Sweetheart (6 page)

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Did it have a picture of a woman on the cover?” he asked.

She smiled up at him, two rows of tiny teeth. “I want to meet her. I like her.”

It was the saddest thing Archie thought he’d ever heard anyone say in his whole life. “Don’t say that,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“You like her, too, don’t you, Daddy?” Sara said. “You used to go and see her all the time. Ben heard Mom and Henry talking.”

Archie ran a hand over his face and worked to keep breathing. “Do you know where Ben keeps the book?”

She looked back toward the hall and then whispered: “He hides it.”

He sat still for a moment, gathering himself. Then he wrapped a hand behind her head and kissed her on the forehead. “Okay,” he said. He held out his hand and she took it, wrapping her fingers around his index finger. “Let’s go.”

He led her out into the hall, toward the kitchen.

She stopped, her face concerned. “I can’t go in there, Daddy. My surprise.”

Archie glanced up at the kitchen. The music. The cake. “Of course,” he said. “Go to your room, okay?”

She nodded and turned and ran to her room, turning once to peek back at him from behind her bedroom door.

Archie walked into the kitchen. They were frosting the cake. Ben on his knees on a stool at the island. Debbie standing. She wore a white chefs apron over her black T-shirt and jeans, but had managed to get frosting everywhere, even her hair. She looked up at Archie when he came into the room, and grinned. “You’re just in time for the marzipan flowers,” she said.

Archie walked over to the white stereo that fit under the cabinet by the fridge and turned it off.

“He has a copy of the book,” he said flatly.

The cake was on a lazy Susan cake tray and Debbie rotated it, holding the frosting knife steady across the top. “What book?”

Archie took a step forward, his hands in his pockets. “The book. Jacob Firebaugh gave him a copy.” Archie didn’t even know who Jacob Firebaugh was.

Ben stuck his finger along the edge of the glass frosting bowl. “He says you’re famous.”

“I don’t want you reading that shit,” Archie snapped at him.

Debbie lifted the knife from the cake. “Archie,” she warned in a low voice.

Archie pulled his hands out of his pockets and ran them through his hair. “It’s full of violence. Crime scene photos.” The thought of his eight-year-old son reading what she’d done to him made his stomach burn. “Graphic descriptions of torture.”

“A glimpse into your world,” Debbie said.

He walked up to her. She smelled like buttercream. “It’s completely inappropriate,” he said. He felt shaky; his body ached for the pills. “He showed it to Sara.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “She’s such a tattler.”

“Go get it,” Archie ordered him, pointing toward Ben’s room. “Right now.”

Ben looked at Debbie. It had been like that since Archie had come home. His son always looked to his mother before he did anything. She nodded and he hopped off the stool and disappeared down the hall, still licking his fingers.

Debbie laid the knife back on the cake and spun the lazy Susan. “If you don’t talk about it,” she said carefully, “they’re going to try to find answers other places.”

“Not in that book,” Archie said.

Debbie’s mouth tightened. “They know you were lost. That you were hurt. They were just babies, then.” He could hear her throat constrict, fighting the tears. “But they’re going to have to hear the whole story.”

Not the whole story. “Why?” he asked.

“What about your scars?” She set the frosting knife across the bowl and turned to face him. “How exactly do we explain that to them? All those trips to the prison. They remember that. They know you went to see her.”

“It was my job,” Archie stressed.

Debbie reached up with a sticky hand and touched his face. “Don’t bullshit me, Archie. I’ve known you too long.” She looked him in the eye. “You went there because you needed to, because you liked it.”

Archie took a step back and turned away. “I’m exhausted. I don’t want to do this now,” he said, opening a cabinet to get a glass.

“I just want you to be honest with us. With me.”

He turned on the faucet and filled the glass with water. “Please, don’t,” he said.

“I want you to be honest with yourself.”

Archie slowly lifted the glass to his lips and took a sip and then poured the rest down the drain. Then he set the glass in the sink. Self-awareness wasn’t his problem. He knew exactly how fucked up he was. He would have given anything for a little denial. “I
am
honest with myself,” he told Debbie. God, he was so tired of this. He resented her for it. For making everything so hard. For making him feel so guilty.

