10:00:00 a.m. Sign-on
Bad days are the raw material of life. Good days are earned. Apparently, I was undeserving as well as unemployed.
“Sorry, Rich. I’m solo.”
“Not anymore. Not if you want this job,” Richard Gatt shot back at me. Picture your typical midwestern fireplug of a guy-shiny head, white button-down oxford and a blunt, booming voice.
I could feel my interview smile warping into a grimace. Must have made for a fabulous ensemble, with my current suicide-blonde-in-leather-pants look. My fingertips worried the seam across my knee. My lucky pants.
News flash: the pants weren’t working either.
“Come on, Richard. Why tie up resources? I’m a one-woman show. It’s part of my charm.” I attempted the smile that once got me out of a cardboard box and into a bullet-proof truck in Somalia. Works pretty well on bartenders, too.
Gatt ducked his chin into his collar. I caught a tinge of blush on his unprotected forehead. He pulled a handful of sugar packets out of his desk drawer. “We can help each other out here, O’Hara. But if you want this job, you gotta train my kid.”
“Kid?” The sudden déjà vu resulted in serious stomach acid.
News of Gatt’s job opening was whispered in my ear by a friend at the tippy-top of the network-TV food chain who owed me a favor. WWST was a small sister station camped in western suburban Chicago Land. Not exactly top ten, but Gatt was the only program director in the state looking to hire a producer for a position that offered both salary and benefits. People in jobs that sweet sat tight until ratings off-ed them or they actually died.
It wasn’t my dream job. But I’d stopped feeling picky two months ago. Too long between gigs. Every freelancer knows the feeling that creeps over you as the jobs spread thinner, the fear that what you’ve got inside-all your dreams and abilities-no longer match what’s happening outside. If you aren’t working, you’re a fraud.
My stomach issued another warning shot.
Gatt pretended not to hear it. He ripped the tops off three sugar packets and dumped them all into his cup at once. “We want stories with a local slant. Warm-fuzzy midwest shit. Local, but with national appeal.”
“Sure,” I said. Local but national. Oxymorons are Television Marketing 101.
“How much do you know about this area, O’Hara? They told me you’re local.”
“I grew up in the city. But my parents brought us out this way occasionally. My dad used to race dirt bikes when I was a kid. We’d always end up picnicking at that war museum out here where you can climb on tanks while you eat your tuna sandwich… You know the place I’m talking about?”
“Cantigny.” Gatt nodded.
It was one of many grand summer homes dotting the farm county, built by Chicago’s landed gentry of a century ago. Cantingy’s owner survived France and the First World War. His house was a monument created to display the souvenir tanks-cum-lawn ornaments he’d brought home.
My grandfather survived that same war. He claimed all he’d been allowed to bring back was a bad case of foot rot.
“Nice spot.”
We did the mutual yeah.
My eyes kept straying to the window behind him. The view from Gatt’s office was the visual definition of horizontal. Farmland at the horizon blended into a field of grassy weeds that ended at the black-topped parking lot.
War. Tanks. Foot rot and flatland. Unfortunately, local story associations weren’t looking very warm and fuzzy.
Gatt bent his mouth into something like a smile. “Born and raised in the city myself, O’Hara, and I’ll tell ya, this ain’t Chicago. But it has its moments, you know? Small town. People know people. Sometimes, reminds me of the neighborhood.” He raised an eyebrow and opened his palm, the regional gesture for your turn.
“Grew up in Longwood.” The far south side neighborhood I hadn’t seen in years.
“Then you know what I’m talking about. Neighbors help each other out.”
Translation: the kid Gatt wanted me to train was a favor. Payback.
The best way to think of a Chicago neighborhood is like a clan designation. Clans are all about relationships and alliances. Favors are the currency most often traded. I might know somebody; I’ll make a call is Chicagoan for money in the bank. Who you can call is the last best measure of the good life, whether you need a driveway plowed, a ticket fixed or a special order birthday cake from a really good German bakery.
Out on the East Coast, it’s all about the pedigree. On the West Coast, it’s only about the paystub. Here on the Third Coast, it’s the clan pact.
From the look on Gatt’s face, the only way I was getting this job was if I agreed to train his kid.
Settling deeper into the chair, the faux leather protested with the kind of rude noises my pants would never dream of making. “First things first, Richard. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Exactly what the man was hoping I’d say. “Network’s launching a new magazine show, half-hour format. It’s a late-season fill but they’ll go sixteen weeks if it gets any kind of numbers. Most of it’ll come to us in the can. They’re leaving a hole for each market to drop in a local story.”
“How long?”
“We get four to six minutes,” Gatt said.
I nodded. Six minutes was a hell of a lot of network time. “What’s the time slot?”
“Pre-prime or first half hour. They want to see if we can pick up viewers drifting from the news. You’ll produce one story a week. Schmooze the network crap as necessary.” Gatt spun the scenario without fuss. “Deliver the story to engineering before we pick up the satellite feed and that’s it. You don’t even have to cut me promos. Those assholes in promotion need to stay busy, or they start bitching about what kind of doughnuts they’re getting free every morning.”
Free? Any money bet, most of those people didn’t clear 30K a year for the privilege of working here at the crap-end of the business.
“What’s the angle?” I tried to sound like it didn’t matter. Like I hadn’t spent the last ten years building a reputation. “What kind of stories they looking for?”
“Crime, sex, local movie stars. Whatever you get that captures a ‘midwest sensibility.’” He put little air quotes around the words. “New York will help set you up.”
“The ‘midwest sensibility’ on crime, sex and movie stars?”
He shrugged, what can you do?
Sound effect: Ker-flush. That would be my reputation going down the throne in the name of health benefits and geographic stability.
I smiled.
There aren’t a handful of women in this world who make a living freelancing in international crisis scenes. It took me years to earn the respect that would buy me access. Years before I got the chance to take the picture people remember, be the one that shouts, look at this! Do something!
And one phone call is all it took to send it down the tubes.
“But-” Gatt raised a finger in the air. “I don’t care how many New York big-shits you get to blow smoke up my ass, O’Hara. You want this job? Train my new guy. He can camera for you. Drive the truck. Whatever.”
“How ‘new’ is this guy?”
Gatt made a show of adding another pair of sugar packets to his coffee mug. “First job. Got his card last month.”
“Just got his union card?” I almost laughed. “A college newbie who doesn’t know an f-stop from-No way. That’s not going to work.”
