Never Look Away

ONE

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Reeves?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“This is David Harwood at the Standard,” I said.

“Yeah, David.” This was the thing with politicians. You called them “Mister” and they called you by your first name. Didn’t matter whether it was the president of the United States or some flunky on the utilities commission. You were always Bob or Tom or David. Never Mr. Harwood.

“How are you today?” I asked.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

I decided to counter curt with charm. “Hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time. I understand you just got back. What was it, just yesterday?”

“Yeah,” Stan Reeves said.

“And this trip was a-what? A fact-finding mission?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“To England?”

“Yeah,” he said. It was like pulling teeth, getting anything out of Reeves. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that he didn’t like me very much. Didn’t like the stories I’d been writing about what could end up being Promise Falls’ newest industry.

“So what facts did you pick up?” I asked.

He sighed, as if resigned to answering a couple of questions, at least. “We found that for-profit prisons have been operating in the United Kingdom successfully for some time. Wolds Prison was set up to be run that way in the early nineties.”

“Did Mr. Sebastian accompany you as you toured the prison facilities in England?” I asked. Elmont Sebastian was the president of Star Spangled Corrections, the multimillion-dollar company that wanted to build a private prison just outside Promise Falls.

“I believe he was there for part of the tour,” Stan Reeves said. “He helped facilitate a few things for the delegation.”

“Was there anyone else from the Promise Falls council who made up this delegation?” I asked.

“As I’m sure you already know, David, I was the council’s appointee to go to England and see how their operations have been over there. There were a couple of people from Albany, of course, and a representative from the state prison system.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what did you take from the trip, bottom line?”

“It confirmed a lot of what we already know. That privately run correctional facilities are more efficient than state-run facilities.”

“Isn’t that largely because they pay their people far less than the state pays its unionized staff, and that they don’t get nearly the same benefits as state employees?”

A tired sigh. “You’re a broken record, David.”

“That’s not an opinion, Mr. Reeves,” I said. “That’s a well-documented fact.”

“You know what else is a fact? It’s a fact that wherever unions have their clutches in, they’ve been taking the state to the cleaners.”

“It’s also a fact,” I said, “that privately run prisons have had higher rates of assaults on guards, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence, largely due to reduced staffing levels. Did you find this to be the case in England?”

“You’re just like those do-gooders out at Thackeray who lose sleep when one inmate tears into another.” Some of the faculty at Thackeray College had banded together to fight the establishment of a private prison in Promise Falls. It was becoming a cause célèbre at the school. Reeves continued, “If one prisoner ends up sticking a shiv in another prisoner, you want to explain to me exactly how that hurts society?”

I scribbled down the quote. If Reeves ever denied it later, I had him on my digital recorder. The thing was, making this comment public would only boost his popularity.

“Well, it would hurt the operators of the prison,” I countered, “since they get paid by the state per inmate. They start killing each other off, there goes your funding. Do you have any thoughts on Star Spangled Corrections’ aggressive congressional lobbying for stiffer penalties, particularly longer sentences for a variety of crimes? Isn’t that a bit self-serving?”

“I’ve got a meeting to get to,” he said.

“Has Star Spangled Corrections settled on a site yet? I understand Mr. Sebastian is considering a few of them.”

“No, nothing definite yet. There are a number of possible sites in the Promise Falls area. You know, David, this means a lot of jobs. You understand? Not just for the people who’d work there, but lots of local suppliers. Plus, there’s a good chance a facility here would take in convicted criminals from outside our area, so that means family coming here to visit, staying in local hotels, buying from local merchants, eating in local restaurants. You get that, right?”

“So it’d be like a tourist attraction,” I said. “Maybe they could put it next to our new roller-coaster park.”

“Were you always a dick, or is it something they teach in journalism school?” Reeves asked.

I decided to get back on track. “Star Spangled’s going to have to come before council for rezoning approval on whatever site they pick. How do you plan to vote on that?”

“I’ll have to weigh the merits of the proposal and vote accordingly, and objectively,” Reeves said.

“You’re not worried about the perception that your vote may have already been decided?”

“Why would anyone perceive such a thing?” Reeves asked.

“Well, Florence for one.”

“Florence? Florence who?”

“Your trip to Florence. You extended your trip. Instead of coming back directly from England, you went to Italy for several days.”

“That was… that was all part of my fact-finding mission.”

“I didn’t realize that,” I said. “Can you tell me which correctional facilities you visited in Italy?”

“I’m sure I could have someone get that list to you.”

“You can’t tell me now? Can you at least tell me how many Italian prisons you visited?”

“Not offhand,” he said.

“Was it more than five?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Less than five, then,” I said. “Was it more than two?”

“I’m really not-”

“Did you visit a single correctional facility in Italy, Mr. Reeves?”

“Sometimes you can accomplish what you need to accomplish without actually going to these places. You set up meetings, meet off-site-”

“Which Italian prison officials did you meet with off-site?”

“I really don’t have time for this.”

“Where did you stay in Florence?” I asked, even though I already knew.

“The Maggio,” Reeves said hesitantly.

“I guess you must have run into Elmont Sebastian while you were there.”

“I think I did run into him in the lobby once or twice,” he said.

“Weren’t you, in fact, Mr. Sebastian’s guest?”

“Guest? I was a guest of the hotel, David. You need to get your facts straight.”

“But Mr. Sebastian-Star Spangled, Inc., to be more precise-paid for your airfare to Florence and your accommodation, isn’t that correct? You flew out of Gatwick on-”

“What the fuck is this?” Reeves asked.

“Do you have a receipt for your Florence stay?” I asked.

“I’m sure I could put my hands on it if I had to, but who saves every single receipt?”

“You’ve only been home a day. I’m guessing if you have one it hasn’t had a chance to get lost yet.”

“Look, my receipts are none of your fucking business.”

“So if I were to write a story that says Star Spangled Corrections paid for your Florence stay, you’d be able to produce that receipt to prove me wrong.”

“You know, you got a hell of a lot of nerve tossing around accusations like this.”

“My information is that your stay, including taxes and tickets to the Galleria dell’Accademia and anything out of your minibar, came to three thousand, five hundred and twenty-six euros. Does that sound about right?”

The councilman said nothing.

“Mr. Reeves?”

“I’m not sure,” he said quietly. “It might have been about that. I’d have to check. But you’re way off base, suggesting that Mr. Sebastian footed the bill for this.”

“When I called the hotel to confirm that your bill was being looked after by Mr. Sebastian, they assured me that everything was covered.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“I have a copy of the bill. It was charged to Mr. Sebastian’s account.”

“How the hell did you get that?”

I wasn’t about to say, but a woman who didn’t like Reeves very much had phoned from a blocked number earlier in the day to tell me about the hotel bill. I was guessing she worked either at city hall or in Elmont Sebastian’s office. I couldn’t get a name out of her.

“Are you saying Mr. Sebastian didn’t pay your bill?” I asked. “I’ve got his Visa number right here. Should we check it out?”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Mr. Reeves, when this prison proposal comes before council, will you be declaring a conflict of interest, given that you’ve accepted what amounts to a gift from the prison company?”

“You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” Reeves said. “A real piece of shit.”

“Is that a no?”

“A goddamn piece of shit.”

“I’ll take that as a confirmation.”

“You want to know what really gets me?”

“What’s that, Mr. Reeves?”

“This high-and-mighty attitude from someone like you, working for a newspaper that’s turned into a fucking joke. You and those eggheads from Thackeray and anyone else you got on your side getting your shorts in a knot because someone might outsource running a prison, when you outsource fucking reporting. I remember when the Promise Falls Standard was actually a paper people had some respect for. Of course, that was before its circulation started going to shit, when it actually had journalists reporting on local events, before the Russell family started farming out some of its reporting duties to offshore help, getting reporters in goddamn India for Christ’s sake to watch committee meetings over the Internet and then write up what happened at them for a fraction of what it would cost to pay reporters here to do the job. Any paper that does something like that and still thinks it can call itself a newspaper is living in a fool’s paradise, my friend.”

He hung up.

I put down my pen, took off my headset, hit the stop button on my digital recorder. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, right up until the end there.

The phone had only been on the receiver for ten seconds when it rang.

I put the headset to my ear without hooking it on. “Standard. Harwood.”

“Hey.” It was Jan.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Okay.”

“You at work?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Jan paused. “I was just thinking of that movie. You know the one? With Jack Nicholson?”

“I need more,” I said.

“Where he’s a germaphobe, always takes plastic cutlery to the restaurant?”

“Okay, I know the one,” I said. “You were thinking about that?”

“Remember that scene, where he goes to the shrink’s office? And all those people are sitting there? And he says the line, the one from the title? He says, ‘What if this is as good as it gets?’”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I remember. That’s what you’re thinking about?”

She shifted gears. “So what about you? What’s the scoop, Woodward?”

TWO

Maybe there were clues earlier that something was wrong and I’d just been too dumb to notice them. It’s not like I’d be the first journalist who fancied himself a keen observer of current events, but didn’t have a clue when it came to the home front. But still, it seemed as though Jan’s mood had changed almost overnight.

She was tense, short-tempered. Minor irritants that would not have fazed her in the past now were major burdens. One evening, while we were getting ready to make up some lunches for the next day, she burst into tears upon discovering we were out of bread.

“It’s all too much,” she said to me that night. “I feel like I’m at the bottom of this well and I can’t climb out.”

At first, because I’m a man and don’t really know-and don’t really want to know-what the hell’s going on with women in a physiological sense, I thought maybe it was some kind of hormonal thing. But I realized soon enough it was more than that. Jan was, and I realize this is not what you’d call a clinical diagnosis, down in the dumps. Depressed. But depressed did not necessarily mean depression.

“Is it work?” I asked her one night in bed, running my hand on her back. Jan, with one other woman, managed the office for Bertram’s Heating and Cooling. “Has something happened there?” The latest economic slowdown meant fewer people were buying new air conditioners or furnaces, but that actually meant more repair work for Ernie Bertram. And sometimes, she and Leanne Kowalski, that other woman, didn’t always see eye to eye.

