path: root/missing-persons/CH-1.txt

The storm came on fast. Trees were already bending like dancers in the wind. She pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. The middle of September was too late for a hurricane. It should have been the start of Autumn, a day when the air suddenly turns cool and crisp. The end of summer was the only season that offered that singularity, that one day when everything was suddenly different. The humidity gone; the air lighter, cleaner. The rest of the seasons merely flowed into a one another like a giant river of time running right through you. But when summer ended it did it all at once, in one day, and everyone all over Washington DC knew it, together, all at once. Provided they paid attention.

Chase Kevale paid attention. Except that Autumn was late this year. *Nowhere to be found* the man on the radio had said earlier as she stood in line at Dunkin' Donuts. It was her turn. She never ate the donuts or drank the coffee, but that reasoning had fallen on deaf ears. Fair is fair her boss said when she complained. Fair is fair. Fair is nowhere. 

*Nowhere to be found*. Instead the city could look forward to Emily, which, if she did not deviate from her current course and speed  would hit the city tomorrow night as a category 4. So far it was only wind, only gusts really, but more than enough to upset a tray of coffee or launch a flimsy box of donuts into the sky. She was already not the most popular employee at the office and losing the Friday donuts to the wind wasn't going to do her any favors. She was the new girl. The new girl everyone disliked because they were no longer new, were years away from new, so far in fact that new felt threatening she supposed. Or perhaps it was simply that they had forgotten how to interact with people that were not as thoroughly jaded as themselves. And despite the cynical atmosphere, the jadedness that practically permeated the air at the office, she had not given in yet. Chase knew she worked too hard, knew she asked too many questions, read too much into the files and was not in any tangible way a part of office life, the life that had certain rules and routines, an order that was, to her fellow employees, as unquestionable and immutable as the laws of gravity or motion. Not that they had much of either Chase thought, no gravity, no motion, no thought of motion even. They were simply government employees punching the clock, gossiping about their pay grade, their years to retirement. The enormity of the job did not occur to them, or perhaps they just didn't care, Chase hadn't yet sorted that one out, she was, after all, just the new girl. Getting coffee and donuts. 

She fumbled for her keys balancing the two trays of small coffee cups and the donuts precariously in one hand as she turned the key and threw her shoulder into the heavy metal of the door, but she made it coffee and donuts fully intact. Everyone was already assembled in the break room, waiting. 

"Sorry, I'm late you guys." She set the coffee and donuts down in the middle of the table and moved back, dropping her bag in an empty chair as the rest tore into the stack of coffee. "There was an unbelievable line at Dunkin Donuts."

Steven smiled and bit into a bearclaw. "DC loves its donuts."

While most of her coworkers filled her with a kind of dread she had previously only felt when she stood in line at the DMV, she had come to like Steven. He wasn't cynical, didn't seem to care about punching clocks and in certain lights he was not unpleasant to look at. He had longish hair that made him seem perhaps younger than he was and though she still thought men with hair down to their shoulders generally looked ridiculous, Steven managed to pull it off somehow. She watched him now as a strand of the hair escaped from behind his ear and fell in front of his face becoming entangled with a bit of glaze from his bearclaw. He kept eating, seemingly unaware that the hair was now in danger of disappearing into his mouth. It wasn't in fact until an inch or two was in his mouth that he realized what had happened and leaned forward to deftly sweep the hair away as he swallowed the rest of the donut. She watched him, fascinated by the complexities of donut eating that she had not previously considered.

"Any luck with Sgt. McCann?" Steven used a napkin to pull a few bits of donut glaze out of his hair and tucked it back behind his ear.

Chase turned around and pulled out a small basket of blueberries she kept in the break fridge. "I'm still waiting on the records from Annapolis to make sure it is in fact that my Sgt. McCann."

"Why don't you just hop a jet out to Annapolis?" sneered Dennis Burch as he slid past her, out of the break room and back, she assumed, to the small, hellish hole in which Chase was sure he lived out his days. Chase glared at his back and watched Steven stifle a smile out of the corner of her eye. "Anyway, if the field tests in Hawaii match then I'm all set because the paperwork puts him there at the time."

