Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 781 & 782, September/October 2006

The Right Call by Brendan DuBois

A new Brendan DuBois novel, Primary Storm (St. Martin’s), an entry in the Lewis Cole series, is due out in September. A former research analyst for the Department of Defense, Cole gets involved in cases that have a touch of thriller to them. Mr. DuBois’s new story for us is about a newspaper reporter — a job he himself held for years.

On the first Tuesday of this particular month, I was at my desk in the tiny Boston Falls bureau office of the Granite Times, writing a story on deadline on a computer that was considered old when a certain President promised us a kinder, gentler government, when a phone call came in from a self-confessed mass murderer.

Rita Cloutier looked up from her phone at the front and said, “Call for you, Jack. Sounds like the phantom, yet again.”

I kept on looking at the screen, trying to decide if I could spell Contoocook River without having to look it up, and I called out, “See if he’d be so kind as to call back after deadline. Most mass murderers have some courtesy, don’t they?”

Rita giggled, like the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl she was thirty years ago. I looked over at her and my surroundings. We were in a tiny storefront with a waist-high counter where people came in to place their classified ads or complain about missed newspapers. Rita sat right by the doorway, and between the two of us was an empty desk that belonged to Monty Hughes, the local circulation manager. My desk was up against the window, which I thought was a privilege reserved for the sole reporter in this news bureau, until the first heavy rains came and the damn thing leaked and soaked my desk. Some privilege.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to admire the view from the window, which was tough to do. The window overlooked a seldom-used rail spur for the leather mill upstream, and the rail spur was next to an overgrown, sluggish canal that spawned mosquitoes in the summer and not much else. For a moment I recalled the office I had in Manchester, at the main offices of the Granite Times. A door of my own. A parking space. A company cafeteria. I sighed. That’s what happens when you get too trusting with a news source, Jack. Exiled to the farthest reaches of the Granite Times empire.

“Jack?” Rita’s voice queried.

Still leaning back in the chair, I reached over and picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.

“Jack Spooner?” came the familiar voice.

“The same,” I said. “What do you have for me today?”

A heavy sigh. “I killed them all, you know. All twenty-four of them. But I had to. What else could I have done?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, leaning forward so I could wrap up the news story I was working on. Three-car accident on Route 302. Minor injuries. Would probably end up as a news brief but it had been a slow news day. “You could have short-sheeted their beds when they weren’t looking. Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

A petulant tone. “You’re not taking me serious.”

There. Finished. I sent the story along the fiberoptic cables to my editor a hundred miles south, and returned to my mysterious caller. “Wrong,” I said. “You’re the one who’s not taking me seriously.”

With my free hand I opened up my cluttered center desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Let’s see,” I said, looking over the phone log that I had started with this character more than four months ago, “you’ve called me more than a dozen times. Each time you say something similar. That some years ago you killed twenty-four people. It happened on a Tuesday. That it wasn’t your fault. Period. The End. How am I supposed to take you seriously if you don’t give me more than that?”

The petulant tone was still there. “I thought reporters were more open-minded than this.”

“Bad reporters are, not good reporters. Look, I’ve got real work to do. Anything else you want to say before I hang up?”

“I... I did it near here. On Shay’s Meadow, by the Graham River.”

I was so eager to take this down that I dropped the pen on the floor. “Hello? Say again?”

I was talking into a dead phone. My mystery caller had hung up.

I returned the favor, then picked up my pen and quickly scribbled down what he had just said.

I’d been working for the Granite Times for almost two years, after spending some time at a weekly near Conway, by the Maine border. I started out at their Manchester headquarters, and would have gladly stayed there as I established my burgeoning newspaper career, except for an unfortunate incident on my part where I didn’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s while doing a silly little feature story. The mistakes associated with the story might have ended a career at any other newspaper. The Granite Times not being that kind of newspaper — and desperate to hold on to reporters during a tight labor market — I got exiled instead of fired.

I looked over the log sheet that I had started that first Tuesday, when my phantom caller had rung me up. I had taken a lot of notes, thinking that I had a key to a great story that would get me back into the good graces of my editors down south. I still remember that day, a clean and empty desk before me, a nearly empty reporter’s notebook at my elbow, when the phone rang and Rita picked it up and said, “Oh. Hold on.”

Then the caller started, as he would so many times later: “Jack? Jack Spooner?”

I had said yes and then the confession began, one that ended too soon.

I passed him off as a nut when he called the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that. I asked Rita and Monty, the circulation guy, if the previous reporter, Mindy Williams — who now worked at the copy desk down in Manchester and whom I envied and hated in about equal measure for grabbing such a cushy job — had pursued a story based on anonymous phone calls and they both said no.

So. Any other reporter probably would have given up on the phantom and forgotten about it.

But not me. Like I said, I’m not like other reporters. And I still wanted that key to get out of Boston Falls. It was a perfectly nice town, but I knew I didn’t belong here. I felt like a person invited to a wedding reception where everyone else is family and friends, and you’re trying to find a way to make a graceful exit.

The rest of the morning was spent doing a feature for the Sunday edition about a woodworking business on the other side of town that had thrived by doing knockoffs — oops, excuse me, artistic interpretations — of famous Shaker furniture. That was another depressing aspect of my exile here to this little town. Back in Manchester — New Hampshire’s largest city — I’d focused on crime stories, with an occasional feature piece to relax my brain. Here, it was exactly the opposite, with most of my stories being features and small-town stories, with only the occasional crime (usually an outburst of teenage vandalism on a warm summer night) to break the monotony. After you’ve done ride-alongs with Manchester cops, breaking into crack houses right behind the TAC cops, doing a lengthy feature on a guy who makes boxes and rocking chairs is torture.

The purpose of the exile, I suppose.

Just before lunch, I went into the rear storage area and pulled down a bound copy of the Granite Times from 1978, looking for a particular story. I figured that if my mysterious caller was telling the truth — a stretch, I admit — I might find something in the back issues to match what he was claiming. Both Rita and Monty said they had no idea what the caller was talking about, but after my bad experience in Manchester, I was determined to look into it myself. I had spent weeks scanning past years’ issues, every Tuesday edition of the newspaper, until I realized my stupidity and began glancing through the Wednesday issues as well.

It would have been easier to check microfilm but the nearest large library was in Purmort, about an hour away.

So before the appointed noon hour, I spent awhile back in 1978, back when a peanut farmer was President and the biggest news around Boston Falls was whether or not the leather mill would close.

