“Who’s ‘they’?”
For the first time she smiled, a wry little grin that acknowledged my echo of her question.
“The police, of course. At the time the Riverside chief was Armand Fecteau. He was nice, grandfatherly, in the way local cops can be. The state police were businesslike. The FBI guys were brutal. One of them, Wellington was his name, cooked up a theory that I’d been George’s lover and was just waiting for a signal to fly off and meet him in Rio or something.”
She fiddled with the cigarette case, glancing over at me.
“Does my smoking bother you?”
“It’s fine.” I’d tolerate her lighting one after another as long as she kept talking.
Joan extracted another slender cigarette and flicked the lighter to its tip.
“Sometimes cops say provocative things when they’re questioning people, just to see how they’ll react,” I said.
“The notion that I was involved with George was outrageous. He was a good boss, but not my type at all. Too straight-arrow. I liked wild guys back then.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“What do you remember about the last week or so before George disappeared? Was he acting odd in any way?”
“Not a bit. He was his usual self. Came in early, worked hard, told jokes at lunch, talked about his plan to go fishing on the weekend.” She inhaled deeply, blowing smoke out in a sharp stream. “Then he just disappeared. It was a Saturday, so I was off, but the security guard saw him midmorning. George sometimes went in on Saturday mornings to catch up on work, so it wasn’t unusual.”
“The old newspaper clippings I read said no one saw him leave the office that day.”
“Not surprising. The office building was deserted on weekends.”
She nodded at my empty glass and asked with her eyes if I wanted more iced coffee. I did, but knew better than to interrupt her remarkably sharp memories.
“When did you realize he was gone?”
“He wasn’t in his office Monday morning. That was odd. I couldn’t recall another instance when I’d arrived first. George was a morning guy, and a hard worker. Looking to go up the ladder.”
“Helena recalls that you called her, to ask if he was ill.”
“I was worried that he’d had an accident or something.” Joan took a deep drag on her cigarette. “She went to his house. Found it locked up tight. I suppose you know the rest.”
“I’ve read all the stories written at the time. You can see why the cops came to the conclusion that he left, especially when an audit showed money was missing.”
“I suppose. But even at the time, it seemed a bit too neat to me. The mill’s board of directors asked for that audit so quick, it was almost like they knew there’d be a discrepancy.”
“I didn’t realize it was the board that asked for the accounting.”
She tamped the ash against the tray.
“Oh yeah. The word came down from on high. Board president John D. Preble himself came into the office, acting all buddy-buddy with me, though I’m sure if I hadn’t had a nameplate on my desk he wouldn’t have known what to call me. Ed Talcott—he was the finance director—was sick with cancer, poor guy, but he rolled up his sleeves and I did too. Our job was to sort the files to help the bank people spot any irregularities.”
Taking a last pull on the cigarette, she put it out as she exhaled through her nose.
“They concluded George siphoned money into some made-up company. I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t in his character to do that.”
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She excused herself and went into the kitchen. A moment later I could make out gasping sobs. She returned a few minutes later, face flushed but eyes dry.
“Did they really accuse you of being his accomplice?” Hearing her distress, I used an incredulous tone to soften the question.
“Wellington made no bones about it. Asked me how long I’d been sleeping with George, wanted to see my bank accounts.”
“That must have been insulting.”
“Insulting and stupid. Just because I wore miniskirts to work he assumed I was the sort of woman who’d sleep with her boss, which I wasn’t. My bank account showed I lived pretty much paycheck to paycheck. But Wellington kept coming back and asking the same questions over and over.”
“Is that why you moved away?”
She threw her head back and looked at the ceiling for a moment. The corners of her eyes glinted with fresh tears when they came back to meet mine.
“That’s a whole different story. You know how I told you when you came in the door that I didn’t like reporters?”
I nodded.
“I lost my heart to a reporter. I moved here to put some distance between me and him.” Her mouth twisted itself into something that aimed for rueful but missed. “But that’s all ancient history. You’re probably too young to have known Paulie Finnegan.”
* * *
The interview lost its tentative tone once Joan discovered we had Paulie in common. I had been his protégé. She had been his lover. We ditched the iced coffee in favor of gin and tonic and repaired to a dim screen porch off the back of her house where she talked for another couple of hours.
One thing was crystal clear: Joan and Paulie had a powerful thing going for a brief time in the summer of ’68, and time had not cooled her ardor. Sitting there in the dark, the liquor loosening her tongue, her remembered desire hung in the humid air as heavily as the smoke from her cigarettes. It didn’t take much to sweet-talk the memories from her lips. Before I could say stop I learned more about my bachelor mentor than I ever expected to know.
For one thing, he was a father. Of her child. Her voice was husky with sadness when she confessed this intimacy to me.
Joan found out she was pregnant in late July, 1968. She and Paulie had been a hot-and-heavy item for less than a month back in the spring, but he was the only guy who could have been responsible. She was positive about that.
