Moving Target (10 page)

As Ali read through the material, it looked like there had been a rush to justice, and Lance’s public defender hadn’t done him any favors. The defense seemed inadequate all the way along. Lance hadn’t been allowed out on bail pending trial, and upon conviction, he had been given the highest possible sentence.

It was an article from the
Lariat
that followed the one reporting on Lance’s sentencing hearing that caught Ali’s attention:

Longtime San Leandro High School math teacher Everett Jackson, age 58, passed away suddenly in his home on May 23. For the past ten years, the popular teacher has served as faculty adviser to the school’s prizewinning computer science club, which has won the statewide Longhorn computer science competition three of the last four years.

He is survived by his former wife and two children, Everett Jr. of Dallas and Linda Gail Thomas (Richard) of San Antonio. He is also survived by his mother, Grace Jackson, of San Leandro.

Services are pending.

The family suggests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the San Leandro Suicide Prevention Line.

Ali read through the article twice. What it didn’t say was far more revealing than what it did, and it left Ali asking any number of questions. The only clue that the man’s death was a suicide had come in the line about suggested donations. So how had this popular and presumably well-respected man killed himself, and if so, why? Had he been in danger of losing his job for some reason? Had he faced some kind of looming health issue, or did he have difficulties with substance abuse? Had he been diagnosed with depression? The article said that Jackson was married with two grown children. Was his suicide the result of some kind of marital discord?

Ali was wondering about that when the ringing of the room’s landline phone interrupted her thought process.

“Hey,” she said when she realized it was B. calling. “I got your photo. You looked tired.”

“I was tired,” he admitted, “and I still am. I just found out the doctors amputated Lance’s right leg last night.”

“I’m sorry,” Ali said, and she was. She could tell from the catch in B.’s voice that he was, too. “Do you think he’s in danger from more than just his injuries?”

“Yes,” B. said. “It’s in the file. You’ll find it.”

It struck Ali as odd that he was being so circumspect on the phone, as though he suspected that someone from San Leandro might be listening in on the conversation. “You’re not going to give me any more clues than that?”

“Not right now. I’ve got Stu working on another aspect of the case. Once he comes up with something, I’m sure we’ll both hear from him. In the meantime, I wanted someone to be in Austin to keep an eye on things.”

“Sister Anselm, you mean?” Ali asked.

“Yes.”

“But B., this is sounding more and more like it should be a police matter,” Ali said.

“It will be eventually, but right now the authorities aren’t interested in anything besides what they’ve already determined,” B. replied. “We’ll bring them into the picture once we can point them in the right direction without getting in too much trouble ourselves. Pay close attention to the science fair articles. I think what happened to Lance might have something to do with that. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about the rest of your day. How was the drive?”

“Snowy most of the way, but it cleared up. We just came back to the room after tea with Leland’s cousins, either one of which would have been reason enough for him to run away from home all those years ago.”

“And what’s on the agenda tomorrow for you and Mr. Brooks?”

“I’m going to look at wedding dresses in a shop here that Jeffrey suggested. Leland wants to go to the cemetery to visit his parents’ graves. I’m not sure how to feel about that. When they sent him away all those years ago, they clearly intended for him to stay away, but I think he’s still grieving their loss.”

“It makes sense to me,” B. said. “I went through some of that when I came back to Sedona. I was at war with my parents the whole time I was growing up. By the time I was a success, they were both gone. Leland’s a success now, too. He left all of them behind, went to another country,
and made a whole new life for himself, but being back where he grew up has to be bringing back some nostalgia for what might have been.”

Such as Thomas Blackfield, Ali thought.

“Does he know where his parents are buried?”

“He knows which cemetery—the one at St. Stephens Church. He may even know where the graves are located. His father died in the early fifties, his mother in the sixties, his two brothers in the eighties, and the two sisters-in-law, the brothers’ widows, sometime later than that. I looked on the Internet for him. A lot of cemeteries have grave location apps, but not this one.”

“Are you going with him?” B. asked.

“He didn’t say that he wanted me to. I got the feeling that this is something he needs to do on his own.”

“So he’s going to the cemetery, and you’re going shopping. If you find a dress,” B. added, “be sure to send me a photo.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said with a laugh, “but I won’t promise.”

