Never Look Away Page 2

  “Ethan!” I said. I reached down, scooped him out of the stroller, and held him close to me. “Ethan, oh God, Ethan!”

  I held him out where I could see his face, and he was frowning, like he was about to cry. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. Daddy’s here.”

  I realized he wasn’t upset because he’d been snatched away from us. He was annoyed at having his nap interrupted.

  But that didn’t stop me from telling him, again, that everything was okay. I hugged him close to me, patted his head.

  When I held him out again, his lip stopped trembling long enough for him to point at the corner of my mouth and ask, “Did you have chocolate?”

  I laughed and cried at the same time.

  I took a moment to pull myself together, then said, “We have to find your mother, let her know everything’s okay.”

  “What’s going on?” Ethan asked.

  I got out my phone, hit the speed dial for Jan’s cell. It rang five times and went to message. “I’ve got him,” I said. “I’m coming to the gate.”

  Ethan had never had such a speedy stroller ride. He stuck out his hands and giggled as I pushed him through the crowds. The front wheels were starting to wobble so much I had to tip the stroller back, prompting him to laugh even more.

  When we got to the main gate, I stopped, looked around.

  Ethan said, “I think maybe I want to try the big coaster roller. I’m big enough.”

  “Hold on, partner,” I said, looking. I got out my phone again. I left a second message: “Hey, we’re right here. We’re at the gate. Where are you?”

  I moved us to the center of the walkway, just inside the gate, where the crowds funneled in to get to the rides.

  Jan wouldn’t be able to miss us here.

  I stood in front of the stroller so Ethan could watch me. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Didn’t Mom come? Did she go home? Did she leave the backpack with the sandwiches in it?”

  “Hold on,” I said.

  “Can I have just peanut butter? I don’t want the peanut-butter-with-jam ones.”

  “Just cool your jets a second, okay?” I said. I was holding my cell, ready to flip it open the instant it rang.

  Maybe Jan was with park security. That’d be fine, even though Ethan had been found. Because there was somebody running around this park, taking off with other people’s kids. Not a good thing.

  I waited ten minutes before placing another call to Jan’s cell. Still no pickup. I didn’t leave a message this time.

  Ethan said, “I don’t want to stay here. I want to go on a ride.”

  “Just hang on, sport,” I said. “We can’t go off without your mom. She won’t know where to find us.”

  “She can phone,” Ethan said, kicking his legs.

  A park employee, identifiable by his khaki pants and shirt with the Five Mountains logo stitched to it, walked past. I grabbed his arm.

  “You security?” I asked.

  He held up a small walkie-talkie device. “I can get them,” he said.

  At my request, he called in to see whether anyone from security was helping Jan. “Someone needs to tell her I’ve found our son,” I said.

  The voice coming out of the walkie-talkie was scratchy. “Who? We got nothing on that.”

  “Sorry,” the park employee said and moved on.

  I was trying to tamp down the panic.

  Something was very wrong. Someone tries to take your kid. A bearded man runs away.

  Your wife doesn’t come back to the rendezvous point.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Ethan, scanning the crowds. “I’m sure she’ll be here any minute now. Then we’ll have some fun.”

  But Ethan didn’t say anything. He’d fallen back asleep.

  ONE

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Reeves?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is David Harwood at the Standard,” I said.

  “Yeah, David.” This was the thing with politicians. You called them “Mister” and they called you by your first name. Didn’t matter whether it was the president of the United States or some flunky on the utilities commission. You were always Bob or Tom or David. Never Mr. Harwood.

  “How are you today?” I asked.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  I decided to counter curt with charm. “Hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time. I understand you just got back. What was it, just yesterday?”

  “Yeah,” Stan Reeves said.

  “And this trip was a—what? A fact-finding mission?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “To England?”

  “Yeah,” he said. It was like pulling teeth, getting anything out of Reeves. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that he didn’t like me very much. Didn’t like the stories I’d been writing about what could end up being Promise Falls’ newest industry.

  “So what facts did you pick up?” I asked.

  He sighed, as if resigned to answering a couple of questions, at least. “We found that for-profit prisons have been operating in the United Kingdom successfully for some time. Wolds Prison was set up to be run that way in the early nineties.”

  “Did Mr. Sebastian accompany you as you toured the prison facilities in England?” I asked. Elmont Sebastian was the president of Star Spangled Corrections, the multimillion-dollar company that wanted to build a private prison just outside Promise Falls.

  “I believe he was there for part of the tour,” Stan Reeves said. “He helped facilitate a few things for the delegation.”

  “Was there anyone else from the Promise Falls council who made up this delegation?” I asked.

  “As I’m sure you already know, David, I was the council’s appointee to go to England and see how their operations have been over there. There were a couple of people from Albany, of course, and a representative from the state prison system.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what did you take from the trip, bottom line?”

  “It confirmed a lot of what we already know. That privately run correctional facilities are more efficient than state-run facilities.”

  “Isn’t that largely because they pay their people far less than the state pays its unionized staff, and that they don’t get nearly the same benefits as state employees?”

