Chase killed the headlights in the driveway and sat in the car for a minute, watching the rain lash against the windshield in pelting gusts. The sky in the rearview mirror was nearly black, though the sun would not set for at least another hour. Nera the horizon to the west, where the storm did not reach there was still a faint glow that cast an eerie orange glow on windshield making the beads of rain look like orange soda. She watched the house turning orange and noticed that the paint was peeling along the front, chips of it flaking from the window trim and the stubby pillars still holding up the porch. She watched as rain broke off bits of it and, craning forward she could see the watch pooling on the steps, a miniature see of white paint chips collecting. She made a mental note to call her mother about it. Though she had no immediate plans to do so Chase had always assumed she would end up out here, just like everyone else in her family had. She didn't like the peeling paint, it didn't bode well for her future or her past, both which were likely tied up in this house. She sat in the car waiting for a lull in the rain, but none came. At least this time there were no donuts to worry about. She grabbed her bags off the passenger seat, slung them over her shoulder and leap out of the car. She cross the drive in two quick strides and darted up to the side of the house where she could keep the house between her and the nearly horizontal rain. From there it was a easy stroll to the side door with hardly another drop of water hitting her. The house smelled stagnant and stale. She set her things on the kitchen counter and made her rounds, checking the windows upstairs and down. Back downstairs on the coffee table Chase found a bill, along with a note from Duncan explaining that he had hired two kids down the way and that Chase's mother could pay them when she returned. Chase laugh loud enough that she startled herself in the silence of the house. She considered pulling down the boards on the front windows to let a little air in, perhaps watch the storm, but she didn't. She went to the back door and propped it ajar with a broom handle. She sat down on the floor, marveling at the utterly wildness outside. The dark swirling center of the storm still lurked off on the horizon, but already waves from the bay were beginning to break over the old wooden dock that stretched out across the marsh and reeds behind the house. She could see the cattails the wind had strewn across the small plot of grass just past the back deck. She stuck her head out and looked around the side to see the rusting swing set still crumbled behind the flat cement slab where the shed had once stood, it too a victim of a storm. The air smelled of the sea, clean, not like the air that hung around the marsh on quite evenings. The sea smelled of something far away, something unknown. Hurricanes were really more her grandfather's kind of weather. He'd loved them back when they rarely, if ever, came up the Chesapeake. Her grandfather had never followed evacuation orders. If her mother was with them he would pack her and Chase in the car and send them back off to hotel room in Annapolis. But when he was alone and later when it was just he and Chase they would board the upstairs windows, buy a few days worth of food and supplies and ride out the storms in the basement. Her grandfather seems to light up at those times, become considerably younger all of the sudden. They would sit in the sun room at the back of the house, she drinking ice cold tea, he sipping a perspiring bottle of beer. They would watch as the storm rolled up the Atlantic shore toward the mouth the bay, and the barometer that hung by the door of the porch began to fall dramatically. He would tell her about movements of air, the way the clouds circled around a singular point as the storm spun over the ocean. He could spend hours talking about clouds, about the massive movements of air that, for all the technology of the age, remained more than a little mysterious to both of them. Her grandfather had never come right out with it, but she came to understand after years of listening to him that he accorded the storms some kind of consciousness. There's something in them he said, something old, something we have forgotten. Later they would go inside and eat dinner by the light of a hurricane lamp, that's what it's for, he'd say with a grin. Afterward he would pour another beer and they would, if the storm were bad enough, head down to the basement where there were two cots, a couple of chairs and an old folding table where they could sit and play cards or a board game and listen to the rain lashing against the house. Few of the storms ever came up the bay back then, at most they would drop two days the wind and rain, clouds spun out from the arms of the hurricane, and then continue north, bouncing merrily up the coast, not making landfall until well past New York. The warming ocean had changed that. Chase had watched it change, spending her summers at the little house on the bay ever since she was a little girl. Back then she sometimes wondered if her mother was trying to get rid of her. It was only later, after her grandfather died and her mother moved out to the house that she realized what a lonely place the bay could be. She realized then that her mother wasn't getting rid of her, her mother was trying to keep her grandfather company. Not that Chase had minded of course. For her the marshes and beaches of the bay were a never-ending playground far greater than any amusement park she had ever heard her friends back in Massachusetts describe. But then she didn't have many friends back in Massachusetts. She was an only child and for the most part kept to herself even from a very young age. She had never particularly liked school and was known to throw tantrums every September when her mother flew down and collected her up for the beginning of the new school year. She tolerated school, but ultimately