She wanted the truth? Fine. Fuck it. “I went there,” he said slowly, enunciating each word as if it were a grammar lesson. “Because. I. Liked. It.” In the sink, a cake pan sat soaking next to the glass, the grit of the cake floating in soapy water. “It was the only time of the week I actually felt like I was still alive.” He looked up at Debbie. “I would still go. If I thought that I could get away with it.”

She stood hugging her arms, her freckles like dark stars. “You can’t see her. If you want to stay with us.”

Archie smiled. “There it is,” he said.

“What?” Debbie said.

“The ultimatum,” Archie said. “You know how I like those.”

He heard Ben’s voice say, “Here.” Both Debbie and Archie turned to see Ben standing at the entrance to the kitchen, the thick paperback in his hands, Gretchen’s lovely face smiling seductively on the cover.

Archie turned and walked over to him and took the book from his hands. He bent over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” he said into his ear. “I’m sorry I yelled.” He smoothed his son’s hair and walked past him toward the hall.

“Where are you going?” Debbie asked.

Archie spun around. “It’s Sunday afternoon,” he said. “I thought I’d go to the park.”

Debbie’s eyes were full of tears. “You shouldn’t drive.”

Archie kept walking. “I shouldn’t do a lot of things.”

T
here were flowers on Parker’s desk. A pot of African violets, a bouquet of yellow tulips, and a bouquet of some fleshy pink flower that Parker would have hated. One of the HR ladies from the third floor had brought that one up.

Neither of the bouquets was in water. They would just sit there and wilt and die and rot. What good that was supposed to do anyone, Susan couldn’t figure. Someone dies, so you kill something beautiful?

The
Herald
building was downtown. It had been built a hundred years ago and then fallen victim to an unfortunate renovation in the 1970s. The floors were gutted, cubed, and affixed with fluorescent lights and drop ceilings. Susan’s desk was on the fifth floor. The view was impressive, which was about the only nice thing you could say about the place. It was too quiet for Susan’s taste, too corporate, and, no matter what the temperature outside, too cold.

Sundays at the
Herald
were usually Siberia. Anyone important was at home. The Sunday paper was printed. Monday was light. Things were run by one senior editor who drew the short straw and usually spent the day at his desk playing solitaire or surfing the Internet for gossip sites and blogs. There was a lot of sitting around. No one knows more Internet gossip than newspaper people, whether they admit it or not.

This particular Sunday was an all-in day. A sitting senator was dead. Parker, one of their own, was dead. They had an evening edition to get out, and a Web site that required a breaking story every few minutes to compete with the TV news. Most of the news department had come in, copy editors, features. But there were also the übereditors, the assistant editors, interns, HR people, receptionists, and the TV critic who planned to write a story about how TV was covering the story. Everyone wanted to get in on the action. The worse the tragedy, the more you wanted a piece of it. That’s what separated reporters from regular people.

Susan pulled a hooded sweatshirt she kept in her desk drawer on over her black dress and rested her head in her hands. Molly Palmer had flaked out and wasn’t returning Susan’s calls. She dialed her cell again. Nothing. They were planning coverage of the senator for the next day’s paper. It would be a huge pickup day. Castle’s photo on the front page. A huge, bold headline announcing his death. That was the kind of newspaper that people still bought and Susan wanted her story to be featured.

Susan leaned back in her desk chair to see if Ian was out of his meeting yet. The door to the conference room was still closed. Ian had been in there for an hour with Howard Jenkins and an assembly of
Herald
bigwigs planning the Castle coverage and deciding the fate of her story. She had thought she’d earned some capital with her series on Archie Sheridan and the After School Strangler. But in the end, it was all newspaper politics. And without Molly to confirm her story to the paper’s fact checkers, the
Herald
was waffling.

Susan punched in Molly’s number again. Nothing.

