Bloodlines

8

T HE NURSE CAME BACK TO CHECK ON CORRIGAN, BREAKING THE SPELL reminiscence had cast on O’Connor. She attempted another round of banter with O’Connor, but after his third one-word reply gave it up and left him to brood over Corrigan alone.

He watched Jack, still filled with wonder that the man had taken an eight-year-old boy’s ambitions so seriously. Jack had told O’Connor to begin by keeping a diary, to note what he had seen and heard each day, and his thoughts on any matter that struck his fancy. “That will be private,” he said. “So I’m going to trust you to do that on your own. I’ll give you assignments to turn in to me.”

O’Connor had borrowed paper from Maureen that evening and wrote, “Jack Corrigan told me this will help me learn how to be a newspaper reporter. I hope he is right. P.S.: He gave me a boxing lesson, too.” A week later, Maureen presented him with a gift, a small cloth-bound diary with gilt-edged pages and a lock and key. She had earned the money doing mending for the lady their mother worked for, and O’Connor knew it must have taken the whole of her earnings to buy it. When he wanted to pay her back with his lucky silver dollar, she said, “Oh no-never give away your luck. Besides, this is an investment on my part. I want to be able to brag that my brother is the famous newspaper reporter Conn O’Connor, whose name is on the front page of the Express. So you do what Mr. Corrigan tells you and fill up this diary.”

Several months later, another visitor had stopped near his corner.

Mitch Yeager stood eyeing him for long, nerve-wracking moments before he approached O’Connor. O’Connor knew that Yeager had managed to weasel his way out of the jury-tampering charges, a subject Jack had discussed bitterly and at length with his protégé. Yeager had power and powerful friends. He even had influence over Old Mr. Wrigley, according to Jack, because Old Mr. Wrigley-under pressure from advertisers who were Mitch Yeager’s business partners-had forbidden Jack to write any more stories about Yeager. That made O’Connor angry, but it also made him believe that Mitch Yeager was someone to fear.

Not much older than Dermot, O’Connor thought, watching him come closer. But Yeager’s youth didn’t soften anything about the man.

He stood staring at the boy. Conn swallowed hard and said, “Paper, mister?”

He heard laughter behind him and saw Yeager look up with a scowl. He turned to see Jack Corrigan.

“Picking on schoolkids now, Mitch?” Jack said. “You start bullying Wrigley’s paperboys, he might be willing to let the ink flow again.”

“The kid would have been better off going to school instead of hanging out in a courtroom,” Yeager said. He looked back at O’Connor. “A kid can get in trouble playing hooky.”

Jack put a hand on O’Connor’s shoulder. Conn was ashamed to feel himself shaking beneath that hand.

“He’s a smart kid,” Jack said. “Why don’t you be smart, too, Mitch?”

Yeager gave a small nod. “Sure. A smart man can wait for what he wants. Someday you’ll find out just how smart I can be, Jack Corrigan.”

He turned and walked away.

“Who told him?” Conn asked, his mouth dry.

“I don’t know, Conn,” Jack said. “Could have been someone on the paper, or a cop, or someone in the D.A.’s office…” He frowned, then sighed. “No, it’s probably my fault.”

“Your fault? No!” he said fiercely. “You never would have peached on me to the likes of Mitch Yeager!”

Jack smiled ruefully. “Appreciate the faith, kid, but my guess would be that Lillian told Mitch just to spite me. She’s a little irritated at me.”

“What does she care? She’s married now. To that rich Linworth fellow.”

Jack didn’t say anything.

“She wanted to marry you,” O’Connor said, deciding to get something that had been troubling him out in the open, “but she doesn’t like me. I made her mad at you.”

“No, kid. No, that’s not true. As far as Lily was concerned, I was just fun and games. Hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, that’s all. She flirted with men like me and Mitch because it was exciting to her, but she was always going to marry money. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

“Does it make you sad?”

“Hell, no,” Jack said.