saw it as something that kept her from being at her Grandfather's house. Even later in high school she never missed a summer on the bay. Boyfriends and college prep class all had to wait, sidelined and insignificant next to Chase's world on the Chesapeake. Most of the old houses on the bay like her mother's, though Chase still thought of it as her grandfather's, had long since been torn down and replaced with massive mansions that no one called home, save perhaps whatever support staff were always on hand to keep it spic and span for the absentee owners who might, at most, show up once or twice a season to host some gala affair. "The rich on terrible holidays," her grandfather would say, shaking his head and smiling. Chase was perhaps ten. She had been unable to sleep, the noise from parties across the channel would bounce off the water and into her second story window. Her grandfather brought her outside to look at the stars. To listen to the party. He knelt beside her and pointed out across the bay to a light warbling on the choppy water. "That's where Daisy lives Chase." "Who's Daisy?" "That's the question isn't it?" He gestured out again and Chase followed his finger up to the wooden light post at the end of the dock, the source of the warbling light. "See that, see how beautiful that warbling light is Chase? It's like it's dancing for us." She nodded and look up at her grandfather's face but he was lost somewhere out there, somewhere in the water. "it doesn't take anything really," he mumbled, "just a bit of water and the ordinary looks extraordinary... of course it always is. It always is." Chase remembered sitting up with her grandfather on many nights, listening to the distant laughter and music. If they spoke it was to decided whether it were family party or a butter-up party as her grandfather called the other type of party on the bay. The latter tended to be louder, less inviting and went much later, often into the dawn. Sometimes, once she was older and the rich high school boys started to spread rumors about the cute, but possibly crazy, girl down at the end of the road, from time to time an invitation would arrive. Several times Chase went, every now and then showing up with her grandfather in tow, her date for the night. Then he became to sick to go to the parties. Then he was too sick to leave the house. Then he had waited, holding out against the cancer until the the first hurricane drifted up the coast. The first night it was visible from the bay, still far out over the Atlantic, he somehow pulled himself outside, revolver in hand, and shot himself in the chest. The storm had rolled by without dropping so much as a shower. Duncan had found her grandfather on the dock by the marsh the next morning. Chase had not entirely inherited her grandfather's love of hurricanes, or if she had it had been tempered over the years by the increasing ferociousness with which they wrecked havoc on the east coast. Tonight there was no light across the bay. The old dock had long ago been washed away in a storm and no one had bothered to rebuild it. Chase contented herself with the far less impressive dock at the back of her house, which somehow managed to remain. There was nothing Gatsby-like about it though, just a simple wooden platform that was now so overgrown with reeds and grasses that it had become part of the marsh, which held it in place year after year until it was really more marsh than dock. Eventually her view of the dock and the marsh and the rain faded into darkness. The horizon disappeared and the rain began to change direction, beating against the back of the house. Chase closed the door and dug around the kitchen until she found a bottle of wine. She poured a glass and turned on her laptop to check the news. The weathermen droned on, projecting several paths for the storm, two of which hit D.C. proper, two which did not. All four of plowed straight through the Chesapeake. She flipped over to a more general news stream and listened to clip about a new longevity drug already on the market in Asia. Then there was a clip of the millionaire senator Bradford, the Democratic front runner of the moment, who, despite already being fantastically wealthy had for some reason decided to run for president. Chase shook her head wondering why anyone would want to do that. He was handsome though, in fact probably too good looking to be president she thought. She tapped a video note from her mother who said she was just checking in, making sure that Chase and house were together, in one piece. She decided not to respond. Instead, she poured a second glass of wine and pulled out the files she had brought along to keep herself company. There were two that intrigued her. One was an airman shot down over Guadalcanal at the beginning of the war, registered in a Japanese POW camp by the Red Cross, but unaccounted for after the Japanese surrender. Most likely it would require a trip to Japan, which she was told still did not much like anyone digging too deep into its recent past. But the POW case wasn't what she wanted to pursue. She pulled out the slip of paper that the prostitute in the impossibly short skirt had given her and stared at the name, Lt. Reese Lawrence. She smiled thinking about Steven's crack that perhaps it was simply the woman's pimp and he wanted Chase to sign up. Chase had frowned enough to make Steven feel uncomfortable and then said, "for that you get to do the research. Feed that name in your database and tell me what you get." Steven had managed to find the name in the database, but there was little more than an enlistment number, and a few orders that told of an assignment to flight training in San Diego and then a squadron assignment shortly thereafter. The squadron was shipped out to defend the Panama canal in January of 1942. That was it. Chase pulled a paper file upstairs, that basis for the data in Steven's database and found nothing more, save a hand written note clipped the back of the very thin