My head throbbed. “It was too long ago.”
“Then it’s a dead end. Gader says he’s sorry.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“He says if you’re relying on dental records to prove that Lester Dant is really your brother using an alias, you’re setting yourself up for a big disappointment. Anyway, how’s that going to help find your family?”
“I don’t know, but I can think of words that are a whole lot stronger than disappointment.”
The cell phone’s reception became staticky.
“Where are you calling from?” Payne asked.
“South Dakota.”
“Nice there?”
“I didn’t come for the scenery,” I said.
“Well, as long as you’re determined to be on the road, do you want some advice?”
“Provided it’s not ‘Take it easy and get some rest.’ ”
“No, something else. This might surprise you,” Payne said. “It’ll sound like encouragement.”
“Then go ahead and surprise me.”
“Until I put on all this weight and I got to relying on the Internet,” Payne said, “I was a hands—on kind of investigator. That’s why I noticed things others didn’t. When there’s time, nothing beats going to the places and people you want to know about.”
“ ‘When there’s time.’ ”
“Which you seem to have plenty of.”
“You’re suggesting that if I’m determined to find that dentist, I should do it myself?”
“More or less.”
“You’re right—it does sound like encouragement. Why the change?”
“Because I’m worried about you.”
The reception became staticky again. I listened hard.
“I’m afraid, if you don’t satisfy yourself one hundred percent that you’ve done everything you can, if you lose hope …”
I strained to hear, but the static became worse.
“… you’ll destroy yourself.”
“I’ll get back to you later in the week,” I said.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
I broke the connection.
12
As I imagined spending days in secluded places asleep in the back of the car, using my nights to drive as far as I could, I knew that Petey wouldn’t have tolerated that routine much longer. The one thing that would have kept him motivated was his discovery —from the widespread news reports on the car radio a couple of days later (the media really loved the story)— that I hadn’t died in the mountains. He wouldn’t have told Kate and Jason that I was alive, of course. But his secret would have given him resolve, imagining how my fear and longing for my family made me suffer. No crowing midnight phone calls to me, no gleeful postcards, nothing with an inadvertent clue that might have led the police to him. Only taunting, gloating silence.
But, damn it, where would he have taken them? I thought about the South Dakota badlands ahead. In the old days, rustlers used to hide in the maze of sun—scorched canyons, the environment so hellish that posses wouldn’t go in after them. It was too desperate a choice, even for Petey. After the badlands, there were hundreds of miles of flat grassland, hardly a tree anywhere, everything exposed. But Petey wouldn’t have tolerated being in the open. Hide in plain sight? I doubted it. He wouldn’t have felt protected without the shelter of hills and woods.
So had he found a place in the Black Hills? A deserted cabin maybe, or a …
I’d come as far as intuition could take me. A dead end, just as Gader had said that the idea about the dentist was a dead end.
The dentist. “Nothing beats going to the places and people you want to know about,” Payne had said.
Ye s.
After sleeping in the back of the car until sundown, I set out toward where I now realized my route had already been taking me, toward where everything had started so long ago.
Toward Petey’s lost youth.
Part Four
1
BROCKTON NEXT EXIT.
The sign caught me by surprise. It was two nights later. I’d gone through Iowa and Illinois and was now on Interstate 70, continuing relentlessly east through Indiana. My destination was Ohio. Just beyond Columbus. Woodford. My hometown.
But as I saw the sign for Brockton, Lester Dant’s birthplace, I frowned. Although I’d long ago made myself familiar with Brockton’s position on the map, this was the first time I’d realized that it, like Woodford, was close enough to 70 to merit an exit sign. Fixated on the dental records that I hoped to find in Woodford, I hadn’t focused on Brockton. But at that moment, my attention rapidly shifted. I made the turn.
A two—lane road wound through shadowy farm country. After twenty miles, street lights revealed run—down houses and a bleak main street. Two—story buildings flanked it, some with FOR SALE notices on windows. A sputtering neon sign announced BROCKTON MOTEL, VACANCY. It too looked run—down, but with no other choice, I stopped.
A bell rang when I opened the office door. Harsh overhead lights hummed. A puffy—eyed woman in a robe shuffled from a room behind the office. “How many nights?”
I said, “Two,” determined to stick around and learn as much as I could.
The elderly woman seemed puzzled that anyone would have a reason for staying in Brockton more than one night. “Cash only.” She named an amount, a narrowness in her eyes suggesting that she thought the rate was a fortune, which it wasn’t.
When I gave her the money, she looked relieved, handed me a key, yawned, and shuffled back to her room. “Soft—drink machine’s outside next to the candy machine,” she murmured over her shoulder.
“Sorry for waking you.”
“Plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.”
Outside, in the humid night, a single bulb illuminated the parking area. There weren’t any vehicles at any of the ten motel units. The key I’d been given was for number one. Imagining that I was Petey, I noted that all the units were behind the manager’s room. In the shadows, I couldn’t be seen if I took a bound and gagged woman and child from my trunk.
