Never Look Away: A Thriller Page 3

  “He drives me nuts,” Mom would say, “but in forty-two years of marriage I don’t think we’ve had even one mosquito get through a hole in a screen.”

  Dad’s problem was that he couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as diligent about their duties as he was with his. He was intolerant of other people’s mistakes. As a city building inspector, he was a major pain in the ass to every Promise Falls contractor and developer. Behind his back they called him Don Hardass. When he got wind of that, he had some business cards made up with his new nickname.

  He found it difficult not to share his wisdom about how to make this a more perfect world, in every respect.

  “When you leave the spoons to dry like this without turning them over, the water ends up leaving a mark,” he’d say to my mother, holding up one of the offensive items of cutlery.

  “Piss off,” Arlene would say, and Don would grumble and go out to the garage.

  Their squabbling masked a deep love for each other. Dad never forgot a birthday or anniversary or Valentine’s Day.

  Jan and I knew, when we left Ethan with his grandparents, as we did through the week when we both went to work, that he wasn’t going to be exposed to any hazards. No frayed light cords, no poisonous chemicals left where he could get his hands on them, no upturned carpet edges he could run and trip on. And their rates just happened to be more reasonable than any nursery schools in the area.

  “Mom called me after you,” I said to Jan, who was driving in her Jetta wagon. It was nearly five-thirty. We’d rendezvoused at our house so we could pick up Ethan in one car, together.

  Jan looked over, said nothing, figured I’d continue. “She said Dad’s really done something over the top this time.”

  “She say what?”

  “No. I guess she wanted to build the suspense. I got hold of Reeves today, asked him about his hotel bill in Florence.”

  Jan said, without actually sounding all that interested, “How’s that story coming?”

  “Some woman called me anonymously. She had some good stuff. What I need to know now is how many others on the council are taking bribes or gifts or trips or whatever from this private prison corporation so that they’ll give them the nod when the rezoning comes up for a vote.”

  And you thought all the fun’d be over when Finley dropped out of politics.” A reference to our former mayor, whose night with a teenage hooker didn’t sit well with his constituents. Maybe, if you were Roman Polanski, you could screw someone a third your age and still win an Oscar, but if you were Randall Finley, it kind of played hell with your bid for Congress.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing about politics,” I said. “When one dick-head leaves the scene, half a dozen others rush in to fill the vacancy.”

  “Even if you get the story,” Jan said, “will they print it?”

  I looked out my window. I made a fist and tapped it lightly on my knee. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Things had changed at the Standard. It was still owned by the Russell family, and a Russell still sat in the publisher’s chair, and there were various Russells scattered about the newsroom and other departments. But the family’s commitment to keeping it a real newspaper had shifted in the last five years. The overriding concern now, with declining revenues and readership, was survival. The paper had always kept a reporter in Albany to cover state issues, but now relied on wires. The weekly book section had been killed, reduced to a page in the back end of Style. The editorial cartoonist, tremendously gifted at lampooning and harpooning local officials, was given the heave-ho, and now we picked up any number of national, syndicated cartoonists who’d probably never even heard of Promise Falls, let alone visited it, to fill the hole on the editorial page. Oh yeah, the editorials. We used to run two a day, written by staffers. Now, we ran “What Others Think,” a sampling of editorials from across the country. We didn’t think for ourselves more than three or four times a week.

  We no longer had our own movie critic. Theater reviews were farmed out to freelancers. The courts bureau had been shut down, and only the most newsworthy trials got covered, provided we happened to know they were on.

  But the most alarming indicator of our decline was sending reporting jobs offshore. I hadn’t thought it was possible, but when the Russells heard about how a paper in Pasadena had pulled it off, they couldn’t move quickly enough. They started with something as simple as entertainment listings. Why pay someone here fifteen to twenty bucks an hour to write up what’s going on around town when you could email all the info to some guy in India who’d put the whole thing together for seven dollars an hour?

  When the Russells found how well that worked, they stepped it up.

  Various city committees had a live Internet video feed. Why send a reporter? Why even pay one to watch it from the office? Why not get some guy named Patel in Mumbai to watch it, write up what he sees, then email his story back to Promise Falls, New York?

  The paper was looking to save money any way it could. Advertising revenue was in freefall. The classified section had all but disappeared, losing out to online services like Craigslist. Many of the paper’s clients were becoming more selective, banking on fewer but costlier radio and TV spots instead of full-or even half-page ads. So what if you hired reporters to cover local events who’d never even set foot in your community? If it saved money, go for it.

  While it wasn’t surprising to find that kind of mentality among the paper’s bean counters, it was pretty foreign in the newsroom. At least until now. As Brian Donnelly, the city editor and, more important, the publisher’s nephew, had mentioned to me only the day before, “How hard can it be to write down what people say at a meeting? Are we going to do a better job of it just because we’re sitting right there? Some of these guys in India, they take really good notes.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of this?” Jan asked, hitting the intermittent wipers to clear off some light rain.