“Work’s fine,” she said.

“Have I done something?” I asked. “If I have, tell me.”

“You haven’t done anything,” she said. “It’s just… I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could make it all go away.”

“Make what all go away?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

A couple of days later, I suggested maybe she should talk to someone. Starting with our family doctor.

“Maybe there’s a prescription or something,” I said.

“I don’t want to take drugs,” Jan said, then quickly added, “I don’t want to be somebody I’m not.”

After work on the day she called me at the paper, Jan and I drove up together to pick up Ethan at his grandparents’ place.

My mother and father, Arlene and Don Harwood, lived in one of the older parts of Promise Falls in a two-story red-brick house that was built in the forties. They didn’t buy until the fall of 1971, when my mother was pregnant with me, and they’d had the place ever since. Mom had made some noises about selling it after Dad retired from the city’s building department four years ago, arguing that they didn’t need all this space, a lawn to cut, a garden to maintain, that they could get along just fine in a condo or an apartment, but Dad wouldn’t have any of it. He’d go mad cooped up in a condo. He had his workshop out back in a separate two-car garage, and spent more time in there than in the house, if you didn’t count sleeping. He was a relentless putterer, always looking for something to fix or tear down and do all over again. A door or cupboard hinge never had a chance to squeak twice. Dad practically carried a can of WD-40 with him at all times. A stuck window, a dripping tap, a running toilet, a jiggly doorknob-none of them stood a chance in our house. Dad always knew exactly what tool he needed, and could have strolled into his garage blindfolded to lay his hands on it.

“He drives me nuts,” Mom would say, “but in forty-two years of marriage I don’t think we’ve had even one mosquito get through a hole in a screen.”

Dad’s problem was that he couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as diligent about their duties as he was with his. He was intolerant of other people’s mistakes. As a city building inspector, he was a major pain in the ass to every Promise Falls contractor and developer. Behind his back they called him Don Hardass. When he got wind of that, he had some business cards made up with his new nickname.

He found it difficult not to share his wisdom about how to make this a more perfect world, in every respect.

“When you leave the spoons to dry like this without turning them over, the water ends up leaving a mark,” he’d say to my mother, holding up one of the offensive items of cutlery.

“Piss off,” Arlene would say, and Don would grumble and go out to the garage.

Their squabbling masked a deep love for each other. Dad never forgot a birthday or anniversary or Valentine’s Day.

Jan and I knew, when we left Ethan with his grandparents, as we did through the week when we both went to work, that he wasn’t going to be exposed to any hazards. No frayed light cords, no poisonous chemicals left where he could get his hands on them, no upturned carpet edges he could run and trip on. And their rates just happened to be more reasonable than any nursery schools in the area.

“Mom called me after you,” I said to Jan, who was driving in her Jetta wagon. It was nearly five-thirty. We’d rendezvoused at our house so we could pick up Ethan in one car, together.

Jan looked over, said nothing, figured I’d continue. “She said Dad’s really done something over the top this time.”

“She say what?”

“No. I guess she wanted to build the suspense. I got hold of Reeves today, asked him about his hotel bill in Florence.”

Jan said, without actually sounding all that interested, “How’s that story coming?”

“Some woman called me anonymously. She had some good stuff. What I need to know now is how many others on the council are taking bribes or gifts or trips or whatever from this private prison corporation so that they’ll give them the nod when the rezoning comes up for a vote.”

And you thought all the fun’d be over when Finley dropped out of politics.” A reference to our former mayor, whose night with a teenage hooker didn’t sit well with his constituents. Maybe, if you were Roman Polanski, you could screw someone a third your age and still win an Oscar, but if you were Randall Finley, it kind of played hell with your bid for Congress.

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing about politics,” I said. “When one dick-head leaves the scene, half a dozen others rush in to fill the vacancy.”

“Even if you get the story,” Jan said, “will they print it?”

I looked out my window. I made a fist and tapped it lightly on my knee. “I don’t know,” I said.

Things had changed at the Standard. It was still owned by the Russell family, and a Russell still sat in the publisher’s chair, and there were various Russells scattered about the newsroom and other departments. But the family’s commitment to keeping it a real newspaper had shifted in the last five years. The overriding concern now, with declining revenues and readership, was survival. The paper had always kept a reporter in Albany to cover state issues, but now relied on wires. The weekly book section had been killed, reduced to a page in the back end of Style. The editorial cartoonist, tremendously gifted at lampooning and harpooning local officials, was given the heave-ho, and now we picked up any number of national, syndicated cartoonists who’d probably never even heard of Promise Falls, let alone visited it, to fill the hole on the editorial page. Oh yeah, the editorials. We used to run two a day, written by staffers. Now, we ran “What Others Think,” a sampling of editorials from across the country. We didn’t think for ourselves more than three or four times a week.

We no longer had our own movie critic. Theater reviews were farmed out to freelancers. The courts bureau had been shut down, and only the most newsworthy trials got covered, provided we happened to know they were on.

But the most alarming indicator of our decline was sending reporting jobs offshore. I hadn’t thought it was possible, but when the Russells heard about how a paper in Pasadena had pulled it off, they couldn’t move quickly enough. They started with something as simple as entertainment listings. Why pay someone here fifteen to twenty bucks an hour to write up what’s going on around town when you could email all the info to some guy in India who’d put the whole thing together for seven dollars an hour?

When the Russells found how well that worked, they stepped it up.

Various city committees had a live Internet video feed. Why send a reporter? Why even pay one to watch it from the office? Why not get some guy named Patel in Mumbai to watch it, write up what he sees, then email his story back to Promise Falls, New York?

The paper was looking to save money any way it could. Advertising revenue was in freefall. The classified section had all but disappeared, losing out to online services like Craigslist. Many of the paper’s clients were becoming more selective, banking on fewer but costlier radio and TV spots instead of full- or even half-page ads. So what if you hired reporters to cover local events who’d never even set foot in your community? If it saved money, go for it.

While it wasn’t surprising to find that kind of mentality among the paper’s bean counters, it was pretty foreign in the newsroom. At least until now. As Brian Donnelly, the city editor and, more important, the publisher’s nephew, had mentioned to me only the day before, “How hard can it be to write down what people say at a meeting? Are we going to do a better job of it just because we’re sitting right there? Some of these guys in India, they take really good notes.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of this?” Jan asked, hitting the intermittent wipers to clear off some light rain.

“Yeah, sure, but I’m beating my head against the wall with Brian.”

“I’m not talking about work,” Jan said. “I’m talking about your parents. I mean, we see them every day. Your parents are nice enough and all, but there’s a limit. It’s like we’re being smothered or something.”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“You know we can never just drop Ethan off or pick him up at the end of the day. You have to go through the interrogation. ‘How was your day?’ ‘What’s new at work?’ ‘What are you having for dinner?’ If we’d just put him in day care, they wouldn’t give a shit, they’d just kick him out the door and we could go home.”

“Oh, that sounds better. A place where they don’t actually have any interest in your kid.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“Look,” I said, not wanting to have a fight, because I wasn’t sure what was going on here, “I know most days you get off work before I do, so you’ve been doing pickup duty, but in another month it won’t even matter. Ethan’ll be going to kindergarten, which means we won’t be taking him to my parents’ every day, which means you won’t have to endure this daily interrogation you suddenly seem so concerned about.” I shook my head. “It’s not like we can take turns dropping him off at your parents’ place.”

Jan shot me a look. I regretted the comment instantly, wished I could take it back.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a cheap shot.”

Jan said nothing.

“I’m sorry.”

Jan put her blinker on, turned in to my parents’ driveway. “Let’s see what your dad’s done now.”

Ethan was in the living room, watching Family Guy. I walked in, turned off the set, called out to Mom, who was in the kitchen, “You can’t let him watch that.”

“It’s just a cartoon,” she said, loud enough to be heard over running water.

“Pack up your stuff,” I told Ethan, and walked back into the kitchen, where Mom stood at the sink with her back to me. “In one episode the dog tries to have sex with the mother. In another, the baby takes a machine gun to her.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “No one would make a cartoon like that. You’re really turning into your father.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re wound too tight.”

“It’s not The Flintstones anymore,” I said. “Actually, cartoons now are better. But a lot of them are not for four-year-olds.”

Ethan shuffled into the kitchen, looking tired and a little bewildered. I was surprised he wasn’t asking about food. Mom had probably already given him something.

Jan, who had come in a few seconds after me, knelt down to Ethan. “Hey, little man,” she said. She looked into his backpack. “You sure you have everything here?”

He nodded.

“Where’s your Transformer?”

Ethan thought for a moment, then bolted back into the living room. “In the cushions!” he shouted.

“What’s Dad done this time?” I asked.

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Mom said, taking a pot from the sink and setting it on the drying rack.

“What?”

“He’s out in the garage. Get him to show you his latest project. So, Jan, how was work today? Things good?”

I walked through the light rain to the garage. The double-wide door was open, Dad’s blue Crown Victoria, one of the last big sedans from Detroit, parked in there. My mother’s fifteen-year-old Taurus sat in the driveway. Both cars had kid safety seats in the back for when they had Ethan.

Dad was tidying his workbench when I walked in. He’s taller than me if he stands up straight, but he’s spent most of his life looking down-inspecting things, trying to find tools-so that he’s permanently round-shouldered. He still has a full head of hair, which is something of a comfort to me, even if his did start going gray when he was barely forty.

“Hey,” he said.

“Mom said you have something to show me.”

“She needs to mind her own business.”

“What is it?”

He waved a hand, which I wasn’t sure was a dismissal or surrender. But when he opened up the passenger door and took out something to show me, I realized he was going to share his latest project.

It was several white pieces of cardboard, about the size of a piece of regular printer paper. They looked like they might be the card sheets they slide into new shirts. Dad saved all that stuff.

He handed the small stack to me and said, “Check it out.”

Written on each one, in heavy black marker, all in capitals, was a different phrase. They included TURN SIGNAL BROKEN?, STOP RIDING MY ASS, TAILLIGHT OUT, HEADLIGHT OUT, SPEED KILLS, STOP SIGNS MEAN STOP, AND GET OFF THE PHONE!

