Amy said, “When you heard my voice, warning you not to go, how did I sound?”
Tuesday morning marked day five of the Re-Occupation of People’s Park. We had the TV on mute, watching the live coverage while enjoying a rare breakfast together.
“What do you mean? You sounded like you.”
“Was I begging? Scolding? This imaginary version of me, I’m trying to get a sense of how shrewish she is. That way I have something to aim for in real life.”
On-screen, a tree-sitter raised a gallon jug of water up to his branch using a rope. He had a bucket up there, too. Input/output.
I said, “Every part of me wanted to get in there. Pure instinct.”
“For your daughter’s sake, it might be time to revise your instincts.”
Several protesters had chained themselves to a backhoe.
“The real question,” Amy said, “is will Bakke keep her word and give you credit for participating.”
“No chance. Every time she looks at me, she’s going to be reminded how idiotic it was. I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t find some excuse to demote me.”
Chloe Bellara’s face filled the screen. The chyron identified her as PROTEST LEADER.
I switched the TV off and took our plates to the sink.
“What time are you meeting this guy?” Amy asked. “I’d like to take a run, if possible.”
“I’ll be back in a couple hours. Love you.”
“You too.”
The monitor crackled, and the baby began to make noise. I kissed Amy on the head and hustled out.
—
PETER FRANCHETTE’S OFFICE was on the eighth floor of a building in downtown Oakland. My conversation with Nwodo and the background I’d done on him had led me to expect a lavish setup, with tech-sector quirks and perks.
I once took a removal call at a start-up near Jack London Square. The head of sales had dressed down an underperforming rep, who left the conference room and crossed the open floor plan to the gym, where it was assumed he intended to sweat out his stress. Thirty minutes later, co-workers found him hanging from a noose fashioned out of a jump rope and affixed to a hook meant for a heavy bag. The CEO, I was told, was really into boxing as a metaphor for business. A second heavy bag swayed gently next to the body, twin columns of leather. We rolled the body out on the gurney, past the other employees, baby-faced and tearstained as they huddled atop the common-area furniture: rich-hued fabric blobs meant to invite lounging, chance collaboration, divergent thinking, productive play.
Franchette Strategic Ventures had a more modest setup. A small reception area fronted two offices. White walls, generic chairs, potted dracaenas. No air hockey table or milkshake dispenser. In place of a logo, a mosaic of headshots hung behind the reception desk, women and men in smart attire, each tagged with a name and the name of a company.
A young woman at work in one of the offices stood from her computer to shut her door, pausing first to smile at me and nod.
The receptionist, a husky guy in Banana Republic, sent me through.
Franchette’s own office had a south-facing picture window but was similarly austere.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, extending a hand.
I knew the basics. Born in Albuquerque, a graduate of New Mexico Tech. Married, three children, home address in Piedmont and a second in Bolinas. He’d come to Silicon Valley straight out of college, right before the first dot-com bubble began to inflate. His street-routing software, Straight Shot, was acquired by a larger GPS firm for one hundred ninety million dollars. In the intervening decades he’d retreated from public life, enough so that a tech blogger had included him on a Whatever Happened to Them? listicle.
He wore jeans and flannel, a reddish-brown goatee, fashionable in his heyday and unchanged save a minor incursion of gray on the left flank. Hair the same rusty color, utilitarian cut. He looked delivered from the womb straight into middle age, except for the eyes, an unexpected cobalt blue nestled amid stellate, impish creases.
He toed an overstuffed cardboard box tucked against the side of the desk. “This is everything.”
“A few questions, first.”
“Be my guest.”
We sat. I placed a printout of the snapshot on his desktop. “Beverly’s your mother.”
He appeared pleased that I’d ferreted out her name. “Yes.”
“And you think the baby is your sister.”
“That’s how it started, the photo. After my mom died, I went home to clean out her things and found that in her vanity. At first I thought it was me. I didn’t recognize the house, and when I saw the date I knew it couldn’t be. I was born in seventy-four. So I did the logical thing, went and showed it to my dad. He claimed not to remember, but I could tell from his reaction that there was something wrong.”
I said, “He’s getting up there, age-wise. Could he be reacting to something he can’t remember?”
