It was still dark when Louis slid from under the sheets. He dressed quickly, looked back at Joe curled deep in the blankets, and crept from the bedroom. The cartons from last night’s Chinese dinner still sat on the table. After glancing at Amy, fast asleep on the pullout sofa, Louis grabbed a leftover egg roll and slipped silently from the hotel room, locking the door behind him.
The campus was asleep as well, the wind kicking up the gutter litter of paper cups and cans from the night’s revelry. A misty rain followed him as he drove deep into the countryside.
He ate the cold egg roll and chased it down with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee as he drove. Just east of Hell, Louis flicked on the high beams, looking for the cutoff road to Talladay Trail. He spotted it at the last second and swung the Bronco hard onto the gravel road.
The sky was turning a muddy gray as he parked and picked his way through the high, wet grass to Lethe Creek. The creek was running fast and deep, swollen by the recent rains, and for a second, he thought about going back to the hotel and slipping in next to Joe’s warm body.
Instead, he turned up the collar of his jacket, found the same narrow part of the creek he had braved before, and waded across, grabbing on to low-hanging willow branches to stay upright.
With sodden shoes, he continued up the small incline to the cemetery. In the mist, the headstones seemed small, insubstantial things, like they were slowly being absorbed into the earth. Louis stood, looking down at Amos Brandt’s grave.
What am I doing here?
Looking for answers.
You don’t even know the questions, Louis.
He knew that a troubled sixteen-year-old girl had somehow come to believe she was a murdered black woman from long ago. And he knew he had to find an explanation for her memories. Yesterday, after the session at Dr. Sher’s home, he had asked Amy if she could remember ever visiting a cemetery. Amy said she had a fuzzy memory of old gravestones in trees. Had Jean brought her here once? Or had Geneva just told her about a family plot far beyond the cornfields?
Had she seen the name Isabel here?
A sound behind him made him spin around. He half expected to see the strange old man with his dog. But there was no one.
You got kin here?
The old man had asked him that. Why had it stuck in his mind?
Don’t you want to know where you come from?
Lily had asked him that.
And what had he answered? What would be the point?
It was a harsh thing to say to a child, let alone his own. He had realized it as soon as he said it. What made it worse, it was not something he even truly believed. He used to believe it, back when having no ties to anyone took the shape of freedom rather than loneliness.
What would be the point? He still wasn’t sure. Maybe just to feel connected to something tangible and unbroken? His mother was dead, and he had no idea where his half-brother and sister were, or if they were even alive. He had no one he could claim as his blood — except Lily.
The sun had broken through the clouds. The letters on Amos Brandt’s headstone took shape. Louis stared at them for a moment, then turned away.
He walked slowly through the clearing, examining every headstone he saw. Just the same names he had seen before.
There was one last piece of half-buried granite. He knelt in the damp grass, digging it out. His fingers stiff with cold, he scraped the dirt and moss out of the faded carved letters. It said: MURIEL BRANDT.
He hadn’t seen this one on his first visit. He stood up, wiping his muddy hands on his jeans. In the quickening light, he could see there were no other headstones he hadn’t examined.
No one named Isabel was buried here.
After one last look around the cemetery, he left.
Louis hung up the pay phone with a sigh. He had called Joe to tell her where he had gone. She hadn’t chastised him, but he could almost imagine what she was thinking: What are you doing chasing down ghosts in graveyards? She had, however, felt compelled to tell him they had only two days before they were scheduled to appear again in custody court.
He didn’t need to be reminded. The thought of turning Amy over to Owen Brandt made his stomach turn.
“You want a fresh cup?”
Louis looked up at the kid holding the coffee pot and nodded, going back to his stool. The kid refilled Louis’s mug and retreated to the far end of the counter to read his book.
Louis ate the last of his omelet, observing the kid. He was black and slender, with the red-rimmed eyes and chin stubble of a hard studier. It struck Louis that the kid had the same lone-wolf look he himself had at that age, when he had sat in this very seat at the Fleetwood Diner, lost in his prelaw books. Louis wondered what the kid was reading.
At that moment, the kid closed his book, giving Louis a look at the cover: Pathologic Basis of Disease. Louis smiled slightly. Premed.
“Excuse me,” Louis called out.
“You want more coffee?”
“No, just some help,” Louis said.
The kid came toward him, pushing his glasses up his nose. “With what?”
“Is there a historical society or something in Ann Arbor?”
The kid frowned. “Historical society? Probably, knowing this burg. What kind of history you interested in?”
“Black,” Louis said. “Especially slave history, the Underground Railroad.”
The kid rubbed his whiskers. “I saw a sign over on Main the other day in a store window. Something about African-American Cultural Society or something.”
“That might do.” Louis rose, leaving a twenty on the counter. “Thanks. Keep the change.”
“Hey, thanks, man, I can use it.” He pocketed the bill. “Can I ask what you’re looking for?”
For some strange reason, Mel Landeta’s line popped into Louis’s head: Cherchez la femme.
“A woman,” Louis said.
The sign in the storefront on Main was hand-lettered: ANN ARBOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER. An old neon martini glass above the door told of the place’s previous life as a cocktail lounge.
Inside, the fifties-style blond-wood bar was still in place, cardboard boxes covering it and filling the liquor shelves behind. Turquoise vinyl booths lined one wall, with tables and chairs stacked in the back. The lights were off, giving the place an alleylike feel.
