The Office of Historical Corrections(50)
“It’s still Genevieve. Come on, Cassie. In a different world, if I wanted to know what was happening with one of your cases, I could have called you.”
I opened my mouth, impulsively reaching for the first adolescent retort that came to mind—Whose fault is it that you couldn’t call me?—but before I said the words, I remembered that it was arguably mine.
“I don’t need your help,” I said. “This might turn out to be a simple fact-check. If it doesn’t, you’re not going to make it any easier. I’m guessing open-and-shut historical mysteries don’t sell a lot of reality-TV pitches. Is that really what you’re in this for?”
“As always, I’m in it for the truth. I’m also in it for my custody case, if you need a better reason. James wants primary custody and it’s hard to fight that without a reliable income, so, unless I want to be stuck in LA waiting for my alternate weekends and watching him raise my daughter with his pageant-queen fiancée who can’t wait to get a tiara on her, I need to come up with something fast.”
“You grew up in tiaras. I was there, remember?”
“Cassie, I couldn’t possibly speak to what you remember and what you don’t.”
Genevieve had worn a tiara at her own wedding, I wanted to say, but of course I did not actually remember that, not having been there. I had only seen it in the photographs. When I was feeling uncharitable, I allowed myself to think that Genie and Genevieve weren’t so different; both versions of the girl I grew up with wanted most of all to be the center of attention. Then I thought of Octavia, whom I’d last seen as a child who could barely stand to be parted from her mother, whom Genie spoke to and of with a tenderness I’d never heard in her voice in any other context, and I felt cruel for imagining Genevieve would let a mere performance cost her as much as it already had. Whoever she was these days, she believed in it.
The front door opened with a bell chime, and I recognized Andy Detry from his description of himself—he’d said he was a big guy with a big beard and would be wearing a Brewers cap. I’d expected I might find a dozen men fitting that description, but he was the only one in the coffee shop this morning. He introduced himself with a firm handshake. I introduced Genevieve as merely Genevieve, and although she had no idea who Andy was or why he’d come to meet me, she pulled out an official-looking notebook and pen and leaned in as though she too had been waiting for him.
I’d wanted to see Andy in person for a better sense of what I was dealing with—an honest concerned citizen, or a man trying to find the loophole that would get his grandfather off of a list of public shame. Once he started talking, I decided I liked him. He had a nervous laugh, the kind that bubbled up at his own jokes and also when nothing was funny at all, but he seemed genuinely horrified by both versions of what might have happened to Josiah Wynslow.
“I grew up here as a husky gay boy,” he said. “Not saying it’s the same as knowing what it would have been like to be him back then, or hell, to be me back then, but I know something about how it feels to have a whole gang of people wishing you didn’t exist, ya know?”
Most of his story was already in the file: when he saw his grandfather’s name on the plaque, he’d decided to do something about it. He ran a bar now and made a decent living and wanted to find out whether Josiah had any next of kin to whom he might deliver an apology or some meager reparations. By all accounts, Josiah had been unmarried and childless when he came to Cherry Mill, but Andy wondered if perhaps there’d been siblings, cousins, anyone. Someone had sent in an obituary, after all. He’d reached out to an amateur genealogist friend and started with vital records, which is where he’d come upon a puzzle: there was a 1937 Wisconsin death certificate for Josiah Wynslow, listing no next of kin, but there was also a 1950 marriage certificate for a girl in Kenosha whose father appeared to be the same man, though it was hard to be completely sure—the 1937 Josiah didn’t yet have a Social Security number. He’d gone digging and turned up an Illinois marriage certificate for Josiah and the mother of the woman in Kenosha, and then an Illinois death certificate reporting Josiah had died in Chicago in 1984. His wife had also died years ago, but the daughter who had married in Kenosha still lived there, with one of her daughters and two of her grandchildren. That was how he’d found the relatives I was scheduled to talk to later in the afternoon. They’d told him they knew Josiah had run into trouble in Wisconsin and been run out of the state, but he had certainly run out alive. Andy threw up his hands.
“So, it’s a mystery,” he said. “I’m not saying they weren’t trying to kill him, but it doesn’t seem they managed.”
I pulled the photograph of the arsonists out of the file.
“What can you tell me about who took credit for it?” I asked. “Anything it might be helpful to know about the people in this picture?”
“Not much I can think of. Everyone in the picture’s long dead of course, except the baby, and she’s almost ninety. I’d say there’s maybe ten people still in town related to someone in the picture somehow. Me. Susan behind the counter there. Susan’s mother—she’s the baby. Susan’s fool nephew. Two of the Piekowski grandkids. And Ronald Bunch’s son, but he’s on home care and good luck getting past his nurse.”
Andy laughed his nervous laugh again. He shifted back in his chair and gripped the edge of the table. I looked over at Susan, round faced and gray haired. She had greeted me with a smile and offered me a muffin on the house because she didn’t want me having coffee on an empty stomach, and I’d had to promise her I’d already had breakfast before she let me walk away empty-handed. “They’re not bad people, mostly,” Andy said. “But they don’t talk about it much and probably wouldn’t much appreciate me bringing it up again. If anyone knows anything that’s not already in the records, they sure haven’t told me.”