The Third Brother Read online

  “So he blames me for that, too,” I concluded.

  “That’s sounds irrational.”

  “He knows that. But as he likes to say, he can’t help himself and no one’s paying him to think differently.”

  “Did they divorce?”

  “They’re back together.” I explained about her cancer.

  “So a happy ending, of sorts?”

  “Hopefully. For Ruth’s sake. And maybe for theirs.”

  She thought about that. She took a drink of her iced foam. “Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for what you did. For Abdi and for Barbara. I’m—well, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “It’s my foot in my mouth that’s usually the problem. Big plans today?”

  “Not really. Some loose ends at school. I’ll actually be back here tonight. Romeo and Juliet is opening at the park. Gabe’s girlfriend is Juliet. You’re welcome to join us.”

  I thought of Abdi Mohamed and Faith Monroe. Wondered if they’d seen each other yet.

  “Only if I can bring the flasks of wine.” She smiled and made to get up. I said, “Don’t worry about rushing off. You’d only be keeping me if I had someplace to go.”

  “Don’t you have lost puppies to find, or something?”

  “Trying to cut back. The real money’s in international terrorism, anyway.”

  She gave that the demure smile it deserved. “In that case, I’m a little hungry. May I buy you lunch?”

  “Lunch? Does this mean you’ve accepted my friend request?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  “I’m not. I don’t friend just anyone, believe me.”

  “I’m getting that impression.”

  We walked out of the coffee shop and went down the street. We lingered a moment in front of the Book Loft, gazing at the display windows.

  I said, “The Brown Bag has sandwiches. It’s just around the corner from me. We could take them to the park for a picnic.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “Or we could bring them back to my house. You could meet my roommate.”

  “Oh really? And then you could show me some of your sketches?”

  “No George Bellows prints, I’m afraid.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m partial to Thurber cartoons. I have a couple framed ones you might like.”

  “Now I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Twenty minutes later we arrived at my door with paper takeout bags in hand. I let Helene inside. Hopalong lumbered up and greeted her with interest. She knelt and petted him and said things like “What a good dog” that he hasn’t heard in a while. I closed the door and turned the deadbolt and she stood up and our paper bags hit the floor with two soft smacks, plop plop. I put my hands on Helene’s waist and pressed her against the closet door just inside the entryway and as she looked up at me I kissed her neck, and then her cheeks, and then her lips. This time I tasted more than the stirrings of reciprocity.

  “You certainly don’t waste any time,” she said, after a long minute or three.

  I pulled back. “Did you want me to?”

  She put her arms around her neck and kissed me back. “I guess not.”

  “Good to hear,” I said, loosening the top button on her dress.

  “You realize I’m an older woman, right? By more than a couple years.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me,” I said, tackling the second button and kissing her again.

  “Really?” she said, digging her hand under my shirt. “Doesn’t your ilk chase pretty young things half your age around desks in dark offices?”

  “Only in months that end with ‘r.’ And besides, I’m no spring chicken myself.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that,” she said, taking my hands and raising them to the next button in line.

  Epilogue

  We were spared the sun, so deep in the woods like that. But there was no relief from the July heat and humidity, not to mention the stinging insects. It occurred to me for the first time that my experience growing up in the country—the flat farm fields surrounding Homer, Ohio—was far different than coming of age here, in what felt like a primeval forest about an hour east-southeast of Columbus as the crow flies and light years by any other measure.

  “Hang on.”

  We looked up at the sound of the man’s voice. I was standing on the other side of a band of yellow crime-scene tape wound from tree to tree to tree, the barricade marking off a poison ivy–infested patch of ground a hundred yards into the woods from where the remains of a rough cabin, half-house, half-shed, sagged slowly into oblivion as grasses and saplings and vines claimed it for their own. Beside me stood a portly state Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent, face as red as stewed tomatoes and sweat dripping from, as far as I could tell, every pore in his body. Beside him stood Henry Fielding.

  The man who’d spoken was standing ten feet away beside a rectangular patch of turned-over soil, a brush in his left hand, a small, narrow-bladed spade in his right.

  “Whaddya got?” the BCI agent said. His name was Gil Pollard. He’d worked a case once, more than three decades earlier, with John McQuillen.

  “Something. Better check it out.”

  Breathing hard, the agent raised the tape and trudged forward. At the excavation site he slowly eased himself onto his hands and knees to take a closer look.

  “Henry,” he said, after a moment. A pause, and then: “You too.”

  I looked at Fielding. He nodded. We ducked under the tape and approached.

  The man with the tools in his hands acknowledged us with a nod. He was a forensic anthropologist from Shawnee State University, down the road in Portsmouth. Trim, bespectacled, tidy beard the opposite of Ronald J. McQuillen’s bird’s nest. He consulted with BCI and other law enforcement agencies from time to time. As we watched, he crouched down and used the tip of the spade to point at an object in the dirt. It was yellowish white, more than a few inches long, with a rounded knob at one end.

  “Tibia,” the forensic anthropologist said.

  “Animal?” Pollard said.

  “No.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Can’t tell for sure. Little small for a man.”

  Crime scene investigators had been there most of the morning. They’d been directed to the shack—what was left of it—by Brenda Renner, whose memory of events in those woods on a rainy night thirty-odd years ago had improved remarkably as she stared at the possibility of federal terrorism charges.

  “Think it’s her?” Pollard said.

  “Hard to say. Lot of work to do. But chances are good.”

  Her. The girl—the young woman—taken by David Derwent to carry his seed. To extend the family tree of Seth. The Third Brother. Trey Renner’s real mother. Died in childbirth. But not her child. No one was quite sure whether to believe Brenda Renner when she swore that she really didn’t know the woman’s name. Or anything else about her. Or if Brenda really was looking out for the infant’s welfare by disappearing with him to California for a few years, or was just trying to evade the law. But as we stood there in the woods in the heat and humidity, it seemed likely that whoever the dead woman was, wherever she came from, whatever she believed at the time—or thought she did—we were a little bit closer to seeing that she got home again, to where she belonged.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to Mahdi Taakilo, editor of Somali Link Newspaper, for our conversations about the Somali community’s experiences in Columbus and elsewhere. I’m also appreciative of the many Somalis I’ve met over the years and interviewed for various stories for their openness and candor. The love and respect they have for their adopted home is obvious. Special thanks to Mitch Stacy for help with football lingo, Butch Wilson for the concept of an “Evil Twin” attack, and Robert Bennett for tracking down what Cicero really wrote. With gratitude as always to everyone at
Ohio University Press for their continued support, guidance, and awesome cover designs. Finally, with much love to Pam, my no. 1 fan—and I hers—on our journey through life and work.