Blood Hunt

10

Lien, Harry, San Francisco, and his family seemed a universe away from these Kansas plains. Just I Ching lingered with him. Persevere. Yes, he would, to the end of the earth and time…whatever it took to find Lane. That threat of failure if he set himself up as judge kept ringing in his head, however. Reminding him that even without a badge, he must act as lawfully as though he carried it.

The highway entered Bachman. After asking directions, Garreth found the high school. Climbing out of the car, warm wind struck him. It had some qualities of a sea breeze…pushiness, an aggressive wildness, a singing contempt for the land and what crawled there. It buffeted him, bringing the scents of fresh-watered grass and dusty earth, and pushed him up the steps into the building.

He located the office and the principal, a Mr. Charles Dreher, who listened to his story with interest. “Every since Roots was on TV, more and more people are hunting theirs. I’m happy to help.”

Which consisted of taking Garreth to the small Board of Education building and down a steep set of stairs to a dim space less basement than cellar. Smelling and feeling wonderfully of the earth. While Dreher apologized for the conditions, Garreth sucked in a long, contented breath and wanted to stay forever. It took a hard mental shake to refocus.

They hunted through file envelopes stacked together on metal shelves and through ancient metal and wooden file cabinets. A secretary joined them eventually. “Graduation pictures? I know I’ve seen a whole pile of them somewhere.”

Which turned out to be on a top shelf, still framed, the glass so dusty it rendered the sepia-toned photographs all but invisible. Dreher returned to the high school, leaving Garreth and the secretary to bring the pictures up into the light and clean the glass. But when all that had been done, and Garreth compared the picture of the girls in the 1930 to 1940 classes with his mental image of Lane Barber, while pretending to compare them to his photo, he found no match.

The secretary wiped at a smudge on her nose. “Who is it you’re looking for?” When he gave her his story she said, “You know, a postmark here doesn’t mean the family lived here. Rural mail gets our postmark, so they could have had a farm, or lived somewhere like Dixon, that’s too small for its own post office and also gets our postmark. Then she’d probably have gone to a one-room school. Those are pretty much all gone now, though, and I don’t know where you’d find their records. Why don’t you sit down with a phone book and call Pfeifers in the area?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to go busting in on people’s lives until I know we’re related. Besides, being pregnant out of wedlock, Mary Pfeifer might not have been her real name.”

The secretary considered that and nodded.

She had a valid point about Lane going to school elsewhere. The postmark meant only that the correspondent lived here now, not necessarily then. Which meant he needed to check other high schools in the area…assuming if the correspondent moved, it had not been far, staying in the comfort zone of the ethnic area.

Now he needed to sneak in Lane’s name. “My grandmother’s diary mentioned something she didn’t tell us — maybe forgot — that another girl came to visit one time, a Maggie Bieber, or maybe Maddie — the ink smudged — and Mary hid in her room, asking my grandmother to say she wasn’t there. I’m wondering if it was the person who wrote her. It sounds like a name from here.”

“Maybe your grandmother wrote down the name wrong,” the secretary said. “We have Biekers, but I don’t know any Biebers.”

Checking her phone book confirmed Bachman had listings for only Biekers. Garreth felt a lurch of dismay. Had the reference librarian in San Francisco telling him Bachman had telephone listings for Biebers heard him wrong? Yet Lane called herself Bieber and he clearly remember the letter being addressed to Madelaine Bieber.

Back in his car, Garreth pushed dismay aside. Maybe Pfiefer had Biebers.

He headed east on a county road. A few miles out of town it took him through the Dixon the secretary mentioned. Not just a small town, he found. Dead…two houses, with overgrown foundations all that remained of several others, a gas station-come-general store, and a grain elevator — a fascinating row of huge, melded columns…a giant tombstone marking the town’s passing.

In Pfeifer, he stopped at a gas station and checked the phone book before going on to the high school. It listed Biekers, no Biebers. Still, he pushed on to the high school and was handed over to their school librarian, who showed him to the shelves holding almost a century’s worth of yearbooks. He went through those from 1930 to 1940…where he found Biekers and some Pfeifers, but no Biebers. And none of the faces were Lane’s.

Gloomily, he wondered what his chances were of finding Lane this way and whether he was totally off base about where to search. On which depressing note, he headed back to Hays.