"Wow, so you're going to have the oldest closed case this year then." Steven raised his eyebrows at her. "Setting the bar kind of high for yourself aren't you? I mean, what are you going to do next year? Tackle Whitmore again?" Steven giggled and walked out of the break room. 

Assholes. All of them. Chase picked through the moldy blueberries to find the dozen or so ripe ones which she picked out and piled on a napkin. The rest of her fellow employees began to file out, heading off to start whatever it was they did all day. Chase dumped the moldy blueberries in the trash and threw the rest on her mouth. She leaned against the table and stared out over the low ceiling, florescent lighted basement room where she spent her days.

The Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office was ostensibly charged with identifying and recovering the remains of United States personnel lost in foreign wars and other actions abroad. It was the sort of agency that brought a misty tear to many a Senators' eye and many a snapped salute from Presidents, but very little in the way of funding. So little in fact that its predecessor had been disbanded entirely from 1951 to 1976, during which time missing soldiers effectively became persona non grata in the eyes of the government. Even now the diggers, as one of Chase's exes had called the agency, a name that, at least in Chase's mind, had stuck, consisted of fewer than sixty people. And that included the maids and janitors who cleaned the buildings at night. When Chase had arrived nearly a year ago the DPMO was backlogged with some 230,000 MIA cases, some dating from as far back as World War II, some newer, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Mogadishu, Darfur. Just about any hell hole the United States had ever sent its soldiers into, a few had failed to come home. By the time the files reached the basement the MIA solider was dead. The same was likely true of most POWs. In the twenty years her boss had been working here, he told her, he had never once heard of anyone being found alive. Not even MIA/POW reports from more recent wars. If soldiers were alive their comrades rescued them. If there was no rescue then the paper work became part of a Kafkaian labyrinth that eventually led here, to a filing cabinet, somewhere in the long wall of metal filing cabinets that lined the entire bottom floor of the building -- case records, field reports, eyewitness testimonies and countless other pieces of paper that formed the story, from enlistment to disappearance, all packed into the cold metal cabinets surrounded all of them as they worked every day. Around the turn of the century the overlords at the DoD had seen fit to launch a plan to index the files into a database, something searchable, something they might be able to share with outside agencies. The effort had gotten as far the some 74,000 soldiers still missing from World War II. Thanks to budget shortfalls under the Bush administration there were currently only two temps entering data and only one programmer, Steven, trying the wrangle it all into something organized.
Despite a promising career as an academic historian, Chase had shunned the cushy university posts offered to her by well wishing professors and administrations, opting instead to, as she blithely told Dr. Rosenbaum the morning she accepted the position at the DoD, "do some research that actually affects peoples lives." Rosenbaum had just shrugged, rubbed the white stubble of his sagging chin and hrumphed quietly, as was his nature. She knew that he, and rest of her professors thought she was crazy, that they all, like her mother, thought she was throwing something away, but she didn't care. She didn't want to spend her life just talking about the past, she wanted to touch it. She wanted to see it in front of her, to feel it between her fingers, to dig in the soil, to make it part of the present, the way it had always been to her, as far back as she could remember.

So she shoved her PhD in a box, filled up the back of her old Volvo station wagon and drove from Massachusetts down to Washington DC where she had accepted a job as junior research fellow at the Defense Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office. With Dr. Rosenbaum's half-hearted help she managed to get herself assigned to what everyone referred to as the skull and bones department, which specialized in field work and connecting, as the joke went, the skull with the bones. But despite a reputation for fieldwork, Chase had only, thus far, been out of the office once and that had been her own doing, not the DoD.