The peanut farmer now builds furniture and makes life miserable for his successors, and the debate over the leather mill continues. When my stomach grumbles increased, I wrapped up 1978 and went out to have lunch.

Lunch on this particular Tuesday was with the police chief, detective, patrol officer, and juvenile officer for the town of Boston Falls, and involved takeout submarine sandwiches from Dot’s Place, about three doors up from our bureau office. We met in the police department’s tiny basement office in the town hall, on the other side of the town common. The entire police force, in the person of Connie Simpson, looked up at me as I came in bearing lunch. Her skin looked freshly tanned and I could tell that her dark blond hair had also recently been trimmed.

“Mmm,” she said. She wiggled her nose. “Smells like fat and grease and meat. How yummy.”

I sat down across from her as she cleared her desk. Connie wore the dark blue uniform of the Boston Falls police department, and in my humble opinion, she wears it pretty well. I passed over her sandwich — steak, cheese, peppers, onions, tomatoes, and whatever else was handy — and opened up my own, just steak and cheese. In some areas I remain a puritan, including food preparation.

When we got into the cleanup phase and were piling up the greasy napkins, I said, “Two questions, Chief.”

“Go right ahead.” Connie’s a few years older than me, though she refuses to get specific.

“Ever hear of a place called Shay’s Meadow, near the Graham River?”

She wiped her delicate lips with a white paper napkin. “Sure. Go up Timberswamp Road, take the second right after the bridge. Dirt road leads out to a gravel pit. Just beyond that is Shay’s Meadow.”

“And the owner is...?”

“The town of Boston Falls,” she said. “Conservation land, donated to the town back in the nineteen forties, if I remember correctly. Which is why that particular lot can be a real pain in the ass.”

“Why’s that?”

She leaned back in her chair and tossed the napkin into a trash can, while I tried not to stare too hard at how she filled out her uniform shirt. “It’s a popular place for kids to raise hell. Make a bonfire, drink beer, shoot off fireworks. Every couple of weeks I get a call to go up there and roust them out.”

“Anything in particular happen out there?”

She grinned and took a sip of her Diet Coke. “What kind of particular?”

“Homicide,” I said. “Some time ago, in that location.”

Connie put the can down on her clean desk. “Let me guess. It’s Tuesday. Must have been your mystery caller.”

“Well,” I said a bit defensively, “you could take it seriously, Chief. A confessed mass murderer and all that. You could put a tap on that phone line, or get phone company records, find out where the call is coming from. Would be a pretty good chit for your record, right?”

Though Connie was still smiling at me, the look had gotten distinctively chilly. “Jack, do you know how many unsolved murders the entire state of New Hampshire — from Canada to the Massachusetts border — currently has?”

“I have no idea, though I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

“Twelve. For the entire state. Going back more than a decade. And I’ll clue you in to something yet again. None of those unsolved crimes took place in and around Boston Falls. The only homicide we’ve had here took place about thirty years ago, involved a high-school boy who broke into an old man’s house. Period. Plus, don’t you think the attorney general’s office might be aware of a crime involving more than twenty deaths?”

The day was becoming a bust and I decided to wrap this part up. “Okay, all I know is that I keep on getting phone calls from some guy, saying he’s killed twenty-four people. But today he told me that it took place on Shay’s Meadow. That’s why I’m asking.”

Connie shook her head. “Poor Jack, still looking for that big story to spring you out of here, right?”

I ignored her and said, “All right, time for my second question.”

She laughed. “Hold on, you’ve asked me more than just two. What’s going on here?”

“Only the first question counted. The others were just follow-ups. And here’s the second question. How about dinner this Saturday night, over in Compton? Then we can catch the fireworks show up on Lake Montcalm.”

She shook her head. “Sorry, Jack. You know the answer. No can do.”

“Why not? We get along, we’re about the same age, we have jobs that bring us into contact every day. We certainly won’t lack for interesting conversation.”

The head shake again, slower. “Sorry, Jack. Lunch is fine. Lunch is wonderful. But that’s it for now.”

“Still worried about the gossipers ruining your reputation?”

“If I had one to ruin, I’d worry about it. Sorry, let’s just leave it. All right?”

Oh well. Shot down in flames yet again. I said, “Okay, but just one more question before I leave.”

“Go ahead.”

“Nice tan. Where did you go?”

“Oh, I spent a few days with my sister. She rented a condo near Hampton Beach.”

“Never heard of it,” I said. “Anywhere near Tyler Beach?”

“Beats me, all those beaches look the same to me,” Connie said. “Now it’s time for my question. When are you going to tell me what you did that got you exiled out here?”

I got up from her desk. “You’ll find out the night we have dinner together.”

“Then I guess we’re both in for a long wait,” she said, her smile no longer so frosty.

“I guess so.”

About twenty minutes later I was in knee-high grass, insects whirling about me, as I strode down near the Graham River. The police chief’s directions were perfect and I had parked my car near the gravel pit, which had some old charred wood and piles of empty beer cans in the center. Shay’s Meadow was a large field, bordered on three sides by lines of maples and birches. It sloped down gradually to the river, which was one of the cleanest in the state. Until it went through Boston Falls and its leather mill, of course.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Maybe a pile of bones. Maybe a series of graveyards. Maybe a signed confession in a bottle sitting on top of a rock. You never know. But all I saw was a beautiful New Hampshire field and in the distance, the eastern peaks of the White Mountains.

I was admiring the view so much that I didn’t look where I was going, so of course I tripped over something and fell flat on my face.

I got up, cursing some at the cuts and scrapes on my hands. Grass is delicate and beautiful, except when it’s long and when you fall into it. Then it can be as sharp as razor blades.

I looked at what had tripped me up, and found an old concrete post, sticking out of the ground about two feet. In the center of the post was a square section where I poked at a chunk of rotten wood. Interesting. I got up and walked some more, and damn if I didn’t trip again and fall down. I stayed there for a moment, to see if anyone was around laughing at me, but all I heard were birds and the low whirr of insects, so I got up. Post number two looked exactly like post number one. I got back down on my hands and knees and went exploring.

In less than five minutes, I had found a dozen such posts, located in a rectangle.

Making my way to the woodline, I snapped off a piece of pine branch and swept the grass in front of me, and in another hour on Shay’s Meadow, I found about a dozen rectangles, each made up of a dozen concrete posts.

