The office of the Fort Farrell Recorder seemed to be more concerned with jobbing printing than with the production of a newspaper, but my first question was answered satisfactorily by the young girl who was the whole of the staff — at least, all of it that was in sight.
‘Sure we keep back copies. How far do you want to go back?’
‘About ten years.’
She grimaced. ‘You’ll want the bound copies, then. You’ll have to come into the back office.’ I followed her into a dusty room. ‘What was the exact date?’
I had no trouble in remembering that — everyone knows his own birthday. ‘Tuesday, September 4th, 1956.’
She looked up at a shelf and said helplessly, ‘That’s the one up there. I don’t think I can reach it.’
‘Allow me,’ I said, and reached for it. It was a volume the size and weight of a dozen Bibles and it gave me a lot less trouble than it would have given her! I supposed it weighed pretty near as much as she did.
She said, ‘You’ll have to read it in here; and you mustn’t cut the pages — that’s our record copy.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised, and put it on a deal table. ‘Can I have a light, please?’
‘Sure.’ She switched on the light as she went out.
I pulled up a chair and opened the heavy cover of the book. It contained two years’ issues of the Fort Farrell Recorder — one hundred and four reports on the health and sickness of a community; a record of births and deaths, joys and sorrows, much crime and yet not a lot, all things considered, and a little goodness — there should have been more but goodness doesn’t make the headlines. A typical country newspaper.
I turned to the issue of September 7th — the week-end after the accident — half afraid of what I would find, half afraid I wouldn’t find anything. But it was there and it had made the front page headlines, too. It screamed at me in heavy black letters splashed across the yellowing sheet: JOHN TRINAVANT DIES IN AUTO SMASH.
Although I knew the story by heart, I read the newspaper account with care and it did tell me a couple of things I hadn’t known before. It was a simple story, regrettably not uncommon, but one which did not normally make headlines as it had done here. As I remembered, it rated a quartercolumn at the bottom of the second page of the Vancouver Sun and a paragraph filler in Toronto.
The difference was that John Trinavant had been a power in Fort Farrell as being senior partner in the firm of Trinavant and Matterson. God the Father had suddenly died and Fort Farrell had mourned. Mourned publicly and profusely in black print on white paper.
John Trinavant (aged 56) had been travelling from Dawson Creek to Edmonton with his wife, Anne (no age given), and his son, Frank (aged 22). They had been travelling in Mr Trinavant’s new car, a Cadillac, but the shiny new toy had never reached Edmonton. Instead, it had been found at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot cliff not far off the road. Skid marks and slashes in the bark of trees had shown how the accident happened. ‘Perhaps,’ said the coroner, ‘it may be that the car was moving too fast for the driver to be in proper control. That, however, is something no one will know for certain.’
The Cadillac was a burnt-out hulk, smashed beyond repair. Smashed beyond repair were also the three Trinavants, all found dead. A curious aspect of the accident, however, was the presence of a fourth passenger, a young man now identified as Robert Grant, who had been found alive, but only just so, and who was now in the City Hospital suffering from third-degree burns, a badly fractured skull and several other assorted broken bones. Mr Grant, it was tentatively agreed, must have been a hitchhiker whom Mr Trinavant, in his benevolence, had picked up somewhere on the way between Dawson Creek and the scene of the accident. Mr Grant was not expected to live. Too bad for Mr Grant.
All Fort Farrell and, indeed, all Canada (said the leader writer) should mourn the era which had ended with the passing of John Trinavant. The Trinavants had been connected with the city since the heroic days of Lieutenant Farrell and it was a grief (to the leader writer personally) that the name of Trinavant was now extinguished in the male line. There was, however, a niece, Miss C. T. Trinavant, at present at school in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was to be hoped that this tragedy, the death of her beloved uncle, would not be permitted to interrupt the education he had so earnestly desired to give her.
I sat back and looked at the paper before me. So Trinavant had been a partner of Matterson — but not the Matterson I had met that day because he was too young. At the time of the smash he would have been in his early twenties — say about the age of young Frank Trinavant who was killed, or about my age at that time. So there must be another Matterson — Howard Matterson’s father, presumably — which made Howard the Crown Prince of the Matterson empire. Unless, of course, he had already succeeded.
I sighed as I wondered what devil of coincidence had brought me to Fort Farrell; then I turned to the next issue and found — nothing! There was no follow on to the story in that issue or the next. I searched further and found that for the next year the name of Trinavant was not mentioned once — no follow-up, no obituary, no reminiscences from readers — nothing at all. As far as the Fort Farrell Recorder was concerned, it was as though John Trinavant had never existed — he had been unpersonned.
I checked again. It was very odd that in Trinavant’s home town — the town where he was virtually king — the local newspaper had not coined a few extra cents out of his death. That was a hell of a way to run a newspaper!
I paused. That was the second time in one day that I had made the same observation — the first time in relation to Howard Matterson and the way he ran the Matterson Corporation. I wondered about that and that led me to something else — who owned the Fort Farrell Recorder?
The little office girl popped her head round the door. ‘You’ll have to go now; we’re closing up.’
I grinned at her. ‘I thought newspaper offices never closed.’
‘This isn’t the Vancouver Sun,’ she said. ‘Or the Montreal Star.’
It sure as hell isn’t, I thought.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she asked.
I followed her into the front office. ‘I found some answers, yes; and a lot of questions.’ She looked at me uncomprehendingly. I said, ‘Is there anywhere a man can get a cup of coffee round here?’
‘There’s the Greek place right across the square.’
‘What about joining me?’ I thought that maybe I could get some answers out of her.
She smiled. ‘My mother told me not to go out with strange men. Besides, I’m meeting my boy.’
I looked at all the alive eighteen years of her and wished I were young again — as before the accident. ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ I said.
‘Perhaps.’
I left her inexpertly dabbing powder on her nose and headed across the square with the thought that I’d get picked up for kidnapping if I wasn’t careful. I don’t know why it is, but in any place that can support a cheap eatery — and a lot that can’t — you’ll find a Greek running the local coffee-and-doughnut joint. He expands with the community and brings in his cousins from the old country and pretty soon, in an average-size town, the Greeks are running the catering racket, splitting it with the Italians who tend to operate on a more sophisticated level. This wasn’t the first Greek place I’d eaten in and it certainly wouldn’t be the last — not while I was a poverty-stricken geologist chancing his luck.