“I see where you’re coming from. He’ll be ninety-nine in April. Assuming he makes it till then. Which—I see no reason to believe he won’t. I know: Everyone dies. But he still lives on his own. He has a nurse who comes over during the day, but for the most part he’s self-sufficient. He could be a hundred and ten, and I’d still be surprised to get the call.”
“I applaud your optimism.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” Franchette said. “He’s an unbreakable bastard. Put it this way: His senility kicks in at convenient moments. He has no trouble remembering when the Cubs are playing. I’ve asked him about the photo multiple times. At any point he could’ve said, ‘No, that’s so-and-so, nothing to do with us.’ He’s never denied she existed, he just refuses to talk.”
“And you know it’s a she because…?”
“He slipped, once. I was down there, visiting him, and I said, ‘Did the baby die? Tell me where it’s buried, at least, so I can put flowers.’ I’d been pestering him about it, and he finally lost his temper and started shouting at me. ‘It’s over. She’s not coming back.’ I don’t understand why he’d use those words, unless he thought she might still be alive. If he knew she was dead, why not come out and say that?”
“Too painful for him to talk about?”
Franchette shook his head. “Anyone else, I’d agree. But everything with him is calibrated. There’s no room for sentiment. Unlike my mother, who was emotional to a fault.”
He shifted in his chair and looked to the side. “I can’t explain it. It’s like he wants me to keep asking, but has no intention of answering.”
“Do you think he’d be willing to talk to me?”
“You’re welcome to try.”
“Let him know I’ll be calling.”
“That won’t necessarily improve your odds. But I will.”
I said, “What makes you so certain the baby in the photo doesn’t belong to someone else? Say a friend of your mother’s.”
“The way she hid it—it was obviously deliberate. It was at the back of a drawer, buried in lipsticks and whatnot.”
“She might’ve forgotten about it.”
“She wasn’t the type to hang on to material possessions. When I was a teenager, she’d go into my closet and purge it without my consent. Take my word for it: The photo was there because she wanted it there. I’m not coming to these conclusions based on nothing. How you interpret the data depends on how well you understand my parents.”
“Let’s back up, and you can help me understand. Start by giving me a sense of your family as a whole. Any other siblings?”
“Just me.”
“Grandparents, uncles, cousins.”
“My father’s the youngest of four. The rest are dead, one before I was born, and the others when I was young. My mom had one sister. She’s in a home, outside Philadelphia.”
“Have you asked her about the photo?”
“Yes. I recorded the calls; the audio files are in the box, on a thumb drive. It’s pointless. She’s had several strokes. You can hear for yourself, she’s impossible to follow. The rest of the extended family is back east. We didn’t have much to do with them. Anything, really.”
“Where are your parents from originally?”
“My dad was born in Chicago. He came out during the war, or a little before, to join the lab at Berkeley.”
“The article you sent me about the fire said he worked on the bomb.”
“That’s what he did at Los Alamos, too.”
“That paper’s really something else, by the way. Where’d you find it?”
“The public library, believe it or not. They have a historical collection. Some of it’s searchable online.”
“Whoever wrote the piece didn’t seem too upset by what happened.”
“I doubt ‘weapons scientist’ was a popular calling card around Berkeley back then.”
Or now. Signs posted at the city line continued to declare it a nuclear-free zone.
Franchette said, “He liked to play it up. He always drove Lincolns, and he’d keep a little plastic mushroom cloud stuck to the dash.”
I asked about the newsletter I’d found celebrating Gene’s career at Los Alamos.
He nodded. “I’ve seen that. ‘High-energy physics’ is a euphemism. I knew what he did. Everyone did, it was common knowledge. Growing up, all my friends’ fathers worked at the lab. That’s who we socialized with. My parents used to argue about it, because my mom couldn’t stand the other women. She called them Stepford wives. They’d throw potlucks, and her Jell-O mold always came out lopsided or whatever, and he’d accuse her of doing it on purpose, to embarrass him…Anyway. The photo’s not the first time I’ve asked him something and not gotten an answer. He has plenty of practice being tight-lipped.”
“And your mother? What’s her story?”
“She was a housewife. Grew up in New Jersey.”
I waited for him to add more, but his gaze had wandered to the snapshot. Beverly Franchette was frail where her son was fleshy, her throat sunken and dark from sun exposure. Nobody wore sunscreen in those days. In contrast, the backs of Peter’s hands glowed a watery blue, a lifetime of computer monitor light soaked into his skin.
