Absent Friends

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 5

Secrets No One Knew

October 31, 2001

Laura was sitting at Harry's desk.

The big soft chair with a pattern like a Persian carpet was where she'd started. But when Laura was in the big chair, Harry was at his desk; that was how it had always been, since she had begun to take space in Harry's life, since she had made space for him in hers. Sitting there, Laura couldn't shake the feeling that Harry was about to walk out of the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, to ruffle her hair, go over and pull up the creaky old desk chair, and sit down to his work. She couldn't concentrate, waiting for Harry.

Her other usual spot was Harry's bed. That was out of the question.

So she sat at Harry's desk, his few files piled neatly on the left side, notebooks on the right. Two pin-sharp pencils rested eraser to eraser against the ridge on Harry's keyboard. More than once, when his syncopated clicking stopped, Laura had looked over to see Harry picking up one of those pencils, bringing it toward the blue monitor screen as though to correct a mistake, a bad thought, in the white copy glowing there. The pencil would hover, Laura never sure if it was threatening the newer technology—behave, because there's still me—or reassuring it—I've got your back. Then he would drop the pencil into the ridge again and go on typing until he hit the next bump in the road.

Laura had always meant to ask Harry how the pencil and the screen felt about each other. Always meant to.

Soon she would have to start going through Harry's files, and the notebooks, and the computer, too, though she wasn't expecting much. Harry threw things out. This was a habit from his early days, the days his Pulitzers came from, three of them lined up on the wall, all a little crooked with vibration and neglect. “That one,” Harry had confided last spring, pointing an accusatory finger at the plaque in the middle, “is for a six-piece team story. Eight reporters. I wrote the fourth piece. It doesn't really count.” Laura had reached out and straightened the one that didn't count and then the others. She didn't think they'd been straightened since.

Those plaques had been won and hung years ago, before Harry had developed an intimate relationship with gin. In the newsroom Laura had seen young reporters lift their eyebrows, shrug as Harry stood at the shredder, feeding it page after page of notes for stories that would be lucky to see the inside of Section Two. She never knew if Harry saw the eyebrow-lifters, or if he cared, until the day her first front-page story ran—below the fold, but it was her first—and he had grabbed her, kissed her, and murmured romantically in her ear, “Now shred your notes.”

Laughing, giddy at her success, she reminded him that that sort of paranoia seemed to be out of fashion at the Tribune. Harry, one arm around her waist, had pointed to one of the eyebrow-lifters hard at work across the room. “That bozo,” he said mildly, speaking as if he and Laura were at the zoo and he knew an interesting fact about a creature, “doesn't shred his notes. That's all right; he'll never write anything worth a subpoena. You, my little oyster, will. Keep the quotes, to protect the Tribune's ass. Destroy all else.” He looked at her gravely. “The great and powerful Oz has spoken.”

Laura had spent the rest of that afternoon sorting and shredding her notes.

So she was not holding out much hope for Harry's files, his notebooks or computer. But there would be something. Someplace to start: a question between the lines, a name she didn't know, a call Harry had made that had never been returned. To find that starting point was why she had come.

But first, for the hundredth time, she had reread the story that had begun, and now, she thought, ended, everything.

And been stopped, frozen, by the story's final line.

The investigation is continuing.

Continuing. Laura stared at that word, unable to move her astounded eyes from such an outrageous lie. Continuing? Nothing was continuing. Everything now was new. Everything had to start over.

She shoved Harry's chair away from the desk, paced the room with her hands deep in her back pockets. Whenever she was stuck, this was Laura's way, to stride back and forth frowning at the carpet as though whatever word, phrase, fact, she needed were hiding there.

Sit down, Stone, Harry would tell her. You're driving me crazy. Come have a drink.

No, you drink, she used to answer, I'm working.

Harry would shrug and drink. Laura would go on pacing; or she would storm out the door, run down the nine flights to the lobby, and head uptown on Broadway and then, eventually (and it never took long), back again. Sometimes she stopped at Starbucks for mocha cappuccinos, extra whipped cream. Harry would accept his gravely, savor it slowly, and, when finished, go back to his bottle.

And always, somewhere on the sidewalks, like a dropped quarter, Laura would have found the word she needed. Her cappuccino would sit, cooling and untouched, as she returned to work.

Harry's advice to her: Join a gym.

Now Laura stood at the window. Blades of sun glinted off the river's silver. She didn't like the river to be silver, she never had; she couldn't see anything in water this color. She'd been crying again; she was through with that now, her cheeks sticky and dry, but she was stopped, frozen. These had been tears not of grief but of fury. The floodwaters of her rage had astonished her.

The anger, she now saw, had been building all the time she'd been reading, but she hadn't felt it, the way you might not feel the current changing as you drifted downstream until, too late, you heard a new roar and without warning found yourself crashing over the falls.

After she'd read the article, she'd begun to pace, striding the length of Harry's living room, toward the window, spin, away, toward again, back and forth as though she were in a jail cell. As she made a turn, the silence was splintered by a sudden shout: “Goddamn you, Harry!” She stopped, terrified. Then she realized the voice was her own, and that frightened her more.

And then another voice, mild and amused: Me?

Harry. She spun wildly, but of course he wasn't there. He was dead, he was gone. The hell with him, though: she wasn't letting him off that easily.

“Yes, you!” she hissed raggedly. “Why didn't you leave that story alone?”

Why didn't I—? Please, my little minnow.

Strange how she could hear him so clearly but not see him at all. But she didn't have to see him. She knew that tone, and the infuriating half-smile that went with it.

He asked, Was it I who was spouting that bilge about the north star and the noises in the dark?

“It was dangerous!” she shouted. “I didn't know that!”