  A tired sigh. “You’re a broken record, David.”

  “That’s not an opinion, Mr. Reeves,” I said. “That’s a well-documented fact.”

  “You know what else is a fact? It’s a fact that wherever unions have their clutches in, they’ve been taking the state to the cleaners.”

  “It’s also a fact,” I said, “that privately run prisons have had higher rates of assaults on guards, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence, largely due to reduced staffing levels. Did you find this to be the case in England?”

  “You’re just like those do-gooders out at Thackeray who lose sleep when one inmate tears into another.” Some of the faculty at Thackeray College had banded together to fight the establishment of a private prison in Promise Falls. It was becoming a cause célèbre at the school. Reeves continued, “If one prisoner ends up sticking a shiv in another prisoner, you want to explain to me exactly how that hurts society?”

  I scribbled down the quote. If Reeves ever denied it later, I had him on my digital recorder. The thing was, making this comment public would only boost his popularity.

  “Well, it would hurt the operators of the prison,” I countered, “since they get paid by the state per inmate. They start killing each other off, there goes your funding. Do you have any thoughts on Star Spangled Corrections’ aggressive congressional lobbying for stiffer penalties, particularly longer sentences for a variety of crimes? Isn’t that a bit self-serving?”

  “I’ve got a meeting to get to,” he said.

  “Has Star Spangled Corrections settled on a site yet? I understand Mr. Sebastian is considering a few of them.”

  “No, nothing definite yet. There are a numb
er of possible sites in the Promise Falls area. You know, David, this means a lot of jobs. You understand? Not just for the people who’d work there, but lots of local suppliers. Plus, there’s a good chance a facility here would take in convicted criminals from outside our area, so that means family coming here to visit, staying in local hotels, buying from local merchants, eating in local restaurants. You get that, right?”

  “So it’d be like a tourist attraction,” I said. “Maybe they could put it next to our new roller-coaster park.”

  “Were you always a dick, or is it something they teach in journalism school?” Reeves asked.

  I decided to get back on track. “Star Spangled’s going to have to come before council for rezoning approval on whatever site they pick. How do you plan to vote on that?”

  “I’ll have to weigh the merits of the proposal and vote accordingly, and objectively,” Reeves said.

  “You’re not worried about the perception that your vote may have already been decided?”

  “Why would anyone perceive such a thing?” Reeves asked.

  “Well, Florence for one.”

  “Florence? Florence who?”

  “Your trip to Florence. You extended your trip. Instead of coming back directly from England, you went to Italy for several days.”

  “That was … that was all part of my fact-finding mission.”

  “I didn’t realize that,” I said. “Can you tell me which correctional facilities you visited in Italy?”

  “I’m sure I could have someone get that list to you.”

  “You can’t tell me now? Can you at least tell me how many Italian prisons you visited?”

  “Not offhand,” he said.

  “Was it more than five?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Less than five, then,” I said. “Was it more than two?”

  “I’m really not—”

  “Did you visit a single correctional facility in Italy, Mr. Reeves?”

  “Sometimes you can accomplish what you need to accomplish without actually going to these places. You set up meetings, meet off-site—”

  “Which Italian prison officials did you meet with off-site?”

  “I really don’t have time for this.”

  “Where did you stay in Florence?” I asked, even though I already knew.

  “The Maggio,” Reeves said hesitantly.

  “I guess you must have run into Elmont Sebastian while you were there.”

  “I think I did run into him in the lobby once or twice,” he said.

  “Weren’t you, in fact, Mr. Sebastian’s guest?”

  “Guest? I was a guest of the hotel, David. You need to get your facts straight.”

  “But Mr. Sebastian—Star Spangled, Inc., to be more precise—paid for your airfare to Florence and your accommodation, isn’t that correct? You flew out of Gatwick on—”

  “What the fuck is this?” Reeves asked.

  “Do you have a receipt for your Florence stay?” I asked.

  “I’m sure I could put my hands on it if I had to, but who saves every single receipt?”

  “You’ve only been home a day. I’m guessing if you have one it hasn’t had a chance to get lost yet.”

  “Look, my receipts are none of your fucking business.”

  “So if I were to write a story that says Star Spangled Corrections paid for your Florence stay, you’d be able to produce that receipt to prove me wrong.”

  “You know, you got a hell of a lot of nerve tossing around accusations like this.”

  “My information is that your stay, including taxes and tickets to the Galleria dell’Accademia and anything out of your minibar, came to three thousand, five hundred and twenty-six euros. Does that sound about right?”

  The councilman said nothing.

  “Mr. Reeves?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said quietly. “It might have been about that. I’d have to check. But you’re way off base, suggesting that Mr. Sebastian footed the bill for this.”

  “When I called the hotel to confirm that your bill was being looked after by Mr. Sebastian, they assured me that everything was covered.”

  “There must be some mistake.”

  “I have a copy of the bill. It was charged to Mr. Sebastian’s account.”

  “How the hell did you get that?”

