That’s why I didn’t even question his connection to her. He knew I was married. Knew I had five kids. Even knew their names—” He grew pale. “My God! You don’t think he’d harm my family?”
“I don’t think that’s likely at all, but here,” Cassidy said, pulling out his cellular phone. “Why don’t you check on them? Go ahead, call them.”
Brandon looked at him with gratitude and quickly punched in a series of numbers. He bit his lower lip while the call went through, then said, “Honey? Oh, thank God. Thank God. Listen, something’s come up. I can’t talk about it right now, but
He looked like he was ready to cry.
“Use it again,” Cassidy offered. “Let your dad know he’s about to have a passel of kids over there.”
“Thank you,” Brandon said. He dialed again. “Dad? I need your help…. No, not money. Just listen, okay? I’m worried about Louise and the kids. They’re coming over to your place…. Yes, I know what A1 broke the last time he was there. I’ll pay for anything they break, Dad. Listen. Please…. Oh, for crying out loud!”
He looked up at Cassidy. “He hung up!”
Cassidy took the phone and pressed the redial button.
“Mr. North? Good afternoon, sir. This is Detective Thomas Cassidy of the Las Piernas Police Department. We have reason to believe that there is a possibility — just a slim possibility — that your grandchildren may be in danger. I’m on an unsecured line here, so I can’t go into details, but we asked your son to think of someone who could defend his wife and children until police protection could be arranged. He named you, sir. Your son will probably be calling you to let you know more about all of this, but I wanted to make sure you were up to the job…. Well, sir, he seems to believe you are capable, but I would hate to see an elderly gentleman placed in a position of…. Well, I’m sure you do know how to use a shotgun…. Why, no, that’s not very old at all. But you also need to be willing, sir. Sometimes people are not as kind to their kin as you’d expect them to be…. Well, no wonder he’s so certain of your help, then. As I said, he’ll probably be calling, so I won’t tie up the line. Thank you, sir…. Good day to you, too, sir — and please be very careful with that gun around the children, now…. Yes, that’s a wise precaution. Good-bye.”
He hung up, pressed redial one more time, and handed the phone back to Brandon, who was now looking at him like he was Moses come to take him to the Promised Land. I had known for some minutes that Cassidy was going to get into the library at the
We went back into the building and headed up to the third floor. At first I thought Brandon was taking us into the newsroom, but he saw my confusion and said, “The library moved since you worked here. It’s right next to the newsroom now.” We entered a long, narrow room. Painted white and filled with sunlight from the large windows along one wall, it was a more pleasant research environment than our windowless tomb at the
“Let’s see, now. Where did I put that fax?” He began shuffling through a pile of papers.
An interior set of windows ran along part of the wall that partitioned the library from the newsroom. I looked through them, wondering if I would see any familiar faces on the other side. But it was Saturday afternoon, and there wasn’t much activity. The few reporters who were in the room were busy at their desks, not interested in looking at the library. I didn’t recognize any of them.
“Feeling nostalgic?” I heard a voice drawl behind me.
“No,” I lied, and kept staring through the glass. A moment later Cassidy walked away. I was glad. He had managed to stick to me like a burr on a foxtail, and I was tired of it. I didn’t want him intruding on this particular ground. We all have our sacred places, and I couldn’t help it if this part of Bakersfield was one of mine. I had learned to be a reporter at this paper. My college instructors might have taught me how to close my hands around the tools of the trade, but this was where I really learned to use them. I paid my dues here, in this city, in this newsroom. Both had changed, but that didn’t matter. Looking through that window, I saw the newsroom not as it was, but as it had been not so long ago.
When I first came to Bakersfield, manual typewriters were giving way to electrics, and a few hotshots had portable computers — although what passed for a portable computer then was a far cry from the notebook computers of today. A newsroom sounded different then. It was a noisy place, filled with the clatter of typewriters and the grinding rasp of carriage returns; the
I thought of a young rookie cop I used to meet for breakfast at a nearby coffee shop at the end of our night shifts.
“I found it!” Brandon said. Then, noticing where I was standing, he asked, “You want to go into the newsroom, for old times’ sake?”
“No, thanks, Brandon. Not with a cop in tow.” I said it to irritate Cassidy, but it was really for old times’ sake that I refused to enter that changed world, with its muted keyboards and paperless monitors and silent wire services.
Brandon handed the fax to me. Cassidy moved closer, read over my shoulder.
Beneath a phony version of the
June 18
June 19
September 23
October 26
“Mean anything to you, Irene?” Cassidy asked.
“Not offhand. But these aren’t my stories. This was the year after I left the paper.”
“Let’s pull the microfilm,” Brandon said.
We followed him out into the hallway and entered to a nearby room, where there were microfilm storage cabinets, each with a padlocked locking bar down the front.
“Why do you lock them up?” Cassidy asked.
“This collection contains every issue of the paper since 1866, except for one missing year. That one walked out
