position at the Concord Center.”
Werner nodded while hoping at the same time that this was not the entire message.
“Anyway, after you left, Monica felt bad about not having helped you get in contact with your daughter. So she got in touch with a few students she thought might have heard from her. One of them said that your daughter Marie has been studying at some college or university in England, but she didn’t know where and couldn’t remember where she had heard it.”
Werner felt his heart pound at the unexpected news.
“You’re sure they were talking about my Marie and not confusing her with someone else?”
Nancy shrugged but with such sympathy that Werner felt it would be ungracious to press for details where none were available.
“Monica promised me that she would let me know if more turned up, but not to expect much.”
Werner thanked Nancy for the news and for her delicious tea. Within a week she would be living with her daughter in Northampton and out of touch with Monica Cogan. It seemed unlikely that there would be any more news of Marie through this channel, at least for some weeks. But news it had been, even if fragmentary and unconfirmed. And coming as the first news he had received of Marie since his return to Boston, it made his heart sing.
****
Greg Doherty was waiting on the loading dock when Frank Werner backed up the delivery van to unload on his return from Concord. Doherty was the day shift supervisor at his uncle’s bonded warehouse off Boylston Street in Newton. He greeted Frank warmly, took a quick look at the two wooden pallets in the delivery van, and then walked Frank over to the chain-link cage where Werner’s other goods were stored before leaving to fetch a pallet jack.
Werner was both pleased and relieved that Doherty showed no signs of having downed a few beers with lunch. At forty, Doherty still looked extremely fit, as might be expected of a stellar high school hockey player who spent nearly twenty years in the Second Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Master Sergeant. He served in Afghanistan, Civil War II, the Canadian and Mexican incursions, and the Manchurian War.
Doherty was tall, lean and sinewy, with a severe hawk-like profile inherited from his mother’s French-Canadian ancestors. He wore his graying hair in a buzz cut as he had since joining the Army just out of high school. But inside that warrior’s body, Werner had come to know, was a simple, honest, forthright character motivated in large part by a desire to please.
Werner had met Doherty in late 2027, only a few weeks after returning to Boston from Utah, at a bar in Newton frequented by military veterans. Many of the vets had fought in the Manchurian War and had either been taken prisoner by the Chinese, or had been held by their own government in so-called repatriation camps in Alaska and the Yukon.
When Werner met him, Doherty had been working at the warehouse for five years, ever since his discharge from the U.S. Army and release from the P.O.W. reindoctrination center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Doherty had been a career soldier when he had shipped off to Vladivostok to help the Russians repel the Chinese invaders. He fled the Chukhotka Peninsula in the Second Infantry Division’s final evacuation from Russia in 2020, having experienced almost continuous combat for the better part of a year.
Doherty and his fellow soldiers were shocked and bewildered when military police arrested them on arrival in Anchorage and transported them to a military prison camp in the Yukon as a precaution against mutiny. Later, those who were deemed politically unreliable were transferred to a civilian labor camp operated by the Corrective Labor Administration of the Department of State Security—without a hearing, trial or right of appeal.
Doherty spent nearly a year at a camp called C227, because it was located at Milepost 227 on the Canol Road (short for Canadian
Werner nodded while hoping at the same time that this was not the entire message.
“Anyway, after you left, Monica felt bad about not having helped you get in contact with your daughter. So she got in touch with a few students she thought might have heard from her. One of them said that your daughter Marie has been studying at some college or university in England, but she didn’t know where and couldn’t remember where she had heard it.”
Werner felt his heart pound at the unexpected news.
“You’re sure they were talking about my Marie and not confusing her with someone else?”
Nancy shrugged but with such sympathy that Werner felt it would be ungracious to press for details where none were available.
“Monica promised me that she would let me know if more turned up, but not to expect much.”
Werner thanked Nancy for the news and for her delicious tea. Within a week she would be living with her daughter in Northampton and out of touch with Monica Cogan. It seemed unlikely that there would be any more news of Marie through this channel, at least for some weeks. But news it had been, even if fragmentary and unconfirmed. And coming as the first news he had received of Marie since his return to Boston, it made his heart sing.
****
Greg Doherty was waiting on the loading dock when Frank Werner backed up the delivery van to unload on his return from Concord. Doherty was the day shift supervisor at his uncle’s bonded warehouse off Boylston Street in Newton. He greeted Frank warmly, took a quick look at the two wooden pallets in the delivery van, and then walked Frank over to the chain-link cage where Werner’s other goods were stored before leaving to fetch a pallet jack.
Werner was both pleased and relieved that Doherty showed no signs of having downed a few beers with lunch. At forty, Doherty still looked extremely fit, as might be expected of a stellar high school hockey player who spent nearly twenty years in the Second Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Master Sergeant. He served in Afghanistan, Civil War II, the Canadian and Mexican incursions, and the Manchurian War.
Doherty was tall, lean and sinewy, with a severe hawk-like profile inherited from his mother’s French-Canadian ancestors. He wore his graying hair in a buzz cut as he had since joining the Army just out of high school. But inside that warrior’s body, Werner had come to know, was a simple, honest, forthright character motivated in large part by a desire to please.
Werner had met Doherty in late 2027, only a few weeks after returning to Boston from Utah, at a bar in Newton frequented by military veterans. Many of the vets had fought in the Manchurian War and had either been taken prisoner by the Chinese, or had been held by their own government in so-called repatriation camps in Alaska and the Yukon.
When Werner met him, Doherty had been working at the warehouse for five years, ever since his discharge from the U.S. Army and release from the P.O.W. reindoctrination center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Doherty had been a career soldier when he had shipped off to Vladivostok to help the Russians repel the Chinese invaders. He fled the Chukhotka Peninsula in the Second Infantry Division’s final evacuation from Russia in 2020, having experienced almost continuous combat for the better part of a year.
Doherty and his fellow soldiers were shocked and bewildered when military police arrested them on arrival in Anchorage and transported them to a military prison camp in the Yukon as a precaution against mutiny. Later, those who were deemed politically unreliable were transferred to a civilian labor camp operated by the Corrective Labor Administration of the Department of State Security—without a hearing, trial or right of appeal.
Doherty spent nearly a year at a camp called C227, because it was located at Milepost 227 on the Canol Road (short for Canadian
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