So Much Pretty (25 page)

“What do you do, though?” I asked him. “It’s such a small place, and you know that White was probably killed by someone just walking around here, going to the bar, sitting at the Laundromat. Somebody we might know, might pass by every day. Did you know Dino hasn’t even searched the Haytes property?”

“I didn’t know that, no.”

“Yeah. This whole fucking thing has been bullshit from beginning to end. Did you know thirteen hundred women are killed every year in the U.S. by intimates? Boyfriends or husbands. What’s that like, three, maybe more than three, women a day? That fact alone should have that motherfucker Dino all over that shit pile up there.” He nodded in agreement. I went on, “The statistics are fucking staggering, man, the number of women every year murdered or disappeared. And raped, my God, you know what those stats are? You want to talk about rape?”

“No!” He shook his head and covered his eyes with his hand, leaning his head back. “I really don’t. I know the numbers are high. People sure do get hurt and killed, and it’s overwhelming. I know that, I do. I used to be obsessed with the traffic fatalities. Thirty-eight thousand people die in car crashes every year. Four hundred and fifty thousand die from heart attacks. Seventy percent of murder victims are men killed by men. People
die
, Stacy. All day long, every day, for a variety of reasons.”

“You know that this is not the same. You know it’s not. What do you think the autopsy is going to show?”

“You asked me that this afternoon. I don’t know. Malnutrition, drugs; it will show trauma. Sexual assault, I’m sure, based on the pattern of bruises. Hopefully, we’ll get some DNA evidence. That would help.” He looked at me. “It was a really bad idea to have dinner tonight.”

I studied his face for a time.

“Honestly,” he told me, “I didn’t want to be alone. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. You may have, but I haven’t. And I didn’t want it to be the only thing I could see all night. I didn’t want the image of you at the scene stuck in my head, either. You know especially. You know . . . I’m sorry.”

I reached over and took his hand. I was tired and drunk and would have liked to cry, but I didn’t. The quiet was still there. I couldn’t make it go away with tears or fighting or quoting statistics. We slumped lower on the couch, and I rested against him. He put his arm around me, held my hand, leaned down, and kissed the top of my head. And I remembered, then, him talking about the golden hour and being afraid of kids getting hit by cars. And I felt like a fool for talking statistics. I didn’t find her. And he didn’t save her. Because these are things you don’t do alone.

It was dark out when I looked over at him again, and the porch was dimly lit from the kitchen lights. His head was resting on the arm of the couch, his lips were parted, and he was breathing deeply, his long black eyelashes resting on his cheeks. I pulled the blanket down to cover us and closed my eyes.

Scoop

APRIL 4, 2009

S
COOP WAS ALREADY
there when Flynn arrived at the paper, and he was trying not to lose it. She looked like hell. Her clothes were wrinkled, and her hair was matted in the back.

“What is this?” Scoop yelled before she had the door all the way open. He had meant to sound more controlled but found he was too enraged to manage. The bell tied to the handle of the door jingled as she shut it and walked to her desk. He waved the paper at her again. “What in the hell is this?”

She looked a little more awake but not alarmed, just disappointed. She must have been expecting it. “
This
is called a special edition. You might remember it from J-school,” she said as she walked across the room and put a filter in the coffeepot.

“It’s called terrorizing the town!”

That had the effect he’d desired. She looked startled, completely shocked. “This is called terrorizing the town?
This
is?” She fixed him with a look of such complete malice that he forgot what he had planned to say. The phone started ringing.

“See?” he said. “
You’ll
see. I got calls all night.”

She glared harder at him and picked up the phone. “
Haeden Free Press
,” she sang reflexively into the receiver. “Yes.”

She paused, and he watched her blank tired face as she listened.

“Yes.”

She paused again and took the pen out of her hair and wrote something on the back of her hand.

“The National Bureau of Crime Statistics. And the New York State Division of Criminal Justice.”

She winced.
Good
, Scoop thought—
someone’s getting through to her
.

“Yes.”

Flynn hung up the phone, and Scoop said, “I’d fire you if I had anyone else to do this job right now.”