The man flopped backward in his chair. He was so short, it made him harder to see behind the cluttered landscape of his desk-three years of flip-page calendars, a dozen remotes for the monitors behind me, piles of color-coded files, a tower of old black tape boxes and a phone that could double as a NASA console.
“Let’s be honest, O’Hara.” He spread his hands. A classic how-bad-do-you-need-it move. “I’m willing to offer you a nice predictable gig, but I don’t want the station left high and dry if, or should I say when, you decide to blow.”
He had a point. “I’d have to meet this kid first.”
“Sure you do.” Gatt hit a button on his phone. Nothing happened. He jabbed at a few more, grumbled a few expletives in the back of his throat, then stood up, which didn’t really make a lot of difference to my overall view.
“Barbara! What the hell is going on here?” he shouted in the direction of the door. “Barb’s my assistant. My absolute right hand. Make her happy, she’ll take care of you. Make her unhappy, everybody suffers. Barbara! Damn it, I’ll be right back.” He walked as far as his office door, flung it wide and shouted, “Barbara!” at the top of his lungs.
I could see from where I was sitting, there was no Barbara at the nearby desk. Gatt disappeared through a side door to the WWST reception area, a time capsule of early ’80s-retro with a touch of grunge. Dark paneling and mirror tiles on the walls, olive-colored carpet with a plastic runner, and orange burlap upholstery on the lobby chairs. A stunning first impression.
The nasal drone of the receptionist drifted this way.
“I don’t care if her entire family has Ebola. You promised me coverage from nine ’til five, Monday through Friday. Either you get someone in here to answer my phones or I tell Mr. Gatt we’re doing an ex-pose-ay on a certain local weasel who runs a temp agency.”
It was a voice you didn’t forget. On the way in, the woman had looked me up and down and assumed I was a courier. Didn’t care for the biker boots or the leather pants. The boots might be a little butch, but the pants were my mother’s finest Gold Coast Goddess knock-off. What’s not to like?
“Barbara,” Gatt whined. “What the hell are you doing at reception?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? And I will tell you right now, Richard, I go on break at ten. I don’t care if this whole switchboard crashes.”
“Where’s Katie?” he asked.
“Schmed’s got her unpacking boxes.”
Gatt grumbled something I couldn’t hear. “Leave it. Go find the boy. Please,” he added, with some effort.
“You don’t pay me enough for this, Richard,” she threatened. “I am serious.”
He came back into the office rubbing the top of his shiny head. “Okay. Ainsley’s on the way.”
“Ainsley? Are you shittin’ me?”
“No, Ms. O’Hara, I am not ‘shitting’ you.” He plopped back into his chair and answered deadpan. “It happens to be an old family name. Ainsley Prescott is my sister’s kid, so I’d appreciate you keeping it clean around him.”
“Your sister’s kid?” My mouth stayed open. Possibly from the foot I’d inserted there.
Maybe it’s the same everywhere, but the majority of men in the television business seemed to have only recently evolved from the single-cell organism. Behind the scenes, we’ve got the engineer geeks who think it high-end comedy to splice beaver shots into color bar pre-roll and behind the closed doors upstairs, we’ve got skanky VP executives waving their standing invitation to lunch. Talk about something that’ll put a girl off her feed.
You learn to cope or you get out. Harassment is CDB-cost of doing business-if you’re a female in Television Land. A little garbage mouth helps. I learned early how to do the boy patter, what would help me pass and what wouldn’t. Most of the women I know in this business cuss like soldiers, skim the sports pages enough to blend and would personally scoop out their eyeballs with plastic spoons before they shed tears in public.
What was Gatt expecting me to teach this kid?
A quick knock was followed by a bright blond head around the door. “Hello?”
“Come on in, buddy.” Gatt took a swallow of his candied coffee and waved.
Welcome, Ainsley Prescott-poster child for the Aryan nation, all flaxen haired and sweet smelling. He flashed me a mouthful of sparkling teeth and popped out his hand to shake.
I turned back to Uncle Gatt. “I don’t work with stand-ups.”
The kid’s perfect smile down-shifted from eager to encouraging. The offer of his hand was not retracted.
“Ainsley’s not talent,” Gatt assured me. “He wants to camera.”
“I want to produce,” he corrected and pumped up the output on his kegel-watt grin. “But I’m willing to start with camera.”
“Sure you are.” I forced myself to smile back and take his hand.
Nearly six-foot in my boots, I’m tall as the average American man and could probably bench press him too, if he’d stick around long enough. I usually get a pretty good feel for a guy by eye-balling him in the clinch and watching for flinch.
Ainsley didn’t flinch. He tipped his head nearer my ear and in a private voice added, “Cool pants.”
Gatt beamed, the picture of a satisfied matchmaker. “Look, Ms. O’Hara, you want this job, Ainsley gives the tour, shows you to the truck and you two go get to work. Our first feed is next Wednesday. So there’s-”
“-less than a week to produce the story.” Typical.
“That’s right.” Gatt started making himself busy sorting his stack of phone messages. I was being dismissed. He had me and knew it. “You don’t want the job, say so now. I got a conference call in five minutes.”
I looked the kid over again. He wore razor-pleat khakis and a white button-down shirt so squeaky clean-cut it hurt my teeth. Most camera jocks lumbered around in size double XL athletic wear. Ainsley barely topped six feet, had the beanpole build of a young man who hadn’t fully grown into his feet and the smooth blue-eyed complexion of the perennial ingénue. How was he going to handle fifty pounds of camera equipment at a jog?
Ainsley’s head flipped back and forth between Gatt and me, looking for one of us to say something. His smile faded on a sigh of resignation. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, elbows locked, exactly the way my eight-year-old niece, Jenny, does when she’s worried.
What the hell. I’d made a career of specializing in disasters.
“All right. I’m in.” I accepted Gatt’s deal with a grim nod.
Gatt looked relieved. “Great. You’re hired. I’ll get Barbara going on the paperwork. You have a look around. Make some calls. Like I said, we need something in the can by next Wednesday.”
Looking at Ainsley, all I could think was I’d have to change my damn hair color. Side by side, we’d look like the freaking Bobbsey twins.
“Awesome,” Ainsley said. The smile was back.
“Go show her around, buddy.” Gatt winked. The boy’s charm wasn’t lost on the uncle. “O’Hara, I’ll set you up with the GM for a meet-and-greet later, and get your offer finalized today.”
“Anybody pitched you a story idea for this week?” I asked.
“Nope. Network’s got some ideas. You’ll want to call them first. Reminds me-I logged a weird call this morning, right before you came in. Out west somewhere, Amish land. People love those Amish-in-trouble stories. Why don’t you go check it out?”
