In Plain View (31 page)

“You,” he whispered. “You smell like her.”

“Who? Pat, what the hell—?”

“Shut up.” He crushed his body against me. I stopped inhaling. “Questions don’t help. Knowing won’t help. It only makes things worse. Don’t you get that?”

“No. I don’t believe that.”

“What’s it take to teach you? They both died! Leave it alone.”

“Both?” I said.

“Tom and Gina.”

“Gina?”
You smell like her.
Confusion was all that kept me calm. Once again, my lizard brain jumped ahead to a place where logic feared to go. “Angelina? Do you mean my sister?” My internal temperature dropped twenty degrees. It’s a miracle my next breath didn’t fog the air.

“You are making everything worse,” he said. “You have to stop.”

Resistance bubbled up, hot and sharp. I bucked and twisted. “Get off me.”

He was as mad as I was, but a whole lot bigger. He slammed himself against me again, smashing us into the wall. All the body parts you never see, never think about, suddenly appeared on my mental map, tracing a line of vulnerability from the top of my spine, down the slope of my back, to the curve of my ass.

Nobody moved for a heavy second.

He seemed to lose track of the moment, anger suspended by a surge of hormones, or confusion, or something else. His body took over. He inhaled deeply, chest swelling, and I felt the barest suggestion of motion forward and back with his pelvis, a reaching out. His cock was big enough to make an impression. I kept very still.

“Stop,” he repeated. “Just stop.”

Too slowly, he withdrew contact with his lower body. The pressure of his hand over mine increased. It hurt.

Before I realized what he meant to do, he grabbed the back of my collar and bent my arm behind my back. With a twist, he shoved me hard from the center of my back toward the middle of the room.

I flew forward and face-planted, hands too slow to catch myself. My head re-bounded off the industrial carpet.

Pat was already out the door.

Over the sound of my ears ringing, I heard the bad news, loud and clear.

He’d jammed a chair against the outside of the door. I was locked in.

“What took you so long? Where’d you go this time?” Tonya said, in the usual way. Then she took a good look at me. “Oh Lord, what now?”

I stood in the doorway of Jenny’s hospital room, not completely in my body, or my right mind. The urge to scream, hit something, throw something, had stiffened every muscle.

Jenny sat right up in the center of the bed with the rolling table pulled across her lap. There was a bunch of balloons tied to the water pitcher and a curly haired teddy bear leaning on her pillow. A “Get Well” card from some of the hospital people her mother had known was on the bedside table.

“Did you bring us food?” Jenny asked. She was concentrating hard, trying to bridge-shuffle a deck of playing cards.

“No food.”

“Darn.”

“What’s wrong?” Tonya leaned toward me, her body alert. She’d pulled her braids behind her back and tied them with a piece of silver curling ribbon cut from the balloon streamers. Jenny wore a head band of the same ribbon. It looked like they were having a little party.

“I got lost. And I stopped to talk to someone. Remember Dr. Graham? The one I interviewed the other day. She said she’ll come down and talk to Jenny later.”

“She a social worker?” Tonya asked.

“No. The other kind.”

Psychologist. Psychiatrist. Headshrinker. Whatever. At least I knew her somewhat. She seemed normal, given her profession and all. I’d certainly trust Jenny with her, better than a stranger.

“No wonder you look a little worse for the wear,” Tonya said.

It hadn’t taken long to attract someone’s attention and break out of the chapel lockup. It took longer to convince the guy we didn’t need to call security. Afterward, I’d wandered the halls in a daze of muddy thinking.

When I recognized Dr. Graham’s offices it seemed like fate. Here was a problem I could solve. I sat in her waiting area and gathered my thoughts until she was free. “How would you like to study the effect of small families on self-actualization?” I bantered as my lead. She waited for me to come clean with the real story. It wasn’t easy. She turned those shrewd eyes on me and saw the things I didn’t headline, like admitting I’d only been on the job with Jenny four months and I’d already crashed and burned.

Everywhere I turned, I was tanking on my own ignorance.

Pat-the-paramedic knew my sister. From the hospital maybe?

You smell like her.

More than just the hospital.

Part of me wanted to call Curzon and get the asshole arrested immediately. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t get me what I wanted even more. Information.

They both died?

Turn Pat in and the sheriff would lock him up where I couldn’t talk to him. End of story.

“Your boy called,” T said. “He’s going to stop in to see Jenny in a few minutes.” She did a slide of the eyes over the shuffling cards. “You giving that boy a hard time?”