file that said the airman was listed Missing in Action. That gave Chase her first feeling that something might be wrong with the Lawrence file. The handwritten note implied someone had worked the file, but there was hardly anything in it, more specifically, there was nothing in it that lent any credence to the notion that Lawrence was MIA. Either whoever had taken the case before her not worked very hard, which was possible. She mulled over the apathy of her coworkers as she slipped her wine, but lazy though they may have been it would be unusual not to at least sign the file and even more unusual to leave a hand written note. Chase had a hunch that something about Lawrence's disappearance made someone look bad. Someone with enough pull that the case had been shelved and the paperwork lost. Something like Steven's missing sniper where the bosses realized they were about to get a nice bucket of mud dropped on their faces and hurriedly made the whole thing go away. There had not been a lot of combat in the Canal area. In fact none that Chase was aware of, but of course almost half of the aircrew deaths in World War II were not combat related so the lack of Messerschmitts and Zeros in the area certainly didn't mean Lt. Lawrence hadn't gone down. In fact, with the primitive navigation tools they had used back then an alarming percentage of deaths could be attributed to pilots and navigators getting lost. The plane flew into a cloud bank and was never seen again. Just like Whitmore and Hume. Except that it was worse for pilots over the sea. It was, as the head of the coast guard search and rescue archive liked to tell her, a very big ocean out there and it was all one big hole waiting to swallow you up. Once the wreckage sank into the ocean, once the sharks got done with the survivors, there was nothing and no one left to tell the story. That was precisely why Chase was intrigued. Our stories are the only record of our passing and Chase hated it when she had the beginning of a story, and even the unfortunate end, but not the meat of it, not the middle where everything happened. Two things kept Chase awake at night. One was the thought that most stories were simply gone. The staggering number of lives that had been lived and yet left no trace overwhelmed her and left her feeling dizzy. The second was the thought that there were people out there that did not know the story of their husbands, their sons, their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, and, more recently, wives, mothers, aunts and sisters. The stories that had simply faded out. You waved goodbye full of fear and trepidation and then, that was it. There was no ending, no closure. If she had any guiding force behind her, and she was never quite sure if she did, it was this; to give the stories back, to record as many as she could so that everyone would know them, so that every life lived with leave some mark. Chase had loved history ever since she was a little girl. It had been part of her from a very early age. Her dolls did not have tea parties, they explored the Oregon Trail, clamored through the pine needle forests of the Sierra Nevada in search of the Donner pass and took the air with Amelia Earhart in a quest to be first around the world. Even the far end of the bathtub was nothing short of the Northwest Passage, or the Cape of Good Hope, depending on which books her grandfather had been reading to her at the time. She was told she had an active imagination. She had heard her mother say as much many times, but Chase never saw it that way, even when she was older and knew what her mother had meant. For her it was never really imagination, it was retelling. It was reliving, finding herself inside the story. For Chase it was a chance to become a part of something much larger than the here and now, something bigger. It surprised no one that she majored in history. It was even less surprising that she stuck with it all the way to a PhD. What had surprised everyone, except perhaps her grandfather, though he had been dead some time by then, was that she had turned her back on what her professors assured her would be a promising academic career to work at a small, overlooked government bureau with little funding and no real career path to offer. But it was a chance to reclaim stories. And for Chase it was always about the stories. Without the stories there was no point to history. Only statisticians cared who fought whom where and when. Only hindsight ever found a pattern to history, the truth was that history made no more linear sense than the present. Eliminate the illusions and misconceptions about what history is and eventually you discover the kernel of truth that Chase had always known: it is nothing but stories. Lose track of them and you lose everything. Chase set down the pink slip of paper pulled up a search window on her laptop. She hesitated, staring at the screen. She had been putting off a web search all day because she didn't want to know, she didn't want to lose the mystery. At the same time she had vague sense of unease about the whole thing. The strange encounter with the prostitute had left her feeling strangely exposed. Anyone could walk into the DPMO and ask for her, but whomever had sent the note did not. Yet whomever had sent her the piece of paper obviously knew who she was. What creeped her out more than a little bit was that this person seemed to not only knew the what DPMO was, but apparently had the free time to followed her around. Or perhaps he had only followed her that day. Perhaps, thought Chase, suddenly feeling little sheepish for being paranoid, perhaps this person had in fact gone looking for her at her office and, discovering that she was playing hooky, had simply been pointed in her direction as she walked out of the building. But then why not approach her directly? And even if it wasn't direct for some reason, why employ an outlandish prostitute to deliver your rather simple message. That of couse assumed the woman who handed her the paper was telling the truth. Chase considered for a moment that perhaps the story of the man was simply a ruse, something along the lines of *I have this friend...