Half Moon Bay: A Novel (Clay Edison Book 3)

“Oh, he hated Buddy.”

Elaine Shumway paused. “Scratch that. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s unfair to Phil, because he didn’t truly hate anyone. My husband wasn’t a hateful person. I wish I could say the same about myself. He was much nicer than I am. So, no. I won’t say hate.”

I hadn’t been able to find an obituary for Phil Shumway, either in the Boston papers or nationally. What caught my eye instead was an online newsletter put out by the Brookline ward of the Mormon Church, profiling the class of 2016’s graduating seniors. Devyn Shumway was soon to depart for her mission in Colombia—an especially meaningful destination, because her grandfather, former FBI agent Philip Shumway, had also served his mission there.

I left a message at the LDS meetinghouse in Weston. By day’s end Elaine had called me back. She spoke in measured, elegant beats, her voice nasal and girlish; blond, if voices could be blond.

She said, “How about this: He disapproved of Buddy.”

“What specifically?”

“You name it. Drinking, smoking, swearing, the merry-go-round of girlfriends. Phil and I came from a different world. I was eighteen when we got married, he was twenty-four. We were living in Virginia at the time while he went to law school. We didn’t see ourselves as unusual, because folks tended to get married younger, and anyway all our friends were like us. Next thing the Bureau hands him a letter and we’re getting off a plane in San Francisco.”

“Must’ve been a shock.”

“Oh yes, yes. We had this tiny apartment in Laurel Heights. Our neighbor to the right played psychedelic music on his hi-fi, and the one to the left played soul music, and they would both keep raising the volume to try and drown each other out. It was like getting caught between two heavyweight boxers. I’d look out my window and be reminded of that painting, the one with all the…The Garden of Earthly Delights.”

I smiled.

“For the first couple of weeks, I was afraid to go outside. Phil was gone at the Bureau morning till night. Our daughter, Hope, our eldest, she was about two then, and I wouldn’t do much more than run down to the corner market for milk. Sooner or later I got an awful fit of cabin fever. I made up my mind to be brave and take her out. Somehow I got turned around and ended up wandering through the Haight.”

“Wow.”

“Wow is right. I’m pushing the carriage, flipping the map this way and that, steering around people sitting naked on the sidewalk. They’d feed drugs to their pets. It was so pathetic, dogs and cats rolling around like they were possessed. Even chickens, all stoned. Ask a person for directions and they’d look you in the eye in complete seriousness and tell you to travel inward.”

“Sounds like an education.”

“You said it. One month in San Francisco, I learned more than in all my years of schooling combined. I adjusted. We both did. You have to live in the world. That’s part of what we believe. Remember, Phil spent two years in Bogotá, knocking on doors and asking strangers to invite him in. Tell the truth, I think he enjoyed mixing it up with the counterculture. It reinforced a sense of confidence in his own convictions. He was fond of Buddy in the beginning. They even went out and shot pool a few times, Buddy with his beer and Phil sipping orange juice.” She laughed. “It started to grate, though. Buddy’d turn up for work hung over with lipstick on his shirt.”

“I’m surprised the higher-ups tolerated it.”

“They had to. The Bureau was trying to bring itself into the twentieth century, hire young agents who could get behind the scenes and not stand out like sore thumbs. Phil was a bit of an anachronism. But he was a wonderful man, and extremely dogged.”

“I got that from reading the Franchette file.”

“Yes,” she said. “It bothered him until the end.”

“Did he discuss the case with you? Either aspect, the kidnapping or the fire.”

“Not really. He kept his work to himself. They had rules and he stuck to them. And I think he wanted to shield me from the ugliness he saw. He didn’t like me to know he was frightened, or hurting, or…But I knew, of course. He was my husband.”

I thought of my own wife and what she must know about me.

I chased that out of my head, telling Elaine about the final two items in the file, Phil’s interview with Janice Little and the confessional case review.

“It ends on an unfinished note,” I said. “Like he’s leaving it for someone in the future.”

“And you’re that person?”

“I hope so, Mrs. Shumway.”

“November ’88, you said?”

“That’s right.”

“Phil passed that Christmas.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. We quarreled about that trip to California. I thought he was too sick to travel on his own. He’d been through so many rounds of radiation, he’d lost a huge amount of weight…I wanted to go with him, at least, but he said no, he needed to go by himself. I suppose he meant to clear his conscience. I doubt it worked.”

“How sick was he?”

“If you’re asking if he knew the end was near, the answer is yes, he did. We’d stopped treatment, and his doctors had told us it was a matter of weeks. That’s another reason I didn’t want him to go. ‘You have a finite amount of time left, and this is how you want to spend it?’ As it happened, he ended up hanging on a little longer.”

“What did he have?”

“Esophageal cancer. The irony…He never touched alcohol or tobacco, he was a fitness fanatic, he ran the Boston Marathon eight times. Now take someone like Buddy, who you’re telling me is still alive and kicking. I’m sorry. It’s unkind to say. It’s not as though there’s some heavenly scale, and you can take Phil off one side and swap him out for Buddy. But.”

“I understand.”

She went quiet for a moment. Then: “Here’s something I remember. Phil would always greet me with a smile when he got back from work. But there was one night, right around when the girl went missing, he came home hopping mad. I asked what the matter was, and he said Buddy had gone without him to talk to one of the witnesses.”

“Did he say who?”

“I don’t think he would’ve mentioned them by name. I didn’t really understand what he was so upset about. He was walking around, pulling off his tie, sort of muttering to himself, and I heard him say—pardon my French—‘Fuck her.’ I’d never heard him talk like that. That’s why it sticks with me, because it was so out of character. I must have looked appalled. Right away he snapped out of it and started apologizing.”

I remembered young Buddy Hopewell’s report from the hospital.

On July 29, 1970, SA MILTON W. HOPEWELL conducted an interview with CHRISSY KLAUSEN. The interview took place in room 192 of Alta Bates Hospital, 2450 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley. The subject was recovering from a physical assault that had taken place the day prior…

Old Buddy Hopewell, ruefully fingering his giant silver belt buckle.

I didn’t have this big gut.

I did have a full head of hair and a royal blue Barracuda with racing stripes.

I loved that car. Girls loved it, too.

Nice-looking gal. No two ways about it.

“Do you think,” I said, “and I apologize for the language—”

“Oh please. I’m a big girl.”

“Any chance it could’ve been ‘He’s fucking her’? Something along those lines?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Is that what happened?”

“I don’t know, either. Would Buddy do that?”

“I met him a handful of times,” she said. “I always thought he was more talk than action.”

“Phil didn’t come out and accuse Buddy of wrongdoing.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Other than that, did he mention any other theories?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“Did he keep his own private notes?”

“I’m not sure. I could look.”

“Would you, please?”

“I’d be glad to.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I’m very grateful.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s nice to talk about him. It brings me back to the kind of man he was. I have seventeen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, and none of them ever met him. The oldest was born a few months after he passed. Thirty years, and I’ll still read about something that he’d like, and I’ll think, ‘I should tell Phil that.’ ”