She continued to stare at him. He was so angry at her disrespect that he could feel himself begin to tremble.

Then she gave him a quick crazy-looking smile, something horrible, actually frightening. “You are not the publisher
or
the editor of this paper anymore,” Flynn said. “I answer to
Weekly Circular
, and they’re not going to fucking fire me! They’re going to give me a motherfucking
raise
for the work I did on this Podunk white-trash bullshit! I won a George Polk when I was twenty-three. Do you even know what that
is
? Or did you just read it on my résumé and think I made it up? The paper I worked for employed real fucking writers. And what I fucking wrote yesterday was a real story. One I am going to keep investigating, so you might want to change your fucking tune. Stat.”

Scoop felt his face flush. He raised the paper again and clutched it in his fist. “Do you have any idea what this has done to this community? To the families in this community? To people’s professional careers?”

“
What
community? Is there a
community
here? Don’t you fucking get it? Are you from fucking Mars? When the average income is fourteen K and the average educational level is eleventh grade and the so-called dairy is a factory fucking farm that employs next to nobody in town, and the Home Depot is where you all fucking work—
if
you even work.
That’s
not a community, and it doesn’t become one because people shoot clay pigeons or endearingly call women ‘the missus’ or have fucking parades where they crown a dairy queen! That’s for actors in some anachronistic passion play about a town that never was, in a country that never, ever fucking was.”

Scoop was overwhelmed by how fast she was talking and how
quickly she had become furious. He had come here to reprimand her, and she wasn’t the slightest bit concerned. She didn’t even look like herself. Her eyes were slits, and he could see how hard her jaw was; the skin on her neck and chest was flushed and blotchy, but her face had gone white. She wasn’t about to stop.

“Community? Professional careers? Are you talking about your large-animal vet coroner who didn’t show because he was yakking it up over at the Haytes dairy? Or your buddy who fucked up every aspect of this investigation, thinking that the killer was some drifter? You ever even heard the word ‘drifter’ outside of movies from the 1950s? You don’t have a community, and you don’t have professionals. Do you know where you are?
Do
you?”

The phone rang again, and Flynn picked it up. “
Haeden Free Press
.” Then she snapped, “This
is
Stacy Flynn. What can I do for you?

“Oh. Mm-hm. Uh. Sure. Yes. I would be happy to talk to you about it.”

She slammed down the phone. “There! There! Do you
see
? Channel Seven!”

Scoop had no idea what he was supposed to see or say. He was irate, but he was scared Flynn would do something crazy. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a woman look that awful. She was obviously not all right with the body being found, and she must be in shock. He wished that he had approached her in a different way or at least come to the scene with her yesterday. He had heard from Dino it was very upsetting. But what she was saying was nonsense. The coroner never showed up, so the body got taken by the EMTs. Big goddamn deal. He had been waiting for her to say something about that. Dino said she was hounding him all yesterday. Something about the Haytes dairy again—she just couldn’t let anything go, thought everything was on purpose, even little mistakes. Just because someone knew someone or worked for someone—to her, it meant they were connected.
Think the county can afford a full-time coroner? Jesus. Of course the dairy uses a large-animal veterinarian. No shit. She thought people were looking away or covering things up when it was just the way things were around here. Around everywhere, as far as he knew. He was angry too, goddammit, and he couldn’t just throw some histrionic tantrum like a lady reporter.

In fact you know what? He was furious. He’d just had breakfast with Dino and Jim Haytes. Jim said his son was so broken up about the murder that he’d been crying all night, and then about what he read in the paper. So upset he was moving to Argentina to take a job with the dairy’s parent company. With Groot. Too many memories in Haeden, even if he got over Wendy, said he’d never be able to walk down the street without people staring at him. Now that farm was going to have to fall to Bruce, and everyone knew Bruce didn’t have Dale’s responsibility or social skills. That whole family’s living stained with the shame of rumor. Even if she never said anything specific, why would she print all those ladies’ names? Pages and pages of names. Or ask those questions. Like it had anything to do with Haeden. He wished she’d done something truly libelous so he could make
Circular
fire her, but she was right, he didn’t work for them anymore, and they never much cared about who was running the paper in the first place. Jim was meeting with the family’s lawyer to see if there was a case. Jim wanted to send her to jail for what she wrote, but Dino said he doubted it would happen. If she only knew how much Scoop had already been doing for her this morning, she would never have blown her top like that.