As the new girl Chase had been handed the worst job in skull and bones, trying to find Whitmore and Hume. It was a ritual, hazing for history nerds. The case had been handed, amid chuckles and snickers from old timers, to every new Skull and Bones employee for the last twenty years, none of whom had ever managed to find the skull, bones or even vague whereabouts of Lt. Whitmore or his gunner, Sgt. Hume. The two had simply disappeared into a cloud. Like most newcomers Chase had accepted the file as her first challenge, her opportunity to prove herself. She heard the snickers. She heard the chuckles. She knew the case was a dog even before Steven took pity on her and pulled her aside one day at lunch to say, "You know you can't solve Whitmore and Hume, right?" He lowered his voice to a whisper, "We've all had to dog it for a while. I had it three years ago when I started, before they found out I could write code. Fuckers think it's funny." He grimaced. "Just thought you should know."

Thank you Steven," Chase was twirling a pen through her fingers wondering if perhaps the case were solvable despite years of failure. She knew of half a dozen mathematical proofs that for years had been considered unsolvable and then one day, damn it all, someone solves it. And she wasn't even a mathematician, probably there were far more examples. Still, history was trickier, Amelia Earhart was still unsolved, Jesse James' gold was still missing, DB Cooper was never heard from again.

Whitmore and Hume had disappeared over present day Slovenia on April 19, 1917.

Officially the DPMO did not investigate missing persons from WWI. At first Chase had found that disconcerting, surely the United States did not just give up on people? But the deeper she dug into the case, the more she understood why everyone had given up. She wasn't about to.

At first her fellow employees would smile behind her back as she walked by carting yet another load of files back from the archives up on the fifth floor. After a while she started smiling back at them, or rather smiling preemptively as Chase thought of it. Broad, fake smiles that said *I am having so much faun at this job, you have no fucking idea*. It was childish she knew, but eventually the smiles were no longer fake because she could see how much it really was messing with their heads, and that really did make her smile. She was careful to make sure she never gave up the game, never let them know she knew she had been had. Instead Chase threw herself deeper into the case.

She spent more time upstairs in the archives than anyone else ever had. She did something no one at Skull and Bones had ever really bothered to do; she got to know the archivists. They were a different bunch, the sort of nerds that had actually understood the statistics class she had barely managed to pass as an undergrad, but, despite a love of organization and raw data that she couldn't relate to, she got along well with Jim Dimperryll, the head of the archive department and he helped her piece together the trail of Whitmore and Hume in far more detail than anyone else has ever done. Chase packed so much data into both Whitmore and Hume's file that she convinced herself no one was ever going to be tricked into this case again. She started spending her lunches with Dimperryll in the upstairs cafeteria, which required a different keycard pass, one the Dimperryll had, but Chase and the rest of her Skull and Bones workers did not. Not only did it get her out of lunch with her co-workers, it got her a much better selection of fresh fruit, which Chase had something of a fetish for. It was around then that the people in her own department began to drop their snickers, stop smiling at all, even behind her back and give her a wider berth in the halls. Some even looking down when they passed, avoiding even eye contact.

"They think you're trying to make them look bad," Steven informed her one day. He had developed a habit of stopping by her desk in the mornings, before she left to go to the archives. He liked, she could tell, to feel as though her were passing on his wisdom to someone else, which, she figured was really just a cover for the fact that he was ecstatically excited to no longer be the new guy. And she realized much later, he was also thankful to finally have someone closer to his own age to talk to. She didn't mind it either. Steven came to serve as kind of anchor for the tether she was developing, one that would take her further and further away from the frustration and that her boss had expected her to find in the Whitmore and Hume file.

Whitmore started in Georgia. He was then shipped out west to California for flight training and then back east again before shipping out to France in April of 1917. Chase had spent the better part of two weeks down at the Army Archives tracing the movements of the airman's unit. Hume did not come into the picture until much later. Whitmore's unit suffered heavy loses above the battlefields of eastern france, but somehow Lt. Charles Whitmore had survived. The unit was then moved north, to Belgium to drop mustard gas canisters on enemy lines. Whitmore had been shot down over Belgium and was picked up by the Germans. He apparently spent time in a POW camp before being swapped out for some Germans captured during a rare allied push into Axis territory. In his absence Whitmore's unit had been wiped out. Unlike today, when the time as a POW alone would likely have earned him a trip home, Lt. Whitmore was given a new plane, assigned a new rear gunner, one Steven Hume formerly of the 212 Squadron, and the two were sent merrily on their way to join a new unit in sunny, warm Italy. Except that for Whitmore and his fellow airmen, Italy was not warm. Or it was, but they were still cold, flying high into the Dolomites and Slovenian Alps to support the war happening on the mountain slopes.  One day Whitmore and Hume, along with three other planes were sent to bomb an area near Bled, in present day Slovenia. The squadron flew in bad weather, but made it to the target, dropped their bombs and turned around to fly home. Somewhere along the way, Whitmore and Hume flew into a cloud and were simply never seen again. Whitmore and Hume had not returned. That was all the paperwork said, missing in action. Full stop.