After a moment, O’Connor ventured to say, “I’m glad you didn’t marry her.”

Jack laughed. “So am I. She’s got one hell of temper, and she’s probably mad at both of us. At Mitch, too. Probably told him that a kid caught him at his game-kind of thing she’d do, just to piss him off.”

The memories of those early days with Corrigan were bittersweet to O’Connor. The years had brought many changes in his life, some good, some bad. Jack Corrigan’s friendship had remained a constant.

“Through the best of times, and the worst of times,”he said softly to himself.

Some of the worst came quickly to mind. Jack’s near-fatal car accident, which left him with the limp that kept him out of the service. A dozen other dark days, but without any hesitation he could name the worst of these: April 6,1945.

Maureen and his mother had both found high-paying jobs at one of the war plants-Mercury Aircraft. It had allowed the family to move into a nicer place. Maureen worked days, then took care of their father in the evenings while their mother worked second shift. O’Connor worked part-time, from six to eleven, four evenings a week at the Express-by then he was a copyboy, and had even sold a few stories to the paper. Despite the late nights, he did well in school and was close to graduating.

He remained devoted to his sister, and protective of her. Every evening, when Maureen’s shift ended at five, he was there at the gates of Mercury Aircraft, waiting to walk her home. Often, a neighbor who worked at the plant would join them on this walk, but he liked it best when it was just the two of them, away from their neighbor and away from their parents, able to talk and dream of the future. They did that more often in those early days of April. The war was coming to an end, it seemed-the Allies had crossed the Rhine.

O’Connor knew the end of the war meant that men would be coming home and taking their jobs back, and that Maureen and his mother might lose their jobs, but he couldn’t be sorry about it. Who could think of that after all these years of war? When you saw Gold Stars hanging in windows of those who’d lost loved ones, who didn’t wish for every mother’s son to come back home safely? One of his older sisters was a war widow. O’Connor’s only regret was that it looked as if it would all be over before he was old enough to enlist.

If the war didn’t end soon, though, he feared Maureen would end up an old maid, taking care of their parents until she was past the age of marrying. He was seventeen, and felt sure that Maureen was nearly at a nuptial dead- line-that she only had until she was about twenty-two to find a husband. His mother and older sisters had all been married before the age of nineteen.

It was just the two of them still at home, Conn and Maureen. Dermot had moved out to a place of his own years ago. Most of the care of their father had fallen to Maureen and his mother, although O’Connor shaved him. He also took on many of the household tasks that might have otherwise been his father’s.

O’Connor had been glad when Maureen took the job in the factory, thinking she’d meet more fellows. She had a job in purchasing, so she got to wear a dress to work-his mother had a higher-paying job, on the line, and wore slacks, which had nearly thrown Da into a fit until he saw the check she brought home.

Dresses or no, he lost hope for Maureen-he soon realized that with the war on, it was nothing but women and old men there at the aircraft plant, anyway. She hadn’t a chance of meeting a man who was near her age, unless he had some problem that made him 4-F. She told him that he was judging them too harshly, and that if he didn’t stop standing by the gates of Mercury Aircraft, scowling at every man who talked to her after work, she’d never meet anyone.

Once, when he complained that one of her dates was 4-F, she reminded him that Jack was 4-F because of his ankle-but the moment she said it, she apologized. They both knew how hard it was for Jack not to be able to enlist. After that, O’Connor never used a man’s handicap to as a reason for Maureen not to date him. Since he was good at finding information on people, it wasn’t too difficult for him to find other reasons to criticize a would-be suitor.

He began to suspect that she had stopped telling him about the men she was interested in. Lately, he noticed she wore a heart-shaped locket, hidden beneath her blouse, but he saw it fall free of its hiding place when she bent to pick up a paper she had dropped. He questioned her about it, and she told him she had purchased it herself to keep men from annoying her-told them she had a steady beau. “Who’s annoying you?” he wanted to know, firing up.

