Fate Choice and Chance: An Immigrant's Quest

By Geoffrey Hepburn

Fate Choice and Chance recounts Ben Peters quest to escape his familys traditions and poverty, the haunting memories of the past, and the limitations of the small town on the Canadian prairies where he lived as a child. His life could have gone in many different directions, but the interplay of fate and chance resulted in choices leading inexorably to the present. In retrospect, his most fateful choice was to marry the woman that he loved. Ultimately he achieves the American dream of financial success in New York City, but this is far removed from his youthful dreams of public service. The path from that small prairie town to New York City was treacherous and crooked, leading through Toronto, a city of broken dreams. His painful break with the past has left emotional scars, and he tries to deal with them by neatly compartmentalizing his life into two halves the forgotten Canadian past and the American present. But then his chance encounter with a mysterious stranger on a business trip to Toronto and their conversation about a murder that occurred in the high school in that small prairie town of his childhood leads him to embark on a spiritual journey to reconciliation with the past and the healing power of forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477267684

Geoffrey Hepburn

First novels are often partly autobiographical, and Fate Choice and Chance is no exception. Like the main character in the novel, Geoffrey Hepburn grew up in a small prairie town in Canada before coming to the United States to complete his graduate education at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most of his career was spent in the international oil industry and on Wall Street before he retired to become a writer of fiction. This book builds on his experiences accumulated over a lifetime in business and academia and reflects his love of history and travel and his personal journey of faith. He lives with his family in a suburb of New York City. Geoffrey Hepburn is a nom de plume

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© 2012 Geoffrey Hepburn. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/24/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6768-4 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6769-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6770-7 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012916488

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Contents

Chapter 1:   The Man in the Black Hat

Chapter 2:   I Don’t Want to Go Home

Chapter 3:   The Last Stop before Heaven

Chapter 4:   A Secret Revealed

Chapter 5:   Awkward Encounters

Chapter 6:   The Past is Prologue

Chapter 7:   For Whatsoever Things Are True

Chapter 8:   At the Crossroads of the World

Chapter 9:   False Prophets and Broken Dreams

Chapter 10: Looking for Providence on a Bad Day

Chapter 11: Life is Not a Bell-Shaped Curve

Chapter 12: The Journey’s End

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

To go in quest means to look for something of which one has, as yet, no experience; one can imagine what it will be like but whether one’s picture is true or false will be known only when one has found it.

W.H. Auden, The Quest Hero

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

1 Corinthians 13:12

Chapter One:

The Man in the Black Hat

Ben Peters eased back in his arm chair and glanced at the other occupants of the Consort Bar, mostly businessmen like himself engaged in animated conversation with colleagues after work over drinks and a light dinner. He ate here whenever he was in Toronto, a city of bitter memories to which he had returned on business only in recent years. He found the bar a peaceful refuge just off the lobby of the King Edward, preferring it over the hotel’s more ornate and formal Victoria restaurant. It reminded him of an English gentlemen’s club – muted colors, leather-bound chairs, a dark mahogany bar, shining brass, high ceilings that hushed the voices of its guests, evening sunlight filtering through the windows facing King Street. The staff was pleasant and unobtrusive, the food reasonably priced and the wine list good.

Three television screens flickered in the bar, two tuned to sports channels and a third offering the evening news. The two sports channels were on mute, and the volume of the news channel was set so low that it was difficult to hear the commentator’s words over the murmur of conversation in the bar.

Suddenly, his attention was riveted to the television screen by the words, fatal shooting in Taber, Alberta and Todd Cameron Smith. Smith was the young man who on April 28, 1999 at age fourteen had entered W.R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta with a sawed off .22 caliber rifle, fatally shooting one student in the hallway outside the cafeteria and seriously wounding two others. The shooting was widely believed to have been in imitation of the Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County, Colorado only eight days earlier.

The commentator reviewed the trial that had followed the murder. Smith had been tried as a juvenile and had been sentenced in 2000 to three years in prison followed by seven years of probation. In March 2005, he had been released to a halfway house in Toronto, but a few months later on August 15 he had escaped, leaving a note that he had been caged too long and would never surrender alive. Because the Toronto police had obtained a court injunction permitting them to publicize Smith’s identity, the news report was able to reveal his name and to provide a photograph. From its archives, the news channel also flashed back to the day of the crime – the familiar outline of W.R. Myers High School, the original red brick building constructed in 1950 and linked to the D.A. Ferguson Middle School in the buff brick building constructed in 1960; scenes of shocked and weeping students and parents – and concluded with a reference to the more horrific Columbine massacre, in which 12 students and one teacher were killed and nearly two dozen others were injured.