They looked like the cue cards you used to see the crew holding up for Johnny Carson.

Dad said, “The STOP RIDING MY ASS one I did with bigger letters because they’ve got to be able to see it through my rear window, and I’m up in the front seat. But if they’re tailgating that close, they’ll probably see it.”

I looked at him, at a loss for words.

“How many times you seen some jackass do something stupid and you wish you could tell him? I keep these in the car, pick out the right one, hold it up to the window, maybe people will start to realize their mistakes.”

I’d found some words. “You installing bulletproof glass?”

“What?”

“You flash these, someone’s going to shoot you.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Okay, so let’s say it’s you. You’re driving down the road and someone shows a sign like that to you.”

Dad studied me. “That’d never happen. I’m a good driver.”

“Work with me.”

He pushed his lips in and out a moment. “I’d probably try to run the son of a bitch off the road into the ditch.”

I took the cards from him and ripped them, one by one, in half, then dropped them in the metal garbage bin. Dad sighed.

Jan came out the back door with Ethan. They walked up the side of the house to the Jetta and Jan started getting Ethan strapped into the safety seat.

“Guess we’re going,” I said.

“Your problem,” Dad said, “is you’re afraid to shake things up. Like that new prison they want to build. That’d be a real shot in the arm for the town.”

“Sure. Maybe we could get a nuclear waste storage facility while we’re at it.”

I got into the Jetta next to Jan. She backed out, pointed us in the direction of our house. Her jaw was set firmly and she wouldn’t look at me.

“You okay?” I asked.

Jan said nothing all the way home, and very little through dinner. Later, she said she would put Ethan to bed, something we often did together.

I went upstairs as she was tucking our son in.

“You know who loves you more than anyone in the whole world?” she said to him.

“You?” Ethan said in his tiny voice.

“That’s right,” Jan whispered to him. “You remember that.”

Ethan said nothing, but I thought I could hear his head moving on his pillowcase.

“If someone ever said I didn’t love you, that wouldn’t be true. Do you understand?”

“Yup,” Ethan said.

“You sleep tight and I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Can I have a drink of water?” Ethan said.

“No more stalling. Go to sleep.”

I slipped into our bedroom so I wouldn’t be standing there when Jan came out.

THREE

“Check it out,” said Samantha Henry, a general assignment reporter who sat next to me in the Standard newsroom.

I wheeled over on my chair and looked at her computer monitor. Close enough to read it, but not so close she might think I was smelling her hair.

“This just came in from one of the guys in India, who was watching a planning committee meeting about a proposed housing development.” The committee was grilling the developer about how small the bedrooms appeared to be on the plans. “Okay, so read this para right here,” Samantha said, pointing.

“‘Mr. Councilor Richard Hemmings expressed consternation that the rooms did not meet the proper requirements for the swinging of a cat.’” I stared at it a moment and grinned. “I should call my dad and ask if that’s actually written somewhere in the building code. ‘A bedroom must be large enough that if you are standing in the center, grasping a cat by the tail, its head will not hit any of the four walls when you are spinning with your arm fully extended.’”

“Stuff’s coming in like this every day,” Samantha said. “What the fuck do they think they’re doing? You saw the correction we ran the other day?”

“Yeah,” I said. The city did not actually own any barns, and no city employees had actually closed the barn doors after the horses had left. It was bad enough our reporters in India were unfamiliar with American idioms, but when they got past the copy desk right here in the office, something was very very wrong.

“Don’t they care?” Samantha asked.

I pushed away from the monitor, leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers behind my head. I always felt a little more relaxed when I moved away from Sam. The thing we had was a long time ago, but you started sharing a computer screen too often and people were going to talk.

It felt like the chair’s back support was going to fail, and I shifted forward, put my hands on the arms. “You have to ask?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “I’ve been here fifteen years. I asked the M.E.’s assistant for a new pen and she wanted to see an empty one first. Swear to God. Half the time, you go in the ladies’ room, there’s no goddamn toilet paper.”

“I hear the Russells may be looking to sell,” I said. It was the number one rumor going around the building. “If they can pare down the costs, get the place showing a profit, they’ll have an easier time unloading the place.”

Samantha Henry rolled her eyes. “Seriously, who’d buy us in this climate?”

“I’m not saying it’s happening. I just heard some talk.”

“I can’t believe they’d sell. This place has been run by one family for generations.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a very different generation running it now than ten years ago. You won’t find ink running through the veins of anyone on the board these days.”

“Madeline used to be a reporter,” Samantha said, referring to our publisher. She didn’t need to remind me how Madeline got her start here.

“Used to be,” I said.

What with papers shutting down all over the country, everyone was on edge. But Sam, in particular, was worried about her future. She had an eight-year-old daughter and no husband. They’d split up years ago, and she’d never gotten a dime of support from him. A former Standard staffer, he’d left to work on a paper in Dubai. It’s pretty hard to chase a guy down for money he owes you when he’s on the other side of the planet.

When she was newly divorced, with a baby, Sam put up a brave front. She could do this. Still have her career and raise a child. We didn’t sit next to each other back then, but we crossed paths often enough. In the cafeteria, at the bar after work. When we weren’t trading reporters’ usual complaints about editors who had held or cut their stories, she let down her guard about how tough things were for her and Gillian.

I guess I thought I could rescue her.

I liked Sam. She was sexy, funny, intellectually challenging. I liked Gillian. Sam and I started spending a lot of time together. I started spending a lot of nights at Sam’s. I fancied myself as more than a boyfriend. I was her white knight. I was the one who was going to make her life okay again.

I took it pretty hard when she dumped me.

“This is too fast,” she told me. “This is how I fucked things up last time. Moving too quickly, not thinking things through. You’re a great guy, but…”

I went into a funk I don’t think I really came out of until I met Jan. And now, all these years later, things were okay between Sam and me. But she was still a single mother, and things had never stopped being a struggle.

She lived paycheck to paycheck. Some weeks, she didn’t make it. She’d had the labor beat for years, but the paper could no longer afford to devote reporters to specific issues, so now she reported to general assignment, and couldn’t predict the hours she’d be working. It played hell with her babysitting. She was always scrambling to find someone to watch her daughter when a last-minute night assignment landed on her desk.

I didn’t have Sam’s week-to-week financial worries, but Jan and I talked often about what else I could do if I found myself without a job. Unemployment insurance only lasted so long. I-and Jan for that matter-was worth more dead since we signed up for life insurance a few weeks back. If the paper folded, I wondered if I should just step in front of a train so Jan would be up $300,000.

“David, you got a sec?”

I whirled around in my chair. It was Brian Donnelly, the city editor. “What’s up?”

He nodded his head in the direction of his office, so I got up and followed him. The way he made me trail after him, without turning or chatting along the way, made me feel like a puppy being dragged along by an invisible leash. I wasn’t even forty yet, but I saw Brian was part of the new breed around here. At twenty-six, he was management, having impressed the bosses not with journalistic credentials but with business savvy. Everything was “marketing” and “trends,” “presentation” and “synergy.” Every once in a while, he dropped “zeitgeist” into a sentence, which invariably prompted me to say “Bless you.” The sports and entertainment editors were both under thirty, and there was this sense, at least among those of us who had been at the paper for ten or more years, that the place was gradually being taken over by children.

Brian slipped in behind his desk and asked me to close the door before I sat down.

“So, this prison thing,” he said. “What have you really got?”

“The company gave Reeves an all-expenses-paid vacation in Italy after the UK junket,” I said. “Presumably, when Star Spangled’s proposal comes up before council, he’ll be voting on it.”

“Presumably. So he’s not actually in a conflict of interest yet, is he? If it hasn’t come up for a vote. If he abstains or something, then what do we really have here?”

“What are you saying, Brian? If a cop takes a payoff from a holdup gang to look the other way, it’s not a conflict until the bank actually gets robbed?”

“Huh?” said Brian. “We’re not talking about a bank holdup here, David.”

Brian wasn’t good with metaphors. “I’m trying to make a point.”

Brian shook his head, like he was trying to rid his brain of the last ten seconds of conversation. “Specifically about the hotel bill,” he said, “do we have it a hundred percent that Reeves didn’t pay for it? Or that he isn’t paying back Elmont Sebastian? Because in your story,” and now he was looking at his computer screen, tapping the scroll key, “you don’t actually have him denying it.”

“He called me a piece of shit instead.”

“Because we really need to give him a chance to explain himself before we run with this,” Donnelly said. “If we don’t, we could get our asses sued off.”

“I gave him a chance,” I said. “Where’s this coming from?”

“What? Where’s what coming from?”

I smiled. “It’s okay, I get it. You’re getting leaned on by She Who Must Be Obeyed.”

“You shouldn’t refer to the publisher that way,” Brian said.

“Because she’s your aunt?”

He had the decency to blush. “That has no bearing on this.”

“But I’m right about where this is coming from. Ms. Plimpton sent the word down,” I said.

While born a Russell, Madeline Plimpton had been married to Geoffrey Plimpton, a well-known Promise Falls realtor who’d died two years ago, at thirty-eight, of an aneurysm.

Madeline Plimpton, at thirty-nine, was the youngest publisher in the paper’s history. Brian was the son of her much older sister Margaret, who’d never had any interest in newspapers, and had instead pursued her dream of having a property worthy of the annual Promise Falls Home and Garden Tour. She managed to be on it every year, which I would never suggest, not for a moment, was because she was tour president.

Brian had never actually worked as a reporter, so you almost couldn’t blame him for not understanding the thrill of nailing a weasel like Reeves to the wall. But Madeline, when she was still a Russell, had worked as a general assignment reporter alongside me more than a decade ago. Not for long, of course. It was part of her crash course in learning the family business, and in no time she was moving up the ranks. Entertainment editor, then assistant managing editor, then M.E., all designed to get her ready to be publisher once her father, Arnett Russell, packed it in, which he had done four years ago. The fact that Madeline had, however briefly, worked in the trenches made her willingness to turn her back on journalism-to tiptoe around the Reeves story-all the more disheartening.

