Free Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery by Steve Ulfelder Page A

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    In 1934, the Catholic girl died while delivering her first child, Tander Phigg, Jr. Unlike virtually all men of the day, Phigg Senior never remarried. This led to rumors about the old man and the German housekeeper/nanny who raised Phigg Junior. The rumors were true, Trey had decided long ago.
    Phigg Paper Products hung on through the Depression, then struck government-contract gold during World War II, then took off in the postwar boom. Tander Phigg, Sr., became an old-fashioned industrial baron. He was the biggest employer in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for more than a generation. He kept his name out of the papers and gave wads of money to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, even though he’d never set foot on campus and never would.
    Trey went quiet again, staring up I-93 as it narrowed to two lanes. We had maybe twenty minutes to Concord, and I wanted more info. I thought of another guy I knew a while back, the son of a physicist. The son made 80 million bucks as a venture capitalist—and felt like a failure. “Your father was the son of a great man,” I said. “That’s not always an easy thing.”
    Trey nodded slowly and looked at me, maybe reevaluating me, before he went on.
    Tander Phigg, Jr., was an only child, raised by the nanny he loved like a mother (and whom, most likely, his father loved like a wife). He went to a bunch of brand-name boarding schools but left them all suddenly and quietly. Nobody ever explained why, so he must’ve been thrown out, Gentleman Jim style. He finally scraped together a high school diploma and started at UMass Amherst in 1952.
    Trey’s tone made me glance over. I said, “What’s wrong with that?”
    “The sons of the rich did not go to UMass back then,” he said. “Harvard, Dartmouth, maybe Bates or Williams in a pinch.”
    “Big deal.”
    “It was then, and my father, and his father, knew it. Trust me.”
    Phigg Junior graduated on schedule in 1956. As far as Trey knew, his father didn’t do a single memorable thing in the four years. Diploma in hand, he tried the MBA program at UMass’s Isenberg School. Dropped out after two semesters.
    Long pause now. We were hitting the southern edge of Concord, didn’t have a lot of time left. I said, “And?”
    “At that point,” Trey said, “I do believe my father rose up on his hind legs for the first and only time in his life.”
    “Finally.”
    “Yeah.” Half a smile again, Trey cutting his eyes my way. “Yeah, finally.”
    Trey had pieced together the story while he grew up—his father refused to talk about that part of his life and got pissed whenever Trey tried to.
    Tander Junior, miserable in the MBA program, had hauled off and told Tander Senior, a man who’d been working fourteen-hour days six days a week for thirty years, that he’d snapped pictures at UMass football games and turned out to have a knack for it. Tander Junior was dropping out of B-school and heading for New York to study photography.
    “Can you imagine,” Trey said, “the scene when my father laid all this on his father, a first-generation immigrant workaholic industrial baron who’d never so much as seen a talkie?”
    I exited 93. State Police HQ was just a few traffic lights east. I said, “Friction?”
    “ Beyond friction!” he said. “‘You are not my son.’ ‘Never darken my door.’ ‘Where did I go wrong?’ ‘Was it because I never remarried?’ The works.”
    But Tander Phigg, Jr., stuck to his guns, moved to New York City, and enrolled in photography classes. After a few months on broke street he called his nanny-mama, who figured out a backdoor way to get him trust-fund income.
    I pulled into the lot. Trey and I swapped cell numbers. I had errands, said I’d pick him up when he finished with the detectives.
    He popped the door of his rental, got a foot out. “There’s got to be more,” I said. “Give me a teaser.”
    “My dad had five happy years in New York,” Trey Phigg said. “His only five, as