Front Page Teaser

“This is not easy for me to discuss with a lady,” the book dealer said, echoing a similar statement by Ali. “But the answer is yes. Teena, the word for fig, can also be used—man-to-man only, of course—to refer to a woman.” He blushed.

“What about the other fruits? Here in America a man might say of a woman, ‘Look at them apples,’ for instance,” Liz said.

Faisal’s complexion reddened further. “No, I wouldn’t say the other words on this grocery list would be used in that way. More coffee?” he said, ducking into the kitchen.

“I ask because we know that the cabdriver who drove Ellen Johansson in New York, and who also visited her house on the day she disappeared, made her uncomfortable by using that word in a sleazy tone in a two-way radio conversation with another male. She wondered if the cabbie was talking graphically about her, and then, when she heard him continue to use the word, she relaxed a little, thinking he was talking in sexual terms about a woman called Tina.”

Returning to the room, Faisal underlined Nadia’s view. “I think she was correct in feeling uncomfortable. I think perhaps the driver was talking in a most improper manner about his passenger.”

Chapter 26

After leaving the book dealer, Liz drove the Tracer to the Banner parking lot and stopped in at the city desk, only to learn that she’d been put on another mall story. This time the assignment was to interview store managers about the drop in customer numbers in response to terrorist-inspired fears of gathering in public spaces. Liz drove to the closest mall she could think of, the CambridgeSide Galleria, a snazzy shopping complex in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.

Inside the mall she met Banner photographer Jim Collins, who shot photos of the unpopulated place from the top of an escalator. This turned out to be a good spot to get comments from a sampling of the few who had decided to shop, terrorist threat or not.

“I’m getting married next week,” one young woman told Liz defiantly. “I’m not letting al-Qaeda prevent me from buying my bridesmaids their gifts!”

“Let ’em try to shoot me!” a belligerent older man wearing a Veterans of Foreign Wars baseball cap declared. “They’ll regret it!”

Despite the small number of shoppers, excellent quotes were easy to get. With time to spare, Liz and Jim decided to cover two more shopping venues, Boston’s upscale Newbury Street and then more humble Washington Street, also known as “Downtown Crossing.” Thanks to the dearth of shoppers, it was unusually easy to find parking spaces on Newbury Street. They decided to walk a block over to Boylston Street, where the very posh toy emporium FAO Schwarz seemed a great choice to represent this shopping district. What did well-heeled parents think about spending big bucks on playthings now?

“You can’t buy security, I know,” one mother said, “but you can buy together time. I’m purchasing this horribly complicated Taj Mahal model to show my son the beauty of another culture’s architecture and to give our family something to do together. I’m uneasy about taking my kids to public places at the moment, so I figure we’ll be spending more time together at home.”

With answers like this, Liz knew she had the makings of a sidebar, if hard news about the terrorist attack aftermath didn’t grab all the space in the paper. Thinking ahead, she got contact information from the woman for a possible family page piece about family time as an antidote to terror. The toy store interviews were so productive and time-consuming that Jim Collins had to leave her so he could cover another story. Outside the store, feeding the parking meter, Liz realized she did not have enough time to walk to Downtown Crossing after all, a pedestrian mall where parking was nonexistent.

Instead, she returned to Newbury Street and strolled along it for several blocks. Rejecting a ladies’ hat shop, several beauty salons, and some art galleries that were all too posh to provide contrast with FAO Schwarz, she made her way on foot back to Boylston Street. Running parallel to Newbury Street, this thoroughfare offered a mix of shopping, from the posh toy shop and elegant Shops at Prudential Center mall to discount pharmacies. Scanning the stores, she made her way to a place bearing the sign “Puttin’ on the Ritz: Off-Price Remainders.” The customers here were all female, and the well-heeled matrons and homeless women seeking warmth in the chill of the autumn afternoon represented two extreme ends of the economic scale. None of them seemed eager to talk with Liz, so she killed fifteen minutes by pushing designer leather jackets around on their rack, while trying to overhear shoppers’ chatter about what was on their minds. The effort was fruitless for the purposes of Liz’s article, since the bargain hunters were mostly shopping solo and those who spoke to one another seemed absorbed in talking about the fact that the shop stamped the word “Ritz” in hot pink on the trendy designer labels, but she did get a great buy on a leather jacket.

If anyone were to interview me about this expenditure, she thought, I’d say it is an indulgence along the lines of comfort food. A guilty pleasure.

Before Liz could return to the Tracer, her cell phone rang. It was Cormac Kinnaird.

“Where are you, Liz?” he demanded. “Have you heard the news?”

“Has there been another attack?”

“No, thank God, no. But some hikers in a state park out near Plymouth have turned up the remains of two bodies in a wooded area. I’m surprised your editor hasn’t called you.”

“Someone else might be assigned to this. When and how did you hear about this?”

“Just now, on the radio. I know I won’t have access to the heart of the scene, but I’m heading out there anyway. You might be able to barge in on it better as a reporter.”

“What do you know about the scene?”

“Two sets of skeletal remains, that’s all the police are saying.”

“Let me contact the newsroom and I’ll call you right back.”

Liz was in luck. Thanks to the fact that Dick Manning was following up on a bomb scare, Dermott okayed her heading out to Forges Field Recreational Area in Plymouth County, where the remains had been found.

It was midafternoon as she drove southeast from Boston, leaving the urban scene behind and entering a sandy landscape of scrub pines, blueberry bushes, and cranberry bogs. Ordinarily, a visit to such a scene would provide welcome recreation, but that was not the case now. Grateful that this was not happening a few weeks later, when the change from daylight-saving to standard time would plunge the area into darkness within an hour, Liz nevertheless made haste to arrive while a reasonable amount of daylight remained.

The recreational area was well named. Home to a playground, two baseball diamonds, and a few soccer or football fields, it looked like a regional gathering place for team practices and intramural sports. Extensive parking lots were filled with vehicles that spoke of school sports and the suburban lifestyle: bright yellow school buses, minivans, and SUVs. Parents, team coaches, and uniform-clad kids were now clustered in the playground area, the children’s faces rosy with excitement. Unable to approach the scene of the crime, they focused their attention on the access road to the recreational area. It was lined with police and rescue vehicles, the latter sadly useless in the circumstances. Flashing lights and radioed conversation kept the scene lively.

Pulling on her new jacket against the afternoon chill, Liz clipped her Banner I.D. card on her chest pocket, grabbed a reporter’s notebook, and strode into the underbrush far to the left of the obvious path to the crime scene: Liz knew it was unlikely she would get very close to the scene before being barred by the police, but at least she might get a sense of the lay of the land.

And, covered with white pines, pitch pines, and tangled underbrush, the landscape could only be described as undulating. Visible chiefly because of bright lights set up in advance of dusk, the center of police activity was located at the bottom of a depression. Liz shivered to think it was walking distance from a center of kids’ activity and wondered if the hikers who had come across the skeletons were young people—and if they remained in the vicinity.

“Hey, you!” a policeman bellowed at her just then. “This is a crime scene. You can’t walk in here.”

“I know, detective,” she said, looking at his badge. “I’m Liz Higgins from the Beantown Banner and I was trying to get a sense of the lay of the land here.”

“I’m not in charge of talking with the press. You’ll have to talk with the sergeant.”