When Brian didn’t deny that his aunt was pulling the strings here, I said, “Maybe I should go talk to her.”

Brian held up his hands. “That’d be a very bad idea.”

“Why? Maybe I can make a better case for this story than you can.”

“David, listen, trust me here, that’s not a good plan. She’s this close to-”

“To what?”

“Forget it.”

“No. She’s this close to what?”

“Look, it’s a new era around here, okay? A newspaper is more than just a provider of news. We’re an… an… entity.”

“An entity. Like in Star Trek?”

He ignored that. “And entities have to survive. It’s not all about saving the world here, David. We’re trying to get out a paper. A paper that makes money, a paper that has a shot at being around a year from now, or a year after that. Because if we’re not making money, there’s not going to be anyplace to run your stories, no matter how important they may be. We can’t afford to run anything that’s not airtight, not these days. We’ve got to be sure before we go ahead with something, that’s all I’m telling you.”

“She’s this close to what, Brian? Firing me?”

He shook his head. “Oh, no, she couldn’t do that. She’d need some sort of cause.” He sighed. “How would you feel about a move to Style?”

I settled back in my chair, absorbed the implications. Before I could say anything, Brian added, “It’s a lateral move. You’d still be reporting, except it would be on the latest trends, health issues, the importance of flossing, that kind of shit. It wouldn’t be something you could file a grievance over.”

I breathed in and out a few times. “Why’s Madeline so worked up about the prison story? If I was writing about another Walmart coming into town, I could see her freaking out over lost ad dollars, but I kind of doubt Star Spangled Corrections is going to be running a bunch of full-page ads about weekly specials. ‘License plates fifty percent off!’ Or maybe, ‘Need your rocks split? Call the Promise Falls Pen.’ Come on, Brian, what’s she upset about? She buying the argument that this is going to mean jobs? More local jobs means more subscribers?”

“Yeah, there’s that,” Brian said.

“There’s something else?”

Now Brian took a few slow breaths. There was something he was debating whether to tell me.

“David, look, you didn’t hear this from me, but the thing is, if this prison sets up here, the Standard could wipe all its debts, have a fresh start. We’d all be able to feel a lot more secure about our jobs.”

“How? Are they going to get inmates to write the stories? Let them start covering local news for free as part of their rehabilitation?” Even as I said it, I thought, Not too loud. Give the bosses around here an idea-

“Nothing like that,” Brian said. “But if the paper sold Star Spangled Corrections the land to build their prison, that would help the bottom line.”

My mouth was open for a good ten seconds. I’d been a total moron.

Why had this never occurred to me? The twenty acres the Russell family owned on the south side of Promise Falls had for years been the rumored site of a new building for the Standard. But that talk stopped about five years ago when earnings began to fall.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Brian said. “And if you go out there and breathe a word of this to anyone, we’re both fucked. Do you understand? Do you understand why anything we run has to be nailed down, I mean really nailed down? If you find something good, really good, she won’t have any choice but to run it because if she doesn’t, the TV station’ll find out and they’ll go with it, or the Times Union in Albany will get wind of it.”

I got up from my chair.

“What are you going to do, David? Tell me you’re not going to do anything stupid.”

I surveyed his office, like I was sizing it up for redecorating. “I’m not sure this room meets the cat-swinging code, Brian. You might want to look into that.”

I sat at my desk and stewed for half an hour. Samantha Henry asked me five times what had happened in Brian’s office, but I waved her off. I was too angry to talk. Despite Brian’s warning not to, I was seriously considering walking into the publisher’s office, asking her if this was what she really wanted, that if we had to abandon our principles to save the paper, was the paper really worth saving?

In the end, I did nothing.

Maybe this was how it was going to be. You came in, you churned out enough copy to fill the space, didn’t matter what it was, you took your paycheck, you went home. I’d worked at a paper like that-in Pennsylvania-before coming back to the hometown rag. There’d always been papers like that. I’d been naïve enough to think the Standard would never turn into one of them.

But we were hardly unique. What was happening to us was happening to countless other papers across the country. What might buy us some time was the Russell family’s ace in the hole-a huge tract of land it hoped to sell to one of the country’s biggest private prison conglomerates.

If things didn’t work out here, maybe I could get a job as a bull. Wasn’t that what inmates called guards?

I picked up the phone, hit the speed dial for Bertram Heating and Cooling. If I couldn’t save the state of journalism, maybe I could put a bit of effort into my marriage, which had been showing signs of wear lately.

A voice that was not Jan’s said, “Bertram’s.” It was Leanne Kowalski. She had the perfect voice for someone working at an air-conditioning firm. Icy.

“Hey, Leanne,” I said. “It’s David. Jan there?”

“Hang on.” Leanne wasn’t big on small talk.

The line seemed to go dead, then Jan picked up and said, “Hey.”

“Leanne seems cheery today.”

“No kidding.”

“Why don’t we see if my parents can hang on to Ethan for a couple of extra hours, we’ll go out for a bite to eat. Just the two of us. Rent a movie for later.” I paused. “I could get into Body Heat.” Jan’s favorite film. And I never got tired of the steamy love scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.

“I guess,” she said.

“You don’t sound very excited.”

“Actually, yeah,” said Jan, warming to the idea. “Where were you thinking for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Preston’s?” A steakhouse. “Or the Clover?” A bit on the pricey side, but if the newspaper business was going into the dumper, maybe we should go while we could still afford it.

“What about Gina’s?” Jan asked.

Our favorite Italian place. “Perfect. If we go around six, we probably won’t need a reservation, but I’ll check just to be sure.”

“Okay.”

“I could pick you up at work, we’ll go back for your car later.”

“What if you get me drunk so you can take advantage of me?”

That sounded more like the Jan I knew.

“Then I’ll drive you to work in the morning.”

Taking a shortcut through the pressroom on the way to the parking lot, I spotted Madeline Plimpton.

It was the pressroom that most made this building feel like a real newspaper. It was the engine room of a battleship. And if the Standard ever ceased to be a paper, these monstrous presses-which moved newsprint through at roughly fifty feet per second and could pump out sixty thousand copies in an hour-would be the last thing standing, the final thing to be moved out of here. We’d already lost the composing room, where the paper’s pages had been, literally, pasted up. It had vanished once editors started laying out their own pages on a computer screen.

I saw Madeline up on the “boards,” which was pressman-speak for the catwalks that ran along the sides, and through, the presses, which were not actually massive rollers, but dozens upon dozens of smaller ones that led the never-ending sheets of newsprint on a circuitous route up and down and over and under until they miraculously appeared at the end of the line as a perfectly collated newspaper. The machinery had been undergoing some maintenance, and a coverall-clad pressman was directing Madeline’s attention to the guts of one part of the presses, which ran from one end of the hundred-foot room to the other.

I didn’t want to pass up this opportunity to speak to her directly, but I knew better than to clamber up the metal steps. The pressmen could be a bit sensitive about that sort of thing. They weren’t as hard-line as they used to be, but the men-and handful of women-who ran and maintained the presses were staunch unionists. If someone from anywhere else in the paper got up on the boards without their permission-especially management-it suddenly got a lot easier to carry on a conversation. The presses would stop dead. And they wouldn’t start running again until the trespassers left.

But the pressmen, while still a force to be reckoned with, had softened with the times. They knew newspapers were in a tough period from which they might never recover. And the people who worked in this room found it difficult to dislike Madeline Plimpton. She’d always been able to connect with the average working guy, and knew the names of everyone who worked in here.

Madeline was in her publisher’s outfit: a navy knee-length skirt and matching jacket that was not only impervious to printer’s ink, but set off her silver-blonde hair. She was a curiosity in some ways. Designer duds, but down here on the boards, I wondered if, in her heart, she wouldn’t have been more comfortable in the tight jeans she’d worn as a reporter. She’d look just as good in them today as she did then. I’d only seen Madeline age in the time since her husband had died, and even after that she’d managed to keep any new lines in her face to a minimum.

I managed to catch her eye when she glanced down.

“David,” she said. It was normally deafening in here, but the presses weren’t currently in operation, so I could hear her.

“Madeline,” I said. Considering that we’d come through the newsroom together, years earlier, it had never occurred to me to call her by anything other than her first name. “You got a minute?”

She nodded, said something to the pressman, and descended the metal staircase. She knew better than to ask me to join her up there. The boards were not a place to hang out.

Once she was on the floor, I said, “This Reeves story is solid.”

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“Please,” I said. “I get what’s going on. We like this new prison. We don’t want to make waves. We act real nice and play down local opposition to this thing and we get to sell them the land they need to build.”

Something flickered in Madeline’s eyes. Maybe she’d figure out Brian had told me. Fuck him.

“But this will end up biting us in the ass later, Madeline. Readers, they may not get it right away, but over time, they’ll start figuring out that we don’t care about news anymore, that we’re just a press release delivery system, something that keeps the Target flyer from getting wet, a place where the mayor can see a picture of himself handing out a check to the Boy Scouts. We’ll still carry car crashes and three-alarm fires and we’ll do the annual pieces on the most popular Halloween costumes and what New Year’s resolutions prominent locals are making, but we won’t be a fucking newspaper. What’s the point in doing all this if we don’t care what we are anymore?”

Madeline looked me in the eye and managed a rueful smile. “How are things, David? How’s Jan?”

She had that way about her. You could blow your stack at her and she’d come back with a question about the weather.

“Madeline, just let us do our jobs,” I said.

The smile faded. “What’s happened to you, David?” she asked.

“I think a better question would be, what’s happened to you?” I said. “Remember the time you and I were covering that hostage taking, the one where the guy was holding his wife and kid, said he was going to kill them if the police didn’t back off?”

She didn’t say anything, but I knew she remembered.

“And we got in between the police and the house, and we saw everything that went down, the cops storming the place, beating the shit out of that guy, even after they’d found out he didn’t have a gun. Just about killed him. And the story we put together after, laying it all out just like it happened, even though we knew it was going to cause a shit storm with the police, which it sure as hell did when it ran. You remember the feeling?”

