Chapter 4 begins from Cameron's viewpoint, walking along behind Kerr & Tom as they head through the woods toward the Standing Stones. While they're talking about Mozart and Salieri, among other things, Cameron's thinking about his lack of talent compared to what is clearly Toni's genius and the ease she has with her compositions. So naturally Cameron starts thinking more about this Allegro Conservatory he's been checking out on-line: maybe it could be just the thing to help him? This piece by some beginner, an orchestral piece called "Absence & Return," was pretty impressive, even for an experienced composer.
Kerr, meanwhile, is listening to Agent Bond talking about new leads in her investigation into Osiris and the Aficionati, recalling a lot of uncomfortable details of last fall's "adventure." He's doing his best not to agree to anything that would get him involved in this one.
“It is impressive, isn't it?” Tom stepped a bit further into the clearing. He couldn't hide the hint of satisfaction in his voice as if quietly acknowledging, “yes, I own this: isn't that amazing?”
Tom and Cameron stood at the opposite corner of the clearing from me, looking over the stones and ignoring my conversation. I noticed the path we'd taken didn't continue on the other side, yet this clearly wasn't the top of the hill. It was a hidden room at the end of its own private hallway.
The clearing, such as it was, was neither wide nor deep, easily overlooked, and I suspected from where we stood, given the amount of underbrush along its edges, it had once been much broader. Except for the view of the valley, it was more of a pocket than a clearing, like a secret hillside balcony.
Only three stones were standing. Another was a pile of rubble; a large, flat one lay on the ground, toppled over. The biggest one, looming over the center, was taller than I was, the two on either side perhaps a head shorter. Other than the broken one, I couldn't tell there'd ever been any others.
Naturally, as a child, Tom remembered these stones being huge, the clearing immense, but he hadn't been back here since then. He was also skeptical about whatever the adults told them, legends or fantasies.
“Still impressive, though,” Tom said, watching my reaction. Smiling, I nodded my approval. “We called the central one 'Fred'; the other two were 'Wilma' and 'Betty.' The shattered one, there, was of course 'Barney'.”
“And the flat one in the center,” I laughed, “that must be 'Bedrock'!”
Cameron's confusion certified our pop-culture references were prehistoric.
Too elaborate for a hoax – and for what purpose, hidden here on this remote hillside – could the site itself be prehistoric? Tom said it existed before the 1840s when Emaline's father built the cabin.
They stood a little lopsided, and the left one, “Betty,” dangerously listing, was also headed for collapse if not shored up, but that was more the fault of years rather than design or workmanship. That pile of broken rocks meant it wasn't symmetrical unless others were missing, and if they were, what happened to them?
While the cabin faced south-east, the Stones stood on a ledge midway between the house and the summit but faced west, the denser forest sloping up gently behind it, a beautifully detailed theatrical backdrop. The edge of the cliff may have fallen away in some ancient landslide, so I didn't care to stand too close. From the outside end of the flat stone, I first faced the large central stone – I refused to call it “Fred” – then turned around completely to view the valley when it occurred to me.
“Considering it's a space only open in one direction, isn't it odd the stones hadn't been placed to face the sunrise?” Perhaps it highlighted the setting sun or some rising constellation on the equinox? Perfectly centered on the outer periphery of what might have been a semicircle was a small block like a conductor's podium.
Tom didn't know if any scientists – geologists or anthropologists – ever examined the place but remembered stories passed down from Uncle Max's generation how friends of Cousin Emaline's had seen it during a summer holiday. Having visited Stonehenge, they decided some American branch of Druids must've built it since our native “savages” lacked the necessary technology.
“Right,” Cameron laughed, “it could only be some hopelessly lost White Guys who never left any other trace of their existence...”
“But don't forget,” I pointed out, “the oak was sacred to the Druids!” On closer inspection, the Stones, not carved from the immediate granite, had been cut, chiseled and brought uphill from farther away. Tiny, when compared to Stonehenge, but still astounding on a more personal scale.
“Okay, so how do you know they're not 'carved from the immediate granite'?” Tom asked, cross-examining me with his usual skepticism.
“Simple, my dear Watson,” I pointed out with my own. “That rock-studded path to the pond? Those're dark brown, rather plain. But this stone's darker, bluish-gray, almost black, with specks of quartz in it.”