The news channel moved on to other stories. The Toronto and New York stock exchanges had had a good day; Prime Minister Paul Martin planned to press President George W. Bush for more talks on the softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the United States; meteorologists were forecasting a severe hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico; U.S. troops had suffered another bloody month of casualties in Iraq; and pre-trial hearings had resumed in the case of accused serial killer Robert Pickton in Vancouver. August 16 would be fair with a chance of a late-day shower.

Peters sat motionless at his table. W. R. Myers was the school that he had attended for four years from 1958 to 1962. How could this crime have happened? Had Taber changed that much, or had there always been an underlying current of violence? He had left Taber for university at the age of eighteen, and his visits thereafter to see his parents before they moved back to Saskatoon had been rare and brief. His last visit had been in 1968 when he returned from two years of post-graduate studies in England. Family and friends from school had long scattered to other parts of Canada and the United States. There had been little to draw him back. His life had moved on – from an aborted teaching career in Toronto to a financial career on Wall Street in New York. Because of his current job with Borealis, he had begun to rediscover his Canadian roots, but Taber still seemed so remote.

Yet the crime exercised a certain fascination. What if good fortune had not smiled on him, what if he had been a school dropout rather than a star student who had attended elite British and American universities? He had had a troubled youth and could easily have gone the wrong way. Would he have become a drifter, moving aimlessly from one seasonal construction job to another, perhaps committing some crime in an eruption of pent-up rage, evading the law by working at an oil sands project near Fort McMurray, where labor was scarce and background checks were perfunctory? There but for the grace of God go I, he thought.

Strange, that shooting. A small town in the Alberta Bible Belt is about the last place I would have expected it to happen.

The gruff voice came from the table to Ben’s left. Ben turned in the direction of the voice to determine whether that comment had been directed at him. He had scarcely taken notice of the man sitting there when he had been shown to his table, but now he saw a middle-aged man in a dark suit, with ruddy complexion, thinning black hair and an expansive waist, gazing in a friendly manner at him.

Yes, it was remarkable, Ben responded, expecting the exchange to end there. He was not eager to initiate a conversation with a stranger, preferring the company of his own thoughts.

But the man persisted. My first job after I graduated with an accounting degree from the University of British Columbia was with Rogers Sugar in Vancouver. They owned the sugar beet refinery in Taber, which I visited every quarter to audit the books. A nice, quiet town with a large Mormon population. Not much going on, but people were always willing to stop and talk to you if you needed directions.

Do you still visit Taber? Ben asked politely.

Not any more. I left Rogers Sugar some years ago. Too much travel. I developed a drinking problem and my first marriage broke up. After I had sorted out my life, I remarried and joined a small accounting firm in Vancouver, where I am now a partner. The man’s candor about his private affairs startled Ben. He was accustomed to being reserved with strangers.

The man continued, On my last visit to Taber, about five years before the high school shooting, there was another murder involving a young man who abducted a woman at gunpoint from the store that she and her husband owned. He raped and killed her. She and her husband had emigrated from Ireland. They had a number of small children. The police caught the killer almost immediately. Let me see, what was his name? Oh, now I remember, Thurston! In Vancouver, this kind of crime would not be shocking. After all, we have this guy Pickton on trial now. But in Taber? I never cease to be amazed by these seemingly placid little towns.

Perhaps the town has changed from the way I remember it. The words escaped from Ben’s mouth before he realized what he had done.

Remember it? Do you mean that you know Taber?

Yes, I grew up there, Ben confessed, regretting that he had let slip this information about his past.

Where do you live now? asked the stranger.

Just outside New York City.

No kidding! How did someone from Taber, Alberta end up in New York City?

That is a riddle that I ponder myself from time to time, Ben replied. Tell me more about the high school shooting, he said, eager to shift the discussion away from himself. Living in the United States, I heard a lot about the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado and almost nothing about the Taber shooting. Was there some connection between the two, occurring as they did only a week apart?

