Eye Contact (48 page)

I laughed. It felt good, as my mood had ranged from funky to somber over the previous few weeks. Setting my drink on a table in front of the sofa, I took Neil’s hands into mine. He still held his glass, and its icy condensation spread through his fingers to mine. “Set your mind at ease, kiddo,” I assured him. “I won’t let this come between us. You’re far more important to me than my professional wanderlust. You’ve uprooted yourself once already to be with me. I wouldn’t dream of confronting you with such a choice, not again.”

“But you’ve got to be
happy
,” he insisted, setting his own drink next to mine and leaning forward, his face close to mine. I felt his breath as he continued. “You’re at the top of your profession, Mark. I can’t expect you to take some beat reporter’s job in Podunk. You need to move
up
, and there aren’t many options—none within driving distance.”

I smiled, wanting to tell him how much I loved him, but that might have led to some carnal diversion, and there was something I was eager to discuss with him. “I’ve had an idea,” I told him, “and I think it might work, and it wouldn’t disrupt ‘us’ at all.”

“Oh?” Intrigued, he reached for his glass again and sipped. “I’m all ears.”

Pausing, I grinned. “What if I
bought
a paper? Nothing on the scale of the
Journal,
of course—that’s impossible. But with other investors, I might be able to swing a small-town daily somewhere, maybe in the suburbs. It would be a big investment, certainly a gamble, but one that I would really care about. And here’s the point: It would be a new challenge. Acting as a publisher, I
would
be moving up, ‘steering the ship of journalism’—a small ship, granted, maybe a measly punt, but it would be mine and I’d be in charge.” Twitching my brows, I asked Neil, “What do you think?”

“Mr. Manning,” he told me, kissing me before passing judgment, “I think you’re a genius.” Then his face turned quizzical. “How do you go about buying a newspaper? Check the want ads?” He wasn’t serious.

“There are various trade journals,” I explained, “and if I need to field some discreet queries, Gordon said he’d help.”

“You’ve already discussed this with
Gordon
?” asked Neil. “He’d be the
last
person I’d tell.”

We were speaking of Gordon Smith, the
Journal’s
acting publisher, recently promoted, waiting for the nod to take over the position permanently. Before his promotion, he served as managing editor, and I’d worked with him on a daily basis for years. He always took a fatherly interest in my career, pride in my success. Much of what I achieved at the
Journal
, I owed to Gordon’s mentoring.

“Gordon is remarkable,” I told Neil. “He seems almost as concerned about my welfare as you do, and he knows that I’m itching to try something else. I can tell that he’s sick at the prospect of losing me, though.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” asked Neil. Then we sat quietly for a while, weighing the future’s uncertain prospects, but secure in the knowledge that we’d hit upon a workable plan.

Later that week, I was at my desk in the
Journal
’s newsroom, at work on a story about some routine autumn scandal in the county treasurer’s office, when I took a phone call, grateful for the interruption.

“Good morning, Mr. Manning,” said the thin voice of an older man on the line. “This is Elliot Coop. Do you remember me?”

I hesitated. The name was familiar. He continued. “I’m the lawyer from Dumont who handled the sale of your uncle’s house on Prairie Street.”

“Of course. Forgive my memory lapse, Elliot. It’s nice to hear from you—it’s been a while.”

“Nearly three years,” he tittered. “I got a phone call from Professor Tawkin yesterday, and I thought you’d want to know about it. You do remember the Tawkins, don’t you?”

How could I forget? Elliot Coop prattled on about something, but his words were a blur against the din of the newsroom as I recalled the day some three years ago when I first met both the lawyer and the Tawkins.

I hadn’t seen the house on Prairie Street in over thirty years, when I first visited Dumont as a boy of nine. Even then, the house struck me as a place of uncommon beauty—masculine beauty—but its restrained grandeur seemed tainted by an unspoken past. Like its occupants, it guarded secrets, and those bits of missing history puzzled me until the day I returned, the day I met Elliot Coop.

The first I knew of Elliot was a few weeks prior, when I received a FedEx from him informing me that I had inherited the house from my uncle, Edwin Quatrain, who had recently died. Uncle Edwin, my mother’s brother, was a wealthy man, patriarch of the huge Quatro Press, a web-fed printing business in Dumont, situated in the central Wisconsin area known for its paper mills. His children grown and his wife long dead, Uncle Edwin had no other family with him during his latter years in the house on Prairie Street, just the live-in housekeeper who had helped raise the children. Her unlikely name was Hazel.