Looking at the great oak that dominated the clearing, I asked Tom if anyone had any idea how old it was. Could it be more than 500 years old? Would the original builders have planted it or chosen to set up here in front of an already existing, imposing tree? How old can oaks live?
“But that means it's only been here since, say, the early-1500s,” Cameron said, “which is too late for any migrating Druids.”
“Unless it's not the original oak tree,” I pointed out. “Maybe it's one that grew from an acorn as a replacement. Notice, it's not entirely centered, given the symmetry of the other measurements.”
“Noted...”
If it faced the west, did that mean their ritual began at sunset? Were the people who built this “night worshipers”? Whatever it meant, afterward they would've returned down the hill in the dark.
I hadn't forgotten that time back in Tom's living room last fall when I picked up his ballerina figurine and next thing I knew there I was, watching us back in grad school; so naturally I was reluctant to touch these stones for fear of being transported into the midst of some ancient Druid sacrifice. I'd had enough touch-induced “involuntary memories” tantamount to time-traveling for one lifetime, especially those I'd participated in rather than just observed – even Cameron told me some he had experienced – and I wanted no more.
Tom sat down on the edge of the flat stone, facing the valley, and Cameron and I cautiously sat beside him, both relieved nothing unexpected happened to disturb our tranquility and, particularly, our presentness.
Cameron, pulling three cups from Tom's shoulder bag, poured coffee from the thermos while Tom opened the cookies.
“To the past...”
He parceled out the cookies – “one for you, one for you, one for me” – and recalled how he and Burt had divided a paper bagful of cookies between them right here on this stone. “Things like 'how old that tree was' or 'why did they build this place' were not issues of our concerns, then.”
“Though I bet if you'd heard they were 'night-worshipers,' you might've thought more about them,” Cameron said, laughing in between bites.
“Oh, I'm sure Burt and I would've concocted some elaborate theories about vampires.”
“Or ancient Indian mummies coming back to life and terrifying the local villagers,” Cameron's child-like imagination no less vivid than Tom's.
Thinking of Bond's talk about the return of Osiris, I wondered if my considering he's periodically resurrecting himself wasn't very different.
“Would the Indians here have mummified their dead?”
“I doubt it – too damp.”
After a period of refreshing silence, sorting out what I'd seen and trying to ignore the news Bond had told me, I started to say something when Tom perked up, pointing toward the horizon.
“Even as a child, I always enjoyed this view, how calming it was” – a child dealing with his mother's recent death.
When I went to say something again, Tom leaned back, his hands behind him, and looked up into the trees, cutting me off. “Isn't it a wonderful place just to sit back and think?”
Now I realized why the “Thinking Rock” at Faber's pond had been so important to him when we were students there: it was the same kind of place, its placid woodland view undisturbed, timeless. We'd go there – perhaps other times he went alone – when either of us needed to “de-stress” or “sort out important issues.” After he'd broken up with Odile, his girlfriend the dancer, our friends Susan and Penelope organized this picnic near the rock. That was the time he'd made a hasty decision and eventually married Susan.
Tom was obviously equivocating, not yet willing to delve into whatever conversation he'd been avoiding, putting it off three times already: “Let's go see the Stones first,” he'd said – well, now here we were.
He hesitated, taking a deep breath. “Remember that business about Trazmo back in the early-'80s?”
“And so,” I realized, “it begins.”
Tom and I had each gone our separate ways after finishing our degree-work at Faber, running into each other less often, then kept in touch less and less often after those first five years. I recall how he'd met this “annoying little, full-of-himself Once-Upon-a-Prodigy” at that artists' colony in Iowa, the one calling himself “Trazmo.”
There were some rumors I'd heard concerning the disappearance of this arrogant young twit everybody'd been talking about who just vanished – it even made the national news – inevitably presumed the victim of foul play.
But that Tom would become a suspect in his murder? He'd never talked about it and I admit I never asked. (That was around the time I'd lost touch with Tom, speaking of disappearing.) My reaction then – my reaction now – was, if they've never found a body, how can they be talking about a murder?
“You certainly have a history of getting blamed for murders you didn't commit,” I said, trying not to sound too serious. The Marple Police, unaware he was being held prisoner at the time – a fairly iron-clad alibi – considered Tom a dangerous serial killer responsible for four murders, not just his publisher and an innocent secretary.
