do yet with that bit of information.
And I also left out the part where Trixie opened up about her fondness for me. There was no need to get into all that, either.
Later, sitting with Sarah on the couch, I said, “I think I may quit the paper.”
Sarah turned and looked at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I don’t even know if Magnuson’ll take me back, take me off suspension, but if he does, I don’t know whether it’s right for me. And my being there, it’s not working for you, either. You’re going places. I mean, you lost the foreign editor thing this time, because of me, but there’ll be other opportunities. You’ve got more of a future there than I do.”
“That’s not true.”
“The thing is, Sarah, I don’t know whether I have what it takes.” I paused. “I don’t know whether I can tell the whole story.”
“What do you mean? About what?”
“About…anything. To be a half-decent journalist, you have to be willing to let all the secrets out, to tell everything. I haven’t been doing that. Not with some of the stories I’ve already done, not with the one about what happened up at my father’s place, and not with what’s happened this past week.”
“You’re just too close to these things. They’ve all been too personal. It’s different.”
I shrugged, looked down. “It’ll all sort itself out. As long as I’ve got you, it doesn’t matter to me what I’m doing.”
We hadn’t planned to make a dramatic entrance, but when Sarah and I walked into the kitchen, my arm hanging lightly around her nightshirted shoulder, her arm loose around my waist, thumb tucked into the waistband of my pajamas, I guess we made quite a picture for the kids, who were sitting at the table, eating toast and drinking coffee.
“Ooohhh, check it out,” Angie said.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Paul said. “Guys, get a room.”
“Where do you think we just came from?” I said.
Paul grimaced. I poured coffee for Sarah and me, opened the cupboard looking for cereal.
“How about eggs?” Sarah asked. Sarah makes great eggs.
“Won’t you be late to Home!?” I asked. She was the one heading off to work, not me.
“Fuck Frieda,” she said.
“But my heart belongs to you,” I said. Paul and Angie exchanged glances.
Sarah was leaning into the open fridge. “You want eggs or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want eggs.”
And so she made eggs. With cheese, and Canadian bacon, and toast and jam.
“I won’t be around for dinner,” Angie said. “Late lecture, then I’m hanging out with some friends.”
“Me neither,” said Paul. “After school, a bunch of us are going to this thing, and then we’re getting something to eat, and then we’re doing this other thing. So like, I could use a bit of cash. ’Cause I don’t have a job anymore, you know.”
The kids vanished. Sarah and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table, ate our breakfast, drank our coffee, glanced at the headlines in the
We were alone, together, and things just seemed so right. That morning seemed like the dawn of something much more than another day. It had the aura of a new beginning. Handcuffed in a basement with a corpse, duct- taped in a barn in Kelton, tossed about by cops in a dead-of-night raid-all these things seemed like distant memories.
Things were good.
I should have savored the moment even more. It wasn’t going to last.
32
ONCE I’D SEEN SARAH off to work and was dressed, I hopped into Trixie’s car (I had to sort out this business of getting my car back from Kelton, maybe on the weekend) and drove to Bayside Park. I pulled into the same spot I’d been in three days earlier. I didn’t feel the need, this time, to put Lawrence on alert. The first time, I didn’t quite know what to expect from Brian Sandler, but felt confident now that he posed no personal risk to me.
I looked out over the lake, switched on the radio. It was a phone-in show, where everyday nincompoops got to sound off on important political matters because it was considerably cheaper to produce a radio show that relied on nincompoops rather than people who actually knew what they were talking about.
We’d agreed to meet at nine, and I’d arrived five minutes early. I’d brought along a notebook to take down more information from him, as well as the scrap of paper on which I’d jotted down his various phone numbers.
I wondered what the hell I was doing.
I was on suspension. I wasn’t even sure I was going back. Yet here I was, waiting to meet with a man who had a hell of a story to tell, a story that couldn’t help but end up getting splashed across page one. Provided, of course, Bertrand Magnuson allowed me to write it.
My original thinking had been that I could use this story as leverage to get my job back. And not just any job, but my feature-writing job in the newsroom.
But there was another person who could use some help restoring a reputation and getting back into the newsroom. I could take all this stuff I was getting from Brian Sandler and hand it over to Sarah. Let her write it, take the credit, get the hell out of Home!
I’d have to tell Sandler, of course. I didn’t want to mislead him. I’d tell him about the suspension, but not to worry, my wife was a seasoned journalist. She’d been an investigative reporter before moving up the ranks and becoming an editor. She’d do a better job putting this story together than I would, truth be known.
That’s what I’d tell Sandler.
If he ever showed up.
I glanced at the digital dashboard clock. It was 9:15. Okay, not really late. There were any number of reasons why he might be fifteen minutes late.
But it was harder to explain being thirty minutes late.
At 9:31 a.m. I dug out the slip of paper with Sandler’s phone numbers on it. With my own cell phone, I tried his cell. It rang four times, then went to his voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. Next, I tried his line at the city health department, and again, I got his voicemail. I wasn’t interested in leaving a message there, either. The only number I had left for him was home, and I punched it in.
After three rings, I figured no one was going to answer, but after the fourth, someone picked up.
“Hello.” Quiet, sullen. A young voice, it sounded like. Male.
“Hi. I’m looking for Brian? Brian Sandler?”
“Who’s calling?”
Should I say? Had Sandler told anyone he was talking to me, that he’d made arrangements to speak to a (suspended) writer from the
“Just a friend,” I said.
“Well, he’s not here. This is his son. Can I help you?”
“Maybe you could tell me where I could reach him. I have his cell and office numbers, and tried both of them, but he’s not picking up.”
“He’s in the hospital,” the son said.
“What? When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
