had permitted Colter to leave the Corps early, joining fur trappers already heading up the Missouri. Colter had then diverted those trappers off the Corps’s route, south into the Yellowstone region.) When Colter “happened” to encounter Astor’s overland party on their ascent of the Missouri River, he persuaded them, too, to veer off the explored route. The outcomes of Astor’s expedition: sixty-one dead—a fatality rate exceeding forty percent; utter failure; and far-western expansion discouraged for decades.

Jefferson, clearly, had been a founding father of the cabal. Truman, I was as certain, had taken part generations after. What of other presidents? Presidential succession must have a darker side to it than I had ever imagined. Dark like my prospects....

Suppose that JFK and the cabal, for whatever reason, had not seen eye to eye. That the cabal took drastic action: in Dallas, in 1963. Did I believe that? More importantly, had subsequent presidents believed it?

Why else, in 1972, would Nixon have agreed to scuttle Apollo 18, the program’s final budgeted mission? All that glorious, expensive hardware wound up in a kumbaya meet-up with an Earth-orbiting Russian Soyuz. (And even then, had the repurposing come too late for the president? Had the cabal already orchestrated the Watergate break-in to force out Nixon?)

Why else, since Nixon, had president after president redirected—and starved for funds—the American manned space program? Build a reusable shuttle! No, build a space station! Retire the shuttle without any replacement. Plan to return to the moon, then on to Mars—but first we need a brand-new booster. No, let’s visit an asteroid—but first cancel the half-developed new booster and start designing a yet newer one from scratch. No, we’ll make the goal Mars again!

From Sputnik to the first manned moon landing took but twelve years. That’s the kind of thing humanity could accomplish. But in almost a half century, despite countless billions spent by NASA, no human had flown beyond low Earth orbit. That’s what the cabal had accomplished.

I’d already witnessed their influence over the National Park Service and deduced it at NASA. Why not also at the IRS? And often it would suffice for the cabal’s man in the Oval Office to steer the bureaucracy.

Did ET Kill JFK to Stop Moon Landing? That article had run only days before I’d broken into the temple. Of course the cabal had stomped on the Truth—and, if Reggie hadn’t identified me (and why wouldn’t he?), they would have seen through the Carl Markson byline as easily as had Olivia. I felt guilty about Knowlton, worried about Olivia—and terrified for myself.

 

~~~

 

I had passed a Walmart on my ride to the diner. I paid for my coffee and walked to the Walmart. With a burner cell in my pocket, I felt just a tad less isolated.

Not close to my biggest concern, but still worrisome: the rental car and hotel room running up charges against my credit card. I Ubered to the downtown garage where I’d left the car. My personal cell was in the glove box, powered down, as I had left it. Its battery went into the nearest trash basket, the cell itself into a dumpster blocks away, and the SIM card, snapped in half, down a sewer grate. I drove to the hotel—

And kept on driving. A man balancing two cups had been getting into the back of an unmarked white panel van. As seldom as I watched TV, I recognized a stakeout.

Two miles and four random turns later, I pulled over to the curb. I texted Olivia that my final lead had come up dry and to declare myself done, then texted again with sympathies about her father. I texted a third time, stay safe, not knowing what she could do with that admonition, unable not to send some warning.

The rest of the day was a blur. I abandoned the rental car in a long-term airport parking lot, rode the parking shuttle to the terminal, and then a local bus from Departures into the city. At a downtown office-supply store, I packaged and mailed the parking receipt, car keys, rental paperwork, and an excuse (Couldn’t find the return area... late for my flight). If the local postmark ends up confusing the rental company, so be it. I phoned the hotel, blamed oversleeping for my dash to the airport without checking out, and asked that they send my clothes to my New York address—uncertain when, or whether, I might go home.

And then, utterly spent, I checked into a cash-basis, no-questions-asked flophouse. There, no matter the foreboding and bedbugs, I slept. It was that, or die.

 

~~~

 

My dear Vincent and Geoffrey: I trust you are still reading. I further trust you will excuse the rehashing of events already familiar to you, as you will have inferred I mean this account to stand alone. As for my more dramatic passages, a popular history—as you will surely grant—must do more than recite dry fact.