“They'd even accused me of killing Jack Ripa's mother, for some reason, though there was a time I considered murdering him...” Assuming he'd killed his own assistant, Amanda Wences, that had stung the most.
When Tom asked if I were familiar with “Great American Cold Cases,” since I'm no fan of most popular fare on television these days, all I could say was “I've heard of it. Why?”
“It's one of those reality-based documentary police shows that deals with real life cases, specifically cold cases.”
“I figured that much.”
What I hadn't figured was what this had to do with the old Trazmo Case which was over thirty years old. Had watching the show brought back unpleasant memories? Why would he call me?
“I never watched it – those shows don't interest me,” he explained, “and I never paid attention to when the show aired. So I was surprised when one of their producers called me last week.”
“Wait... they called you? What about? And how did they even find you?”
“Well, it is a detective show, isn't it?”
It couldn't have been too difficult to track him down since his name would've shown up on any number of Google searches, what with all the recent reports about all the murders in Marple; and depending on when these were reported, naming him a “person-of-interest” in them before they had ever been corrected or up-dated.
That still didn't answer the question why they tracked him down and called. During the ensuing silence, I could well imagine the elephant in the room, watching us from the edge of the clearing.
“They wanted an interview about the Disappearance of Phillips Hawthorne, the so-called famous 'Trazmo Case,' and I nearly passed out. 'Not this again,' I thought – I told them no, said I had no comment. Before I could hang up, he said they're ready to wrap up production in two weeks if I changed my mind.” He'd left his name and phone number, suggested Tom contact his lawyer, “as if I had one on my regular payroll. It was difficult to miss the ring of a threat in his tone.”
He assumed they would just be rehashing all the old conspiracy theories, especially the stuff Trazmo's father had been spewing out, and wondered if by declining to comment it wouldn't make him look guilty. And time was of the essence: once they finished production, the program was set to air over the Memorial Day Weekend.
With no proof, not even a body to prove there was a murder, they would only state what they know or what they've concocted from it and leave the viewer to determine the verdict.
“More like 'fantasy news,' the equivalent,” I suggested, “of literature's 'Historical Fiction' genre.”
“Whatever it is,” Tom said, “it's all fake!”
“But if you agree to be interviewed,” I said, “regardless of context, they could pick and choose whatever suited their premise.”
“That's what I'd thought, too: either way, Terry, they'll make me look guilty.”
Cameron agreed. “You don't really need legal knowledge to understand what they're doing. They're there for ratings: what do they care about abstract justice? Saying nothing lets viewers infer you have something to hide. There was nothing for them to gain by not stirring up some controversy, even if that meant perverting the constitutional system.”
We'd long known how “The Media,” depending on the network or on the newspaper's political leanings, managed to manipulate the public, where many cases got tried 'in the press,' regardless of any available facts.
“And there's another thing you've always said, Terry,” Cameron added: “Perception is everything.”
“Well, that's because that, too, is always true.”
Tom coughed. “Thanks, guys,” he said, “but you're not really helping, you know.”
“Why bring this up again now,” Cameron wondered. “If that was the early-1980s, it's not like a significant anniversary, is it?”
Initially, Tom explained, everything blew over fairly quickly: basically, a man disappeared from a motel in the middle of a blizzard, the local police interviewed everyone else who'd been stranded there by the storm, especially the other composers who'd attended the White Hill Artists Colony with him, and the assumption was he'd just wandered off.
“The bus stopped at the motel before dark – the roads were already impassable and we couldn't leave until the next day – but they raised the alarm when the guy didn't show up for lunch.”
The manager went to check his room but found no sign of him, and said the bed hadn't been slept in. Nothing seemed to be disturbed, and nobody else remembered seeing him after 10pm.
“They took our basic information like you'd expect – nothing struck me as suspicious. Thing is, nobody there could stand the guy.”
“Which, naturally,” Cameron added, “no one bothered to mention because it'd sound... suspicious?”
“Right, of course not. It came out later when some guy at the Colony told a local reporter covering the case how Trazmo never got along with anybody, the other guests or the management.”
“Trazmo...?”
“Yeah, that's what the kid called himself.”
His real name was Phillips Hawthorne, a “really arrogant pain-in-the-ass” who managed to annoy everybody, including several strangers on the bus, “a typical spoiled little rich kid with an excessively high opinion of himself.”