“Amish? There are Amish people out here?” I tried not to sound panicky. “I thought they only lived in remote rural areas.”
Gatt’s cock-eyed glare begged the question, what’s your point? “Get going, you two. I got work to do.”
11:41:12 a.m.
Hanging around the office waiting for network to call back and pitch me a “crime, sex or movie star” item did not sound like a good plan to me. Seeing Ainsley the Wonder Boy in action might be a good idea before a real shoot landed on us.
It didn’t take long to pin down the necessary details. Ainsley was happy to lead the way. “Our Amish community isn’t really that nearby,” he assured me. “It’s actually way out to the edge of the county, at least a half-hour drive west and south.”
“A half hour?” I repeated, trying to adjust to the thought that I now lived closer to an Amish settlement than the city. It took an hour to get into downtown from out here, when the traffic didn’t suck. “That far?”
“Few miles past the Walmart. But there’s a Mennonite church right over in Lombard if you’re looking for something closer. You want to see the remote truck first? It’s pretty sweet.” Ainsley pointed me up the hall. “I knew this one Amish guy who got special permission to go to my high school. He was there a year. Had to ride a bus for an hour and thought it was the greatest. Hard to believe, huh?”
We turned a corner and walked past the cubical shanty town that housed sales, accounting and the promotions departments. Ainsley offered a good morning! to every person we passed, along with a quick introduction.
Maneuvering our way through the building, the kid pointed out the station’s highlights. “Through here’s the kitchen…doughnuts…pop machines…oh, and the bulletin board where we keep the take-out menus.”
“College boys are walking stomachs.”
“No way,” he told me. “I’m no college boy. I’m done with school.”
“Really? Where’d you go?” There were a couple of good schools nearby. A credential I could trust would be nice.
“Pretty much everywhere.” His confession melted out, sticky and sweet. “I, um, had a little trouble in school.”
“You flunk?”
“Not exactly.” The words stretched twice their usual length, long enough to include a whole range of possible mischief. “Got kicked out. Twice.”
“Twice.” I nodded. “That takes some effort.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t seem too upset about it. “Nothing for you to worry about though. I finished all the core courses in broadcasting and camera. I’m fully trained.”
“Sure you are.”
Freelancing a new job, I usually feel excited, ready to dig in, ready to work. It was different to be filled with thoughts of doom.
Ainsley, on the other hand, could not believe his luck. Taking out the remote truck on our first day. He scored points for loading the cameras with the proper awe. The remote “truck” was technically a van, with a decent bank of machines inside-playback, switcher, monitors. Some of the places I’ve worked would have considered it a state-of-the-art editing bay. He was right, it was sweet.
“Looks good. Let’s get going, College.” I slammed the rear doors after a quick inspection and climbed in beside him on the passenger side. “Stop in the front lot on the way out, would you? I need to grab my cameras.”
I always carry both still and video camera equipment to a shoot. I started as a photographer which is unusual these days. I never set out to be on-screen talent. I prefer to let the pictures tell the story. Sometimes on location, I can get straight photos where I can’t get tape. With a splice of quick-cut, pan-tilt, I’ll incorporate the photos into the final story. It’s a distinctive look, one of my signatures.
“If the Amish thing doesn’t heat up, you can show me around town. But I do need to be back at the station by say, two-fifty this afternoon. You know where we’re going, right?”
“Sure. I’ve lived in Dupage County my whole life,” Ainsley admitted without a trace of embarrassment. “Wow. Is that your motorcycle?”
“Yeah.”
“How old is that thing?”
“Older than me,” I answered flatly. “Older than television.”
“No way,” he whispered reverently.
“Watch it, kid.” Peg had been my grandfather’s, before she was my father’s, before she was mine. I pulled my camera gear out of the saddle bags and gave her a pat goodbye.
Peg’s always my first choice of transportation. In the city, she was fairly practical-what with my frequent travel schedule and her fabulous parking profile. But I haven’t had many chances to take her out on the road lately. Practical transport has been redefined for me.
“Where’d you get it?”
“My bike is not an it. My bike is a she.” I tossed my gear into the truck. “Her name is Peg.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Boy didn’t stay down long. “How’d you and Peg meet?”
“Grandpa O’Hara worked at the Chicago Schwinn factory back in the old days.”
“The bike company?”
“They made motorcycles back in the ’20s and ’30s. Fastest motorcycles in the world-including the Excelsior Henderson Super X.” I waved a hand of introduction. “Back in those days, boys named O’Hara needed to travel fast.”
“Why?”
I frowned. “Gangs. Chicago in the ’20s? The mob was Irish.”
“Oh, right.” That got a nod and a furtive glance, as he compared me to his mental picture of an Irish mobster’s granddaughter. “Mind if I drive?”
Was he razzing me? “Knock yourself out, College Boy.”
“Cool,” he replied.
No sooner were seatbelts fastened than he gunned the van across three lanes of divided traffic into the left lane.
My hand welded itself to the oh-shit-bar above my door. When the truck settled into a straight away, I used my free hand to secure the camera on my lap. “Network usually hires me a driver. Someone who can translate and handle a weapon.”
“A weapon?” he scoffed.
“Mostly small arms, though one guy preferred the Uzi. Whenever I traveled with him, I didn’t have to worry about a bodyguard.”
I made a show of giving him the once-over and nodded a tentative approval. Honestly? Most of my employers were too cheap to hire a driver. And if I needed a translator, I had to pay him out of my per diem. But the boy and I were bonding; he didn’t need to know that.
“You’re a light weight but I’ll bet you could keep somebody occupied long enough for me to get into the truck and call for back up, right?” I gave him a friendly shot to the arm. “You study martial arts or anything?”
His eyes jumped sideways. He rubbed his shoulder where I hit him. “Uh, no.”
“We’ll have to stay out of trouble then, won’t we?” I flashed my best buddy smile.
Given something else to think about, his driving mellowed considerably. I pried my hand from the grab bar and dug around behind the seat for my camera bag.
The light was beautiful. I wanted to shoot a few prints to play with later. I always carry a couple of bodies in my camera bag, both digital and print. Old school.
Approaching the entrance to the highway, we stopped at an intersection that presented exactly the same kind of reality shift you get on a Hollywood backlot. Behind us lay a long procession of strip malls-to the right sat a Walmart, to the left a Home Depot. Beyond the shadow of the highway overpass lay fields of feathery yellow grass on one side of the road and a farmhouse with an honest-to-god rusty red barn on the other. I felt as if I was looking through a time machine at the view of before and after.
