The Gray Radiance: A New Novel by Robert Gore

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The Gray Radiance is the second of a three-book, multigenerational story about the Durand family. However, it is not at all necessary to have read The Golden Pinnacle to fully enjoy The Gray Radiance. There is a short note at the beginning of the book explaining the limited overlap. The Gray Radiance is available as a paperback and Kindle ebook. The cover image does not show up on the Kindle description. I’m working with Amazon to get that fixed, but the Kindle version is available. Here’s the back cover description:

Shadows Within Shadows

Nick Wozniak never knew his father, who died during World War II under mysterious circumstances. Nick’s determination to solve that mystery takes him to Europe, Asia, and a remote refuge called Solitude. The quest involves dangerous secrets the U.S. government wants to stay secret…forever.

 

Nick finds himself in a confusing land during a confusing time. His allies are on the other side of the world. A beautiful violin virtuoso warns him not to fall in love with her. A ruthless and brilliant adversary’s psychological ploys take him to the breaking point. Nick repeatedly risks his life and confronts questions that have bedeviled the U.S. for decades. Will Nick discover the truth about his father? Will he discover the truth about his country and its government? Discover The Gray Radiance, a novel that won’t let you go, even after you’ve finished it! The Gray Radiance is full of surprises and mysteries within mysteries. My abbreviated description stems from my desire to not play spoiler to my own book and to let readers discover it on their own. However, to give readers a glimpse of what the book is about, the first chapter, “The Third Name,” follows.

THE THIRD NAME

Sam had worked a long day and a long night. He trudged through the snow along the narrow road, weary but almost home. His friend Bill Starnes gave him a ride every night from the mine but dropped him off half a mile from home. It hurt to breathe, as if the Upper Peninsula air had frozen and filled with fine shards of ice. A pale quarter-moon hung above the trees. He wondered about the tire tracks in the snow that had fallen during the day.

They said he was crazy to work two shifts. At one o’clock in the morning, soaked in sweat, chilled to the bone despite his heavy coat, muffler, gloves and hat, so weary he could hardly move his feet, they were right. But money was money. There was never enough of it. Except for Sunday, they were all long days and long nights. He rounded the curve to the shack he and Mother called home.

There was a Model T out front and a lantern on in the kitchen. Was somebody with Mother? After-hours would often find her in a Houghton or Hancock speakeasy. The town’s preachers and civic authorities had wisely and remuneratively recognized that neither God nor the Eighteenth Amendment would stop miners from drinking. Mother was still pretty enough that they would buy her drinks. But when she came home, she did so alone, usually by ten, never later than eleven, and doused the lanterns.

Sam opened the front door and stepped into the kitchen. Sheriff Carlson sat in a chair against the wall, smoking a cigarette, an ashtray and cup of coffee on the table. Something was wrong.

“Sit down, Sam.”

Sam pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Your mother’s dead.”

“What?”

“She fell off the bridge. I haven’t seen her body. I was at home, and I got the call from Flanders at the station. She landed head first on the ice.”

Spanning Portage Lake, a steel, two-level swing bridge connected Houghton on the south side with Hancock on the north. The bottom level was for trains, the top level for electric street cars, autos, carriages, and pedestrians. During the ice-free months, the bridge swung open to allow ship traffic between Portage Lake and Lake Superior.

“Did anyone see it happen?”

“Lars Hakala heard a scream, but didn’t see anything. He was on the Hancock side. He went out on the lake to look and found the body. If there was anyone actually on the bridge who saw what happened, they haven’t come forward. It was late and not many people were out.”

Sam stared at the table. He wasn’t particularly shocked or surprised. Since he had started working at the mine three years ago, at the age of sixteen, he had taken care of his mother more than she had taken care of him. He fixed her coffee and rolled her out of bed in the morning before he went to the mine. If she was hungover and sick, he boiled water so she would clean up and not fall back into bed and miss work.

