Bloodlines

52

“T ODAY MAUREEN GAVE ME THIS DIARY. SHE IS THE BEST SISTER IN THE world.” A little below that was written, “Jack would say that’s hipurboily, but it’s not.”

“Best” and “not” were heavily underlined. The word “hipurboily” had been crossed out and carefully corrected to hyperbole. I sat on the other trunk and kept reading. As I read on, again and again I saw corrections. I found myself feeling amazed that a boy his age wrote so well, and had taken the time to correct his mistakes.

“Jack gave me another boxing lesson today.”

“Da had a bad day today. I tried to be quiet.”

“Jack liked the story about the horse but he is making me redo it anyway.”

“Jack said to call it rewrite, not redo. Said my diary is for me, not to show it to him again. Said I could get mad as fire at him in my diary-say anything here.”

“Miss Swan scared me again today. Asked if I am writing Jack’s stories. Told her I am only a kid.”

That one made me laugh aloud.

“Jack still likes Lily, I think. She is mad at him.”

“A good day. Jack took me upstairs to the newsroom. Met Mr. Wrigley. He is very old. Jack told him I will be a reporter for the Express one day. Mr. Wrigley did not say no.”

“Jack and Miss Swan had dinner tonight. Jack calls her Swanie. He is brave.”

Hardly a day went by without a reference to Jack Corrigan. Helen had told me they were close, as had O’Connor, and O’Connor was always full of stories about him. But seeing this day-by-day record of O’Connor’s boyish adoration of him gave me new awareness of just how close they were. Jack seemed to treat him like a much younger brother, at times almost as a son. He must have taken him under his wing from the start and had infinite patience.

Well, no, I thought-even at eight, O’Connor was obviously an amusing companion.

As I read on, I realized that while Helen clearly thought of him in that way, Lillian seemed to have been annoyed with him. She probably wasn’t aware that her snide remarks were not only overheard but dutifully recorded by O’Connor. Gradually, through the observant if not fully comprehending eyes of an eight-year-old, I saw a picture of a young, willful rich girl who was enjoying a bit of rebellion by dating Corrigan. The picture that emerged of Thelma Ducane was even less flattering. Corrigan, for his part, seemed unfazed by Lillian’s tantrums or threats, and not far into the entries, either Jack stopped seeing her or O’Connor became uninterested in reporting about Jack’s love life.

I guess Jack sought company with his colleagues for a time, because then the stories were of other reporters, often Helen Swan. I had a feeling that Jack had been smitten with her long before he married her, something that was going right over O’Connor’s young head. Maybe over Jack’s as well.

I got a fascinated child’s view of the staffs of the two papers.

In that same summer, O’Connor, the little rat, had spied on Jack one night-and saw that he was out with Lillian again. “It is wrong. She is married.” The kid should have been a gossip columnist. I turned the page and repented of these thoughts.

This page was tearstained. It said, “Jack hurt in his car. Might die. Please, God, help him. I will be good.”

The next entry thanked God “even though I was not so good.” O’Connor had managed to sneak into the hospital to visit Jack, apparently by charming a kind janitor and a sympathetic old nun. This went on for a few days. The entries were worried ones-“Jack’s ankle broke. The doctor can’t fix it.” “Jack is sad. I can’t help him.” Then, one day, “Miss Swan visited.” A report of what she said to Jack made me realize she was as tough then as she is now. But the entry ended with, “Jack likes her. He will be better, I think.”

He noted a date not much later, when she left the News. I hadn’t known about that. O’Connor wrote, “Jack misses her, I think. Talks about her a lot.”

The outside hallway light had turned off at some point, but it suddenly snapped on again. I waited, heard someone’s footsteps at the other end of the hall, the sound of another unit’s door being rolled open and down again.

For no real reason I could name, I felt uneasy.

I glanced at my watch and nearly swore. I had certainly whiled away the afternoon. Lydia probably thought I’d gone to work for another paper. She hadn’t called, though. I pulled out my cell phone to see if I had missed a call. No signal.

No way to know if Lydia had tried to reach me or not.