“What are they growing over there?”
“Where?” Ainsley made a quick check out the window. “What?”
“The yellow stuff over there. In the field.”
“Are you kidding?” He checked my face. “That’s hay.”
“Oh.” I tried to explain. “I never saw it growing. All together like that. It’s pretty.”
I made myself busy testing my equipment in the silence that followed. There was half a roll left in the camera. It didn’t take long to check my lenses, so I dug out my notebook to brainstorm a few story ideas. No storms came to me; all was dry. Very dry.
“Done much location work?” I asked after a few more miles of silence.
“A little cable stuff. Uncle Rich, uh, you know-Gatt-he helped me get some freelance work last summer, so I could get my union card. The station hired me about three months ago.” He did some very elaborate mirror checking, his face turned away.
Not a shock to me. The entertainment industry is just as incestuous as it’s ever been-theater, vaudeville, movies, television-it ran in families like eye color and a tendency toward mental illness. Shakespeare had probably had two uncles and a chorus of cousins on the payroll. As long as the boy did his job, it didn’t matter to me.
We traveled straight west on the interstate, and then a relatively short hop south through stubbled farmland. Once we hit the exit, Ainsley got behind a state police cruiser with its lights flashing and ended up following him the rest of the way. It surprised me PD was still en route.
A crowd of assorted rescue vehicles appeared beyond a rise. Everybody’s lights were flashing like a cheap Christmas display. Police and a few bureaucrats were milling around the edge of a grassy field. Fire department was there, as well. They’d driven a ladder truck as close as the pavement could get them to the base of a huge spreading oak. Farther away, the fenced field, the white barn and simple farmhouse made a perfect country backdrop.
“Pull over, College.” I rolled down my window, switched to my longest range telephoto lens and shot the rest of my print film as the van rolled to a stop. I prefer to shoot both print and digital when I have both cameras handy. I trained on print. Digital cameras try to do the thinking for me. It’s annoying. “You ever worked with police on a shoot before?”
“No.”
With my finger on the camera’s trigger, I rattled off some basics. “When we get out of the truck, go ahead and pull a camera box, but stay behind me. Wear your credentials on your shirt. Keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Don’t try to set up the camera until I say it’s a go-got it?”
“Got it.” He didn’t sound happy about it. “Can you see any better with that lens?”
The tree must have blocked his view from the driver’s seat. It’s hard to miss a body with a crowd of public servants standing around gaping. The FD couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty minutes ahead of us to the scene. I caught the shot of the dead man being lowered into the arms of a firefighter.
“Hanging.” My voice had gone flat. The working voice. The voice I use to face the world. My lousy luck was running true. I hate suicides.
“What?” Ainsley asked, that long, slow midwest version of huh?
“The dead guy was swinging from that big oak tree. Look at all these guys. Half the public servants of the county must be out here. Fire, EMT, sheriff-” I dropped the camera to peek over at my college boy. “Did you just say ‘Eeeuuu’?”
His pretty face was crunched up, one part uh oh, and two parts yuck.
There’s something else I forget. In these Great United States, plenty of people get all the way to full grown without ever seeing death any closer than roadkill from the car window.
“Maybe you better wait in the truck.”
“No way.” He worked to smooth out his expression. “I’m fine.”
I looked into those clear blue eyes and felt myself caught between two minds. Part of me wanted to toughen him up-get him out there and force him to meet reality. Part of me didn’t want to be the one that popped his corpse-cherry. I’d seen enough of the world to know innocence had a value that was always underrated.
“It’s your choice. No problem if you want to wait.” I made my voice as neutral as possible while rewinding and reloading. The film can got stuffed deep in my front pocket, out of sight. Old habit-I always hide exposed film. I switched to digital to give me electronic options-easy translation to the web and satellite feed.
“I want to go with you.” Ainsley nodded as he spoke, convincing himself.
He didn’t use the high-volt smile this time and I liked him better for it.
“Come on then. Follow me.”
We hopped a fence and strolled across the field. Broken rows of corn bristled all around us. The unfortunate oak was perched on the far side of a small rise. As my sight line improved, the corn stretched toward the horizon, creating the illusion of perspective. Except for the dead guy, it was a pretty view.
With the fire truck unable to get close enough to the tree, the guys had carried a regular extension ladder over to lean against the limb where the rope was tied. The fireman I’d photographed remained at ground zero hunched over the body. The fireman at the top of the ladder was busy slicing through the last of the rope with a small hacksaw. From his higher vantage point, he was the first to see Ainsley and me approach the edge of the action. The man on the ladder shouted to the men below. The guys beside the body stood up and stared.
I’m not sure why, but I suddenly felt protective of my camera and my college boy. I shifted the strap to hide the lens in the crook of my arm.
“Stick close, kid. These guys aren’t too happy to see us.”
12:53:22 p.m.
Shit. Shit. Shit. What was Maddy O’Hara doing here?
There was a shit smell coming from everywhere: the farm downwind, the body on the ground and the men jockeying around it for a look.
“Watch it!”
“On three. Up!”
It took four men to lift the body and set it on top of the bag. The head lolled toward the shoulder at a nasty angle. The guy had known his knots; knew just where to place it so the fall would snap his neck.
“Camera Press over there,” somebody whispered.
“No shit,” he said. “Get me the cardiac monitor. We should record asystole before we bag him.”
“Not here.” The sheriff stepped in, all puckered up because the press was on site. “I want this body in the ambulance and en route-now.”
“Yes, sir. I’m on it.”
“Then quit staring at that woman. Move.”
1:06:49 p.m.
The sheriff’s men weren’t happy to see us either. A big bouncer type who stood guarding the perimeter backed us off before I even had a chance to make our case. We hung out for a few minutes trying to get someone to talk to us without any luck.
“What now?” Ainsley asked as we retreated to the roadside.
“We’re on a bear hunt, College.” I scanned the perimeter and started toward the shrub line. “Can’t go through ’em. Can’t go over ’em. Got to go around ’em.”
I walked along the road to where the fence line ended, then turned up a small side road that seemed to follow the boundary of the property.
Ainsley matched my pace, breathing heavily with the camera case in tow. “Where are we going?”
“Don’t know. I’m looking.”
Not far from the turn, I cut back following a line of scraggily shrubs and small trees up a slight incline toward the farmhouse we had seen from the road. Every so often I popped through the bushes and held up my camera to check for a decent line of sight.
The college boy threw questions at my back the entire way. “Do you think we’re trespassing? What if someone lives here? Is this legal?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Follow me.”