He was always giving her money. They had had some money once, but that was long gone. Sometimes he escorted her to church. Respectable folks avoided their pew. Only on Sunday nights, when she fixed him dinner, a roast or a chicken with trimmings, did it feel like she was still his mother. She had never really tamed her wild side, but she loved him and had done her best to protect him from his father. She was all he had. There would have been tears if Carlson weren’t there.

“I’m sorry, Sam. I don’t know what else to say.”

Sam hung his head.

“I hate to see you out here by yourself. Do you want to ride with me back into town? You could spend the rest of the night with us; we’ve got an extra bed.”

He couldn’t, for reasons he wouldn’t tell the sheriff, and to avoid the lies he’d have to tell in the morning. He shook his head. “It’s late, sir, I’ll be okay.”

 Carlson stood. “Try to get a day or two off, for funeral arrangements and such. Come by the house. Linda’s always got something on the stove or in the oven.” He put his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “You’re a fine young man. People will help you, if you let ’em. Take care.” He went out the door and Sam heard him start his car and drive away.

Sam went to the stove and lifted the coffee pot, which still had coffee in it. He felt the pot―reasonably warm―took a large mug from a shelf, and poured the coffee. He wouldn’t go to sleep tonight. Carrying his cup and the lantern, he went to his room in the back of the house. It didn’t take long to pack his sturdy old backpack. The last items he put in were his hunting knife and a framed photograph of his mother, taken fifteen years earlier. He stood on his bed, reached to the ceiling, pushed a board aside, removed a cookie tin, sat on the bed, opened the tin, and counted out its contents: sixty-seven dollars, which he put in his wallet. Sooner or later Mother found his hiding places, but she wasn’t tall enough to get at this one. He reached under the bed and brought out a loaded Colt revolver.

He grabbed his backpack, stepped out of his bedroom, and dropped it by the front door. Opening the door back and forth, he placed the pack just outside the door’s arc. He went into his mother’s bedroom and opened the door to her closet. She had her hiding places, too, but she had shown him this one, the contents of which he was to take, in her words: “If something ever happened to me.” At the back of the closet hung a shabby brown coat. Taking the coat from its hanger, he found a hole in its frayed lining. Reaching through the hole, he felt towards the bottom of the coat until he found the sealed envelope. He knew it contained newspaper clippings, a letter, and a photograph, and he did not open it. Rather, he stepped into the entryway and put it in a pocket on his backpack.

 Off the entryway was a parlor. Two always-loaded Winchesters stood in the corner. He took his favorite, went back to the kitchen, put his revolver on the table, and doused the lantern. In perfect darkness he sat in the chair at the table that faced the door, his rifle in his lap. If his mother’s killers came for him that night, he was ready. If they had a light, they would be a target before they ever saw him. If they were in the dark, they’d stumble over the backpack when they entered the house. Either way, he’d have the advantage.

There was no reason for Mother to be on the bridge in the freezing cold. Hancock had its share of speakeasies. She would have stayed on that side to drink and then come home. Even if she had a reason to be up on the bridge, how did she fall off? The walkway had a rail. She could hold her hooch. She would have had to have been drunk, crazy drunk, to climb over that rail. That’s not saying it couldn’t have happened, but it wouldn’t make any sense. Of course, she didn’t always make sense.

She was up there with someone. If she was going home with a man, why would he have let her risk her life by climbing over the rail? Unless he meant her no good. Someone pushed her off―much more likely than her drunkenly climbing over the rail and falling to her death.

“If they’re after me, they’re after you,” she had told him more than once. If she was murdered, they wanted him dead, too. Sam waited for them through the night in the dark, chain-smoking, rifle on his lap, revolver at hand, facing toward the front door, watching out the kitchen window. He never went to sleep, and they never came.

❖

Helmi Jokinen knew she recognized the young man, big and bulky with his backpack and rifle bag, standing before her at the train station ticket counter, but she couldn’t place him. “Where you headed?”

“One ticket for the eight-twenty train to Nestoria.”

“Gonna do some hunting?”

“Yeah.”

