“Sorry, Petey, you have to go home.”
“But …”
“You’re just too little. You’d hold up the game.”
His eyes had glistened with the threat of tears.
To my later shame, I’d worried about what my friends would think if my kid brother started crying around them. “I mean it, Petey. Bug off. Go home. Watch cartoons or something.”
His chin had quivered.
“Petey, I’m telling you, go. Scram. Get lost.”
My friends had run toward where the other kids were choosing sides for the game. As I’d rushed to join them, I’d heard the
clackclackclack
of Petey’s bike. I’d looked back toward where the little guy was pedaling away. His head was down.
Standing now by the bicycle rack, remembering how things had been, wishing with all my heart that I could return to that moment and tell my friends that they were jerks, that Petey was going to stay with me, I wept.
Unlike the baseball field, the house had changed a great deal. In fact, the whole street had. The trees were taller (to be expected), and there were more of them, as well as more shrubs and hedges. But those changes weren’t what struck me. In my youth, the neighborhood had been all single—story ranch houses, modest homes for people who worked at the factory where my dad had been a foreman. But now second stories had been added to several of the houses, or rooms had been added to the back, taking away most of the rear yards. Both changes had occurred to the house I’d lived in. The front porch had been enclosed to add space to the living room. The freestanding single—car garage at the end of the driveway had been rebuilt into a double—car garage with stairs leading up to a room.
Parking across the street, seeing the red of the setting sun reflected off the house’s windows, I was so startled by the change that I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t on the right street (but the sign had clearly said Locust) or maybe this wasn’t the right house (but the number 108 was fixed vertically next to the front door, just as it had been in my youth). I felt absolutely no identification with the place. In my memory, I saw a different, simpler house, the one from which my dad and I had hurried that evening, scrambling into his car, rushing toward the baseball diamond in hopes of finding Petey loitering along the way.
A wary man from the property next door came out and frowned at me, as if to say, What are you staring at?
I put the car in gear. As I drove away, I noticed half a dozen FOR SALE signs, remembering that in the old days everyone on the street had been so dependent on the furniture factory that no one had ever moved.
Mr. Faraday had thin lips and pinched cheeks. “My wife says your brother died or something?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you need the dental records? To identify him?”
“He disappeared a long time ago. Now we might have found him.”
“His body?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if it wasn’t something important like that, I wouldn’t go to the trouble.” Faraday motioned me into the house. I heard a television from the living room as he opened a door halfway along the corridor to the kitchen. The quick impression I got was of excessive neatness, everything in its place, plastic covers on chair arms in the living room, pots on hooks in the kitchen, lids above them, everything arranged by size.
Cool air rose from the open basement door. Faraday flicked a light switch and gestured for me to follow. Our descending footsteps thumped on sturdy wooden stairs.
I’d never seen a basement so carefully organized. It was filled with boxes stacked in rows that formed mini—corridors, but there wasn’t the slightest sense of clutter and chaos.
Two fans whirred: from dehumidifiers at each end of the basement.
“I can’t get rid of the dampness down here,” Faraday said. He took me along one of the minicorridors, turned left, and came to a corner, where he lifted boxes off a footlocker.
“What can I do to help?” I asked.
“Nothing. I don’t want to get things mixed up.”
He raised the lid on the locker, revealing bundles of documents. “My wife complains about all the stuff I save, but how do I know what I might need later on?” Faraday pointed toward a stack of boxes farther along. “All my tax returns.” He pointed toward another stack of boxes. “The bills I’ve paid. And
this
stuff …” He indicated the documents in the locker. “My father’s business records. The ones I could find, anyway.” He sorted through the bundles and came up with a stack of file folders. “What was your brother’s name?”
“Peter Denning.”
“Denning. Let’s see. Denning. Denning. Ann. Brad. Nicholas.
Peter
. Here.” His voice was filled with satisfaction as he held out the file.
I tried to keep my hand steady when I took it.
“What about these others? Do you want yours? Who are Ann and Nicholas?”
“My parents.” I felt heavy in my chest. “Yes, if it’s okay with you, I’ll take them all.”