“You are!” she told him.

That Friday night in April, he didn’t meet her after work. He had a night off from his job at the Express, and he had a date. For months now, he had been one of the many young men who sought the attention of another high school senior, Ethel Gibbs, and she had finally agreed to go out with O’Connor, surely the shyest member of her court. Maureen had been more excited about the prospect of her brother going on a date than perhaps he had been himself. A vicarious bit of pleasure for her, he thought, since she seldom dated.

Looking back on it now, he could not remember where he had planned to take Ethel. He hardly remembered why he had wanted to date her, what it was that had seemed so attractive about her. He could only vaguely recall her face.

He could, however, recall perfectly that moment when her mother opened the front door and looked in a puzzled way at the young man who stood before her, wearing his best clothes, smelling of his father’s cologne. He remembered Mrs. Gibbs’s blushes as she stammered confused apologies on her daughter’s behalf. Ethel had left an hour ago, she said in dismay, with- but she halted mid-sentence, not naming O’Connor’s rival. O’Connor had felt his own face redden and only managed to murmur, “My mistake, I’m sure.”

He had delayed going back home, had wandered around the streets of downtown Las Piernas for a couple of hours before deciding that he might as well swallow his shame and let Maureen know that Ethel had stood him up. Going up the steps of the porch, he wondered how she would take it. Probably be more disappointed than he was, really.

As he opened the front door, he saw that although there was no blackout ordered that night, the house was nearly in total darkness. He heard his father shout frantically, “Maureen! Maureen! Is that you?”

“No, Da, it’s me, Conn,” he called back, turning on the lights as he went toward the back room that had been adapted for his father’s use.

A small lamp near the bedside cast the only light in the room. His father had moved himself to a sitting position-an act that he could barely manage on his own, and only by enduring tremendous pain. Kieran O’Connor’s hair was silver, but that night, looking at his father in the light of that single lamp, was the first time that O’Connor found himself thinking, He’s become an old man.

“Conn!” his father said sharply. “Conn, listen to me-your sister-she’s not come home.”

“Not come home?” O’Connor repeated blankly. “Maureen, not come home?”

His father’s face twisted in agony.

“Da, lie back down now. I’ll get you something to eat.”

“To hell with that!” his father roared. “It’s your sister I’m worried about, not my damned belly!” And to O’Connor’s shock, the older man burst into tears.

“Da,” he said, coming to his side, easing him back on the bed. “Da, don’t now. Don’t. It might not be anything-maybe she had to work overtime. I’ll call the factory…”

“I’ve already called,” his father said, quickly wiping a hand across his face. “There’s been no overtime since February.”

O’Connor felt a coldness in the pit of his stomach. Maureen was dedicated to taking care of their father. She would never leave him, not even for a few moments, without arranging for someone to care for him.

“Conn,” his father said, “never mind me, now. You’ve got to go look for her. You know she always comes straight home to me. Something’s wrong. What if she’s-if she’s been in an accident?”

“I’ll find her. I promise.”

He began by calling the neighbor who often walked with them. She was surprised at his questions-Maureen had walked as far as the corner of their street with her, before turning to walk toward home. Maureen had mentioned no other plans. The neighbor hadn’t noticed anyone else nearby.

O’Connor left the house carrying a flashlight, feeling more worried now. He retraced the path between the corner and the house, looking at first for Maureen herself, and then on the ground for some sign of her having passed this way, a lost earring, a footprint, anything. He knocked on every door of every house that had any view of the corner, or of the street, but no one had seen her or noticed anything out of the ordinary.

It was growing late now. He went back to the house and told his father that he’d had no luck. He called the police. He also called his mother, who got permission to leave work.

A patrolman came to the house. O’Connor guessed him to be about fifty. He took a report, acting no more excited than if O’Connor had told him a car had been stolen. Less so. He said, “I’ll file this with Missing Persons.”

“What do you mean, file it?” O’Connor asked, struggling to keep his temper.