Her eyes went soft at the memory. “I remember.” She paused. “I miss it.”

“Some of us still care about that feeling. We don’t want to lose it.”

“And I don’t want to lose this paper,” Madeline Plimpton said. “You go to bed at night worried about whether your story will run. I go to bed worried about whether there’s going to be a paper to run it in. I may not sit in the newsroom anymore but I’m still on the front line.”

I didn’t have a comeback for that.

I parked out front of Bertram’s a little after five-thirty. Leanne Kowalski was standing in the parking lot like she was waiting for someone.

I nodded hello as I got out of the Accord and headed for the door. “How’s it going, Leanne?” I said. I’d met her enough times to have known better than to ask.

“Be a lot better if Lyall ever turns up,” she said. Leanne was one of those people who seemed to have only two moods. Annoyed, and irritated. She was tall and skinny, narrow hipped and small breasted, what my mother would call scrawny. Like she needed some meat on her bones. While she kept her black, lightly streaked hair short, she had bangs she had to keep moving out of her eyes.

“No wheels today?” I asked. There was usually an old blue Ford Explorer parked next to Jan’s Jetta any time I drove by.

“Lyall’s clunker’s in the shop, so he borrowed mine,” she said. “I don’t know where the hell he is. Was supposed to be here half an hour ago.” She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Honest to God.”

I offered up an awkward smile, then pulled on the office door handle, a cool blast of A/C hitting me as I went inside.

Jan was turning off her computer and slinging her purse over her shoulder.

“Leanne’s her usual cheerful self,” I said.

Jan said, “Tell me about it.”

We both happened to look out the window at the same time. Leanne’s Explorer had just careened into the lot. I could see Lyall’s round face behind the windshield, his sausagelike fingers gripped to the wheel. There was something bobbing about inside, and it took me a moment to realize it was a large dog.

Instead of getting in the passenger side, Leanne went to the driver’s door and yanked it open. She was pretty agitated, waving her hands, yelling at him. We couldn’t make out what she was saying, and as curious as we were to hear it, we didn’t want to venture outside and run the risk of getting in the middle of it.

Lyall slithered out of the driver’s seat. He was almost bald and heavy-set, and his tank top afforded us a generous glimpse of his armpits. He slunk around the front of the Explorer, Leanne shouting at him across the hood the entire time.

“Must be fun to be him,” I said as Lyall opened the passenger door and got in.

“I don’t know why she stays with him,” Jan said. “All she does is bitch about him. But you know, I think she actually loves the loser.”

Leanne got behind the wheel, threw the Explorer into reverse, and kicked up dust as she sped off down the road. Just before Leanne backed out, I saw Lyall give her a look. It reminded me of a beaten dog, just before it decides to get even.

Gina showed Jan and me to our table. Her restaurant had about twenty tables, but it was early and only three of them were taken.

“Mr. Harwood, Mrs. Harwood, so nice to see you again,” she said. Gina was a plump woman in her sixties whose eatery was a legend in the Promise Falls area. She, and she alone, possessed the recipe to the magical tomato sauce that accompanied most of the dishes. I hoped it was written down someplace, just in case.

“When did you tell your parents we’d be coming for Ethan?” Jan asked around the time we got our minestrone.

“Between eight and nine.”

She had her spoon in her right hand, and as she reached with her left for the salt her sleeve slipped back an inch, revealing something white wrapped about her left wrist.

“They’re really good with him,” she said.

That seemed something of a concession, given how she’d been talking about my parents only the other day.

“They are,” I said. It looked like a bandage wrapped around her wrist.

“Your mom’s in good shape. She still has lots of energy,” Jan said. “She’s, you know, youthful for her age.”

“My dad’s pretty good, too, except for being a bit, you know, insane.”

Jan didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “It’s good to know that if something… if something happened to me-or to you-they’d be able to help out a lot.”

“What are you talking about, Jan?”

“It’s just good to have things in place, that’s all.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you or to me,” I said. “What’s that on your wrist?”

She left her spoon in the bowl and pulled her sleeve down. “It’s nothing,” she said.

“It looks like a bandage.”

“I just nicked myself,” she said.

“Let me see.”

“There’s nothing to see,” she said. But I had reached across the table, taken hold of her hand, and pushed the sleeve up myself. The bandage was about an inch wide and went completely around her wrist.

“Jesus, Jan, what did you do?”

She yanked her arm away. “Let go of me!” she said, loud enough to make the people at the other tables, and Gina by the front door, glance our way.

“Fine,” I said quietly, taking my hand back. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Just tell me what happened.”

“I was cutting some vegetables for Ethan and the knife slipped,” she said. “Simple as that.”

I could see injuring your finger while cutting up carrots, but how did a knife jump up and get your wrist?

“Just drop it,” Jan said. “It’s not… what it looks like. I swear, it was totally an accident.”

“Jesus, Jan,” I said, shaking my head. “These days, lately, I don’t know… I’m worried sick about you.”

“You don’t have to be concerned,” she said curtly and studied her soup.

“But I am.” I swallowed. “I love you.”

Twice she started to speak and then stopped. Finally, she said, “I think, sometimes, it would be easier for you if you didn’t have both of us to worry about. If it was just you and Ethan.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Jan didn’t say anything.

I was frantic with concern, but there was anger, too, creeping into my voice. “Jan, answer me honestly here. What kind of thoughts are going through your head lately? Are you having-I don’t know how to put this-self-destructive thoughts?”

She kept looking at the soup, even though she wasn’t eating it. “I don’t know.”

I had this feeling that we had reached a moment. One of those moments in your life when you feel the ground moving beneath you. Like when someone calls and says a loved one has been rushed to the hospital. When you get called in by the boss and told they won’t be needing you anymore. Or you’re in a doctor’s office, and he’s looking at your chart, and he says you should sit down.

You’re finding out something that’s going to make everything that happens from here on different from everything that has gone before.

My wife is ill, I thought. Something’s happened to her. Something’s come undone. Something’s wrong with the circuitry.

“You don’t know,” I said. “So you might be thinking about hurting yourself in some way.”

Her eyes seemed to nod.

“How long have you been having thoughts like this?”

Jan’s lips went out, then in, as she considered the question. “A week or so. These thoughts come in, and I don’t know why they’re there, and I can’t seem to get rid of them. But I feel I’m this huge burden to you.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re everything to me.”

“I know I’m a drag on you, like an anchor.”

“That’s crazy.” I immediately regretted my choice of word. “Look, if you’ve been feeling this way a week or so… what’s brought this on? Has something happened? Something you haven’t told me about?”

“No, nothing,” she said unconvincingly.

“Has something happened at work?” After seeing Leanne going at it with Lyall, I wondered whether she was dragging Jan down somehow. “Is it Leanne? Is she making your life hell, too?”

“She’s… she’s always been hard to deal with, but I’ve learned to cope,” Jan said. “I can’t really explain it. I just started feeling this way. Feeling that I’m a burden, that I have no purpose.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You know what I think? I think maybe you need to talk to-”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Jan said.

“But if you just talked-”

“What, so they could put me away? Lock me up in some loony bin?”

“For God’s sake, Jan. Now you’re just being paranoid.” And again, I managed to pick a word I really should have avoided.

“Paranoid? Is that what you think I am?”

I sensed Gina approaching.

“That’s what you’d like, isn’t it?” Jan said, her voice rising again. “To be rid of me for good.”

Gina stopped, and we both looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” Gina said. “I was just going to-” she pointed at the soup bowls, “take those away, if you were finished.”

I nodded, and Gina removed them.

To Jan, I said, “Maybe we should go home and-”

But Jan was already pushing back her chair.

FOUR

I didn’t sleep much that night. I tried to talk to Jan on the way home, and before we went to bed, but she wasn’t interested in having any further conversations with me, particularly when I brought up the topic of her seeking some kind of professional help.

So I was pretty weary the following morning, walking with my head hanging so low on my way into the Standard building that I didn’t even notice the man blocking my path until I was nearly standing on his toes.

He was a big guy, and he seemed ready to burst out of his black suit, white shirt, and black tie. Over six feet tall, he had a shaved head and there was a tattoo peeking out from his shirt collar, but not enough for me to tell what it was. I put his age at around thirty, and the way he carried himself suggested that he was not to be messed with. He wore the suit as comfortably as Obama sporting bling.

“Mr. Harwood?” he said, an edge to his voice.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Sebastian would be honored if you would join him over coffee. He’d like a moment to have a word with you. He’s waiting down at the park. I’d be happy to drive you.”

“Elmont Sebastian?” I said. I’d been trying for weeks to get an interview with the president of Star Spangled Corrections. He didn’t return calls.

“Yes,” the man said. “By the way, my name is Welland. I’m Mr. Sebastian’s driver.”

“Sure,” I said. “What the hell.”

Welland led me around the corner and opened the door of a black Lincoln limo for me. I got into the back, settled into a gray leather seat, and waited while he got in behind the wheel. If this car had a glass partition, it wasn’t in position, so I asked Welland, “Have you worked long for Mr. Sebastian?”

“Just three months,” he said, pulling out into traffic.

“And what were you doing before that?”

“I was incarcerated,” Welland said without hesitation.

“Oh,” I said. “For very long?”

“Seven years, three months, and two days,” Welland said. “I served my time at one of Mr. Sebastian’s facilities near Atlanta.”

“Well,” I said as Welland steered the car in the direction of downtown.

“I’m a product of the excellent rehabilitation programs Star Spangled facilities offer,” he said. “When my sentence ended, Mr. Sebastian took a chance on me, gave me this job, and I think it says a lot about the stock he puts in second chances.”

“Do you mind my asking what you were serving time for?”

“I stabbed a man in the neck,” Welland said, glancing into the mirror.

I swallowed. “Did he live?” I asked.

“For a while,” Welland said, making a left.

He stopped the car by the park that sits just below the falls the town takes its name from. Welland came around, opened the door, and pointed me in the direction of a picnic table near the river’s edge. A distinguished-looking, silver-haired man in his sixties was seated on the bench with his back to the table, tossing popcorn to some ducks. When he spotted me and rose from the bench, I could see he was as tall as Welland, although more slender. He smiled broadly and extended a large sweaty hand.