“My wife’ll be thrilled to see me getting rid of some of this stuff.”
By the time I got back to the car, dusk had set in. I had to switch on the interior lights so I could see to search through Petey’s file. No longer able to keep my hand from trembling, I pulled out a set of X rays. I’d never touched anything so valuable.
Back in Denver, when I’d gone to the dentist to get a copy of the X rays he’d taken of the man who claimed to be my brother, I’d made sure to get a duplicate set in case the FBI lost the ones I gave them or in case I needed copies in my search. Now I could barely wait to get to a motel. Driving to the outskirts of town, I picked the first one I saw that had a vacancy. After checking in, I rushed to my room, too hurried to bring everything from my car except my suitcase, which I yanked open, pulling out the X rays from Denver.
A child’s teeth and an adult’s have major differences, which made it difficult to tell if these X rays came from the same person. For one thing, when Petey had been kidnapped, some of his permanent teeth would not yet have grown in. But
some
of them would have, my dentist had said. Look at the roots, he’d said. On a particular tooth, are there three roots or four? Four are less common. Do the roots grow in any unusual directions?
With the adult’s X rays in my left hand and the child’s in my right, I held them up to my bedside lamp. But its shade blocked much of the illumination. I almost took off the shade before I thought of the bathroom and the bright lights that motels often have there. Hurrying past the bed, I found that this particular motel had a large mirror in front of a makeup area. When I jabbed the light switch, I blinked from the sudden glare above the mirror. After raising both sets of X rays to the fluorescent lights, I shifted my gaze quickly back and forth between them, desperate to find differences or similarities, frantic to learn the truth. The child’s teeth looked so pathetically tiny. I imagined Petey’s frightened helplessness as he was grabbed. The adult’s. Whose
were
they? Slowly, I understood what I was looking at. As the implications swept over me, as the various pieces of information that I’d found began fitting into place, I lowered the X rays. I drooped my head. God help Kate and Jason, I prayed. God help us all.
An organ blared as I opened the church’s front door: a solemn hymn I didn’t recognize. To the right of the vestibule, stairs led up to the choir loft. They creaked as I climbed them. It was shortly after noon. I’d been to eleven Protestant churches before this one. With only six more to go, I was losing hope.
The choir loft was shadowy except for a light above the organ. As the minister finished the hymn, in the gathering silence my echoing footsteps made him turn.
“Sorry to bother you, Reverend.” I walked nearer, holding out the photograph. “The secretary at your office said that you were almost done getting ready for choir practice. I’m trying to find this man. I wonder if you recognize him.”
Puzzled, the minister took the photograph, pushed his glasses back on his nose, and studied it.
A long moment later, he nodded. “Possibly.”
I tried not to show a reaction. Even so, my heart hammered so loudly that I was sure the minister could hear it.
“The intensity of the eyes is the same.” The minister put the photograph under the organ’s light. “But the man I’m thinking of has a beard.” He pointed toward my own.
Beard? I’d been right. He’d grown a beard to hide his scar. “Perhaps if you put your hand over the lower part of his face.” I tried to sound calm, despite the tension that squeezed my throat.
The minister did so. “Yes. I know this man.” He looked suspicious. “Why do you want to find him?”
“I’m his brother.” I managed to keep my hand steady as I shook hands with the minister. “Brad Denning.”
“No. You’re mistaken.”
“Excuse me.”
“Denning isn’t Pete’s last name. It’s Benedict.”
I didn’t know what struck me more, that Petey was using his own first name or that he’d taken the last name of the minister who’d wanted to adopt him after the fire. My stomach soured. “So he still won’t use the family name.”
The minister frowned. “What do you mean?”
My heart pounded harder. “We used to live around here. But a long time ago, Pete and I had a falling—out. One of those family arguments that cause such bad feelings, it splits the family apart.”
The minister nodded, evidently familiar with what that kind of argument had done to some families in his congregation.
“We haven’t spoken to each other in years. But recently, I heard that he’d come back to town. This was the church we used to go to. So I thought someone here might have seen him.”