The young man gave her his three dollars and thirty cents and she gave him his ticket on the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railway’s morning run to Nestoria. She was still trying to place him as he walked away, but turned her attention to the next person in line and forgot about him.

After the morning crowd thinned out, she went to a utility room, fixed a pot of coffee, and poured cups for her and the other ticket clerk, Beth.

“Thanks,” Beth said, stirring in sugar she kept at her counter. “Isn’t it terrible, about that accident?”

“What accident?”

“You didn’t hear? A waitress at Blyleven’s fell off the bridge last night. Killed when she hit the ice.”

“Who was she?”

“Patricia Crenshaw. I didn’t know her. Helmi, you look like you just seen a ghost! What’s wrong?”

“Patty Crenshaw. I knew her . . . a little. She came to church once in a while with her son. That’s who he was!”

“That’s who who was?”

“This morning, her son Sam. That’s so odd. I sold him a ticket to Nestoria this morning. He said he was going hunting. If you knew about his mother, he had to have, too. Now why would he be leaving town the morning after his mother died?”

❖

Sam didn’t know who his father was until he was twelve years old. Before they left New York, when he was still Sam Tyler and Mother was still Pamela Tyler, she had told him that his father was a rich, powerful man who wanted to keep it a secret that he was Sam’s father. Not because he didn’t love little Sam―he sent Mother money for him―but because he wasn’t married to Mother and so their child had to stay a secret. Then Mother met a man who frightened her so badly that they had to leave New York in a hurry, and she gave herself and five-year-old Sam new names: Patricia and Sam Crenshaw.

They had gone west and north. Sam asked, repeatedly, when they would stop and settle down. His mother said, “I’m looking for the middle of nowhere, and I’ll know it when I find it.” They had found Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, which met his mother’s requirements. It was remote, sparsely populated, and frozen and isolated at least half the year. The country was striking: thick forests, streams, smaller lakes and Lake Superior, which stretched to the horizon like the Atlantic Ocean. The main industry was mining. The area provided the rapidly electrifying United States with most of its copper. The miners—and the stores, saloons, and whorehouses where they spent their money—came and went. Nobody paid any attention to newcomers. As long as the mines were going, there were jobs to be had for Mother, and for Sam when he got older.

Mother decided her dance hall days were over. She took a job as a waitress in a Hancock cafe and found a little shack north of Hancock. When Sam was younger she didn’t go out much, but as he got older she resumed drinking and seeing men. They had a tough time making ends meet until Sam started working.

When he was twelve, Mother had called him into the parlor. “Sit down,” she said, in her don’t-argue-and-don’t-ask-questions voice. It was a hot, uncomfortably humid day in the summer. She sat in the old wooden rocker and he sat on the room’s only couch, brown, threadbare, torn in some spots, frayed in others. “It’s time I told you some things.” Her voice was low. “Before you was born, I met a man, Durand . . . Will Durand. He was a nice enough fellow and we spent some time together. He’s your father.”

“But you wasn’t married.”

“No, we wasn’t married. I stopped seeing him after you was born, but he sent me money, regular-like, for a long time, so I’d have something for you. Then he quit sending me money, and it made me mad.”

“What did you do?”

“He was running for Congress. I was going to ruin his chance. I went to a newspaper and told two reporters my story. They printed it and it caused a big sensation.”

“Did he lose his election?”

“No. I’m not proud of it, but I changed my story. A friend of Will’s, Mr. Baldwin, gave me a lot of money. I went to another paper and told them that the first story was a lie, even though it was the truth. I said the first newspaper had paid me for my story, but they hadn’t. Will won his election because I changed my story, He was in the House of Representatives for a long time, in Washington.” She looked out a dirty window. “It’s wicked to lie like that.”

“My father was in the House of Representatives, and we’re here? Why was you so scared we left New York?”