The Taber shooting was a copycat. There was a lot of media coverage of the Columbine shooting in Canada. But that is where the similarity ends. The kid who did the shooting in Taber was a loner, someone from a broken home, who had few friends and had been bullied mercilessly at school. Television reports on the Columbine massacre triggered some crazy impulse to get even, so he took his stepfather’s gun and concealed it underneath his coat until he entered the school and started firing at random students. The Columbine shooting, from what I have read, was meticulously planned over several months by kids who had friends but were very much into violent video games. Their grasp of reality may have been influenced by medications that they were taking.

Interesting comparison, said Ben. He noticed that his conversation with the stranger was attracting the attention of other patrons, who were glancing curiously at them.

But do you know what I find most extraordinary about the Taber high school shooting? The student killed was Jason Lang, the son of the rector of the Anglican church in town. At the memorial service held at the high school, which was nationally televised in Canada and attended by a number of bigwigs, including the premier of Alberta and the wife of the Canadian prime minister, the rector publicly forgave the killer of his son. That is what it means to be a Christian - forgiving those who have wronged you before there is reconciliation, even when there is no hope of reconciliation. I am not an Anglican, but I am a born-again Christian. That is how I overcame my drinking problem. I have been through some tough spots myself, but I know I could not have done what he did. The murder at the high school showed the dark underside of Taber, but the rector’s example revealed the bright side of that town. My wife and I were watching the memorial service on television, and there were tears rolling down our cheeks.

Ben stirred uncomfortably in his chair. He was not inclined to wear his religion on his sleeve. Gesturing to the waitress for his check, he turned to the stranger and said, I have enjoyed our discussion, but I must go now. I have some office work that needs to be done by tomorrow morning.

The stranger reached over to shake hands. In doing so, he accidentally knocked a broad-brimmed black hat from the chair next to his table. My name is Robert Enslow. What is yours?

Benjamin Peters. Ben stooped to pick up the hat.

Well, Ben, do you still have family in Taber?

No, my parents and siblings moved away years ago, as did my high school friends. I have not been back for thirty-seven years. I have only my distant memories of the town.

Good memories, I hope. Ben did not respond. There was an awkward pause.

Enslow continued, Memories can be good friends, but they can also be troublesome ghosts that burden our lives. I confronted my ghosts and am much the happier for it. Who knows, visiting Taber again might do you a world of good.

Ben charged his meal to his room bill. The stranger had apparently already paid.

Here, let me accompany you as far as the lobby, said Enslow. It is such a fine evening that I think I will take a stroll up University Avenue to Bloor Street. Maybe I will walk around the downtown campus of King’s University. Do you ever get up to that area when you are in Toronto?

To Bloor Street, yes. But I have neither the time nor the interest to wander around the campus, Ben said brusquely. There was nobody that he wanted to see there, no memories to which he wanted to return.

That is a shame. I think that is one of the most pleasant areas in Toronto.

Ben wanted to end the conversation. He nodded in the direction of the stranger as they exited the Consort Bar. He could feel the stranger’s eyes on his back as he walked toward the elevators just off the hotel lobby. What had the stranger murmured as he walked away? Until we meet again. That was an odd thing to say. The chances of their paths crossing again were miniscule.

As the elevator doors closed, he glanced at himself in the mirror – a man in his early sixties, medium in height, trim, immaculately attired in a subdued blue suit purchased at Paul Stuart in New York, his serious face framed by thinning gray hair and Armani wire-rimmed glasses, the wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes hardly noticeable. Life’s challenges, and there had been many, had left few visible scars.

When he got back to his room, he called his wife, Joanne. A partner at a New York law firm, she had an exhausting schedule, requiring that she work late and get up early. Whenever he traveled, he called her to check on how her day had been and whether she had arrived home safely.

He turned on the desk lamp and checked the email messages on his Blackberry – confirmation of meeting with Ontario Teachers at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow; request from Scotiabank to postpone meeting from 1:30 to 2:00 p.m.; Air Canada flight to Edmonton for the meeting with Alberta Heritage Trust rescheduled from Thursday morning to Wednesday evening; office party next week in New York to celebrate the birthday of Jerry Booker, the compliance officer; an invitation for lunch with Mike Recchi, an old friend and portfolio manager at Capital Guardian in Los Angeles, who expected to be in New York the following week. There was also an email reporting on last month’s performance of the Borealis Global Horizons fund, but he did not open up the attachment. Suppressing a sigh, he placed the Blackberry on the desk. There would be no surprises in the performance report. He had spent most of the day at meetings with restless clients explaining why the Global Horizons fund, which had had a stellar record before the stock market crash of 2000-2002, had for several years been lagging major international equity indexes.

