William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

“I have no idea what’s going on.”

“But you have the genealogy to find out.”

“I didn’t ask to be dragged into this!”

“Of course not, but you’re key. Which is why you’re in danger. And it was dumb luck I learned enough to warn you. And there is an inheritance, apparently. You can thank me later.”

“After my knees heal.” She felt truculent about being caught up in something without being asked first. It wasn’t fair.

“That wasn’t planned. Before we could be properly introduced, ‘boom’! And, well, here we are.”

“Here we are where?”

“Concrete.” Once more he turned the pickup off the main highway, driving them past some gigantic dull-gray concrete silos that, in faded red letters, indeed announced Concrete. “Guess what they made in this place? It built some big dams upriver.”

“Benjamin Hood lived in Concrete?”

“Nah, he’s up on the Cascade River, which is where we have to go. But he did his banking here, and that’s where you come in.”

Rominy looked out at a rain-stained, pocket-sized town punched into more of the valley’s lush forest. She’d heard of it but never been here.

Barrow turned onto Main Street. “This burg is actually modestly famous, because De Niro and DiCaprio made This Boy’s Life here. The Tobias Wolff memoir? Wolff lived up in the Seattle City Light company towns, Newhalem and Diablo, but he came down here for high school. Hollywood, baby.”

They parked. Downtown was a block-long clump of architecturally uninspired buildings about as charming as a gas station and as typically American as baseball and Barbie. Tavern, hardware store, Laundromat, food bank-unsurprising, since there was no sign of money-and, more heartening, a surviving movie theater. Many of the time-warp buildings were built (as she should have guessed) of painted concrete. There were old lodge halls for the American Legion and Eagles and an eight-foot carved wooden bear, incongruously rearing under a gazebo built to keep the rain off. Summit Bank had a reader board displaying the temperature (67 degrees) and a sign, SINCE 1914. Inside was utilitarian as a post office. Paneling painted white, forest green carpet, and the kind of fluorescent lighting that gives off the warmth of Greenland’s ice cap. The clerks, however, smiled. A vault door gave a peek toward safety deposit boxes.

“When Hood lived up here, this was the State Bank of Concrete,” Barrow explained. “He left a will and a safety deposit box for his heirs, but guess what? No heirs. Until you. And a mystery seventy-plus years unsolved. Until now.” He grinned and went up to a teller. “Mr. Dunnigan, please.”

“I’ll see if he’s available.”

“Tell him Mr. Barrow and Ms. Pickett-Hood are here to see him. He’s expecting us.” Jake stood tall like it was his birthday, glancing around impatiently. Rominy studied him again. Her companion, she admitted, was intriguing, smart, and a bit of a stud. He was built like a fitness freak, and his eyes seemed lit with blue fire. Certainly more interesting than another evening home with Netflix and Haagen-Dazs. Instead of savior or kidnapper, Jake was making himself, she realized, a partner.

Curiosity kept her with him. And it was reassuring he’d taken her somewhere dull, like a bank.

“I still don’t get what I’m supposed to do here,” she whispered.

“Inherit, remember?” he whispered back.

Mr. Dunnigan was a balding, portly bank vice president in a white no-iron synthetic shirt and JCPenney sport coat, who reigned behind a Formica desk of faux oak. He picked up a stack of manila folders and took them into an adjacent small conference room with wooden table and hard chairs, looking at Rominy as if she were a ghost. Which she supposed she was in a way, if what Barrow claimed was true. The missing heir of Benjamin Hood! Who?

“Congratulations, Mr. Barrow,” the banker began, dropping the folders with a thump. “As you know, I was skeptical of your research.”

“You sound like my editors.”

“The DNA test, however, convinced me.”

“DNA?” Rominy asked.

“Yes, Miss, it’s been so long since Mr. Hood’s death and his family history is so truncated-goodness, such tragedy-that a mere genealogical table wasn’t going to convince me an heir still existed. That’s when Mr. Barrow suggested the use of DNA evidence, which is surprisingly quick and affordable. We had a rather gruesome relic

…” He paused, looking at Barrow.

“A finger.” The reporter shrugged. “It must have meant something, because Hood kept it in his safety deposit box after he lost it from his hand.”

“He was attached to it,” Dunnigan said, smiling. Apparently, bankers in Concrete possessed quite the wit.

“Wait a minute,” Rominy said. “You matched my DNA to his?”

“Yes, dear. An impossibility for earlier generations, but science marches on.”

“But how did you get my DNA?”

Dunnigan looked surprised at the question and turned to Jake. He in turn looked uncomfortable.

“How did you get my DNA, Barrow?” Rominy asked again.

He cleared his throat. “Saliva.”

“Saliva? When? ”

“I got it off a Starbucks cup. I fished it out after you left a store.”

“Are you joking? When was this?”

“A week ago.”

“You’ve been following me to get my saliva?”

“To let you inherit, Rominy,” he said patiently, as if she was a little dense.

“That’s illegal. Isn’t it? ”

“My bank cannot condone anything improper,” Dunnigan added.

“Of course it’s legal,” Barrow said blandly. He turned to the banker. “My newspaper’s lawyers checked this out. As long as you’re not taking samples from a person’s body without permission-like clipping their hair-it passes the test. We’ve done this before. It’s fine, so long as it’s from discarded organic material.”

Dunnigan frowned, then shrugged.

“Discarded like a Starbucks cup,” Rominy said.

“Yes.”

“That’s sick.”

“Do you think you would have let me run a swab inside your mouth?”

“Maybe, if you’d ever explained yourself in a normal way.”

“I had to be sure or you would have run like a rabbit. ‘Hi there, you might be due a missing inheritance so do you mind if a run a Q-tip?’ It sounds like molestation. You would have dumped espresso down my pants and been furious if it wasn’t a match. So I did something that didn’t disturb you one iota, and we compared Hood’s finger to the saliva you left on the cup.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Maybe so, but because of it you’re sitting in a bank about to get a look into Benjamin Hood’s safety deposit box. How many times do I have to tell you I’m trying to help you?”

“You’re trying to help yourself.” She closed her eyes, momentarily wishing she could will this day away. But when she opened them they were both still looking at her with troubled and not unkind expressions. There was sympathy there. And Jake did have that compelling little scar. She sighed. “The DNA shows this Hood character and I are related?”

“Yes,” Dunnigan said, visibly relieved she wasn’t going to throw a fit.

“What happened to all the other descendants? After three generations, there should be a zillion of them by now.”

“Only children after mysterious accidents to their mothers,” Jake said. “A drowning, a car crash. Nobody ever put it all together because of the changes of names and growing fear of even discussing the Hood relationship, I’m guessing. Nobody put it together until I did. And I realized there was one final survivor: a survivor because she was left in a campground, adopted by strangers, a girl who knew nothing of her own past.”