and she allowed Alma to place her own things on the walls and shelves of Maureen’s room. To O’Connor’s way of thinking, his mother was giving up on Maureen. Alma was seen by her youngest brother as encroaching and little more than a squatter. Beneath all his resentment of her, he carried the fear that some spiritual connection to Maureen had been broken by these changes in the household, that by moving Maureen’s possessions, they had taken away a place for her to come back to, somehow made it impossible for her to return home.
Jack had been O’Connor’s salvation. It was Jack who had talked Mr. Wrigley, the publisher, into promoting his copyboy to general assignment reporter. O’Connor later learned that Jack had support for this idea from an unexpected quarter: Helen Swan.
“I told the old man the truth,” she said when O’Connor asked about it. “I told him Jack was giving you writing lessons, and if they turned out not to be good ones, I’d give you better ones myself, because I could see when some half-pint had ink in his veins, even if Wrigley couldn’t.”
He knew of no one who talked back to Mr. Wrigley the way Helen Swan did. He remained in awe of her.
It had taken him a while to realize that there was a strong friendship beneath the rivalry between Helen and Jack. In the spring of 1936, she left the paper for a little more than a year, not long after Jack’s car accident. O’Connor was still a paperboy then, and he began to see that Jack missed her terribly.
O’Connor was convinced that it was her relentless needling that pulled Jack out of the misery he had fallen into when he was hospitalized after the accident. “Get up off your ass,” she said the first time she visited him. “I’ll let you set it down again in a room across the hall. There’s a blind guy in it. He can’t see you pity yourself.” Jack had winced, and she added in an angry voice, “So you’ll have a limp. There are other people around here who’ve lost more than that.”
O’Connor gathered up his courage and told her to leave Jack alone.
Helen stared at him, apparently just realizing he was in the room. “I thought the hospital didn’t allow kids under sixteen into patients’ rooms.”
“They don’t,” Jack said. “But the doctors ran some tests and figured out that O’Connor has never been younger than forty-two.”
“All right,” she said, coming to her feet, “bowing to his seniority, I’ll do as Conn asks.”
“No, don’t go, Swanie,” Jack pleaded. “Make her stay, Conn.”
Conn started to try to convince her, but she raised a hand to cut him off. She sat down again and sighed. “Jack Corrigan, I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve the boy’s loyalty.”
O’Connor always thought it was the other way around. Looking back, he wondered at the patience Corrigan had shown. More than once, as an adult, O’Connor had asked Jack what on earth had caused him to all but adopt him from the time he was eight-why he had troubled himself over such a grubby little brat. Corrigan usually laughed and said, “You chose me. Not the other way around. Same way all stray dogs operate-easier to let you follow me than to keep kicking you away.” O’Connor thought there was some truth in the jest-the times when Corrigan roared at him to leave him the hell alone, his scathing criticisms of O’Connor’s writing, the bouts of heavier-than-usual drinking when Jack would become quiet and withdrawn-none of these had the power to keep O’Connor away from him for long.
Helen Swan had been right about the writing lessons. All those years ago, when O’Connor asked Jack to teach him to be a newspaperman, Jack had taken him seriously-for reasons O’Connor was never entirely sure of.
Even at eight, O’Connor was reading at a level beyond that of most children his age, and Jack began by giving him assignments-most of which taught him to read the paper with an eye toward the way it was written. Jack asked him now and then if he was still keeping the diary, but never asked to see it. O’Connor asked him once how he knew that O’Connor was really writing in it. “Because I believe you are an honorable young man.” That was, O’Connor knew, the highest praise Jack could give anyone, and no reward could have been greater for his work.
And work it was. There were lessons on finding the heart of the story, on writing clean, clear prose to tell it. He learned to notice differences in style. Jack would read to him, and ask him to tell him which reporter wrote the story. Corrigan’s and Helen Swan’s he began to recognize for their skill. Others, he could often spot because of their weaknesses.
He learned to observe and to describe what he saw. At first, the descriptions were delivered verbally, and sometimes breathlessly during a boxing lesson. Later, he wrote small stories for Jack, who did not spare his feelings when critiquing the results.
So it was that by the time O’Connor was added to the staff of the Express, Mr. Wrigley got a reporter who was far from the greenhorn he expected. One day as he stood talking to Helen Swan in the newsroom, Wrigley walked up to them and said to her, “Seems I won’t be needing to give you teacher’s pay.”
She smiled and made O’Connor blush by saying, “Imagine what you’ll be getting out of him five years from now. Keep this boy challenged, or you’ll be reading his bylines in the Herald or the Times.”
The challenge of reporting for the Express was the only thing that kept him from going crazy after Maureen disappeared. He thought at first that Jack might have believed that all he needed was distraction, something to keep him from dwelling on her disappearance.
He had underestimated Corrigan.
Jack had no more given up on the idea of finding Maureen than O’Connor had.
Jack spent time with him in the paper’s morgue, going through clipping files on disappearances. O’Connor had been astonished at the number of them.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Jack told him. “There are young runaways mixed in here, and plenty of people who are lost because they don’t want to be found. Women whose husbands beat them, men who want to escape debts or responsibilities, teenagers who have cruel parents, parents who-well, of a terrible kind-so terrible the paper can’t print the details.”
“But there have to be some missing girls who are like Maureen,” O’Connor protested. “She wasn’t a runaway, no matter what the coppers say.”
“I know that and you know that. But after you’ve read enough of these, you’ll understand why detectives are skeptical people.”
He read them, and had to admit that in many cases, it was as Jack had said. He found two other stories, though, in which young women near Maureen’s age had gone missing in the month of April, although in other years-young women who seemingly had no reason to disappear. Less, he admitted to himself, than Maureen had. Anna Mezire. Lois Arlington. Both twenty years old. The coincidence was too strong to ignore.
“I want to talk to their families,” he told Jack.
“Fine, but remember-both of them are old news as far as the Express is concerned. Don’t try to do anything about it on company time.”
The mothers of the missing women, wary at first, became more open with him upon hearing that his own sister had disappeared. He spoke to them separately and learned that they were each unaware of any other cases. Anna had disappeared on April 30, 1943. Lois on April 18, 1941. But neither woman had any more information about her daughter’s disappearance than what he had read in the paper. He took down the names of a few of the girls’ friends, but he found that the ones who hadn’t moved away had little to tell him. “I think about her,” one of Anna’s friends said. “I think I’m always going to feel sad in April. My brother’s a policeman, and he said that Anna’s probably dead, and I should just accept that as a fact. But I can’t, you know? It would be easier-I hate to say it, but it would be easier to know that she was dead.”
O’Connor had been hard put to hide his feelings as she spoke, not to let her see how angry these words made him. He would never give up hope, he thought as he took a streetcar back to the paper. He would never want to learn that Maureen was dead.
But before many months had passed, he decided that anything would be better than not knowing-anything. He could and did imagine so many horrific possibilities for her fate, the notion of her being beyond harm ranked far from the worst of them. Please, not suffering, became his evening and morning prayer, his silent plea throughout the day.
One afternoon he learned that Jack-who seemed to have a “pal” in every government office and on every street corner of Las Piernas-was getting calls from a worker in the county coroner’s office whenever a Jane Doe was brought in. O’Connor insisted on going with him to view the next body.
“You sure you want to do that?” Jack asked. “It’s seldom-well, it’s not the sleeping beauty parlor, if you take