He reviewed mentally the meetings that he had had that day, starting with the breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel with Robert Simmons, the director of investments at the endowment office of King’s University. It had been their third meeting in eighteen months, devoted to discussing the conclusions of a consultant’s report on how the endowment office should change its strategy in order to improve its investment returns. The ambitious expansion plans of the university required enhanced performance; the endowment office’s second quartile performance in recent years was no longer acceptable. The consultant’s report had recommended reallocating investments away from traditional equity products, placing greater emphasis on alternative investments – hedge funds, private equity, infrastructure, areas where the current offerings of Borealis products were weak. While that had been disheartening, the most awkward part of the meeting had come at the end when they had engaged in small talk about recent political developments in Ottawa and Toronto.

You know, Ben, for an American, you are remarkably well-informed about Canada, Simmons had commented.

For a split second, Ben had been tempted to divulge that he had grown up in Canada, had even taught at King’s University. Instead he had smiled and responded blandly, Knowing my market is part of my job.

That was his practice with Canadian clients and prospects. He did not want to open up a Pandora’s box of painful questions about why he had left teaching at a Canadian university to emigrate to the United States. He rarely talked about the first half of his life, even with American friends. Some things were best forgotten. He reflected on that for a moment. Could the past ever be forgotten? Did it not continue to intrude into the present, influencing his moods and choices? But if he attempted to connect the past to the present, could he make sense of the whole? The two halves of his life seemed separated by a wide chasm.

After updating his records of the day’s meetings with clients on his laptop computer, Peters washed up, settled into bed and turned on the television to check on the news before turning out the lights. Smith’s escape from the halfway house was still one of the top items. A reporter standing outside the halfway house repeated a warning from the Toronto police that Todd Cameron Smith should be viewed as extremely dangerous and that a nationwide manhunt had been launched. She noted that an Ontario judge, Justice Rhys Morgan, had kept Smith in prison for sixteen months beyond his three-year sentence because psychiatric reports showed that he continued to have violent fantasies. He had been released to the halfway house for a slow and supervised transition into society while remaining under intensive treatment.

Television coverage then switched to a local police station in the vicinity of the halfway house, where Jennifer Smith, the escapee’s forty-four year old sister, issued an emotional appeal, begging the public not to harm her brother. She was afraid that she would find him dead because he was the only one at risk. Looking into the cameras, she appealed directly to her brother, promising him that he could make amends for whatever damage had been done by his fleeing.

This is not irreparable, she said. Please, please, Todd, come home.

Chapter Two:

I Don’t Want to Go Home

Todd Cameron Smith heeded his sister’s plea and surrendered at the halfway house the following day, as Peters discovered after his flight had arrived in Edmonton. That was perhaps a hopeful sign that Smith recognized his need for help in making the transition back into society. Living on the run in constant fear of discovery could have ended tragically for him and others.

Peters thought about Smith as he eased his rental car, a Ford Taurus, out of the early rush hour traffic onto the Deerfoot Trail heading south in the direction of Fort McLeod and Lethbridge. Slipping away on his right was a distant view of tall office buildings in downtown Calgary, glistening in the early morning sunlight against a backdrop of blue mountains. He felt that he was embarking on a journey of discovery, not so much about Smith as about himself. Although he came to Alberta on business once or twice a year, he had never taken the time to visit his former hometown. On previous occasions, there had always been more pressing commitments, more interesting places to see, even brief visits with his brothers who lived near Edmonton. This time had been different. Smith’s escape from the halfway house, reminding him of the shooting at W. R. Myers High School, had prompted him to act uncharacteristically, to make a whimsical decision to visit Taber.

He smiled wryly as his mind flashed back to a job interview that he had had many years before with an executive at Smith Barney, a brokerage firm in New York. The executive, Larry Jones, had started the interview by asking:

Where are you from originally? I always start my interviews in this way because the response tells me a lot about who the job candidate is. I am from a small town in Indiana myself.

Peters had hesitated before responding, Taber, Alberta. He had not gotten the job offer, for whatever reason. Subsequently, they had met again at a business conference and had started chatting during the cocktail hour.