“Wish you’d stop saying that.”
Near the crest of a small rise, through the heavy barberry branches, I found a spot where the perspective on the action by the tree was perfect. Firefighters and police were milling around. The ladder was coming down. Some of the men were fascinated by a spill of cardboard boxes and paper where the body dropped.
“Okay, College Boy, this is it. Let’s get a hand-held shot. We’re too far away for anything but the in-camera mic, but record it anyway. We may want to use the ambient sound-wind, leaves rustling, birds. See if you can get tight enough for a couple steady, close-up head-shots of these guys. I want facial expression if you can get it.”
Ainsley set the camera case down with a thud. His face glowed with a faint sheen of sweat from the effort of getting it there. He took a few minutes to organize himself. We’d prepped in the van, so it didn’t take long. Once he had the camera rolling, I stepped back to give him some room. Behind me, I heard the rustle-crack of a scramble in the hedge, the sound of an animal trying to escape.
With two hands, I spread the leafy whippets of overgrown barberry. My camera bumped against my chest, swinging heavily from the neck strap. It took a second for my eyes to adjust.
At first, all I saw was her face and her fear. The white of the young woman’s skin reflected light where her dark clothes disappeared into the shadow. Bits of contrast jumped out at me. She was wearing a hat, a black Amish bonnet to be exact, but she had a cell phone pressed to her ear.
“What the hell is going on here?” a man’s voice rose behind me.
I admit, I jumped. The branches I’d been holding snapped back into place as I spun around. Ainsley jumped too, but he kept the camera up and running. The guy shouting was obviously The Man. From what I could see, he was the only one wearing a decent suit and all the men around the tree stopped everything to watch.
“I thought I said no cameras!”
“The officer told us to stay as far back as the road, but no one said anything about no cameras.” I smiled. Behind me, there was absolute silence in the bush. “I’m Maddy O’Hara, WWST. You’re the man in charge, I presume?”
He was a fairly large guy, enough so I’d notice. Not a whole lot older than me. Sandy-dark hair with a thread or two of silver, maybe. Good sharp bones beneath the cheek and brow. He’d be a dream to photograph monochrome, except you’d lose the eye color-the pale green of a cloudy agate.
“Give me the camera,” he said to Ainsley, ignoring me in the extreme.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I pressed. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Sheriff Curzon.”
Boy, I hadn’t cheesed-off a local public servant this fast in years. Good to know I hadn’t lost my touch.
Ainsley appeared mesmerized. He lowered the camera off his shoulder and shot me a quick, panicked look.
“It’s all right,” I soothed with a snicker. “You don’t have to give him anything.”
While I was busy being amused at the sheriff’s bravado, Curzon reached over and grabbed the television camera, scanned the side quickly and pressed eject. He plucked the card right out of its slot. Ainsley stood there, face frozen.
“I am the man in charge here,” Curzon announced. “And I said, no cameras.” He looked at me and the 35mm hanging from my neck.
I wrapped a hand around my Nikon lens and dared him to try.
He jabbed the little black rectangle of digital recording at me like a pointed finger. “Give me that card or I will arrest you. You can tell your story to the judge-tomorrow morning.”
It felt like being clocked upside the head. Six months ago, I’d have gone to jail for my card with no hesitation.
My fingers opened the camera and handed him the memory card.
Of course, the fact that I had a roll of exposed 35mm tucked in my pocket made it a little easier. “We heard there might be a story worth covering here, Sheriff.”
“I don’t think so, Ms. O’Hara. A man’s dead. Sad, but nothing important enough to rate the television news.”
I couldn’t help it. This time, I did laugh.
“Something funny about that?”
I was thinking, then why bother? But I said, “Just between you and me, Sheriff, around here, it’s news when somebody’s dog dies.”
“Not from around here, are you?” he deadpanned. Was that a sense of humor? It didn’t last. “There’s nothing to see here, Ms. O’Hara. My office will provide a written statement to the press as soon as possible.”
“Ah.” I nodded, all understanding. “And when do you think that might be?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Look, I’m just trying to do my job, Sheriff. Performing a public service, you know?”
His gaze dropped abruptly, taking in my leather pants. He hesitated for half a second before he added, “Funny. That’s what they used to say about prostitution.”
I flashed the man a smile and winked. “And I’ll bet people like you still do, Sheriff.”
Ainsley’s eyes popped and he did a panic check-look left, look right, look down.
Now I’ll admit, I was overdressed for fieldwork. Compared to the girl in the bushes in the long dress and hat, I was looking more Saturday night on Rush Street than Monday morning on Michigan Avenue. But no way did Sheriff Curzon, in his fine suit, hold to an Amish dress code standard. He was trying to annoy me.
Oh, there was definitely something going on around here.
“What’s in the bushes?” Curzon asked, stone-faced and heavy on the green-eyed death glare.
“What?” I asked him back.
“You had your head in the bushes. You drop something?”
“No.” I felt the silent shadow-presence of the girl behind me. A little louder I answered, “No. Thought I heard a rabbit or something.” I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged. “You know us city girls, we’ll do anything for a glimpse of wildlife.”
He wasn’t wholly convinced, but one of the other men down near the tree called out. “Time to go,” Curzon announced.
“See you.” I waved.
I caught the flavor of a grin quickly suppressed, before he grabbed Ainsley’s silver camera case with one hand and the boy’s elbow with the other.
“Walk,” Curzon ordered Ainsley.
It irritated me he never bothered to look back and see if I followed.
Curzon did not lead us into the area near the action; he edged the crowd and handed us off to a couple of junior dogs whose job was to shoo us back to our truck. As we crossed the road, I noticed a skinny guy in worn corduroy pants ahead of us. He stumbled toward an old Civic, head bent over a spiral notepad, pen flashing. A comrade in arms.
“Hey!” I jogged after him.
Ainsley followed slightly behind, camera case clunking with his long-legged strides.
“Excuse me?” I called. “You with the Trib?”
Mr. Skinny Guy looked back our way, his shoulders hunched. Beat reporters were kind of like B-movie undead; they always looked uncomfortable in the bright light of day.
“What?”
I jerked my thumb toward the truck and held out a hand. “I’m Maddy O’Hara, special assignment to WWST. We heard there was something going on here, but the cops won’t let us near the place. Did you get anything?”
“Melton Shotter. I’m with the local daily-the Clarion.” He seemed a little disconcerted by my directness. “Did you say Maddy O’Hara?”
“In the flesh.”
“I’ve heard of you.” He shook his head in a wonders-never-cease kind of way.