I sat on one of the posts and thought for a while, wondering about mass murder and this peaceful place. I stared at the slow-moving river for quite a while, until the mosquitoes finally drove me home.

The next day I waited in the bureau until deadline had passed and Rita Cloutier had gone out for lunch. That left me and Monty Hughes. Monty was somewhere between forty and fifty and lived alone in an apartment on the north side of town. He had a good-sized beer gut and wore black slacks and white long-sleeve shirts in winter and white short-sleeve shirts in summer. His black hair was slicked back and never touched his shirt collar, and the color of his hair matched both his moustache and frames of his eyeglasses.

Each morning and each afternoon he would smoke a single cigarette at his desk, as he worked on audit numbers or made phone calls. Not once had I ever seen him get upset, and believe me, newspaper circulation manager is another description for lightning rod. Dealing with irate customers, lazy paperboys and papergirls, and irritated parents who can’t believe that their hardworking sons and daughters would dump newspapers in shrubbery instead of doorways would drive many a man to shaky hands and blurry eyes. But not Monty. He’d just nod and listen to all the rants and raves, and go about his business.

His business included more than just the Granite Times. Monty was one of those unsung and nearly invisible people who keep a small town like this one alive. He served on the conservation commission, the zoning board, the local Boy Scout council, and for my purposes today, he was head of the Boston Falls Historical Society.

When Monty had snubbed out his single cigarette of the afternoon, I called over to him. “Got a sec for a question, Monty?”

“Sure, sport, go ahead,” he said, going through a handful of papers on his desk.

“Got a question about something historical, thought it might be right up your alley.”

“And what’s the question?”

“Shay’s Meadow, out by the gravel pit on Timberswamp Road. What was there before?”

Monty kept his eyes on his papers. “Before what?”

“Before all that was left was the concrete posts. I was up there yesterday and found all these concrete posts, in some sort of pattern. They looked like footings for buildings. What kind of structures used to be there?”

Monty’s voice didn’t change. “And why were you up on Shay’s Meadow?”

Voice change or not, I didn’t like the question. “Just wandering around. So what was there? Buildings belonging to the town? A farm? A business?”

A small shake of the head. “Don’t rightly know, Jack. Sorry, I can’t help you.”

I leaned across my desk. “Oh, come on, Monty. You’ve grown up here, you know everybody in town, you’ve been with the historical society for years. What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Just what I said. I don’t know.”

“Monty...”

He looked up at me, his face expressionless. “Tell me, sport. Who killed JFK?”

“Hunh?” By now I was equal parts confused and frustrated, a mixture I didn’t like.

“You heard me. The most powerful man in the world was shot and killed before a movie camera and dozens and dozens of witnesses, including Secret Service agents, government officials, and members of the news media. All of this took place on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. So tell me. Who killed him?”

I said, “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Monty nodded. “An easy answer. But you know the truth. Hundreds of books and dozens of TV specials and movies have all been made around that single question: Who killed the President? And despite all that occurred, despite the movie camera and all those witnesses, nobody can agree on who did the shooting, why the shooting occurred, and how many shots were fired.”

“Nice little lesson, Monty, but—”

He interrupted me. “So listen here, sport. If all that’s true, that something so violent could happen in public to such an important man, then don’t go telling me that I should know everything here in Boston Falls. Small towns like their secrets and they manage to keep them nice and tight. Which means not everything’s out there for answers.”

I had a thought. “Are you telling me you don’t know what’s out there, or you do know and won’t tell me?”

Monty went back to his paperwork. “Don’t be offended, sport, but what I’m telling you is that you’re just like every other young man and woman who’s sat at that desk. You roll in here with your college degree and fresh ideas, full of energy and enthusiasm, and you go through this town, stirring things up and writing your stories. Not a problem, if any of you would learn what this town is about and how the people live here, year after year. Nope, all you reporters care about is making your mark and then moving on.”

“That’s the way the business is, Monty. You know that.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Rita’s been here ten years, I’ve been here eleven. You know the longest duration of any reporter that’s stayed here? Ten months, that’s all. Not even a full year. Not even time to learn enough about the people here and show the proper respect. So there you have it, sport. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to my computer terminal. “Don’t call me sport anymore.”

For a moment it looked as if he might smile. “All right, Jack.”

Later that night, after having dinner by myself in my apartment in Boston Falls, I went out on the tiny rear deck that probably added about fifty dollars a month to my rent. In Manchester, I had lived in a condo complex downtown, where the old mill buildings were being rejuvenated with fresh money and fresh people. I hardly ever ate dinner by myself back then. My usual schedule included drinks and get-togethers after work with my fellow reporters, editors, and whatnot from the paper. Sometimes, if I was very lucky, one of those fellow newspaper types would come back and visit me at my rented condo, with its high cathedral ceilings and great views of the renewed waterfront.

Here, my colleagues were Rita and Monty, neither of whom seemed particularly interested in seeing me after work — and to be truthful, I shared their disinterest. Now dinner was a frozen pizza, cooked in an oven that had to be nursed along, since its temperatures varied widely according to the time of day. My apartment was one of four in a building that had been built in the early 1800’s, before the concept of insulation and soundproofing. The apartment next-door was occupied by a mother and daughter on public assistance who seemed to get great joy from yelling at one another. One of the apartments downstairs was rented by a little old lady who loved action movies, and since she was hard of hearing, she liked to play them so loud that each explosion and machine gun burst would make the walls shake. The other apartment downstairs was rented by a young couple with three children, trying to make a go of it by working at the mills, and while they were fine, children can be children.

Which is why I spent a lot of my free time at home sitting on the tiny rear deck, looking at the dirt parking lot that abutted Tony’s Towing and Auto Salvage. A funny thing: often I would do a story about a car accident and see the crumpled remains on one of the town’s twisty roads, and by the time I got home, Tony would be there, backing in the same crushed debris.

But there was no such entertainment tonight. Just me, sulking, nursing a Sam Adams beer. Earlier today, after my frustrating conversation with Monty, I had made phone calls to other people I knew in Boston Falls. The town clerk. The three selectmen. Members of the zoning board and planning board. Other members of the town’s historical society. And it was like a computer virus had suddenly spread to all of them, affecting their memories. Not one knew anything about what had been up at Shay’s Meadow. Not one.

So what was going on?