I made a conscious effort not to wipe my hand on my pants.

“Mr. Harwood, thank you so much for coming. It’s a pleasure to be able to speak to you at last.”

“I’ve been available, Mr. Sebastian,” I said. “You’re the one who’s been hard to get hold of.”

He laughed. “Please, call me Elmont. May I call you David?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I love feeding the ducks,” he said. “I love watching them gobble it down.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“When I was a boy, I had a summer job working on a farm,” he said, tossing more kernels, watching the ducks lunge forward and fight over them. “I grew to love God’s creatures back then.”

He turned and pointed to the table, where a couple of take-out coffees sat in a box filled with creams, sugars, and wooden sticks. “I didn’t know what you took in yours, so it’s black. Help yourself to what you need.”

He turned himself around and tucked his legs under the table as I took a seat opposite him. I didn’t reach for a coffee, but did go into my pocket for a notepad and pen. “I’ve left several messages for you.”

Sebastian glanced across the park lawn at Welland, who was standing guard by the limo. “What do you think of him?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Model citizen.”

Another laugh. “Isn’t he, though? I’m very proud of him.”

“Why did you pay for Stan Reeves’s trip to Florence?” I asked. “Is that standard policy? To reward people in advance who’ll be voting on your plans?”

“That’s good.” He nodded. “You get right to it. I appreciate that. I like directness. I’m not one to pussyfoot around.”

“If you can find another way to say it, you can put off answering my question even longer.”

Elmont Sebastian chuckled and pried off one of the coffee lids and poured in three creams. “As it turns out, this is exactly why I was hoping to meet with you. To deal with that question. I brought you here to show you something.”

He reached into his suit jacket and withdrew an envelope that had his name written on it. The flap was tucked in, not glued. He pulled it back, withdrew a check, and handed it to me.

Was this how Elmont Sebastian operated? He cut reporters checks to back off?

I took it in my hand and saw that it was not made out to me, but to him. And it was written on the personal account of Stan Reeves, in the amount of $4,763.09. The date in the upper right corner was two days ago.

“I know you think you were onto something where Councilor Reeves is concerned,” he said. “That he accepted a free side trip to Italy from me, but nothing could be further from the truth. I had already rented a couple of rooms in Florence, expecting to entertain friends, but they had to cancel at the last minute, so I said to Mr. Reeves, while we were still in England, that he was welcome to take the extra room. And he was pleased to do so, but he made it very clear to me that he was not able to accept any gifts or gratuities. That would put him in an untenable position, and of course I understood completely. But the reservation was all paid for, so we made arrangements that he would settle up with me upon his return. And there’s the check that proves it.”

“Well,” I said, handing it back, “I’ll be damned.”

Elmont Sebastian smiled, revealing an uneven top row of teeth. “I would have felt terrible had you gone ahead with a story that impugned the reputation of Mr. Reeves. And myself, for that matter, but I am used to having my name besmirched by the press. But to see Mr. Reeves harmed-it would have been my fault entirely.”

“Isn’t it great that that’s all cleared up,” I said.

He returned the check to its envelope and slipped it back into his coat. “David, I’m very concerned you may not appreciate what my company is trying to do. I get the sense from your stories you think there’s something inherently evil about a private prison.”

A for-profit prison,” I said.

“I’m not denying it,” Sebastian said, taking a sip of coffee. “Profit is not a dirty word, you know. Nothing immoral with rewarding people financially for a job well done. And when it turns out to be a job that serves the community, that makes this country a better place to live, well, what’s wrong with that, exactly?”

“I’m not on a one-man crusade, Mr. Sebastian.” He looked hurt, my not calling him by his first name. “But there are a lot of people around here who don’t want your prison coming to Promise Falls. For a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that you’re taking what has traditionally been a government responsibility and turning it into a way to make money. The more criminals that get sentenced, the better your bottom line. Every convict sent to your facility is like another sale.”

He smiled at me as though I were a child. “How do you feel about funeral home directors, David? Is what they do wrong? They make money out of death. But they’re providing a service, and they’re entitled to make money doing that. Same for estate lawyers, the florists you call to send flowers to loved ones, the man who cuts the lawn at the cemetery. What I do is, David, is make America a better place. The good citizens of this country are entitled to feel safe when they go to bed at night, and they’re entitled to feel that way knowing they’re getting the best bang for their tax dollar. That’s what I do, with all the facilities I run across a great many of these wonderful United States of America. I help people sleep at night, and I help keep their taxes down.”

“And all you get out of it is, if last year is any indication, a $1.3 billion payoff.”

He shook his head in mock sadness. “Do you work for free at the Standard?” he asked.

“Your company’s actively involved in trying to see minimum sentences raised across the board. You’re telling me your only motive there is to make Americans sleep safe at night?”

Sebastian glanced at his watch. I thought it might be a Rolex, but the truth was, I’d never seen a real Rolex. But it looked expensive.

“I really must be going,” he said. “Would you like me to make a copy of the check for the purposes of your story?”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said.

“Well then, I guess I’ll be off.” Sebastian rose from the bench and started walking across the grass back to his limo. He brought his take-out cup with him, but even though he walked right past an open waste bin, he handed it to Welland to dispose of. Welland opened the door for him, closed it, got rid of the cup, and before getting into the driver’s seat he looked at me. He made his hand into a little gun, grinned, and took a shot at me.

The limo drove off. It was looking very much like they weren’t going to be giving me a lift back to the paper.

FIVE

Ten days after our dinner at Gina’s, Jan got us tickets to go to Five Mountains, the roller-coaster park. It seemed the perfect metaphor for her moods since our dinner at Gina’s. Up and down, up and down, up and down.

She’d been doing her best to be herself around Ethan in the ten days since she’d said I’d be happy to be rid of her, and my tactful suggestion that she might be paranoid. If Ethan had noticed his mother was not well, he hadn’t been curious enough to ask what was up. He usually asked whatever question came into his head, so that told me he really hadn’t noticed. Jan had taken a couple of days off from work in the last week, but I’d still taken Ethan to my parents’, thinking maybe what she needed was time to herself. She’d never actually come out and said she wanted to kill herself, but I still felt a low-level anxiety when I thought about her home alone.

The day after Gina’s, I snuck out of the office for a hastily booked afternoon appointment with our family doctor, Andrew Samuels. When I called, I told the nosy receptionist, who always wanted to know why you were seeing the doctor, I had a sore throat.

“Going around,” she said.

But when I was alone in the office with Dr. Samuels, I said, “It’s about Jan. She’s not herself lately. She’s down, she’s depressed. She said she thinks Ethan and I would be better off without her.”

“That’s not good,” he said. He had some questions. Had something happened recently? A death in the family? Financial problems? Trouble at work? A health matter she might not have told me about?

I had nothing.

Dr. Samuels said the best thing was for me to suggest she come and see him. You couldn’t diagnose a patient who wasn’t there.

I started pushing her to go talk to him. At one point, I said that if she refused to go, I’d go see him without her, never letting on I’d already done it. She was furious. But later she came into the kitchen and told me she’d made an appointment to see him the following day, which she was taking off.

The next evening, I asked how it had gone. I tried hard not to make it the first thing I asked when I saw her.

“It was good,” Jan said without hesitation.

“You told him how you’ve been feeling?”

Jan nodded.

And what did he say?”

“Mostly he just listened,” she said. “He let me talk. For a long time. I’m sure I ran into the next appointment, but he didn’t rush me at all.”

“He’s a good guy,” I said.

“So, I told him how I’ve been feeling, and I guess that’s about it.”

Surely there was more. “Did he have any suggestions? Did he write you out a prescription or anything?”

“He said there were some drugs I could try, but I told him I didn’t want anything. I’ve already told you that. I’m not going to become some drug addict.”

“So did he do anything?”

“He said I’d already taken the first positive step by coming to see him. And he said there were some people who were better at this sort of thing-”

“Psychiatrists?”

Jan nodded. “He said he’d refer me to one if I wanted.”

“So you said yes?”

Jan eyed my sharply. “I said no. You think I’m crazy?”

“No, I don’t think you’re crazy. You don’t have to be crazy to go see a psychiatrist.” I’d almost said “shrink.”

“I’m going to try to deal with this on my own.”

“But those thoughts you were having,” I said. “About whether to harm yourself.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “suicide.”

“What about them?”

“Are you still having those?”

“People have all kinds of thoughts,” she said, and walked out of the room.

That same day Jan ordered the tickets, an email arrived in my in-box at work:

“We spoke the other day. I know you’re looking into Star Spangled Corrections and how they’re trying to buy up all the votes on council. Reeves is not the only one they’ve treated to trips or gifts. They’ve gotten to practically everyone, so there’s no way this thing is not going to go through. I’ve got a list of what’s being paid out and who’s getting it. I don’t dare phone you or say who I am in this email, but I’m willing to meet you in person and give you all the evidence you need for this. Meet me tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. in the parking lot of Ted’s Lakeview General Store. Take 87 north to Lake George, up by the Adirondack Park Preserve. Take 9 North, which goes for a ways alongside 87. There’s an area where the woods opens up, and that’s where Ted’s is. Don’t come early and hang around and don’t wait long for me. If I’m not there by 5:10, it probably means something has happened and I’m not coming. I’ll tell you this much: I’m a woman, which you probably figured out when I called you, and I will be in a white pickup.”

I read it through a couple of times, sitting at my desk in the newsroom. Rattled, I signed out, went to the cafeteria for a coffee, took a couple of sips, left it there, and returned to my desk.

“You okay?” Samantha Henry, at her desk next to mine, asked. “I said hello to you twice and you ignored me.”

The Hotmail address it had been sent from was a random series of letters and numbers that offered no clues about the author. I made a couple of notes, then deleted the email. Then I went into the deleted emails and made sure it was purged from the system. Maybe I was paranoid, but ever since learning that the paper’s owners had an interest in selling land to Star Spangled Corrections, I’d been looking over my shoulder a bit more.

I didn’t trust anyone around here.