Although Average Joes wouldn’t know me from Adam, there were plenty of papers that ran my photos on occasion. Ainsley seemed to get a little thrill off my sort-of celebrity status.
“There wasn’t much to get.” Melton shrugged. “Suicide. What kind of story would WWST be doing?”
“Local human interest.” I glanced across the road at the broken stalks of a stripped corn field. “But you probably get a lot of suicides out here.”
“There’s definitely more to it-” He sounded like a kid with a secret. All I had to do was be patient. Reporters live to tell secrets. “But I couldn’t get any kind of ID on the guy. They’ll never let me run the story without more detail.”
“What did you see?”
“The body was covered by the time I got close. Everybody had gathered round in a huddle.” He leaned toward me and his voice dropped. “I did see porno mags on the ground. Spread out all over the place, like the guy’d been reading them before he jumped.”
“No way.”
“I kid you not.”
“What?” Ainsley ambled into the conversation in confusion.
“Maybe it wasn’t suicide.” I felt that prickly tingle of discovery, the journalist’s drug. “Ever heard of autoerotic asphyxiation?”
The reporter snapped his fingers and flapped his notebook open. “That’s what I missed! I heard the sheriff mumble something before they chased me off.”
“Really?” I grinned back at the scene of the action. “Now why would Sheriff Curzon tell us there was no story here? I may be from out of town, but I’d say when an Amish-”
“I don’t think he could be Amish,” Ainsley corrected me. “Maybe Mennonite-”
“Whatever. When a man of serious religious conviction offs himself publicly, in more ways than one, that’s news.”
Ainsley’s face scrunched again-grossed out, sure, but also trying not to laugh.
Of course, when a sheriff steals your pictures, that’s a pretty good indicator as well.
“Why do you think he was Amish?” Melton asked.
“The clothes.” I pictured the girl in the bush wearing that dark bonnet, even before I thought of the man from the tree.
“She got some pictures with a long lens before we got out of the van,” Ainsley clarified. “But that guy couldn’t have been Amish. He looked too old to shave, and I heard one of the cops say the Honda over there must be his. Amish don’t own cars.”
“No cars at all?” I asked.
“Too old to shave?” Melton said, at the same time.
“Grown men wear beards,” Ainsley told him. “It’s a sign of maturity.”
We experienced one of those awkward pauses in which I got caught staring at Ainsley’s baby-smooth cheek.
“About those pictures?” Melton jumped in. “Could I get a look at those? The paper’d pay, of course. They’d run the story if I had a picture. Nothing too gruesome, though.”
I thought about it for a minute, glancing back toward Sheriff Curzon. I didn’t have a lot of time here. Autoerotic asphyxiation was the kind of pseudo-serious sex topic they would love at network, a definite ratings grabber. The sleaze factor was high, but if I scored on ratings I’d definitely stay employed. Compromises like that guaranteed I’d be dining on antacids and acetaminophen for the foreseeable future. Yum, yum.
There was certainly more to this than a simple suicide. I could feel it, the way I’d felt the girl behind me in the bushes.
What was she doing there?
I needed to flush this story out into the open where it was fair game. It’s not like my story would be competing with nightly news for a scoop. By releasing one of my photos to Melton, I could make the story public and re-direct Curzon’s fire toward the print media. Without heating up attention for the story, the sheriff would continue to stonewall me and chances were good, I’d end up stuck doing something on the network’s latest local promotional tie-in.
Time to take a gamble.
“I might be able to help you out with a photo, Melton. Let me take a look at what I’ve got. What’s your deadline?”
“Eight o’clock.” Melton passed me a card.
All of a sudden, I thought to look at my watch. It was past two already. “Damn. How long will it take to get back to the station?” I asked Ainsley.
“As long as it took us to get here, I guess.”
Double that damn. I’d never get back to the station for my bike and home again by three o’clock. “We need to go.”
“Back to the station?”
“No. I need you to take me straight…to my appointment.”
3:11:17 p.m.
Maddy O’Hara was going to be a problem.
“This is township ambulance number five, currently en-route with a twenty-eight-year-old male, apparent suicide.”
“This is County ER. Can you repeat?”
He twisted the cell phone away from his mouth and shouted to the man driving the ambulance. “Siren? Can’t hear a fucking thing back here.”
The sheriff had sent a car to escort them to the hospital. With both vehicles blaring full lights and sirens, even the dead couldn’t hear himself think.
What was she doing there?
He flipped the blanket back and tugged the zipper down. Some genius had decided to start making body bags white instead of black lately, because everybody knew what a black bag meant. Like it made a difference-black or white. What nobody could change was the sound of that big, thick zipper sealing everything up inside. Forever.
He peeled open the sides of the bag and forced himself to think in the impersonal terms of work. “Male patient…mottled skin…obvious lividity.” Painting the picture for the dispatcher in the ER gave him time to reach down inside, open the rough, buttonless shirt and attach the cardiac monitor electrodes.
“Lead one-flat line.”
Had she gotten a call too?
“Lead two-flat line.”
“Roger. Stand by,” the dispatcher said.
The only personal effects the sheriff’s team had located on the scene were those fucking magazines. It was hard not to hit something just thinking about it.
There had to be a cell phone. He held his phone cocked against his shoulder, pulled off the electrodes with one hand and snaked the other hand down into the bag, along the body. It was cold already. There were damp patches where fluids had started to settle. He felt the change of texture and temperature through the thin casing of latex over his hands.
Nothing.
The phone wasn’t the only thing missing that could get him into trouble.
“Everything all right back there?” his driver called out.
“Fine.”
He had to find the sample bag. Everyone was watching him now. Thinking the worst. No matter how hard he tried to explain, to fix things, it never seemed to be enough. Nothing else could go wrong now or more people would get hurt.
She didn’t know what she was getting into. He was not going to let her fuck everything up now.
The face lying before him wore a contorted grimace of pain and bruising.
He wasn’t supposed to touch the body but he couldn’t stop himself. He pounded down with both fists, hard, center of the chest, right over that guilty heart.
What did you do? What did you do, you dumbass farmboy?
“Hey! Whoa, what’s going on back there? We’re one minute away, man. Captain’s going to be at the other end. Don’t freak on me now.”
“Okay. I’m okay.”
There was no peace in death on that face. Only pain. And hatred.
Gently, he laid his hands on the face. He massaged the mouth, the jaw, the brow. He tipped the head and smoothed the expression.
At last, the face appeared peaceful.
He would do whatever he had to do to fix it, to smooth it over.