I decided I’d look through the contents of the two trunks in the comfort of my own home. Still uneasy about the other visitor to this floor, I crept toward the roll-up door on O’Connor’s unit, eased it higher, and looked up and down the hall before I pulled the flatbed cart inside. I loaded the two trunks on it, pushed it out, and started to close up the unit, then stopped and grabbed the box labeled “Jack” before locking up.

The elevator was at the other end of the hall. I pushed the cart past the unit that was occupied and paused briefly to listen, but the person visiting it wasn’t making any noise. I hurried out.

I wasn’t all that far from the house, and the parking lot of the Wrigley Building is far from secure, so I stopped off just long enough to place the trunks and box in our guest room, and close it off from our pets.

At work, I had about ten calls on my desk voice mail, but nothing that needed immediate attention. All around me, computer keyboards softly clicked away. Reporters furiously at work as they always were this late in the afternoon, trying their damnedest to make deadline.

Happily, I had earned the luxury of being able to work on long-term projects now, and knew that nothing in the day’s “budget” was being held up by me-there wouldn’t be a hole in the front page because I had become caught up in reading O’Connor’s first diary.

I should have felt relatively relaxed. I didn’t. Something was going on in the newsroom. But what?

More than twenty years of newspaper work had made me attuned to those times when someone on the staff was onto something hot. Any veteran could feel that. Some reporters could hide their excitement about a hot story from their fellow reporters, but I seldom met a first-year who could pull that off. You might as well play the William Tell Overture over loudspeakers in the newsroom whenever a green reporter was on the chase.

I looked around. Hailey looked bored. Mark Baker was over at the city desk, talking to Lydia and Ethan.

Ethan. That’s who it was. Lydia had something up on her screen, and Ethan was smiling as she talked to him about it, while Mark took notes. I left my desk and walked over to them.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Mark was saying.

“Find out about what?”

“Oh, hi, Irene,” Mark said. “I’m doing a sidebar for this A-one story of Ethan’s.”

“Ethan’s got a story on tomorrow’s front page? Hey, that’s great.”

“Thanks,” Ethan said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“What’s it about?”

Lydia answered. “He’s found disturbances of graves at Municipal Cemetery. Called someone from the Parks Department and the State Cemetery Bureau to see what they had to say about it, and he’s spent the afternoon covering their mutual investigation. Turns out the city subcontracts with a private company that gets paid for administering the burials there. This company was moving caskets from unmarked graves, burying them two-deep in marked graves, and then reselling the plots they had ‘vacated.’ And looting the caskets they moved-and that’s just what they learned today. It’s going to take months to sort the burials out and figure out who belongs where. Great story. Congratulate him.”

Instead, I said, “You little shit.”

Lydia’s eyes opened wide, and Ethan’s chin came up.

Mark said, “What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you who’s the looter here-he is. He stole a story.”

“I did not!” he protested hotly.

“Hailey was asking me about this very subject this morning.”

“Irene,” Lydia said reasonably, “don’t jump to conclusions. Ethan came to me with this idea-”

“Hailey!” I called.

The muted clickety-clack of keyboards all across the newsroom came to a halt. It was like disturbing crickets that you hadn’t noticed until they stopped singing.

She sauntered over. “What’s wrong?”

“Did you talk to Ethan about your story idea, the one about the cemetery?”

“No,” she said hesitantly.

“Did you say anything about it within earshot of him? Leave notes about it out on your desk?”

She looked over at Ethan, who stared back at her defiantly. “No,” Hailey said quietly.

I glanced at Mark, saw him studying the two of them.

“Irene,” Lydia said. “It’s just a coincidence.”

“I’m sure Lydia’s right,” Hailey said. “You’re the only one I’ve spoken to, and when I talked to you about it this morning, Ethan was talking to Lydia. I remember because-” She seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “I remember because he made her laugh.”

“That’s right!” Lydia said, with obvious relief. “Ethan was telling me about an old roommate, one who works for the Bee up in Sacramento.”

“Satisfied?” Ethan said.

“Not by a long shot. Hailey, Ethan has just happened to discover cases of burials being moved and looted in Municipal Cemetery.”

