What The Dead Know

impertinent…” Here, she uttered some oath in German or Yiddish, Barb couldn’t be sure. “I will have you fired. I will-” She clambered out of her chair and over the piles of reports she had used to create a makeshift barrier around her desk, and raced to the editor’s corner office on her tiny, perfect heels, quivering all over, as if Barb had threatened her with violence. Even her topknot-dyed into submission and touched up every two weeks so nary a root showed in the fierce chestnut red-shook as if in fear.

Barb might have been worried, if she hadn’t witnessed the same performance at least twice a month since she’d started working in the newsroom last summer. Mrs. Hennessey raged up and down in the editor’s office, shaking her tiny fists, demanding Barb’s ouster. She huffed out of the room and, within seconds, Barb was summoned by electronic message.

“If you could just see your way to being a bit more tactful with her…” the editor, Mike Bagley, began.

“I’ll try,” Barb said. “I do try. Do you ask her to be more tactful with me? She treats me like her personal servant. Granted, the computer eats her work every now and then, but most of her problems stem from the fact that she refuses to do the most basic stuff correctly. I’m not her keeper.”

“She’s an”-he looked around as if fearful of being overheard-“an older woman. Set in her ways. We’re not going to change her at this point.”

“So that little tail wags the whole newsroom’s dog?”

Bagley, a large man with thin gingery hair that had faded with age to the color of Tang, made a face. “That conjures up quite an image. Mrs. Hennessey’s tail. My eyes! But look, Barb. Your career path has been unorthodox at best. Your people skills are less than…”

She waited, curious to hear what word he would put to it. Nonexistent? Crippled? But he didn’t even try to finish the sentence.

“We are utterly dependent on you. When the system crashes and you bring it back up, your work saves us thousands of dollars. You know that and I know that. So let Mrs. Hennessey pretend that she’s a person of consequence, as opposed to an age-discrimination suit waiting to happen. Just apologize to her.”

“Apologize? It wasn’t my fault.”

“You called her a crappy writer.”

“I…?” She laughed. “I said that it was a poor craftsman who blames his tools. It’s just an old saying. I didn’t say shit about her writing. But she is, isn’t she?” Barb mulled on this. It had not occurred to her before that she was entitled to have an opinion about the words that appeared on the screens she tended. She had been plucked out of the Classified department, a computer savant discovered in the newspaper’s equivalent of Schwab’s. She wasn’t even conscious of reading the paper, but she had been, she realized, and Mrs. Hennessey was a crappy writer.

“Just say you’re sorry, Barb. Sometimes the expedient way is the right way.”

She looked at him through her lashes, eyes glowering. Do you know what I could do to this system? Do you realize I could cripple this whole operation? In her six-month evaluation, Bagley-who had no right to supervise her, given that he had no inkling what her job involved-had written that she needed to “work on her anger.” Oh, she worked on it, all right. She banked it like a fire every night, recognizing it as her best source of energy.

“And who will apologize to me?”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “Look, I agree that Mrs. Hennessey is a handful. But she didn’t say boo to you. And she thinks that you said she’s a bad writer. It’s just easier all around if you apologize.”

“Easier for who?”

“For whom,” he corrected. What an asshole. “Okay, it’s easier for me. And I’m the boss, right? So just say you’re sorry and let me get the hell out of this hen fight.”

SHE FOUND MRS. HENNESSEY in the break room, a grimy alcove of vending machines and Formica-topped tables.

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly

The older woman inclined her head with equal stiffness, a queen staring down her nose at a peasant. That is, she would have been staring down at Barb if she hadn’t been seated. “Thank you.”

“It was just a saying.” Barb didn’t know why she felt compelled to keep speaking. She had done what she’d been told to do. “I wasn’t implying anything about your writing.”

“I’ve been a reporter for thirty-five years,” Mrs. Hennessey said. She had a first name, Mary Rose. It appeared in her byline, but it was never used in conversation. She was always Mrs. Hennessey. “I’ve worked at this paper longer than you’ve been alive. Women like me, we made your career possible. I covered desegregation.”

“Yeah? That was a big issue-” She stopped herself, just in time. She had been on the verge of saying “That was a big issue where I grew up.” But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school. But she wasn’t sure if desegregation had been a big issue in Chicago. Probably, but why risk saying anything too specific? “That was a big issue in the seventies, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was. And I covered it single-handedly.”

“Great.”

She had meant to sound sincerely impressed, but her voice betrayed her as it sometimes did, and the word came out a little sour, sarcastic.

“It was great. It was meaningful. More meaningful than tinkering with machines for a living. I’m writing the first draft of history. What are you but a mechanic?”

The would-be insult made Barb laugh. It was just so funny that this was Mrs. Hennessey’s idea of a cutting remark. But her laughter provoked the old woman even more.

“Oh, you think you’re so special, wiggling around the newsroom in your tight shirts and short skirts so the men all look at you. You think you matter.”

The editor had told her that she did matter, that she was essential. “I don’t see what my wardrobe has to do with this, Mrs. Hennessey. And I honestly think that your work was great-”

“Was? Was? Is. My work is great, you, you… guttersnipe!”

Again she wanted to laugh at the older woman’s idea of an insult. Yet this one was more effective somehow, finding a soft spot. Sex, her own sexuality, was a touchy subject for her. She didn’t flirt with the men in the newsroom, or anywhere else for that matter, and her skirts weren’t short. If anything, they were long by the standard of the day, because her frame was petite, so skirts hung lower than they were supposed to, drooping on her hips. With her towering upsweep and high heels, Mrs. Hennessey was almost as tall as she.

Which could explain, perhaps, why she felt it was fair play to pick up the older woman’s Diet Pepsi and pour it over her beautiful, quivering topknot.

THEY FIRED HER. Of course. Actually, they gave her the option of attending counseling sessions or leaving with two weeks’ severance. “No references,” Bagley added. As if she would ask for one, as if it would have any application when Barbara Monroe disappeared and another woman took her place. She took the severance.

She sneaked back in that night, using the newspaper’s research tools, crude as they were. The newspaper’s sole librarian was in her debt and had never dreamed why Barb wanted to know so much about the library, its capabilities. He’d been flattered, in fact, to show Barb all the things a well-trained librarian could do with a telephone and a list of reference desks in city libraries. Title searches, which kicked up property and court records, were also valuable, but they required time and money, neither of which she had right now, although she had sneaked a few through the newspaper’s account over the past year. Dave Bethany was still on Algonquin Lane. Miriam Bethany remained missing, as she had been for some months now. Stan Dunham was at the same address-but then, she had never really lost contact with Stan Dunham.

Finally she picked out her new name and existence, just as Stan had taught her to do. Time to start over. Again. It was a burn, not being able to use this job on her resume, but she had decided that she wasn’t going to stay in newspapers. Once she got the formal training she needed, she would find a more lucrative home for her skills, in an industry used to paying for talent. She could do better than the Fairfax Gazette , even if they did have to push her out of the nest. Didn’t it always work that way? Even in the worst