“Holy shit,” I said under my breath.

Someone had dirt on the members of Promise Falls council who were accepting bribes, gifts, kickbacks, whatever you wanted to call them, from Elmont Sebastian’s prison corporation.

My story on Reeves’s Florence vacation had never made the paper. His check to Sebastian was obviously written after he’d found out I knew about his Florence trip, but it was enough to bury the story as far as Brian was concerned, and I wasn’t sure I blamed him. I needed something that really nailed Reeves and possibly other council members to the wall.

This anonymous email might just be it.

I certainly had no confidence in Brian to champion my stories on this issue. Only a couple of days earlier, in an editorial that wasn’t actually written in some far-flung part of the country and wired to us, the Promise Falls Standard proclaimed that a private prison would bring not only short-term construction jobs to a recession-weary town, but long-term employment. If the citizens of Promise Falls expected to be protected from those who would break the law, they could hardly adopt a “not in my backyard” attitude when it came to hosting a facility that would lock up those lawbreakers. And as for the prison being privately run, the paper had taken a “let’s see” attitude. “This concept, while it has met with mixed results in other jurisdictions, deserves a chance to prove itself here.”

The piece had Madeline Plimpton’s fingerprints all over it.

It made me sick to my stomach to read it.

I went to Google Maps to find the rendezvous point. Even though I had no doubt I was going to head up to Lake George, I had to admit the email was short on specifics. I still didn’t know who this woman was, or who she worked for. Someone at city hall? Could it be a clerk? An administrative assistant? Someone in the mayor’s office who saw everyone come and go? Some pissed-off prison guard from one of Sebastian’s other facilities? Whoever she was, she knew about Reeves and his free hotel stay in Florence. Maybe it was someone right in his office. The guy was widely regarded as an asshole; it wasn’t hard to imagine one of his staff sticking a knife in his back.

I guessed I’d have to wait until I got to Lake George to find out.

• • •

“I’ve bought us tickets to go to Five Mountains,” Jan said when she phoned in the afternoon.

“You what?”

“The park north of town? The one we drive by with all the roller coasters?”

“I know what it is.” Everyone knew about Five Mountains. It had opened just outside Promise Falls in the spring to much fanfare.

“You don’t want to go?” she asked. “I already bought the tickets online. I don’t think there’s any way to take them back.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m just surprised.” One minute, she was talking like someone who wanted to kill herself, the next she was booking tickets to a theme park. “You booked tickets for all three of us?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Those coasters are huge. They won’t let Ethan on them.”

“They’ve got that area for little kids, with the merry-go-rounds and everything.”

“I guess.” Then, a worry. “You didn’t book these for tomorrow, did you?” It wasn’t like Ethan was in school yet. He could go any day, and for all I knew Jan was planning to take the next day off, assuming I might be persuaded to do the same.

“No, they’re for Saturday,” she said. “Is that a problem?”

“No, that’s perfect. It would have been hard for me to go tomorrow.”

“What’s up tomorrow?”

I lowered my voice so Sam, who was tapping away at her computer, wouldn’t hear. “I have to meet somebody.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I got this anonymous email, a woman claiming to have the goods on Reeves and some of the other councilors.”

“Oh my God, that’s just what you’ve been waiting for.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know whether it’ll pan out.”

“You meeting her in some dark alley or something?”

“I’m driving up to Lake George.”

Jan didn’t say anything for a moment.

“What is it, hon?”

“Nothing. I was just, I was just thinking of taking one more mental health day tomorrow. It’s really slow in the office. If we were having a real heat wave, the phone’d be ringing off the hook with A/C service calls, but the weather’s been not so bad, so it’s pretty quiet.”

I hesitated just for second. “Why don’t you ride up with me?” I could use the company, and given Jan’s dark thoughts lately, it would be a way to keep tabs on her for the day. Not that I was going to offer that up as a reason for her to join me.

“I couldn’t do that,” Jan protested. “Wouldn’t that freak out your contact, you not coming alone?”

I thought about that. “If she asks, I’ll just tell her. You’re my wife. We made a day of it. Combined meeting a source with a drive in the country. If anything, it should put her more at ease.”

Jan didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I suppose. But if this is some secret Deep Throat kind of meeting, are we going to be safe?”

I managed a chuckle. “Oh, it’s going to be very dangerous.”

I didn’t think it would take much more than an hour to drive to Lake George, and even though I was supposed to meet this person at five, I thought it made sense to get on the road at three. The woman in the note had made it clear that there was only about a ten-minute window for us to connect. I was to be there at five, and if she hadn’t shown up within ten minutes, I was to turn around and go home.

Jan decided to keep Ethan with her for most of the day, then drive over and drop him off at my parents’ around two. It didn’t seem to matter how many times we imposed on them, they didn’t mind. Mom adored him, and loved the novelty of having a male under her roof who’d actually do what she asked. Dad was talking about setting up a train set in the basement for Ethan to play with when he was over, although I suspected Dad was using Ethan as a cover story. Dad probably needed a project, and he’d always loved model trains, the big Lionel engines that made a huge racket and spewed smoke. I couldn’t imagine Mom being crazy about the idea, but if it kept Dad from making more instructional signs for his fellow motorists, she’d probably be on board.

I got to the house about quarter to three, thinking Jan might be waiting for me on the front porch-we live in an old part of town where they still have such things-but she wasn’t there. I bounded up the steps, opened the screen door, and called out Jan’s name.

“You all set?” I said.

“Up here!” she said.

I bounded up the single flight, talking the entire way. “I think if we hit the road now, we might be in Lake George in time to grab a bite to eat or a coffee or something before I meet with-”

I walked into our bedroom. Jan was in the bed, under our covers, her head resting on her crooked arm.

“What-are you sick?” I asked.

She threw back the covers to reveal that she was naked. “Do I look like I’m sick?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, smiling, “even in August you’re bound to catch cold if you head up to Lake George like that.”

“If you really want to get up there in time to get coffee, I suppose I could throw on my clothes and we could go right now.”

“To be honest,” I said, “I had coffee this morning.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were on the road.

For the first twenty miles, I was starting a conversation in my head that wasn’t going anywhere.

“You seem better,” I wanted to say to Jan.

“You haven’t been as down the last day or two,” I nearly said.

“It’s good to see you like this,” I contemplated telling my wife.

But I said nothing out of fear of jinxing things. If Jan was coming out of this downturn, I didn’t want to fuck it up by making a big deal out of it. I worried she might get defensive, accuse me of watching her every little tic, overanalyzing her every word. Which, of course, was exactly what I’d been doing for a couple of weeks now.

So I decided to act as though there was nothing out of the ordinary. That Jan wasn’t taking a day off work because she’d been so troubled. She was just playing hooky. Keeping me company on my way to an interview.

I’d brought along my pen and notepad and digital recorder. If possible, I wanted to get this woman’s revelations on tape-okay, it’s not really tape anymore, but I’d yet to find another way to say this that didn’t sound funny. But I had my doubts she’d want to have her voice recorded.

I had the recorder tucked into my pocket just in case.

“Not bad traffic,” I said as we headed up the interstate.

Jan turned slightly sideways in her seat, not an easy thing to do in the Jetta. She alternated looking at me, the scenery, the road behind us.

“There’s something I should tell you,” she said.

I suddenly got that feeling again, the one I’d had in the restaurant. “What?” I said.

“Something… I did,” she said.

“What did you do?”

“Actually, it’s more like something I didn’t do,” she said, looking out the rear window, then back out the front.

“Jan, tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“You know that day we took a drive in the country?”

I shook my head. “We do that a lot.”

“I can’t even remember the name of the road, but it’s a place I can find, you know? Like, make a right turn at the white house, keep on going until you go past the red barn, that kind of thing?”

“You’ve always been able to find your way around,” I said. “You just don’t have much of a memory for street names or road numbers.”

“That’s right,” she said. “So I don’t know if I can even tell you where I was, I mean, the road or anything. But you know that back road, it’s well paved but it’s out in the country and it doesn’t get a lot of traffic? On the way to the garden center?”

That narrowed it down a bit.

“And you come up to this bridge? You know where the road narrows a bit to go over it, and even though there’s still a line down the middle, if there’s a truck coming the other way you slow down and let it go through first?”

Now I knew exactly where she was talking about.

“And it goes over the river there, and the water’s moving really fast over the rocks?”

I nodded.

Jan glanced out the back window again, then looked at me. “So I drove up there the other day, parked the car, and I walked out to the middle of the bridge.”

I don’t want to hear this.

“I stood there for the longest time,” Jan said. “I thought about what it would be like to jump, wondered if a person could survive a fall like that. It’s not all that far, but the rocks, they’re pretty jagged down there. And then I thought, if I’m going to jump off a bridge, I should just use the one that goes over Promise Falls. Remember you told me that story, about the student who did that a few years ago?”

“Jan,” I said.

“I stood up on the railing-it’s made of concrete and it’s quite wide. I stood there for a good thirty seconds, I’m guessing, and then climbed back down.”

I swallowed. My mouth was very dry. “Why?” I asked. “What made you not do it?”

Because she loves us. Because she couldn’t imagine leaving Ethan and me behind.

She smiled. “There was a car coming. A farmer’s truck, actually. I didn’t want to do it in front of anyone, and by the time I was back down, the moment had passed.”

I have to take her to a hospital. I need to turn around and drive her to a hospital and have her checked in. That’s what I need to do.

“Well,” I said, trying to conceal my alarm, “it’s a good thing that truck came along.”

“Yeah,” she said, and smiled, like what she’d told me was no big deal. Just something she’d thought about, and then the moment had passed.

I asked, “What did the doctor say when you told him about this?”

“Oh, this happened since I saw him,” she said offhandedly. She reached out and touched my arm. “But you don’t have to worry. I feel good today. And I feel good about tomorrow, about going to Five Mountains.”

That was supposed to be reassuring? So what if she felt good right now? What about an hour from now? What about tomorrow?

“There’s something else,” Jan said.

I gave her a look that said, “What?”

“It might be my imagination,” she said, glancing out the rear window again, “but I think that blue car back there has been following us ever since we left our place.”