“Will’s father―Daniel Durand―your grandfather, was behind the original story. He’s very rich, very powerful, and I made him look real bad when I changed my story. I thought he’d come after me. And that fellow Baldwin, Will’s friend, even though he gave me money, he’d scare the fuzz off a peach. He had big, bulgy eyes and he talked fancier than a preacher, but you knew there was something under it. Dressed like an undertaker. Never smiled, even when I smiled at him. Said he valued my ‘discretion,’ but the way he said it, it was like if anybody found out the truth, something . . . something bad, really bad, would happen to us. You couldn’t trust a man like that. Between Baldwin and Daniel Durand, it was time to get out of New York.”

“So, that’s why I can’t ever tell anyone we’re from New York?”

“That’s right. I wanted you to know who your father is, even if you’re never going to see him. If you ever run into somebody named Durand, or Baldwin, you’ve got to let me know, quick as you can. Don’t you ever say them names, not to anyone, not even Billy. There’s something else.”

“What?”

“If something happens to me, if I get killed, you get out of Hancock lickety-split. I don’t care if they tell you I died in my sleep―get out! If they’re after me, they’re after you, too. You go someplace far away, and don’t let nobody, and I mean nobody, know where you’re going. Durand and this Baldwin devil, they know a lot of people and have a lot of money. Money makes people talk, even people you thought were your friends.”

Sam stared at her. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“I’ve just had a feeling lately, a notion that something could go wrong.” Sam felt a sudden stab of apprehension and his face must have reflected it. “It’s probably nothing, but sometimes feelings tell you things. You keep your Winchester right here, in this room, and keep it loaded. I’m getting me a rifle, too.”

Like so many of his mother’s fears and premonitions, this one hadn’t come to anything . . . until two nights ago, when she “fell” off the bridge. Sam had got out of Hancock and Michigan―lickety-split. First west, then south, west again, south again; through St. Paul, Des Moines, Omaha, Cheyenne, Denver, and now Pueblo. He had been careful, only getting off the trains when he had to transfer, not lingering in the stations any more than necessary.

Maybe because he hadn’t seen many in New York or Michigan, he was fascinated with mountains, the higher the better. Colorado had mountains—more than anyplace else—and mines. He stared out the window as the Denver & Rio Grande train rolled west out of Pueblo through towering peaks.

“Where you headed?”

Sam looked across the aisle and saw a girl about his age, smiling at him, seated next to another girl.

“I’m not sure.”

“But you’ll know it when you get there?” Both girls laughed.

“I’m not from this state―”

“Is that so?” They laughed harder.

“I’m a miner. I’m looking for work in a mine.”

“You can’t throw a rock in this state without hitting a mine. What kind of mining do you do?”

“I worked in a copper mine.”

“Don’t know about copper mining. There’s gold and silver mining in the San Juans. Seems to me, if I wanted to strike it rich, gold and silver would be better than copper.” She smiled again. She was a real cat. Red curly hair, blue eyes, nose turned up a bit. Not bad to look at and neither was her friend, a blonde.

“The San Juans are mountains?” The girl nodded. “Where are they?”

“South and west of here. This train goes to Gunnison, and you can get a train to Silverton from there. Lots of mining in Silverton.”

“Lots of nice ladies, too,” the blonde said. The girls laughed.

Gals could be like that, when they were with their friends around a guy. Everything a joke, cats playing with a bug, and you were the bug. The good looking ones got away with it. A guy couldn’t win at that game. Sam picked up a magazine from a pocket on the back of the seat in front of him and flipped it open to an article about steamboats.

The cats ignored the bug for less than a minute. “What’s your name, miner?” the redhead asked.

“Sa—” He shouldn’t give them his real name. “Steve.” He looked at the magazine article. There was a picture of Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat. “Steve Fulton.” His third name. “And who are you?”

“Sa-Steve, what an interesting name.” More damn smiles. “I’m Delores and she’s Millie. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sa-Steve.”

“And yours as well,” he said, a note of finality in his voice. He picked up the magazine and pretended to read. The girls let him go, returning to their conversation. Eventually he fell asleep, only awakening in the middle of a dream―his mother falling off the bridge.

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