“Hello! Anyone here?”
He heard the click of heels on terrazzo. A woman emerged from the back, carrying yet another cardboard box. She was tall, about forty, with close-cropped black hair, wearing a black sweater and slacks and big gold hoop earrings.
“Can I help you?” she asked, setting the box down on the bar.
Louis came forward. “I’m looking for some information on the Underground Railroad.”
“We’re not officially open yet,” the woman said. She reached over the bar and hit a light switch. The fluorescents spit and hummed into life. “As you can see.”
In the harsh light, the woman’s odd beauty registered. She had smooth, dark skin and a long, solemn face that made Louis recall a Modigliani portrait he had seen in a book once. The book had sat on his foster mother Frances’s coffee table, a big shiny thing that went untouched except for all those times as a kid when he furtively thumbed through it looking for naked women. The Modigliani face had stuck in his mind, because it looked just like an African mask he had seen in one of Phillip’s National Geographics.
“The grants just came through last month,” the woman said. “All we’re doing now is bringing in the stuff from storage. We don’t even have our computers yet.” The woman saw his disappointment and offered a smile. “Maybe if you told me exactly what it is you’re looking for?”
“I wish I knew,” Louis said, shaking his head. “I’m trying to find out if a farm near here could have been a station on the Railroad.”
“Well, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti were right on the routes.” She hesitated, then moved away, her long fingers tracing the writing on the boxes. She stopped, dug inside one box, pulled out a paper, and unfolded it on the bar in front of Louis.
It was a map of southern Michigan, with colored lines cutting up from Ohio and Indiana, across lower Michigan toward Detroit and over to Canada.
“There were seven main routes on the Underground Railroad, and three of them ran right through here,” she said. “Where is the farm?”
“South of Hell,” Louis said.
The woman pointed to a red line that ran up along Lake Michigan, veered east to Lansing, then south. “This is the old Grand River Trail,” she said. “A slave using this route probably would have gone right through there.”
Louis couldn’t take his eyes off the red line.
“Do you know much about the Underground Railroad?”
Her soft voice drew his eyes up to hers. She wasn’t patronizing him, but he had the sense that she had asked this question of many others before. She had the evangelistic energy that all good teachers had.
“I know it wasn’t a real railroad.”
She smiled.
“How did a place become a station?” he asked.
“There were always people — Quakers, abolitionists, and just regular folks — who hid runaways. We think there were as many as three thousand people involved when the system was running at its strongest.”
“Where did people hide?” Louis asked.
“Churches, barns, attics, cellars, anywhere they could,” she said. “The stations were about twenty miles apart, and there were secret ways to alert someone that it was a safe place, like a lighted candle in the window. Some say the patterns of quilts were codes, but no one has proven that.”
“Michigan was a free state,” Louis said. “I always thought once someone got this far, he was safe.”
She shook her head. “They could still be captured and sent back. Especially after 1850.”
“Why then?”
“Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. There were so many escapes that plantation owners in the South pressured the government to step in. The act gave slave owners the right to come up here and hunt down their ‘property.’ There were posses of men called slave catchers who were paid bounties to capture runaways and take them back to the South.”
Louis was thinking now of Amy’s tortured account of Isabel’s death. “What happened if someone got caught helping a runaway?”
“They could be fined and imprisoned,” she said. “At the least, they were hassled by the law or others in the community. At the worst, they were killed.”
Again, the images from Amy’s dream came to Louis. Men on horses with torches and dogs. A woman hanged from a hook and buried alive, as a white man in eyeglasses — Amos Brandt? — stood by and watched.
“Is there any way to find names?” Louis asked.
The woman just stared at him.
“I mean, of runaways or people who might have helped them?”
She gestured toward the boxes. “Oh, Lord, we have thousands of records here, journals, photographs, ledgers, property records. People have heard about us and keep bringing things in.” Her hand dropped. “But we are years away from getting it all organized.”
“So, you would have no way of telling me if a man named Amos Brandt had a station somewhere on his farm?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Or the name Isabel? She was a black woman who-”
The slow shake of her head cut him off. “Except for me, everyone is a volunteer here,” she said. Again, she sensed Louis’s disappointment, and her eyes softened. “But you’re more than welcome to look yourself.”
Louis let out a long breath, his eyes dropping to the map spread on the bar. When he glanced up, there was a mild look of pity on her face.
“Is this woman part of your family?” she asked.
“No,” Louis said. He held out his hand. “Thank you for your time.”
She shook his hand. “Can I give you my card? If you find any proof that your farm was a station, we’d really like to hear about it so we can document it.”
Louis took the card. Daphne Mayer, Ph.D. He was about to give it back, telling her he wasn’t going to be in Ann Arbor much longer, but then he paused. He dug in his jacket, found his wallet, and pulled out Eric Channing’s business card. He spotted a pencil on the counter and used it to scribble his name on the back of the card.
He handed it to the woman. “On the small chance you do find something about the Brandt farm, could you call me?”
She looked up at him with mild surprise on her face. “I can do that, Sergeant Channing.”
He pointed to the card and smiled. “I’m on the back. Louis Kincaid. And I’ll be leaving town soon. But the sergeant will know where to find me.”
She pocketed the card and give him a smile of her own. “I hope you find her,” she said.
“Thanks.”
Louis eyed the mountain of cardboard boxes. But as he said it, he knew that even if Isabel was buried in there, no one was ever going to unearth her.