By the time they hung up, it was long past dark outside. Off to the west, the sea was a fathomless black void. After one more raid on the fruit basket, Ali returned to her files and worked her way through to the most recent batch. The science fair articles from two and three years earlier were interesting, just as B. had said. In both cases, Lance Tucker had walked away with the code-writing honors, leading his school’s computer science club to easy victories. In an article dated two years earlier, Everett Jackson had told a reporter from the
San Leandro Lariat
that freshman Lance Tucker had all the makings of becoming the next supernova of the computing world.

Ali had no doubt it was the possible loss of all that potential that had goaded B.’s involvement in Lance’s case, but it wasn’t until she saw the article about the most recent fair, one in which San Leandro again took first place, that Ali tumbled to what B. had seen.

When the San Leandro Computing Club went looking for their fourth win in the annual Longhorn Science Competition, the idea of
coming away with the grand prize, as they had in years past, was seriously in jeopardy. For one thing, the club’s faculty adviser, longtime math teacher Everett Jackson, passed away last year. In addition, the talented student who led the charge in the recent past and who had served as team captain in the two previous winning years no longer attends San Leandro High.

Concerns about not winning proved groundless when the San Leandro Saints brought home the grand prize in the competition once again, this time under the leadership of their new team co-captains, Andrew Garfield and Jillian Sosa.

As she had previously, Ali took copious notes. There was something about the name of the first co-captain that hit home. She highlighted it and pressed Find. Immediately, her cursor landed on an earlier note and the name of the San Leandro superintendent of schools—Richard Garfield. Were Andrew Garfield and Richard Garfield related? Garfield wasn’t all that common a name.

Ali remembered reading articles about girls’ cheerleading competitions getting out of hand when parents saw to it that their daughters made it onto the cheering squad no matter what. Maybe this was a variation on that theme. Maybe this was all about a second-class geeky guy wanting to be captain of the team.

She wrote a brief note to Stuart Ramey back home in Sedona: “Are Andrew Garfield and Richard Garfield related?”

Once the note was written and encrypted, she loaded a photo onto her thumb drive from her camera, one she had snapped of Leland boarding the plane in Phoenix, dropped the question into the mix, and sent it off to [email protected]. Under the photo, she added the unencrypted caption “Leland Brooks is headed home.”

With that, having done as much as she could in one day, Ali turned off the lights in the sitting room and returned to her own part of the suite.

She went to bed, but she didn’t sleep. As she lay there, restless and
wakeful, Ali had a feeling there was something she was missing—some part of the puzzle that B. hadn’t told her or that she had yet to glimpse on her own. She also worried about Sister Anselm. If B. thought Lance Tucker was in danger, then what about Ali’s friend? Wasn’t she in danger, too?

At last Ali slept. When she awakened, it was late enough that wintery sunshine filled the room. Knowing that a run would do her a world of good, she dredged up the running shoes and tracksuit that she had crammed into the bottom of her suitcase and headed out.

The Highcliff Hotel was just that—on a high cliff overlooking the beaches and promenades for which Bournemouth was famous. She raced down the aging flight of stone steps that led away from the hotel’s grounds. First she went west on the footpath along West Cliff Promenade, past the lift, and down the zigzag path that led through the garden, where she turned back east, still on the footpath, this time running next to the sandy beach.

As Ali pounded past the pier, the amusement park and rides and beachside cafés were shuttered for the season, although people were taking full advantage of a small break in the cold weather. The footpath was crowded with people out walking dogs or pushing strollers; the beaches were alive with preschool-aged children chasing after seagulls. Along the way Ali nodded and smiled at her fellow runners, who, like her, were pleased to be doing their wintertime morning workout outside rather than in some overheated gym. When she finished her long circuit, the stairs leading back up to East Overcliff seemed far longer and steeper than they had on her way down.

Ali arrived in their suite to find Leland not only fully dressed but happily enjoying a solitary room-service full English breakfast. There was only one breakfast tray, but Ali noticed that there was a large pot of coffee along with an extra cup and saucer. Unasked, Leland filled the empty cup and passed it to her.