“Apparently,” I added, “given his own nickname was an anagram for Mozart – Traz-Mo?”
“Thank you, Dr. Obvious,” Cameron smirked. “Point noted.”
At the colony, Tom mentioned several of the older composers – from Trazmo's viewpoint, mid-30s; one was 50-something – gave themselves similar nicknames behind his back: Tom became Grebschoen, another was Nerbew, and, my favorite, Yksnistrav.
“Sounds like Classical Music Pig Latin.” Cameron laughed. “Hmm – Kotbar... not very imaginative...”
Once all this came out later, it was considered bullying, when it was really just how they'd dealt with his attitude.
“Unfortunately, everything exploded with all that and it went from a Missing Persons Case to a 'Disappearance with Suspected Foul Play.' That reporter theorized one of us did him in and hid the body! Suddenly, each of us were contacted by the local Iowa police again and asked questions that implied we were all suspects.”
This second investigation is what made the national news around the time the movie based on Peter Shaffer's Amadeus was released, with headlines like “The Case of the Missing Prodigy: A Modern Day Amadeus?” Questions were raised why anyone with his artistic potential would run off into a blizzard voluntarily: where would he have gone? He'd loudly complained any delay, regardless of the storm, jeopardized an important meeting which, he'd been letting everybody know, was with his agent and several representatives from the Metropolitan Opera about a likely commission.
“We all assumed he was bragging, just another one of those youthful fantasies, nothing that would have any basis in fact – even I had dreams of someday having an opera done at the Met.”
I nodded as well. “Yeah, me, too... But would they commission some young unknown when they hardly bothered with famous ones?”
Since the new house opened in 1966 and the Met commissioned two new operas, both basically box-office failures, it would be a long time, I imagined, till they'd risk anything on another living composer. If he'd said some other, more adventuresome house like San Francisco or Santa Fe, Tom figured the others might've believed him.
“Every time Trazmo'd mention this – which was probably once or twice a day – we'd just sit there and roll our eyes. On the bus, he became intolerable, like it was the bus driver's fault.”
Cameron was curious why they were all on a bus to begin with, so Tom unfurled the story, since this blizzard had materialized unexpectedly, it was the only way they'd reach the nearest airport. It was possible it was already closed by the time they'd get there, and waiting out the storm could take days. They had all arrived by way of the nearby Spirit Lake Airport with puddle-jumper flights originating in Omaha or Des Moines. They managed to get seats on a bus eventually headed for Des Moines.
“There were five composers from the colony, Hawthorne sat by himself in the back; me and the others near the front. As I recall, there were maybe ten other passengers on the bus, total. The further south we went, the snow got worse and some roads had become impassable. Sidetracked, we ended up in Orient.”
This was a small town in southwestern Iowa indistinguishable from many others as they pulled into it late in the afternoon – even for late-March, it was already dark from the clouds and swirling snow – and to Tom it consisted of a main street with several low buildings and a nondescript motel at the far end. Any other buildings were hidden by the blizzard, the only lights visible coming from the Express Motel and its adjacent diner. He said they waded through three-foot snow drifts to get to the lobby.
It was clear even the strangers on the bus ignored Trazmo once everyone gathered in the diner next to the motel. And it didn't take long till he'd insulted the waitress, then the manager. Even the handful of regulars, hanging out for lack of anyplace else to be, were glad he'd gotten up and left.
Fortunately, it was “the slow season” so there'd been enough beds if everybody shared a room; the driver gallantly volunteered to sleep in the lobby so no one was forced to room with Trazmo. Tom and another composer, Perry Harcole, shared the room next to Trazmo's, the farthest room at the end of the row.
Under the covered walkway that ran the length of the motel, drifts already measured two feet deep and were still mounting. “Beyond that,” Tom said, “it's Ultima Thule – the Edge of the Known World.”
In the morning, the snow may have stopped but it continued to drift, and as the manager and his staff tried their best to shovel the walkway open, the snow filled in behind them. We were told the plows were already clearing some roads so with any luck we might leave mid-afternoon, headed toward Omaha.
“Nobody thought it strange Trazmo hadn't shown up for breakfast – but when the manager checked after lunch, his room was empty. Nobody knew where he might've gone: his bed hadn't been slept in, either.”
