magazines his mother had saved and the photos of the Warsaw Ghetto and the prison camps. To the mind of a child the photos were incomprehensible. For untold reasons they are also incomprehensible to adults. Is it us doing such things? But as a student of history he knew you could barely turn a page without coming upon a new horror. A good portion of his impulse in becoming a detective was to lessen horrors. His friend Marion was an expert on the Indian Wars which he had pointed out were massacres rather than wars. The march of conquest across our land had a striking resemblance to Nazi Germany. They aimed their rifles low into tents to make sure they got all of the women and children not just the obvious warriors. The editorialists of the East were behind the notion of “kill them all and let God sort them out.” Sunderson found reading in this area unbearable partly because in Munising he grew up with many Indians so the deaths in books had human faces.
Chapter 6
When he got home he treated himself to a beer, a taste of the stew, and got out a notepad. Mona was a whiz at computers and had done a lot of work for him on the theory and practice of cults. Why not get her to do thorough research on the Ames family background? It was his understanding that they emerged from Boston but in their more recent past it was a remote part of rural New York State and also Frankfort, Kentucky. He sadly wished he could email her but settled for a phone call. He had steadfastly held out against the computer revolution but now thought of it as a stubborn mistake. His former secretary was relatively incompetent but Mona was an ace hacker and could come up easily with arcane information on anyone. He called and she said she was finally feeling well, walking a great deal, and pleased to have an assignment for which she would charge him a minimal amount. College was okay but a trifle boring and she spent much of her free time wandering the splendid library. After he hung up Sunderson worried about heroin. Ann Arbor was close enough to Detroit so it must be readily available.
Within two days he received an ample FedEx with her initial findings on the Ames family, an offshoot of the prosperous group who stayed in the East. It’s often forgotten that those who settled the West were doing poorly in the East. The progenitor of the questionable branch of the family was a man named Simon who had murdered a neighboring farmer but the court ruled self-defense. The dead man was popular and Simon was generally despised so he set off on a whim for Frankfort, Kentucky, with his young wife and three children. It amused Sunderson to read about this brute who shared his own much-loathed first name. Frankfort went badly with the only land he could afford being poor indeed. They held out for twenty largely miserable years with the accumulation of six children working at thoroughbred stables around Kentucky. Simon heard that there was cheap good land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was cold up there but he had dreamed of fertile land at a low price. He had an old flat rack truck and built a cover for the back to house the kids. The two eldest stayed in Kentucky which angered him as he was losing free labor for farming. The oldest son to accompany him was his namesake, Simon Jr., who was twenty-one and had started his own family. The youngest was only eight. They headed north on a cold spring day. He bought three sections of cleared land from a lumber company for cheap. The problem was the hundreds and hundreds of stumps left over from the timbering. It took a couple of years to clear them with dynamite and a team of big Belgian mares he also bought from a lumber company that had no more use for them hauling logs. Simon put his family in a worthless abandoned house in town that he still had to pay rent on. He later blew up the owner’s car with dynamite and he wasn’t caught though everyone seemed to know he had done it. This started the Ames tradition of
Chapter 6
When he got home he treated himself to a beer, a taste of the stew, and got out a notepad. Mona was a whiz at computers and had done a lot of work for him on the theory and practice of cults. Why not get her to do thorough research on the Ames family background? It was his understanding that they emerged from Boston but in their more recent past it was a remote part of rural New York State and also Frankfort, Kentucky. He sadly wished he could email her but settled for a phone call. He had steadfastly held out against the computer revolution but now thought of it as a stubborn mistake. His former secretary was relatively incompetent but Mona was an ace hacker and could come up easily with arcane information on anyone. He called and she said she was finally feeling well, walking a great deal, and pleased to have an assignment for which she would charge him a minimal amount. College was okay but a trifle boring and she spent much of her free time wandering the splendid library. After he hung up Sunderson worried about heroin. Ann Arbor was close enough to Detroit so it must be readily available.
Within two days he received an ample FedEx with her initial findings on the Ames family, an offshoot of the prosperous group who stayed in the East. It’s often forgotten that those who settled the West were doing poorly in the East. The progenitor of the questionable branch of the family was a man named Simon who had murdered a neighboring farmer but the court ruled self-defense. The dead man was popular and Simon was generally despised so he set off on a whim for Frankfort, Kentucky, with his young wife and three children. It amused Sunderson to read about this brute who shared his own much-loathed first name. Frankfort went badly with the only land he could afford being poor indeed. They held out for twenty largely miserable years with the accumulation of six children working at thoroughbred stables around Kentucky. Simon heard that there was cheap good land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was cold up there but he had dreamed of fertile land at a low price. He had an old flat rack truck and built a cover for the back to house the kids. The two eldest stayed in Kentucky which angered him as he was losing free labor for farming. The oldest son to accompany him was his namesake, Simon Jr., who was twenty-one and had started his own family. The youngest was only eight. They headed north on a cold spring day. He bought three sections of cleared land from a lumber company for cheap. The problem was the hundreds and hundreds of stumps left over from the timbering. It took a couple of years to clear them with dynamite and a team of big Belgian mares he also bought from a lumber company that had no more use for them hauling logs. Simon put his family in a worthless abandoned house in town that he still had to pay rent on. He later blew up the owner’s car with dynamite and he wasn’t caught though everyone seemed to know he had done it. This started the Ames tradition of
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