“A long, long time ago,” she said, “when things were very confused, there was a war that no one wanted. It was a time of upheaval, a time of fear. Our own police, supposedly sworn to protect, had turned on us. Some people left the country, to Canada, to Europe. Some put their heads down and endured, praying the horror would pass. And some, like Nadine Reynolds, protested peacefully. Nadine had grown up privileged, in Ohio. She came out here to college, to Berkeley. There she met a group of peace-seeking people, and shelent her presence to those who were trying to convince the politicians that what they were doing in Vietnam was wrong. But some of those gentle people had lost their way, too. They did things they shouldn’t have done, things they couldn’t see were just as wrong as what they were protesting against.”
Lucy Vesuvius got up, went to the stove, and held up the dented kettle. I shook my head. She poured more hot water into her cup, brought it back to the table, and watched the steam rise for a minute before continuing. “One night, the little group that Nadine had joined set off a small disturbance, a little explosion in the middle of the night, when no one was supposed to be around. Underneath a police car, just an empty police car, behind a police station.” She shook her head, still looking down at her tea. “There was a girl, come to see a rookie cop on his break. She was out in back, waiting in the parking lot. She got hit by a tiny part from the car. Just a bit of the outside mirror, the paper said, but it was enough to blind her.” Lucy raised her head. Her eyes were wet. “Don’t you suppose everyone knows that wasn’t supposed to happen?”
“I’m not here about that.”
She pulled a piece of paper towel from a roll on the table and dabbed at her eyes.
“It was Michael who built the bomb?”
She shook her head, hard. “No. Like Nadine, he had no idea the others were planning a bomb. It scared him. It made him angry. He was just home from Vietnam. He’d seen the horror, the wrongness of violence. All he wanted was for others to see that, too. But in the end, the people who’d built that bomb were no better than the people they were protesting against. That’s what war does, Michael said: It infects everybody.”
“And after the police car blew up?”
“The ones who’d set the explosive took off, shocked and scared by what they’d become. Nadine dropped out of school, came up here.”
“What about Michael?”
“He’d learned electrical in the Army and went down to L.A. to work construction. It was no different down there. The craziness was everywhere, and it wore at him like an infection. He told Nadine he was going to check out the heartland, the Midwest, to see if things were less agitated there.” She blew her nose with the paper towel. “They were going to get married, you know, Michael and Nadine. But too much had happened. They were both changed people. He took off, and she stayed up here, out of touch with it all, hoping Michael would come back and they could rebuild what they’d had. He never did come back.”
“But he calls.”
She shook her head. “He never did come back.”
“Betsy down at the store said he calls every few months.”
Lucy shook her head again.
“And he sends her money.”
She dropped her eyes, and her hand moved again to the pocket of her sundress.
“That twenty was from Michael, wasn’t it?”
She raised her head. “No telling. There’s never a letter.”
“Why doesn’t he write?”
She twisted the piece of paper towel she had in her hand. “What’s there to say?”
None of it was making sense. “Is he running? Are the police looking for him for that car bombing?”
“I told you, Michael wasn’t involved. When he went down to L.A., he kept on using his right name. If they’d been looking for him, they would have found him easy enough.”
“Then why doesn’t he write? Why send money with no letter?”
She managed a small smile. “He’s been doing that since he left. The message doesn’t have to be in words.”
“In 1970, his employer sent his paycheck here, after he quit working for them.”
She closed her eyes and smiled, thinking back. “For sure, thatwas strange. The check came with a note saying Michael had listed her name as somebody to contact. Nadine cashed the check and put the money in a cigar box. The money is still here.” She dabbed again at the corners of her eyes with the piece of paper towel. “Can you believe, still here after all this time, waiting for him?”
“You have no idea where he is?”
She forced a tight smile and looked right into my eyes. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
I stood up. “Thank you for the tea.”
“Thank you for the mail.”
I walked around the table and let myself out the back door. I sat on the stoop to put on my shoes. After a glance backward to make sure she wasn’t watching out the window, I fished the blank piece of paper and the envelope out of the plastic tub and stuffed them in my pocket.
I drove back south through Clarinda. The V.W. bus and the faded Reliant were gone from the Inn, their people fortified for another day. After a few miles, I pulled off at an observation point, got out my duffel, and wrapped the envelope and the sheet of paper inside a clean shirt. It was a long shot, but all there had been was long shots. Maybe A.T.F. could find a fingerprint on the sheet of paper.
I watched the waves pound the big rocks down below and thought about Lucy Vesuvius. I’d believed her when she told me that Michael Jaynes, service-trained demolitions expert, disillusioned war protester, skilled electrician, and authentic angry man, had taken off for the Midwest long ago. I’d believed her when she said he never wrote, just sent the occasional ten- or twenty-dollar bill wrapped in blank paper. I’d believed her when she said she’d never tell where he was, whether she knew or not.
And I believed she hadn’t seen him, at least not recently. Fromthe way she tore at the envelope I’d brought, she was too hungry for news of him.
It was that envelope that nagged the most. I couldn’t figure the twenty-dollar bill she’d just received. It was such small change, enough only for a few groceries. A ten or a twenty might have been all he’d been able to spare in the years past, but now he had half a million, enough to stuff an envelope full of hundreds. But the envelope I’d brought her, postmarked after the money pickup, had contained only another twenty.
Till’s people would have to get on it. I picked up the cell phone to call him. The display still read NO SERVICE. I set it down on the seat, started the Sebring, and drove on.
My phone started chirping with message alerts two miles south of Bodega Bay. I was on the inland stretch then and pulled off on a gravel road next to a horse farm. I punched in my voice mail code. There were seven messages from Leo and four from Stanley.
I got Leo on his cell phone.
“Where the hell have you been, Dek?”
“Surfing, beach parties, hot tubs with implanted California girls-”
“Anton Chernek was arrested by the F.B.I. yesterday afternoon.”
I stared at the corral across the road. The horses had stopped moving.
“Dek?”
“I heard you. F.B.I., not A.T.F.?”
“F.B.I., Financial Crimes. One of Chernek’s clients accused him of stealing from her account. What’s interesting is that the story is on page three of today’s Tribune, which means the reporters have been tipped there’s more than what’s in the ink. Embezzlement cases usually are reported in the metro or business sections. So there’s more news to come.”
“Any mention of the problem I’m working on?”
“None yet.”
I stared at the horses.
“Maybe you were right, Dek. Needing money bad enough to embezzle from clients might have made the Bohemian desperate enough to extort money from Gateville.”