Tunnel Vision

I was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a rainy night when we came to one of the tunnels, and the three children in my car all at once started screaming as loud as they could. I have no idea why. The rain of course stopped though the windshield wipers didn't; suddenly I saw something so chilling I'll remember it the rest of my life.

In an oncoming, or westbound, car, greenish if I remember correctly, a man had a gun pointed at the woman driver. Someone else was in the front passenger seat, but knocked out, asleep or dead, and he had pushed himself up between the front seat to get the gun pointed at her head. SHe had a look of abject terror in her eyes but kept the car going straight; she was going highway speed. I could see it clearly but only for a split second. My concern was whether the kids had seen it but they were screaming so loud I kind of doubted they could.

When I was out of the tunnel I looked for a place to pull over and call nine-one-one, but I was shaking and almost couldn't stop when a place came up after a few miles. Still shaking, I got out of the car in the rain and put a jacket over my head and the phone so I could make the call. I told the police what I saw. The signs wouldn't tell me which tunnel it was but I figured they could deduce that from my location. All I could say was what I'd seen. I didn't remember much, as it turned out, except that the car was a greenish color. It had all flashed by pretty quickly.

The kids were all somewhat concerned that I'd bolted out of the car in the pouring down rain out in the middle of the turnpike right after we'd gone through a tunnel, so I told them everything was ok and we got started back on the road as soon as we could. Little Jummy was right behind me; he was the one who wasn't mine. We were taking him to live with his grandmother in Philadelphia as his mother had died unexpectedly back in Pittsburgh. Bobby and Jane were mine, 5 and 3 respectively; Bobby and Jimmy were kindergarten buddies. I had left my wife and a smaller baby home. I had somehow been roped into this due to association with a church that Jimmy's mother had attended for a while. Somebody had to deliver this kid to his grandmother. The father apparently was not part of the picture.

The image of what I'd seen disrupted my driving all the way into Philadelphia. It had been dark when it happened, though it was only about six, but when we got into Philadelphia it was still raining and I had a lot of trouble finding that grandmother's house even though I had GPS and all the modern ways of doing it. It just seemed like a very scary world where a guy can hijack a car right in the middle of a tunnel on a cold and rainy night, and get away with it. I somehow figured that woman would end up dead one way or the other.

The grandmother was very nice to us and insisted we stay for the night. She put all the children, plus one she had named Chloe, on one huge bed that was hers, while she insisted on sleeping in another, and put me on the living room couch but insisted on making tea first. I didn't want to burden her with the cold facts of what I'd seen and what made it such a disturbing journey. Instead we talked about Jimmy and what he'd need growing up.

She admitted she'd made mistakes bringing up her daughter, Jimmy's mother, who had had a rough life before she had just apparently committed suicide by jumping off the Warhol Bridge in Pittsburgh. This had happened in the middle of the night and poor Jimmy had been found the following day afraid and left an orphan. Poor kid, no wonder he had nightmares and even now he was babbling to his grandma about his aunt and some guy with a gun. I thought of the situation in the tunnel once again wondering if he'd seen it and thought, if the kid had seen that it would trigger all kinds of unpleasant nightmares. Grandma was soothing to him and assured him that everything would be ok.

In the morning the kids and I got packed up and ready to go on the long haul back to Pittsburgh. I didn't look forward to those tunnels but there was no easy way around; you pretty much had to shoot right through them day or night, rain or not. The grandmother got a call from her other daughter who was apparently stranded somewhere out in the boondocks of Pennsylvania, no car, no money, no nothing but a horrible story which I didn't hear because I heard only the grandmother's voice. The grandmother agreed to send her bus fare to get her back to Philly as soon as she could. After she hung up she told me she was already keeping that daughter's child, Chloe, and that was the girl, about four, who entertained her cousin Jimmy and my two, and of course they'd all had a pretty good time though Jimmy had one of his nightmares. Grandmother didn't tell Chloe what had gone bad with her mother - how much can children take?

