March 24

I wanted to believe Mike was still alive, living somewhere abroad with an alias and a Dutch girlfriend. Through the naïve lens of childhood, I imagined him sailing through Scandinavia, growing tulips in the Springtime, eating chocolates in a café. The reality of what actually happened to Mike was far too difficult and obscure to process. I could not fathom how a healthy, thirty-year-old person could be poisoned 3,000 miles from home. 

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Jennifer was already at the house when I arrived to help pick through sixty years of our grandparents’ lives, arranged as neat piles of books, dusty ceramics, old canisters of film. We didn’t have an agenda of what we were looking for, exactly; however, there was a palpable sense that this was a bonafide treasure hunt. Hundreds of books lined three out of the four walls in grandpa’s study. There were four shelves, each supported by flimsy steel brackets and shelves made out of cardboard, plywood, and old printing plates that he had carefully glued together into long, rectangular platforms. His research on family genealogy, printing methods, and historical events filled dozens of white, plastic binders that covered the back wall in stark contrast to the navy blues, reds, and browns of the canvas and leather-bound aged titles, above. 

“I just want to get at these printing plates,” Jennifer said, teetering on a step stool as she cleared books off the handmade shelf. I scanned a circle from Jennifer’s outstretched body around the living room and realized: I didn’t have a focus here. Or, perhaps, my focus was on everything. Haphazardly, I started clearing off the old secretary desk by the front door. The desk was always there, as far back as I remembered, with an old, lace runner laid lengthwise over the top. It caught our keys, held ceramic birds, and, later, pictures of me and my Dad when the house became his after my grandma died. I never considered what was inside. I don’t know what I was expecting to find; the mix of items in the drawers and nooks seemed random next to one another, but against the context of my grandparents’ lives and interests, they made perfect sense. A microcosm of their hobbies and habits: old stamps; letters from long-lost relatives; a professional-looking, printed family tree going back to the colonists; fancy ink pens; and, a few little green army men. I examined a tiny army man closely in my palm. “This must have been Mike’s,” I thought. My Dad Sam and Jennifer’s Dad Bill were years older than Mike, far beyond little-green-men-age by the time the family moved into this house in 1962. 

Without pre-thought, I blurted, “Hey Jenny, what did your Dad tell you about how uncle Mike died?” It was hard for us to separate Mike from his death. I was just shy of three when he died, Jenny wasn’t even born.

“Oh, just that he thinks Mike was murdered and their cousin had something to do with it,” she said casually.

“Have you ever seen the police report from Amsterdam? I know my Dad had it translated back in the eighties, but I’ve never read it,” I said. 

“Yeah, my Dad showed it to me. I think the police ruled it a suicide, but the circumstances were strange.” 

“I bet that report is still here somewhere. I wonder if we can find it?” This last comment hung like a challenge.

“Yeah, I bet you’re right.” 

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Remnants from my own childhood were scattered among boxes in the middle bedroom my grandma called “Mike’s Room.” She slept there every night in her final years at the house. During my second year of college, my Dad’s business finally crumbled and he lost both his job and the condo where we’d lived my whole life. Without the time or transportation to come home from school, my Mom, her new husband Cary, and my step-brothers went to the condo to help pack up. As a result, twenty years of trinkets, notes, and trash, were hastily thrown in old paper-ream and appliance boxes and taped up for the storage unit. Two decades years later, I stood staring at the boxes in Mike’s room, wondering what I missed and what I may not want to see. My old, blue, padlocked trunk sat on end underneath a large cardboard box, a leaning tower of junk. When I was eleven and living half-time with my Mom’s new, blended family, my Dad bought me that trunk and padlock to hide my stuff away from my step-siblings; one of many band-aids to control the flood of collateral damage from their divorce.

“I bet there’s a bunch of weird, funny stuff from middle school in that trunk,” I joked to Jennifer. She had joined me in Mike’s room to look through the book cabinet full of calendars, WWII-era newspapers, and mid-century comic books. “You see the padlock? My Dad wrote the combination on the back. He always did that. Defeats the purpose, right? But I’m glad he did that now,” I laughed.  

After heaving the large box from the top, I carefully tilted the trunk on its base and undid the padlock. Inside, were ten white boxes stacked side-by-side. I quickly realized I had not found my own stuff but my Dad’s diaries, instead – the same notes he typed up nightly at the dining room table some thirty years ago. The sound of the word processor’s soft hum and gentle, ticking keys rushed back to my head. The boxes were numbered from 1991 – 1996 like a set of encyclopedias, but one box also said “Mike Notes”.

Quietly, I said, “Jennifer, I think I found my Dad’s documents about Mike’s death.” 

To have wondered about this information my whole life, and then to find it so easily, laid out right before me without even trying, was almost surreal. As a kid, I read a lot of fantasy. After some cajoling on my part, my Dad bought me a yearly subscription to Weekly World News magazine - a sci-fi-meets-The Onion type of deal that included stories like “Bat Boy,” Elvis sightings, and Serena and Sonya Sabak’s psychic advice column. When I was old enough to ask, my parents told me Mike died of food poisoning, which is the story I told all of my middle-school friends. “Isn’t that so sad and scary?” I would add to emphasize the tragedy and fear.

At home, I could tell there was more to the story. I became fascinated by Mike’s death and, shortly after, his life. When we found an old metal nightstand that belonged to Mike at my grandparents’ house, I convinced my Dad to let me keep it in my bedroom. Inside its drawer I found an old leather “MG” Midget keychain. “One more clue,” I thought. Shortly after we brought the nightstand home, I woke up to see a shadowy, sparkling figure in my room. “Hi Mike,” I said to the shadow. I guess he’s not sailing around the Netherlands, I thought.

My Dad was cagy about Mike’s life and death. It seemed the topic was always bubbling under the surface when we’d talk about the past, or find an old photo, but I was too afraid to stir things up. So, I did the only thing I knew at the time – I wrote a letter to the psychic sisters in Weekly World News. Serena and Sonya Sabak’s weekly psychic advice column answered all kinds of other-worldly questions from readers. I was sure they would pick my letter - a desperate plea (from a child, for God’s sake!) asking for the truth about her poor uncle’s mysterious death - and publish a quick reply. I had even gone so far as to include an ambiguous name that I pulled from other advice columns, like “Signed, Seeking Answers,” just in case my Dad happened to leaf through the magazine himself. “Daddy, I need a stamp. Can you mail this for me? Do NOT open it or read it. It’s private,” I said firmly as I handed him the sealed envelope.

The psychics never answer, but now, years later, I was staring at hard evidence. The grown-up stuff, the gritty details. I removed the rubber band from the bulging box and pulled out a thick, letter-sized envelope from the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam postmarked 1987. Laid in front of me was a document cache with the police report in Dutch, letters from the State Department and a private investigator, and photocopies from my Dad’s diaries at the time.

“Jenny, it’s all here.” The answers. Or, so I thought.