The room was small, the sheets thin, the mirror dusty. I stared at my thickening beard stubble. My eyes looked haunted. I was a stranger to myself.
2
“Do you know this man?”
The manager looked as tired as when I’d wakened her the previous night. Her wrinkled mouth left a trace of lipstick on her coffee cup. Behind the counter, she tilted the police photo this way and that. “Not exactly flattering. How’d he get the scar on his chin?”
“Car accident.”
“Can’t say I recognize him. You another FBI agent?”
“Another?”
“Last year, somebody from the FBI asked me about this guy.”
My optimism sank. If Gader had arranged for Dant’s background to be double—checked, I was wasting my time.
“He must have done something really bad for you to keep looking for him,” she said.
“Yes. Something really bad. Does the name Peter Denning sound familiar?”
“Nope.”
“How about Lester Dant?”
“Dant.” The woman thought a moment. “That’s the name the other FBI agent asked about. There used to be a couple of families named Dant around here.”
I felt more discouraged.
“The hardware store’s named after one of them,” she said, “but the man who owns it now is Ben Porter.”
Wasting my time, I repeated to myself. Tempted to drive on to Woodford, I decided not to take anything for granted. “Where’s the hardware store?”
3
“I don’t know him.” Ben Porter was in his fifties, as was just about everybody I’d passed in the sparsely populated town. His coveralls were flecked with sawdust from boards he’d been cutting. “But that doesn’t mean much.”
“Why not?”
“I never met the store’s original owner. I kept the name Dant on the building to maintain tradition.”
In a dying town,
the word tradition sounded brave. “You don’t know any Dants?”
“Like I told the other FBI agent, they’re before my time. I moved here only ten years ago.” The expression on his face made it seem that he wished he hadn’t.
“Can you think of anybody who might know about them?”
“Sure. The reverend.”
“Who?”
“Reverend Benedict. The way I hear it, he’s been in Brockton just about forever.”
4
The white steepled church and the cottage behind it were the only two buildings in town that didn’t look in need of repair. On the right, between the church and a graveyard, a path went through a rose garden. Ahead, an elderly man in a short—sleeved blue shirt with a minister’s collar had his back to me. He was on his knees, his head bowed in prayer. Then his arms moved and his head bobbed, and I realized he was pruning the roses.
He had a hearing aid tucked behind his right ear. It must have been an excellent model, because he heard me walking across the grass and turned to see who I was.
“Reverend Benedict?”
His wrinkled brow developed more furrows as he came creakily to his feet. His old pants had grass stains on the knees.
“My name’s Brad Denning. Ben Porter at the hardware store—”
“A fine man.”
“— suggested I talk to you about a couple of families who used to live around here.”
“Families?”
“The Dants.”
The reverend’s eyes had sparkled as if he’d welcomed the opportunity to test his memory. Now they became guarded.
“Do you remember the Dants?” I asked.
“Are you with the FBI?”
“No.”
“Someone from the FBI asked me about the Dants last year,” the reverend said.
“I know that. But I’m not with the Bureau. Did the agent show you this photograph?”
“Yes. That’s Lester. I told the agent the same thing.”
“You’re sure of that? It’s Lester Dant?”
“He was younger. He didn’t have that scar on his chin. But there’s no doubt it’s Lester.”
I felt sick. The theory I’d worked so hard to believe toppled. Lester Dant, not my brother, had taken Kate and Jason. He wouldn’t have had a reason to keep them alive.
“Why do you want to know about him?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Reverend,” I managed to say. Hollow, I turned to leave.
“ ‘Just a routine investigation,’ the FBI agent told me.”
I looked back at him. “Hardly routine.”
“What’s wrong, Mr. Denning? You seem in terrible distress.”
I hadn’t intended to explain, but something about him invited it. In despair, I started to tell him. I tried to keep my voice steady, but the more I revealed, the more it shook.
The reverend stared. He seemed to hope that I was finished, but then I told him more—and more—and his shocked look turned to pity for someone who, because of a boyhood mistake, had been condemned to the torment of hell.
“Lester did all that?”
“Or my brother pretending to be him. That’s what I needed to find out.”
“God help him. God help you.”
“If only God would.”
“All prayers are eventually answered.”
“Not soon enough, Reverend.”
He seemed on the verge of telling me to have faith. Instead, he sighed and motioned me toward a bench. “There are several things you need to understand about him.”
“ ‘Understand’? I hope that doesn’t mean make excuses or sympathize, because what I really want to do, Reverend, is punish him. And please don’t tell me to turn the other cheek or let God take care of vengeance.”
“You just said it for me.”
We studied each other.
“You’re positive that the man in this photograph is Lester Dant?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I felt sicker. Even so, I had to know the truth. “All right then, Reverend.” Despondent, I sat on the bench. “Help me ‘understand’ him.”