Perry wondered if he might've gone off with someone, maybe spent the night in somebody else's room. “But whose,” someone asked, “who would've wanted to invite him? And what'd make you think that?”
“I was having trouble getting to sleep and heard conversation in the next room – Trazmo's room – a man and a woman.”
But everybody agreed he must've been dreaming – especially since he couldn't say for sure it was Trazmo's voice he'd heard – so he forgot all about it by the time the local police showed up. The manager, along with the bus driver and the policemen, searched everybody's rooms while the passengers waited in the diner – nothing.
“Maybe they thought he might've hidden himself, probably as a joke, waiting to see if someone would come looking for him. Nobody believed he'd wandered off and got lost trying to find the diner.”
By the time the plows arrived, opening the roads out to the highway, the police were already checking out a “Man Presumed Missing, Perhaps Lost in the Storm” report, whatever their official jargon was. Two cops interviewed everybody for information and got each individual's side of the story, but there was so far nothing suspicious. When the bus was ready to leave, the police checked every room again, and found no reason to detain everyone further. Finding a body, “death,” no doubt, “by misadventure,” could take days, maybe weeks.
And no body had ever been found, not even a trace, suggesting Trazmo could've simply evaporated or been abducted by aliens. There was nothing to imply he'd been murdered or taken against his will.
“That summer, the police called me, asking if I'd remembered anything else – I hadn't – and that was the end of it.”
Much of this I'd heard before and most of it I'd forgotten, but there were things that still didn't add up, things that struck me as what, in the detecting business, we called “fishy.” There were some facts that appeared logically in one column, some details that didn't quite gel in another but for some reason, adding everything up, logic wasn't enough to make sense out of them. This is where one applied a healthy dose of intuition, the little gray cells unlocking the secrets of the loose ends.
Not the least of these ends was “why was this all coming up again, thirty years later?” Were there new developments? If there was new evidence, there was also new technology, like DNA testing. How old were those original policemen: one assumes they could've retired by now? What about the witnesses? Wouldn't some have died?
What I didn't know with any certainty concerned that second investigation's going “Full Tabloid” after the release of the film, Amadeus. Published only a year later, it revealed new details uncovered at the Colony. In suggestive quotes teasing the story, it “threatened to blow the cover on the competitive cut-throat world of contemporary classical music.”
Tom had to give him points for “effective use of alliteration” but there was very little merit in either his investigative powers or his journalistic approach except it managed to earn him nationwide attention.
“He had set it up like a novel on the installment plan, one cliff-hanger leading to the next,” Tom said, “full of nothing but his deductions and conjecturing – clearly stated as such so no one could sue him for libel – but the purpose was to convince the gullible reader who knew nothing about the context. The reporter, Mickey McRaker, suspected someone at the White Hill Colony must have done the young genius in and assuming a fellow composer naturally meant it was one of the four on the bus.
Whoever this reporter was who'd set out to investigate this, Tom was pretty sure he was associated with a “local newspaper” – whatever axe he may have had, his only concern was grinding out readership. Despite Hawthorne's personality flaws others mentioned, he painted a sympathetic portrait, then ended his second installment, “so who was Trazmo's Salieri?”
Cy Hardman, the local sheriff for Adair County who investigated the initial case, sent Tom and the other composers copies of these first two “episodes” to inform them “you should be aware of this,” assuring them he'd given the reporter a blanket “No Comment” when contacted; even a year later the investigation was still on-going. It was Hardman's final sentence that piqued Tom's budding paranoia – “should any of his statements unlock memories not previously reported, you'd do well to let my office know” – which sounded ominously like another threat.
“None of us apparently mentioned our behavior back at the Colony,” Tom said, shrugging his shoulders, “since Hardman seemed more interested in Trazmo's state-of-mind,” unrelated to any interactions leading up to his “mysterious disappearance.” Thinking of Grebschoen and Yksnistrav made things darker: “we'd been responding to his taunts but how did he respond to ours?”
The third article Hardman forwarded shifted Tom's paranoia into overdrive and at this point he spiraled into even deeper despondency, reluctant to throw around the easily maligned term, “depression,” which seriously affected his creativity. He told no one about it, not even his wife, Susan, and soon cut himself off from all friends and colleagues.
