Bloodlines (9 page)

Looking back on it now, he could not remember where he had planned to take Ethel. He hardly remembered why he had wanted to date her, what it was that had seemed so attractive about her. He could only vaguely recall her face.

He could, however, recall perfectly that moment when her mother opened the front door and looked in a puzzled way at the young man who stood before her, wearing his best clothes, smelling of his father's cologne. He remembered Mrs. Gibbs's blushes as she stammered confused apologies on her daughter's behalf. Ethel had left an hour ago, she said in dismay, with-- but she halted mid-sentence, not naming O'Connor's rival. O'Connor had felt his own face redden and only managed to murmur, "My mistake, I'm sure."

He had delayed going back home, had wandered around the streets of downtown Las Piernas for a couple of hours before deciding that he might as well swallow his shame and let Maureen know that Ethel had stood him up. Going up the steps of the porch, he wondered how she would take it. Probably be more disappointed than he was, really.

As he opened the front door, he saw that although there was no blackout ordered that night, the house was nearly in total darkness. He heard his father shout frantically, "Maureen! Maureen! Is that you?"

"No, Da, it's me, Conn," he called back, turning on the lights as he went toward the back room that had been adapted for his father's use.

A small lamp near the bedside cast the only light in the room. His father had moved himself to a sitting position--an act that he could barely manage on his own, and only by enduring tremendous pain. Kieran O'Connor's hair was silver, but that night, looking at his father in the light of that single lamp, was the first time that O'Connor found himself thinking, He's become an old man.

"Conn!" his father said sharply. "Conn, listen to me--your sister--she's not come home."

"Not come home?" O'Connor repeated blankly. "Maureen, not come home?"

His father's face twisted in agony.

"Da, lie back down now. I'll get you something to eat."

"To hell with that!" his father roared. "It's your sister I'm worried about, not my damned belly!" And to O'Connor's shock, the older man burst into tears.

"Da," he said, coming to his side, easing him back on the bed. "Da, don't now. Don't. It might not be anything--maybe she had to work overtime. I'll call the factory..."

"I've already called," his father said, quickly wiping a hand across his face. "There's been no overtime since February."

O'Connor felt a coldness in the pit of his stomach. Maureen was dedicated to taking care of their father. She would never leave him, not even for a few moments, without arranging for someone to care for him.

"Conn," his father said, "never mind me, now. You've got to go look for her. You know she always comes straight home to me. Something's wrong. What if she's--if she's been in an accident?"

"I'll find her. I promise."

He began by calling the neighbor who often walked with them. She was surprised at his questions--Maureen had walked as far as the corner of their street with her, before turning to walk toward home. Maureen had mentioned no other plans. The neighbor hadn't noticed anyone else nearby.

O'Connor left the house carrying a flashlight, feeling more worried now. He retraced the path between the corner and the house, looking at first for Maureen herself, and then on the ground for some sign of her having passed this way, a lost earring, a footprint, anything. He knocked on every door of every house that had any view of the corner, or of the street, but no one had seen her or noticed anything out of the ordinary.

It was growing late now. He went back to the house and told his father that he'd had no luck. He called the police. He also called his mother, who got permission to leave work.

A patrolman came to the house. O'Connor guessed him to be about fifty. He took a report, acting no more excited than if O'Connor had told him a car had been stolen. Less so. He said, "I'll file this with Missing Persons."

"What do you mean, file it?" O'Connor asked, struggling to keep his temper.

"Most adult disappearances are voluntary, sir."

"No--this isn't voluntary. Someone has taken her. She takes care of my father. She'd never leave him. This is a crime ...for God's sake, she's in danger!"

The officer shrugged. "People get tired of responsibilities. But we'll keep an eye out for her."

O'Connor said, "I work for the Express." He didn't tell him that he was only a copyboy.

The patrolman paused, then said, "Look, it's not up to me. You call Detective Riley first thing tomorrow."

"Tomorrow! By then she could be God knows where! He could have..." But the thought of what could be happening to her so distressed him, he couldn't say it aloud.

The officer patted him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, son. I'll be on the radio, asking all our patrol cars to keep an eye out for her. You just wait--I'll bet she'll come back a little later this evening. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if an adult disappears, it's because they forgot to tell someone their plans or they don't want to be found."

"She's in that one percent then," O'Connor said angrily.

"If so, we'll be a little more sure of it tomorrow."

"That one percent," O'Connor said. "They aren't numbers, you know. Those are human beings. A young woman, in this case. Someone who is loved and who has a job and a home and who has never said a cross word to anyone in her life...a good girl."

"Call Riley in the morning," he said, and left.

Instead, O'Connor called Jack Corrigan. Corrigan listened to O'Connor's anxious recital in silence, until O'Connor described what the patrolman had said and done. Jack interrupted him.

"Never mind Riley," he said grimly. "Unfortunately, Missing Persons is the retiring cop's pasture in most police departments around here. Riley--that asshole wasn't any good when he was really on the job, and now he's just sitting around waiting for them to engrave his gold watch. Speaking of which... hang on." There was a brief pause. "It's late, and Wrigley might not go for it, but let's give it a try. Listen, Conn, grab the clearest, most recent black-and-white photo of her you can find and meet me down at the Express. Bring two or three of them if you can."

O'Connor waited only until his mother arrived to care for his father, a few minutes after he had found three photos of Maureen that he thought the engravers might be able to work with.

Old Man Wrigley had been reached at home. By the time O'Connor got to the paper, Jack was already sitting at a typewriter, writing the lead. Wrigley's son, who was news editor, picked out a photo and told O'Connor to sit next to Jack and answer his questions.

