51

W HEN THE DOGS STARTED BARKING, FRANK WAS IN THE SHOWER AND I was in the bedroom, getting dressed. I had just pulled my pantyhose up around my knees when the doorbell rang. I glanced at the clock. Seven-thirty on a Wednesday morning. Who the hell was at my door at this hour?

I hastily pulled the pantyhose up the rest of the way, got a big run in them as I quickly put on some shoes, swore, and went to the door. I opened it to see-to my utter surprise-Kenny O’Connor.

Kenny was not the same man who had walked into that café all those years ago. He and Barbara had married and divorced, and were talking seriously about remarrying now.

Over those twenty years or so we had all changed to some degree, I suppose, but Kenny’s growing up had been recent. He had received a savage beating at the business end of a baseball bat, a beating that had left doubt about whether he’d live, and, if he survived, whether he’d walk, be able to speak without slurring his words or stop seeing double. The latter two problems cleared up fairly quickly. After years of rehabilitation work, he was walking now, with the help of a cane, and although his features were perhaps not as handsome as they had once been, anyone who had seen him immediately after the beating was now a believer in the wonders of plastic surgery and dental prosthetics.

He still worked in construction, but had been forced to sell his own company to pay medical bills. Now he was employed by O’Malley’s company, as a supervisor. Working for O’Malley had been good for him-better for him, in many ways, than working for himself. These days, Kenny never took his job- or much of anything else-for granted.

“Hi, Irene. Mind if I come in for a minute?”

“Sure, great to see you. I was just about to make breakfast. Have you eaten?”

“Yes-I’ve eaten. But don’t let me hold you up.”

I motioned him inside. “Come and talk to me while I get busy in the kitchen.”

“Is your husband here?”

“Yes, he’s in the shower. Let me tell him you’re here.”

“That’s okay-I came here to talk to you, anyway. I just thought-well, I’ll ask him later.”

He followed me into the kitchen, sat at the counter, and accepted an offer of coffee. He watched while I put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.

“So, what’s up?” I asked.

“Barbara tell you we’re moving?”

“Yes. A house not too far from here, right?”

“Right. Thought we’d make a fresh start this time around.”

“You’ll like the area,” I said, not commenting on the fresh-start part. I kept trying to make myself forgive him for some of the horrible things he had said to Barbara when he was going through man-o-pause. For fooling around on her. I supposed I should get over it, since obviously she had.

There is a distance between “should forgive” and “have forgiven” that is sometimes hard to cross.

“Well…” he said, then stalled.

I waited. Eventually he started up again. “I have some old stuff of my dad’s. I thought you might like to have it.”

“Stuff of your dad’s? Kenny, I saw what was left of his house when he was…when he died. Everything burned to the ground. You lost everything…right?”

“Yeah, everything.” He fell silent again. The toast popped, and I set it on a plate. Maybe Frank would want it. My appetite was gone.

Deke, one of our big mutts, sidled up to him. “Well,” Kenny said, reaching down to pet her, “you might not remember this, but after Barbara and I separated, I moved back in with my dad. He had filled my old room up with a lot of papers and stuff, and so when I came back home, he dumped it into boxes and carted it all over to this storage place.” He opened his wallet and pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

“U-Keep-It Self-Storage,” I read. I flipped it over. Scrawled on the back, in a hand I would have recognized anywhere, O’Connor had written “#18B.”

“It might just be junk,” Kenny said quickly.

“Haven’t you looked through it?”

He paused, went back to petting Deke, then said in a low voice, “I can’t.”

After a moment, I said, “I understand.”

He nodded, not looking up at me. Dunk, our other dog, saw what he was missing and crowded him on the other side of the chair.

“If they’re getting obnoxious, I’ll put them out,” I said.

“No. No-I like dogs. Might have room for them at this new place.”

“You’ve been paying the rent on this storage place all this time?”

He nodded again. He reached for his keys and pulled one off. “Almost forgot. You’ll need this to open the padlock. The code to get into the gate is four-six-four-five.”

I frowned. “Everyone who rents there knows that code?”

“No, Dad made that one up for himself. Each person has his or her own. And there are cameras all over the place. But you can change the code if you want to-just see the guy at the counter, and he’ll put your new one in the computer. I guess he was a friend of Dad’s.”

