The Good Byline

by Jill Orr

  Best,

  Regina H, Personal Romance Concierge, Click.com

  CHAPTER 9

  On Kay Jackson’s advice, I’d called Will Holman, the reporter for whom Jordan worked, and set up a meeting for that evening after work. I waited for him on the curb in front of the Times building. We were supposed to meet here at 7 p.m., but I had arrived at 6:52. Early again. I took the extra few minutes to check my email. I wasn’t exactly looking to see if Regina H had any news about me from Ajay, but I wasn’t exactly not looking for that either.

  “Excuse me?” I felt a tap on my left shoulder and jumped about a foot in the air.

  “Sorry.” A man, presumably Will Holman, stood beside me wearing a yellow T-shirt that read A Doctor Today Keeps the Daleks Away. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Are you Riley?”

  I swallowed my heart back into my chest. “Yes. Mr. Holman?”

  “You can just call me Holman.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, squashing the quiver in my voice, “Holman.” If I sounded nervous, it’s because I was. And it wasn’t just that he somehow snuck up on me. It was that interviewing an award-winning investigative journalist would make anyone nervous. Especially someone who wasn’t a real reporter (or even a real librarian). I had done a little research on Will Holman and learned that he had won the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism three years ago, at the age of twenty-six, for a piece that exposed abusive group homes for children in southern Virginia. He uncovered that kids were being abused and locked into closet-size rooms for breaking arbitrary rules like not eating all their carrots. His exposé led to the state taking action against the group, including the arrest of several community leaders.

  I stuck out my hand to shake his. He had one of those limp-fish handshakes. Ew.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” he smiled, but it didn’t look like a natural position for his face. Holman was definitely an odd duck, as Kay Jackson had said. He was tall and lanky, with eyes so round it gave him the appearance of a claymation character out of a Wallace and Grommet movie. His round, wire-framed glasses did nothing to lessen the effect, nor did the fact that he appeared not to blink. Ever. He stood on the sidewalk, his circle-eyes wide open, as if he were appraising me for auction.

  “Um, do you want to talk in your office? Or Coffee Zone?” I gestured to the place across the street.

  “Nope,” he said. “I think we should talk off the grid.”

  I laughed. He didn’t.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I don’t like to have sensitive conversations in crowded places. I know a great spot we can go. No cell towers, no drones. Plus, they have the best pulled pork you’ll ever eat.”

  Off the grid? No drones? Pulled pork? What the hell was going on here? I must have been desperate for information, because I was actually considering getting into a blue Dodge Neon and going “off the grid” with this guy. “Um,” I said, stalling for time.

  “I can see why you’re hesitant. But I can assure you I am not a threat to your safety.”

  Oddly, I believed him. That’s probably the last thought Ted Bundy’s victims had, too, I heard my mother’s voice saying inside my head. I wasn’t sure if it was his earnest expression or my curiosity about what was so sensitive that he had to take me off the grid to discuss it, but I got in his car.

  Riley Ellison, expired at the age of twenty-four after accepting an invitation to go eat pulled pork with a man she didn’t know at all. Her remains were found chopped up and frozen inside ice cubes that the perpetrator used to chill his iced tea for months after her death.

  Holman regarded me before pulling out onto Whistler Avenue. “I think you have a nice face.” But he didn’t say this with the emphasis on “face” or even “nice.” The emphasis was on “think,” so it gave the whole sentence a questiony feeling, as in I think this milk is spoiled. I think I may have run over a squirrel back there. I think you may have a melanoma.

  “Thanks,” I said and looked out my window, craning my nice face away from his view.

  We turned onto the highway and rode in silence for a couple of minutes. I began to question my decision. No one knew I was coming here; I didn’t tell Mom and Dad. And since I pretty much had no living friends, and the only people I talked to on a regular basis were an ex-boyfriend, who lived two thousand miles away, a romance concierge who was worried about my stability, and a professor who thought I was certifiably insane, no one would miss me for days if Holman decided to hit me over the head with a shovel and dump my body in the James River. I guess I could have texted Tabitha, but she would just have been annoyed by my impending doom, so I decided against it. But I snuck a glance at my cell phone to make sure I had full battery and a signal just in case. Check and check.

  After a few silent moments, Holman said, “What do you think of my face?”

  “What?”