O'Connor listened as Jack called the chief of police and asked if he'd care to comment.

There was a pause, then Jack repeated the story of Maureen's disappearance, and the patrolman's lack of concern. There was another pause, then Jack said, "Yes, sir, the sister of one of our own staff. I know the family personally... Exactly, sir...No, she wouldn't have abandoned her father." O'Connor saw a kind of triumphant light come into Jack's eyes. "That's what I thought, sir."He began writing notes.

When he hung up, he said, "Chief claims it was all a misunderstanding. You go on home, I'll file this and come by for some follow-up."

Detectives came to the house. Jack came to the house--often over the next few days--and then other reporters, for other reasons. Friends and family, neighbors and curiosity seekers. None of them were of any use.

O'Connor hardly mourned Roosevelt's death the next week, and later had no heart for the victory celebrations at the end of the war. Maureen was missing. God knew what was happening to her. And it was his fault.

Neither of his parents ever said that to him--in fact, once hearing him say it, they protested adamantly that it wasn't so. But he believed that they must, in their heart of hearts, feel it to be true--that perhaps they even said it to each other, and only guilt had made them protest. It hardly mattered--he said it often enough to himself.

For five years, O'Connor and his parents went through the motions of being a family, but Maureen's absence grew nearly to be a stronger force than her presence. His father's interest in life beyond his room, always something Maureen had cajoled from him, began to fail, and what remained of his health failed with it.

O'Connor's eldest sister, Alma, had lost her husband in the war, and now she came to live with them to help his mother. His mother, who, like his father, seemed suddenly to age after that one April evening, was grateful for Alma's help.

Alma was not Maureen, though. O'Connor found himself ill-at-ease with this prim woman, who was seventeen years his senior and all but a stranger to him. In truth, he decided later, the thing that bothered him most was that she was staying in Maureen's room. His mother had packed up Maureen's belongings and placed them in the attic, and she allowed Alma to place her own things on the walls and shelves of Maureen's room. To O'Connor's way of thinking, his mother was giving up on Maureen. Alma was seen by her youngest brother as encroaching and little more than a squatter. Beneath all his resentment of her, he carried the fear that some spiritual connection to Maureen had been broken by these changes in the household, that by moving Maureen's possessions, they had taken away a place for her to come back to, somehow made it impossible for her to return home.

Jack had been O'Connor's salvation. It was Jack who had talked Mr. Wrigley, the publisher, into promoting his copyboy to general assignment reporter. O'Connor later learned that Jack had support for this idea from an unexpected quarter: Helen Swan.

"I told the old man the truth," she said when O'Connor asked about it. "I told him Jack was giving you writing lessons, and if they turned out not to be good ones, I'd give you better ones myself, because I could see when some half-pint had ink in his veins, even if Wrigley couldn't."

He knew of no one who talked back to Mr. Wrigley the way Helen Swan did. He remained in awe of her.

It had taken him a while to realize that there was a strong friendship beneath the rivalry between Helen and Jack. In the spring of 1936, she left the paper for a little more than a year, not long after Jack's car accident. O'Connor was still a paperboy then, and he began to see that Jack missed her terribly.

O'Connor was convinced that it was her relentless needling that pulled Jack out of the misery he had fallen into when he was hospitalized after the accident. "Get up off your ass," she said the first time she visited him. "I'll let you set it down again in a room across the hall. There's a blind guy in it. He can't see you pity yourself." Jack had winced, and she added in an angry voice, "So you'll have a limp. There are other people around here who've lost more than that."

O'Connor gathered up his courage and told her to leave Jack alone.

Helen stared at him, apparently just realizing he was in the room. "I thought the hospital didn't allow kids under sixteen into patients' rooms."

"They don't," Jack said. "But the doctors ran some tests and figured out that O'Connor has never been younger than forty-two."

"All right," she said, coming to her feet, "bowing to his seniority, I'll do as Conn asks."

"No, don't go, Swanie," Jack pleaded. "Make her stay, Conn."

Conn started to try to convince her, but she raised a hand to cut him off. She sat down again and sighed. "Jack Corrigan, I don't know what you've done to deserve the boy's loyalty."

O'Connor always thought it was the other way around. Looking back, he wondered at the patience Corrigan had shown. More than once, as an adult, O'Connor had asked Jack what on earth had caused him to all but adopt him from the time he was eight--why he had troubled himself over such a grubby little brat. Corrigan usually laughed and said, "You chose me. Not the other way around. Same way all stray dogs operate--easier to let you follow me than to keep kicking you away." O'Connor thought there was some truth in the jest--the times when Corrigan roared at him to leave him the hell alone, his scathing criticisms of O'Connor's writing, the bouts of heavier-than-usual drinking when Jack would become quiet and withdrawn--none of these had the power to keep O'Connor away from him for long.

Helen Swan had been right about the writing lessons. All those years ago, when O'Connor asked Jack to teach him to be a newspaperman, Jack had taken him seriously--for reasons O'Connor was never entirely sure of.

Even at eight, O'Connor was reading at a level beyond that of most children his age, and Jack began by giving him assignments--most of which taught him to read the paper with an eye toward the way it was written. Jack asked him now and then if he was still keeping the diary, but never asked to see it. O'Connor asked him once how he knew that O'Connor was really writing in it. "Because I believe you are an honorable young man." That was, O'Connor knew, the highest praise Jack could give anyone, and no reward could have been greater for his work.