Morna Brennan Minnesota

[One response to “Fugitive On Two” by Jonathan M. Myers]

So here was I thinking that I had just begun my so-called reporting of the fugitive on the streets of California, I spent the weekend in the city I’d lived in and worked in all my life. I had visited Sacramento just once over five years before. In fact, after much research and probing in the archives, I could not find any record of the missing person I had heard of that was the subject of that quiet town near the Mexican border, I believe in Sonoma County, but nevertheless—no more than that. And then on Saturday there I was, at the home of a middle-aged, black female, who lived and had married in Napa Valley but had been left in the middle of nowhere in Sonoma County. In a sense, she, too, resembled a hiker in that she often hiked alone, for a couple of miles to get where she needed to be. Her maiden name at birth was Penina, but for the entirety of her life she seemed called Caminita.

She wasn’t all that foreign to me—after all, I was meeting her anyway from Lodi, around two hours drive north up the Interstate and maybe halfway as far as Ridgefield, just for a local brunch at her lovely home, an incredible find, really—certainly enough that I went there to see her. So much so that no sooner had I put myself between her and anyone I knew that she—in the manner of something like a genteel courtier—put me right there, after just a couple of steps across the kitchen from me in her apartment. And I do mean right, and with such a mixture of laughter, frustration, and disdain that I could’ve well had a match.

Her husband in that moment was what is referred to among the locals the best, if unofficial, historian of that area. He didn’t believe me after everything that had gone down on my little stroll to get some food at a nearby cafe. It was important for everyone, he said firmly, that I wouldn’t be lured away to do myself one more thing that could ruin.