It rained again all the way home and I practically shut my eyes in the tunnels hoping not to see anything as bad as what I'd already seen. The grandmother agreed to stay in touch as people in the church all wanted to know if she would be ok with Jimmy and if she needed anything. She was a pretty tough lady and would probably be fine, but Jimmy appeared to be somewhat damaged by the chain of events. It turns out it was his father in his aunt's car, holding the gun, and that his mother didn't just jump off the Warhol bridge. The father had just stolen the car, though, and didn't actually hurt Chloe's mother; he wrecked it out in Ohio somewhere the following day in a crash that involved a semi and a police car. By the time I heard this though I was back home safe and sound, with the baby sleeping in the main bed, and my wife worried that I would roll over on her. I now had nightmares too, but it was always the same one, what I'd seen in the tunnel, and I never did find out exactly what Jimmy had seen.

Amateur Night

It's St. Patrick's Day at Murphy's Pub, in a small town in Colorado. Because Murphy's has a shamrock on its sign and is easily identifiable as the Irish place, it's crowded, and is selling a lot of alcohol.

Jerry O'Brian is Irish and is a regular at Murphy's Pub. He doesn't like St. Patrick's Day, which he calls "Amateur Night," because there are too many non-drinkers at the bar and too many of them are drunk. He himself holds his alcohol - he can drink whiskey all night and not do anything rash or violent, but these people, one or two beers and they start yelling or punching each other like they'd been holding it in all year.

One of these so-called amateurs is named Jake, and he has been hitting on Rose, another regular at the bar. Jerry, like many guys at the bar, is somewhat protective of Rose if only because she's a regular. They've all hit on her too at some point or another and who knows who she has actually ever gone home with, not Jerry for sure. But Jerry gets in Jake's face at one point because he's being too forward with Rose. He tells Jake to bug off and go find someone else. Jake takes a swing at Jerry. But he's so drunk he ends up falling on the floor, the swing missing Jerry by a country mile.

Now people rush in to keep the two separated. They make moves to get Jake out of there; he's the guilty party. Jerry watches Jake with a hardened eye - it's hard to tell whether he is memorizing his features so as to pound him later, or whether he simply doesn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to take such a wide swing at him.

Rick the bartender has played the biggest role in trying to get a fallen Jake out of the bar, tossed out onto the curb and told not to come back tonight. He hasn't gotten very far because the bar is so crowded. With a man on the floor everyone has to jostle around to get their drinks and take them to their tables. One guy, Scott, actually spills his scotch onto Rick while Rick is dragging Jake across the floor.

This is the last straw for Rick, who stops what he's doing and just tells Scott to leave the bar also. "Just leave before I pop you one," he tells Scott, but Scott is also drunk beyond his usual limit, and doesn't take him seriously. Besides, he'd just bought a Scotch and was now eager to drink part of it. He swigs what's left in his glass and looks seriously at Rick. It's like he's trying to figure out if Rick is serious or not.

But Rick is dead serious, and he knows he should never back down from a demand he's made of any customer. If he thinks Scott should leave, Scott should leave, and he'll stare Scott down until he does, and get back-up help if necessary. There are at least four people working the floor, three of them big enough to help him in a pinch. He wants Scott to leave and he's not backing down.

There's an Irish band over in the corner. This is quite unusual for a small town in Colorado, but this bar found the band, and employed them, and they're busy playing lots of Irish music. The fiddler, Seamus, is out front and he knows he needs a lot of elbow room to do his job. He's not happy that people keep spilling drinks so near to their cords and mics and electric equipment. He's somewhat superstitious about losing all the power just because people are so drunk and so crowded they can't hold a drink upright. He's got his eyes on Rose who for some reason got his attention the minute they started playing.

Rose for her part has stayed close to Jerry, thinking that if she stays close to him, he won't pound that Jake guy who is drunk on the floor and being dragged out of the place by Rick. Jerry puts his arm around her and gives her a big wet sloppy kiss. They are old friends if nothing else and it's St. Patrick's Day, maybe they feel it's their way of celebrating to just let go and enjoy the situation. Seamus steams a little as he watches but he's busy fiddling; there isn't much he can do.

The bar has degenerated a little into a fight with lots of pushing and shoving. This started because Scott took a swing at Rick the bartender, and missed and hit some other guy, who then jumped into it like it was his opportunity to let go of a year's built up stress and tension. It was an accident, for God's sake. But this guy doesn't care, and goes swinging at everyone, Scott, Rick, whoever is anywhere near him.