“For decades I somehow resisted the American custom of drinking coffee in the mornings,” he said with a smile, “but I believe you and Mr.
Simpson have worn me down. I still can’t drink the stuff straight the way you two do, however. I much prefer mine with a bit of cream and sugar.”

Ali took a sip of coffee. It was weaker than she would have liked, but at least it was coffee. She sat down on the sofa and waited. Leland Brooks had been part of her life long enough that she understood there was more going on than the mere offer of morning coffee. In the old days, when she worked as a journalist, Ali might have pressed for answers at once. Her classes in interrogation at the Arizona Police Academy had taught her that sometimes it was best to simply wait and let the looming silence create its own kind of pressure.

“I thought about it overnight, and I’d like you to come with me,” Leland said at length. “To the cemetery, I mean. Yesterday’s storm seems to have blown itself out, and today is expected to be unseasonably warm.”

“I’ll come along on one condition,” Ali said.

“What’s that?”

“After the cemetery, you come with me to look at wedding dresses.”

“Fair enough,” Leland agreed.

“Let me shower and change clothes, then,” Ali said. She disappeared into her own room. When she emerged half an hour later, Leland’s empty breakfast tray had been replaced by a fresh one.

“I took the liberty of ordering for you,” he said, pulling out a chair. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Ali shook her head. “Even on vacation, you can’t get out of the habit of looking after me, can you?”

“I suppose not,” he said. “It’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks.”

An hour after Ali returned, she and Leland left the hotel, properly attired and comfortably fed. It would have been easy to catch a cab, but they decided to take advantage of what felt like balmy late morning weather, meandering through the central shopping district and the winter-dead gardens with Leland confidently directing their path as though no time had passed between now and when he had last wandered
these same streets. On the way, he pointed out the building on Albert Road where his father’s print shop had once been located. The space was now occupied by an Indian restaurant.

A little over half an hour after leaving the hotel, Ali and Leland made their way into the small churchyard cemetery tucked behind St. Stephens Church. Many of the grave markers were so moss-covered that the names engraved on them were unreadable. Some of the stones leaned at odd angles, as though the slightest wind might send them tumbling. Leland led Ali through the collection of assorted grave markers with the same confidence he had used to guide them through the streets of Bournemouth.

“Our family plot was always in the far corner,” he said.

Though Leland had said that he wanted Ali to come with him, on the way there, he had maintained an uncharacteristic silence. He walked past the graves of both his brothers and their wives without a word and without giving either a second glance. It wasn’t until they stopped in front of two matching headstones that he spoke again. “These were my parents,” he said in a flat voice, as if offering an introduction to someone among the living rather than to someone long dead.

Ali studied the words and numbers printed there. Jonah Brooks. Adele Mathison Brooks. According to the dates chiseled into the granite, Jonah Brooks was a relatively young man when he died. When Adele died eighteen years later, she was the same age as Ali’s father now. Their outcast son had outlived his father by over three decades, but in that moment, as Leland pulled a white hankie from his pocket and dabbed at his eyes, Ali realized that, for him, the pain of losing his parents was as fresh right then as if their deaths had happened yesterday. They had died while he was gone, and he had never, in all the intervening years, had a chance to pay his respects.

“I’m sorry,” Ali said. At first that was all she could think of to say. After a pause, she added, “Your father was only fifty-five when he died.”

Leland nodded. “When I was growing up, he always seemed larger
than life. I always thought he was a good father. One of the things I respected most about him was that he was always scrupulously fair. Some parents clearly favor one child over another. He was never like that, or at least I never thought he was like that.” Leland paused. “But you’re right, of course. He was very young. He died in September 1954, less than a month after I left Bournemouth for the U.S. My father wasn’t ill, at least not as far as I knew. It seemed to me he was in the prime of life. When Langston told me he was dead, I had a hard time believing it was even possible. Not only was our father dead, Langston was only too happy to let me know that I had been disowned prior to his death. That was a second blow, one that hit me hard. I wouldn’t have expected that of my father. Even now I find it difficult to accept. My decision then was to simply turn my back on all of them—to move forward with my life and not give them another moment’s thought. In large part, I succeeded in doing that, but now that I’m here, I find myself wanting to know more, especially after what Jeffrey said the other night.”