The car had been parked in the background of every family photograph for forty-two years. Nobody had ever noticed.
The album had been on the bookshelf of Owen Halverson’s parents' house in the Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis since approximately 1995, when his mother had finished assembling the family-history project she had been working on for almost a decade. The album was a leather-bound volume, perhaps four hundred pages, containing approximately six hundred family photographs spanning the years 1972 through 1994. The photographs had been organized chronologically. The captions had been written by Owen’s mother — Helen Halverson, a retired junior-high English teacher — in her blue-ink hand.
Owen was forty-nine. He had been living in Indianapolis since 1998. He had been visiting his parents in Broad Ripple, by his honest later estimate, approximately twice a month for the previous twenty-seven years. He had looked through the album, by his honest later estimate, perhaps fifteen times in those twenty-seven years.
He had not, in any of those fifteen viewings, noticed the car.
He had been visiting on a Sunday afternoon in late October. His father had been at the kitchen table watching a Colts game. His mother had been on the living-room couch with the album in her lap, in the Sunday-afternoon way she sometimes had, slowly turning the pages.
He had sat down beside her. He had been, by his own honest later description, half-paying attention.
Then she had said: Owen, that is funny.
He had looked over.
She had been pointing at a photograph from 1978. The photograph showed Owen at the age of two, in a red corduroy jumper, standing in the front yard of the Broad Ripple house. In the background, parked at the curb across the street, was a 1968 Plymouth Fury — pale blue, with the particular shape of late-sixties American sedan.
She had then turned the page. The next photograph was from 1979. Owen at three, in the same front yard, holding a birthday balloon. In the background, parked at the same curb across the street, was the same 1968 Plymouth Fury — pale blue, in the same parking position.
She had turned to another page. 1982. Owen at six, with his younger sister Marian at one, on the front porch. In the background, at the same curb, the same 1968 Plymouth Fury.
1985. 1988. 1991. 1993.
The 1968 Plymouth Fury was in every single exterior family photograph from the Broad Ripple front yard, parked at the same curb, between 1976 and 1994.
She had turned to her husband at the kitchen table.
“Carl,” she had said. “Did you ever notice this?”
II. The eighteen years.
Carl Halverson had been seventy-six. He had been a retired Indianapolis Public Schools middle-school principal for fourteen years. He had been the kind of careful Indianapolis husband who had been, for fifty-three years of marriage, the person who paid careful attention to the slow steady details of the Halverson family life.
He had walked over from the kitchen. He had taken the album from his wife. He had looked at the sequence of photographs.
He had been quiet for almost a full minute.
“No,” he had said finally. “I never noticed.”
The Halversons had moved into the house on Carrollton Avenue in Broad Ripple in 1974. They had owned the house for fifty-one years. They had taken, by Helen’s estimate, perhaps three thousand photographs of the exterior of the house and the front yard between 1974 and 2025.
They had not, by either of their honest descriptions, ever paid attention to what was parked across the street.
The curb across the street — directly opposite the Halverson driveway, in front of the 1923 craftsman house at 4218 Carrollton Avenue — had been, in their collective fifty-one years, simply the place where the neighbor’s car was usually parked.
The neighbor at 4218 Carrollton, by the Halverson informal neighborhood knowledge, had been a older woman named Mrs. Eulah Pendrey, who had been living in the house since approximately 1962 and who had passed away, by Helen’s gentle memory, in approximately 1998. The house had then been sold to a younger family — the Kettering family — who had been living in it ever since.
The Halversons had assumed, in the fifty-one years, that the pale-blue Plymouth Fury had been Mrs. Pendrey’s car.
III. The Plymouth.
Carl Halverson had picked up his careful reading glasses. He had looked carefully at the 1978 photograph, then at the 1985, then at the 1991.
“Helen,” he had said. “That is the same car.”
“I see that.”
“That is exactly the same car. The same parking position. The same — Helen, look at the angle of the front wheels. The wheels are turned slightly to the right in every single photograph. The same angle. For — Helen, for almost twenty years.”
She had looked.
He had been correct. The angle of the front wheels — turned approximately fifteen degrees to the right — had been identical in every photograph in which the Plymouth was visible.
The position relative to the curb — approximately eighteen inches from the gutter — had been identical.
The position relative to the driveway across the street — approximately three feet north of the driveway opening — had been identical.
The car, by every available reading of every careful photograph in which it appeared, had not been parked in different positions on different days.
It had been parked in the identical position every time.
Owen had been quiet for a moment.
“Mom,” he had said. “Mrs. Pendrey would have driven the car. People drive their cars. They go to the grocery store. They go to doctor’s appointments. The car would have been in different positions across the eighteen years.”