When the police show up he's the guy they're after, because he's already decked three or four guys and he's not afraid to do as much damage as he possibly can. He's all dressed up, but strong underneath all those fancy clothes, and nobody's ever seen him before, like he just popped in out of nowhere with an agenda to beat everyone up. At one point a gun appears, in the hands of some guy that got popped in the jaw, but cooler heads prevail and this is just before the police arrive, so in that situation it's best to keep the gun out of sight and out of the fight. Jerry at some point goes over to deal with the guy with the gun and after that, to explain to the police a little of what happened, and he gets drawn into the argument about who started it all.

This is Seamus' opportunity, and he offers Rose a ride home, which she accepts. The night is over. Too much damage has been done already. The band takes down its equipment and gets ready to go home; it's at least midnight anyway. The police are now swarming the place, having called for backup, so no one is going to have a good time from this time out, unless you count those who have slipped out the back, like Seamus and Rose. It's another one for the books. The management of Murphy's just wants to close the place and have everyone go home. Out on the street, police are patrolling for drunken drivers, who are plentiful, so it's best just to walk home, if you live in the town.

Two guys are friends. Actually one of them is the former lover of the other's girlfriend, but they are friends anyway. They both are in and out of the woman's house, and she doesn't seem to mind or find one's presence a problem for when the other visits. They have fallen into dealing drugs as that's the best way for their vagabond souls to stay in plenty of money and be able to live the life they want. Sometimes they work together, sometimes not. One of the guys has a deal going in this town and is about to get a large chunk of money.

Two kids have come up with the money and hope to get a large drug score with it, and with that they'll turn it around and come into big money, at the same time having plenty for themselves. They are kids, about nineteen. Really, it's the idea of one of the kids, the other is along for the ride. The other, however, owns the car, a small sleek car that does well when he wants it to, over the sand desert, accelerator to the floor. His parents got him this car as a graduation gift. Little did they know there would be a drug deal in it.

The two older kids climb in the back of the car to complete the deal. They are both armed, but so are the kids in the front. The kids in front turn around to see that all the drugs are as they said it would be, and they hand over the money, all tied in piles, in a single small suitcase, plenty of money. We can assume that they collected this cash from earlier deals as kids don't generally go into the bank asking for large piles of cash held together by rubber bands. Anyway the older kids assume that the money's all there, and the deal appears to be ready to go through.

But something happens, and on cue, the two guys in back pull out their guns and kill the two kids in front. Their heads are literally blown up by the guns at close range. It makes a loud sound, two shots close together, and neighbors are alarmed. But the two older boys, the shooters, are out of the car in a flash and running down the street. They have both the money and the drugs.

Some security cameras in the neighborhood catch them running, but nobody can figure out who they were. In the car, along with the two dead boys with severely blown-apart skulls, are some cartridges that can help them track down the weapons, but no luck there either, the weapons are gone with the shooters. There are traces of drugs in the car, but no evidence to show that it was a drug deal, as both the suitcase with the money and the drugs themselves are also gone with the shooter. Neither of the dead boys has a cell phone.

In fact the cell phone of the young boy who seems to have arranged the deal is never found. But it doesn't matter, the older boy who arranged it on his end, is found eight years later, and his cell phone has all that information. He was texting the younger boy, eight years ago, on that day, arranging the deal. His cell phone also has GPS data that show he was at that very spot of the murder. He and his friend are arrested and brought to justice.

You would think they would scrap all the cell phones and start over, rather than leave any evidence at all around their person. Somehow they got away with it for eight years; nobody came to check their cell phones. The other boy, arrested also, in prison for life for murder, didn't seem to have a cell phone at all. It's a wonder, though, that a cell phone can still be in this world, with all that evidence on it, and basically send two kids on their way to a life in prison, if they're lucky. That's not much of a life, but then, they weren't living much of a life anyway.

 

I sometimes come across people who I'd like to write about but can't because I'm flying by, and also because basically my book is about someone else.

There is this woman who is kind of parallel to the woman I am writing about. The woman I am writing about, Elizabeth, wqs an elocutionist in Toledo at the turn of the 19th century. She came to Toledo to set up an elocution business (actually she came because she married an insurance agent who had a business there) and she hung on for most of her life until she retired in 1929.