Though they’d split before she learned she was pregnant, Joan was sure Paulie would have been decent about if she’d told him, would have offered to marry her and raise the child. Instead she moved to Durham to live with her sister, happy to let those who knew her in Riverside think she’d had a nervous breakdown from the stress of being the assistant to the man who’d ripped off the mill—ripped off the whole town. Her son was born in January. She was allowed to hold him for a few minutes before he was whisked away by a worker from an adoption agency that already had him placed with a well-to-do couple from the Boston suburbs.
“You never saw him again?”
“Never.”
“How about Paulie? Did you ever see him again?”
“I kept track of him from afar. Picked up the Portland paper whenever I was in Maine, so I know he stuck with the Chronicle his whole career, and made a good name for himself. His death was written up in the Portsmouth paper. I went online and read the obituary in the Chronicle.”
“I wrote it.”
She ignored my lame comment.
“He never married,” she said, as if that was news to me.
“He never talked about why. I never felt I could ask.”
“He wasn’t the marrying kind.” Joan took a long pull on her drink. “Paulie was a good guy. He was a lot of fun. But the news business owned his heart. I always would have been competing with that.”
“It’s not an either/or thing. Reporters get married all the time. He would’ve been able to love you and be a newspaperman at the same time.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side. “Paulie loved his work. More than he loved anything.”
She paused, looking into space. “I shouldn’t leave you with the impression it was noble intent on my part to take my pregnant self down here to Durham
because I didn’t want to saddle Paulie with a wife and a kid and break his spirit. The truth is, I was just twenty-five at the time and I wanted a career. I wasn’t ready to be a mother.”
She shook a cigarette out of the leather case and undertook the lighting ritual before resuming her monologue.
“If I’d used my pregnancy to rope him in, that’s what I would have been. A too-young mother. Paulie never would have agreed to let me give his child up for adoption.”
She inhaled a lungful of smoke. Exhaled out the side of her mouth.
“Back then, I had this fairytale notion that I’d find a man who’d make me the center of his universe. Maybe this isn’t fair to Paulie, but I believed the most I would have been for him was a minor planet. Mercury maybe. Or Pluto. I worried that I’d have to fight for his love, vie with the adrenaline rush of covering a big story, the camaraderie with the guys on the copydesk, the absolute joy he took in his work. So I moved down here where I could have my baby more or less anonymously.”
We sat in silence, her occasional drags on the cigarette the only noise other than the humming insects outside the screen porch. Her name was still Slater, so she either never got married or kept her birth name. I suspected the former. Something told me that despite her looks, she’d never found the man of her dreams.
“You’ve lived here in Durham ever since?”
She snuffed out her butt. “It’s a good place. My sister lives nearby. She’s got three great kids, grown now. I found a job at the university. Made friends. Moved on.”
She detoured to a hallway bookcase on our stroll toward the front door. Pulling out an old-fashioned photo album, she paged forward until she reached some snapshots of her and Paulie, back in the day. As I’d guessed from her current appearance, at twenty-five Joan was the kind of woman who induced men to take crazy risks: shapely in a pink dress, long blond hair, her smile ignited by a look in her eyes that murmured, “Come here, Big Boy.” Paulie wore his hair in a grown-out crew cut. Like a current-day hipster, he sported black-rimmed glasses and a tattoo on his left forearm. His catbird smile said “I’ve got the prize.”
In the photo they were sitting close, hands clasped atop a picnic table, looking delighted with life.
“A good day?” I gestured at that particular shot.
Her fair skin betrayed a blush. “I’ll never forget it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Monday, July 14, 2014
Riverside, Maine
I woke at seven-thirty, an hour later than my usual rise and shine. A young Joan Slater had been in my dreams and so had Paulie, but he’d been the life-scarred man I’d known: white-haired, no nonsense, hiding his loneliness with long hours in the newsroom, preaching his journalism-is-a-noble-calling gospel to the few of us kids willing to listen.
I retrieved the Chronicle from the front porch so I could check the play on my story. Three columns. Above the fold. Illustrated with a shot of the medical examiner’s car wheeling out of the mill’s potholed parking lot. No photo of Desmond. The powers that be were still skittish.
While showering I realized I hadn’t checked my voicemail after the interview with Joan Slater. I’d silenced my phone before entering her house, my usual practice when heading into a sensitive interview. It’d been after eleven when I climbed back into my car. Head swimming with the facts revealed by Paulie’s former lover, it hadn’t occurred to me to check for messages as I drove up the Maine Turnpike.
Technically it was my day off, but the unwritten terms of my truce with Leah required me to plot my next steps in her presence, and obedience served my immediate purposes. I padded into my bedroom with a towel around my waist and fished my phone out of the khakis I’d dropped on the floor the night before. Multiple message chimes sounded as soon as I flicked the switch.
Leah’s voice was breezy in her first message, irritated in her second and fuming by the third. One of the weasels from Upstairs had cornered Gene moments after I’d left the newsroom the previous night, asking where I was and what angle I was working. When Gene texted Leah to alert her, she called the guy and put him off. Her first voicemail to me made it clear she didn’t want me to get too far out of pocket. The second demanded an ASAP callback. She was spitting mad in her last message, left at 7 a.m. when I still was snoozing.
