Never Look Away (4 page)

"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."