College interviewed Pat yesterday at the firehouse. I couldn’t help salivating at the thought. What the hell did he say to my boy? I needed to see that interview.

Too bad I’d quit.

“Me?”

“I’m hungry,” Jenny said again. She bounced as she waited for Tonya to finish passing out the cards. “Really hungry.”

“How many people you planning on putting in the hospital today, Ms. Maddy?” Tonya asked. She turned over her first card and cackled.

“Keep it up. I’m sure they got room for one more,” I answered. The second bed looked good. I stretched out flat and could feel the ghost of Pat’s body behind me. Pressing. “Have I mentioned that I’m tired, really tired?”

Jenny’s tongue poked out in concentration. She took another card from the deck and discarded slowly.

“What do you know?” T mumbled.

The question sunk into my silence.

Not much.

My guess was Tom Jost killed himself because he discovered Mr. Vegas scheming and scamming something big-time. They fought about it. Tom couldn’t stop him and couldn’t keep the secret inside.

Pat tried to ensure no one would believe Tom if—or when—he spilled the beans, by setting Tom up with a trunk full of porno. And the men at station six turned on Tom.

When Tom reached out for the girl he’d hung the last of his dreams on, he found himself more alone than ever and raging with despair. He phoned his father, the fire station, and the fourth estate to witness his death. He went gunning for both Pat and his daddy, with his elaborate suicide set up—calls, binoculars, trust funds.

Tom wasn’t a suicide victim. He was a suicide vigilante. This was para-misery of the sacrificial type.

And Rachel? Maybe Tom meant to give her choices by leaving Rachel all his savings. Maybe he meant to say sorry for the episode in the car, or worse, split her from her father forever.

Bits and pieces of conversations tumbled around in my head.

Number no longer in service.

Old phone’s gone,
I’d heard Pat say to the man behind the curtain.

Had Pat ditched his cell phone to try and cover for Tom’s suicide calls? The first time we met, Pat seemed genuinely unhappy about Tom’s death. Maybe he didn’t mean to hurt Tom as badly as he did. For an extroverted loose-screw like Pat, a trunkload of magazines was probably the kindest way he could imagine to ruin a man’s reputation. That weird scenario in the chapel was all the proof I needed—in the planning department, Pat was an idiot.

That worried me most of all. Idiots could be tricky.

Was Pat the Player driving the silver car that College saw parked at the Jost farm, the silver car that had been following me?

What if Mr. Jost was right about Rachel having a gentleman caller?

They both died.

I traced the timeline in my head again. Pat knew my sister. She died. Player moved on. If Pat started seeing Rachel next, Tom would have been in quite a twist.

Rachel hadn’t said anything about another guy. But that girl was half clam. If she
was
seeing Pat, she would certainly know how to keep it to herself.

Had my story gotten between Pat and his girl?

“Anybody want a bagel?” Ainsley knocked once as he came through the door with a wave for Tonya and a full-blast smile for Jenny. He’d changed into clean clothes and his hands were freshly bandaged.

“Hallelujah and pass the bag,” Tonya said. “Welcome to the real world, where people eat food. They don’t just talk about it.”

“You talking to me? I’ve seen the shoes you wear on Saturday night. You live nowhere near reality.”

“And it ain’t heaven either. Just look at these cards.” She discarded a queen. Jenny snatched it, tucked it into her hand and threw down all of her cards.

Tonya shrieked and stamped her feet to Jenny’s obvious delight.

“Want to play?” Jenny asked. “Four people are just right. It’s crazy eights.”

“Sure,” College said. He dragged another uncomfortable chair to the side of the bed where Tonya was sitting. It took some arranging but he finally got his legs situated under the bed. What is it about long-legged boys? My legs are almost that long and you don’t see me fussing like a debutante in a ball gown.

“What’s your plan for today?” Ainsley asked.

“We’re hanging out here.”

“Jenny can’t go home ’til tomorrow,” Tonya said.

Ainsley looked at me.

“For observation,” I said.

“My turn to deal.” Jenny reached for the cards. The dark hair bordering her face exaggerated the shadows under her eyes. I wanted to carry her out into the sun and tell her every knock-knock joke I knew.

“Heard you quit,” Ainsley said.

“Yeah.”

Jenny froze, mid-deal. “I’ll figure something out,” I told her, gently pulling the card from her fingers. “Keep dealing.”

“Why didn’t you tell Uncle Rich anything about—the circumstances?”

“I was pressed for time.” I gave Ainsley the shut-the-hell-up eyeball. “We’re playing cards here, College. You in or you out?”

