F OUR WEEKS LATER, THINGS SEEMED TO BE LOOKING UP. HAILEY’SSTORY on Helen was nothing short of beautiful. We got letters from readers young and old after it ran. I had taken Helen’s advice and called Lydia and pretended we weren’t fighting, which happened to work, and eventually we had a long heart-to-heart about it that resulted in newsroom harmony, greater mutual respect, and increased local sales of Kleenex.
One unexpected result of this was that she became less defensive about Ethan, which ultimately made her more watchful. I decided not to tell her that Frank hated the Harmon story, mostly because he had only said, “This is bullshit, he never had this much access to Harmon,” when he saw it.
One evening, I stopped by her desk before leaving for the day. I had found some quizzes among O’Connor’s papers, and I told Lydia about them. “Middle sections of articles-no headlines, leads, or bylines-had been clipped out and pasted onto cheap paper-I suspect Jack took the paper from the newsroom. O’Connor had written names next to them. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. Jack used to have O’Connor read stories without knowing who had written them, to teach O’Connor to recognize the style of the different members of the staff.” I shook my head. “He was ten or eleven years old, and he was getting most of them right. I don’t think I could do that now.”
“Sure you could,” she said.
From her computer, she printed out a few things that would be in the next day’s paper.
I was surprised. There was a little guesswork involved, but I got about eight out of ten. I missed twice-both were written by Ethan. Neither of us commented on that fact.
“Let’s see how you do,” I said.
Her test was a little harder to devise, because she had already read almost everything filed, so I waited at her computer until a few new stories were filed, and then added two sections from older stories of Ethan’s. I picked harder passages than she did-odd snippets, paragraphs that wouldn’t be recognized because of special content.
She also got eight of ten-she missed both of Ethan’s, too.
“What the heck does that mean?” she said, frowning.
“Maybe his style is imitative,” I said, hoping I wasn’t about to start another fight.
“No,” she said slowly. She asked the computer to give her everything written by him for the past month.
It pulled up a lot of material, but she quickly culled out two minor local stories. “You see?” she said. “These two-I would have known either one as his style. I like it, actually. Clear and direct. Doesn’t overdo it.”
I admitted they were well written. “Pull up the Harmon story,” I said.
She opened it, and I read it over her shoulder. I kept my mouth shut, but I wasn’t the only one who noticed a difference in what we were reading now and what we had read before. The style was also clear and direct, but there was something finer involved-a surer hand, more detailed observations, and words that evoked more powerful images. It stumbled here and there, but then the next sentence would redeem it.
I could see her posture change.
“I recognize that style-in places, anyway,” I said. “It’s not just one person, is it? But the strongest parts-I’ve read that writer before.”
She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair, staring at the monitor.
Oh hell, I thought, here we go again.
Then she put her hands back on the keyboard and called up her connection to the wire services. She searched for stories on Bennie Lee Harmon.
Nothing matched the best parts of Ethan’s story. Then she searched for a few exact matches of phrases in the story. Again, no matches. “At least that’s a relief,” she said. “For a moment, I envisioned telling Wrigley we’d need to make a public apology and who knows what kind of compensation to another paper for ripping off a story.”
“I don’t think there has been much access to Harmon,” I said. “He’s been ill.”
“So where did this come from?”
I looked around the room, trying to picture who sat at each desk, and how they wrote. When I came to my own desk, I said, “Oh God.”
“What?”
“O’Connor. He’s ripped off O’Connor. And Lord knows who else.”
A conversation came back to me. I checked my watch. “Lydia, call down to the morgue, ask the librarian to pull these dates.” From Ethan’s story, I read out dates that were key to events in Harmon’s life.
Instead, when she called, she told the librarian, “I’ll be down there in five minutes. I’ll need everything Ethan Shire checked out on the day before he left for Sacramento. You’ll have his signature on the sheet? Great.” She gave the librarian the date.
She got an assistant to cover the desk, printed out two copies of Ethan’s interview, and we went down to the morgue together. It didn’t take us long to find what we were looking for.
“O’Connor interviewed Harmon,” I said. “I had forgotten that.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
O’Connor was already dead, and I knew she didn’t mean Harmon.
She told me later that it took some effort to convince Wrigley, but that she and John eventually persuaded him that yes, it was a serious matter when a person lifted a fellow reporter’s words wholesale and made them appear to be his own, or quoted twenty-year-old interviews and tried to lead the public to believe they had just taken place. She thought Wrigley would have shrugged it off as youthful high jinks if John hadn’t pointed out that Wrigley had probably reimbursed Ethan’s expenses for a party trip to visit a college friend.
Lydia had the zeal of a convert, and began ferreting out other stories that seemed to her to be, as she said, “Assembled, not written.” She found several. O’Connor was a favorite to quote, apparently because he was dead rather than retired, and therefore unlikely to call the paper to complain.
“A lot of research. You’d think it would have been easier for Ethan to just write the stories himself,” I said.
“Don’t ask me to explain the psychology of plagiarism,” she said.
The Express ran an apology to its readers that ended up making the paper itself a news story for a day or so. No one doubted the need for it, but the shame the staff felt did nothing for morale, already low due to rumors of the paper being put up on the block.
We thought Ethan would be fired. He was put into an alcohol rehab program and told he could return on probation.
Hailey thought this was another scam on his part. I thought about friends of mine who had been alcoholics, and what it had taken them to try to turn their lives around. “He may be totally insincere about it, but this isn’t the easy way out,” I said. “Let’s hope this has been a wake-up call.”
“Yeah, right,” Hailey said. “For some reason my heart refuses to break.”
Ethan would be gone for at least thirty days. My teamwork with Hailey was intensifying.
We eventually took over a small conference room near the morgue, so that we would cause less interference with the functioning of the library. We camped at microfilm readers for hours at a time. The results of the DNA tests would be back within the week, and we had drafted background material on the Ducanes, the Vanderveers, and the Linworths, and recaps of stories about the crimes and victims of that night in 1958, and the discoveries of 1978.
We had stories written about Max, and thanks to Stephen Gerard, we had photos of Max, Lillian, and the two of them together to choose from. Helen had been at the house during the shoot, and Stephen-who apparently became a fan of Helen’s when he was one of her students, years ago-had even talked her into sitting for a few group photos.
I loved those the best, although there was no reason to run a photo of Helen with this article. They looked happy to be together, though, and looking at the photo made me feel some hope that biology wouldn’t call all the shots-Max would remain connected to these two women no matter what. I made Stephen promise to give me prints of the trio.
We had other artwork ready, including some about how DNA testing worked. Hailey wrote an article to go with that.