He remembered calling her references in Cleveland, and one of the editors had described her as a “pit bull.” Scoop laughed out loud at that after he met her, thought it proved something about city people being a little queer. But now he could see it. She didn’t let go of anything.

Flynn’s face was no longer pale but had become completely red. A vein stuck out in her temple. No one had ever looked at him like that.

“You know where you live?” she shouted again. “It’s called Appalachia, motherfucker! You are in motherfucking Appalachia! Even if you’re one of the little lords of Appalachia and you play golf and drive a snowmobile! You’re here because you are comfortable around stupid people. You know they’re easy to exploit. And the cost of living is cheap. There’s about one hundred of you who are even capable of abstract thought! And even those people are nearly unintelligible. Hyuk. Hyuk. Hyuk. Well, guess what? I don’t need to learn how to speak your fucking language, because your language is being
eradicated
, thank fucking God! Do you know that word? ‘Eradicated’? Your life, your way, your language. And for a good fucking reason. It’s all bullshit! You sold all your precious land that was fucking stolen in the first place! You betrayed your fucking neighbors. And you! You personally sat by while a kid
from
this town was somewhere
in
this town
dying
! And she died yesterday. She died
yesterday fucking morning
!”

Flynn was trembling with rage. “
Fire me?
Fucking fire me, then!
You can’t!
YOU CAN’T! And don’t you
ever
threaten me for doing my job. Wendy White is
dead
because I couldn’t do my fucking job!”

Scoop had sat down for the last of Flynn’s attack. He had never in his life seen anyone behave like that. And he knew then that people were right about her being ethnic of some kind. He sat down because he wanted to hit her or grab her, and he felt that if he remained standing, he might do it, and then he would be charged with assault. He should have called Dino while she was still raving.

All he really wanted to tell her was that Wendy White was dead because somebody killed her and it had nothing to do with any of them or the town. And that she shouldn’t have run all those stories about women getting killed, or printed those pages with just names on them because it wasn’t good for people to think about. He sat there not saying a thing until he wasn’t angry
at her anymore. She ignored him, turned on her computer, made a pot of coffee.

He was suddenly painfully aware that she was about five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than his granddaughter. He hoped to God she would start crying and that this was some kind of girl crisis so he could comfort her, but she kept ignoring him. He knew she would leave town and he wouldn’t have to fight with her anymore. She was just bluffing that she would keep investigating. He should have come with her to the scene. He should have invited her over more. The phone rang. She picked it up and slammed it back down. Then she unplugged it from the wall and pulled a tape recorder out of her desk, put it in front of Scoop, and pressed play. It was the voice of Wendy White’s mother:

“I’m Lori White, I live in Haeden, New York. It’s January fourth, 2009. Uh, okay. I’ll try to get through this for you. Don’t know if I can.”

Her voice was low and soft, and when she paused, he realized it was the sound of someone quietly crying as she spoke.

“Well. I guess it was Beth Ann first realized there was something wrong, because Wendy usually comes early to watch the girls so they can gossip a bit. And she was waiting and waiting, and she called Wendy’s apartment. Then she called me to see if I could babysit because Wendy hadn’t showed up, and we were a little pissed, you know. Thinking it’s that boyfriend and she forgot. So I went over to stay with the girls while Beth Ann went to her ceramics class at the Y in Elmville.

“About, oh, maybe a half hour forty-five minutes later, Dale come over to Beth Ann’s, and he was real serious. Not himself, you know how he is, joking always, well, his face was white and he looked like he had been crying, he was all sweaty, looked sick. And he said he couldn’t find Wendy. Well. She’d been at work, so it was only a couple of hours.