I took a swallow of my brew. Let’s look at the facts. Our mysterious Tuesday caller claims that he’s responsible for killing a number of people. This week, however, he slips in an extra piece of information. That this dreadful event had occurred up on Shay’s Meadow. On Shay’s Meadow are the remains of what look like concrete footings for structures of some kind. But the police chief and about every other breathing individual in this town claims no knowledge of what had been up there.

Yeah, right. Facts.

There were other facts as well, a little voice inside of me said. Right? Right. Like the boxes of books, clothing, and other personal belongings piled up in my spare bedroom. No time to unpack since moving here, or no interest? Monty was right. We’re here to make our mark, make the editors down south forget about the foul-up that exiled us here. We’re not here to serve the people in this town, to learn who they are or what they do. Nope, we’re here to feed off of them, until we can go back to an office with a door and a condo with a swimming pool in the complex.

And while we’re looking at facts, Mr. Drinking-a-Beer-All-Alone, how many of your wonderful friends and acquaintances down south have been up here to meet you since your exile?

Easy answer: none.

Exiled from what you thought was your home, and ending up at a place where you didn’t fit in. I finished my beer and thought some more, as the mother-and-daughter team next-door started yelling about whose turn it was this week to clean the bathroom.

Facts. Didn’t mean I particularly liked any of them.

The next day at my desk, I sent off an e-mail before I did anything else, and then did the usual grunt work of the morning: calling the fire departments and police departments in the local towns as well as the county dispatch center to see if anything interesting had happened overnight. The first few weeks after I arrived in Boston Falls, I insisted on driving around and looking at all of the logs myself, because I couldn’t see trusting any of these people to tell me what was going on. I quickly found out how stupid I had been: The people in these towns are proud of what their departments do, and they want stories about them to appear in the newspaper. Not like other places I’d worked, where it sometimes took a court order and a crowbar to get information.

After writing a small piece about a chimney fire that night in Denson and a car accident involving a deer and a pickup truck (score: truck 1, deer 0), I found a reply to my e-mail. And this reply actually frightened me for how simple it was:

So. I quickly deleted the message and pretended to look through my desk drawers for something as I thought about what I had just read. Simple and to the point. I hadn’t been the first recipient of the phantom caller’s confessions. My predecessor had received his calls as well.

I looked up at Rita, busily typing up classified ads to send south, and over at Monty, on the phone with some subscriber upset at some damn thing. Rita and Monty. I had been here four months and thought I knew them both pretty well. Monty and his whole history of being a townie and the circulation manager. Rita, of an undeterminable age, widowed when her husband got caught in some machinery at the leather mill a few years back. Didn’t seem to mind being a widow, and told me once that she started dating enthusiastically exactly one year after the funeral of her husband. Rita and Monty were friendly enough to me, gave me news tips, even sometimes intervened when something delicate came along — like the time a promising high-school boy got killed in a car accident and I needed a picture for the paper, and Monty took care of it.

I’d thought I knew them both pretty well. But now I knew I didn’t know them one damn bit.

Later that day I went to the Boston Falls Free Library, just up the street from the town hall and police station. It’s open from noon to five, Tuesday through Saturday, and struggles along by the generosity of the town’s taxpayers and those who donate books. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that this particular visit was only my second since moving to town; the first was the week I arrived in Boston Falls, when I came by to get a library card.

Today I went to the card catalog and identified the book I was looking for, and went to the shelves. I checked the Dewey Decimal number that I had written down on a paper scrap, and checked again. Gone.

At the front table an older gentleman looked up at me from his copy of National Geographic magazine. Nate something or other, the town librarian.

“Yes?” he said, pulling his glasses up to his eyes.

“I’m looking for a copy of a book,” I said. “It’s called Boston Falls, 1700–1970: A History.”

“Ah yes,” he said, smiling slightly. “I’m afraid it’s been checked out.”

“The card catalog said there were two copies available. Have both been checked out?”

“Yes, it does look that way, doesn’t it?”

I tried to keep my voice even. “Any idea when either of them will come back?”

A slight shrug of his thin shoulders. “This is a small-town library, son. Nice, friendly place. I guess those books will come back when the people that have them are finished.”

Then he went back to his magazine, and I went outside. Strange that both copies of the book that I was looking for had disappeared.

Almost as strange as the town librarian knowing what books had been checked out without looking at his own card system.

I had a drink with the police chief after my interesting visit to the library. It sounds quite delicious and intriguing, a drink with the police chief, except it was a can of Diet Coke for her and a real Coke for me while we sat in her police cruiser, running radar on Route 4, the only state road through town.

It was warm and I noticed how thin strands of Connie’s hair were escaping from her short ponytail to delicately adhere to her smooth cheek. But I kept things under control and asked her, “Why did you come back here?”

“What do you mean?” she said, balancing the can on her knee. Her uniform pants leg stretched up and I caught a glimpse of tanned shin and had a quick and enjoyable thought of how she might have looked in a bathing suit while on vacation.

“I mean, you told me you went to college down south at UNH, got a degree in sociology, and then entered police work. With a good record and with a lot of departments in this state trying to hire more women, why come back to Boston Falls?”

She grinned at me. “Because it’s home, silly.”

Well, duh. “I know it’s home, but there has to be more than that.”

“Really? Jack, tell me more of how you became a reporter and how you ended up here. Without telling me the dark secret about your exile.”

I rubbed my thumb across the metal top of the can. “Not much to say. Grew up an only child in one of those northern suburbs of Boston. Majored in English at UMass Amherst, found out quickly that teaching English to kids more interested in dating or the Internet wasn’t my bag. Worked a few more years as a tech writer for a couple of companies, and found out that trying to turn engineering English into real English also wasn’t my bag. Then I thought I’d try my hand at newspaper work. Worked on a couple of weeklies and small dailies, and then ended up at the Granite Times. End of career story.”

“So,” she said, “how many places have you lived since college?”

I shrugged. “Eight, maybe nine.”

“Are your parents still in Massachusetts?”

“Both retired, living out in Arizona, enjoying their second or third childhood by now. I’ve lost count.” Then, I don’t know why I said it, but I did. Maybe it was her interrogatory skills. “Truth is, Connie, I think they’re quite glad that I’m out and about and on my own, and that they have no other children to care about. It’s like I was a mistake or something, or that after I came along, they decided parenthood wasn’t for them. In any event, we all seem quite content with the occasional postcard and letter, and phone calls on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Christmas.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, and a car sped by and her radar detector bleeped, but she didn’t bother looking at the numeral readout to see if the car had in fact been speeding. “Let me tell you my own story, for comparison’s sake, nothing else. I grew up here and knew the names and backgrounds of all my neighbors and relatives, including third cousins. I can go into High Point cemetery and find the graves of my ancestors who came here in the 1700’s. I could go to the Founder’s Day Festival and know the name and address of everyone there. That’s what it was like, growing up in Boston Falls.”

