Page 63 of Code Violation

Eventually, he found the old newspapers.

“Holy moly.”

Rufus hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d saved them all. Nero estimated there had to be somewhere around two thousand. Rufus stored them in deep plastic containers with lids, but some of them must’ve gotten damp at some point; he could see old water damage through some of the clear boxes. It was impossible to keep things dry all the time in this environment.

The best part was that Rufus had marked each box with dates by year.

“Yessss,” Nero whispered as he scanned for the dates they wanted.

They were easy to find only because the paper had ceased printing in the early 1990s. Dragging the correct box off the shelf, Nero carried it back up the stairs. Magnus and Forrest were still in the living room. They’d been talking but abruptly stopped as he entered the room.

Magnus looked pissed. Forrest looked guilty.

Nero wondered what they’d been talking about—him, probably—but he decided that, whatever it was, it wasn’t something he needed to worry about.

“Found the right year. I hope anyway. This box appears to cover the issues published from 1978 to 1980. We may want to look in one of the earlier or later ones, but I thought we’d start here.”

Forrest removed the lid and started to pick up the top paper.

“Oh, do I need gloves or anything?”

“No,” Nero assured him. “Latex gloves are more harmful to old documents than the oils in human skin. And these aren’t all that old anyway, plus they have some water damage already.”

“What are you looking for?” Magnus asked, taking a few papers for himself.

“Any article that might mention who else decided to play pioneer with Dina and Witt Cooper.”

“I have the idea this is the start of a very long day after an already long one yesterday. How about I make us a pot of coffee?” Magnus set the stack of papers down and ambled into Rufus’s kitchen.

“Thanks, Magnus,” said Nero, his focus already on the documents in front of him.

It took about an hour before Nero found any mention of the pioneers. He was seriously missing the modern search-and-find function; they had to scan every single page of every edition.

Similar to the article he’d found online in the Globe, this one said that the handfasted couple, Dina Paulson and Witt Cooper, were planning to live life as Mother Nature intended. As of the date of the article, they were expected to leave any day. The title of the article was “An Experiment in Human Ingenuity: Can we return to times of old?”

What utter horse shit.

“What does that even mean, as Mother Nature intended?” Nero demanded. “Sure, back before penicillin was discovered and the smallpox vaccine. I can’t hardly wait.”

Forrest came around to sit next to him and read the article.

“As far as I remember, it also meant cold and damp.”

Magnus rattled the edition he was reading through. “Here’s another one. It looks like Robert was doing a human-interest series on the group.” He cleared his throat. “‘Hometown pioneers, Witt Cooper and Dina Paulsen, will be joined by Dale and Jane Lockwood from Timber, Oregon, and Karl and Brenda Fossen, who recently relocated from Hayden Lake, Idaho.’ Christ, they make it sound like they were on a season of Survivor.”

“Anything else?” Forrest asked.

“Hmm, let me see here. Blah, blah, just what they can grow and produce on their own. The heathier, natural, human way of life. In touch with Mother Earth. They sound out of touch more than anything. Oh, and here Dale mentions the Iron Man of the Hoh.”

“Who?”

“John Huelsdonk, a real person. One of those one in a million people who defy any kind of bell curve. He was born in Europe, I think, and his family moved to the Midwest, but he ended up out here as a young man. Iron Man John. I haven’t thought about him in years. He was incredible. He and his wife built a homestead in the Hoh rainforest and lived there for decades. I read that Dora Huelsdonk spent sixteen years out there and had four children before leaving the farm and traveling to Seattle for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. She hated it and went back home.”

“Magnus, this is scintillating information, but what’s your point?”

Magnus scowled at Forrest’s interruption. “Well, I just mean the Huelsdonks built a real farm out there, with chickens and cattle. Even grew vegetables. Iron Man John was a huge man. Even as an old man, he was strong enough to carry a fifty-pound bag of flour with one hand. He carried most of their supplies in himself and earned extra money packing for timber companies in his spare time. He firmly believed that the forest belonged to those who knew how to live in it. When the government started changing rules, he protested. I’m just thinking that these folks may have been influenced by his story, thinking they could best The Deep. But I don’t think many people can. And a group of six seems like a recipe for disaster.”

“Do either of you know Rufus’s Wi-Fi password?” Nero interjected. He was fairly sure they would get sidetracked for hours if Magnus kept on about Iron Man John.

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