Thief of Words (27 page)

Annie snapped at it like a hungry trout. Before Jack DePaul had returned to his desk, she’d made two phone calls. Twelve days later it was done. An eighty-inch feature she’d worked on between daily assignments and polished up late at night.

The day before the chicken inspector story ran—above the fold on page one—Jack DePaul came by her desk again. “Up for an adventure?” he said. “Always,” she said. That night, they got in his ’72 VW Bug and drove twelve miles to cross the state line, where they ate fried perch and hush puppies at Bueley’s Fish Camp in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They talked until LaFontaine Bueley, the seventy-two-year-old owner, turned out the dining room lights. The next night, he took her to Country City USA, where they learned to line dance.

Within weeks they were known in the newsroom as DeHollerman. They were wunderkind bookends, full of talent and drive. Friends could picture Jack running the
Washington Post
’s style section and Annie reporting from the White House. DeHollerman could picture it, too, but their newsroom pals would have been surprised to learn that the wunderkinds had other, far different, dreams as well.

One Sunday over lox and bagels at the Park Road Deli, they read a
New York Times
Magazine story about Peace Corps volunteers helping street kids in Ghana. The next day, they called the New York office for applications. They imagined trips all over the world. Jack wanted to take Annie to Nepal. Annie wanted to take Jack on a train ride through countries thick with jungle. Jack read Annie some poems by Pablo Neruda. Annie, fired by the words, decided they had to make a pilgrimage to Chile.

They made love on Annie’s secondhand sofa halfway through a late-night broadcast of
Goodbye Columbus.
An hour later they made love on the rug by the couch. An hour after that they made love in Annie’s bed.

Then came an uncharacteristically cold spring day in the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina. The kind of cold day that makes the shiny red tulips lining the city’s main streets shiver.

Annie got to the paper at 9:15. First she stopped at the cafeteria, where she bought coffee and joked about the cold weather. She seemed even more buoyant than usual. If the cafeteria ladies had thought to ask her why, she might have told them about the night before, when Jack, being a man who liked ceremony and flourishes, bent down on one knee before her and asked if she would move in with him.

Her second stop was the desk of city editor Mark Snowridge, where she apologized for not bailing him out with a last-minute column. “There was no way I could finish in thirty minutes,” she said.

“Don’t sweat it,” replied Snowridge. “What’s another license plate story? It’s all just next day’s birdcage liner anyway. You’ll have something for me next time, Hollerman. You’re still the aces.”

She arrived at her own desk around 9:30. There on the keyboard of her computer was a small box. Taped to it was a note, in Jack’s handwriting, that read, “Open me.” Inside, resting on a pillow of white cotton, was Jack’s house key. “For you, Annie,” the note said. “Always and forever.”