The Most Beautiful Daughter (Ch21)

Jackson decides it's high time he gets out of 1918. Will he make it?

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Crack!

The second time Asa Jackson slammed his shoulder int the fishing cabin’s front door, the wooden frame buckeled. The third time it split in two places and Jackson stumbled into the little room like a drunk zeroing in on the last bottle. He rubbed his shoulder but the slight pain was nothing compared to the pain in his heart.

His father, Seneca Jackson, had built the cabin with his own father in the summer of 1905 on the banks of the Kansas River, about twelve miles west of Camp Funston. The cabin was protected by three white pines interspersed with tangled thorns, shielding it from the road. By the time Asa had been able to thread a hook with a live worm, his father had brought him there for overnight stays and they enjoyed those rare times when they were able to spend a few days away from the sadness that clung to them both, his mother’s death a shadow always attached to them.

He studied the door, which was now hanging from one hinge, and his face slowly changed, eyes closing and throat hitching. He composed himself and spoke softly into the eerie silence. “The door frame tore and you’ll repair it with a long board. On my tenth birthday in 1928, I’m going to ask you why that board doesn’t match the other ones. You’ll tell me that one day, when you were back from the War, you wanted some fish. Some fish for your little boy. Your wife was gone by the time you came back. You came here and you found the door hanging off the hinge. Thieves, you’re going to say. You’re going to laugh a little. Thieves got in the cabin, kid. But it wasn’t a thief, Pop. It was your son.”

When he accepted Dr. Andersen’s assignment to travel to 1918 Fort Riley, it was understood he was not to touch anything from his life because of the threat of somehow damaging the future. This was for mostly for his own protection. Jackson didn’t like to think that even the slightest of interactions with people who, now living in his past, would be a part of his future, could jeopardize his very existence. To no fault of his own, that rule was broken the instant he became acquaintances with Billy Rankin, the father of one of his childhood friends. Dr. Andersen had told him to stay away, far away, from all things that had to do with his real life as a boy on the outskirts of Junction City. The dates of his father’s deployment didn’t coincide with early March, so there was no need to worry about actually running into him. Seneca was on a ship now, heading to France.

He slowly turned his head. The kerosene lamp, without its future rust, in its rightful place on a shelf next to canned beans and beef. Wood stacked in a pyramid next to the small stone fireplace. But what made his throat catch was a newly made fishing pole, small, the size a child could handle. He walked to it but didn’t touch it. He would. In time.

Jackson breathed deep, inhaling the familiar scents of pine, and got to work moving one of the two raised wooden pallets that they would throw blankets on to sleep. The floorboards were weathered gray, but hadn’t yet deepened to the dark gray he knew. Two of the boards had almost invisible groves cut into them. He moved his fingers there and pulled them up.

The secret compartment was empty. He dumped a burlap potato sack into the hole. The sack contained the leather valise that had been hidden under his bunk at Camp Funston. In this were two suits: the first his black job from 1946, complete with fedora and black and white wingtips and the second, the brown tweed suit he wore on his arrival in 1918.

After this, he would enter Fort Riley for the last time and when his business was complete, he would ride to the cabin, change into his brown suit, drive the motorcycle to Junction City and ditch it on the outskirts in one of the junk fields. From there, he’d walk to the train station and casually board the 7:30 night train to Chicago with the ticket he had already purchased. He would speak in a perfect English accent without any regionalisms, the English of the highly educated. When anyone asked about his final destination, he would answer that it was Yale University, where he had just been awarded a visiting professorship in ancient languages. And no one would even suspect that he had just murdered a famous doctor at the nearby military base.

He dropped an unloaded .45 automatic that he swiped from one of his bunkmates onto the pile and a small box of bullets, along with cash and his train ticket. Then he replaced the boards and moved the cot back into place. He took one fast glance around and headed for the door.

He left it open. Make it look like thieves broke in.

He scooped up another sack from the ground next to his motorcycle and walked the few paces to the river and tossed it in. Inside were his fake military transfer papers, created in 1946, to gain him access to the base, along with all his personal items pertaining to Private Asa Jackson. He was the Ghost, after all. His death had been staged more than once over the years, with the paperwork to prove it. Even in 1946, Asa Jackson didn’t exist.

Jackson hopped his motorcycle and revved it, skidding slightly on the dead pine needle ground cover. All the years of Jackson men walking to the cabin had beaten a path and he cruised until he met the road, and turned toward Camp Funston.