Very well, now that we have an understanding....

Like Meriwether Lewis, I thought I might disappear. Did I appreciate the irony? Not really. True, for a few days I’ve stayed beneath the radar, but it’s unrealistic to expect I can keep it up. I possess neither the resources nor the wilderness skills to go underground.

That left me to adopt another course of action taken from the Lewis saga—and to hope I will fare better with the stratagem than did John Pernier. Hence, this journal. (As good as is my memory, I didn’t needlessly challenge it with the idiosyncratic, vaguely phonetic style Gramps favored. Notwithstanding my corrections to his oft-creative spelling, I trust you will agree I have memorized much of his private journal.) I have learned many things not commonly known. I can infer others:

Were the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs designed to wreck a booming, tech-driven economy? To force from the presidency that engineer and champion of progress, Herbert Hoover? Willis C. Hawley was, like both of you, a Mason.

Was Charles Lindbergh sincerely a Nazi sympathizer? Or was he—a St. Louis Mason—attempting, in his own way, to head off world war and the outpouring of technological advancement such existential conflict must—and in the event, did—provoke? When the war did break out, in a few short years it brought rockets, jets, the atomic bomb, and radar.

From the discovery of the neutron in 1932 to the atomic bomb took a mere thirteen years. Fusion power has been twenty years into the future... for about seventy years. Did the cabal stymie fusion research just as it has space exploration?

After decades of reliable service, the Russian space agency has endured a spate of launch accidents. Young, privately owned, American rocketry companies are having their own string of fiery failures. Unbelievably bad luck all around? Or, as I believe, the cabal’s doing?

And many, many more.

I don’t pretend to know whether you are saving humanity, or leading us, needlessly defenseless, to our doom. Perhaps, in honest, introspective moments, not even you know.

I suspect we don’t have long until another Hroath starship—or an armada of them—follows up on the vessel lost over Roswell. After that, well, none of this may matter. But until then? That’s where my private journal comes in.

Should Olivia, Delia Smith, or I be harmed, or die, or disappear? Then all bets are off. (And while I’m dictating terms, release Reginald Knowlton from IRS clutches. Yes, he’s a jerk, but without his training, I wouldn’t have survived. Besides, he’s Olivia’s father.) Then lawyers randomly selected in several states, whom I’ve entrusted with sealed copies of this journal, will deliver the files to major newspapers and to Wikileaks. Will any of them publish? I can’t be sure, but—and this is the point—neither can you.

P.S. Please give my best wishes to Harry.

 

 

[“Harry and the Lewises” first appeared in Analog (September/October 2018).]

 

~~~

 

I pretty much had to include the story which one reviewer described as, “a conspiracy that would have astonished Fox Mulder.”

There’s no reason you’d know that at an early age I’d toyed with history as a career (though by this point in the collection you might well have suspected). Regardless, teaching, noble a profession though it is, never appealed to me, and—like Ted—I have an addiction to regular meals. In the end, history became the road not taken. My fascination with the past, however, will out,³² as in the story you’ve just read. (This recurring interest’s most significant manifestation, the novel Countdown to Armageddon, involves time travel and a crisis in Dark Ages European history.) But I digress.

“Harry and the Lewises” reflects many personal connections. As I wrote it, I’d been for about thirty years a Virginian—ten years living in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. I’ve often been to Mr. Jefferson’s hometown of Charlottesville, and twice to his beloved Monticello. Returning from the 2016 Worldcon in Kansas City, MO, I’d gone to the Truman Presidential Library, the Lewis and Clark Exhibit in the Old St. Louis County Courthouse (turned museum), and up the Gateway Arch.

Should you wonder, my tabloid consumption is limited to front-page glimpses while waiting in grocery checkout lanes. Nor am I a Mason, although the Temple in the story is very real. It’s in plain view, as I’ve described, from the top of the Gateway Arch. Conveniently—for my purposes, anyway—the St. Louis lodge was once interested in selling this huge, and epically embellished, building; lots of interior photographs from the promotional materials ended up online. (Does that temple have secret passageways and tunnels? I can only hope.)

So far, “Harry and the Lewises” has no sequel—but I must confess: from time to time, I do wonder how the surely pending next Hroath visit might play out....