Everyone from their unit was long since deceased. Even if she could have tracked down their families, any stories would be second, perhaps third hand at this point. Sometime in the late 1940s, when an agency similar to the DPMO had existed, someone had interviewed the Colonel in charge of the unit, but the written report that Chase found stapled to the back of the folder in the Army archives offered no real insight. One minute they were there, the next they were not the Colonel said. 

She knew that was when she was supposed to give up. She knew she was supposed to learn the lesson, to humbly accept that she wouldn't solve everything. She was supposed to given in. Chase had never given in. Instead she filed a travel form, called an old boyfriend who had landed at the State Department and managed to get on a diplomatic flight to Germany. She landed in Berlin one cold and raining December morning and realized that she didn't speak a word of German. She spent two days tracking down a translator and then several more tracking down the records she wanted. Finally she found herself, translator in tow, in a dusty, forgotten room in the basement of building that housed what passed for Germany's WWI records. The place wasn't much, but the records were, in typical German style, fastidiously neat and thorough. With the help of her interpreter and a very put out looking woman the German archive she managed to tracing the movements of German and Prussian forces that might have been in the general vicinity of Whitmore and Hume's flight path. She was looking for reports of shooting down an airplane or coming across Allied bodies, parachutes anything. There was nothing. So she had ponied up for a train to Ljubljana. Again she spent several days looking for a translator and then, with the help of Tomaz, a sympathetic old man who had listened to her frustration over a cup of coffee and eventually agreed to help her, she dug through local news archives, papers and radio transcripts from the war, looking for any report of American pilots. There were in fact several, but most were well after Whitmore and Hume disappeared. One could possibly had been them, but neither solider in question claimed to be a pilot and both were, according to the postwar reporting in the local paper, sent back to the Allied forces before the end of the war. One day, after she had finally decided it was time to give up for real, She agreed to let Tomaz drive her up to Bled, into the mountains that had claimed Whitmore and Hume and countless others. "Hemingway fought in these mountains," Tomaz told her as they drove up through thickets of pine and fir trees and hillsides strew with bluebells and heather. They stopped at the top of a pass, far above Bled, and got out to admire the views further up into the mountains. It was hard to imagine anyone fighting a war here, thought Chase, it was simply too peaceful, too quiet. Tomaz brought a thermos and poured them cups of coffee. Chase stood in the snow, her hands wrapped around the cup, staring up at the white alpine world beyond the pass. Tomaz seemed amused when Chase told him that she was supposed to fail, not supposed to ever know what became of Whitmore, that she even knew all that and still didn't care, still didn't want to give up. Tomaz chuckled and asked if she thought she had learned more of a lesson by continuing on or less. I'm not sure she had said, watching the clouds pour down from the peaks and cover the pass in fog. The bright green tips of fir trees dripped water on the gravel edges of the parking lot. Tomaz climbed back in the car. The next day Chase flew home.

Sometimes the past is truly gone, swallowed up by time. Other times it just looks that way.


                                -----


Chase had just finished typing up the last of her report on Sgt. McCann when Steven wandered into her office and sat down on the edge of her desk, one leg on the floor, one draped over a stack of files Chase need to send back to the Archives.

"Steven," she said without glancing up from her laptop screen. "Something on your mind?"

"Mmmm. Just wondering who you're going to do next?"

Chase smiled, but kept her head down. "A lady never tells Steven." She could see him blush out of the corner of her eye. 