“You want to be reconciled with him?”
“With everything that’s in me, Reverend. But I don’t know where he is.”
“I haven’t seen him since …” The minister thought about it. “Last July, when Mrs. Warren died. Of course, he was at the funeral. And before that, the last time I saw him was … Oh, probably two years. I’m not even sure he’s in town any longer.”
“Mrs. Warren?”
“She was one of the most faithful in the congregation. Only missed one service that I can remember. When Pete showed up two years ago and volunteered to do handiwork for the church for free, Mrs. Warren took a liking to him. She was amazed by how completely he could quote Scripture. Tried to trick him several times, but he always won.”
“That was my dad’s doing, teaching Pete the Good Book.”
“Well, your father certainly did an excellent job. Mrs. Warren finally offered him a handyman’s job on her property. Our loss, her gain. When she missed that service I mentioned, I was convinced she must be sick, so I telephoned her, and I was right—she had a touch of the flu. The next time she came to church, Pete wasn’t with her. She told me that he’d decided to move on.”
“Yeah, Pete was always like that. But you say he was here for her funeral?”
“Evidently, he’d come back and was working as her handyman again. In fact, the way I hear it, she left her place to him.”
“Her place?”
“Well, she was elderly. Her husband was dead. So were her two children. I suppose she thought of Pete as the closest thing she had to family.”
“Sounds like a kind old lady.”
“Generous to a fault. And over the years, as she sold off portions of the farm her husband had worked—it was the only way for her to survive after her husband died— she made sure to let eighty acres around her house go wild for a game preserve. Believe me, the way this town’s expanding, we could use more people like Mrs. Warren to preserve the countryside.”
“Reverend, I’d appreciate two favors.”
“Yes?” He looked curious from behind his glasses.
“The first is, if you see Pete before I do, for heaven’s sake don’t tell him that we’ve spoken. If he knows I’m trying to see him, I’m afraid he’ll get so upset that he might leave town.”
“Your argument was that serious?”
“Worse than you can imagine. I have to approach him in the right way and at the right time.”
“What’s the second favor you want?”
“How do I find Mrs. Warren’s place?”
Two miles along a country road south of town, I reached a T intersection. I steered to the left, and as the minister had described, the paved road became gravel. My tires threw up dust that floated in my rearview mirror. Tense, I stared ahead, hoping that I wouldn’t see a car or a truck coming toward me. The countryside was slightly hilly, and at the top of each rise, I was afraid that I’d suddenly come upon an approaching vehicle and that
he’d
be driving it. Maybe he wouldn’t pay attention, a quick glimpse of another driver, but maybe he paid attention to everything. Or maybe he wouldn’t recognize me with my beard, but if he did, or if he recognized Kate’s Volvo (Jesus, why hadn’t I thought to bring another car?), I’d lose my chance of surprising him. I’d have even less chance of finding Kate and Jason.
Sweating, my shirt sticking to my chest, I saw the expanse of thick timber and undergrowth that the minister had said would be on my left. I passed a mailbox, a closed gate, and a lane that disappeared into the forest. Mrs. Warren’s house was back there, the minister had said, where she could watch the deer, the squirrels, the raccoons, and the rest of what she’d called “God’s children” roaming around the property. Relieved that I hadn’t seen anybody and hence that no one had seen me, I kept driving, more dust rising behind me. At the same time, I couldn’t help worrying that the reason I hadn’t seen any activity was that Petey wasn’t there, that he’d moved on.
Petey.
Yes.
Each X ray had shown a particular tooth with four roots that grew in distinctive directions. The child’s had been smaller and less pronounced than the man’s. Nonetheless, it hadn’t been difficult to see that one had evolved into the other. Not that I’d relied on my opinion. Before going to the various churches, I’d made sure to be at a dentist’s office when it opened. With cash I’d gotten from a local bank, I’d paid the dentist a hundred dollars to examine the X rays before he attended to his scheduled patients. He’d agreed with me: Man and boy—the X rays had belonged to the same person.