again.
For no real reason I could name, I felt uneasy.
I glanced at my watch and nearly swore. I had certainly whiled away the afternoon. Lydia probably thought I’d gone to work for another paper. She hadn’t called, though. I pulled out my cell phone to see if I had missed a call. No signal.
No way to know if Lydia had tried to reach me or not.
I decided I’d look through the contents of the two trunks in the comfort of my own home. Still uneasy about the other visitor to this floor, I crept toward the roll-up door on O’Connor’s unit, eased it higher, and looked up and down the hall before I pulled the flatbed cart inside. I loaded the two trunks on it, pushed it out, and started to close up the unit, then stopped and grabbed the box labeled “Jack” before locking up.
The elevator was at the other end of the hall. I pushed the cart past the unit that was occupied and paused briefly to listen, but the person visiting it wasn’t making any noise. I hurried out.
I wasn’t all that far from the house, and the parking lot of the Wrigley Building is far from secure, so I stopped off just long enough to place the trunks and box in our guest room, and close it off from our pets.
At work, I had about ten calls on my desk voice mail, but nothing that needed immediate attention. All around me, computer keyboards softly clicked away. Reporters furiously at work as they always were this late in the afternoon, trying their damnedest to make deadline.
Happily, I had earned the luxury of being able to work on long-term projects now, and knew that nothing in the day’s “budget” was being held up by me-there wouldn’t be a hole in the front page because I had become caught up in reading O’Connor’s first diary.
I should have felt relatively relaxed. I didn’t. Something was going on in the newsroom. But what?
More than twenty years of newspaper work had made me attuned to those times when someone on the staff was onto something hot. Any veteran could feel that. Some reporters could hide their excitement about a hot story from their fellow reporters, but I seldom met a first-year who could pull that off. You might as well play the William Tell Overture over loudspeakers in the newsroom whenever a green reporter was on the chase.
I looked around. Hailey looked bored. Mark Baker was over at the city desk, talking to Lydia and Ethan.
Ethan. That’s who it was. Lydia had something up on her screen, and Ethan was smiling as she talked to him about it, while Mark took notes. I left my desk and walked over to them.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Mark was saying.
“Find out about what?”
“Oh, hi, Irene,” Mark said. “I’m doing a sidebar for this A-one story of Ethan’s.”
“Ethan’s got a story on tomorrow’s front page? Hey, that’s great.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“What’s it about?”
Lydia answered. “He’s found disturbances of graves at Municipal Cemetery. Called someone from the Parks Department and the State Cemetery Bureau to see what they had to say about it, and he’s spent the afternoon covering their mutual investigation. Turns out the city subcontracts with a private company that gets paid for administering the burials there. This company was moving caskets from unmarked graves, burying them two-deep in marked graves, and then reselling the plots they had ‘vacated.’ And looting the caskets they moved-and that’s just what they learned today. It’s going to take months to sort the burials out and figure out who belongs where. Great story. Congratulate him.”
Instead, I said, “You little shit.”
Lydia’s eyes opened wide, and Ethan’s chin came up.
Mark said, “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you who’s the looter here-he is. He stole a story.”
“I did not!” he protested hotly.
“Hailey was asking me about this very subject this morning.”
“Irene,” Lydia said reasonably, “don’t jump to conclusions. Ethan came to me with this idea-”
“Hailey!” I called.
The muted clickety-clack of keyboards all across the newsroom came to a halt. It was like disturbing crickets that you hadn’t noticed until they stopped singing.
She sauntered over. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you talk to Ethan about your story idea, the one about the cemetery?”
“No,” she said hesitantly.
“Did you say anything about it within earshot of him? Leave notes about it out on your desk?”
She looked over at Ethan, who stared back at her defiantly. “No,” Hailey said quietly.
I glanced at Mark, saw him studying the two of them.
“Irene,” Lydia said. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“I’m sure Lydia’s right,” Hailey said. “You’re the only one I’ve spoken to, and when I talked to you about it this morning, Ethan was talking to Lydia. I remember because-” She seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “I remember because he made her laugh.”
“That’s right!” Lydia said, with obvious relief. “Ethan was telling me about an old roommate, one who works for the Bee up in Sacramento.”
“Satisfied?” Ethan said.
“Not by a long shot. Hailey, Ethan has just happened to discover cases of burials being moved and looted in Municipal Cemetery.”
There was a moment, just a brief moment, when Hailey’s sense of hurt and betrayal showed on her face. She hid it quickly and said, “Cool. I’ll tell my friend who mentioned it to me. You might want to talk to him about it for follow-up.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said.
Hailey murmured, “No big,” and hurried away from the city desk-and out of the newsroom.
“You see?” Lydia said to me.
“Oh yes, I see all right.” I walked away before I gave in to a desire to throttle someone.
I logged off my computer, thought about how close Ethan’s desk was to mine, then logged on again and changed my password.
I decided to try to talk to Hailey again. I called the security desk. Geoff said she hadn’t left the building. That being the case, my guess was that she had gone into the women’s bathroom.
I got up from my chair and walked through the Express’s warren of hallways. As I made the hike, I kept thinking that in the course of two decades, it should have occurred to someone to spend a little money to put a women’s room closer to the newsroom, and a men’s room closer to features, but Wrigley claimed that all the funds available for updating the building had gone into earthquake retrofitting.
As recently as two years ago, features would have been jumping at this time of day, but Wrigley had decided to pick up the vast majority of our features content from wire services-the result being massive layoffs in this department. The room was completely deserted-a journalistic ghost town.
As I stood near an abandoned desk, Hailey came out of the bathroom. She froze when she saw me.
“You and I need to have a little talk,” I said, sitting down in a big rolling chair, and motioning her toward another.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was going to deny everything, run back into the bathroom, or try to make it past me. Then her shoulders slumped, and she sat down in a nearby chair. “I’m not going to try to take that story from him.”
“The way he took it from you?”
“Past experience tells me I won’t be able to prove that. He’s very slick when it comes to computer stuff. Besides…you don’t know Ethan.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She bit her lower lip, looked toward the door, then said, “He’s a troublemaker.”
“No shit.”
“I mean-he makes trouble for people who cause him problems. In school? He had the chair of the J- department completely by the balls.”