“You don’t much resemble her,” I said.
“I’m all Gene.” He smiled. “Gene’s genes.”
“Do you know when your mom came to California?”
“In her twenties, I think.”
“How did they meet?”
“At a party? I’m not sure.” A beat. “It must seem—I don’t know. Deficient. To be missing such elementary facts.”
“You’d be surprised. People don’t always think to ask.”
“For me it came from understanding, early on, that I didn’t have permission to ask. There was a lot of silence in our house. Then one day you turn around and realize you know nothing about yourself, or where you come from. By then it’s too late.”
“Your father was a good deal older than her.”
“About twenty years.”
“Was it his first marriage?”
“That’s another thing they didn’t bother to tell me about,” he said, rifling in the box.
He tugged out a marriage certificate. Eugene Franchette and Beverly Rice had wed before the Alameda County clerk on May 8, 1964. The groom listed one previous marriage, ended by dissolution.
“I couldn’t get any further than that,” Peter Franchette said. “The courthouse doesn’t seem to have any record of the divorce, and I can’t submit online records requests without both parties’ names, which of course he won’t tell me. So I still don’t know who this first woman was. It’s the same for other records: The age of the file means it hasn’t been scanned, or I’m missing some piece of essential information. I can’t search for a birth certificate with my parents’ names alone. I need the baby’s name, or the date and the city of birth.”
His tone remained even, but the pale hands had balled. As if discovering he’d given something away, he opened them quickly and offered a joyless smile. “First-world problems.”
Behind the irony lay genuine sorrow. His parents had locked him outside the house, so to speak, ignoring him as he pounded and pleaded to be let in.
I said, “Let’s run with the idea that she is your sister and that she’s not dead. Have you considered that she might’ve been put up for adoption?”
“I did. That’s why I hired the private investigator. He claimed he could find that out for me. He took a whole year and came back with nothing.”
“That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to find. Adoption records are tricky.” Or the PI realized who he was working for and decided to treat him like an ATM.
“I thought about it,” Franchette said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. My mom…she was a helicopter parent before the term existed. She never let me out of her sight. I got accepted into MIT and she wouldn’t let me go. She and my father had a huge fight about it. Usually, he pushed her around, but on that she wore him down. Me, too.”
“Maybe she felt guilty for having given up a previous child.”
“But she felt fine with it a few years prior? What could have changed so drastically, between the baby’s birth and mine, to make her do a one eighty?”
I said, “The experience of giving up a child.”
He waved, conceding. “Something happened to make her that anxious and overprotective. And whatever it was, I have no doubt she decided it was her fault.”
“Twice now you’ve mentioned your parents arguing. Was it that kind of marriage?”
“…no.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him.
“As long as she did what he wanted,” he said, “they were fine.”
“Did she?”
“Most of the time. The incidents I cited stand out because they’re exceptional.”
I wasn’t wholly convinced. “Aside from your father’s slip-up, do you have any reason to believe the baby isn’t deceased?”
“Well,” he said, reaching over and mousing, “it’s a little difficult, trying to prove a negative. I must’ve called every cemetery in the Southwest. Nobody has her.”
He turned his monitor around to show a spreadsheet of addresses and phone numbers.
“Lot of work,” I said.
“My wife thinks I’m crazy. ‘Why can’t you find a normal hobby?’ Golf, or wine.”
He eyed the file box like a prizefighter sizing up an opponent. “I had no idea what this would become. If I did, I might never have started.”
I said, “You mind if I ask what it is you do here?”
“Socially conscious VC. We search out and develop CEOs we believe in.”
“The headshots on the wall out there are your mentees.”
“Yes.”
“Any exciting prospects?”
“A few. We’re young. Soon I’ll need to take on more staff. For the moment it’s me and Radhika, plus Nat and a support team in Belarus. It’s not about money, though.”
“With due respect, only rich people say that.”
For the first time he laughed: a thin, metallic sound. “Look, I’ll never turn down an opportunity, but I’m far more concerned with supporting missions we can get behind. Big ideas that create social value.”