“Sounds claustrophobic.”

“Nope,” she said, tapping the can on her knee. “It was invigorating, knowing that I was bound into the fabric of this little place, that it would always be home, would always be a place I could call my own. That’s why I came back here. I couldn’t think of living or working anywhere else. Ever since I came back, I’m convinced I made the right call.”

“You don’t find that small towns equal small minds?”

“Not for a moment. We may be small, but we’re close-knit. We look out for each other.”

I decided to take a shot. “Does that mean keeping secret what once happened up on Shay’s Meadow?”

She kept on looking out the windshield, and now she was smiling. “Old Jack Spooner. Still looking for that big story.”

“Among other things,” I said. “Including a big date. How about this Sunday evening?”

The chief put the cruiser in drive. “How about I take you back to town?”

I wanted to protest, but I never get into a heated discussion with a woman who carries both a gun and handcuffs.

Late that night, I was in the spare bedroom of my apartment, which I had turned into a half-ass office. I guess if I had bothered to unpack my collection of books and other items, it would be a full-ass office. By the wall that had the only window in the room — which also offered a delightful view of the nearby junkyard — I had set up my desk and my PC. I looked at the glowing screen in the darkness of the room. I imagined the several thousand people out there in Boston Falls this evening, all of them related to each other and knowing each other, knowing not only names and addresses but histories. Background. Who married whom back in 1968. Who went off to the Merchant Marine in World War I. Who humiliated his family in 1862 by moving to Georgia and fighting for the South.

I remembered what the chief had said earlier. In the darkness of this little room, knowing that my small collection of relatives were scattered around New England and the rest of the country... Well, I could see why it would be comforting. The chief had made the right call.

Still, though. All of these people, knowing one another’s secrets. All of this knowledge. All of this moving around in the confines of a small town. Like an organization, a defense organization.

Then an outsider comes in. Asking embarrassing questions. Questions about something related to a mass killing, of twenty-four people.

What then? The group comes together. The group forms a defense. Questions go unanswered, phone calls go unreturned, and books disappear from library shelves.

The small town closes ranks, puts on a friendly face, and waits until the outsider leaves or quits asking questions.

I sighed, reached forward, and started tapping on my keyboard. Within a few moments I was deep on the World Wide Web, on the homepage of a New England used-book dealer who claimed a collection in the thousands and offered overnight delivery.

There. Boston Falls, 1700–1970: A History. A couple of clicks on the keyboard and the book was mine.

This outsider wasn’t planning to follow this town’s script.

Two days later, I left the office early and told Monty and Rita that I was heading over to the Superior Court building — a good half-hour drive away — but instead I made a shorter drive. I ended up at my apartment building and sat on the front stoop, waiting for the mail to show up.

I suppose I could have just picked up the mail when I got home at my usual hour, but the past few days had fed every reporter’s instinct for paranoia and conspiracies. Not that I believed the U.S. mail could be intercepted and packages made to disappear, but... Anyhow, I felt better waiting for the mail to arrive. I was beginning to believe that I was living in a town out of a Shirley Jackson short story, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of any rock-throwing.

In the end, it was almost anticlimactic. A heavyset woman in a U.S. Postal Service uniform came up the cracked sidewalk, trundling her little mailbag. The package from the bookstore was left in my hands, and I tore open the heavy paper and took a look.

Typical small-town history book. Self-published and maybe a thousand copies. This one’s cover was soiled and the binding was cracked, but I didn’t care. I flipped the book open to the rear index and found three references to Shay’s Meadow. The first reference was for 1774, when the town’s militia drilled for a time on Shay’s Meadow. The second reference was to a great party and picnic held on Shay’s Meadow in 1900, to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the town’s founding.

The third reference was to something that took place in Shay’s Meadow in 1944. Something went ker-plunk in my chest as I read a page and a half of what was in Shay’s Meadow at the time, and what had happened there later that summer in 1944.

I went back to the newspaper office and puttered through the rest of the day, trying hard to be relaxed. The book was safely at home, in a box inside my bedroom closet. Monty did his usual phone work while Rita chatted with customers who came in to place classified ads announcing yard sales, lost pets, and church ham-and-bean dinners. When four P.M. came Monty announced that he was going out to see a couple of paperboys about their work habits, and when five P.M. rolled around, Rita said her day was through and asked me to lock up the office when I was done.

I said sure.

About fifteen minutes after Rita left I turned off the lights out front, locked the front door, and went back to the storage room. I went through the leather-bound volumes of the old Granite Timesuntil I found the set I wanted. March 1944. It was a thin volume, and the old yellow sheets felt brittle in my hands. The musty smell transported me back in time, as I studied the tiny print under the large headlines. The advertisements were so innocent-looking that I hesitated over them. OD 30 deodorant. An appeal by the local Red Cross. And playing at the downtown Strand Theater — still operating to this day — was the movie A Guy Named Joe, starring Spencer Tracy.

Some of the stories were familiar: road construction bonds, town meeting disputes over loose dogs, and a one-car accident in the town common involving a drunk driver and an ancient maple tree.

But there were other headlines as well, headlines that reminded me just how different things were back then, when guys my age and much younger were involved in a worldwide struggle against darkness. NAZIS IN HUNGARY. PARTISAN FIGHTING CONTINUES IN BALKANS. And on page two of the paper, the latest casualty lists from the army and navy, breaking down who was wounded and who was killed from the local towns, and in which theater of operation it had occurred. In the list for the Boston Falls area there were a handful of dead, names like Coughlin, Dupont, Dupuis, and Morrill.

Then, the headline I had been looking for, and I looked up just for a moment, to make sure I wasn’t being watched.

Then, underneath the headline, the lead of the story: “The War Department announced yesterday that a prisoner of war camp for German and Italian prisoners will open in the next few weeks. The camp, located on Shay’s Meadow, is expected to hold up to five hundred PWs.”

I stared at the paper, rubbed the brittle surface. Then I started flipping through the pages, faster and faster, trying to avoid the headlines about battles in Europe and the Pacific, about scrap drives and bond drives, stories about mud season and budget appropriations.