“In.” His cheeks darkened with the flush of self-conscious emotion. “Somebody told me the only way to survive the bad days is to get back in the game.”

Tonya snorted. I don’t think it was the cards she was holding.

“I’ve got all our raw footage with me. And a monitor and some other stuff.”

That would include Pat’s interview at the firehouse. I wanted to throw my arms around him. I shifted my cards around.

“Other stuff? Editing equipment?”

“Enough to do a rough-cut. We could set it up in here. Maybe fiddle around a little.”

“Did your uncle send you?”

“No.” He sighed. “This morning, maybe I misunderstood where you were coming from, you know?”

Tonya stared at me. Jenny stared at me. Ainsley stared at his feet.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

“Uncle Rich said you promised him a story.” Ainsley sounded hopeful.

“Did I? Maybe after I kick your butt in crazy eights, we’ll get the tapes and give these two a private showing.”

He held up his bandaged hands. His fingers were exposed from the second knuckle down. He demonstrated button pushing and dial twisting abilities. “Ready, boss.”

“Finish the deal, Jen,” I told her.

“Eat-your-ownies round.”

Something changed in her face as she tossed cards at all of us. A shadow passed.

Finally, I’d done something right.

8:49:16 a.m.

“You been at it all night?” Mick popped his head through the door of edit bay one. He had a cup of coffee in one hand. With the other, he pat himself down for cigarettes and lighter.

The fresh light sliced through our privacy. It made me wince. The editing bay is a cave, no telling day or night, sun or rain, when you’re inside. Time is counted in hundredths of a second and passes without notice.

“Clock?” Ainsley asked.

“Almost nine-A,” Mick told us. “The troops are gathering. I’ve been on since midnight. Headed out. There’s a call for O’Hara on line three.”

Jenny.
The fear hit me hard as I realized how completely I’d been sucked into the work. “Yeah?”

“‘Hello’ is the way the rest of the world starts a phone conversation, O’Hara.”

Curzon and relief didn’t normally combine in my head. At least five seconds of dead airtime passed while my nerves settled.

I cleared my throat with, “Ha. Thanks for the tip, Sheriff. I love a public servant who provides good service for my tax dollars.”

“How’s Jenny?”

“Better,” I said. “She’s getting out this morning. I’m headed to the hospital as soon as I send this feed.”

“And what will you be driving?”

“Holy shit! Quick, tell me. How’s my other girl?”

Curzon clucked. “Motorcycle like that is not a girl. That one is all woman. And every guy in this place has a hard-on for her, judging from the requests I’ve been getting.”

“Keep those animals away from Peg.”

“I might be able to work something out for you in that regard,” he agreed, his voice dripping the promise of slippery compromises. “With appropriate reciprocity.”

What was I doing with a guy like Curzon? Apparently, my hormonal
coup
had put a figurehead Maddy in charge. She appeared to be a bit of a hussy. I shifted back in my chair. Bounced out a little rhythm. Had one of those stomach-crunching after flashes that a good kiss will set off.

“Reciprocity, huh? What exactly are you looking for, Sheriff?”

“Seen any SUVs lately?”

Talk about the cold shower effect. “No. Not me.”

“What is it?” Ainsley whispered. His radar was up.

I clapped a hand over the mouth piece. “Curzon wants a report on the SUV driver. You told the guys at the fire, right?”

“I told them,” Ainsley mumbled. “For all the good it did.”

“O’Hara? You still with me?” Curzon asked.

“I’m here.” Too much at stake. Time to come clean. And the story was in the can. “You might be right, Sheriff. Maybe we should make out a report.”

“We?”

“Me and my college boy. There was another possible sighting last night, out at the Jost farm? Not sure it’s related, but my new motto is take no chances.” I filled the sheriff in on what Ainsley had seen. And told him my theory on Jenny’s shiny car as well. “If I’m paranoid, you’ve got only yourself to blame, Sheriff. You’re the one that keeps nagging me about SUVs.”

“Not paranoid enough I’d say,” Curzon said. “I’ll send a car to pick up your man Pat. See what he has to say. I still need you to come in and make a report.”

“Can you give me the forms in a handy takeout bag? I could make a quick stop on the way home from the hospital. Make sure my poor Peg isn’t subject to further harassment.”

“It ain’t harassment if she likes it. Tell you what? How about I run the paperwork out to your house later? I’ll bring a pizza and give you and Jenny a lift back to the station afterward to get the bike?”

The cold shower of disappointment did a quick reversal. If it was only work, why invite himself over?