This other woman had to move to Toledo because her husband ran a City Directory project. Her husband's name was Thomas Martin so almost impossible to trace. They moved to Toledo in about 1882, about five years after Elizabeth got there. They moved there from Indianapolis.

But the woman, Lucia Julian Martin, had experience, having run a school for Oratory in Indianapolis. So somehow, when she got to Toledo, she started the Toledo School of Elocution and Oratory. Sounds good, huh? Elizabeth seemed to be involved. They were kind of partners in this enterprise as far as I can tell and both are at some point listed as principal.

Lucia went back to Indianapolis after only three years in Toledo, in about 1885. The City Directory project done, or under way, they didn't have to stay. But Thomas died sometime then in the late 1800's. Maybe he died early or maybe they were both a little older than Elizabeth, who was still only 47 at the turn of the century.

Lucia returned to Toledo in about 1895, but she is listed as a widow. She again gets work at the Toledo School of Elocution and Oratory, a school she probably founded. It changes its name some; at some point it's Elocution and Physical Culture. In any case she is partners with Elizabeth. Elizabeth also is a widow but has two young children. They teach elocution together or at least side by side in the city. Lucia is a little more into the physical culture fad of the age, elocution by knowing how to exercise the body and make lungs stronger.

Lucia eventually moved to Chicago and from there to LA. In LA, in about 1905, she was still teaching elocution, starting her own business again. But she died in November of 1908. In 1909 in LA newspapers lawyers can be found dealing with her estate.

But the best I can figure, she appears to be buried in Toledo. How did they get her back there from LA, or rather, who did? I find no evidence that she had any children, not to mention any who would go to that trouble. It probably had to do with her request. Records of her are lost (or seem to be) - I find no record of where she's from (probably Indiana), when she was born, when she married, etc. The gravesite record is all there is and even it is somewhat incomplete as it calls her Lucia J. What happened to Thomas? Were those lawyers in LA arguing about real money or more likely trying to figure out what to do with old scrapbooks? She seems to be lost to history - google searches come up empty, no information to be had, no idea who she really was.

But she seemed to like Toledo a lot, or at least I can infer that by the way she ended up there. I can't find anything else about the rest of her life, but by apparently being close to Elizabeth, actually a kind of mentor, you could say, since she seemed to start the College and was a bit older than Elizabeth - well, that's her ticket into my book. She won't be forgotten altogether, because she'll be in there.

Ghost

I knew full well when I bought the house that there were ghosts in it, at least one. The sellers were very clear about telling me that a man had killed himself in the house, and they thought he was still around; they could hear him in the closet or in the attic, or going from one to the other. For example they'd hear the stairs, late at night, that led from the second-floor hallway up to the attic or back, and then the door to the master bedroom on the second floor, and then the closet door in that bedroom.

I slept in a small room on that second floor, because I could look out my window and see a charming street corner of the city with relatively steady traffic, which I liked, as idly I could enjoy people coming and going no matter what time or weather. I was not bothered by the ghost. Let him go back and forth as much as he wanted, work out whatever problem he had that had made him kill himself, even wail out at night if he wanted, which was actually rare. I did hear him occasionally, but I was ok with even that, and in an old house you never knew if that was just the rafters of the attic or the wind getting in some place where it shouldn't. 

The house was in a town by the sea; there were cliffs nearby and the fog would often roll in, shrouding it and the town for hours. It was a beautiful old house, though, with bushes and trees all around it and an attic window from which you could see most of the town and the sea.

While I was at that house, I fell in love with a woman, Sarah, and we planned to marry. She would spend a lot of time at my house, most of it downstairs, cooking, watching movies, playing Scrabble. But when she was upstairs in my room, she heard the ghost and had a different reaction from mine. She was not as eager to just let him be and let him wail in anguish at whatever was bothering him. She heard it as a call for help or a call to intervene in some way, to release him from his misery.