Every now and then, a small story would appear about the prisoner of war camp up on Shay’s Meadow, a camp that had disappeared and now only existed in these faded sheets of paper and the concrete footings that were still there. The stories talked about the arrival of German and Italian prisoners from North Africa, how some of them would be working in the summer planting crops, or in the forests, cutting lumber. There had even been an escape, when an Italian prisoner who had fallen in love with a local girl had just walked away from a weeding detail at a local farm, and was picked up less than a day later.

My hands started moving more slowly as I reached the month of June. There, June 13th. The headline was on the front page, complete with a photo.

FAST-MOVING FIRE KILLS 24 AT PW CAMP. I read through the story, seeing how the blaze had started in one of the barracks, how it had been blamed on an electrical short or the careless disposal of cigarettes. The photo showed the members of the Boston Falls Volunteer Fire Department wetting down the wreckage of the barracks, smoke billowing out from the blackened timbers. I looked again at the headline. Twenty-four dead. I was getting ready to close the volume when I saw a small sidebar story with a tiny headline: Local Soldier Discovers Fire. The story said that the fire had been discovered by Paul Gagnon, a Boston Falls boy who had unexpectedly been stationed in his own hometown to serve as a guard at the PW camp.

I thought for a few moments, and then I flipped back through the month of June, looking for something familiar, something I had seen before. I found it on page two of the issue from June 9th.

Then I jumped as the phone at my desk started ringing. I snapped the bound volume shut and looked toward my desk, where the shrill ringing continued. I wondered who was calling me here, who knew I was still in the office.

The phone kept on ringing.

Come on, I thought. This is a small office. Why are you letting it ring so long? Don’t you know no one’s here?

The ringing continued.

“Fine,” I said. I got up, prepared to answer it, but just as I reached it, it stopped ringing.

I put the bound volume back in its place, and went home and locked all my doors and windows.

It was now Tuesday morning. Over the weekend I’d gone for a drive by myself, down to the beaches of New Hampshire, about a three-hour drive away. I rented a room in a small beachfront motel — spending about a quarter of my monthly rent bill for a two-night stay — and spent a fruitless few hours unsuccessfully looking for the beach that Connie Simpson, the police chief, had stayed at. I thought I would enjoy being on the wide sands, with all the delightful attractions in bathing suits around me, but my thoughts kept on going back to a small town with tall trees and sharp hills.

On Monday, after taking care of the weekend police and fire logs and writing a weekend wrap-up for that day’s paper, I spent the day at the town hall and the county courthouse, quietly checking records — the mundane paperwork that can lead you right to someone’s home address.

Now, Tuesday morning, I was walking down the freshly washed and shined floors of the Crawford County Rest Home, past the quiet staff efficiently taking care of the residents, some in wheelchairs, others sitting in a large sunroom. I was looking for someone in particular, and in Room 104, I found him.

Mr. Paul Gagnon, formerly of the U.S. Army and the War Department’s Prisoner of War Camp in Boston Falls, New Hampshire, was sitting in a chair near the window overlooking the parking lot. He looked over at me for a moment as I came in, and then resumed his gaze outside. He was nearly completely bald, with just a short frizz of white hair circling his wrinkled and freckled scalp. He had an afghan on his lap, and his black-and-red-checked shirt was buttoned all the way up to his fleshy neck. His black-rimmed glasses were repaired on one side with a strip of tape. On a shelf near the window were a collection of photos and glass knickknacks, and in his lap, his large and slowly shaking hands held a telephone. I looked at the photos for a moment and wasn’t surprised to see a face that I recognized.

I took a spare chair and looked across him, past the carefully made bed. Soft music was piped in from speakers overhead, and the room had the smell of old medicine and old memories. The television set was on, but the volume had been turned down.

“Mr. Gagnon?” I said, my reporter’s notebook closed in my lap. “Mr. Gagnon, my name is Jack Spooner. I’m from the Granite Times. I decided to come here today, so you can talk to me face-to-face instead of making your call.”

He spoke up, his voice quiet. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “You’ve been calling me every Tuesday morning for the past few months, wanting to confess about those twenty-four dead prisoners of war, up on Shay’s Meadow.” Then I lied. “The phone records prove it.”

That seemed to make him think, for he sighed and shifted in his seat, and continued looking out the window. The minutes passed and then he said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “You’ve been saying things to me every week now, every Tuesday morning. That’s because the fire happened on a Tuesday morning, back in June 1944. Right? Everyone thought it was accidental. Electrical failure, burning cigarettes tossed in a trash bin. But you knew better, right? You knew better because you set that fire, didn’t you?”

He said nothing, but his hands tightened on the telephone. I went on. “The fire happened on June thirteenth, right? Just four days after the latest casualty lists were printed in the paper. A casualty list that included Raymond Gagnon. Your older brother. Killed in France.”

Now he turned, looking straight at me. “You and your kind, you know nothing.”

I nodded. “You’re probably right.”

“We fought and bled and died for the generations to come, so you wouldn’t have to worry about secret police or cities being bombed or being sent away to a gas chamber. That’s what we did for you, and how do you repay us? By using your freedom to get drugged up and watch filth on TV, and complain that the stock market isn’t making enough money for you. Bah. The hell with you all. Makes me wish sometimes we’d get into another Depression, another big war, not this phony war on terrorism, so you can see what it was really like.”

“Your brother, Raymond,” I said, not rising to the bait. “That’s what happened, right? You got word that he died and you saw a chance for revenge, a way to get back at—”

He raised a hand from the phone and made a dismissive motion towards me. “Oh, you make it sound so cold and conniving, don’t you? The truth? You want to know the truth? I was seventeen years old, carrying a rifle almost as big as me. I was face-to-face, every day, with the enemy, with what we thought of as Nazis. Truth? Most of ’em were my age, that’s right, my age, and were scared at being so far away from home. They didn’t look so mean or so scary up close. So it was pretty easy duty. Just escortin’ them back and forth to the farmers’ fields or the forests. But then there came the news of Raymond...”

The old man looked out again to the parking lot. “My only brother. My best friend, really. My dad had died years earlier, so Raymond taught me how to fish and hunt and set traps out in the swamps for beaver. Older brothers sometimes get a kick out of raising hell against their younger brothers. Never Raymond. Oh, we had such grand plans, the two of us, when the war was going to be over. We were going into business for ourselves. Didn’t matter what kind of business, we never got that far in talkin’ about it, but what did matter is that we were going to stick together, the two of us, when the war was over.”