“Sounds good,” I said. “We’ll handle the pizza though. Jenny may want to eat as soon as they spring her from the joint. Come after five.”

“You got it.” Mr. Phone Manners didn’t offer any goodbyes.

I shagged my fingers back through my hair, stretching and shaking off the work intoxication with the juice of Curzon’s interest.

Mick appeared at the door of the edit bay again. “You all done in here? I need to check a discrepancy.”

“We’re done.” I hit the rewind.

“Can I see it?”

I glanced at the clock. “There’s time before the feed. But I’ve got to run. Want to watch while we check the last dissolve?”

“Sure.” Mick settled against the dark egg-crate foam.

Ainsley rolled his chair away from the counter to stretch his legs straight out in front of him and hit Play.

The piece timed out at nine seconds under the six-minute mark. Good thing a picture’s worth a thousand words. How else could you tally the cost of isolated innocence against the price of emancipation in three hundred fifty-one seconds?

“Who wrote the copy on the voice-over?” Mick asked.

“I did.”

“Different, but it works. You done that before?”

“No. Seen it done here and there.”

Instead of the usual omniscient voice-over, I’d gone for a narrating voice that had an identity, an “I” voice—part Rod Steiger and part Laura Ingalls Wilder. Maddy O’Hara’s alter-ego.

On screen, the house melted in reverse from flame to smoke. I matched the gray-whites to a close up-zoom out we’d gathered of the Jost farm that first morning. Billowing sheets danced on a laundry line, the children weaving between. Magically, the house was restored.

Somehow the college boy had managed a racked-zoom centered on the old oak, with the children disappearing into the billowing laundry. It’s a tricky maneuver with the camera on a track—almost impossible freehand. The camera moves away from the subject at the same rate the zoom magnifies the subject closer. The picture looks as if the world behind the subject shifts, while the subject remains still.

“Nice rack.” Mick gave Ainsley a shot of praise, fist to top of the left biceps.

Ainsley mugged
aw shucks
and rubbed his arm with his bandaged hand.

The voice-over came in again.

As the children disappeared, the house and barn came into view, then the road and finally, the great old oak spreading its branches across the horizon line. Still standing.

“I didn’t think that last shot was gonna work,” Ainsley admitted. “Cutting back to the kids? But you were right. Sadder, but less depressing.”

“Yeah.” I punched the save button. “Send it.”

I tried to make it out of the building before anyone noticed me. No such luck. The wide-eyed kid from the mail room came running up behind me as I walked out the dock exit.

“Mr. Gatt wants to see you.”

“Tell him I left.”

“He said if I don’t bring you back he’ll fire me and—”

“—you’ll never work in this business again. Yeah, yeah.” I turned around. “You should take the deal, kid.”

When I passed Barbara’s desk on my way to Gatt’s inner office, she was typing ninety words a minute from dictation. Without turning her head, she pushed a folded napkin across the desk toward me. Four ibuprofen and a stack of soda crackers.

Breakfast and absolution.

“You are the effing best,” I told her sincerely.

Barbara never stopped typing, but the smug expression on her face was one of the friendliest I’d seen.

Gatt spewed a string of common and colorful obscenities as soon as I opened the door. He summed up, “Are you insane?”

“I had no idea you were in this early, Gatt. Satellites don’t wait.”

“Bullshit! Nothing gets sent unless I approve it.” He waved the remote in the direction of the largest monitor. The screen was paused over the last few seconds of my piece. It must be running on the in-house channel. Without Gatt doing anything the image suddenly reversed and played again. He clicked on the audio.

“What the hell does that mean? Where’s the auto-shit? Where’s the erotic stuff? All I see are a bunch of kids playing with the wash.”

“Did you watch the piece from the beginning?” I propped my butt on the arm of a chair. Two all-nighters in a row; I was trashed. If I sat down now, I might not get up again.

“No, I haven’t watched the piece. Because you didn’t bother to show it to me. But I know this is not what we discussed.”

“It’s good stuff.”

“Not for pre-prime, it isn’t. Not against game shows.”

“It’s six minutes of programming, Gatt,” I snapped back. “I’m sure network has other material that can conquer the game show.”

“I want to see it. Now. And I may have changes. So you’d better stick your ass to the chair and see what happens next.”

I could see daylight through the window. The view was exactly the same as a week ago—parking lot to weed field to pasture. Today though, I wasn’t looking at a horizon line. I was looking at a time line. Present and past laid flat, right in front of me. The rest of my life started now.