“He made them wherever he went.”

Kenny smiled. “True.”

“You sure you want me to have whatever is in there? Maybe there will be things you’ll want.”

“If it’s just papers and stuff like that, I don’t really want them. Otherwise-you can let me know if there’s something you think I’ll want. I trust you.”

That statement left me speechless.

Frank came out then, and Kenny visibly relaxed. “Hey, Frank-how’s it going?” They shook hands and almost immediately began talking about weekend sports.

Frank glanced over at me, his gray-green eyes full of amusement, and reached for the cold toast.

“Let me heat it up for you,” I said, a bit of domesticity that made him raise his brows even as he thanked me. I put the toast back in the toaster.

Kenny said, “Do you know much about this DNA stuff, Frank? I mean, being a homicide detective and all, of course you do, but…well, can I ask you about it?”

“Sure. What’s on your mind?”

“My dad’s only living brother is coming over from Ireland in a couple of months.”

“Dermot?” I asked.

“Yes. What I was wondering is-I’ve heard you can tell about paternity from DNA, even if you don’t have a sample from a living parent.”

“Yes, that’s true. You just need a relative descended from the same person.”

“So I could find out if my dad was really my dad from a sample of Dermot’s blood?”

“Yes. You’d each have to provide a blood sample, and you’d have to have it done by a private lab. It can be expensive-about fifteen hundred or more. Takes about four to five weeks.”

“Oh. Well, that makes sense, I guess.”

“Is that something you want to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it, that’s all.” He sniffed the air and said, “I think your toast is burning.”


Later that morning, I sat at O’Connor’s desk in the newsroom. It was my desk now, at least as far as the newer staffers were concerned, and I called it mine, but that was for convenience’ sake. I could never truly think of it as mine rather than his, and I know most of the staffers who had known him felt the same way-I was a tenant, not a proprietor. It’s one of the last of the old-style desks in the newsroom, and I have resisted all attempts to get me to exchange it for a piece of plastic on metal tubes. The publisher has heard me threaten to quit if it’s moved an inch from where it is.

Winston Wrigley III, the jerk who inherited his late father’s job, knows that isn’t an empty threat. I quit the paper in the late 1980s after he failed to fire someone for sexually assaulting another staff member. I was gone from the Express for a couple of years. I came back because it was the only way I was going to find out who had killed one of my closest friends-my mentor, Conn O’Connor.

The same people who had been responsible for Kenny’s beating had been responsible for O’Connor’s murder. O’Connor had died because he got too close to the truth while covering a story. I followed the leads he had worked so hard to discover, and his killers were brought to justice. It didn’t ease the loss.

The homicide detective working on the case was a man I had known in Bakersfield, Frank Harriman. Though he moved to Las Piernas in 1985, we didn’t manage to reconnect until O’Connor’s death. To the shock of everyone who had written me off as a woman who would be single all her life, we had married.

I’m Irish enough to think O’Connor’s spirit had a hand in that.

Maybe because I held the key to his storage unit in my hand, I could feel him looking over my shoulder in the newsroom that morning. I still missed him terribly and often wished I could hold another conversation with him, to tell him he was right, that newspaper work was in my blood, and that I had wanted to come back to the Express all along-but mostly to listen to his voice, his laughter, at least one more time.

I looked around me and wondered if he would want to work here these days. Not so much as a whiff of cigarette smoke, but that wouldn’t have bothered him. A bigger problem would be that a Starbucks Double Latte was about the strongest drink anyone kept near his desk.

No, that wouldn’t be the biggest problem. The biggest problem would be that someone had come by, vampirelike, and sucked the life’s blood out of the place while we were all trying to make deadline.

Nearby, I heard other reporters murmuring into headsets and the soft snicking of computer keyboards. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead provided the loudest noise in the room. Quiet as a damned insurance office, and looked like one, too.

A few faces would be familiar to him. John Walters, Mark Baker, Stuart Angert, and Lydia Ames-who was now the city editor. Most of the men who had been hired in the late 1950s and 1960s had taken advantage of retirement packages in recent months, unable to watch the paper change as it had under Winston Wrigley III’s latest overhaul. We were losing a lot of people who had ten to twenty years in, too.