I sat silently there, letting him talk, my notebook still safely shut on my lap. He went on. “Then... Mother got the telegram. Back then telegrams were delivered by taxi drivers. Always hated seeing taxi drivers in the neighborhood, ’cause you knew they were delivering bad news. Poor Raymond. Died the day after D-Day, in France. Oh, how Mother wept, and I did, too, though I kept it secret from her. I was the man of the house, you know... I wanted to show her how strong I was...”

The music overhead stopped for a moment, as a nurse was paged to report to the reception center. I cleared my throat and said, “What happened at the PW camp, then?”

A slight tremor of the body. “I was young, I was so sad, and so angry... Those boys in the camp, most of ’em were captured in Italy and North Africa. They had nothing personally to do with Raymond’s death... But one night, I heard them laughing and singing. You know why? They were happy that the invasion was on, ’cause they knew the war would be over and they’d be going home to their families, their mothers and fathers, their brothers... I smoked back then... I had some matches... That’s all it took...”

He turned and looked back at me, his eyes moist. “The minute I set the fire, I regretted it, regretted it so much, Mr. Spooner... Those wooden buildings went right up and I could hear them screaming inside, screaming as they were trapped... I reported the fire and helped the firemen drag hoses there, but... Twenty-four... In the end, I killed twenty-four... But what else could I have done? They were laughing and singing while my brother’s body was getting colder and colder in the mud of France...”

I slowly opened up my reporter’s notebook. “Then why the calls to the newspaper every Tuesday? Why were you doing that?”

A brief smile came over him, just for a moment. “A man gets to my age, your mind starts racing backward, starts remembering. I found I had to say something, confess to someone, so that I could sleep at night. And the local newspaper seemed to be the place to do it.”

I uncapped my pen, started making a few notes, looking down at the notepad. “Well, here’s a newspaper reporter right here, ready to hear the whole story again, Mr. Gagnon. So tell me how it all happened, right from the start.”

His voice: “I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’m afraid I won’t let you.”

I looked up, ready for a comment about the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and all that, but Mr. Gagnon was now practicing his rights under the Second Amendment, and was pointing a large pistol at me that he had pulled out from underneath his afghan.

“You see,” he said, “I’ve lived here all my life. Raised a family. Became a supervisor in the mills and a selectman for twenty years in the town. This is my home, my place, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some stranger humiliate me while I’m still alive.”

And then he put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

A half-hour later I was sitting in the rec room. The shakes in my legs were finally beginning to subside as Connie Simpson sat next to me, a clipboard in her lap, looking at me with concern.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked.

I was embarrassed to say that seeing the gun pointed in my direction had caused me to soil myself, so I just quickly nodded and changed the subject. “It happened so quick, I couldn’t do anything... It was like I was nailed to that chair. Could not move.”

She gave a reassuring touch to my shoulder. “Happens, facing a firearm for the first time.”

I was still holding my reporter’s notebook in my sweaty hands, and I thought that when I got back to the office, I would toss it away. “Well, when he put it in his mouth like that and pulled the trigger...”

“Your yells could be heard on the other side of the rest home. Which is how I got called here.”

I stared down at the brightly polished linoleum. “Well, how was I supposed to know the damn thing was a toy?... It sure looked real.”

I think she tried not to laugh at me. “This is a good retirement home, Jack. They wouldn’t let him have a real weapon. It was just a toy, something his grandchildren would play with when they came. He was just messing with you, that’s all. A cranky old man. Look, most of the people who live here and work here are locals, and everyone—”

I interrupted her. “I know, I know, around here, everyone looks out for everyone. Everyone knows everyone’s history. Everybody knows damn everything except for those of us who haven’t had the good fortune to have been born in Boston Falls.”

There was a slight pause there, and Connie shifted a bit in her seat. “Look, you’re still pretty shook up. How about I give you a ride? You want to go home?”

“No,” I said. “Back to the office. I’ve got a couple of things to do.”

On the short drive back to the bureau, I rolled down the window of the cruiser and just let the air cool my face. I was embarrassed and humiliated and angry all at once, a deep mix of emotions that outweighed the tiny triumph I had in finally nailing the story down, in learning what had really happened here more than sixty years ago, and in finding out who the mystery caller was.

When Connie pulled the cruiser up next to the sidewalk in front of the bureau office, I turned to her and said, “Space cadet.”

She looked confused, and who could blame her. “Excuse me?”

“That’s why I got exiled here,” I said, feeling again that squishy, warm feeling that only comes from remembering how thoroughly I had screwed up. “Space cadet. Or, actually, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. A big hit TV series during the nineteen fifties. A guy came to the Manchester office one afternoon, old guy. Said he had been one of the major characters in the show. Had old photos, scripts, memorabilia, stuff like that. Now lived by himself in a tiny one-room apartment in the West End. Not a very nice place to live. Any other newspaper might have done just a small story, but he talked to my boss, a fan of old science fiction and science fiction TV shows and movies. So I got the story and did it up big. Front page of the Sunday edition, about a hundred thousand readers. Sort of a Where Is He Now? complete with heart-tugging photos of him living in one room with a fold-out couch and hot plate. A great story.”

“What was the problem?”

Funny how that memory still made me wince. “The problem was that it was all made up. The guy had never been west of the Connecticut River in all his life. He had some mental problems, that’s all. And I should have done a more thorough job in checking it out. But I didn’t. I relied on his word and his memorabilia, and the disaster unfolded from there. Which explains my exile, and why I was working so hard to find a story to get me out of here.”

She smiled. “I thought you were going to save telling me that story until I agreed to go out with you.”

“I changed my mind.” I got out and stepped onto the sidewalk.

She called out to me as I shut the door, “Are you still going to write that story? Still looking to get out?”

I pretended not to hear her.

Inside the bureau Rita was looking at me, as was Monty. Neither said anything as I went over to my desk and pulled out two things. The first was the official town history of Boston Falls that I had bought over the Internet. I walked past Monty’s desk and let it drop there with a satisfying thump.

“There, Monty,” I said. “Call it a little donation to the town library. I’m sure your friends there will be thrilled to get another edition of this hard-to-find book.”

I think he was going to say something, but instead his phone started ringing and he picked it up, and his voice was sharp and low as he looked over at me. I went over to Rita, whose giggly face was now solemn, her reading glasses hanging from a thin chain around her neck.