Trazmo's father had sent McRaker his son's last letter, how others “connived against him,” especially someone he'd dubbed “Little Tommy Tuneless.”
“And which composer,” McRaker ended in a grandly rhetorical flourish, “is named Thomas?”
It hadn't occurred to me why there'd been a reason behind Tom's silence: I'd just assumed, like many friends as years go by, separated by time and distance, we'd moved on with our lives. Several more years would pass until I'd heard from a mutual friend about the death of his daughter and the divorce. I heard he'd left Tansonville, surprised to find he'd landed in a smaller, less prestigious school until he left there, too. Later, with the advent of the internet, I found no trace of him. But since I'd also moved and dropped out of Academia myself, how could he find me in the days before Facebook? Most friends admitted they'd lost contact with him shortly after leaving grad school. Henry Joyce told me a reply to an e-mail from him in the late-'80s bounced back “undeliverable,” the account presumably deleted.
After his heart attack a year ago, I'd managed to locate him in Marple, PA, one of his various childhood homes, but his health issues, more delicate than I would've thought possible, took precedence. Under the circumstances, I was reluctant to pry; clearly these had not been good years for him, “forgotten” for a reason. As fall rolled around, we had been thrown together, between Fate, the Kapellmeister and the IMP, more than we'd either anticipated. Months later, I doubted he was strong enough yet to face these memories.
Initially, Tom continued, he'd considered suing the reporter or his paper – or, for that matter, any publication picking up his story – for defamation of character, their suppositions based on statements taken out of context, but a legal friend told him such charges would be difficult to prove, focusing on McRaker's “pre-meditated intent-to-harm” and so forth. It was especially difficult, Tom mentioned without explanation, since much of the damage was being self-inflicted, the result of mounting self-doubts: his paralyzing writer's block, not being granted tenure, possibly losing out on commissions. All of this, his friend suggested, could easily be turned into something that was not the direct result, “pain and suffering” included, of anything McRaker intended to do, therefore making a favorable verdict unlikely. McRaker's lawyers would depict whatever happened to Tom's career and his personal life as “just an unfortunate string of bad luck.”
It was difficult to imagine anyone dismissing what happened in Tom Purdue's life as merely “an unfortunate string of bad luck,” like he was being followed around by some black cloud over his head. Stuff like that didn't happen because someone stepped on a crack, broke a mirror, or was overdue for some bad karma. Even Mahler convinced himself his daughter died because he'd set the poems of Kindertotenlieder, “Songs on the Death of Children,” to music – or was it Alma who'd been convinced? – that he'd provoked the Fates.
But all the same, as he told me last fall, one thing led to another, each one sending him deeper into despair which no amount of therapy ever seemed to help for very long. Not that he could blame it on this business with Trazmo or McRaker's suppositions, but everything began falling apart after that.
Who was that friend – someone at Faber, or more recently? – who'd get irritated every time I wished her “good luck,” complaining she didn't believe in luck, that “Fate” had nothing to do with it? It was too common an expression not to wish someone good luck: it sounded so benign to have any deeper meaning. Yet wasn't thinking someone wishing you good luck before a performance would bring bad luck the same kind of outmoded belief? I never knew what to say to her so eventually we stopped talking.
Tom continued along these lines, how it would all be brought up again by “Great American Cold Cases” – would McRaker be interviewed for the program (how old would he be, probably in his sixties)? There probably wouldn't be any new evidence coming to light over the past thirty years that was likely to exonerate him. The key point was no one, as far as he knew, had ever found a body that pointed to foul play. Whatever case they had would still be based solely on supposition and innuendo.
And what prospects did he have now, he wondered, to stop the program? Suing them for defamation of character would be no different this time, remembering the advice he'd been given in the past. Did he want his “long, sad trail of failures” paraded across nationwide television, an old man who'd never recovered from them?
“Unless I could prove I was not granted tenure because of these salacious allegations or that I lost this commission through their not wanting to be associated with a potential murder suspect,” he said, “there was no way I could prove my career issues had anything directly to do with whatever McRaker implied about me.” The fact he was no longer composing could have as much to do with his resulting lack of self-esteem as any mid-life crisis or other issue most composers invariably suffered from at some point.