“I would have thought so,” Helen had said.
“And the car would have aged. It would have rust spots. It would have different tires. It would have sun damage. But — Owen, look. The car looks identical.”
She had handed him the album.
He had looked carefully at the 1978 photograph. He had looked at the 1991. He had looked at the 1993.
The Plymouth Fury — in every photograph, by every visible reading — looked identical. The pale-blue paint was the same shade. The chrome trim was unbroken in the same pattern. The front bumper had the same small minor dent on the driver’s side that was visible in 1978 and that was still visible, in the identical position, in 1993.
The car had not, by any visible reading of fifteen years of Halverson family photographs, ever moved.
IV. The conversation with the neighbors.
Owen had walked across the street on the Sunday afternoon.
The Kettering family — the current residents of 4218 Carrollton — had been home. The father, Adam Kettering, had been a Indianapolis attorney in his late forties. The mother, Jennifer Kettering, had been a pediatric dentist. The family had been living in the house for twenty-six years, since their purchase of it from Mrs. Pendrey’s estate in 1998.
Owen had explained, by the direct way of a Sunday-afternoon neighbor with a unusual question, what he had been looking at in the album.
Adam Kettering had listened carefully.
“Owen,” he had said. “Come inside. Let me show you something.”
He had led Owen into the house, through the living room, and into the kitchen at the back. He had pointed out the kitchen window into the backyard.
The backyard contained, in the far corner, under a canvas tarp, a car-shaped object.
He had walked Owen out the back door and across the backyard.
He had pulled back the tarp.
The car under the tarp was a 1968 Plymouth Fury. Pale blue. The chrome trim intact. The front bumper with a small minor dent on the driver’s side.
The tires were flat. The interior, by every visible reading through the driver’s-side window, was dust-covered but intact.
“We inherited it,” Adam said. “From Mrs. Pendrey. It came with the house when we bought it in 1998. The will specified that the car had to remain on the property. We have been keeping it under the tarp for twenty-six years.”
Owen had looked at him.
“Adam,” he had said. “The car is in every photograph my mother took of the front of our house between 1976 and 1994. Parked at the curb across the street. In the identical position. For eighteen years.”
Adam Kettering had been quiet for a moment.
“That is interesting,” he had said. “Because the car has not, by every honest reading of Mrs. Pendrey’s estate documentation, been driven since 1971.”
V. The estate documentation.
Adam had shown Owen, in the kitchen of 4218 Carrollton over the subsequent two hours, the estate documentation that had come with the house.
Mrs. Eulah Pendrey had purchased the 1968 Plymouth Fury new in 1968. She had driven it for approximately three years. In 1971, by the direct description of the detailed will she had drawn up in 1995, she had stopped driving it. She had not, by every available reading of the Indiana DMV records that the estate attorney had compiled for the 1998 probate, ever registered the car again after 1971.
She had also not, by every available reading, ever driven the Plymouth Fury again after 1971.
She had kept it, by her own explicit instructions in the 1995 will, in the detached one-car garage in her backyard, under a canvas tarp identical to the one currently covering it. The instructions had specified that the car was to remain on the property, under the tarp, in perpetuity, and that any subsequent owner of the house had to agree, by purchase covenant, to maintain the arrangement.
The will had not, by any portion of its text, explained why.
Mrs. Pendrey had not been seen driving the Plymouth Fury, by any neighborhood resident the Ketterings had spoken to over the years, between 1971 and her 1998 death.
The Plymouth Fury had not been seen parked at the curb across the street from the Halverson driveway, by any neighborhood resident, between 1971 and the present.
It had been, by every available reading of every available record, parked in the detached one-car garage in Mrs. Pendrey’s backyard since 1971.
VI. The photographs.
I want to be careful, in writing the next part, about what I do and do not say.
The Halverson family album contains, by Helen Halverson’s careful subsequent inventory in early November, approximately forty-seven photographs taken in the exterior of the Halverson home between 1976 and 1994 in which the 1968 Plymouth Fury is visible parked at the curb across the street.
The Plymouth Fury, by every available reading of every available record from Mrs. Pendrey’s 1998 estate, was in the detached one-car garage at 4218 Carrollton Avenue, under a canvas tarp, for every single one of those forty-seven days.
The two facts are, by every honest reading, incompatible.
I have, by the gentle agreement of the Halverson family and the Kettering family and a Indianapolis photo-restoration specialist named Daniel Whitcombe whom I consulted in early November of this year, attempted to determine what is going on.
