Lineage (30 page)

“Thanks for meeting us here,” Lance said, as Harold led them farther into the building. “I’m guessing you’re not normally open on Sundays.”

Harold swatted his hand at the comment like it was a buzzing insect. “
It’s
fine, it’s fine. I wasn’t doing anything anyway, much to the chagrin of Josie.
Happy to help you out.”

Harold opened a swinging door to a small kitchen. A narrow table had been set up with three chairs around it, and Lance could smell coffee brewing.

“Sit down and I’ll pour us a cup,” Harold said, as Lance and Mary pulled two of the chairs close to the table and sat.

After a moment, Harold returned holding a platter with three mugs of steaming coffee and a few tea cakes resting between them. The cakes looked like dried-up Ping-Pong balls. They sat for a while in silence, sipping the coffee and listening to the distant patter of the rain.

Harold motioned to the platter. “Help yourself.” Neither Lance nor Mary made a move for the cakes, and Harold sighed. “Yeah, they taste like shit. Josie makes them, so I bring them here to be polite. She thinks I love them.” Lance raised his eyebrows at Mary and she laughed into her hand. “So, what did you want to know, my boy? Mary mentioned you never knew your grandfather at all.”

Lance nodded. “My family wasn’t very close and I grew up near the cities, so …” Lance trailed off.

Harold had his eyes shut with a knowing look on his face. “Say no more, my boy.
Sounds very familiar.
I came from a family that didn’t talk—they yelled.
And with what happened up there at the house, who could blame your father for not telling you.
I suppose he wanted to protect you from something hurtful like that.”

Lance couldn’t help but huff a cynical laugh. Harold looked at him, and then at Mary. Lance just shook his head, and the older man shrugged and sipped his coffee.

“Sorry, I’m guessing you didn’t know my father. I think if he knew it would’ve hurt me, he would’ve told me. Anyhow, I guess I’d like to know about Erwin’s murder. John filled me in on the earlier history, but he was a little vague with the details about what actually happened up there.”

Harold sipped at his coffee again and then set it on the table before crossing his bony arms over his slight chest.

“History is nasty business sometimes. The thing that people forget is that when something happens, it doesn’t just die and fade away. Not anymore. Maybe a few thousand years ago it would’ve, but not now. No, there are people like me who remember everything. That’s what I was made to do: collect, categorize, and remember when others can’t or won’t.” Harold looked out of a nearby window and watched the sheets of rain cascade into the alley behind the building, his eyes lost in thought.

Finally he looked back to Lance, and then dropped his eyes to the table. “Aaron
Haff
. I remember the day that he walked in here.
Good-looking man.
Dark
hair, strong build
.
Couldn’t really tell his age.
He moved like a young man, but when you got up close, you realized his eyes were old, like he’d been through more than his mind could handle and it pushed him past his years. Jocelyn was working here with me then. She was all of twenty-five, and God, was she pretty.” Harold paused and looked at Lance. He must have read the expression on the younger man’s face.
“My daughter.
I could see right away they were taken with each other. That Aaron, his whole demeanor changed when she walked out of the back.” Harold leaned forward and rapped his knuckles on the wood of the table. “But I could’ve
swore
it was sincere. As much as I didn’t know that man, he was polite and courteous in a way that disarmed you. Jocelyn showed him around that day, and the last thing I heard him ask her was if she’d like to get a drink with him.”

“John said that he asked questions about Erwin when he arrived. Was Jocelyn the one who told him what he wanted to know?” Lance asked.

Harold rubbed his arms through his sweater as if he were cold. “I’m afraid so. He rented a room at the hotel here in town and came in almost every day of the week. I overheard him asking Josie one afternoon if she knew what part of
Germany
the
Metzgers
had come from. No one really knew that, not around here anyway.” Harold swallowed and frowned, the memory darkening his eyes.

Lance leaned forward toward the older man. “What happened at the end of the week?”

Harold grimaced as if the coffee had turned sour. “He came in here that day. He was talking to Jocelyn in the front of the museum area, right by the door. I heard her say ‘Why?’ a little too loud for regular conversation, so I peeked around the edge of an exhibit we had set up near the back of the shop. That Aaron was holding her hands in front of him like a soldier about to go off to war. I could see she was crying, and I was about to step out and ask if everything was all right when he just let go of her and walked out the door. She watched him go through the window.

“It was raining like this that day. We heard the sirens around one in the afternoon. The cars blazed right through town and kept going. None of us had the foggiest about what was happening. It was only later when a neighbor of mine came in, whose brother was a sheriff’s
deputy, that
we found out. From what he said, Aaron drove right up to the house and parked outside. Walked up to the front door and kicked it in. Erwin and Annette were in the living room watching the lake, and Erwin came out to meet him just next to the stairs there. After that, it gets a little hazy, and all the sheriff had to go off of was the ballistics report. Apparently, Aaron made Erwin kneel down before him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. Annette saw the whole thing.”

Harold shook his head in dismay, his color paling. “As far as I know, she’s never spoken again. I asked Jocelyn what he’d asked her during that week, and she’d just said normal questions about the
Metzgers
: what their business was, who knew them in town, what they were like. When I asked her what he’d said to her that day before he left to go kill your grandfather, she got real quiet. I had to pester her a little, until she finally told me he’d just come to say goodbye and that he was sorry.”

“Sorry?” Lance asked.

“Yes. That he was sorry he’d met her when he did. At the time she didn’t know what to think. Afterwards, she slowly closed herself off. You see, a few people had seen them out together having a drink and, well, you know how small towns are.”

Lance nodded. Harold sipped his coffee again before he continued.

