Never Look Away (5 page)

I got up from my chair.

"What are you going to do, David? Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid."

I surveyed his office, like I was sizing it up for redecorating. "I'm not sure this room meets the cat-swinging code, Brian. You might want to look into that."

I sat at my desk and stewed for half an hour. Samantha Henry asked me five times what had happened in Brian's office, but I waved her off. I was too angry to talk. Despite Brian's warning not to, I was seriously considering walking into the publisher's office, asking her if this was what she really wanted, that if we had to abandon our principles to save the paper, was the paper really worth saving?

In the end, I did nothing.

Maybe this was how it was going to be. You came in, you churned out enough copy to fill the space, didn't matter what it was, you took your paycheck, you went home. I'd worked at a paper like that--in Pennsylvania--before coming back to the hometown rag. There'd always been papers like that. I'd been naive enough to think the
Standard
would never turn into one of them.

But we were hardly unique. What was happening to us was happening to countless other papers across the country. What might buy us some time was the Russell family's ace in the hole--a huge tract of land it hoped to sell to one of the country's biggest private prison conglomerates.

If things didn't work out here, maybe I could get a job as a bull. Wasn't that what inmates called guards?

I picked up the phone, hit the speed dial for Bertram Heating and Cooling. If I couldn't save the state of journalism, maybe I could put a bit of effort into my marriage, which had been showing signs of wear lately.

A voice that was not Jan's said, "Bertram's." It was Leanne Kowalski. She had the perfect voice for someone working at an air-conditioning firm. Icy.

"Hey, Leanne," I said. "It's David. Jan there?"

"Hang on." Leanne wasn't big on small talk.

The line seemed to go dead, then Jan picked up and said, "Hey."

"Leanne seems cheery today."

"No kidding."

"Why don't we see if my parents can hang on to Ethan for a couple of extra hours, we'll go out for a bite to eat. Just the two of us. Rent a movie for later." I paused. "I could get into
Body Heat."
Jan's favorite film. And I never got tired of the steamy love scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.

"I guess," she said.

"You don't sound very excited."

"Actually, yeah," said Jan, warming to the idea. "Where were you thinking for dinner?"

"I don't know. Preston's?" A steakhouse. "Or the Clover?" A bit on the pricey side, but if the newspaper business was going into the dumper, maybe we should go while we could still afford it.

"What about Gina's?" Jan asked.

Our favorite Italian place. "Perfect. If we go around six, we probably won't need a reservation, but I'll check just to be sure."

"Okay."

"I could pick you up at work, we'll go back for your car later."

"What if you get me drunk so you can take advantage of me?"

That sounded more like the Jan I knew.

"Then I'll drive you to work in the morning."

Taking a shortcut through the pressroom on the way to the parking lot, I spotted Madeline Plimpton.

It was the pressroom that most made this building feel like a real newspaper. It was the engine room of a battleship. And if the
Standard
ever ceased to be a paper, these monstrous presses--which moved newsprint through at roughly fifty feet per second and could pump out sixty thousand copies in an hour--would be the last thing standing, the final thing to be moved out of here. We'd already lost the composing room, where the paper's pages had been, literally, pasted up. It had vanished once editors started laying out their own pages on a computer screen.

I saw Madeline up on the "boards," which was pressman-speak for the catwalks that ran along the sides, and through, the presses, which were not actually massive rollers, but dozens upon dozens of smaller ones that led the never-ending sheets of newsprint on a circuitous route up and down and over and under until they miraculously appeared at the end of the line as a perfectly collated newspaper. The machinery had been undergoing some maintenance, and a coverall-clad pressman was directing Madeline's attention to the guts of one part of the presses, which ran from one end of the hundred-foot room to the other.

I didn't want to pass up this opportunity to speak to her directly, but I knew better than to clamber up the metal steps. The pressmen could be a bit sensitive about that sort of thing. They weren't as hard-line as they used to be, but the men--and handful of women--who ran and maintained the presses were staunch unionists. If someone from anywhere else in the paper got up on the boards without their permission--especially management--it suddenly got a lot easier to carry on a conversation. The presses would stop dead. And they wouldn't start running again until the trespassers left.

But the pressmen, while still a force to be reckoned with, had softened with the times. They knew newspapers were in a tough period from which they might never recover. And the people who worked in this room found it difficult to dislike Madeline Plimpton. She'd always been able to connect with the average working guy, and knew the names of everyone who worked in here.

Madeline was in her publisher's outfit: a navy knee-length skirt and matching jacket that was not only impervious to printer's ink, but set off her silver-blonde hair. She was a curiosity in some ways. Designer duds, but down here on the boards, I wondered if, in her heart, she wouldn't have been more comfortable in the tight jeans she'd worn as a reporter. She'd look just as good in them today as she did then. I'd only seen Madeline age in the time since her husband had died, and even after that she'd managed to keep any new lines in her face to a minimum.

I managed to catch her eye when she glanced down.

"David," she said. It was normally deafening in here, but the presses weren't currently in operation, so I could hear her.

"Madeline," I said. Considering that we'd come through the newsroom together, years earlier, it had never occurred to me to call her by anything other than her first name. "You got a minute?"

She nodded, said something to the pressman, and descended the metal staircase. She knew better than to ask me to join her up there. The boards were not a place to hang out.

Once she was on the floor, I said, "This Reeves story is solid."

"I'm sorry?" she said.