“Most adult disappearances are voluntary, sir.”

“No-this isn’t voluntary. Someone has taken her. She takes care of my father. She’d never leave him. This is a crime…for God’s sake, she’s in danger!”

The officer shrugged. “People get tired of responsibilities. But we’ll keep an eye out for her.”

O’Connor said, “I work for the Express.” He didn’t tell him that he was only a copyboy.

The patrolman paused, then said, “Look, it’s not up to me. You call Detective Riley first thing tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow! By then she could be God knows where! He could have…” But the thought of what could be happening to her so distressed him, he couldn’t say it aloud.

The officer patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. I’ll be on the radio, asking all our patrol cars to keep an eye out for her. You just wait-I’ll bet she’ll come back a little later this evening. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if an adult disappears, it’s because they forgot to tell someone their plans or they don’t want to be found.”

“She’s in that one percent then,” O’Connor said angrily.

“If so, we’ll be a little more sure of it tomorrow.”

“That one percent,” O’Connor said. “They aren’t numbers, you know. Those are human beings. A young woman, in this case. Someone who is loved and who has a job and a home and who has never said a cross word to anyone in her life…a good girl.”

“Call Riley in the morning,” he said, and left.

Instead, O’Connor called Jack Corrigan. Corrigan listened to O’Connor’s anxious recital in silence, until O’Connor described what the patrolman had said and done. Jack interrupted him.

“Never mind Riley,” he said grimly. “Unfortunately, Missing Persons is the retiring cop’s pasture in most police departments around here. Riley-that asshole wasn’t any good when he was really on the job, and now he’s just sitting around waiting for them to engrave his gold watch. Speaking of which… hang on.” There was a brief pause. “It’s late, and Wrigley might not go for it, but let’s give it a try. Listen, Conn, grab the clearest, most recent black-and-white photo of her you can find and meet me down at the Express. Bring two or three of them if you can.”

O’Connor waited only until his mother arrived to care for his father, a few minutes after he had found three photos of Maureen that he thought the engravers might be able to work with.

Old Man Wrigley had been reached at home. By the time O’Connor got to the paper, Jack was already sitting at a typewriter, writing the lead. Wrigley’s son, who was news editor, picked out a photo and told O’Connor to sit next to Jack and answer his questions.

O’Connor listened as Jack called the chief of police and asked if he’d care to comment.

There was a pause, then Jack repeated the story of Maureen’s disappearance, and the patrolman’s lack of concern. There was another pause, then Jack said, “Yes, sir, the sister of one of our own staff. I know the family personally… Exactly, sir…No, she wouldn’t have abandoned her father.” O’Connor saw a kind of triumphant light come into Jack’s eyes. “That’s what I thought, sir.”He began writing notes.

When he hung up, he said, “Chief claims it was all a misunderstanding. You go on home, I’ll file this and come by for some follow-up.”

Detectives came to the house. Jack came to the house-often over the next few days-and then other reporters, for other reasons. Friends and family, neighbors and curiosity seekers. None of them were of any use.

O’Connor hardly mourned Roosevelt’s death the next week, and later had no heart for the victory celebrations at the end of the war. Maureen was missing. God knew what was happening to her. And it was his fault.

Neither of his parents ever said that to him-in fact, once hearing him say it, they protested adamantly that it wasn’t so. But he believed that they must, in their heart of hearts, feel it to be true-that perhaps they even said it to each other, and only guilt had made them protest. It hardly mattered-he said it often enough to himself.

For five years, O’Connor and his parents went through the motions of being a family, but Maureen’s absence grew nearly to be a stronger force than her presence. His father’s interest in life beyond his room, always something Maureen had cajoled from him, began to fail, and what remained of his health failed with it.

O’Connor’s eldest sister, Alma, had lost her husband in the war, and now she came to live with them to help his mother. His mother, who, like his father, seemed suddenly to age after that one April evening, was grateful for Alma’s help.