“She moved away a month after Erwin was killed, just up and gone one day.
Didn’t call Josie or me until nearly a week later, and we worried ourselves sick while we waited.
She just said she couldn’t live here after what happened, couldn’t stand to look people in the face. I told her it was
nonsense, that
she should come home, but she wouldn’t have it. She felt responsible on some level, telling Aaron what she did without knowing what he was planning. I think she felt so betrayed, also, that the thought of setting foot back here again was like tearing an old scar open.”

“If you gave me her number, do you think she would talk with me? I’d just like to know a little …” Lance trailed off as Mary’s hand squeezed his arm, and when he looked at her, her head shook from side to side.

“I’m sorry, but she passed away a little over a year after she left home,” Harold said, his voice breaking like dry kindling. “She fell asleep at the wheel of her car one night. We’d visited her a few times just before it happened. She finally told us where she’d gone—a little town in northern
Iowa
, just across the border. We had the funeral there too. We figured she wouldn’t have wanted to come home.” Tears leaked from the corners of Harold’s eyes; the sound that might have gone with them had dried up over the years. All that remained was the man’s memory of his daughter and the unavoidable grief that it brought.

“God, I’m so sorry,” Lance said, but Harold sniffled once and shook his head.

“It’s okay. I just loved her so
much,
it’s still hard to believe she’s been gone for over thirty years.”

The room fell silent in the wake of the older man’s words. The rain tapped against the window, asking to be let in, and receding thunder grumbled at the tossing waves of the lake.

After several minutes, Harold cleared his throat and took his glasses off to be polished repetitively by a practiced hand. “Mary said you wanted to know about something else too? Rhinelander, was it?”

Lance nodded, trying to shake off the guilt he felt for making the other man expound on his daughter’s death. “Yes. I heard someone say that he was a missing person?” Lance tried to sound casual, not wanting to delve into the details of his visit to
Riverside
.

“Gerald Rhinelander. Yes, that was a mystery.” Harold stood from his chair, motioning for them to follow.

They left their coffee on the table and walked after the older man as he
zigged
and
zagged
through the interconnecting paths of relics. Lance marveled at how quiet the building seemed.
How still.
Perhaps it was the passage of time suspended in increments everywhere he looked. The bottling of history all in one place instead of evenly spread out.

Harold came to a stop before a table with several leather-bound albums on its surface. He selected one from the rear of the table, a coat of dust layering its dark cover. He turned and flipped it open, squinting as he turned the stiff pages.

“Gerald Rhinelander was a young man who lived in this area back in the late sixties. Worked for your grandfather’s shipping company, actually, now that I think about it. He disappeared on the eighth of October, 1968. He was supposed to meet his ex-wife for dinner that night but never showed. She reported him missing the next day when she went to his house and didn’t see his car or any sign of him. The police finally went into his place when he didn’t turn up after a few days. Nothing seemed out of place. Actually, his wallet was still there.”

Harold flipped another page and then nodded, turning the album so Lance and Mary could read the clipped, faded article plastered beneath the clear plastic that held it in place. Lance read the brief report, no more than a blurb about Gerald’s disappearance, and searched for something that he would recognize within the print. Nothing jumped out at him, and Mary shook her head too, reading his thoughts.

“So did they ever find anything? Any leads or reasons for the disappearance?” Mary asked, handing the album back to Harold, who closed it and set it back in its place on the table.

“No, not really.
Apparently they interviewed a few of his fellow workers and his supervisor, but everything came up a dead end. Some people said suicide, but that didn’t ring true either. That was why it was such a mystery. Why
would a young
man, in the prime of his life, suddenly up and leave a decent job, his home, and an ex-wife that he was trying to rekindle a relationship with? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Why was he meeting his ex-wife? Were there children involved?” Lance asked.

“No, no children. From what I heard, he and his ex were merely trying to make amends. They had gotten married young and divorced young, but still lived in the same town. They were having dinner that night as a first date, so to speak.”

Lance frowned. Rhinelander didn’t seem to be anything other than a repeated name on his grandmother’s crossword. Perhaps she’d met him and he’d made an impression on her, since he had worked for his grandfather’s company. Maybe the name somehow seemed important to the torn rigging of her mind and she couldn’t get past the letters she wrote down each time she had pencil and paper.

Harold flipped through another album, his brow wrinkled in concentration. Mary shifted from foot to foot and gave a shrug as Lance looked at her, as if to say,
It
was worth a shot.

“This is the only other article I have on the disappearance,” Harold said as he handed the new album to Lance.

The column of print offset to the side of the page was just a few paragraphs, but that was not what held Lance’s gaze as his eyes widened in shock.

A black-and-white picture was pasted next to it. He could see light colored hair hanging carelessly over the man’s forehead and an easy smile on his face, the picture obviously one from a happy time in his life. The eyes twinkled at Lance through over forty years of time as he stared at Gerald Rhinelander, the main character from his novel.

The storm had relented somewhat by the time they were back on the highway, headed toward Lance’s house. The rain sprinkled without a break, keeping the wipers at a steady rhythm on the Land Rover’s windshield. The sky remained dark overhead, and had even deepened with the coming afternoon. The waves still rolled over one another on the lake whenever Lance caught a glimpse of them as they drove in silence along the narrow highway.

He’d tried to conceal his surprise at the sight of Gerald’s photo, but both Mary and Harold had noticed. He recovered as quick as he could, telling Harold that the man looked like someone he used to know for an instant. Shortly thereafter, Mary had excused them both, saying that they had another appointment to get to. As an afterthought, Lance left his cell-phone number with the historical director in case he came across anything else that might be of importance. The moment they were in the car, Lance explained what had happened. Mary’s thoughtful silence only added weight to the heavy feeling that had settled over him with each turn his life had taken recently. They hadn’t spoken since leaving town, and Lance didn’t feel like talking anymore. His fingers rested lightly on the wheel and he tried to keep his breathing in time with the stroke of the wipers.