The man that had owned the house, one Alfred Morris III, had inherited the house from his parents, and had killed himself supposedly because his wife had died in the ocean nearby. No one knew much about the wife, Maria, or why she was out there - perhaps she had gone somewhere? She was from a nearby town somewhere, and though the neighbors had seen her, they didn't know her very well; if she had friends, they didn't even know who they would be. Alfred himself had grown up in the house, so knew every hiding place, every nook and cranny, so to speak, and most of the neighbors knew him and remembered him well - some of the older ones remembered him being a young kid, stepping on their flowers, or knocking on their doors selling tickets for the school carnival. They were upset by news of his suicide, which happened maybe a month or two after she had died.

I had accepted the previous owners' story - that they had bought the house from Alfred Morris III's estate after his death, that the ghost disturbed them but wasn't really the reason that they moved, that his suicide was big news in town so the house would always be marked to some degree. Even the neighbors liked to tell the story of all the news cameras parked up and down the street and the body being brought out and put in the police ambulance. There was some confusion about how they knew to look in there and whether they had actually searched the entire house, but the previous owners assured me that they personally had inspected every little closet and hallway and it was what they said it was - the old Morris estate, with all its history, and historical artifacts to be gone through, sold at auction or given to family members, a process that took months. 

But after Sarah moved in she wanted to act on the situation, so we both began asking around among our friends about the deaths, which had both happened about ten years earlier, in a single year. One of Sarah's friends maintained that Alfred III was gay, and that his lover, one John Maxwell, had died in the same year. This, if true, complicated the situation considerably, so finally I went and checked the newspapers and public records, as I hadn't been in the town ten years ago. It turned out that Alfred III had died at the cliffs, a popular place for locals to jump and commit suicide; it happened every few years or so. The wife had died earlier, and it had been at sea, but she was good with boats; why would she even be out there in difficult boating conditions? 

But this meant that the body they had taken out of the house, regardless of what the neighbors thought, was that of John Maxwell. 

Three suicides seemed to be a heavy burden, too much to think about while padding around the kitchen making coffee. I talked to Sarah about it quite a bit. Her friend who had first identified John Maxwell was suspicious, and said that they weren't all necessarily suicides, particularly Alfred's, which had been death from jumping from the cliff. It wasn't impossible, she said, for people to be pushed from up there. And though investigators may have found DNA or some other evidence on the body of Alfred, that wouldn't be enough to do any more than question Maxwell; they had closed the investigation shortly after Maxwell himself had died. 

The noises didn't abate after we had learned all this; on the contrary, they seemed to get worse once we became more familiar with the people involved. But Sarah and I both spontaneously began simply talking to the ghost, and telling him to be quiet or at least quit the wailing. It didn't stop or even change any of the noise, but it at least made us feel better. It was only when we had guests over, especially at the time of the wedding, that it was a little tricky. We knew a little too much, and it was better to just tell people part of the story.

Round Circle Hays

When my older boys were children, we lived in Illinois, and occasionally when driving we'd see a hilly field of round hay bales out there, at which point the youngest would shout out, "round circle hays!" They were visible and dramatic, and he could relate to them somehow as something to point out, like a toy he wanted to play with. And often, with the rolling green fields and wooded forests around them, they were a pretty sight.

I would often think of Monet, the French artist who painted the same field many times, trying tp perfect the light and the shadows from each time of day. He was convinced that mastering the light and the shadows was the key to getting the right impression of the hay bales. When I first heard that story, I was more impressed that he must have spent weeks in the same field with those hay bales, than that he painted the same field over and over again with slightly different colors. When you're an impressionist, you have to master the impressions, and the feeling one field of hay bales might give the viewer.

Last night we set out from far northern New Mexico, down along the eastern border of the state, on remote and partly icy two-lane roads, a day or two after a snowstorm. There were fields of hay bales there, too, first a field of squarish ones (square-rectangle hays?), then a field or two of round ones. At the round ones I spoke out, "round circle hays!", but in my later family, which includes four teens, two dogs, and my second wife, they don't really get the reference. I might have explained a little about Monet to them at some point, but I don't think anyone remembered or cared about impressionism. Besides the New Mexico sun was blazing down on these fields, and they were flat as a pancake, out in the eastern grasslands, without even the purple mountains that so many barren fields in New Mexico offer. I dropped the issue and kept on driving. Later on we would be passing through Roswell, with its UFOs and aliens in front of every storefront, and maybe they could relate to that better.