Alma was not Maureen, though. O’Connor found himself ill-at-ease with this prim woman, who was seventeen years his senior and all but a stranger to him. In truth, he decided later, the thing that bothered him most was that she was staying in Maureen’s room. His mother had packed up Maureen’s belongings and placed them in the attic, and she allowed Alma to place her own things on the walls and shelves of Maureen’s room. To O’Connor’s way of thinking, his mother was giving up on Maureen. Alma was seen by her youngest brother as encroaching and little more than a squatter. Beneath all his resentment of her, he carried the fear that some spiritual connection to Maureen had been broken by these changes in the household, that by moving Maureen’s possessions, they had taken away a place for her to come back to, somehow made it impossible for her to return home.

Jack had been O’Connor’s salvation. It was Jack who had talked Mr. Wrigley, the publisher, into promoting his copyboy to general assignment reporter. O’Connor later learned that Jack had support for this idea from an unexpected quarter: Helen Swan.

“I told the old man the truth,” she said when O’Connor asked about it. “I told him Jack was giving you writing lessons, and if they turned out not to be good ones, I’d give you better ones myself, because I could see when some half-pint had ink in his veins, even if Wrigley couldn’t.”

He knew of no one who talked back to Mr. Wrigley the way Helen Swan did. He remained in awe of her.

It had taken him a while to realize that there was a strong friendship beneath the rivalry between Helen and Jack. In the spring of 1936, she left the paper for a little more than a year, not long after Jack’s car accident. O’Connor was still a paperboy then, and he began to see that Jack missed her terribly.

O’Connor was convinced that it was her relentless needling that pulled Jack out of the misery he had fallen into when he was hospitalized after the accident. “Get up off your ass,” she said the first time she visited him. “I’ll let you set it down again in a room across the hall. There’s a blind guy in it. He can’t see you pity yourself.” Jack had winced, and she added in an angry voice, “So you’ll have a limp. There are other people around here who’ve lost more than that.”

O’Connor gathered up his courage and told her to leave Jack alone.

Helen stared at him, apparently just realizing he was in the room. “I thought the hospital didn’t allow kids under sixteen into patients’ rooms.”

“They don’t,” Jack said. “But the doctors ran some tests and figured out that O’Connor has never been younger than forty-two.”

“All right,” she said, coming to her feet, “bowing to his seniority, I’ll do as Conn asks.”

“No, don’t go, Swanie,” Jack pleaded. “Make her stay, Conn.”

Conn started to try to convince her, but she raised a hand to cut him off. She sat down again and sighed. “Jack Corrigan, I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve the boy’s loyalty.”

O’Connor always thought it was the other way around. Looking back, he wondered at the patience Corrigan had shown. More than once, as an adult, O’Connor had asked Jack what on earth had caused him to all but adopt him from the time he was eight-why he had troubled himself over such a grubby little brat. Corrigan usually laughed and said, “You chose me. Not the other way around. Same way all stray dogs operate-easier to let you follow me than to keep kicking you away.” O’Connor thought there was some truth in the jest-the times when Corrigan roared at him to leave him the hell alone, his scathing criticisms of O’Connor’s writing, the bouts of heavier-than-usual drinking when Jack would become quiet and withdrawn-none of these had the power to keep O’Connor away from him for long.

Helen Swan had been right about the writing lessons. All those years ago, when O’Connor asked Jack to teach him to be a newspaperman, Jack had taken him seriously-for reasons O’Connor was never entirely sure of.

Even at eight, O’Connor was reading at a level beyond that of most children his age, and Jack began by giving him assignments-most of which taught him to read the paper with an eye toward the way it was written. Jack asked him now and then if he was still keeping the diary, but never asked to see it. O’Connor asked him once how he knew that O’Connor was really writing in it. “Because I believe you are an honorable young man.” That was, O’Connor knew, the highest praise Jack could give anyone, and no reward could have been greater for his work.

