Message in a Bottle

My prospective client, Regina St. John, was in her late forties, maybe early fifties. Her salt-and-pepper hair was drawn back into a severe bun, but there were laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. She smiled at me, but her smile was tinged with a certain sadness.

“I want you to try to find my brother Mike. We had a horrible fight a couple years ago, over money, and I haven’t spoken to him since. Now both of us have inherited quite a bit from our Aunt Maude, and I want him to get his share. If we can’t find him, I get all of it, but I don’t want it. I’d rather donate it to charity if he’s dead or something.”

“I assume you have tried to contact him.” I had to ask. Some people didn’t even try.

“His number doesn’t work anymore. Not even voicemail. My text message got bounced back. He hasn’t responded to any of my emails, either. I drove out to his house, and there were strangers living there.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“Well, no. What would I even say?” Her voice shook a little.

“Do you have a picture of Mike? Something recent?”

“I have a picture of him from about a year before our fight. His son had just graduated law school. It’s my contact photo for him. I’ll send it to you. If you take the case, of course. Money is no object; I will give you a credit card for expenses, and don’t worry about the limit. I expect there is a fee, as well. You came highly recommended, so I have no problem giving you a lot of money to do this.”

Music to my ears. “Of course I’ll take it. My fee depends on how much footwork I have to do, so I won’t know how much it will be until the case is over.”

“That’s fair. I just sent you the picture. Will you be able to start immediately? Or do you have other cases to work first? Can I pay extra to get bumped up the list?”

“I only work one case at a time. I don’t have anything else to take care of first; I’ll start tomorrow morning. Send me over his address, all the contact information you have. If you have any samples of his signature, I’ll need those, too.”

“His signature? Why?”

“Because if he signed something under duress, or if somebody forged it, we’ll be able to tell. Is there any chance he could have been kidnapped? Human trafficking is high on the list of explanations for sudden disappearances.”

“I don’t know. Like I said, we didn’t talk. I don’t know what his life has been like or what may have happened to him.”

“Okay. I’ll go to the house first, talk to the new occupants.”

After Regina left, I pulled out my phone and looked at the picture she sent me. Mike was smiling at the camera with his arm around a younger man who looked eerily like him in a cap and gown. Before I would visit the house, I would do a little online research, see if he had an internet presence.

My quarry’s full name was James Michael Montgomery, but his Facebook profile revealed that he had been going by “Mike” since high school. He got a bachelor's degree in business accounting and worked as a freelance CPA, mostly handling wealthy clients’ taxes. There were no updates since a year ago, though. Up until then, there were pictures of Mike visiting exotic locales posted about once a year. I browsed through the pictures, curious to the point of being nosy, which is basically a private investigator’s job. He went to Thailand and visited a Buddhist monastery there, then India, where he seemed to have learned yoga. He was obviously one of those people who look for enriching spiritual experiences and practices with a degree of respect for their origins. He had also posted a lot of uplifting memes and pictures, mostly about things like finding your inner divinity.

The following day, I jumped in my car and headed down to the address Regina had given me. It was a cute little saltbox, with periwinkle siding and gray trim. There was a Prius parked in the driveway, so I parked at the curb and went to knock on the door. It was answered by a diminutive Asian man who explained in broken English that his daughter would have to translate for him. He turned and said something in a language that sounded like Cantonese into the house. In a moment, a girl who had inherited his cheekbones came to the door and asked what I wanted.

I told her that I was an insurance adjuster, trying to track down the last owner of the house. I showed them Mike’s picture, and they recognized him at once, but they said he gave the name Geddy Peart. They were able to produce the bill of sale for the house, but the seller’s signature was a scribble that could have been anything. Mike’s signature was just his first name and last initial, but it was legible.

The name seemed familiar, although I couldn’t place it right away. I went back to my office and used a nifty little trick I knew to start searching airline passenger manifests for either the name James Michael Mongomery or Geddy Peart in the last year. After a while, my computer chirped: There he was, registered as Geddy Peart, which means he either legally changed his name or managed to mock up enough identfying documents in this new alias to get a passport. I was sure I knew that name, so I ran another Google search.

A-ha! Geddy Lee and Neil Peart were members of the Canadian rock band, Rush. Mike must be a fan. I liked some of their work, too. Maybe this was a clue as to where he went and what he was doing.

Geddy Peart had flown from the nearby airport all the way to Peru. He had been in seat 2B on the first leg of the flight, indicating that he had flown first class to Dallas/Fort Worth. I called Regina and told her I was on the trail, but I needed to fly to Peru. She reiterated that I was to spare no expense in my search for her brother, so I went ahead and booked tickets to follow Mike to Peru.

When I got to Texas, I had an idea: I went to the information desk for the airline and told them I had left something on a plane a long time ago and gave the clerk the name Geddy Peart, seat 2B. She went into the back and returned with an mp3 player in her hand with a Post-It stuck to it that said 2B and a date almost a year ago. She didn’t seem surprised that the player had sat in a box unclaimed for a year; maybe it happened all the time.

On the flight further south, I plugged my earbuds into the player and turned it on. There was only one song loaded, and it was “Xanadu” by Rush. He had been listening to the same song on repeat for twelve hours worth of flight time? The song was twelve minutes long, about a man who finds Paradise and becomes immortal but then goes mad. Regina hadn’t said anything about her brother being weird. As I listened, one lyric in particular caught my attention: “From an ancient book/I took a clue.” I tried to think like my quarry. Where was he going in Peru?