I always thought you could look at an impressionist painting and see whatever you wanted in it - in other words, just because Monet or someone wanted you to feel a sense of the bucolic countryside, a sense of peace, probably the farmer looked at that same field and said, each of those bales is worth so much money, if I sell it on time, and it doesn't matter so much what the light does when it hits it around dusk. Just when we got past those hay bales my wife got sick, and then when we got to Roswell we missed a turnoff because the blazing sun was in my eyes and I didn't see the exit sign. Because I missed that exit, we missed the aliens at the storefronts, but we still got plenty of that unearthly, empty, wide-open fields that you could land a UFO on; it was a long trip and we were just lucky the roads were as good as they were.

Anywhere around Roswell you can see the mountains to the west, purple in the sunset but even after dark, looming on the horizon. One of our last roads is called the Sagebrush highway, a desolate two-lane through what can be generously called the middle of nowhere. The hot air comes down the east side of the mountains and just dries the place out so completely that I'm surprised you could feed five cattle on a couple hundred thousand acres, but that's what I'm sure someone is trying to do. Having all that hay back up the road would probably help considerably.

The dark set in as we got closer to home, and at the end our luck on the road conditions ran out. We picked up the other two dogs, much larger than the first two, and the six of us people and four dogs headed up over the last mountain to get to our home. This road is half gravel and has cliffs on the side, making it just that much scarier. And it was quite icy, especially on the way down. The oldest dog, a black lab, was jammed between my wife's knees in the front seat. This dog was so glad to be back with her family that she would have jammed herself anywhere, but she also is quite old now, and I could tell she was a little nervous about the trip, even though she was glad her kennel stay was behind her. The other dogs seemed to get along ok and would have protected us a little if we'd run off the side or down into the forest.

But it wasn't necessary; we got home safe and sound to notice that we had power; we had a house waiting for us way out at the end of the road. Everyone was glad to be home. They may not have cared much about Monet, but almost everyone could agree on the idea that home felt good, just about whatever time you landed there. The dogs definitely let us know they agreed with that.

Finders keepers

Mark's farmhouse had a root cellar - it was connected to the house, and shared a stone wall, but you walked down into it from the outside, and an ancient door, solid thick wood, would close on you as you were down there. Mark kept a few things down there but it was a small space and he didn't have big plans for it - he figured he would use it if a tornado ever came through.

He had fixed his farmhouse up pretty well, well enough to have visitors, but he never had any. People just didn't go out into Iowa 100, 120 miles on scenic drives, or going out visiting. It was as if, though he'd bought the perfect, beautiful farmhouse on perfect, beautiful land, he had sentenced himself to isolation. He worked on his own from home, with a good computer network. He rarely talked to anyone except when he got groceries, and even then it was just "how are you?" and "fine thanks." At first he liked it that way, but by now he'd settled into a kind of funk. Didn't know anyone, had trouble meeting anyone, and now the house seemed like a lost corner of civilization.

He did have a friend, though, an old friend from college. The friend one day texted him and told him he was driving through Iowa soon. This friend, Avram, had always been into diving, and had moved to Israel knowing full well that there were some sunken treasures off the coast of Israel. Avram met someone who knew how to find them, and they dove together until they'd found a few of those treasures. Now Avram was driving through Iowa and asked Mark if he could visit. Mark of course said yes and sent directions by text.

When he saw Avram, who arrived at his farmhouse about three days later, he saw an incredible energy in him, as if he wasn't done doing what he was doing. Avram was healthy and happy, but secretive. Avram explained his story and asked Mark for a favor.

Basically the law was unclear about what one had to do with sunken treasure that one found. Authorities in Israel demanded that they be handed over. People like Avram and his friend Peter felt otherwise, especially if the treasure was out a ways, not directly on Israel's coast. Peter had given Avram a bag of old coins, and Avram brought them in from his car to show them. Then he asked Mark if he could hide the coins in the root cellar or someplace for about a month. He had reasons, he said, but wasn't really free to divulge them. Mark agreed. In exchange Avram gave Mark a single gem with a picture of a lute on it. It was one of those ancient lute symbols, and may have represented something, or may just have been a kind of money. In any case, it was now Mark's. Then Avram set out for the coast.