“What are you worried about, Gatt?” I had switched to crisis calm, but sales-mode was hard to muster. The protective shell hadn’t hardened over my work yet. I picked up a pencil and a piece of scrap paper lying on Gatt’s enormous desk. “I’m telling you this piece has class. It’s mysterious. It’s metaphysical. It’s tragic. The target demographics are going to eat it up.”

“Network is not ‘eating it up’ after that pitch you fed them.” Gatt dug inside his desk drawer for a fistful of sweetener. He ripped half a dozen sugar packets clean through the middle. Sugar crystals exploded all over his desk. Some of them must have made it into his cup. He gulped a swallow followed by, “Jesus God, I hate freelancers.”

“You saw most of the raw stock before I cut it together. Give me some credit.” I rolled my neck and got a sound like something breaking. Deliberately, I jotted a short message on the scrap paper. “You’re pissed at me because your nephew got his fingers burned.”

“Bullshit!” he countered. There was a growing sheen to his head which was pumping red and white flashes of furious blood to his skin. “You should have shown me the finished version before you released it. Simple courtesy, even if nothing had changed. Those guys at network are going to want your ass on a platter now. Your problem is you want it both ways. You want a team position but you act like a freelancer. Here today—gone tomorrow. No respect for the team!”

Same theme, new variation. “I’ve been up two days, Gatt. Speaking of bullshit, I’m too tired to take this right now.” I stood up.

“You walk out that door, don’t think you’re coming back.”

“No, I don’t think I am.” I pushed the note across the desk. Signed and dated, it read simply, I resign.

I turned around and Ainsley was standing in the doorway, wearing his goofiest grin, carrying a VHS cassette pinched between his bandaged fingers. His face was pale, his eyes glassy, and he had a hint of manic vibration about him. Six or seven hours in the booth, running on nothing but deadline adrenaline and diet pop, and my college boy was still standing. Don’t ask me why, but I felt a little flash of pride.

Ainsley tilted his head to see around me. “Seen the story yet, Uncle Rich? It’s great.”

Gatt couldn’t speak. He pointed. His eyebrows twitched. His nostrils flared.

“Go ahead and show him,” I told Ainsley. “I’m gone.”

4:23:51 p.m.

I begged a ride off the mailroom courier to pick up the Subaru. Then drove back to the hospital, waited around for the doctor’s discharge and suffered through forty minutes of paperwork, wherein I promised to turn my entire self over to accounts receivable for parts if I forfeited on my bill.

Tonya kissed us both goodbye and went back to the city. Jenny cried.

“I’ll be back on the weekend, honey. You can count on it.” Tonya always knew the right thing to say. For both of us.

At last, Jenny and I were on the way home. It was a quiet drive. We hadn’t really been alone together since I’d shipped her off to school on Monday. The silence swirled between us, warping into an emotional black hole that sucked my energy. I wanted to pull over and slump into a long, dark nap.

I’m in this for the long haul,
I reminded myself.
Consider Jenny first.

As we pulled into the garage, I looked for her face in the rearview mirror. “Home at last.”

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. She climbed out of the car and into the house without a glance back. It took me longer to gather up the sack of stuff from the hospital and my camera bag.

“Remember that guy we met at the picnic on Sunday—Sheriff Curzon?” I followed her inside the house. “He’s supposed to stop by later. Maybe share a pizza…what?”

She stood stock still, four feet inside the doorway. I almost stepped on her.

When she tipped her head to look up at me, I could see her eyes had dilated, the black iris swallowing up the lighter brown of her eyes. Her lips moved barely making words.

“What?”

“Someone’s here,” she whispered.

My first instinct was straight out of a bad TV movie.
“Don’t be silly.”
We were only four feet inside the door. They’d told me Jenny might be jittery coming home, but this was more than I expected.

“Someone’s in the house?”

Her head bobbed up and down, fast. “The TV was on when I first came in,” she said. “And the light, too. But they turned off when I opened the door.”

It sounded a little too specific to be a hallucination. I pushed her behind me.

“I put the lights on timers, remember? Wait here. I’ll check it out. Stay by the door.”

“No!” She grabbed my wrist.

“Jenny, calm down, babe. You don’t want to wait?”

She shook her head.

“You want to come?”

Nod.

No one could be in the house. The fact that my heart was beating twenty percent faster was my irrational need for excitement.

I dropped all the junk I was carrying and took Jenny’s cold hand in my warm, moist one. I led her over to the closet, quietly opened the door and removed the midwest girl’s weapon of choice—a solid oak, regulation, Louisville slugger.