And work it was. There were lessons on finding the heart of the story, on writing clean, clear prose to tell it. He learned to notice differences in style. Jack would read to him, and ask him to tell him which reporter wrote the story. Corrigan’s and Helen Swan’s he began to recognize for their skill. Others, he could often spot because of their weaknesses.

He learned to observe and to describe what he saw. At first, the descriptions were delivered verbally, and sometimes breathlessly during a boxing lesson. Later, he wrote small stories for Jack, who did not spare his feelings when critiquing the results.

So it was that by the time O’Connor was added to the staff of the Express, Mr. Wrigley got a reporter who was far from the greenhorn he expected. One day as he stood talking to Helen Swan in the newsroom, Wrigley walked up to them and said to her, “Seems I won’t be needing to give you teacher’s pay.”

She smiled and made O’Connor blush by saying, “Imagine what you’ll be getting out of him five years from now. Keep this boy challenged, or you’ll be reading his bylines in the Herald or the Times.”

The challenge of reporting for the Express was the only thing that kept him from going crazy after Maureen disappeared. He thought at first that Jack might have believed that all he needed was distraction, something to keep him from dwelling on her disappearance.

He had underestimated Corrigan.

Jack had no more given up on the idea of finding Maureen than O’Connor had.

Jack spent time with him in the paper’s morgue, going through clipping files on disappearances. O’Connor had been astonished at the number of them.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Jack told him. “There are young runaways mixed in here, and plenty of people who are lost because they don’t want to be found. Women whose husbands beat them, men who want to escape debts or responsibilities, teenagers who have cruel parents, parents who-well, of a terrible kind-so terrible the paper can’t print the details.”

“But there have to be some missing girls who are like Maureen,” O’Connor protested. “She wasn’t a runaway, no matter what the coppers say.”

“I know that and you know that. But after you’ve read enough of these, you’ll understand why detectives are skeptical people.”

He read them, and had to admit that in many cases, it was as Jack had said. He found two other stories, though, in which young women near Maureen’s age had gone missing in the month of April, although in other years-young women who seemingly had no reason to disappear. Less, he admitted to himself, than Maureen had. Anna Mezire. Lois Arlington. Both twenty years old. The coincidence was too strong to ignore.

“I want to talk to their families,” he told Jack.

“Fine, but remember-both of them are old news as far as the Express is concerned. Don’t try to do anything about it on company time.”

The mothers of the missing women, wary at first, became more open with him upon hearing that his own sister had disappeared. He spoke to them separately and learned that they were each unaware of any other cases. Anna had disappeared on April 30, 1943. Lois on April 18, 1941. But neither woman had any more information about her daughter’s disappearance than what he had read in the paper. He took down the names of a few of the girls’ friends, but he found that the ones who hadn’t moved away had little to tell him. “I think about her,” one of Anna’s friends said. “I think I’m always going to feel sad in April. My brother’s a policeman, and he said that Anna’s probably dead, and I should just accept that as a fact. But I can’t, you know? It would be easier-I hate to say it, but it would be easier to know that she was dead.”

O’Connor had been hard put to hide his feelings as she spoke, not to let her see how angry these words made him. He would never give up hope, he thought as he took a streetcar back to the paper. He would never want to learn that Maureen was dead.

But before many months had passed, he decided that anything would be better than not knowing-anything. He could and did imagine so many horrific possibilities for her fate, the notion of her being beyond harm ranked far from the worst of them. Please, not suffering, became his evening and morning prayer, his silent plea throughout the day.

One afternoon he learned that Jack-who seemed to have a “pal” in every government office and on every street corner of Las Piernas-was getting calls from a worker in the county coroner’s office whenever a Jane Doe was brought in. O’Connor insisted on going with him to view the next body.

“You sure you want to do that?” Jack asked. “It’s seldom-well, it’s not the sleeping beauty parlor, if you take my meaning.”