  “Yeah, sure, but I’m beating my head against the wall with Brian.”

  “I’m not talking about work,” Jan said. “I’m talking about your parents. I mean, we see them every day. Your parents are nice enough and all, but there’s a limit. It’s like we’re being smothered or something.”

  “Where’s this coming from?”

  “You know we can never just drop Ethan off or pick him up at the end of the day. You have to go through the interrogation. ‘How was your day?’ ‘What’s new at work?’ ‘What are you having for dinner?’ If we’d just put him in day care, they wouldn’t give a shit, they’d just kick him out the door and we could go home.”

  “Oh, that sounds better. A place where they don’t actually have any interest in your kid.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “Look,” I said, not wanting to have a fight, because I wasn’t sure what was going on here, “I know most days you get off work before I do, so you’ve been doing pickup duty, but in another month it won’t even matter. Ethan’ll be going to kindergarten, which means we won’t be taking him to my parents’ every day, which means you won’t have to endure this daily interrogation you suddenly seem so concerned about.” I shook my head. “It’s not like we can take turns dropping him off at your parents’ place.”

  Jan shot me a look. I regretted the comment instantly, wished I could take it back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a cheap shot.”

  Jan said nothing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jan put her blinker on, turned in to my parents’ driveway. “Let’s see what your dad’s done now.”

  Ethan was in the living room, watching Family Guy. I walked in, turned off the set, called out to Mom, who was in the kitchen, “You can’t let him watch that.”

  “It’s just a cartoon,” she said, loud enough to be heard over running water.

  “Pack up your stuff,” I told Ethan, and walked back into the kitchen, where Mom stood at the sink with her back to me. “In one episode the dog tries to have
sex with the mother. In another, the baby takes a machine gun to her.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “No one would make a cartoon like that. You’re really turning into your father.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re wound too tight.”

  “It’s not The Flintstones anymore,” I said. “Actually, cartoons now are better. But a lot of them are not for four-year-olds.”

  Ethan shuffled into the kitchen, looking tired and a little bewildered. I was surprised he wasn’t asking about food. Mom had probably already given him something.

  Jan, who had come in a few seconds after me, knelt down to Ethan. “Hey, little man,” she said. She looked into his backpack. “You sure you have everything here?”

  He nodded.

  “Where’s your Transformer?”

  Ethan thought for a moment, then bolted back into the living room. “In the cushions!” he shouted.

  “What’s Dad done this time?” I asked.

  “He’s going to get himself killed,” Mom said, taking a pot from the sink and setting it on the drying rack.

  “What?”

  “He’s out in the garage. Get him to show you his latest project. So, Jan, how was work today? Things good?”

  I walked through the light rain to the garage. The double-wide door was open, Dad’s blue Crown Victoria, one of the last big sedans from Detroit, parked in there. My mother’s fifteen-year-old Taurus sat in the driveway. Both cars had kid safety seats in the back for when they had Ethan.

  Dad was tidying his workbench when I walked in. He’s taller than me if he stands up straight, but he’s spent most of his life looking down—inspecting things, trying to find tools—so that he’s permanently round-shouldered. He still has a full head of hair, which is something of a comfort to me, even if his did start going gray when he was barely forty.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Mom said you have something to show me.”

  “She needs to mind her own business.”

  “What is it?”

  He waved a hand, which I wasn’t sure was a dismissal or surrender. But when he opened up the passenger door and took out something to show me, I realized he was going to share his latest project.

  It was several white pieces of cardboard, about the size of a piece of regular printer paper. They looked like they might be the card sheets they slide into new shirts. Dad saved all that stuff.

  He handed the small stack to me and said, “Check it out.”

  Written on each one, in heavy black marker, all in capitals, was a different phrase. They included TURN SIGNAL BROKEN?, STOP RIDING MY ASS, TAILLIGHT OUT, HEADLIGHT OUT, SPEED KILLS, STOP SIGNS MEAN STOP, AND GET OFF THE PHONE!

  They looked like the cue cards you used to see the crew holding up for Johnny Carson.

  Dad said, “The STOP RIDING MY ASS one I did with bigger letters because they’ve got to be able to see it through my rear window, and I’m up in the front seat. But if they’re tailgating that close, they’ll probably see it.”

  I looked at him, at a loss for words.

  “How many times you seen some jackass do something stupid and you wish you could tell him? I keep these in the car, pick out the right one, hold it up to the window, maybe people will start to realize their mistakes.”

  I’d found some words. “You installing bulletproof glass?”

  “What?”

  “You flash these, someone’s going to shoot you.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Okay, so let’s say it’s you. You’re driving down the road and someone shows a sign like that to you.”

  Dad studied me. “That’d never happen. I’m a good driver.”

  “Work with me.”

