Who Lies Beneath the Headstone?

              After the funeral for Fred Harris the line of well-wishers among his family and friends stretched from the living room of his large Colonial home, out into the street and well down the tree-lined block.  Greetings and expressions of sympathy lasted well into the evening. 

     Since the family had chosen me to help manage the reception, I hadn’t returned to my home until well after 10 pm. 

       Exhausted and worn down with the emotion involved in paying final respects to one of my dearest friends, I parked my car in the garage and walked toward my front door.

      There I spotted a tall gentleman in a very expensive suit waiting on my porch. I hadn’t seen any cars parked along my street, so I couldn’t figure out how he had arrived.

        “Can I help you?” I asked. “Please excuse me. I am still a little bit in shock. I just came from the funeral of one of my best friends.”

        Fred had deeply touched the lives of everyone he met. His many readers and fans religiously read his Daily Post columns on local government and finance, and considered his writings as kind of unofficial operations manuals for the conduct of municipal government in suburban Northern and Central New Jersey

     He also had co-founded the East Somerset Little League, spearheaded a number of community food banks, raised thousands for the families of cops and firefighters killed in the line of duty and became the moving force behind the Annual 10K Run for Knowledge that had raised over $100,000 in 10 years for scholarships to send underprivileged kids to charter schools.

      That is why his untimely death at age 59 from a mysterious illness sent shockwaves through the community.

      I didn’t hesitate for an instant when Fred’s widow Charlene asked me to be the lead undertaker at his funeral and map out a community memorial.

       In accordance with my friend’s final wishes, the carefully-chosen speakers at the humble ceremony paid tribute to him as a good journalist who worked hard to make the lives of his neighbors better. He did not consider himself a hero and did not want eulogies from people who knew very little about him and only wanted to win praise for themselves with their phony remembrances.

      I had carefully selected those he considered most significant in his life—his wife, his older son, Jon, and Daily Post executive editor Paul Columbine—to give the eulogies. Also, only 100 people, barely enough to take up half of the seats in the large and ornate East Somerset Baptist Church, attended the last rites.

      Following the service, it was hard to hold back the multitudes of community mourners, A line of about 20 cars followed the hearse to the Nightingale Memorial Park.

    This made the revelation by the stranger waiting in front of my home even more shocking. 

      As he extended his hand he said,  “My name is Richard Thompson. I am a representative of the Forsythe Commercial Real Estate Trust. I am afraid I have some startling news for you. The man buried in the Nightingale Memorial Park today was not Fred Harris. The real Mr. Harris still is very much alive. He represents our company in commercial real estate sales in suburban Philadelphia.”

       “That can’t be true. I’ve known Fred for 20 years. We went to high school together in Bound Brook, New Jersey. We played on the Bound Brook varsity baseball team together. His wife and mine led the cheerleading squad for the team.”

        “I understand,” Thompson said. “The real Fred Harris had some complications a number of years ago with gambling debts. He didn’t do anything wrong. All caused by a misunderstanding. The less-than-savory people involved with those complications did not believe him and they put out a contract on his life. 

     “He contacted the FBI, and they helped him join the witness protection program. They relocated him out of the country and supplied him with a new identity. He became Harry Schaffer.

      “Because Harry had a number of ties to suburban Philadelphia he told the FBI he couldn’t stay hidden forever. Luckily, the feds discovered, the people who put the contract out on his life died before they caught up with him. So, the bureau made arrangements for him to return to the Philly area and take up life again under his old identity.”

        I replied incredulously, “The dear friend I knew. That was the man his wife married. She knew him only as Fred Harris. How could she not know his real identity?”

      “Actually, his wife learned that the man she would spend her life with had assumed another’s identity in order to throw the thugs off his trail.  While the bad guys looked for the real Fred Harris we had Jared Kingston, one of the agents assigned to the witness protection program, take over the life of Harris.

      The family buried Jared Kingston in the Harris family plot today.”

     “And you, Mr. Thompson, how do you know so much about how the FBI operates and what goes on inside its supposedly top-secret witness protection program?”

    “As you probably have determined by now, I also have not revealed my true identity. I am special agent Rodman Percival and my assignment has been the establishment of our substitute in his new occupation and the continued confidential maintenance of his secret.

      “A major part of my assignment is to make sure that you hold everything I tell you in the strictest confidence. Possibly, living underworld figures associated with Fred’s old nemesis could escape our notice and find out about his continuing existence.  If any harm comes to him, we will know where the leak came from and take every action at our disposal to plug that leak--if you get my drift."

     “None of our investigations have uncovered the cause of Jared Kingston’s mysterious death. Also, since we don’t believe it had anything to do with his connection to Fred Harris we don't see any reason to pursue it further--at least at this point.”