Goodnight, Irene

29

HMM-SOMETHING SMELLS GREAT. You making breakfast?” Lydia called out to me as she made her way to the kitchen.

“Yeah, cinnamon toast. Here, have some.”

“You always cut it up in little strips like this?”

“My grandmother did. I had a dream about her last night.”

“I haven’t had this in ages.”

“Me neither.” I sat down next to her, dishing out some scrambled eggs and bacon. “A country breakfast. Hardens your arteries, but we’ve all got to live on the edge sometimes.”

“This is great, Irene.”

“Thanks. How was the date with Michael?”

“Eh.”

“‘Eh’?”

“There was all this animal magnetism between us, but we couldn’t make much conversation. We just didn’t have anything much to talk about. We saw a movie, or it would have been the longest evening of my life. After the movie, it was either make out all night or come home alone and get a good night’s sleep. God knows I’ve been horny lately, but this is the nineties, not our college days, so Michael and I left it at a goodnight kiss.”

“You went that far on a first date?” I said with mock horror.

“First and last, I’m afraid,” she said, shoving the morning edition toward me. “You see the paper yet? People are going to get jealous.”

Good old John Walters had given me another page one. The story of Jennifer Owens was as public as it was going to be.

There were a pile of messages and O’Connor’s mail waiting for me at work. The mail made me think of the second envelope from Wednesday, which I had completely forgotten. I opened my purse and found it.

It contained a note from MacPherson dated last week, saying he had found someone to do the computer drawings of the woman’s face, and he would call when they were ready. I felt a great sense of relief. I hadn’t been walking around for two days with some big clue stashed in my purse.

I sat down and began to go through the mail and messages. Yesterday, a note from Barbara, asking me to give her a call at the hospital when I got back. A call from MacPherson with “Says it’s not urgent” written at the bottom of the message slip. Some calls from people I recognized as political organizers, probably about various people and issues in our upcoming election.

The mail was much the same, with the exception of one envelope. A scrawling, shaky hand was addressed to me, care of the Express, but marked “Personal Confidential” in one corner. The return address was unfamiliar. Inside was a sheet of paper with a handwritten message:

Miss Kelly,

I understand you are now back at the newspaper. I tried calling you at Malloy Marlowe to tell you I am deeply sorry about Mr. O’Connor. I have a few things to say, and no one left to say them to. I thought of you because I know you were his friend and co-worker, and I imagine you are now pursuing matters he left unfinished. This much I know of you.

As for Mr. O’Connor, it is important to me that you know that I always respected him. Had I known things would go so far, I would have told the truth long ago. But now I am tangled in a web I helped to weave. I cannot bear to live to see my forty-three years of service to this community overshadowed by what will undoubtedly follow. I ask you to forgive me for the unforgivable.

Emmet Woolsey

I re-read Emmet Woolsey’s letter a half a dozen times. I felt uneasy holding this letter from a man who could not live with himself, who had been dead for three days. I knew it was evidence of a sort and should be turned over to the police; I also knew I should show it to John; but both actions seemed a violation of some kind of trust Woolsey had placed in me. I thought about how unwelcome an apology may sometimes be. I wasn’t in a forgiving kind of mood.

I called Frank. It was early, but Sorenson answered on the second ring and told me they were both up and about. He handed the phone over to Frank.

“Good morning!”

His voice said he was in a cheerful frame of mind, and I immediately felt bad about calling. Maybe I wouldn’t tell him about the letter after all.

“Good morning, Frank,” I said, trying to lighten my tone.

“What’s wrong?”

I wondered if I was ever going to be able to fool anybody about anything.

“Emmet Woolsey mailed a letter to me; I guess it’s sort of a suicide note.” I read it to him.

“Hmm.”

I waited.

“They’re going to want to take it as evidence,” he said. “Do you have any problems with that?”

“None that I can’t live with, but I should show the note to John. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll call in and ask someone to come by your offices.” He paused, then asked, “Are you upset that Woolsey picked you to tell it to?”

“A little. I feel awkward. I can’t forgive him. Not without knowing more than he’s told me here. I feel sorry for him, but that’s different.”

“Somebody apparently had something on him. Guess we better try to find out why he was keeping things hidden about this case. I’ll have somebody look into his background. Could you try back issues of the Express from around June and July 1955?”

“Sure, I’ll go downstairs to the morgue and see what I can find out.”

We said good-bye, and I got up and took the letter over to John Walters. He read it, grunted, walked over to a copier and ran off a couple of copies. “Here,” he said, shoving the original and one copy toward me. “I don’t even want to touch it. Goddamn coward worried about his fucking reputation. Makes me want to puke. You gonna find out who had his nuts in a vise?”

“Ooohwee. And I thought I was being stingy with him. Yeah, I want to know what he was afraid of. Must have been pretty bad if he stuck by his story through over thirty years of pestering by O’Connor.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going soft on me, Irene. Are you forgetting what’s happened because this bastard didn’t have the balls to speak up?”

“No, I’m not likely to forget it.”

“Hummph. Well, he’s not getting a dime’s worth of sympathy from me. You just think about Jennifer Owens’s mother not knowing what happened to her daughter for thirty-five years. Go on, get back to work.”

I went back to my desk and called MacPherson to bring him up to date and thank him for his help. Next I tried to call Barbara, but ended up just leaving a message for her at the nurses’ station; apparently she had stepped out of Kenny’s room for a moment. They wouldn’t tell me anything about Kenny over the phone, except that he was still in intensive care.

I gathered the mail into a neat stack, and threw away the out-and-out junk. As I cleared off O’Connor’s desk, I thought to myself that it was unnatural for it to be so clean. He never would have left it so orderly. I still felt like Goldilocks sitting in Papa Bear’s chair, but I wasn’t as uncomfortable as I had been a few days before.

I grabbed a notebook and headed down to the place where all the back issues of the Express were on file, as back issues were at any newspaper, in that place where dead news remains unburied-the morgue. And now, I thought, we’ll see if Lazarus will rise.