“Then why do you go?”

“Why do you think I go, kid?”

O’Connor was silent for a moment, then said, “Thanks. But I’ll be going with you from now on, if you’ve no objection.”

“None whatsoever.”

O’Connor got sick the first time, but Jack still brought him along the next time.

They made these trips for five years.

Each miserable April, O’Connor watched for reports of missing women that might fit the pattern, but there were none.

In April 1949, in San Marino-about thirty miles north of Las Piernas-a three-year-old girl went out to play in a field overgrown with weeds. She fell into an abandoned well-ninety feet down, through a fourteen-inch-wide opening. Her parents heard her crying and called police and firemen. Word of the rescue effort spread, and in Las Piernas the city editor of the Express looked up from the wire reports to see who was available to cover it. There was only one unassigned reporter in the newsroom. Young O’Connor. The editor sent him on his way to San Marino.

The scene was already crowded when O’Connor arrived. Heavy equipment, rescue workers, volunteers, neighbors-even diminutive adults who offered to be lowered down the pipe. Well-diggers were urgently excavating a parallel shaft.

“Not a sound out of her since the first hour,” a patrolman said to O’Connor. “Jesus, I got a little girl not much older than her.”

Next to them, a man from the Herald suddenly said, “What the hell is that?” They turned to see trucks laden with odd-shaped equipment approaching the scene.

“Television,” a reporter from the Times said. “KTLA. Saw them out at the electroplating plant fire over on Pico a couple of years ago. Looks as if they’re getting more sophisticated.”

The cop and the man from the Herald looked amused.

O’Connor didn’t. He was thinking about something Jack had given him to read recently, a report on television.

The man from the Times was saying, “It’s no joke, my friends. Two years ago there were a little over three hundred televisions in Los Angeles. You know how many there are now?”

“About twenty thousand,” O’Connor answered.

“Bingo. Trust the cub to know. What paper are you with?”

“The Express.”

“The Express? You know Jack Corrigan?”

For the rest of the long hours there, the man from the Times took him under his wing, introducing him to others, getting him as close as possible to the rescue itself.

After fifty hours of frantic effort, the rescue crew reached the little girl- to the heartbreak of everyone who had worked or watched or waited, they reached her too late. The coroner would later determine that she had died not long after rescue efforts began.

When O’Connor got back to the Express, tired, dirty, and thoroughly depressed, the city editor said sourly, “I don’t know why you should bother writing it up. Everyone has been watching it on televisions. Twenty-seven hours straight, and people who own sets had their neighbors camped out in their dens. Never seen anything like it. At least Jack has that angle covered.”

After O’Connor filed his story, Jack took him drinking.

“It was amazing, Conn,” Jack told him. “Everyone huddled around the screen, feeling as if they were right there.” He took a pull off a cigarette and exhaled slowly, shaking his head. “The world is not going to be the same place tomorrow morning.”

“It never is,” O’Connor said absently. “Like it or not.”

Jack studied him. “What’s on your mind, Conn?”

“I’m just thinking that I’ll find out about wells in Las Piernas.”

“A follow-up story? Sure. Good idea.”

Honesty made O’Connor shake his head. “No, Ames Hart is already working on that one.”

“Should have known. Anything that might end up being some kind of reform, Hart’s on it.”

“I’m only thinking…you know, maybe…Maureen,” O’Connor ended on a whisper.

Ames Hart told O’Connor that a law was going to be passed, mandating the capping of wells. And more gently, he mentioned that none of the abandoned wells in Las Piernas was so wide that an adult woman would have been likely to have fallen down it.

O’Connor waited for another April.

April 1950 was a strange April-colder than most. A fraction of an inch of snow fell in Los Angeles, and in Las Piernas as well. That might have been the biggest local story that April, if work done in an orange grove damaged by frost had not uncovered three bodies.

Maureen O’Connor, Anna Mezire, and Lois Arlington were no longer missing.