Everything was going to be fine. Just fine.
He zipped the bag shut slowly, so there was almost no sound at all.
3:52:34 p.m.
It took forty-two minutes for Ainsley to drive me to the house that once belonged to my sister, Angelina O’Hara.
Jenny was waiting, sitting on the doorstep hunched by the bulk of her backpack, fiddling intently with her shoe. She’s the kind of kid who looks like she’s made of hollow straws and toothpicks, all held together by wire bread ties. Everything about her was either stiff or sharp.
I swear, we couldn’t have been more than twelve, thirteen minutes late, at most.
“This is where you live?” Ainsley asked.
“Yeah.” A squat, yellow-brick ranch house was not my idea of heaven either.
“Who’s that?” Ainsley asked.
I had a sudden flash of the Boy Wonder reporting back to Uncle Rich all the details of my life story. Definitely not. Not before I signed the paperwork anyway.
I popped the van door open but didn’t get out. “You’re mighty curious, aren’t you? Let’s add research to your job description. Go back to the station and make some calls. See if you can find out why Sheriff Curzon hates us. I’d guess he’s worked with the press before. See what you can find out. Then call the police station just before five. If they still won’t ID the body, get a name on who owns the property where it was found. We ought to try to set up an interview first thing tomorrow. Early light would be nice. Call me at home later so we can set a schedule, but plan on picking me up around seven-A. You got my cell number?”
“Yeah. I got it.” He sounded distracted. Or maybe it was pissed. Sensitive boy. Wasn’t like I ordered him to pick up my dry cleaning.
“Oh, one more thing. Push my bike into the dock, would you? Night air isn’t good for Peg.” I slammed the door behind me. “See ya.” I followed the van as it backed down the driveway, walking all the way out to the road so I could empty the mailbox.
Jenny never picked up the mail; Jenny never went near the road.
Three months ago her single mother-my only sister-was the hit part of a hit-and-run. She died.
Fucking boondocks.
I got the call between flights on my way to a natural disaster in Mexico-earthquake? Killer bees? Hell, I don’t even remember. I got off one plane and onto another, and just that fast, the life I had was over. My new life consisted of a thirty-year-old ranch house, a ten-year-old Subaru station wagon and an eight-year-old niece. Jenny.
The school counselor told me it’d be a big mistake to move her right now. Said Jenny needed stability. Same house, same school, same friends. So, here I am in the no-man’s land of the Chicago ’burbs. Harbor of White Flight. Republican stronghold. Protestant heaven. Journalist hell.
News flash: Jenny wasn’t all that happy with me either.
I crouched down next to her on the concrete step. “Been sitting here long?”
She shrugged and continued staring at her shoes.
“Sorry I kept you waiting.”
No answer. She leaned over and poked the tip of her shoelace into one of the lace holes.
“I got the job. That’s why I was late. We don’t have to move or anything. For now.”
Thank goodness I had enough cash stashed away, I could afford to sit on my ass with her for the summer. Neither of us was in any shape to detail a life plan more complicated than dinner and the TV guide. But I’d told her from the beginning that couldn’t last. Besides the money, I needed to work. It kept me in circulation.
It kept me from going insane.
Jenny finally tossed her head at me, oh? and her purple plastic barrette unsnapped. A curtain of fine, brown hair, straight as her mother’s, drooped in front of her face.
“Guess we should get you a key or something,” I offered. “So this doesn’t happen again.”
“Kids aren’t supposed to have keys,” she mumbled to her shoe laces. “Kids are supposed to have somebody.”
“Right.”
Our after-school routine was loosely based on her mother’s plan of operation. We ate a snack, watched cartoons together, then she tackled homework while I ran through my weight program. Today, I scrapped routine. I threw the kid a bag of chips and went straight down to my darkroom to work, eager to see how my shots would develop.
I had turned a portion of the basement into a work area as soon as I’d arrived. One small window had to be blocked off, but there was running water and plenty of space to hang prints to dry. I tied lines to plumbing pipes, bought myself some heavy-duty shelves and a shop table at the local hardware store. Boom, I was in business.
Jenny hung around the first time I printed a roll. But she didn’t like the smell of the chemicals, which meant I usually had my privacy in the darkroom. Another bonus. Sometimes the hardest thing about coming to live with Jenny was simply having her around all the time.
People are funny. If somebody said go into a damp, smelly basement and sit around for a couple of hours, it’d sound unpleasant to most, but I always felt refreshed after time in the darkroom. There’s a certain level of concentration that must be maintained, steps that happen in a certain order, and in the end if you do it right, you get something beautiful.
Some people do yoga. I do photography.
Photographing a death scene is a special challenge. There are very few shots that will play as acceptable for prime time, although the boundaries of acceptable have expanded in the last few years. I got everything through two baths and hung to dry when I heard a knock. The shot with the firefighter was a beauty.
“Come on in.” I was hunched over the table, checking a wide shot with a jeweler’s loupe. There was a flare showing up in some of the shots that irritated me.
“I’m hungry, Aunt Maddy.”
“Oh, right.” I pulled myself away from the flare problem and cracked my neck. “What time is it?”
“Almost eight. You missed Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob.”
“How many commercials?” I asked.
“Forty-two. Thirty-six promos.”
If the kid was going to watch television, she’d better know what she was watching. Whenever she watched regular TV, I made her count. “That’s a lot of commercial time.”
“Old Navy is having a sale.”
“Ah.”
Jenny slid in next to me as I hunched over proof sheets searching for flares. She looked up at the drying prints. “What is that?”
I jerked upright and had one of those whoops! Is this a fuck-up? moments. The smallest possible answer was, “These are the pictures I took today.”
“Is that guy dead?”
“Yeah.”
She stepped close enough to the photo I thought her nose would touch the paper. “Did he kill himself?”
“Yeah, he did.” The guy had a rope as thick as my wrist hanging from around his neck; what else could I say?
“Why?” she whispered.
I guess I’d been holding my breath because the first sound I made was a whoosh of air. “I don’t know. I guess he was sad.” I knew that wasn’t right, wasn’t enough, so I tried adding, “Very, very sad.”
She turned her nose toward me and stared long enough I counted three blinks.
“Hey Jen, I need to run these downtown to a guy.” I tried diversionary tactics. “Wanna get a hot dog for dinner?”
“Chili dog?”
“Sure.” I gave her my best happy chuck on the arm, feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. “Be right up-you go grab my bag.”
