Anonymous Sources (22 page)

The doctor scanned the message from Kahuta one last time. He noted with relief that no action appeared to be required from him. He hoped there was a sad but simple explanation. A car accident, or a fall. Or perhaps the boy had been ill after all. Yes, it would be something like that. Nothing that would tarnish the reputation of Qureshi's program. He stubbed out his cigarette and prepared to head up to bed. He would be happy to close the book on this one.

    

    

I PUT OFF CALLING HYDE
for as long as I could, pottering around flossing my teeth and shaving my legs. Eventually the dank little hotel room ran out of distractions and I forced myself to pick up the phone. It was well past six back in the newsroom—pushing midnight for me here in London—and I wondered whether he would answer.

Surprisingly, he did. And even more surprisingly, he didn't bite my head off. Perhaps he was already nursing his end-of-the-workday glass of wine. He inquired politely whether I'd seen the video from Thom's funeral. I hadn't. Apparently it had been running all day on CNN. Cameras hadn't been allowed inside, but they had turned out
for the president and the first lady and then filmed the Carlyle family leaving the church.

“You didn't miss much,” Hyde said. “Nora did fine covering it from the press pool. We're running the photo front page tomorrow, but we're putting the copy inside. You were right. It wasn't worth rushing back for.”

“Oh. Well—er—good,” I said, not quite sure how to proceed. Hyde in a raging temper I could handle, and I was used to his mood swings between gallant charm and cutting sarcasm. But a mellow Hyde? This was a new phenomenon.

“Hyde,” I tried again. “For what it's worth, I think you were actually right. About this wild-goose chase over here. The more I'm finding out, the less any of it makes sense, and the less it seems to have to do with Thomas Carlyle.”

“And the Siddiqui character? Anything worth writing up there?”

“I—I had a very strange interview today, or meeting I guess you would call it . . .” I trailed off. I just didn't have it in me to recount the day's adventures with Crispin Withington. It would only bolster the view surely solidifying in Hyde's mind that I was a bumbling nincompoop he should never have let within a mile of a big story.

“Anyway,” I mumbled, “I can fill you in when I get back to Boston. I'm on the first BA flight tomorrow morning. If everything's on time, I could swing by the newsroom midafternoon. And I can pick up trying to work my police sources, and—”

“Fine, fine,” interrupted Hyde. “I've got meetings tomorrow in Washington, so I won't be around anyway. Why don't you check in with David when you get back? And we'll catch up soon.”

David was the editor for education stories. My regular editor. I realized with a lurch that Hyde was releasing me from the special status I had been enjoying—that is, lead reporter on a big story, reporting directly to the managing editor and bypassing the usual management chain.

Shame washed over me. Hyde had trusted me—had let me follow my instincts all the way to England—and I had come up with nothing. Nothing printable, at least, which was as good as nothing.

“Oh, and if you happen to have a minute to make a call or two,” Hyde was continuing, “you may want to look at the story ABC News just posted to its website. They've got a good write-through about Carlyle being depressed, screwing up the exams to get into law school, that type of thing.”

“But I had all that! Remember? From Thom's roommate.”

“Yes. But we didn't run it. He didn't want you to quote him, as I recall. And you said you wanted more time to report it out. Also, ABC isn't quoting the roommate. Their source is Petronella Black.”

My mouth fell open. That bitch.

“It looks like their White House reporter managed to corner her outside the funeral,” Hyde concluded. “Anyway, take a look. It's strong stuff. Definitely moves the story forward.”

“I don't suppose it mentions the fingerprints being wiped clean?” I asked bitterly. “Seeing as that was my scoop, and seeing how it totally undermines the whole Thom-Carlyle-got-depressed-and-killed-himself theory?”

“No, I don't believe they mention that. So—you'll take a look?”

“Sure,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Lovely. Then get some rest, Ms. James.” Hyde hung up.

I threw the phone down onto the bed and cursed. Goddamn ABC News. No, more to the point: goddamn Petronella Black.

It took me half an hour to reach Joe Chang and cajole him into putting the quotes he'd given me last Friday on the record. He agreed after I pointed out that thanks to Petronella, Thom's lousy LSAT score was now public record anyway.

Then it took me another hour to write and file a short update story for tomorrow's paper. The evening update editor carved out space so it
could run as a sidebar to Nora's funeral story. Hyde had alerted him I might be calling in. The editor insisted on inserting this line:

The LSAT score was first reported by ABC News . . .

And I insisted on keeping this one:

But sources close to the investigation say many questions remain, such as why no fingerprints were found in the tower room from which Carlyle fell.

Finally I turned out the lights and climbed into bed, still furious. At myself, at ABC News, at Petronella, at Crispin Withington or whoever he was . . . At sodding Nadeem Siddiqui too. I was determined to find that creep, if only to wring his neck for behaving so strangely.

I burrowed under the covers. Tomorrow I would call the shipping company and see if I could find out anything about the package they had delivered. But I decided to keep this to myself for now. Hyde had sounded bored by the whole Nadeem angle, and who could blame him? Still. I wanted to find Nadeem. I'd invested too much time in him and his stupid bananas to quit now. I would not mention him to Hyde again, not until I had something real to report.