Out here, the air was crisp and clear and without the stench of burning animal dung, but the radio had spoken of another dust storm for tomorrow, which was fine because Jackson would make sure he was ahead of the storm, just as he always did.

Dr. Andersen had sent him to 1918 to find out who Thrax was among the doctors at Fort Riley and to terminate him, then return right away before the first wave of the flu hit the base, but that’s not what Jackson was going to. He was going to stop the flu from ever happening. He knew that Andersen had been dead set against it, but the doctor was dead and it was up to him to finish this as he saw fit. He would be sparing lives, potentially millions. His mother’s life among them.

For a while, he had thought Thrax was Dr. Harris. Harris was strange. When he had seen Harris at the Infirmary and General, he had kept to himself, head down and not very talkative. Today’s almost run-in with Van Horn’s father might have confirmed that, but there was another piece that was now clear. He had seen Van Horn in the infirmary. The man wasn’t sick enough to die in such a short amount of time. And besides, if he had gotten some highly infectious illness that he needed immediate burial, the entire base would be locked down in quarantine. The elder Van Horn was right to be furious. And suspicious. He already knew the harassment his boy and the others faced. Most likely he thought that his son had died during a hazing incident and he wouldn’t be far off the mark.

What Jackson realized when driving Theda back to her house was that a piece of Seneca Jackson’s journal came back to him.

His father had told him stories of being stationed at Fort Riley in the beginning of his military service during the Great War. One story was working on the clean up crew for the General Building which involved constant hauling of something heavy from the back of the building. Those large, burlap-wrapped things smelled terrible, and Seneca, a fourth-generation farmer, knew he was smelling decaying swine. Look for an animal, Andersen had told him.

After his father had died, Jackson had read through some parts of his journals, especially his time in France and Belgium. There was a particular passage that had just come back to him.

December 11, 1918
Our passage home has been delayed yet again and the men are getting restless. We await our ship, the W.A. Luckenbach.
Yesterday, I ran into an old acquaintance from the Funston days, one James Schmidt from Chicago. It was good to see he had survived the fighting and hadn't been terribly injured, if only for a sprained shoulder from having a spill into the trenches.
We spoke briefly about our experiences and the friends we've lost. I'm sorry to report his own brother among the casualties. 
Then James reminded me of our days working at the General Building. James shipped out much later than I, just after the Spanish flu had hit Funston. He said, "You know, right at the end it was kinda funny. They closed down the Gen fast. Boarded the lower windows and put those big boards over the doors. Told everyone to keep away under the pain of a severe court martial."
I asked him why. He shrugged the good shoulder  "Always thought something funny was going on there. You seen it, too, Jack. Saw your face more than once when we was hauling that shit away. One of the docs even disappeared right at the end."
I asked him which one but he didn't know the name, he only said, the one with the beautiful daughter.
Then they called us for mess. Mess here is even worse than at home. Tonight's fare was...

Jackson revved the engine, alone on the road as the sky deepened to sapphire flecked with brilliant stars. In the distance the lights of Army City glowed like a mythical city. Anyone with two good eyes would say that Violet Evora was the more beautiful of the daughters, but to Jackson, there was no one more stunning than Theda. She was a smoldering fire that transcended her looks, which he thought were just as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen.

He tried to push thoughts of her away, but her face kept rising in his mind. She could never forgive him for what he was about to do, even if she knew the awful things her father had done.

They were still a few days away from the start of the flu. If he took out Evora, that may end it before it even began. Evora had said he was working late, which was good. There were times when he was the only one in the building, and Jackson had waited outside for hours for him to emerge. All he had to do was get into the building. He turned on the final road to the General Building.

In the final bit of daylight, a car pulled out of the back parking lot behind the General. Good. Go home. I have work to do. The car sped toward him and he saw that it was the cherry red Stanley. He slowed down, hoping it would just pass him and not give him a second glance. There were hundreds of motorcycles at Camp Funston and one soldier riding a bike looked exactly like the next.

The Stanley drove instead in the opposite lane and for a moment Jackson thought he was in the clear and it was going to zoom past him. But then it swerved into his lane going full throttle, tires turning up the loose dirt behind it in a filthy cloud. He jerked the handlebars right, but it was too late. The last thing he saw before the world went black was Billy’s grinning face over the steering wheel.

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