Part of the problem finding new teaching positions around this time was the sudden shift in academic mobility which dried up suddenly during the Reagan Years: teachers were now desperately hanging onto their jobs. It became easier for colleges to pick and choose from a larger applicant pool, especially on the East or West Coasts. Both Tom and I were finding it easier to be passed over since, with our doctorates, we were “too expensive,” so instead they'd hire freshly minted masters degrees, experience aside, because “they were cheaper.”
“Besides, when my friend said,“ – and he worded this quite delicately – their lawyers could call an 'expert witness,' a psychologist who would open up the possibility these problems of mine could easily stem from a sense of guilt over being responsible for Trazmo's death... well, I decided I wasn't going to put myself through that.”
The silence, beyond soft winds and the faint song of distant birds, continued as Tom poured the last of the coffee. Neither one looked at the other, what expressions we might notice likely misread. Most of what he'd been saying here wasn't entirely new to me, and what he'd mentioned before, I'd essentially told Cameron. What was new was sadly stunning, and I nodded as I realized how much our aging was a part of it. The question was, I suspected, could we limit it to only one source? If we all looked back and assessed where we'd been, how few of us could avoid some likely sense of failure? The answer and the degree of it might differ with each of us. I could imagine Cameron taking all this in, not looking forward to how he might process this in forty years' time.
And where do we go from here, I wondered? It's not like there's much left in Tom's life to be destroyed. He's not going to be fired from some prestigious music school's highly respected faculty because someone's made some more preposterous allegations. His daughter is dead and his ex-wife is who-knows-where: he's almost completely isolated. With everything he has managed to survive – not just the health issues of the past year – the only thing he could give up on now might be, at his age, the will to live.
Recently one summer, searching for something on-line, Tom ran across a video of an interview with a composer named Grayson Trautman. “The name sounded remotely familiar so I clicked on it but was losing interest until he mentioned one of his students was this 'child prodigy named Phillips Hawthorne, whose nickname' (he smiled) 'was Trazmo'.” The boy was maybe 15 at the time, and these lessons lasted for only a few tense years. Initially, Trautman ignored the interviewer's question about his disappearance, focusing on the beginning of the story.
The aim, he explained, was to shape the boy's awareness of what he heard automatically in his head, like some kind of celestial radio he could transcribe, then shape it into a real piece. He'd given him his first manuscript pen, an old Pelikan Graphos, dark green, and taught him the finer nuances of calligraphy.
“Most of these 'so-called lessons,' he'd said, took place back in the early-'70s, so I'm thinking if Trautman was in his fifties in this interview, he'd be, what, 90-something now if he's still alive?” Despite Trazmo's brashness and supreme self-confidence, convinced his talent would last forever, never change, Trautman thought him very fragile, deeply insecure. Now in his twenties, Trazmo was surrounded by people no longer easily impressed; he was old enough to be on his own – like Mozart, nearly the same age – not beholden to some over-bearing father.
His mentor figured he'd grown tired of the stress of being a prodigy, the constant expectations, needing to churn out masterpieces, how maybe one day he'd wake up and his talent would be gone. Had it finally dawned on him nobody seemed to like him very much; maybe he had some kind of “midnight epiphany?”
“I'm paraphrasing, of course,” Tom smiled, “since my memory was never quite so good as Henry's to quote reams of poetry, but as I recall Trautman had developed this completely idyllic image of Trazmo, off somewhere quietly in some small, unassuming Midwestern town under an assumed identity, happily teaching piano lessons to otherwise unsuspecting children.”
“Nice image – doesn't make disappearing seem so bad,” I said, “except for the bit where you've been accused of killing him. Do you think maybe the news of his demise has never reached him?”
It wasn't till several hours had passed on the evening Quinlan had called him that Tom remembered having seen Trautman's interview, unlikely they would ever use it since it didn't fit their murder theory. (Aware he mustn't have mentioned the name before, Tom explained Patrick Quinlan was the executive producer of “Great American Cold Cases.”) But the interview also reminded him of the manuscript pen Trautman mentioned he'd given his student when he was a teenager. When the sheriff was questioning everybody, Tom hadn't thought to ask about it.
“It wasn't that it was such a noticeable item – we all had pens of some kind and Trazmo's wasn't particularly valuable. But I had one very much like it, solid black, recognizably a Pelikan. And I remembered, now, how he'd been fiddling with his while we all sat around the diner the night he disappeared.”