Both Neil and our lawyer friend, Roxanne Exner, were with me in the Chicago loft on the evening I opened Elliot’s FedEx. They were as astounded as I to learn of my good fortune. “Wow,” said Neil. “Your uncle had no kids?”

“As a matter of fact, he had three.”

Roxanne asked, “Then why would
you
inherit the house?”

“I’m not sure.” Then I added, “There was also a printing business, big enough to make them
all
rich,” as if the house were merely an afterthought, a trinket for a distant nephew.

“What’s it worth?” asked Neil, never one to dance around delicate subjects. I had mentioned the house before, and he was intrigued by it, but we would not be moving into it. We were both city mice finding scant allure to the prospect of life in central Wisconsin. Of
course
it would be sold.

“Plenty,” I told him. “Hundreds of thousands—maybe three, maybe five, depending on the market up there.”

Roxanne asked, “Going up to see the place?”

“Probably. The lawyer’s letter says they’ve already got a prospective buyer. They’ll let me know when they need me. God, talk about a nostalgia trip.”

And a nostalgia trip it was. A few weeks later, I was summoned to Dumont by Elliot Coop, the Quatrains’ longtime family lawyer who was handling the estate. He’d found a buyer for the house, the architecture buff from Madison who planned on moving up to Dumont to live in it. We would be meeting him at the house with his wife—she held the purse strings and still needed a bit of convincing.

Driving north in a slick new Bavarian V-8, I was thrilled by the satisfaction of having finally bought the car I’d always wanted. Neil had accused me of counting chickens before they hatched, but it turned out that my estimate of the house’s worth was well on the low side, so the car would barely make a dent in the windfall that would come of that afternoon’s transaction. Besides, I told myself, Uncle Edwin would surely approve—I could still smell the leather in the magnificent imported sedan he drove when I first visited Dumont as a boy.

As I turned onto Prairie Street, the house filled my view, and the sight was no less imposing than when I first saw it thirty years before. An agent’s spec sheet, which was sent to me, described the house as “vintage Prairie School, Taliesin-designed.” It was, in fact, the work of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s students at Spring Green, Wisconsin. An expansive Palladian window across the third-floor facade was not at all typical of the style, a design eccentricity that made the house even more appealing to the man from Madison, a professor of architectural history. The spec sheet further confirmed that the house was every bit as big as I remembered it—six thousand square feet, two thousand on each floor. Plus basement. My most enduring memories of the place focused on the third floor of the house, where there was a beautiful and (in my child’s mind) mysterious loft space. The spec sheet described this attic great room as “a fabulous mother-in-law apartment/retreat.”

Parked at the curb that day were two cars, the lawyer’s and the buyers’. I hesitated for a moment, then pulled into the driveway—it and the house were, after all, mine, if only for the day. As I got out of the car, the lawyer hobbled toward me, extending his hand. “Good afternoon, Mr. Manning. Elliot Coop. Thank you for driving all this way. Let me introduce you to Professor and Mrs. Tawkin.”

The wife cooed, “Introductions are hardly necessary. It’s an honor, Mr. Manning.” We all shook hands, then followed the lawyer in through the front door.

It took less than an hour to tour the house and convince the wife. In the attic great room she told us, “I was skeptical, I admit, but I’m totally won over. Shall we sign some papers?”

Mission accomplished. We trundled down the stairs, out the door, and back to our cars, with the lawyer giving directions to his office. Once the Tawkins were in their car, Elliot walked with me toward mine, telling me, “Before your uncle died, while he was reviewing his will, he gave me a letter and asked me to deliver it into your hand.” He produced the envelope. “There, Mr. Manning. Done.”

“Are you still there, Mr. Manning?” Elliot Coop’s voice buzzed through the phone at my desk in the newsroom.

“Sorry, Elliot,” I told him, snapping back to the moment. “You were saying something about Professor Tawkin?”

“Indeed,” he replied in a breathless tone, giddy with some pent-up gossip. “They’re divorcing! It’s uncontested, and they’ve retained me for arbitration.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to react to this news—or why Elliot thought I’d be interested.