Circulation was down, and Wrigley was engaging in desperate measures these days. In the past few months, photographs had taken up more room than text on the front pages of every section. “What are we afraid of-readers?” one veteran reporter had said to me, just before he left. “Soon we’ll be giving out crayons to new subscribers.”

Another plan involved keeping stories to about two column inches each. All right, that’s an exaggeration, but as one of my colleagues said, “We used to have sidebars longer than these stories.”

The paper would have been even worse off if Wrigley’s father had not foreseen that his son might not be up to the job. While he had spoiled his son to a large degree, by the end of his life he had become less willing to excuse his only child’s weaknesses, and grew impatient with his lack of judgment. He couldn’t bring himself to deny him the position held for two generations by men named Winston Wrigley, but he made sure that Wrigley III didn’t inherit controlling stock, and established a Publisher’s Board that his son had to answer to.

Wrigley had less-than-subtle pressure from the board to keep me around, and John Walters covered my back-a loyalty I tried hard to continue to deserve.

To keep costs down, Wrigley insisted that John replace veteran staffers who left the paper with young reporters fresh out of J-school. I didn’t mind working with these newcomers, but I stopped expecting to get to know them very well, because most of them left us after a few months to work for bigger papers. We were becoming a “nursery paper”-a training program for people who would win the Pulitzers at some other paper. That was another sore point among the older staffers. They became unwilling to invest time and effort into teaching the ropes to people who would be gone in less than a year.

My tolerance-and my friendship with Lydia, who had reign over the general assignment reporters-had earned me the keep of two of these fledglings, Hailey Freed and Ethan Shire. They had been assigned desks near mine. As I logged on to my computer that morning, I felt tired just thinking about them.

They had graduated in the same year from the journalism department of Las Piernas University (formerly Las Piernas College-my own degree was issued before the upgrade, and I shuddered to think what they might make of that fact). They had a lot of confidence in themselves and were competitive as all get out, but otherwise, they were as different as they could be from each other.

I sometimes wished they had a little less confidence. Hailey was fairly sure that two years on the campus paper and a summer internship meant she already knew it all and ought to be left alone so that she could pry journalism from the clutches of crones like me, abandon our archaic methods, and improve the paper for the twenty-first century. She didn’t mind letting me know she resented my old-school style of journalism. Clean writing, balanced coverage, fact checking-boring stuff. A little more of her beautiful, semi-poetic but inaccurate reporting and I was going to FedEx her to Tom Wolfe, to force him to live with the results of what seeds he had sown. I would have, until she told me that Wolfe was an old man and that was the old new journalism-she was going to be part of the new new journalism, a revolution on the World Wide Web. I couldn’t wait. In the meantime, I tried to teach her that the lead-the most essential and dramatic information in a news story-was not an acorn to be buried beneath several other paragraphs.

Ethan, who had been a city editor on that same college paper, was damned sure he was destined for better things than the Express. The rest of us just hadn’t realized that we had Jesus in our carpenter shop.

He was also our budding newsroom politician. He shamelessly brown-nosed Wrigley, who in turn made him a pet. He had talent, I thought, but he didn’t seem to be able to concentrate on his work and often took the easy way out on a story. I didn’t think he had quite found the style that was his own, either, because his writing approach was all over the map. When he focused on what he was doing, I recognized a style that needed a little time to mature, but held a lot of promise. Two days later, I would get stories from him that were so obviously a patchwork of other styles, they didn’t read well. I would tell him that while he had done the basic job of collecting facts in these cases, he’d be better off not trying to imitate other writers.

Ethan thought he had charmed me into believing he paid attention to what I told him about his work. Perhaps he thought I couldn’t read-the proof that he was ignoring me was writ large in nearly every story he filed. Lydia was tough on him-stories got kicked back to him or rewritten by surer hands. While Hailey was going to have problems because she hated anyone touching her lovely words, Ethan seemed almost unnaturally detached from his. He never minded a rewrite of his work-Ethan was on to the Next Big Thing by then-and was happy just as long as his name was on the story.

No problem. A byline was no longer an honor to be earned. Everyone got one. Most of the time, they got a mug shot pasted next to it, too. Lydia said it was just as well that the public knew who to blame.