  “Objectively speaking, do you think that I have a nice face?” His eyes were glued to the road ahead, and he didn’t sound the least bit uncomfortable. “I’m not asking you in a sexual way, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I, um—”

  “It’s okay if you don’t. It’s all pretty clinical stuff actually. The attractiveness quotient in people can be broken down to the symmetry of facial features. Distance between pupils and the hairline, length of face, that sort of thing.”

  The conversation was unbearable. Who asks a question like that? “Um, yes, I guess your face is…symmetrical,” I managed to stammer out.

  He smiled. “Thanks. Yours is too.”

  “Where are we going anyway?” The trees on either side of the highway were getting thicker, and there were fewer homes and buildings off to the side.

  “B’s B & BBQ. Ever been?”

  I hadn’t. And I was getting more uncomfortable by the second. “You know,” I said, making a big show of looking at my phone, “my boyfriend is expecting me home by nine, so.…”

  “You have a boyfriend? Do you live together? What’s his name?” He fired the questions at me quickly.

  “Yes. No. Ajay. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought you might be making him up in order to give me the message that you’re not interested in me, sexually speaking.”

  I really wished he would stop using the word sexually. But he was right, of course. I sighed. “His name is Ajay Badal, he’s a professor at Cardwell College. We’ve only been out a couple of times, so I guess maybe he’s not officially my boyfriend.”

  He nodded firmly. “Got it.”

  I changed the subject. “Kay said Jordan had been helping you on a story?”

  “Yes. A piece on Juan Pablo Romero. She was a great fact-checker. Nothing got past her. I had her researching background information on him, and she was incredibly thorough. Very organized.”

  That was the Jordan I’d known. Her room had always been neat and orderly, bed made, desk cleared off. It was probably one of the reasons for her ability to be involved in so many organizations in school. You had to be highly structured if you were going to be the editor of the school newspaper, on the track team, and in the drama club, all while managing a chronic illness like type 1 diabetes.

  Earlier in the day, I’d had a brief and fruitless conversation with Andie, Jordan’s friend from college. Andie said Jordan was “as steady and driven as ever,” and she was absolutely stunned when she’d heard the news. No, she didn’t know if she was seeing anyone. No, she didn’t think she’d been depressed. No, she hadn’t spoken to her that much recently because Jordan had been so busy with work.

  “Did she have many friends at the Times?”

  Holman blinked hard, like it was punctuation. “She did not appear overly social at work. She was very focused when she was on the job.” I wondered if she and Holman had been friends or just colleagues. But I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask that. Plus, I wasn’t sure if we were far enough off the grid for him to answer my questions anyway.

  About seven silent minutes later we pulled i
nto a gravel parking lot. In the back of the lot was a trailer with a faded painting on the side of a black bear drinking a beer and eating a slab of ribs. The sign above read: “Bear’s Beer & BBQ.”

  “Remember, get the pulled pork. You won’t regret it,” Holman said as he cut the engine.

  I could not have cared less about the pulled pork. I wanted to know what was so sensitive that Holman had to drag me fifteen miles outside of town to discuss it. “Before we eat, can we talk a little more about Jordan?” I asked. “It’s just that I only have a few more days to put this obit together, and—”

  His hand was still on the keys hanging out of the ignition as he interrupted me. “I brought Jordan here once. And she said she had a boyfriend, too.”

  I was losing my patience with this guy and his weird non sequiturs. “Did you ask her what she thought of your face?” I sniped.

  “Not that night. We’d been working together for months. We’d already had the face conversation. Hers was nice, too. Maybe not quite as equally proportioned as yours but close.” Apparently, Holman didn’t get sarcasm.

  “So…?” I said, trying to edge the conversation forward.

  “So what?”

  “So what were you going to say? You said you brought Jordan out here and she told you she had a boyfriend.…”

  “That was it.”

  “What was it?”

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you. That Jordan told me she had a boyfriend.”

  “You brought me all the way out here, ‘off the grid,’ to tell me she was seeing someone?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shook my head. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Did you know she had a boyfriend?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Did her parents know she had a boyfriend?”

  I hesitated. “No, I guess not.”

  “Then it seems like I just provided you with some good information you weren’t able to get from other sources.” He did another hard reset of a blink. “No need to thank me. You can pay me back with a sandwich.”

  We ate our sandwiches (that I paid for) leaning against the hood of his Neon. Holman might have been nuttier than squirrel poop, but he was right about the pulled pork. It was delicious. About three bites in, he starting talking again.