Fuck. Molly was not exactly a willing subject. She’d only agreed to meet in person twice. And getting ahold of her was always a pain in the ass. Molly would turn off her phone and forget to turn it on for days.

Susan had already made a three-foot-long paper-clip chain and worked six tiny braids into her blue hair. Now she unhooked the paper clips and put them back in their cardboard box and pulled the braids out and then rebraided them.

She could smell the honey-sweet pollen drifting from the flowers on Parker’s desk.

The bank of TVs that were bolted on the wall above the copy editors were all live with the senator and Parker’s accident. Susan couldn’t look. She wanted out of the office. She wanted to find Molly. She wanted to be doing something.

Susan heard a voice ask, “Are you okay?” She looked up to see Derek Rogers. His sandy eyebrows were knitted in concern. She’d mostly avoided him since she’d broken things off. She’d tried to explain how he wasn’t her type. He was square and responsible. She was chaotic. He drank his coffee with milk and sugar. She drank hers black.

The truth was, he wanted a girlfriend. And she didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend right now.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said, the dimple in his chin deepening. Then he shook his head. “What a stupid thing to say,” he said. “Everyone says that, don’t they?” Both Susan and Derek had scrambled for Parker’s attention. It was one of the few things they had in common.

“I know you really liked him, too,” she said.

“If you want to talk,” Derek said, “you have my number.”

Why did he have to be so nice?

The door to the conference room opened and Susan scooted back in her chair. It rolled too quickly and she nearly buckled backward.

Ian looked over at her and jabbed a thumb for her to come.

“Duty calls,” she said to Derek, and she got up and walked down the carpeted aisle between desk clusters to his office. It had a window, but it just looked out onto the news floor. There were bulletin boards covered with feature clips, so he could call writers in one by one and go over every word of their stories until you wanted to cry or stab him in the neck.

She’d already decided she was going to quit if they didn’t run it. Or stab him. Whatever impulse took hold hardest. Probably the stabbing.

He motioned for her to sit and she flung herself down on a chair.

“We’re running it,” he said. “But we’re going to have to make some changes.”

Susan pulled at the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “Changes?”

Ian grabbed at his little ponytail. “The senator was an institution in this state. He was beloved. We have to present the story within that context. He had an affair with a teenager. And that was very bad judgment.”

Susan could feel the story slipping away from her. Bad judgment? Yesterday it had been the story of the century. “It wasn’t an affair,” she said. “She was fourteen.”

“Whatever,” Ian said. He clicked his computer mouse, and a Word document sprang to life on his monitor. “I’m going to take a stab at reframing it. I’ll run the edits by you. We’re planning on running the story. But not in Monday’s tribute edition. It just doesn’t seem appropriate.”

Appropriate? “Parker was my editor,” Susan said.

She watched as Ian highlighted a sentence in her story and hit delete. “I know this is hard for you,” he said.

“Parker was my editor,” Susan said again. Behind Ian, pinned on the bulletin board, were photographs of Castle through the years, looking puffy and self-important. Someone had scribbled headline ideas on pieces of paper and pinned them up next to the pictures. STATE MOURNS FAVORITE SON. SENATOR DIES IN CRASH. CHAMPION OF POOR DIES IN BRIDGE CALAMITY.

None of them mentioned Parker. He would be lucky to make the lead.

Ian picked up the telephone on his desk and hit the nine for an outside line. Susan saw right through the gesture. He didn’t really need to make a call; it was just his clumsy signal that the meeting was over. “We’ll need contact info for your source,” he said distractedly, “for Molly Palmer.”

“No problem,” Susan said.

She stomped back to her desk, sat down on her task chair, and spun around slowly. Someone had left another bouquet on Parker’s desk, a bundle of purple carnations and baby’s breath. They were wrapped in green tissue paper and tied together with a black ribbon. Emblazoned on the ribbon were the words REST IN PEACE.

Susan dug her cell phone out of her sweatshirt pocket and punched in a number.

“I have to get out of here,” she said into the phone. “Do you still want some ink on your Jane Doe?”

“I’m at the park right now,” Archie Sheridan answered. “Can you meet me?”