Daniel Whitcombe has examined the original photographs carefully. He has confirmed that they are authentic chemical photographs from the period — Kodachrome and Kodacolor negatives, developed at local Indianapolis labs at the contemporary dates of the exposures. He has confirmed that they have not, by any subsequent photographic manipulation that he has been able to detect, been altered.
He has been unable to explain why the 1968 Plymouth Fury is visible in them.
The Halverson family album contains the photographs.
The Pendrey estate documentation contains the records.
The 1968 Plymouth Fury is, this November, still under the canvas tarp in the detached one-car garage at 4218 Carrollton Avenue.
Some family photographs contain elements that, by every honest reading of every careful available record, should not be in them.
VII. The Halversons.
I sat with Carl and Helen Halverson at the kitchen table of their Carrollton Avenue house in early November, three weeks after the Sunday afternoon Helen had noticed the car in the album. They were, by every visible reading, in the mid-seventies shape of two careful long-married Indianapolis residents who had been, by the slow weeks of late October, slowly absorbing a piece of information about their own family photographs that did not, by any reasonable internal accounting, make sense.
They did not, in our conversation, attempt to characterize what had happened.
Helen had simply said, by her gentle careful description: “Sweetheart. I do not know. I do not understand it. I have looked at the album perhaps fifty times in my life. The car was always there. I assumed it was Mrs. Pendrey’s. I assumed she had been driving it. I assumed the curb position was the kind of arbitrary similarity that family photographs sometimes have because people park their cars in regular positions. I did not, in any of those fifty viewings, count the photographs or check the angles of the front wheels.”
Carl had nodded.
“My wife is the family historian,” he said. “I have looked at the album perhaps ten times. I missed it also.”
I asked them, near the end of our conversation, what they thought.
They looked at each other.
“Sweetheart,” Helen had said. “I do not know what to think. I am seventy-four. I have spent fifty-one years in this house. I have raised two children in it. I have buried both of my parents from it. I have watched the neighborhood change around us. I have, by every honest reading of my own life, considered myself to be the kind of careful observer who would notice things.”
She paused.
“The Plymouth Fury,” she said, “is the kind of thing I would expect myself to have noticed. I did not. Carl did not. Owen, in twenty-seven years of looking at the album, did not. My daughter Marian, in her own careful viewings, did not. The Plymouth was visible, by every honest reading of forty-seven photographs, for eighteen years. None of us noticed.”
She paused again.
“I do not know,” she said, “whether the Plymouth was there and we all simply failed to see it, or whether it was not there and the photographs are showing us something else. I am, by my honest internal accounting, not the kind of person who is inclined to believe in things that are not there. But I am also, by my honest accounting, not the kind of person who is going to lie to a magazine writer about what I am looking at.”
She had paused a third time.
“What I am looking at,” she said, “is a 1968 Plymouth Fury in forty-seven photographs taken across eighteen years, parked in the identical position, in front of a house whose owner had, by every available record, kept the actual car under a tarp in her backyard for the entire period.”
VIII. Why it stays.
The Halverson family album is, this November, still in the living room of the Carrollton Avenue house. The Plymouth Fury is, this November, still under the canvas tarp in the detached one-car garage at 4218 Carrollton Avenue. The curb across the street is, this November, empty of any car.
I have, by my own honest description in this piece, made no attempt to explain what is happening in the forty-seven photographs. I have made the explicit choice not to attempt to explain. The Chapbook publishes, by its editorial standard, true stories of American life. The story of the Halverson family album is the kind of true story that contains, in its documentary core, a piece that does not, by any current available reading, have a clear explanation.
Across the United States, in family albums and detached one-car garages and curb positions across Indianapolis streets, the documentary records of American family life are sometimes, by every honest reading, incompatible with each other. Most of the incompatibilities will, in any practical sense, be explained by subsequent investigation. A handful of them will not. For broader context on the long American history of family photographic preservation and the available work of careful subsequent verification, readers can spend time with the materials at the Library of Congress or the long-form material at the Smithsonian Magazine. The Chapbook keeps its narratives clean, human, and responsible — read more in the Editorial Policy.
The Halverson family is, by gentle joint description, in no hurry to do anything more about the album. They have, by their gentle private decision in late October, simply continued to keep it on the living-room bookshelf where it has been since 1995.
Helen has, by her gentle private decision in early November, begun a new project. She has begun to look more carefully, by the slow Sunday-afternoon practice of retired Indianapolis English teachers, at the other family photographs in the house — the framed ones in the hallway, the loose ones in the kitchen drawer, the slide carousels in the attic that have not been viewed since approximately 1989.
She has not, by her gentle private description, told me what she has been finding.
She has said only, by her gentle careful private description: Sweetheart. I am paying attention now.
