For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,71

the window scowled at me as if I had requested her underwear size, so I could publish it in the newspaper the next morning.

“This isn’t your marriage license,” she said. “Right?”

Eye-rolling wouldn’t be sufficient here to make my point. I would have to do a dramatic double-take. Lucky for her, no glass of water was handy, or she would have gotten a spit-take that would have made Mel Brooks jealous.

“Look, I’ve explained this three times. Is there a problem, or is there someone else back there I can talk to? Is the great Oz behind the curtain? One of his minions? Somebody?”

Somehow, my natural charm was eluding this woman, and she made a sound very much like a growl before saying, “I’ll check.” Then she turned and walked away, probably to check the job postings on the bulletin board so she’d never have to come back. The three people behind me in line grumbled—that’s New Jersey for you. If you stand in a line long enough, somebody will stand behind you, figuring there must be something good at the front of the line, or you wouldn’t be bothering. But the real pleasure in lines is complaining about their length and the amount of time you waste standing in them.

I turned to the one woman and two men standing behind me and let a frustrated sound out between my lips. “Civil service,” I said.

“I’m civil service,” said the burlier of the two men. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be back at my desk.” The woman didn’t look especially pleased, either. I turned back toward the window, properly chastised.

After several eternities, the large window woman returned with another, older woman dressed in a suit from J.C. Penney. “I’m the supervisor,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

I moaned and explained the situation to her again. “You want the county archives,” she said. “Not the clerk’s office. That’s upstairs on Three.” She pointed at the ceiling, so I’d know which way was up.

I thought the two men and the woman, now joined in line by two other women, would break into applause as I left. I considered coming back to do an encore, but humility prevented me.

Upstairs on Three, amazingly, was a room marked “County Archives,” in which a very helpful woman named Louise listened to my spiel, showed me the proper computer, and explained its operation in words designed for a backward nine-year-old. Within minutes, I was deep into the records of other people’s lives (okay, so I looked up Leah and Ethan’s birth certificates to see my name listed as father).

Turning my attention to the task at hand and not my own personal history, I very quickly located the title on the property. Sure enough, Gary Beckwirth’s was the only name listed under “purchaser.” Current ownership records on the property showed the owner (or lien holder) as the Summit Bank Corporation, and Beckwirth again as the sole mortgagee.

That much I had already known. But when I dug back further, I found a marriage certificate for Gary Beckwirth and Madlyn Rossi from February 2, 1978, from a ceremony performed right across the street in New Brunswick City Hall by Judge H. Raymond Jones. The couple listed their address as Middlesex Borough.

What’s scary, looking back on it, is how close I came to missing what was important. After checking the marriage license, I started to search for the next milestone in Gary and Madlyn’s lives. And that meant Joel’s birth, fourteen years ago. So I scanned through a considerable amount of material, and was gaining speed when something in the back of my brain noticed the name “Beckwirth” go by. I almost didn’t go back, thinking I’d only imagined seeing it, but a good reporter doesn’t take anything for granted, and neither, in this case, did I.

And there it was: on June 1, 1978, less than four months after they were married, there appeared in the court of Judge Roger C. Lienhart a petition for the annulment of the marriage of Gary Beckwirth and Madlyn Beckwirth, née Rossi. The petition had been granted the same day.

That’s why Madlyn Beckwirth’s name didn’t appear on the title to Gary Beckwirth’s home. She wasn’t his wife, and hadn’t been for more than 20 years.

Chapter 17

Stunned, I started searching for more bombshells, but there was no record of other marriages for either Gary or Madlyn. Oddly, I couldn’t find a birth certificate for Joel Beckwirth, either. That meant that Joel was not Beckwirth’s son, and therefore didn’t really