Tell me, I am curious, why did I not get that job offer? asked Ben. Was it because Taber sounded too distant and foreign, when there were so many job candidates from comfortably familiar towns in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey?

No, I don’t think that was the case. I know nothing about Taber, good or bad. However, I majored in psychology in college. The fact that you hesitated before answering told me something – that there is a hidden side to your personality, that you had to think about how to answer what was a relatively straightforward question. I tend to avoid hiring complex people.

Of course, Peters’ response had been only partly true. That is why he had hesitated. He had only lived in Taber from the age of five until he graduated from high school at the age of eighteen. That was the longest stretch of time he had lived in any place except for his current home in one of the Connecticut suburbs of New York City. He had been born one wintry morning in 1944 on the family farm near the Saskatchewan hamlet of Rosthern north of Saskatoon into a poor Mennonite farming family, the youngest of twelve children. It had been a difficult birth. His mother was already 43 and not in the best of health. A few months later, his family had moved from the farm near Rosthern to the farm near the hamlet of Hepburn, where he had lived for the next five years. It was the third and last of the farms that his father had lost, a gift from his mother’s parents after bad crops and a crushing debt burden had forced foreclosure on their previous home.

The story of their move had been retold many times. His older sister Lisa had held him in her arms, riding next to his mother, who was driving the team of horses pulling the wagon that contained their household belongings. His father and older brother Will had walked beside the wagon, herding the cattle along the ditch. The farm at Hepburn was a comedown from the farm at Rosthern and certainly from the first farm at Wharman – stony land and a ramshackle, poorly insulated house that had been unoccupied for years except by rats. When they had moved into the house, their mother had instructed his sisters – Lisa, Mary and Martha – to make a racket to keep the rats away from the small tub which served as his bassinet.

This austere existence, sheltered from the changes rapidly sweeping through much of Canada in the years following World War II, had ended suddenly in 1949. His father had lost his third farm to foreclosure by the bank. His father had been an able man, but he was not suited to being a farmer. Admittedly, he had been forced to deal with drought and locusts, the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930’s seared into the memory of every adult in Saskatchewan, and the collapse of international grain markets – blows from which he had never recovered. The farm near Hepburn, which his mother’s relatives never tired of reminding him had been a gift, had not offered him the respite that he needed. One poor harvest followed another, and his father had become indebted to the bank. The first sign of trouble was that his father had gone on a trip in the winter of 1948-1949 to look for work in southern Alberta, where other Mennonites in similar straits had gone to seek employment as farm laborers. When he returned, he had sold his Ford Model T and farm equipment and bought a two-ton truck which was to transport the Peters family to Alberta. Their Mennonite neighbors were invited to join in slaughtering the pigs so that the meat could be cured. For days, the household had been in turmoil. The horses and cattle and farm equipment that remained unsold his father had given to his best friend, Henry Rempel, with the understanding that he would be paid when his friend was financially able. That debt had never been paid, which had left his father with bitter memories of betrayal in his later years.

Finally, the day had arrived when they would leave their Hepburn home forever for their new home on the Russell farm near Taber, Alberta. There had been tearful farewells to his older brother, John, and sisters, Tina, Ann and Lisa, who already had jobs in Saskatoon or had plans to move to Ontario. There had also been a hurried visit at a small cemetery near Wharman to the graves of three older sisters – the two Helens and Eva – who had died as infants. Then they had set off, his parents in the cab of the truck, and he sitting with his siblings - Will, Abe, Mary, and Martha - in the open back of the truck with what remained of their worldly belongings. It must have been a very sad day for his parents, who had already been in their late forties and who had not been prepared by education or experience to deal with the world beyond Hepburn, Saskatchewan.

Peters slowed his car to a halt, flagged down by a construction crew working on a stretch of highway south of High River, Alberta. He glanced at his watch. He still had two hours of driving ahead of him. On his right, he could see horses and cattle feeding in lush pastures made green by recent rains. On his left, he watched a rancher on his tractor mowing hay. Two hundred feet from the highway, near a clump of trees, he noticed an abandoned ranch house, paint peeling, roof sagging, gaping door and windows open to the elements.

