Phantom Patriot

1967 At fifteen, traveling alone, scrambling to stay ahead of a nationwide manhunt, Jake Garrity is forced to temporarily suppress the pain of his father's recent death. He has no other family. The Commandant at the military school where his father had him enrolled was succinct: The mine exploded, his death was instantaneous, he never knew what hit him. Sorry for your loss. Vietfuckingnam. Jake has no alternative. He has to run, run like hell. After three months, he becomes another statistic. It's January, he has until June to find his way to San Francisco, the Summer of Love, the epicenter for the new counterculture, a place he hopes to find answers. At 6'2, sporting a military buzz cut, he looks more man than a kid, more military than civilian. His training may have given him the survival skills, but he is not ready for a country that has gone sour on an unwinnable war. Not yet. 1997 Portland police receive an anonymous tip about a body buried under the right field stands in Multnomah Stadium. The historic Portland ballpark is scheduled for demolition in two weeks. No one would have known. JT and Griff, two homeless teens, occasionally sleep in the stadium's catacombs. Freaked out when they hear about the body, they pray it isn't one of their friends. When the coroner announces the remains have been down there at least thirty years, they're relieved, yet intrigued: intrigued enough to pay the library a visit, always a safer, dryer venue than panhandling in the freezing rain. The coroner's timeline suggests their research begin around 1967. Digitized newsprint in the library's microfilm readers is filled with three repeating headlines about: a prank-playing, anti-war protester the press nickname the Phantom Patriot; a vengeance-seeking cop who swears to kill the traitor; and the mysterious disappearance of a body—a fifteen-year-old vendor who tripped down a long flight of concrete stairs and died. And then disappeared. For months the news alternates between pranks played by the Phantom Patriot and the search for the missing vendor. With the discovery of the grave, the two unsolved mysteries collide, revealing truths buried for over thirty years.