When I landed in Lima, I found a café and opened up my laptop. I searched for the oldest library in the city and called a taxi to take me there. Just like the Asian man who had purchased the house, the librarian immediately recognized Mike’s photo. He had asked to see the field journal of the anthropologist and explorer Matias Puerto, a book that she said had never been reproduced. The handwritten copy they had in their stacks was the only one in existence, mainly because nobody considered it worth transcribing. Puerto had been obsessed with ancient, hidden civilizations and spent a lot of time and money trying to find them. He did encounter a few remote tribes that nobody else had ever made contact with, but he had retired to Peru in relative obscurity until he died. The librarian showed me the book, and when I asked if anyone else had handled the volume since, she said no. If you take a book that somebody else was reading, and let it drop open on its own on a table, it will open naturally on the page they spent the most time looking at. Puerto’s handwriting was erratic, but I caught the words “Xanadu” and “distant mountains.” So he was looking for something that probably didn’t exist. I put the book back on its shelf and left the library, deep in thought.

Another search of airline manifests had him hopping across the pond to Italy. This time, I did not hesitate before I followed. In Italy I stalled out for a couple of days, not finding any planes leaving Italy with his name on the manifest. Where did Mike go from here, and how did he get here? The nearest mountain range to Milan was the Alps. Did he take a bus? Out of desperation, while eating lunch at an outdoor café, I asked my waiter how somebody would get to the Alps from here. “Il treno,” he replied. The train. Now why didn’t I think of that?

I didn’t have a way to check lists of train passengers, but I was sure I was on the right track, so to speak. A train ride later, and I was in southern Switzerland, casting around for the next lead. Mike had been looking for something in the mountains, so he had probably hired a guide and maybe a few people to carry gear. A few questions in the right bars, with silver coins slid across the counter, and I found the man who had led Mike up one side of Mont Fort.

“He did not get far,” the man explained. “We went up a little way, but he looked around and said he was in the wrong place, so we turned back.”

“Did he tell you what he was looking for?” I wondered what Mike’s cover had been.

“He said he was looking for a place to put some kind of weather-watching gear. But that’s not the truth, is it?”

“Actually,” I had to admit, “That’s what I’m trying to find out: the truth.”

So Mike hadn’t found what he was searching for in the Alps. The only remaining mountain range that qualified as “distant” was the Himalayas, so I didn’t even bother with another passenger search. I just took the next available flight to Tibet.

Knowing now that Mike was going mountain climbing, I spent some time seeking out mountain climbing guides among the locals. It took a week of going from town to town at the base of the Himalayas, but I finally found the team of Sherpas who had led Mike up the side of a mountain almost a year ago. The lead guide spoke five languages, and explained to me, in perfect English, that they had gotten quite a ways up a nearby peak before Mike left them and never came back. Then the man reached into his pack and drew out a small leatherbound book and handed it to me. “He told me to give this to whomever came after him. It’s his field journal. You want to follow him, yes?”

“I need to find out what happened to him,” I explained. “He has a sister back home. She deserves to know the truth. Yes, I want to follow him.”

“I will see you in the morning, then. We leave at dawn.”

Back in my room at the local inn, I opened the journal. A folded piece of paper dropped out. It was a letter:

“My friend,

If you have followed me this far, you may be the companion I was hoping for. The man who gave you this journal will take you up the mountain. He will show you where we stopped and I left them behind. You will have to keep climbing, but I do not expect you will have far to go. If all goes well, I will see you in Paradise.

Regards,

Mike”

I flipped to the last entry in the journal, dated eight months ago.

“Tomorrow I will make my final ascent, and I shall do so alone. My guides have done well, but I cannot risk them seeing the door to Xanadu and trying to come in with me. This last journey is one I must take alone.”

This dude was out of his mind. Somehow I knew that he had died up there, chasing a Paradise that certainly did not exist. What drove him? The promise of immortality? Thinking about it, I decided that becoming immortal would drive somebody mad, just like in the song.

The next morning, I joined a group of five men who would accompany me along Mike’s trail. It would take us three days to get to the point where Mike had gone on alone. We made our way up slowly and carefully, telling stories in the evenings and getting up at dawn every day to keep moving. We got to the spot where they had camped the first time, where Mike had snuck out before sunrise and kept climbing. I had no intention of making his mistake and leaving the Sherpas behind. Since we still had some daylight left, we kept going. We were making our way through a labyrinth of fissures in the glacier that covered this part of the mountain, when the lead Sherpa stopped and gestured to me wildly, pointing to the eight-foot-tall slab of ice to the right. I went and looked where he was indicating.

In front of me, a few inches beneath the crystal-clear ice, was Mike. One hand still clutched his canteen. He looked terribly surprised to be there. The only explanation I could come up with was that he had fallen into a crevasse and maybe broken his neck. Then the ice had grown around him, embedding his body and preserving that shocked expression.

“Well, Mike,” I said to the face in the ice, “you wanted immortality. This is probably as close as any of us will ever get.”

I snapped a photo and turned away to climb back down the mountain.