  I wasn’t about to say, but a woman who didn’t like Reeves very much had phoned from a blocked number earlier in the day to tell me about the hotel bill. I was guessing she worked either at city hall or in Elmont Sebastian’s office. I couldn’t get a name out of her.

  “Are you saying Mr. Sebastian didn’t pay your bill?” I asked. “I’ve got his Visa number right here. Should we check it out?”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Mr. Reeves, when this prison proposal comes before council, will you be declaring a conflict of interest, given that you’ve accepted what amounts to a gift from the prison company?”

  “You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” Reeves said. “A real piece of shit.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “A goddamn piece of shit.”

  “I’ll take that as a confirmation.”

  “You want to know what really gets me?”

  “What’s that, Mr. Reeves?”

  “This high-and-mighty attitude from someone like you, working for a newspaper that’s turned into a fucking joke. You and those eggheads from Thackeray and anyone else you got on your side getting your shorts in a knot because someone might outsource running a prison, when you outsource fucking reporting. I remember when the Promise Falls Standard was actually a paper people had some respect for. Of course, that was before its circulation started going to shit, when it actually had journalists reporting on local events, before the Russell family started farming out some of its reporting duties to offshore help, getting reporters in goddamn India for Christ’s sake to watch committee meetings over the Internet and then write up what happened at them for a fraction of what it would cost to pay reporters here to do the job. Any paper that does something like that and still thinks it can call itself a newspaper is living in a fool’s paradise, my friend.”

  He hung up.

  I put down my pen, took off my headset, hit the stop button on my digital recorder. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, right up until the end there.

  The phone had only been on the receiver for ten seconds when it rang.

  I put the headset to my ear without hooking it on. “Standard. Harwood.”

  “Hey.” It was Jan.

  “Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay.”

  “You at work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” Jan paused. “I was just thinking of that movie. You know the one? With Jack Nicholson?”

  “I need more,” I said.

  “Where he’s a germaphobe, always takes plastic cutlery to the restaurant?”

  “Okay, I know the one,” I said. “You were thinking about that?”

  “Remember that scene, where he goes to the shrink’s office? And all those people are sitting there? And he says the line, the one from the title? He says, ‘What if this is as good as it gets?’”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I remember. That’s what you’re thinking about?”

  She shifted gears. “So what about you? What’s the scoop, Woodward?”

  TWO

  Maybe there were clues earlier that something was wrong and I’d just been too dumb to notice them. It’s not like I’d be the first journalist who fancied himself a keen observer of current events, but didn’t have a clue when it came to the home front. But still, it seemed as though Jan’s mood had changed almost overnight.

  She was tense, short-tempered. Minor irritants that would not have fazed her in the past now were major burdens. One evening, while we were getting ready to make up some lunches for the next day, she burst into tears upon discovering we were ou
t of bread.

  “It’s all too much,” she said to me that night. “I feel like I’m at the bottom of this well and I can’t climb out.”

  At first, because I’m a man and don’t really know—and don’t really want to know—what the hell’s going on with women in a physiological sense, I thought maybe it was some kind of hormonal thing. But I realized soon enough it was more than that. Jan was, and I realize this is not what you’d call a clinical diagnosis, down in the dumps. Depressed. But depressed did not necessarily mean depression.

  “Is it work?” I asked her one night in bed, running my hand on her back. Jan, with one other woman, managed the office for Bertram’s Heating and Cooling. “Has something happened there?” The latest economic slowdown meant fewer people were buying new air conditioners or furnaces, but that actually meant more repair work for Ernie Bertram. And sometimes, she and Leanne Kowalski, that other woman, didn’t always see eye to eye.

  “Work’s fine,” she said.

  “Have I done something?” I asked. “If I have, tell me.”

  “You haven’t done anything,” she said. “It’s just … I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could make it all go away.”

  “Make what all go away?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

  A couple of days later, I suggested maybe she should talk to someone. Starting with our family doctor.

  “Maybe there’s a prescription or something,” I said.

  “I don’t want to take drugs,” Jan said, then quickly added, “I don’t want to be somebody I’m not.”

  After work on the day she called me at the paper, Jan and I drove up together to pick up Ethan at his grandparents’ place.

  My mother and father, Arlene and Don Harwood, lived in one of the older parts of Promise Falls in a two-story red-brick house that was built in the forties. They didn’t buy until the fall of 1971, when my mother was pregnant with me, and they’d had the place ever since. Mom had made some noises about selling it after Dad retired from the city’s building department four years ago, arguing that they didn’t need all this space, a lawn to cut, a garden to maintain, that they could get along just fine in a condo or an apartment, but Dad wouldn’t have any of it. He’d go mad cooped up in a condo. He had his workshop out back in a separate two-car garage, and spent more time in there than in the house, if you didn’t count sleeping. He was a relentless putterer, always looking for something to fix or tear down and do all over again. A door or cupboard hinge never had a chance to squeak twice. Dad practically carried a can of WD-40 with him at all times. A stuck window, a dripping tap, a running toilet, a jiggly doorknob—none of them stood a chance in our house. Dad always knew exactly what tool he needed, and could have strolled into his garage blindfolded to lay his hands on it.