“Saw your dad today,” I said. “But he was too busy to send his regards.”

“I see,” she said, her voice faint.

I flipped through the second item I had brought from my desk. My phone log, which had carefully noted every phone call I had received from the Phantom Caller since day one.

“But then again, I should have realized right from the start that you knew him. You see, when he called, the first day I was working here, you just said, ‘Oh, hold on,’ and patched him through. And he knew me by name. Asked for Jack Spooner. But you and Monty were the only ones who knew I was coming to this bureau. It hadn’t even been announced yet in the paper. But this mystery caller goes to you and asks for me by name, when he shouldn’t have known a damn thing. So there you go.”

“I... I...” she started, and I said, “And when I saw him this morning, I saw your photo up on his window sill. Very sweet. I’m sure you and Monty got a big chuckle out of him calling me every Tuesday, getting the new kid spun up. Probably never thought I’d get this far, right?”

“I couldn’t stop him from calling,” Rita said, her voice faint. “And I couldn’t tell you, either.”

Monty glared at me from his desk.

“Well, here’s a helpful suggestion,” I said, leaning over the counter. “Us out-of-towners, we’re not all as dumb as you think.”

Then I left.

That night I was alone on the back deck of my apartment, looking out over Tony’s Towing and Auto Salvage. It had been a quiet night at the junkyard, and instead of gazing at the crumpled cars and trucks, I looked up to the hills and mountains surrounding Boston Falls. Funny thing about that. In all the time I had been here, not once had I gone up those trails, explored those woods. Not once. Just commuted between here and the bureau and the town halls and police stations of the surrounding towns.

I suppose I should have felt triumphant at what I had just done, in uncovering a story that would get me out of this town. But all I could think about was the old man alone in the last room of his life, still agonizing over something he did more than a half-century ago. What a way to live, with such burdens on your mind. And my job was to make that burden even worse, with an hour or two at the keyboard.

“Hey!” came a voice from the dirt parking lot beneath me. “Hey, Jack Spooner! You up there?”

“Nope,” I called down, and there was a chuckle, and the sound of feet on the stairs. I looked over and nearly dropped my beer bottle. Police Chief Connie Simpson, in tight jean shorts, flat black shoes, and a white pullover top that looked mighty fine. It was the first time I had ever seen her out of uniform. In her hand she carried a plastic bag with handles, and I could smell cooked food.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Dinner,” she said. “If you’re hungry, and if you’re interested.”

Luckily for me there was a spare lawn chair on my deck, and the chief — okay, at this point, especially the way she was dressed, I was having a hard time thinking of her as the chief — sat down in it, dropping her plastic bag between us.

She eyed my open bottle of beer and said, “Interrupting anything special?”

“Nope, I was just sitting and thinking. And drinking. Just a little.” I raised my bottle in the direction of the hills and mountains. “Thinking that in all the time I’ve been here, not once have I really explored this town. Just my place and the newspaper office and various police stations and town halls in the neighborhood.”

Connie said carefully, “There are some wonderful trails up there with great views of the valley. I’ll tell you more but we should eat before everything gets cold.”

Dinner was barbequed ribs and French fries and lots of grease and fistfuls of napkins, and a few laughs along the way. Eventually we washed up in my tiny kitchen and reemerged onto the deck with small mugs of chocolate ice cream, and as we ate, Connie extended her long, tanned legs to the railing of my deck.

I tried not to stare and said, “Ask you a question?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Didn’t we just have dinner here? And haven’t you always said no when it came to dinner? What’s changed?”

She laughed, scooping up a dripping mess of ice cream to her mouth. “Yes, this was dinner, and what’s changed is that you moved first. You told me that story about how you got in trouble with your editors. It seemed fair. And to hell with any gossipers out there.”

“If I had known that, I would have confessed all the first time I met you.”

She eyed me with amusement. “Then it probably wouldn’t have worked. Now, time for a couple of questions from me.”

“Fair is fair,” I said, knowing pretty well what was coming up.

“The story about the PW camp and Paul Gagnon. Are you going to send it south to your editors?”

I suppose I should have felt insulted that a town official was trying to interfere with my work, but I was tired and said, “I haven’t started writing it.”

“You’re not answering the question.”

“Sorry, that’s the best answer you’re going to get. And here’s a question for you.”

“Go on.”

“The whole town knew about him and what he did back then?”

She paused for a moment, and said, “There’ve always been rumors here and there. But only that. Tales that no one really wanted to look into... It was so long ago, Jack, and at such a different time.”

“I see.”

“If you did do a big story that got you transferred back to Manchester, would you get paid any more?”

The cold mug of ice cream felt good in my warm hands. “Nope. Though working out of such a large office would give me more opportunities to pad my expense account.”

“Then why try so hard to go back? Just to run faster to stay ahead, is that it?”

I was going to launch into my usual explanation of stagnating in a small town versus the excitement of working out of the biggest city in the state, in a newspaper office that was the hub of the news media in the region, but with her looking at me and the quiet stillness of the night air, well, I just shrugged.

“Tell you the truth, Chief, I don’t rightly know.”

She nodded. “You know, this is a nice place. If you give it a chance. You ever think of that?”

I didn’t reply, and we sat there for a few more minutes, and then we both put our empty ice cream mugs on the floor of the deck. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I spotted her hand, softly resting on the armrest of the lawn chair. I reached over and grasped it, and in a very confused few seconds, she ended up in my lap.

Long, long minutes later, we both came up for air, my lips tingling and my skin so sensitive I swear I could feel the rise in temperature around us.

Both of my hands were around the back of her neck, and I gently pulled her down towards me. “Not to sound too forward or anything, but is there a chance I might pay you back for dinner with breakfast anytime soon?”

“Mmm,” she said. “How does tomorrow sound?”

Which is what I did that morning, and for many mornings after that. Along the way Rita and Monty and myself actually started talking to each other again, as if nothing had ever happened between us. It felt fine, though I found I did miss those Tuesday-morning phone calls, which had immediately stopped. Over the summer and through the fall, I did a lot more stories for the Granite Times, but none that would have been as exciting as the PW camp story.

I suppose I could have brooded over that, but I was too busy during those months, working in my apartment, unpacking all of those boxes, putting things away, sometimes with Connie’s help.

I finally felt good. Like I belonged. Like I had made the right call.

Copyright © 2006 Brendan DuBois