I KEPT SOMETHING BACK FROM
Hyde that day five years ago in the newsroom too. I've never told anyone the whole truth about what happened. Not even my mother. Especially not my mother.

It is true that I had a daughter, and that I lost her. What I've never told anyone is how.

The summer I was seventeen I developed a hopeless crush on a boy from my school. A senior. I spent my afternoons prancing around the
pool in what I considered my most fetching bikini, trying to catch his eye. He ignored me. So it went for weeks. Then summer ended, and I half-forgot about him when he left in September for college.

But when he came home for Thanksgiving break, I bumped into him at a party, and miraculously, he smiled at me. My head was spinning from warm beer and cheap tequila—this was well before my serious gin days—and he teased me about my red hair. It was dark and loud, and I remember the electric feeling as he refilled my plastic cup at the keg and let his hand graze the curve of my jeans. I felt beautiful and reckless and very drunk. We must have left together at some point. A lot of that night is a blur, but I do recall with absolute clarity looking out at the night stars from his car window, my seat pushed all the way back. I remember being sweaty and cold at the same time, my jeans peeled down, my back stuck to the vinyl upholstery, and my knee jammed painfully against the emergency brake. He didn't have a condom. I pretended to be too cool to care. It was my first time.

Now, surely the gods weren't spiteful enough to let a girl get pregnant the very first time, from a quickie with the boy she was sure was the love of her life? Oh, but they were. It was such a cliché. My period wasn't regular in those days, and there was no morning sickness. I waited more than three months before I sneaked to a pharmacy across town and bought a pregnancy test.

When I finally took it and saw the definitive proof, I bawled and then began swinging between terror and denial. The practical thing would have been to quietly get an abortion. But I wasn't thinking practically. I was thinking of how my parents would kill me. And I was secretly hoping—I know this is awful—that I might miscarry and the whole thing would take care of itself. Weeks somehow went by, then months. I wrote to the boy—the
father
—and fantasized that he would show up at my front door, ask me to marry him, and the story would have a fairy-tale ending. It didn't happen.

I was seriously skinny back then, and it was winter and then a chilly
spring. I pulled off the leggings-with-a-baggy-sweater look for a long time before anyone noticed how much my waist had thickened. My mother gave me long, questioning looks at breakfast for most of April before she said anything. When she finally confronted me, I was nearly six months along.

The scene with my parents was even more excruciating than I had imagined. But it was also a relief to let them take over and tell me what to do. By then it was too late for an abortion. Instead a “family emergency” was hastily concocted and sold to my teachers to get me out of the last three weeks of school. And my mother and I packed our things and left for a rented cottage in Maine. The plan was simply to hide me for three months. Then deliver the baby, give it up for adoption, and head back to school for my senior year. The timing actually worked beautifully. I was due on August 16.

It all sounds terribly old-fashioned. But people in my parents' social circle just don't have unwed, pregnant, teenage daughters. Don't get the wrong idea. My parents weren't monsters. They were trying to protect their daughter. And I agreed with them. A baby was the last thing I wanted.

I remember that cottage in Maine as idyllic, strangely enough. It was cozy and I had nothing to do but lounge around reading and watching movies. No one knew us up there, but I still wasn't supposed to go into town, just in case. So my mother made grocery runs and went for long walks while I lay about feeling sorry for myself. In the evenings she would crack open a bottle of Scotch, pour herself a tumbler, and cook aggressively healthy meals. Kale and cabbage gratin. Spicy, scrambled tofu. Fennel and seaweed slaw. She urged me to eat for two. Why? Some impossible-to-repress grandmotherly instinct, even though she would never hold this grandchild in her arms?

My dad came up once for a weekend visit. And every couple of weeks my mother would go home for a night or two, to see my father and to keep up appearances. It was on one of these weekends that my water
broke. July 12. Exactly five weeks early. At first I ignored it, convinced the trickle of clear liquid between my legs was just one more indignity, proof that my last remaining vestiges of bladder control had gone. When the contractions began, I tried to ignore them too—surely just false labor, my body practicing for the big day. The doctor had told me this would happen. The pain cinched across my lower back, making my knees shake and the sweat bead across my lip and forehead.

I waited until the clenching came every few minutes, until it was too late, too late to call my mother, too late to do anything but roll back and forth on the kitchen rug, sweating and panting and terrified. It was quick. Not like the war stories you hear. Only an hour or so of the very worst pain. I rocked my spine along that rug and screamed and then—
sweet Jesus
—there it was. A little girl. She slid onto the floor between my legs. She was covered in blood and wet. I looked at her. She was tiny.

I lay there trembling. Blood was still pouring down between my legs. I wasn't sure what to do. Clean her off, warm her up? There were supposed to be nurses helping me. The doctor. My mother. I hadn't expected to do this alone.

I picked up the child and put her to my shoulder. Clapped her back. I waited for a cough or a whimper. But she was quiet. I looked at her again, more carefully. Rubbed her little legs. Squeezed her. She was limp. She did not move.

And then I was frantic. I hooked my finger and swept her mouth, pressing her warm tongue down, trying to clear her airway.
Come on
. I covered her mouth with mine and breathed, quick little puffs, hoping she would pink up. Hoping she would cry.