Hailey peered at me over the top of her monitor now and asked, “What agency has jurisdiction over cemeteries?”

“No simple answer. California has a Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, which is part of the Department of Consumer Affairs. The federal government maintains veterans’ cemeteries. Some cemeteries belong to religious groups, some to counties, some privately to families.”

“What about the Las Piernas Municipal Cemetery?”

“The city owns that one, and believe it or not, that’s under the care of the Parks and Recreation Department.”

“Oh.”

“What have you got in mind?”

We heard the sound of laughter, and turned to see Ethan talking with Lydia, apparently amusing her. Hailey frowned, probably envying the attention he was getting from the city editor. She had a hard task ahead of her if she was going to compete with Ethan’s charm.

“You were saying something about the cemetery?” I said.

“Nothing much. Kind of a crazy thing-I have a friend who swears someone has been disturbing his grandfather’s grave.”

“Modern-day grave robbers?”

“I don’t think they’ve taken the body. Just messed with the grave. Although my friend thinks someone might have tried to break into the casket to steal this antique ring the old man was buried with. I thought I might try to find out if there’s anything to it, that’s all.”

“You run it by Lydia?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure I want to do anything about it. Besides, Lydia has given me a couple of other things to work on. And I don’t know- the whole thing creeps me out.”

“Maybe she’ll cut you loose from some of the other things you’re handling right now.”

“Maybe.”

I wasn’t going to do any hand-holding. I went back to my own work.

Most of my time is spent covering local politics-being married to a homicide detective prevents me from covering stories about crime, but there’s enough intrigue in city government to keep me busy. I read through some notes I had made about current issues before the harbor commission, but found my thoughts constantly drifting to O’Connor, and wondering what might be in the storage locker. I was curious, but also aware that Kenny had burdened me with what was undoubtedly going to be an emotionally draining task.

On the other hand, maybe it would just be a lot of crap that would be easy to toss out, and nothing more complicated than laziness had kept Kenny from doing it himself.

Except that in the time since he was injured, Kenny hadn’t been lazy at all.


I left the paper and spent a couple of hours at city hall trying to get some answers to questions I had about a planning commission proposal. When I returned, Ethan was talking to Lydia again. He soon rushed out of the news-room. Well, I thought, he’s finally catching on to the fact that you can’t cover the news if you stay inside the building. That, or he was going to lunch.

I glanced at my watch and realized that it was almost noon.

I suddenly recalled an appointment of my own and hurried over to the city desk. “I’m having lunch with Helen Swan and my great-aunt today. You want to join us?”

“I’d love to,” Lydia said, “but I can’t get away. Give them my best.”

“I may be back a little late.” I told her about Kenny’s visit and the storage locker key. “I’ll have my cell phone with me if you need me.”

Despite the fact that, as usual, she had three phones ringing, four people walking toward the desk from various parts of the newsroom, and more “highest priority” e-mail messages waiting for her than I wanted to think about, she said, “You need some company when you do that?”

I shook my head. “I’ll be all right. If it starts to…to bother me, I’ll lock it up and come back to it when I can handle it.”


Would that I could have lunch with Helen and Great-Aunt Mary every day. Each time I do, I’m reminded of how strong and smart and wise and downright ornery they are, and how much I hope to be like them someday. If I have half as much energy when and if I make it to my eighties, I’ll be happy.

It was the perfect way to prepare myself for going over to the storage unit. Helen had grown a little deaf over the years, and had voluntarily given up driving, but otherwise was doing well. Mary had become one of her closest friends. Mary was still driving her red Mustang, and seemed to enjoy taking Helen out and about. Mary was sharp and in good health and remained one of my anchors in times of trouble.

I told them about my fledglings, which amused Helen no end. She kindly didn’t mention her own trials with me, when I was her student. I mentioned to Helen that some of O’Connor’s papers had apparently been in a storage locker, and that Kenny had given me the key to it. “I’m on my way over there after lunch. If I find anything that might be of interest to you, I’m sure Kenny won’t mind if I give it to you.”

She seemed surprised, then distracted. Aunt Mary was going on and on about what a pack rat O’Connor was. She has drawings I gave her when I was in first grade, so I didn’t pay much attention to her. I became worried that I had upset Helen. O’Connor had been so close to her and Jack.

