Bloodlines

25

O ’CONNOR MANAGED TO AVOID ME FOR A WEEK. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING to make that difficult for him. He was covering Warren Ducane’s disappearance-thought to be voluntary-and the Max Ducane story, so he wasn’t in the newsroom much.

He found time to interview Bennie Lee Harmon, who had been convicted of killing two Las Piernas prostitutes back in the late 1950s. Harmon’s death penalty conviction, along with those of about a hundred other prisoners, had been commuted to life with the possibility of parole by a Supreme Court decision in 1972, and now the state parole board had set this “model prisoner” free. O’Connor did his best to get someone to give a damn about the killer’s release, but most of the people who had investigated the case were no longer living, nobody from the hookers’ families showed up at the parole hearing, and apparently Harmon didn’t plan to return to Las Piernas, so the story quickly made the journey to the back pages and then faded completely.

I faded, too. I was back to being the reporter’s equivalent of an errand boy.

That mindless sort of work was all right with me, because the weekend had been a bad one for my father. That occupied my thoughts and my time far more than any need to smooth things over with O’Connor and took away any urge I might have had to turn in the best story anyone had ever seen on the new style of parking meters being installed downtown. Dad was doing better by Wednesday, though, and I was able to start focusing on my work again.

I drove out to the southeastern edge of the city on Friday morning for what I was sure would be my biggest job challenge yet-making an interesting story out of a “grip and grin” piece. My red-hot assignment was the groundbreaking ceremony for a shopping center.

“You’re a girl, you should be able to write it the way the ladies want to read it,” said Pierce, one of the old codgers. He thought he was being encouraging.

By Las Piernas standards, it was going to be a big mall, taking over one of the only remaining stretches of farmland in the city. I had dreamed of coming up with a more interesting angle-something about the last farmer in southeastern Las Piernas County watching sadly as his way of life was paved over by a parking lot. Not quite the loss of paradise in the old Joni Mitchell song, but close.

Unfortunately, the previous owner, a guy named Griffin Baer, had been dead for a few years, and according to the lawyer who had handled the sale for his heirs, Baer hadn’t lived on or personally farmed the land. In fact, Baer had been living miles away-in an oceanfront mansion-when he died. The last of the noble farmers had turned out to be a rich absentee landowner, and the sale of the land to developers nothing more glamorous than the end of a family squabble over the inheritance.

There went my angle.

The ribbon cutting when the completed mall opened next year would be a bigger story. I was just on hand to watch a few businessmen and politicians pretend to use a shovel.

The ground was actually already “broken”-rough grading had been done, and stakes here and there indicated where the next phase would begin. I found the construction supervisor, a gent by the name of Brian O’Malley, who in the course of introductions mentioned to me that he knew a Patrick Kelly.

“That’s my dad’s name.”

“Did your father go to St. Francis High School?”

“Yes, he did. You, too?”

“Yes. And you’ve something of the look of him. How is Patrick these days?”

“Fine,” I lied.

He wrote a phone number on the back of his business card. “That’s my home number. Have your old man give me a call.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

He made sure I had a good seat for the ceremony. The event went the way every groundbreaking ceremony went. Speeches promising everyone that building a mall would lead to prosperity for the community. Guys in suits who hadn’t had their hands on so much as a gardening trowel in decades taking turns posing with a “golden” ceremonial shovel.

The paper hadn’t bothered sending a photographer, so I had to take the photos myself. I did the best I could, but I doubted any of the subjects would be asking if they could buy prints.

I interviewed the city council members, the mayor, the developer, the district manager for one of the department store chains. Not one of them said anything original.

I hung around long after the “show” was over-mostly, I admitted to myself, to avoid going back to the newsroom. While I dawdled, the suits drove off and the actual construction crew started to go to work. An idea struck me, and I approached Mr. O’Malley again.

“Mind if I talk to some of the real ‘groundbreakers’?” I asked.

He laughed and said, “That would be a first.” He studied me for a moment and said, “They’ll tease you unmercifully and their language isn’t fit for a lady, but I suppose a lady reporter is used to such things.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll bet you will.” He started introducing me to the crew.

They asked to see my credentials to prove I was a real reporter, and one asked me if Las Piernas was so hard up for high society that guys in hardhats now qualified. Others immediately and accurately accused me of playing hooky from the office and gave me some good-natured razzing, asking if I really couldn’t think of anything better to do than pester them when they were trying to get some work done. But when they saw I was serious about writing about them, they began to tell me more about their work, their equipment, and best of all, themselves.

A backhoe operator was showing me the accuracy with which he could scrape a layer of earth, when there was a screeching sound that was something like an amplified version of fingernails on a blackboard. It made my shoulders bunch up.

We turned toward the source of the sound-a giant bulldozer excavating an area a few yards away. I heard O’Malley shout for him to hold up.

By the time I walked over, the bulldozer had backed away.

“It’s a car,” O’Malley said.

“I thought this was farmland,” I said, snapping a photo. “It wasn’t a junkyard, was it?”

“No, but back before all these environmental laws started being passed, people buried their trash all the time.”

“Have you found a lot of other buried trash out here today?”

He frowned, then called the backhoe man over. Before long, an old, smashed-up blue Buick was uncovered. “From the fifties at least,” one of the men said.

“We’ve delayed enough,” Brian O’Malley said. “Let’s get the damned thing out of here.”

One of the men had moved to the trunk and had been working at opening it. When he heard Brian’s order, he said, “Wait, maybe there’s a briefcase full of money in here.” He managed to free the latch, but as he opened the trunk, his face went white. “Holy shit, Brian…”

We moved to take a look.

“People,” I said, staring in disbelief at the pile of bones and dried sinew before me. Two loose hollow-eyed skulls stared back from within.

“Fuck me, there goes the schedule,” Brian said in disgust. Then remembering my presence, said, “Don’t you dare tell your father I said that in front of you.”