"Sorry, that didn't come out right did it?" He picked up the cheap nameplate from her desk and toyed with the edge where the fake gold laminate was already peeling after barely a year. At least they weren't wasting money on frivolous stuff he thought to himself. "It's just that, well... there are rumors see, rumors you're going to go back to the Whitmore case or something crazy like that."

She said nothing while she finished entering the last of the McCann report and then clicked save and closed the laptop. "Steven, you know as well as I do that Whitmore is unsolvable."

"Actually, I would've thought that you knew that even better than I do." Steven had set down the nameplate and pulled out a small package of nutter butters which he proceeded to eat, distractedly. "Chase, listen, you know how everyone here thinks that you're trying to make them look bad?"

"That is what you tell me."

"Well, see, the thing is, I'm starting to think that maybe they're right. You've been here just over a year, so this is technically your second year, but I'm going to keep calling it your first year, since it's your first full year, your first year in which anyone can really judge your case work and quite frankly it's really good. You didn't solve Whitmore. So far that's you're only smudge, if it can be called that. So that means you cleared what? fifteen cases?

"McCann makes eighteen actually." Chase leaned back in her chair. "What's your point Steven, just spit it out."

He stared at his shoes. "I don't know. It's just that, if the rumors are true they're going to start giving you even more old cases, cases they think the rest of us can't do. I mean, here's the thing, you know how I told you I ended up getting moved over to the tech department because I knew Python? Yeah, well, that's true, but it's also true that my last case was for a missing snipers in Afghanistan that turn out to be on loan to the CIA for things that are way the hell over my pay grade and quite frankly terrify me. In other words, I got fucked, a snafu that turned out to embarrass half a dozen very high ranking military officers, not to mention my own bosses who have to admit they assigned it to me.... But you, you just keep solving things. I used to be you, but ever since that stupid case I've been writing code, which is fine, but then you came along and it reminds me of how I fucked up, or how I got fucked."

Chase laughed. "Steven, I would have thought you'd be glad to not be the new kid anymore." 

He stood up, nodded and shrugged. "I'll let you get back to work."

"Wait." She dropped her feet to the ground and stood up, pulling her coat off the chair. "Technically I just closed one case and haven't be assigned anything new yet. So... let's play a little hooky and get a real breakfast."

Steven lit up. "Really? Okay. Wait. What's my excuse?"

"Oh who cares, come on, let's go."

They ducked out of Chases office and headed toward the back wall where a row of file cabinets would shield them from the view of those already straggling into the meeting room for the weekly status meeting. Outside the wind was getting stronger, but the city did not seem to care, as if weather were simply not a significant enough event to interrupt a city like DC. Chase was surprised to find that not only were they not the only ones on the street, but there were lines outside the first two diners they passed, people huddled against the walls of the building ducked out of the wind. It made Chase laugh. Whole town is full of diners dear her grandfather had told her when she moved down to DC. It's a town of dirty deeds over breakfast, you won't like it. He had winked at her and smiled. He was right she knew, it was a town of breakfast, a town of deals and negotiations in diners, a town of crowded lunch counters. But he was wrong that she hated it. She had never felt so at home before in her life. Eventually they found a diner, a Greek diner, one that was no longer serving breakfast, which explained why there were a couple empty seats at the counter. Chase and Steven were hardly in the door when Chase's phone began to ring. Steven turned around with a panicked look on his face.

"Relax," Chase look down at the screen, "it's just my mom. Give me five." She headed back outside. "Hi mom, what's up."

"What's up? How is that any way to greet your mother?"

"Sorry Mom, but I'm sorta busy. Morning meeting, work."

"Then you aren't leaving for the storm?"

"Wasn't planning on it, why? Should I?"

"Oh who knows dear. The news is all panic all the time, probably it's nothing, but I was wondering if you would mind going out to the house, you now, just give it a look over, back sure Duncan got the boards on the windows, that sort of thing."

Chase knew Duncan was her mother's neighbor, but last time she had checked he was bit old to put up starboards. "Duncan put up your windows? Jeez mom, he's like 80."