* But that seemed preposterous given the circumstances. She went through her memory, trying to see the people on the street when they had walked out of the building, when they had been talking on their way to the dinner, was their anyone familiar? Anyone that had been there more than once, anyone that was familiar because they were following her? She simply didn't see the world in those terms so there was nothing. She closed her eyes and went through her morning in her mind as though she might suddenly notice lurking in the shadows someone she had never noticed before. Nothing came. You can't will yourself to notice things that you have already not noticed she thought. Or maybe you could, but she was pretty sure you would need a hypnotist. She sighed and poured another glass of wine. Did it really matter? She was interested in the name, not he reasoning behind whomever gave her the name. If she just wanted the story it didn't matter who give her the name or why. The story was there to be found either way, the why didn't really matter. She shoved the thoughts from her head and focused on the far more interesting question, what did this person expect Chase to do with the name? After turning it over in her head for a while, she decided she would do whatever she would have done if the name had come from her boss rather than some cloak and dagger obsessed individual. She plugged Lt. Otto Lawrence into the search box and hit return. Two dozen hits blinked up instantly. She narrowed the search by date, wrapping it around the years of the war and found almost nothing, which was odd. There should have been an official notice, something posted in the papers by the family. And of course the old War Department's records were also available online, to say nothing of WWII memoires, the sheer volume of which generally meant that almost everyone had been mentioned at some point. In every case Chase had worked so far there had always been an MIA notice or a KIA notice somewhere on the web. She expanded the search to pull in a few years after the war, since she realized that the MIA notice in Lt. Lawrence's file didn't actually have a date. Perhaps Lt. Lawrence had survived World War II and disappeared later in Korea or Vietnam. She added in enough time to cover everything up through the first Gulf War and found a few hits on Lawrence, including a Lawrence Foundation, but most of it seemed unrelated. She finished her glass of wine and sat down on the sofa. With little to add to her notes on Lt. Reese Lawrence her mind swung back around to the question of who wanted her to find him. She tried to distract herself. She logged into her news stream, checked the latest weather, and replied to a message from her mother and wondered absently if whomever it was that was, apparently, stalking her--the word made her glance up suddenly and look around the room as if an ax murderer might have suddenly slipped in--was also watching her public news feed. Her profile listed her job for all the world to see and she wasn't shy about posting questions when she needed outside help. If whomever it was knew enough about the DPMO to ask for her they must have also known that she didn't have the rank to charge off on her own whim, pursuing whatever she wanted. Her bosses, on the other hand, had that luxury, so why not ask them? Unless of course there was something about this Lt. Otto Lawrence or something about the nature of his disappearance that the mystery man didn't want revealed to higher ups. So, if the person wanted to know about Lt. Lawrence, but didn't want the military to know about him then why not go to an outsider? She dug around the web, looking for freelancers that specialized in veteran affairs. The sort of investigators rich families used when they wanted to solve something quietly. Something off the books. There were a few, but judging by the client lists they were allowed to divulge most would have no trouble accessing the same records Chase could, and probably a lot more. No real reason to not use an outsider. But this person had not. This person was trying to use Chase Kovele. When she phrased it in those terms the whole affair suddenly sounded entirely crazy. Why in the world would anyone want Chase specifically? Chase wrote why at the bottom of an already full sheet of questions and notes about Lt. Lawrence. She drew a box around the question and stared at it while she listened to the rain lashing against the house. The wind was rattling the window boards, but so far everything had held just fine. ------------------------ This needs to go, but there needs to be some good reason why this person, whoever it might turn out to be, has decided to pursue this via Chase................... Athother problem, though not necessarily with the section below is that the name is too common, there would be millions of Google hits, so either I need to rewrite the above slightly and make her process of narrowing it down a bit more believable, or I make the name something less common. Then it hit her. You use Chase Kevele to send a message to the people above her. This person had known that Chase would walk into the DPMO and start asking questions. And of course she already had. Or at least had sent Steven to do it for her. They wanted to get someone's attention and they were using her to do it. The thought made her angry. You logged into her site and posted a message to the web. "I am not your errand girl, Mr. Paper. Find someone else" A couple of her friends popped in to ask what they hell she was talking about. Her college roommate took it as an anti-media rant, but as the stream of the web rushed past it was quickly lost without further comment. She closed the laptop and poured another class of wine. She was sure whomever it was would be watching. Your move Mr. Paper.