With a snap, I grabbed the picture Jenny had nearly pressed her nose against. It showed the flare as well, but not in the same spot. I set two prints beside each other and realized the flare wasn’t crap on my lens. It was something in the photo, something catching light in the open second-story window of the barn.
Making pictures is a fairly complex operation. A million tiny details, a million choices that contribute to the final product. Most of the choices are things I don’t even think about any more, things happening so fast I don’t remember half of what I see. I crouch to shift the horizon. I frame so the picture will fit into a TV screen’s rectangle. I put the light behind me.
With the sun slanting in above the van’s roof, the lens recorded something my eye had missed-the flare of light on glass in a tiny, double comma. Because I’d spent plenty of time over the last five years taking pictures of soldiers on the job, it happened to be just the sort of flare I’d recognize.
Binoculars.
Somebody had been watching from the barn.
11:17:09 p.m.
By the time her aunt was asleep, it was really dark everywhere. But Jenny didn’t mind.
Lots of other kids were afraid of the dark.
Jenny knew for a fact that Lindsay still slept with a light on, because she’d slept over once last year when they were still friends. That was a long time ago.
Jenny didn’t need a night light anymore. Night wasn’t bad. In fact, she liked it.
She stood in her doorway and listened. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt to swallow.
Before the summer, before everything was different, she’d loved her house: the chair she always sat in to watch TV, the wall where her mom hung her pictures from school, even the bathroom, where the heater vent was right beside the toilet and in the winter it blew warm air on her cold feet when she woke up. Whenever Jenny walked in the door of her house, she always felt right.
Everything was different now. Her chair was lumpy. Aunt Maddy had put her stuff in Jenny’s bathroom, like her toothbrush and this thing called a tongue scraper that was double weird and totally gross. Jenny never had time to warm her feet anymore. She had to hurry up, so her aunt could have her turn. The house didn’t even smell the same, because her aunt hated the smell of Pine-Sol and bought new cleaner that smelled like oranges and made Jenny sneeze.
Jenny looked up and down. The hall returned nothing but a long, black silence. The pounding in her chest began to pass. Here in the dark, she felt safe. Invisible, she could breathe. She could finally do the thing she most wanted to do, the thing she craved through the whole long, bright day.
She tip-toed up the hall, sticking close to the wall where the floor didn’t creak. Outside the guest bedroom where her aunt slept, she stopped again to listen.
Quiet.
Jenny held her breath as she passed the door. Her aunt’s bare foot hung off the bed, her face turned away toward the wall. Your aunt had big shoes to fill, her mother always said and it was true. Aunt Maddy had big feet. That’s why she’s bigger than life. Jenny wasn’t really sure what that meant, until Aunt Maddy came to stay. Her feet weren’t the only big part. She was so tall she bumped the light over the couch almost every day. And she had a big voice, too. She yelled in the car at the other drivers, she yelled when she talked on the phone, sometimes she even yelled at the TV. Loud.
The last door in the hall was Mama’s. It was closed, as usual.
Jenny slipped in and shut the door behind her.
At last.
With a pillow and lap blanket off the bed, she crossed the last threshold into Mama’s big square closet. There was a place deep in the back where she’d cleared away all the shoes, and Mama’s long skirts and dresses nearly dragged the floor. Snuggling back against the wall Jenny let the clothes brush against her face, her mother’s scent, her mother’s softness surrounding her. She closed her eyes, breathing in, in, in.
Mommy, Mommy, Mom-me.
Sometimes everything didn’t feel as bad when you were awake in the dark.
For a while, Jenny worried that Aunt Maddy would take it all away, all her mama’s things in the bedroom. She never did. She just put her suitcases in the guest room and that was that. It was kind of weird, actually. Her aunt had like, no stuff. Except the weights and the camera junk in the basement.
Jenny sunk deeper into the pillow and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. It wasn’t usually so cold in the closet. Tonight, it felt cold.
She couldn’t stop thinking about that picture her aunt had taken. The one with the dead guy.
It was scary. One of those guys looked sort of like somebody she used to know, maybe. It was hard to remember his face though. That was scary, too. Jenny didn’t like the idea of forgetting faces.
She needed to get another look. Maybe she could find another picture. A long time ago there was one in her mom’s bedroom, but now it was gone. Where could it have gone? Jenny didn’t take it and Aunt Maddy never even opened the door to this room.
Jenny pushed her way out of the closet and thought for a minute. Maybe there was another picture somewhere. Her mom always had special ones tucked in her underwear drawer.
Slowly, quietly, Jenny searched.
When she found what she needed, she put everything else back exactly the way it was. For another time…like maybe tomorrow.
The trip up the hall was quick, but heading downstairs, Jenny had to be careful. The stairs were noisy and Aunt Maddy woke up at the least sound. She was a light sleeper. Jenny’s mom used to say that people who slept well had no imagination or a very clean conscience, which seemed to explain pretty good about Aunt Maddy.
Some nights, Jenny was glad her aunt woke up easy. Not tonight though. She didn’t want to talk about this. Aunt Maddy didn’t like her very much as it was.
All the grown-ups Jenny knew had gotten weird since the accident. Teachers stared at her. The neighbors pretended like they didn’t see her. None of her mom’s friends called anymore. Maybe they’d all forgotten her mom, and her. Even the special friend.
Her mom kept a flashlight on top of the fridge in the basement for tornado drills and storms. Jenny had to stand on a plastic box to reach it. Her aunt’s photo work was on the table near the washing machine.
Jenny took the picture from her mother’s room and laid it next to the ones her aunt had made that day.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
It was him.
11:27:09 p.m.
Maybe his luck was changing.
The house was quiet and dark. He almost went inside. But this time he was watching very carefully. He saw the faint light click on and off in Gina’s bedroom-a nightlight, or the closet light maybe? A few minutes later, a light popped up in the basement window.
One of the girls must be awake.
Good thing he hadn’t gone there. He wouldn’t have been breaking the law or anything. He had a key. But there was no sense getting them all excited until he’d had a look.
The right thing to do was wait. Wait and watch.
Sooner or later the house would be empty. Then, he’d go in and see if maybe Maddy O’Hara had found something that belonged to him. Something that might make her hot to play reporter.
Watching was the smart move.
From now on, he’d watch her carefully. And he’d know when she’d gone too far.
VIDEO: reprint of news color photo tree/ladder/rope visible. Crowd of men watch as body lowered. (Slow zoom out)
Newsprint caption. Super over photo. Roll as crawl:
“Unidentified man in Amish clothing was found dead yesterday in a field south of Route 289. Police and fire department services were brought to the scene by an anonymous phone caller.”