"What choice did I have? I'm all the way out here in Vegas, the storm grounded all the flights. And I know you're not going to do it."  Her mother paused a half beat, but Chase did not rise to the bait. "Anyway, that's why I'm calling you now dear. You'll have a look won't you? Unless it's too dangerous I mean. Use your judgment Chase."

Chase nodded. "Sure mom, I'll have a look. But listen, I really half to go right now. I'll call you later okay?" Chase hung up before her mother could respond. Something was happening down the street, at the corner where tk and tk formed a rather massive intersection. Chase glanced inside, but Steven looked well occupied with his menu so she walked down toward the corner to see what the commotion was. People on the corner were transfixed by a woman darting through the intersection, skipping crosswalks and running diagonally through eight lanes of honking cars and screaming cabbies. She was wearing what might have been skirt, had someone added another inch or two of fabric, which, as Chase slowly realized, would need to be vinyl or perhaps rubber, it was hard to tell given that there was so little of it. Similarly her top might have been a shirt if the wind, or scissors or something had not made off with everything but the bare essentials necessary to keep the police from becoming too actively involved in her attire. She was teetering on the biggest pair of platform heels Chase had ever seen, also red and wildly inappropriate for walking, let along the crooked zig-zagging run they were currently engaged in. 

It wasn't everyday, even in D.C., that you saw a hooker in a red vinyl skirt try to cross an intersection full of traffic on the diagonal. Half a dozen people had stopped what they were doing to watch the spectacle, some with their mouths hanging open, gawking as the woman made it to middle, where there was no traffic. She started yelling, *wait up now sugar*, and waving her arms toward the corner where Chase and the other's stood. People near her seemed to tense up at the realization that the ongoing spectacle might involve them in some way, might ruin the fun by turning them into more than spectators. The couple next to her held each other tight, shifting their arms to get a better grip and Chase realized she had been holding her breath. The woman took off her spiked, long heels and made a second dash, this time headed for the curb just down the way from Chase. Chase decided she could not watch, didn't want to see the woman's body splattered all over tk so she turned around. But then she found it impossible not to know what was happening so she turned around again just in time to see the woman scamper to the curb just ahead of a honking bus, which she didn't seem to even notice. The woman said nothing, she bent down and put back on her shoes. There was a collective exhale and the spectators turned away, continuing on to wherever they had been headed. Chase walked back to the diner, still shaking her head to herself, wondering if the woman was certifiable. She heard someone behind her and held the door open, but no one took it from her. She glanced behind her and was surprised to see the woman from the intersection standing there. Chase raised her eyebrows at her. 

"Hey sugar." She smiled, but made no effort to take the open door from Chase.

She's definitely crazy thought Chase, "can I help you?"

"I know this is weird for you, talking to black people I mean," The woman smiled, but Chase felt herself blush. "Thing is honey, your name is Chase right?"

Chase considered saying no, but she was curious. She glanced back inside. Steven's head was buried in the newspaper. Chase stepped back out to the street and let the door close behind here. "How do you know my name?"

"Well, there you go. I thought that boy might be crazy." She laughed nervously. "He asked me to give you something." She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and grinned at Chase who was too shocked to respond. The woman reached into her purse and retrieved a small slip of pink paper folded in half. She thrust it out to Chase who took it from her fingers and without looking at it said, "Okay. Thank you," as if it were perfectly normal for a stranger to be handing her a slip of paper on behalf of another stranger.

The woman seemed to accept that it was in fact normal. She nodded. "Well, anyway. Have a good day." And she turned and walked back toward the corner. 

Chase stood there, watching the woman walk away, wondering if she was going to cross the intersection the same way again, but at the last minute she made a right disappeared around the corner.

Chase went back inside the diner and let the door close behind her. She pulled out the slip of paper. Written in pencil, just along the bottom edge, were small block letters that spelled out a name: Reese Lawrence. She looked up and saw Steven looking quizzically over at her. She glanced down again at the sheet of paper and this time noticed that part of the pencil had been smeared, she brought it closer to her face and felt a chill run down her spin, it read *Lt.* Reese Lawrence.