  He pushed his lips in and out a moment. “I’d probably try to run the son of a bitch off the road into the ditch.”

  I took the cards from him and ripped them, one by one, in half, then dropped them in the metal garbage bin. Dad sighed.

  Jan came out the back door with Ethan. They walked up the side of the house to the Jetta and Jan started getting Ethan strapped into the safety seat.

  “Guess we’re going,” I said.

  “Your problem,” Dad said, “is you’re afraid to shake things up. Like that new prison they want to build. That’d be a real shot in the arm for the town.”

  “Sure. Maybe we could get a nuclear waste storage facility while we’re at it.”

  I got into the Jetta next to Jan. She backed out, pointed us in the direction of our house. Her jaw was set firmly and she wouldn’t look at me.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Jan said nothing all the way home, and very little through dinner. Later, she said she would put Ethan to bed, something we often did together.

  I went upstairs as she was tucking our son in.

  “You know who loves you more than anyone in the whole world?” she said to him.

  “You?” Ethan said in his tiny voice.

  “That’s right,” Jan whispered to him. “You remember that.”

  Ethan said nothing, but I thought I could hear his head moving on his pillowcase.

  “If someone ever said I didn’t love you, that wouldn’t be true. Do you understand?”

  “Yup,” Ethan said.

  “You sleep tight and I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

  “Can I have a drink of water?” Ethan said.

  “No more stalling. Go to sleep.”

  I slipped into our bedroom so I wouldn’t be standing there when Jan came out.

  THREE

  “Check it out,” said Samantha Henry, a general assignment reporter who sat next to me in the Standard newsroom.

  I wheeled over on my chair and looked at her computer monitor. Close enough to read it, but not so close she might think I was smelling her hair.

  “This just came in from one of the guys in India, who was watching a planning committee meeting about a proposed housing development.” The committee was grilling the developer about how small the bedrooms appeared to be on the plans. “Okay, so read this para right here,” Samantha said, pointing.

  “‘Mr. Councilor Richard Hemmings expressed consternation that the rooms did not meet the proper requirements for the swinging of a cat.’” I stared at it a moment and grinned. “I should call my dad and ask if that’s actually written somewhere in the building code. ‘A bedroom must be large enough that if you are standing in the center, grasping a cat by the tail, its head will not hit any of the four walls when you are spinning with your arm fully extended.’”

  “Stuff’s coming in like this every day,” Samantha said. “What the fuck do they think they’re doing? You saw the correction we ran the other day?”

  “Yeah,” I said. The city did not actually own any barns, and no city employees had actually closed the barn doors after the horses had left. It was bad enough our reporters in India were unfamiliar with American idioms, but when they got past the copy desk right here in the office, something was very very wrong.

  “Don’t they care?” Samantha asked.

  I pushed away from the monitor, leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers behind my head. I always felt a little more relaxed when I moved away from Sam. The thing we had was a long time ago, but you started sharing a computer screen too often and people were going to talk.

  It felt like the chair’s back support was going to fail, and I shifted forward, put my hands on the arms. “You have to ask?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “I’ve been here fifteen years. I asked the M.E.’s assistant for a new pen and she wanted to see an empty one first. Swear to God. Half the time, you go in the ladies’ room, there’s no goddamn toilet paper.”

  “I hear the Russells may be looking to sell,” I said. It was the number one rumor going around the building. “If they can pare down the costs, get the place showing a profit, they’ll have an easier time unloading the place.”

  Samantha Henry rolled her eyes. “Seriously, who’d buy us in this
climate?”

  “I’m not saying it’s happening. I just heard some talk.”

  “I can’t believe they’d sell. This place has been run by one family for generations.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a very different generation running it now than ten years ago. You won’t find ink running through the veins of anyone on the board these days.”

  “Madeline used to be a reporter,” Samantha said, referring to our publisher. She didn’t need to remind me how Madeline got her start here.

  “Used to be,” I said.

  What with papers shutting down all over the country, everyone was on edge. But Sam, in particular, was worried about her future. She had an eight-year-old daughter and no husband. They’d split up years ago, and she’d never gotten a dime of support from him. A former Standard staffer, he’d left to work on a paper in Dubai. It’s pretty hard to chase a guy down for money he owes you when he’s on the other side of the planet.

  When she was newly divorced, with a baby, Sam put up a brave front. She could do this. Still have her career and raise a child. We didn’t sit next to each other back then, but we crossed paths often enough. In the cafeteria, at the bar after work. When we weren’t trading reporters’ usual complaints about editors who had held or cut their stories, she let down her guard about how tough things were for her and Gillian.

  I guess I thought I could rescue her.

  I liked Sam. She was sexy, funny, intellectually challenging. I liked Gillian. Sam and I started spending a lot of time together. I started spending a lot of nights at Sam’s. I fancied myself as more than a boyfriend. I was her white knight. I was the one who was going to make her life okay again.