30
W HEN I GOT BACK TO THE PAPER, THE NEWSROOM HAD DEVELOPED ITS usual late-afternoon haze of cigarette smoke. The place was full of noise. In addition to the usual clamor of ringing phones, the snatches of heated conversations, the chatter of the Teletypes, and the shunk-shunk-shunk of electric typewriters, I could hear-and feel-the rumble of the presses. They were in the basement, but they could be heard throughout the building when they ran, beginning as a low hum and increasing to a muffled roar as their speed increased. This was also the hour when bottles started coming out of desk drawers.
O’Connor beckoned me toward his desk-one of the messiest in the newsroom. “Your friend left to interview someone about the farm property. She’s supposed to be back here any minute.” He pointed to a stack of folders filled with clippings and photos. “I’ve just come back from the morgue,” he said, referring to the archives of the Express. “This is what I found on a quick search, enough to give us a start today.”
He seemed depressed. I thought it might be the clippings themselves, since he knew the victims. That brought another thought in its wake. “Did you call Helen?” I asked.
His look of surprise was a good one-for a fake. “Helen? Why?”
“Because Lillian Linworth might need a friend over at her place this afternoon when the coroner calls.”
“Yes,” he said. “I called her. But I didn’t give her any details-”
“I didn’t think you would. And it must have been hard to keep your promise to Lefebvre.”
“It was,” he admitted.
I filled him in on what had happened at the coroner’s office. “Something weird is going on there. Yeager wouldn’t be asking about something that might affect his adopted son unless he had word that a child’s bones had been found. Even then, why would he assume the adult bodies were those of the Ducanes? I thought everyone but you believed they were lost at sea.”
O’Connor stared at me a moment.
“What’s that look for?”
“Nothing…” he said, then smiled. “I’m only thinking that you’ve asked an excellent question about Yeager. What are your guesses about who leaked the information to him?”
“The only people who could have said anything about the child’s body are the two of us, Phil Lefebvre, Matt Arden, or someone in the coroner’s office.”
“Perhaps a member of the construction crew…”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “But that’s not what my gut tells me. Not the crew, certainly not us, and not Lefebvre. And I don’t think it was Arden, either. Not unless he’s a damned fine actor.”
“Homicide detectives often are, I’ve found. It helps them in their line of work. But you’re probably right. Woolsey would be my first bet.” He reached for one of two big Rolodexes that sat on his desk near his manual typewriter-one of the few remaining manuals in the room-and turned the dial on its side until it stopped at the T’s. He thumbed through that section-I noticed that many of the cards had no names on them, only initials or notations in what was apparently some kind of code. He pulled one of these no-name cards free. The only thing on it was a lower-case “t” and a number. “I’ll see what I can find out,” he said, picking up his phone.
While he was making the call, I saw Lydia enter the newsroom. Her movements were tentative and seemed to become even more hesitant after she looked toward my desk and didn’t see me there. She was blushing like a teenaged girl who had just been pushed into an overcrowded boys’ locker room. I realized that she felt as if she were trespassing.
Right at that moment, more than any time before it, I was sure that I was right where I belonged.
O’Connor had hung up and was watching her, too. He waved her over. She regained her composure by the time she reached his desk.
“What did you find out about the property?” I asked her.
She pulled out her notes. “As you know, the farm was sold to the developers by the heirs of Griffin Baer. Baer died five years ago, at the age of seventy- seven.”
“He was the last one to live there?”
“Well, yes, but he hadn’t lived there since 1926. From what I could learn from one of the heirs, Baer had a house down near the shore, and most of the fighting in the family was over that property, not the farm. According to this grandson, Baer used to do nothing but work on the farm, then he sold some mineral rights for a fantastic sum and used the money to build his dream home down by the ocean. He always paid someone else to do the farming after that.”
“And the person who cared for the farmland didn’t live on it as a tenant?” I asked.
“The grandson said there was a house out there until sometime in the 1960s, but it wasn’t really occupied- most of the time, Baer used it as a place to drink with his friends.”
“What happened in the 1960s?”
“He said that after his grandmother died-about fifteen years ago-his grandfather didn’t feel the need to escape to the house so often, and tore the old place down.”
“So when was it sold to the current owners?”
“Two years ago. According to the grandson, Baer’s will was vaguely worded, and there was a huge fight within the family-like I said, mostly over the beach property. But eventually, the heirs settled things, and the offer by the developer was generous enough to get everyone to agree to it.”
“Did you question him about the bodies in the car?” O’Connor asked.
“No-didn’t want to step on anything the two of you might be doing later.”
“Good work,” he said. “You learned a lot about that property in a short amount of time-thanks.”
Lydia left us, glowing from his praise. I asked O’Connor if he had learned anything from his phone call.
“Not yet,” he said. He relented a little, though, and said, “I called someone who works in the coroner’s office.”
“Oh, so that’s a cross, like a graveyard cross, and not a ‘t’ on that card? I guess that system makes it harder on the newsroom snoops.”
He looked surprised-genuinely, this time-then laughed and told me to stay the hell away from his Rolodexes.
I glanced at my watch and called home, and once again begged Mary’s help. She told me not to worry, that my father had slept most of the day and would probably be up and wanting to talk to me when I got home. “So it’s you who’ll have the long day,” she said. “Not me.”
O’Connor and I went to work on the story itself. We divided it along the lines of old and new-he would write the background material on the Ducane murders, and I would cover events at the construction site today. I called Woolsey’s office every half hour. The receptionist wouldn’t put the first few calls through, and told me to give up and call back at the time Dr. Woolsey specified. I didn’t give up, and two and a half hours after I had left his office, Woolsey gave a preliminary confirmation of the identities of the bodies as those of Kathleen and Todd Ducane, and their infant son, Maxwell.
I was still on that call when H.G. told O’Connor that he was wanted in Wrigley’s office.
When he came back, about twenty minutes later, he said that Mr. Wrigley had known Katy Ducane, too, and was a friend of Lillian Linworth. “This may seem strange to you, but…even though we’ve believed for years that Katy and Todd were dead, this is hard on everyone who knew them.”
“That doesn’t seem strange to me at all.”
He was silent.
“Katy was only twenty-one, right?”
“Yes. Younger than you are now,” he said wonderingly.
I did the math. “Weird, isn’t it? She’d be some middle-aged lady now, if she had lived.”
He smiled in an odd way, but said, “Yes.”
“She seems to have been someone who made an impression on people.”
“Spoiled rotten. Headstrong. Alive as anyone I’ve ever known. Jack and Helen adored her. Her husband-well, none of us were fond of Todd, but perhaps he would have matured into a better man. We’ll never know.”
“You wish you were with Lillian and Helen instead of here?”
He thought for a moment, then said, “No, Kelly, I’m where I need to be. This is what I do. And in all honesty, I’d be nothing but miserable anywhere else.”