SIX

It was maybe a quarter of a mile behind us, too far to be sure what make of car it was, definitely too far to read a license plate. But it was some kind of American sedan, General Motors or Ford, in dark blue, with tinted windows.

“It’s been following us since we left?” I said.

“I’m not positive,” Jan said. “It does kind of look like a million other cars. Maybe there was one blue car behind us when we were driving out of Promise Falls, and that’s a different blue car.”

I was doing just under seventy miles per hour, and eased up slightly on the accelerator, letting the car coast down to just over sixty. I wanted to see whether the other car would pull into the outside lane and pass us.

A silver minivan coming up on the blue car’s tail moved out and passed it, then slid into the long space between us.

“I can’t quite see it,” I said, glancing at both my side and rearview mirrors, while not taking my eyes off the road ahead. Even slowing down, we were gaining on a transport truck.

Jan was about to turn around in her seat but I told her not to. “If someone’s following us, I don’t want them to know we’ve spotted them.”

Aren’t they going to figure that out since we’ve slowed down?”

“I’ve only slowed a little. If he’s on cruise control or something, he’s going to catch up to us pretty soon.”

The van had moved back into the passing lane and whipped past us and the truck ahead. I looked in the mirror. The blue car loomed larger there, and I could see now that it was a Buick with what appeared to be New York plates, although the numbers were not distinct, as the plate was dirty. “He’s catching up,” I said.

“So maybe it’s nothing,” Jan said, sounding slightly relieved. “And it is a pretty long highway, without that many exits. It’s not like he can just turn off anywhere.”

I put on my blinker to move over a lane. Slowly we overtook the truck.

“That’s true,” I said, but I wasn’t feeling any less tense. I was puzzling out the implications if in fact the blue car was tailing us.

It would seem to indicate that someone knew I was meeting with this anonymous source. I couldn’t think of any other possible reason why anyone would want to follow me.

And if someone was tailing me to this rendezvous, it meant, in all likelihood, that the email the woman had sent me had been intercepted, found, something. Maybe it had been found on her computer. Or she’d told someone she was going to meet with a reporter.

Could this be a setup? But if so, who was doing it? Reeves? Sebastian? What would be the point of that?

I passed the truck, moved back into the right lane. Now I couldn’t see the car at all, and I had to maintain my speed or the truck was going to have to pull out and pass me. Gradually, I put some distance between the truck and us.

Jan was checking the mirror on her door. “I don’t see him,” she said. “You know what? I think-you’re going to love this-maybe I’m just a bit paranoid today. God knows, with everything else I’ve been feeling, that might actually make sense.”

Which was worse? To find out we were being followed, or that Jan, already troubled with on-again, off-again depression, was starting to think people were following her?

The blue car passed the truck, moved in front of it.

“He’s back,” I said.

“Why don’t you speed up a bit,” Jan suggested. “See if he does the same.”

I eased the car back up to seventy. Gradually, the blue car shrank in my rearview mirror.

“He’s not speeding up,” Jan said. “You see? It’s just me losing a few more marbles. You can relax.”

By the time we got off at the Lake George exit, I’d stopped checking my mirror every five seconds. The car was probably back there, but it had fallen from sight. Jan was visibly relieved.

It was 4:45 p.m., and my sense of the Google map I’d printed out before we’d left told me we were only five minutes away from Ted’s Lake-view General Store. We wound our way up 9 North. I wasn’t pushing it. I didn’t want to arrive too early, and I didn’t want to somehow speed past Ted’s without seeing it.

As it turned out, it would have been hard to miss. It was the only thing along that wooded stretch of highway. It was a two-story white building set about fifty feet back from the road, a full set of self-serve gas pumps out front. I hit the blinker, came slowly off the main road, tires crunching on some loose gravel.

“So this is it,” Jan said. “We just wait?”

I looked at the dashboard clock. Five minutes before five. “I guess.” There were some parking spots off to one side, an old Plymouth Volare in one of them. I swung the car around in front of them, backed in alongside the Volare so I’d have a good view of the highway in both directions, then powered down the windows and turned off the engine.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic. We’d be able to spot an approaching white pickup long before it turned in to the lot.

“What do you think this source is going to have for you?” Jan asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Private memos? Printouts of emails? Recorded phone calls? Maybe nothing. Maybe there’re just things she wants to tell me. But it’ll be a lot better if she has some actual proof. The Standard’s not going to run a word if I haven’t got this thing cold.”

Jan rubbed her forehead.

“You okay?”

“Just getting a headache. I’ve had one most of the way up. I feel like I could nod right off, to tell you the truth.”

“You got some aspirin or Tylenol or something?”

“Yeah, in my purse. I’m going to go in, get a bottle of water or something else to drink. You want anything?”

“An iced tea?” I said.

Jan nodded, got out of the car, and went into the store. I kept my eyes on the road. A red Ford pickup drove past. Then a green Dodge SUV. A motorcyclist.

My dashboard clock read 5 p.m. on the dot. So she had ten minutes from now to show up.

Whoever she was.

A truck loaded with logs rumbled past. A blue Corvette convertible, top down, went screaming by, heading for Lake George.

Then, coming from the north, a pickup truck.

It was a couple of hundred yards away, pale in color. The way the afternoon sun was filtering through the trees, I wasn’t sure whether it was white, pale yellow, or maybe silver.

But as the truck approached, I could see that it was a Ford, and that it was white.

The truck’s turn signal went on. It waited for a Toyota Corolla coming from the south to get past, then turned into the lot. The truck rolled up to the self-serve pumps.

My heart was pounding.

The driver’s door opened, and a man in his sixties stepped out. Tall, thin, unshaven, in a plaid work shirt and jeans. He slipped his credit card into the pump and started filling up.

He never once looked in my direction.

“Shit,” I said.

I looked back out to the highway, just in time to see a blue Buick sedan drive by.

“Hello,” I said under my breath.

The car was driving under the speed limit. Slow enough to take in what was going on at Ted’s Lakeview General Store, but fast enough not to look like he was going to stop.

The thing was, I didn’t know that it was a “he.” The windows were well tinted. It might have been more than one “he.” It might have been a “she.”

The car kept heading north and eventually disappeared.

It was 5:05 p.m.

Jan came out of the store, a Snapple iced tea in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. She was talking even before she opened the passenger door.

“I’m in there and I’m thinking, what if he sees his contact and ends up driving away, leaving me here?”

“There’s been no sign,” I said. The white pickup at the pump had left before Jan returned. “But there was one interesting thing.”

“Yeah?” she said, handing me my iced tea and cracking the plastic cap on the water.

“I saw what I think was our blue Buick driving by.”

Jan said, “You’re shittin’ me.”

“No. It was headed north and kept on going.”

“Do you know for sure it was the same car?”

I shook my head. “But there was something about it as it drove past. Like whoever was inside was scanning this place.”

Jan found some Tylenols and popped them into her mouth, then chased them down with the water. She looked at the clock. “Four minutes left,” she said. “Is that clock right?”

I nodded. “But her clock might not be, so I’ll hang in a few minutes extra. There’s still time for her to show up.”

I drank nearly half the iced tea in one gulp. I hadn’t realized, until the cold liquid hit my tongue, just how parched I was. We sat for another five minutes, saying nothing, listening to the cars go by.

“There’s a pickup,” Jan said. But it was gray, and it did not turn in.

“From the north,” I said, and Jan looked.

It was the blue Buick. Maybe two hundred yards away.

I opened my door.

“What are you doing?” Jan asked. “Get back in here.”

But I was already heading across the parking lot. I wanted a better look at this car. I wanted a look at the license plate. I reached into my pocket and took out my digital recorder. I didn’t have to write down the plate number. I could dictate it.

“David!” Jan called out. “Don’t do it!”

I ran to the shoulder, recorder in hand. I turned it on. The Buick was a hundred yards away, and I could hear the driver giving more gas to the engine.

“Come on, you fucker,” I said as the car closed the distance.

It was close enough now to read the plate. I’d forgotten it was plastered with dried mud. As the car zoomed past the general store, I waited to get a look at the back bumper, but that plate was muddied up as well-save for the last two numbers, 7 and 5, which I spoke breathlessly into my recorder. The car moved off at high speed and disappeared around the next bend.

I clicked off the recorder, put it in my pocket, and trudged back to the car.

“What were you thinking?” Jan asked.

“I wanted to get the plate,” I said. “But it was covered up.”

I got back into the car, shook my head. “Fuck,” I said. “It was the same car, I’m sure of it. Someone knows. Someone found out about this meeting.”

Which was why I wasn’t surprised when, by 5:20 p.m., no woman in a white pickup had showed up at Ted’s Lakeview General Store to give me the goods on Reeves and the rest of the Promise Falls councilors.

“It’s not going to happen,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Jan said. “I know how important this was to you. Do you want to hang in for a while longer?”

I gave it five more minutes, then turned the key.

On the way home, Jan’s headache didn’t get any better. She angled her seat back and slept most of the way. When we were almost to Promise Falls, she woke up long enough to say she didn’t feel well and asked if I could drop her at home before I went to get Ethan.

By the time I got back with our son, Jan was in bed, asleep. I tucked him in myself.

“Is Mommy sick?” he asked.

“She’s tired,” I said.

“Is she going to be okay for tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” I said.

“We’re going to the roller coasters,” he said. “Did you forget?”

“Yeah, I guess I did for a minute there,” I said, feeling pretty tired myself.

“Do I have to go on the big ones? They scare me.”

“No,” I said. “Just the fun rides, not the scary ones.” I put my lips to his forehead. “We want it to be a good day.”

I kissed him good night and went down the hall to our bedroom. I thought about asking Jan whether a trip to Five Mountains was really a good idea, but she was asleep. I undressed noiselessly, hit the light, and got under the covers.

I slid my hand down between the sheets until I found Jan’s. I linked my fingers into hers, and even in sleep, instinctively, she returned the grip.

I felt comforted by the warmth of it. I didn’t want to let go.

“I love you,” I whispered as I slept next to my wife for the last time.