The flagman motioned Peters to proceed slowly past the work men and the huge grading machines. Soon he was out of the work zone, accelerating once more to 70 miles per hour. Traffic was light and the Mounties were not in evidence. He flicked on the car radio and paused to listen to a Johnny Denver ballad. Country roads, take me home to the place I belong, crooned the singer. As the notes died away, he picked his way through a blare of country and rock music to a sparkling rendition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on CKUA, the radio station of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. At Claresholm, reception began to fade. His only choices were country, rock or silence. He chose silence.

He exited from Highway 2 onto the Crowsnest Highway in the direction of Lethbridge. The rolling foothills of western Alberta began to give way to flat prairie, drier and less green, a pale smudge of dust hanging on the horizon. A few high clouds scudded across a vast, limitless sky. Trees bent in the wind gusting up to 35 miles per hour. That was normal for this part of Alberta, less than an hour’s drive from the Montana border. On some winter days, when warm Chinook winds swooped over the Rockies, raising temperatures by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of hours, winds could gust up to 75 miles per hour, ripping the roofs from farmers’ barns. Although Alberta was now Canada’s wealthiest province, thanks to oil and natural gas, the towns and farms that he passed were noticeably less prosperous than those in the vicinity of Calgary.

That began to change as he approached Lethbridge, the distribution center which had been the largest city close to Taber when he had lived there. Founded as Fort Whoop-Up by American whiskey smugglers for the sale of illegal liquor to the local Indian population in the late nineteenth century, it had diversified into strip coal mining and agriculture after the Mounties had put a stop to the whiskey trade. Extensive irrigation had enabled farmers to overcome the limitations of an arid climate, permitting mixed farming including cultivation of sugar beets and vegetables. Farm houses once again became larger, traffic heavier, and billboards proclaimed the attractions of this city whose population had nearly tripled to 80,000 since his childhood – motels, restaurants, bars, a university, a Japanese garden, and Indian Battle Park, created in the coulees of the Oldman River to commemorate the last battle between the Blackfeet and Cree nations in 1870.

The Oldman River originates in the Canadian Rockies, flowing eastward through Fort McLeod, Lethbridge and Taber before joining the South Saskatchewan river system that ultimately empties into Hudson Bay. In the springtime, depending on how heavy the winter snows have been, this broad but shallow river can flood its banks, but in the dry summers its waters retreat, leaving a host of sandbars exposed. It does not invite hikes along its banks. Children are sternly warned not to go to the water’s edge due to the risk of quicksand or into the underbrush, where rattlesnakes might be lurking.

From Lethbridge, the Crowsnest Highway follows the Oldman’s meandering course at a distance of some miles through the towns and hamlets of Coaldale, Cranford, Barnwell and Taber – once hard scrabble towns and hamlets which fifty years later showed signs of being lifted by the rising tide of prosperity in Alberta. On the outskirts of Taber, at the intersection where there had once been a drive-in theater, a billboard now welcomed motorists to the Town with the Assured Future.

Peters felt sharp pangs of hunger as he drove into Taber, looking for familiar landmarks. He had eaten an early breakfast in Calgary before leaving. He saw no sign of the coffee shop that he remembered, Petrie’s Pantry. Instead he saw a Heritage Inn, which had a restaurant that looked promising. As he parked the car, he glanced across the highway toward the center of town and stopped in amazement. The three grain elevators, which for decades had been the tallest structures in town except for the sugar refinery, were no longer there. He would have to ask someone what had happened, he thought, as he entered the restaurant.

He sat down at a table and picked up a menu, thinking that he would want something light, nothing too heavy. After a moment, a waitress came over to take his order.

What would you like? she asked.

He looked down at the menu and up again. A BLT on toast, with coffee, please.

His eyes narrowed and a low whistle escaped his lips. He blurted out, Are you Karen Johnson? She was heavier than he remembered, and her chestnut brown hair was sprinkled with flecks of gray, but her brown eyes and the gap-toothed smile with the dimples at the corner of her mouth were still the same. He had had a secret crush on her as a teenager.

She laughed. That was my maiden name. I am Karen Patterson. I married Don Patterson. Who are you?

Ben Peters. Do you remember me?

Oh my God! Ben, where have you been? I thought you had fallen off the face of the earth!

It’s a long story. Where would you like me to begin?

Here, let me place your order. The lunch-time crowd will start thinning out about 1:30 p.m. Then I can sit down and talk.

His sandwich arrived in a few minutes. He ate quickly and waited for