Absent Friends

baby turtle, it looks big enough to be a grown-up one, but then Markie whispers, There's another one! and when they look where he's pointing, they see that one, too, and then Jimmy sees one, and soon everyone's found one or two, Jack sees three sitting over on a rock and they're real little. Everyone agrees probably they're baby ones.

A rumbling sound comes from far away, they almost don't hear it, or they think it's a jet plane way high up. But Tom looks around at how dark it is and says, You guys, it's going to rain.

The rumbling happens again, and of course it's thunder, and the tops of the trees are moving and a swish of wind sends leaves skittering across the dirt. Look! says Markie. A snake in the water! but no one looks except Jack.

Tom says, Come on, we better go. He heads around the pond to the path they usually come on. Jimmy and Marian and Sally follow him, Sally turning her head to keep looking at the turtles.

Jack says, I'm going back that way, where we came down. It's so cool, climbing up that!

Markie looks at Tom, and then at Jack, and says, Me too, Jack, I'm coming that way, too. Jack says, Cool! And he says, Vicky, you want to come with us?

Vicky looks at the slope, all tangled with roots. Her eyes light up again, and she takes a step that way. But she stops. She looks at Jack and then at Tom, waiting on the path. Her face turns a little bit sad, just for a second, and then she smiles at Tom. Jack, she says, as she walks toward the path, come this way. I don't think we'll get home before the storm, if we go your way.

It's true that, for a time, after Jack comes back from New Haven, his dark eyes linger on Vicky, he winks at her when someone says, Hey, sorry New Haven didn't work out, and he always answers, Hey, it's okay, I won't be here that long, and besides, they got things here they don't have in New Haven. Vicky smiles and blushes. But that passes. And had you asked her then, she'd have told you this: it was like new fashions in the magazine pages. Startling ideas, answers to questions you had never asked, so you try them on in your head. And then realize they're absurd. And discard them. Sometimes maybe you turn back to one of those pages again, take another look . . . but no, still no. Vicky will marry Tom. After the wedding she'll stay in her job at the sewing store—trimmings, notions, exotic fabrics, Vicky's good with those, all the things that make what you expected into something different, special, and sparkling—just for a while, until she leaves to have their babies.

Vicky's happy.

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 6

The Women in the Tent

October 31, 2001

Laura had made phone calls (a task that had once been so simple, that since September 11 demanded patience, ingenuity, dedication). Now she had appointments.

Almost everyone had agreed to speak with her, even the people with the most reasons to hate Harry: Kevin Keegan, Edward Spano, Marian Gallagher. Well, why not? she thought as she gathered her notebooks and pens. She was offering them the opportunity to comment on Harry's death. They probably had a lot to say, each one of them.

The lawyer, Phil Constantine, the one Harry had said was a bagman for the Spano organization— said this to Laura; merely insinuated it in print—he was the only one who'd refused. Constantine had been hard to reach; his office phone was still out, and Laura had left three messages on his cell phone before she reached him. Horns honking and a general background din had told Laura he was on the street, but she didn't think that was what accounted for the way he barked his name when he answered his phone, or for the coldness of the silence with which he listened, or for the terseness of his “no comment” when he hung up. She wasn't surprised at Constantine's refusal, nor particularly thrown. Reporter-Laura knew how to handle this. You wait until one of the others says something new about him, something that's not in print yet, something even worse than what is. Then you call him back and invite him to comment on that.

It almost always worked.

And besides, Laura thought, snapping her tape recorder shut, zipping her bag, how much could you expect to learn about the truth from talking to a lawyer anyway?

She made a trip to the bathroom mirror, checking to see how red her eyes were, giving her hair a comb. While she did this she resolutely did not look at Harry's shaving things on the sink, his bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. Her pale brown hair, straight and sleek and lustrous in good times, lank and sullen now, could have used a little more work, but she stuck the comb back in the cabinet when she felt the lump start building in her throat again. You can't do interviews with a lump in your throat.

Normally, of course, Laura would never chase all over town for interviews like these. There was no time. This was work you did over the phone, in the days, so recent but in another life, when the phone was just another tool you never even thought about, you just picked it up and someone was there. You did interviews over the phone so you could write the story yourself and grab the byline, not the “reported by” that came when you phoned a story in.

Normally, you sat at your desk, scribbling as fast as you could, and you asked people, What did you think when you heard? (The river, my God, how can it be that the river just keeps running under the burning blue sky?) When was the last time you spoke to Harry Randall? (Yesterday, early morning, no time for coffee, dashing out the door, hasty kiss.) What was the substance of that conversation? (Stone [already at elevator, jabbing button]: “Aren't you working today?” Randall [rumpled, preoccupied, but offering that ever-amused smile]: “I have something to check out first. I'll be in later.”) What was your relationship with Harry Randall? (Stone: The ocean with its shores? The ship with its anchor? Randall: Where do you get these things?) Do you have anything to add? (Long, long silence.)

But normally, when Laura asked what someone thought about a death, a disaster, that was what she wanted to know: what they thought. Today what she was going to be asking was, Did you do this? Did you kill Harry?

Not literally, of course. Reporter-Laura would be asking the questions, and she was too cool, too professional, to make a dumb mistake like that. She would be cunning and clever. She would wait and watch and listen, study them, how they sat and spoke and looked at her, when they talked about Harry. Her years in school, her years in Des Moines and St. Paul, and these years on the New York Tribune: Reporter-Laura had