He bubbled onward. “I don’t need to remind you that
she
controls the finances. She
hates
life in Dumont, and—guess what—she’s pulling the plug on the mortgage. So they’ve instructed me to sell the house, at a substantial loss if necessary. ‘Just
dump
it,’ she told me. So I was wondering, Mr. Manning, if you might have any interest in reacquiring it. It’s a magnificent home, as you know, and with your family roots in Dumont, I thought—”

“Thanks, Elliot,” I interrupted him, “but Dumont is a bit out of the way for me.” Even as I spoke, though, another thought occurred to me. The local paper up there, the
Dumont Daily Register,
had long been known as a fine small-town daily. I recalled picking up a few copies during my brief visit three years ago when I sold the house, and the
Register
measured up handsomely to its reputation. What’s more, its venerable founding publisher was due for retirement. So my phone conversation with the lawyer took a different turn. “Excuse me, Elliot, but is the
Dumont Daily Register
still being run by its founder?”

“My, yes,” he assured me. “Barret Logan has manned the helm for nearly fifty years. With Bonnie gone now, it’s his whole life.”

“Do you think he’ll ever retire?”

“Depends.” Elliot chuckled. “In the market for a newspaper, Mr. Manning?”

“Depends.” I thought a moment. “Do you have his phone number handy?”

The lawyer recited it. “That’s his direct line. He answers his own phone, and he’s usually at his desk till noon.”

“Thanks, Elliot. I appreciate the information.”

He asked, “What about the house?”

“Depends.” I laughed at his persistence. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

Within a minute, I had dialed the number he gave me and a man answered, “Good morning. Barret Logan.”

“Hello, Mr. Logan. This is Mark Manning, a reporter for the
Chicago Journal.
My mother was originally from Dumont; she was Edwin Quatrain’s sister.”

Logan laughed gustily. “I know who you are, Mr. Manning—who doesn’t? And to what might I owe the unexpected pleasure of your call?”

An hour later—it was well past noon by then—he said, “I’m late for a lunch appointment, Mark, so I really must go. Let’s both have our people review these numbers; then let’s talk again. Soon. I’m so very glad you called.”

With my mind spinning, I said, “I am, too, Barret. I think we’ve laid the groundwork for a promising transaction. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do, and I know that you do, too. But we
will
talk again. Soon.”

That evening, I waited at the loft for Neil to return from work. I considered having cocktails ready for his arrival, but reconsidered, knowing that this conversation would require a clear head. When he walked through the door, we exchanged a kiss and some small talk. I suggested, “Let’s take a walk along the lake. There’s a bit of daylight left, and I want to discuss something with you.”

“Uh-oh.” A wary glance. “How about a run together? It’s been a while.”

“Maybe later, Neil. But now, let’s just walk, okay? An opportunity presented itself at the office today, and I need to know what you think of it.”

So, still dressed for the office, minus jackets, we headed out. It would be a week till the ritual of setting back the clocks, and shafts of orange twilight angled between the buildings toward the shore. An easterly breeze striped the surface of Lake Michigan with whitecapped waves. Colliding with the cement embankment, they disappeared in rosy mist. Out near the horizon, a few hardy sailors leaned their masts toward harbor, conceding at last that summer was gone.

“What’s up?” asked Neil after we had crossed through the traffic on the Outer Drive and settled into an easy saunter along a stretch of beach.

“Remember the house I inherited from my uncle Edwin in Dumont?”

“I never saw it, but sure, I remember it. It paid for our work on the loft.”

“Right. Well, today I learned from a lawyer up there that the house is on the market again, and I could get it back cheap.”

Neil shrugged an I-don’t-get-it. “Why would you want it?”

Obliquely, I answered, “I also learned that the local paper up there, the
Dumont Daily Register,
might be available to the right person. I talked to the publisher, Barret Logan. He thinks I’m the right person, and he’s ready to retire. I think I could swing it. I’d have to go heavily into debt, and I’d probably have to take on some investors, but it sounds doable—
if
you go along with it.”

Neil’s pace slowed, stopped. He eyed me askance. With an uncertain inflection, he said, “Dumont is—what?—three hours’ drive from here?”