5
“And his parents,” the reverend said. “You also have to understand his parents.” He thought for a moment. “The Dants.” His frail voice strengthened. “There were six families of them originally. They lived around here for as long as anybody can remember. That’s what my predecessor told me, at any rate, when I was assigned here. But they weren’t really part of the community. You couldn’t even say that they were part of the United States.”
“You’ve lost me, Reverend.”
“They were separatists. Tribalists. Loners. Somewhere in their history—my predecessor had a theory that it went as far back as the Civil War—something terrible had happened to them. They came from a place that they desperately wanted to forget, and they settled around here, determined to be left to themselves.”
A bee buzzed my face. I motioned it away, fixing my attention on the reverend.
“Of course, to keep their families going, they couldn’t be entirely insular. They had to interact with nearby communities, looking for young people to marry. On the surface, they had a lot to recommend them. They knew their Bible. They owned property. They didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or swear. For a while, they attracted new members, usually from families so poor that marrying a Dant was a step up. But word got around how severe they were, and the Dants had to look farther, mostly among other strict groups, trying to negotiate marriages. Their options became more limited. By the time my predecessor arrived, the families had dwindled to three.”
I shook my head, puzzled. “If they were determined to stay to themselves, how come somebody named Dant owned the hardware store?”
“A lifeline. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t be self—sufficient. Even in a good year, with bountiful crops, there were necessities that they couldn’t produce for themselves. To them, Brockton was like a foreign country. The hardware store was their embassy. They exported their excess produce through it and imported lumber, tools, clothing… .”
“Medicines.”
“No,” Reverend Benedict said, “never medicines. The Dants were as fundamental religiously as they were politically. To them, sickness was a sign of God’s disfavor. They felt it was a sin to use human means to interfere with God’s intention.”
“Because of our fallen nature?”
“For which the Dants believed God punished us,” the reverend said.
“With a self—destructive attitude like that, it’s a wonder the families survived.”
“That’s the point — they’re all gone now.” Reverend Benedict pointed a wizened finger toward the photograph. “Except for Lester.”
“When did you meet him?”
“After the fire.”
“The fire?”
“I’ll get to that. First, you need to know that, because the Dants avoided doctors, the town had no idea of the birth and death rate out there. Every so often, emissaries would come to town and get supplies. Mostly men, but sometimes women and children. I suspect that their motive was to show everybody in the family how corrupt the outside world was. It could be that we looked as strange to them as they did to us.”
“Strange?”
“The effects of inbreeding were starting to show.”
“The law let them get away with it?”
“Once in a while, a state trooper went out to check on things, but what was he going to charge them with, except wanting to be by themselves?”
“Child endangerment.”
“Difficult to prove if the children are well nourished and can quote their Bible.”
“Isn’t there a law that children have to go to school?”
“The Dants hired an attorney who argued that the children were getting an adequate education at home. It came down to religious freedom. These days, I suppose we’d call them survivalists. But they weren’t hoarding weapons and they weren’t plotting to overthrow the governme
nt, so the authorities decided that dragging the Dants into court was worse than leaving them alone. Live and let live became the motto. Until the weekend when Lester’s mother was one of the emissaries who came to town.”
I listened harder.
“Her name was Eunice. She was visibly pregnant, but evidently her husband believed that she wasn’t far enough along not to travel. She came out of the hardware store. The next thing, she collapsed on the sidewalk, writhing in pain. Her husband, Orval, tried to make light of it, tried to pick her up and put her in the car. But when he saw the blood on her dress and the pool of it around her, he froze in confusion, just long enough for a doctor and a police—man—we had several of both back then—to notice what was happening and rush her to the clinic that served as our hospital. Orval tried to stop them, but suddenly, it was obvious that Eunice wasn’t having a miscarriage. She was about to give birth to a premature baby.”
“The creep was willing to risk her life?”
“He didn’t do it easily. Orval told the doctor and the policeman that the baby meant more to him than anything else in the world; that he and Eunice had already lost three children to stillbirths; that they’d tried persistently to have another child and finally God had blessed them with this pregnancy. But to rely on a doctor was the same as telling God that they didn’t have faith, Orval said. If they interfered with God’s plan, the baby would be damned. Orval felt so strongly about this that he actually tried to pick up Eunice and carry her from the clinic. But the doctor warned him that the wife and the baby would die if they didn’t stay and receive medical attention. The policeman was more blunt. He threatened to arrest Orval for attempted murder if Orval tried to remove his wife. By then, the baby was on its way, and even Orval realized he was going to have to allow medical help, whether he wanted it or not. Eunice nearly died from loss of blood. The baby nearly died from being so small.”
“The baby was Lester?”
“Yes. Orval and Eunice didn’t believe in giving their children names that had religious connotations. They compared it to idolatry. No Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John for them. Once you take away the Bible as a source for a name, there aren’t many choices. The name Lester was neutral, a default.”