After O’Connor died, Max Ducane told me that Helen had been severely depressed and talked of having lost almost everyone who was dearest to her. She was, as always, resilient, and eventually seemed more herself, but I was concerned.

“Helen?”

As if coming out of a trance, she said, “Yes, let me know what you find. But you needn’t give anything to me. If it were up to me to choose one person to have O’Connor’s writing and notes and other treasures, I would choose you.”


I was flattered, and as I made my way to the storage place, I couldn’t help but remember the time I had told O’Connor that Helen’s counsel had kept me working with him. He had admitted then that she had been working just as hard to keep him from giving up on me. I owed her thanks for one of the most important friendships of my life.


U-Keep-It Self-Storage was typical of those built in the mid-1970s. Cinder block and steel roll-up doors. I pulled up to it in the Jeep Wrangler we had just bought from a friend, Ben Sheridan. Ben is a forensic anthropologist. Thinking of him, I wondered if he might be able to help Hailey out with her story.

A sign warned that anyone entering the premises was subject to video surveillance. I entered the 4645 code, and a security gate opened to let me into the parking lot. I was parked and out of the car before it rolled shut again. O’Connor’s unit was on the second floor. I thought that was probably good- a little more secure. I took the stairs. The wide hallway was windowless and dark, but apparently a motion detector sensed my presence, because a series of bare bulbs lit overhead.

I found the unit, shoved a small flatbed cart away from the door, and fit the key in the padlock. The lock was a little stiff, but it opened. I flipped the bolt aside and pulled the door up.

Before me were about forty boxes and plastic containers, and two metal trunks. Some boxes were labeled, some weren’t. Some looked relatively new, but most appeared to be old and bore signs of long storage.

One was immediately familiar to me. Written in that misunderstood scrawl of his was a beloved friend’s name: Jack.

I heard myself exhale, hard. Seeing the box made me think of the day I first saw it, of O’Connor walking across that dusty field, holding on to it as if he were a priest carrying the last tabernacle, asking me-a green reporter-if he could help me with my story. He had worked so relentlessly to discover what had really happened on that night in 1958. For all that had been learned, there was still a great deal that was unknown.

Eric and Ian Yeager were already out of prison, supposedly living on a Caribbean island, but every now and then someone said they had seen them in town. Mitch Yeager-that old buzzard-would probably survive World War III. The only punishment he had received came from his three kids, spoiled brats who had never done an honest day’s work.

I shook off thoughts of that family from hell and stepped inside, found a light switch for the unit (a luxury item), and was surprised to find that the bulb wasn’t dead. I rolled the door down a little more than halfway. I wanted some privacy, but claustrophobia is a problem for me-I counted being able to pull the door shut at all a major victory.

The old trunks intrigued me. One was brown, the other green. They were side by side. Neither was locked, although they were latched shut. I snapped the latches open on the brown one, which looked older to me.

It was full of fragile, yellowing papers covered in a childish scrawl. I carefully lifted a few from the trunk. Each had a title, written in small and large caps, headline style: “THE MAN WHO FIXES MOTOR CARS.” “THE HOUSE WHERE MY MOTHER WORKS.” “HOW MY DA GOT HURT.” “HOW DERMOT HELPS A HORSE WIN A RACE.” “LUCKY THINGS IN MY HOUSE.” “WE MOVE TO A NEW HOUSE.” Each of these stories was clearly marked, “by Conn O’Connor.”

Lucky things in his house included a horseshoe that had come from a stakes winner, various religious medals and other artifacts, a piece of wood “from a true fairy tree” back in Ireland, a crow’s feather that “Dermot says isn’t lucky at all, but he’s wrong,” and a “dollar from my benefactress.” This last word appeared to have been carefully copied from a dictionary.

I smiled. After he had known me for a few years, O’Connor told me of the day he had met Jack Corrigan, and that Lillian had tipped him a silver dollar. I looked around me, thinking that it might well be in one of these boxes.

Maybe not. He was such a superstitious old Irishman, he probably had it in his pocket the day he died.

For some stupid reason, I started crying.

I pulled myself together after a bit and looked in the trunk again. Not far from the top were nine diaries.

The oldest one was dated 1936. I opened it carefully and read the first entry.

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