Cameron was confused. “Pen...?”
“In the old days” Tom explained, “long before computers and the music software most composers used now, we made do with pencils for sketching and calligraphy pens for final copies. “Everything was done by hand with the blackest of India ink on vellum, corrections made very carefully with a razor blade.”
“I still have my first pen: it had been given to me by my music teacher in high school,” I added, “so it has sentimental value even though I can't use it any more.”
“Many of us carry around little things like talismans, though I never particularly thought of it as a 'good luck charm,' a ritual I would set up at my desk before I'd begin work.” Tom mentioned a smooth stone his grandmother gave him, holding it in his hand while thinking. “It relaxed me, grounded me.”
Since Cameron appeared to think such sentimentality a bit odd, I added, “I'd had one, too,” nodding in agreement, “some turquoise. Lost it, once – spent hours looking for it before I could start writing!”
“That's right, turquoise,” Tom started, sitting up, ready to pack the coffee cups. “It was that stone you'd given me, Terry. Right, now I remember: that's the thing that went missing at White Hill. Noksimov and Harcole mentioned insignificant little things missing from their desks, so we'd complained to the manager – a light-fingered cleaning lady?”
The remains of our little snack were packed away as we stirred and stretched, finally ready to return to the cabin. Wrens sang in the pines overhead and lively shadows danced across the stones. I, for one, hoped to return here a few more times before we left, soaking up the view and the silence.
Cameron, buttoning his jacket, walked cautiously to the edge of the clearing and looked down as if hunting for the pond. Could he see it through the sparse new foliage from here? Apparently not...
“But it's odd,” Tom said, coming out of a trance. “The sheriff said he'd left his leather shoulder bag behind – now, that was expensive – and it was full of music, mostly sketches and notebooks.”
“Why? If he'd been kidnapped, don't you think someone would've taken the music?”
“What if he'd just gone for a walk?”
“Who goes for a walk in the middle of a blizzard – at night?” Cameron found that unlikely, unless he was suicidal.
“There's that,” Tom said. He pointed at a cardinal overhead in the oak.
“You're wondering if the pen was still there after he disappeared,” I asked. “Not what you'd think a killer would steal...”
“Well, Perry and I wrote back and forth and he had these theories, but he was always reading these mystery novels. We never thought, like Trautman did, Trazmo just walked away from his existence.”
“Isn't it possible, if someone kidnapped him, he had the pen on him, that it wasn't a conscious decision to take the pen with him or for the kidnapper – or killer – to steal it?”
Cameron wondered why anyone from the group would've been interested in kidnapping Trazmo. “And the blizzard rules out a passing intruder.”
“If the bus ended up there arbitrarily,” I added, “what are the odds a total stranger would've planned to kidnap him?”
“Admittedly, Perry thought maybe it was all staged, like some premeditated publicity stunt.”
That had crossed my mind, too. “But why let it drag on for years – and now, decades? A plan gone wrong?” But how, in the middle of a horrendous snowstorm, could he walk away?
“Unless Trazmo... – could we please stop calling him 'Trazmo'? What's his real name, again?” Cameron found the man's arrogance still annoying.
“Phillips Hawthorne – I forget if there was a middle initial: he wasn't a 'junior,' I remember that,” Tom said, “but 'Trazmo' was his brand and he was right, Cameron – it sticks in the brain.”
“Well, unless Hawthorne staged his own kidnapping, what happened? Who'd know where to meet him unless they're on the bus incognito?”
“If Perry had a dozen different scenarios, many of them too bizarre even for Agatha Christie, trust me, we'd considered them.”
Each of us looked around one last time, then headed toward the path.
He wondered if there was a way of tracking down Grayson Trautman, if he was still alive, if there'd been any changes in his thinking, any new evidence or new communication since that interview? Had the police in Orient kept what was left in the motel room? What's the significance if that pen's still there?
Had “Great American Cold Cases” managed to open up an actual, real investigation or was it just sifting through old information? How much was the sheriff cooperating? And if so, would they be helpful?
“Terry – and Cameron, you, too – could I ask you to somehow look into this, find out what happened to Trazmo? – Hawthorne... – and if you could, maybe clear my name before that TV show airs?”
He admitted it was a lot to ask, and after last year's events, it was difficult for him to ask it.
= = = = = = =
©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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