There was a moment, just a brief moment, when Hailey’s sense of hurt and betrayal showed on her face. She hid it quickly and said, “Cool. I’ll tell my friend who mentioned it to me. You might want to talk to him about it for follow-up.”

“Thanks,” Ethan said.

Hailey murmured, “No big,” and hurried away from the city desk-and out of the newsroom.

“You see?” Lydia said to me.

“Oh yes, I see all right.” I walked away before I gave in to a desire to throttle someone.

I logged off my computer, thought about how close Ethan’s desk was to mine, then logged on again and changed my password.

I decided to try to talk to Hailey again. I called the security desk. Geoff said she hadn’t left the building. That being the case, my guess was that she had gone into the women’s bathroom.

I got up from my chair and walked through the Express’s warren of hallways. As I made the hike, I kept thinking that in the course of two decades, it should have occurred to someone to spend a little money to put a women’s room closer to the newsroom, and a men’s room closer to features, but Wrigley claimed that all the funds available for updating the building had gone into earthquake retrofitting.

As recently as two years ago, features would have been jumping at this time of day, but Wrigley had decided to pick up the vast majority of our features content from wire services-the result being massive layoffs in this department. The room was completely deserted-a journalistic ghost town.

As I stood near an abandoned desk, Hailey came out of the bathroom. She froze when she saw me.

“You and I need to have a little talk,” I said, sitting down in a big rolling chair, and motioning her toward another.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was going to deny everything, run back into the bathroom, or try to make it past me. Then her shoulders slumped, and she sat down in a nearby chair. “I’m not going to try to take that story from him.”

“The way he took it from you?”

“Past experience tells me I won’t be able to prove that. He’s very slick when it comes to computer stuff. Besides…you don’t know Ethan.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She bit her lower lip, looked toward the door, then said, “He’s a troublemaker.”

“No shit.”

“I mean-he makes trouble for people who cause him problems. In school? He had the chair of the J-department completely by the balls.”

“How?”

“He starts by kissing up. But he does research-finds out things about people.” She paused, then said, “It’s so weird. He can do good work, really good work. But he’s lazy. And I think he has problems with…”

I waited. When she didn’t say more, I said, “Problems with what?”

“He likes to party, that’s all. I don’t know if it’s that,” she added quickly, “so I shouldn’t be saying that about him. Besides, I don’t think it’s the biggest reason he acts like he does. I mean, he has all this talent, right?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “When he focuses on something, that’s apparent.”

“But the problem is, he spends more time covering his butt and playing games than he does working.”

“Maybe if you told Lydia-”

“Forget it. I told you. He kisses ass. He’s already done it here. Mr. Wrigley thinks he has a new hotshot.”

“So why would you cave in to him, the way you did today?”

“Just trying to stay on his good side, I guess. You don’t want Ethan to think of you as anything but a friend.”

I sat thinking for a moment, then said, “Have you filed your story for today?”

“Yes. Not that it’s going to set the world on fire or anything.”

I smiled, remembering saying something like that about the first stories I covered.

“What’s so funny?”

“I won’t bore you with tales of my life on the frontier.”

She looked at me curiously. “Is it true that you were the first woman reporter here?”

“No. No, there were others before me. You want to meet one of the first women reporters?”

“Sure,” she said.

I laughed. “I was going to suggest that you interview Helen Swan, but not if you’re just being polite.”

“No, I wasn’t just being polite.”

“You’d better be telling the truth,” I said, “because Helen’s one tough old lady. If you are just being polite, she’ll make you cry for your mommy before the dust settles.”

She swallowed hard.

“Go down to the morgue-I mean, the library-and ask for microfilm of the Las Piernas News from around 1936-”

“Microfilm! It’s not on the computer?”

“Don’t try my patience. Now, get this straight-you want the film for the News and not the Express. We were two papers back then, and Helen worked for the morning paper. Read a few issues before you talk to her. I have a feeling this assignment will help you. Helen has a way of inspiring people.”

She left a few minutes later. I stayed in my ghost town, thinking up ways to trap a troublemaker.