"Please," I said. "I get what's going on. We like this new prison. We don't want to make waves. We act real nice and play down local opposition to this thing and we get to sell them the land they need to build."

Something flickered in Madeline's eyes. Maybe she'd figure out Brian had told me. Fuck him.

"But this will end up biting us in the ass later, Madeline. Readers, they may not get it right away, but over time, they'll start figuring out that we don't care about news anymore, that we're just a press release delivery system, something that keeps the Target flyer from getting wet, a place where the mayor can see a picture of himself handing out a check to the Boy Scouts. We'll still carry car crashes and three-alarm fires and we'll do the annual pieces on the most popular Halloween costumes and what New Year's resolutions prominent locals are making, but we won't be a fucking newspaper. What's the point in doing all this if we don't care what we are anymore?"

Madeline looked me in the eye and managed a rueful smile. "How are things, David? How's Jan?"

She had that way about her. You could blow your stack at her and she'd come back with a question about the weather.

"Madeline, just let us do our jobs," I said.

The smile faded. "What's happened to you, David?" she asked.

"I think a better question would be, what's happened to you?" I said. "Remember the time you and I were covering that hostage taking, the one where the guy was holding his wife and kid, said he was going to kill them if the police didn't back off?"

She didn't say anything, but I knew she remembered.

"And we got in between the police and the house, and we saw everything that went down, the cops storming the place, beating the shit out of that guy, even after they'd found out he didn't have a gun. Just about killed him. And the story we put together after, laying it all out just like it happened, even though we knew it was going to cause a shit storm with the police, which it sure as hell did when it ran. You remember the feeling?"

Her eyes went soft at the memory. "I remember." She paused. "I miss it."

"Some of us still care about that feeling. We don't want to lose it."

"And I don't want to lose this paper," Madeline Plimpton said. "You go to bed at night worried about whether your story will run. I go to bed worried about whether there's going to be a paper to run it in. I may not sit in the newsroom anymore but I'm still on the front line."

I didn't have a comeback for that.

I parked out front of Bertram's a little after five-thirty. Leanne Kowalski was standing in the parking lot like she was waiting for someone.

I nodded hello as I got out of the Accord and headed for the door. "How's it going, Leanne?" I said. I'd met her enough times to have known better than to ask.

"Be a lot better if Lyall ever turns up," she said. Leanne was one of those people who seemed to have only two moods. Annoyed, and irritated. She was tall and skinny, narrow hipped and small breasted, what my mother would call scrawny. Like she needed some meat on her bones. While she kept her black, lightly streaked hair short, she had bangs she had to keep moving out of her eyes.

"No wheels today?" I asked. There was usually an old blue Ford Explorer parked next to Jan's Jetta any time I drove by.

"Lyall's clunker's in the shop, so he borrowed mine," she said. "I don't know where the hell he is. Was supposed to be here half an hour ago." She shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Honest to God."

I offered up an awkward smile, then pulled on the office door handle, a cool blast of A/C hitting me as I went inside.

Jan was turning off her computer and slinging her purse over her shoulder.

"Leanne's her usual cheerful self," I said.

Jan said, "Tell me about it."

We both happened to look out the window at the same time. Leanne's Explorer had just careened into the lot. I could see Lyall's round face behind the windshield, his sausagelike fingers gripped to the wheel. There was something bobbing about inside, and it took me a moment to realize it was a large dog.

Instead of getting in the passenger side, Leanne went to the driver's door and yanked it open. She was pretty agitated, waving her hands, yelling at him. We couldn't make out what she was saying, and as curious as we were to hear it, we didn't want to venture outside and run the risk of getting in the middle of it.

Lyall slithered out of the driver's seat. He was almost bald and heavy-set, and his tank top afforded us a generous glimpse of his armpits. He slunk around the front of the Explorer, Leanne shouting at him across the hood the entire time.

"Must be fun to be him," I said as Lyall opened the passenger door and got in.

"I don't know why she stays with him," Jan said. "All she does is bitch about him. But you know, I think she actually loves the loser."

Leanne got behind the wheel, threw the Explorer into reverse, and kicked up dust as she sped off down the road. Just before Leanne backed out, I saw Lyall give her a look. It reminded me of a beaten dog, just before it decides to get even.

Gina showed Jan and me to our table. Her restaurant had about twenty tables, but it was early and only three of them were taken.

"Mr. Harwood, Mrs. Harwood, so nice to see you again," she said. Gina was a plump woman in her sixties whose eatery was a legend in the Promise Falls area. She, and she alone, possessed the recipe to the magical tomato sauce that accompanied most of the dishes. I hoped it was written down someplace, just in case.

"When did you tell your parents we'd be coming for Ethan?" Jan asked around the time we got our minestrone.

"Between eight and nine."

She had her spoon in her right hand, and as she reached with her left for the salt her sleeve slipped back an inch, revealing something white wrapped about her left wrist.

"They're really good with him," she said.

That seemed something of a concession, given how she'd been talking about my parents only the other day.

"They are," I said. It looked like a bandage wrapped around her wrist.

"Your mom's in good shape. She still has lots of energy," Jan said. "She's, you know, youthful for her age."

"My dad's pretty good, too, except for being a bit, you know, insane."

Jan didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "It's good to know that if something ... if something happened to me--or to you--they'd be able to help out a lot."

"What are you talking about, Jan?"

"It's just good to have things in place, that's all."