“If you want me to cover your back, you can’t keep ignoring my calls. Don’t be an asshole. Call me.”
“Don’t yell,” I said when she picked up the newsroom’s main line. “I forgot my phone was turned off, that’s all.”
“Tell me another story. I’ve never known you to be careless about checking for messages.” She spoke in a low voice, either working to stay calm or trying not to be overheard. “Where are you, anyway?”
“Sitting naked on the side of my bed, fresh from the shower. I didn’t get home until after midnight, so I slept in. It is my day off, you know.”
“Loose cannons don’t get days off.”
I managed to swallow a comeback, reminding myself the morning’s goal was to return to fundamentals with Leah, reconfirm we were a team. The story of my evening with Joan Slater did the trick.
The only thing I left out was the part about Joan having had Paulie’s child. Leah was fascinated to learn the grizzled, workaholic old bach we’d known had a beautiful girlfriend once upon a time. By the time I was done describing the interview she was downright enthusiastic, belatedly offering measured praise for inducing Chief Wyatt to say enough on the record so we could break the story that long-missing George Desmond was the focus of the investigative inquiry. But her sudden fervor didn’t translate into carte blanche. Before hanging up she reminded me of our agreement.
“Tomorrow you’re mine,” she said. “Up for general assignment.”
“That’s our deal.”
I hoped to have such a productive day she’d forget about that damned pact.
My impatient self was scowling in the mirror, but I offered to swing by the newsroom within the hour to outline my day’s plan. She mumbled something that might have been an apology for the pissed-off phone messages.
We’d found even keel.
* * *
The Rambler was busy with a whole different clientele at 8 a.m. Mothers of toddlers, their hands a blur trying to keep milk from being spilled. White-collar folks sipping tea and keeping to themselves. What a difference an hour made.
I parked myself on the stool behind Christie and asked for two bacon-and-fried-egg sandwiches to go.
“Sleep through your alarm?” She talked over her shoulder while cracking my eggs and dropping four slices of oatmeal bread into the toaster.
“Worked very late on the story we discussed Saturday night.”
She turned and poured me some coffee in a to-go cup. “Can you talk about it?”
“Later.”
She nodded, understanding my reluctance to share details around so many big ears. I wasn’t crazy about talking about my lost love life either, but she waded right in.
“When you didn’t show up at your usual time, I wondered if you were maybe on the phone, long distance.”
“With Megan? Hell no. She’s busy, I’m busy. No point running up international phone bills.”
“Is that how you left it, that you wouldn’t stay in touch at all?”
I gulped my coffee and arm-wrestled with myself for a moment, deciding whether to admit the truth. Her dark eyes found mine and busted me open. I confessed in a single breath.
“I kind of checked out there at the end, emotionally.”
The toast popped. She spun back to the grill, painted the slices with melted butter, slid over-easy eggs and bacon in between. I watched her practiced motions, drank more coffee.
She came around the counter and set the paper-wrapped sandwiches in front of me. “I’ve been wondering.”
“Megan liked me fine. She just loves her adventurous life more. She wasn’t sad about leaving. To the contrary, she was excited about moving to Cameroon, and I tried to be excited for her. She saw no reason we couldn’t remain close right up to the end, but I couldn’t get on board with that. Eventually, I was counting the days till she left. But not because I was itching to be single. I’m done with my Free Bird phase.”
I hadn’t spoken the L-word to Megan, not even when we were in the throes of passion. I wasn’t about to use it now, to admit to Christie that I was in love with a woman who’d just moved halfway around the word. So I punted.
“The whole situation, it’s just such a friggin’ contrast.”
“What do you mean?”
“Megan has big plans for her life. I don’t.”
Christie nodded, but the look on her face told me she knew our conversation had jumped the tracks.
“Why can’t I ditch my stupid newspaper job and go off on some grand adventure of my own? It’s not like there’s a future at the Chronicle.”
I stood and picked up the sandwiches. Christie put her arm around my shoulder, maybe to comfort me, maybe to keep me from leaving. She knew damn well my suffering had nothing to do with an inability to be footloose, but she went along with my bullshit.
“Some people have it in them—and have the financial resources—to do what Megan’s doing. It’s not the only way to save the world.”
I looked at the door, visualized myself walking through it to the safety of my car. “I’m not sure anything I’m doing even qualifies as saving this town.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she said.
* * *
When I got to the newsroom my breakfast sandwiches were long gone and I’d shoved thoughts of Megan from my mind. Leah and I agreed my first priority was to track down Mike Thibodeau, the basketball-star-turned-bricklayer who might have rebuilt the wall behind which the bones were found. I also had to figure out if Chief Wyatt actually was willing to be an unofficial source, because I needed a reliable conduit for the facts the state police would hold on to out of habit rather than good sense. And I was itching to get back into the newspaper’s library to read through the 1968 stories again. In my first pass I was looking for clues about the identity of the skeleton. Now that there was little doubt it was Desmond, I needed to comb the disappearance stories for details that might be relevant to the murder case.
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