Mark knew, because Avram had told him, that the authorities and perhaps others were after Avram, and it would be better if he didn't have any coins on him. He knew that the small bag of coins was worth a small fortune, maybe a few thousand. He knew that he shouldn't keep calling Avram or give people reason to believe that Avram had stopped here on the way. He had kept his phone off the whole time. He had erased any texts to Mark or previous communication. Mark kept the large canvas bag of coins in the root cellar, and didn't move them or change them in any way, but he kept the one with the lute on it under his pillow, for some reason, where it seemed to alter his dreams.

He thought about the things Avram had said; he was clearly hiding something. It wasn't the authorities that Avram especially feared. Yes, they wanted the goods, and the coins were only part of a much larger cache, and they wanted the whole cache. Yes, Israeli authorities believed it belonged to the government, but they weren't about to cross the ocean to go chasing after a single guy on his own driving across the middle of the USA. It was someone else - maybe Peter, or a group of collectors, who knew he had something valuable and were after him. Somebody would apparently do whatever they had to to get those coins.

Word came by text about three days later that Avram had been killed in Salt Lake City in a car accident. Mark was very hesitant about answering the text, but felt impelled to know more - would there be a service? Did he have family still in the USA? He had lots of questions, particularly about how it happened. It didn't sound right. He didn't answer the text. He didn't want anyone to think he had anything to do with the treasure or the coins. It didn't matter; the FBI showed up at Mark's farmhouse about a week later. Specifically it was two burly guys, a little rough on the edges, in a newer car with New Jersey plates. They introduced themselves as Benjamin and Walter, and they had badges which they showed. Mark invited them in and they sat at the kitchen table. It occurred to him that they were acting, and weren't really the FBI, but they were good actors, and polite to a fault, as FBI agents generally are. Benjamin was the slicker of the two and did most of the talking.

They said it was a little bit more than sunken treasure, but they weren't free to disclose. They confirmed that Avram had eliminated all trace of Mark from his phone, but said they had ways of tracking Mark down anyway, so he wasn't going to be able to keep that treasure hidden indefinitely. They said they had a warrant or the capability of getting one easily, so the best thing for him to do would be to just hand it over directly and spare them the trouble of finding it the hard way. In this part they alluded to doing whatever they had to, and Mark got the sense that it might not all be nice. But there was one point where Walter, the quieter of the two, accidentally addressed Benjamin as Peter. It was over in an instant and Mark, surprised, didn't quite know what to make of it at first; he wasn't sure that's what he had heard.

Eventually Mark just went and got the coins and handed them over. They were polite to Mark and grateful that he just handed them over without making a fight about it or making them go to the trouble of searching, finding, roughing him up, killing, whatever.. They hinted that Avram was in over his head with a crowd of people that would do anything for treasure like this, and that it was very possible that his death wasn't an accident. And then they were gone. He watched the newer car with Jersey plates go off into the distance and take the road back to the interstate.

Mark had a friend in another city who was capable of checking on such things, who he called, and eventually he found out that the FBI had done no such search at all; in fact it was imposters. What made Mark mull it over and check was the replaying, in his memory, of Walter's calling Benjamin "Peter." He hadn't been sure, at first, that that's what he'd heard, but with time he became more sure. There had just been that subtle clue that they weren't what they said they were. But he also figured that, if Peter was in on finding the treasure in the first place, there was no better person to end up with it than him. And he had put on a convincing performance.

The farmhouse was isolated, and Mark quickly got back into his isolated routine. But the gem under his pillow seemed to change his dreams. The lute symbol was from the time of the treasures, around the time of Jesus, but Mark couldn't seem to find more about it outside of what Avram and the two men had said. His dreams frequently took him back to that time, but he couldn't generally figure out if they were trying to tell him anything. Often the lute would actually be in the dream, or he would hear it, but he wasn't sure if he'd know lute music from any other kind. He came to feel lucky that he'd been spared, and given a window into that world, even though he didn't understand most of it. When he thought back to the two men, Benjamin and Walter, he pictured them as seamen, accurately or not, more comfortable in a boat than in a rural Iowa kitchen. But at times it seemed like they all, even Avram, were reliving those past times, traveling across continents and out into the sea to dredge up clues about what went on before.