Would it have mattered?

“Of course it would have!”

Of course it wouldn't have. Except to make it more exciting.

“Exciting?”

But she was pretending she didn't know what he meant, so he pretended he hadn't heard her.

Quietly, standing in his empty living room, she said, “Couldn't you have been careful?”

I was very careful.

“Then why are you dead?”

The savagery of her anger rolled right off Harry. Ah, he said indulgently. That's the ticket to your Pulitzer, isn't it?

“My what?”

You can't not have thought of that.

“Thought of what?”

Tsk, tsk. The truth about what happened to Harry Randall: that's a very big story.

“You can't think that's why I'm going after it?” Laura was aghast. “Harry, I'm going after it for you. To get justice for you.”

Of course you are. You're going after it because, story or not, it's the truth and the truth matters.

“I don't like the way you said that.”

No, why should you? You're still dew-bedecked enough to believe it. But I was old enough to know better. In fact, until you came along, I did know better. My mistake was listening to you.

“To me?”

To you, quoting me. So really, it's all my fault, you see.

Laura didn't see.

For believing such claptrap in my own misguided youth, Harry patiently explained. And going on to fill young minds with it. Specifically, yours. So you could pour it on thick at a later date. Sucking me back under when in fact I'd escaped. Yes, my sweet octopus. My fault entirely.

“Harry?” Laura had only one thing to say, only one thing she meant. “Harry, please. Don't leave me.”

Too late. The familiar faint amusement and the unseen shrug. And silence.

And the tears of fury, then, like the cataclysmic breaking of a dam.

Now Laura stood lost, staring down at the river. She realized she was furious with it, too. Goddamn Harry, and goddamn the river!

Hating the river, she watched it flow, all that charging, hurtling water, not making a sound.

She coughed; she was thirsty, from the crying. She drank three glasses of water as she stood at Harry's ancient sink. Maybe, she thought as she gulped, maybe this water was like the river water, all water in the end the same. Maybe, once the water was part of her, its need for movement would teach her how to move.

She put her glass carefully in the dish drainer; it clinked on Harry's black mug. She squeezed her eyes against new tears. An enormous powerful need surged in her, the need to be gone, to get out of this place Harry was also gone from.

Fear rose in Laura, flowed around her, threatened to cut off her breath. She swallowed, walked tentatively back into the living room as though wading into a stream whose depth and speed she didn't know.

She could make a break for it: throw open the door, dash through the hall, circle down the stairs, and come bursting onto the sidewalk as she had done so many times.

And then what? Would she find anything, any words or ideas, lying on the sidewalk now, waiting for her to pick them up? And who would she buy cappuccino for, on her way back?

Would she come back?

Laura turned away from the door—she wasn't sure she could keep from plunging toward it, as long as she could see it—and pulled the chair up to Harry's desk. She sat at the edge of it, not her full weight, ready to leap up at any moment. Heart racing, she opened the first of Harry's files. She took from her bag a fresh new pad and two of her own new pens. She didn't touch Harry's sharpened pencils.

An hour later all she had was a list of names and numbers.

It wasn't really right to say there was nothing here. Harry's contact lists; pages torn from notebooks to preserve attributed quotes; Xeroxes of periodicals he'd researched and quoted or used for background. All these filled Harry's neatly piled files.

But what she was looking for: it wasn't here.

Harry's death hadn't been payback for anything he'd written: she was sure of that. Anyone ruined (or about to be ruined) by Harry's stories might have thought murderous thoughts, made muttered threats, nursed dark dreams. But once the cat was out of the bag, what was the point of going after the man who'd untied the string?

Poetic metaphors, Stone, the mark of an amateur, Harry would have scolded.

Laura smiled at that; then she froze as it hit her for the first time that there were people who had had nothing to do with Harry's death who were glad it had happened. People who right now, this moment, might be raising a glass to their hero, his unknown killer.

She hated them.

But those glitter-eyed vultures, feasting on Harry's death, they hadn't killed Harry. It was axiomatic in the news business: the safest time to be an investigative reporter, they told one another cynically, is the day your story runs. The story that's dangerous is the one you're working on for tomorrow.

And McCaffery's papers: that's what Harry had been working on. The new thing he'd found, just yesterday. Hot stuff, McCaffery's papers, Harry had said. That probably meant: dangerous to someone.

And Laura knew what was dangerous: the truth.

But about McCaffery's papers, there was nothing here.

She'd checked Harry's e-mail, his voicemail. She hadn't found his cell phone. Had he remembered, as he so often didn't, to take it with him? She'd studied every scrap of paper, each note she'd found. She'd gone through the pockets of the slacks and jackets left behind, in case he'd been planning to wear a thing and then changed his mind. These, of course, were his summer jackets, linen, seersucker. Harry's wool suits were in storage. Recently he'd said, as they walked home from dinner through an evening chill, that it was time to ransom them out.

When was that, that Harry had told her this? Three days ago. What had happened in between? She had no idea, except for brief, bright flashes: Georgie's face yesterday, reflected in the window above the river when she turned away from him, from what he'd told her. Herself staring at her computer screen while she waited for Leo to arrive this morning. Why hadn't she memorized every second of those days, Harry's last days, written them down, filmed and recorded them, drawn pictures, so she could have them now, so she could look at him, hear him talk, laugh with him? What had she been doing that was so damn important, what memories did she have now that she'd made in these last few days instead of the ones she ached to have?

Laura looked down at the notepad, names and numbers in a tidy list. Names on the left, numbers on the right, ruled blue lines between them like the rungs of a ladder waiting to be climbed.

Stone! she heard Harry howl. Stop that simile! Mash that metaphor! Annihilate those allegories! Fight, team, fight!