I have a low tolerance for Silicon Valley’s sense of noblesse oblige. More often than not “Big Idea” translates to on-demand pudding delivery, and the “social value” created takes the form of increasingly unmanageable rents and scooters cluttering the sidewalk. It’s like the rapture came and God decided the scooter riders alone were worthy of salvation.
At the same time, who was I to judge? Maybe a few years down the line I’d fall into my own existential crisis. With less capital to prop it up.
“Let’s talk about the fire for a second. I take it your father won’t discuss that, either.”
Franchette shook his head.
“Given the nature of his work, arson had to be a consideration.”
“The PI looked for a police report but couldn’t find one.”
“The fire department report?”
“I didn’t ask him to check for that.”
An avenue. I said, “Did the PI speak with Diane Olsen?”
“I’ve never heard that name.”
“The next-door neighbor on Vista Linda. I met her. She was a teenager when it happened.”
He leaned forward, charged up by the prospect of a lead. “What did she say?”
“She wasn’t in a chatty mood. I’ll try again. How’d you find this guy? The PI.”
Franchette hesitated. “Yelp.”
I started to laugh.
“He had five stars,” he said.
“Of course he did.”
“What can I say? I have faith in technology.”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s been all upside for you.”
He allowed a boyish grin, and I found myself starting to warm to him. Wild success at a young age can have a distorting effect. You get used to people telling you what you want to hear, you start to believe the universe is tailor-made for you. It can make you cruelly jaded or blindingly naïve, sometimes both at once.
Peter Franchette seemed to have fared moderately better.
“Just to keep the timeline straight,” I said. “The fire occurred in 1970. Your parents left California for New Mexico when?”
“I’m not totally sure. I think it was a year or two later. One thing I do have is a copy of the deed to the Albuquerque house.” He searched in the box, came up with a page. “ ‘July 27, 1972,’ ” he read. “So around two years later. But it’s an approximation at best.”
“I asked you how old your sister was when she died. You said about three.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you arrive at that based on the moving date?”
“I suppose so.”
“She could have gone with them.”
A beat. His lips twisted. “It never really occurred to me. How could I miss that?”
I said, “There’s a lot of information to deal with. If we’re being strict, why assume she was gone before you were born?”
He blinked, startled anew. “You think we could have overlapped?”
“If you were a baby, why not?”
He’d divided his parents’ lives into two parts, giving himself sole possession of the latter. Now the bright-blue eyes got active. Revising his assumptions.
“I guess I figured that if she’d lived there, I would have seen…clothes, or…I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re right.”
“She could have been older than three,” I said. “She could have been younger. Your parents could have moved before buying a house. They could have rented. They could’ve bought but not moved for six months. She died. She was adopted. Or you never had a sister and the baby was someone else’s. You see what I’m saying?”
“That I don’t know anything.”
“No more or less than anyone would in your position. But you should ask yourself if you can handle rehashing all of this.”
“I can. I want to.”
“You don’t know what I might find. It could be upsetting.”
“I understand. Whatever it is, I’d rather know.”
But I could sense an ambivalence beginning to emerge, a return to his previous moodiness that increased as I continued to question him, poking at the edges of his ignorance. He told me, for instance, that he’d uploaded his DNA profile to various ancestry sites. He showed me pages of distant relatives. But when I asked if he’d attempted to contact any of them, he got defensive.
He’d meant to. He had other things on his plate. His CEOs needed him. He was about to fly to Austin for a three-week deep dive. He could only afford to think about his sister’s case in fits and starts. Sometimes he got so busy that he had to abandon the search for months on end.
His attitude reminded me of how he’d described his own father: It’s like he wants me to keep asking, but has no intention of answering. But where Gene was cagey and manipulative, Peter sounded simply exhausted.
“It’s been draining,” he said, slumping in his executive chair. “Every time I hit a wall, I promise myself I’m going to stop. That’s where I was, mentally, when I spoke to Delilah. I swore I wouldn’t call you. Then I heard about the, the thing in the park and thought, ‘Let’s get the answer and be done with it.’ ”
We’d been talking for an hour and a half. I needed to leave.
I said, “There may not be an answer.”
“I accept that.”
“Do you?”
He didn’t answer me right away. He picked up the box and walked me out to the elevator.
“Delilah says you’re the best,” he said. “If I’m lucky, the question will bother you as much as it bothers me.”