  “So I wanted to ask you about something,” he said.

  I felt my jaw clench. I really couldn’t take any more awkward conversations with this guy. He must have noticed because he immediately said, “It’s nothing sexual, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Please stop telling me things are not sexual. I know when things are and are not sexual, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said evenly. “It’s just that I find that symmetrical girls get bombarded with sexual advances, so I like to be clear. That’s all. Just trying to keep things professional.”

  There was a certain sincere logic in what he said, and all of a sudden I couldn’t help but laugh.

  Holman started laughing, too, but after a moment said, “Wait—what are we laughing about?”

  “Nothing, Holman. Eat your sandwich.”

  He took another bite, then with a full mouth garbled out, “You’re Albert Ellison’s granddaughter, right?”

  I looked at him, my silence confirming what he already knew.

  “You wrote that piece after he died.”

  “I did.”

  “Bet the sheriff didn’t like that.”

  “You win your bet.”

  “And then he iced you out, right? I mean, I read that he refused to reopen the case, even with all the questions your piece raised. How’d that happen?”

  “Is this an interview?”

  “Sorry. Occupational hazard.”

  “No problem,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation back to Jordan. I didn’t want to talk about my granddad with Holman. “It is what it is.”

  “Except when it isn’t.”

  There was something about the way he said that that got my attention. I looked at him trying to get a read on what he meant. “Yes. Except when it isn’t.…”

  Holman regarded me for what seemed a hair too long before he said, “There was something else I wanted to tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  “The story Jordan and I were working on—you know, the one about Juan Pablo Romero? We were actually going in a different direction with it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the paper asked us to write a piece about Romero’s rise from above his tragic and troubled past into this great humanitarian. But the more we looked into Romero, the less we were convinced that he is the saint he pretends to be.”

  “Really?”

  “And the morning that they found Jordan, I found an envelope addressed to me in her files. It contained a letter written by someone who said they wished to remain anonymous. The letter urged me to check out the taco truck at the LJP building site.”

  I looked blankly at him. I didn’t know what any of that meant. “Okay,” I said, still not understanding. “So you got an anonymous tip to check a taco truck? Was this something for the Inspecting the Eateries department?”

  “You’re not hearing me. Jordan opened a letter addressed to me when I wasn’t in the office. And decided not to share it. Why do you think she’d do that?”

  I felt instantly defensive of Jordan. Was Holman suggesting she had acted inappropriately? “Maybe she was trying to be helpful? I’m sure she was planning to tell you about it at some point.”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it. Jordan was ambitious. My guess is she thought the tip would lead to a break in our story and decided to keep it for herself.”

  “I don’t see how you can know that,” I said. Though in truth I had no idea if that was something she would have done. She had always been a go-getter; I supposed it was possible she’d try to keep that information to herself.

  “I’m not angry at Jordan,” Holman clarified, “but an anonymous tip to check out a taco truck on the Little Juan Park project is a big deal, especially since Juan Pablo Romero owns a fleet of them. Who knows what information that tip might have led to?”

  I got a tingly feeling on the back of my neck. I wasn’t sure I understood exactly what Will Holman was suggesting, but I knew we were no longer talking about information to include in her obituary.

  He went on. “And why would an ambitious young reporter kill herself after going through the effort of stealing such a potentially juicy lead? It just doesn’t add up.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Yes,” Holman cut me off. “I never thought Jordan killed herself.”

  “Me either.” I hadn’t known for sure I felt that way until the words were out of my mouth.

  “Symmetrical and smart. I had a feeling about you.”

  “But…” I was lost in the newly formed thought circling around in my head. “…You don’t think she could have been…murdered?” The word sounded foreign coming out of my mouth, and even more bizarre in the context of a friend.

  “I think anything is possible,” he said. “Romero is a powerful guy and definitely not the good guy he pretends to be. Maybe she stumbled onto something through that anonymous tip? Or maybe her death has something to do with that secret boyfriend of hers? Domestic violence accounts for nearly thirty-three percent of female homicide victims.”

  I looked at him, my eyes going wide. We didn’t even know for sure that Jordan had a secret boyfriend. Nor did we know if Romero was a bad guy. Or if her death wasn’t suicide. “This is a lot of speculation.”

  “I’m just saying anything is possible. That’s all.”

  In the back of my mind, I could hear Kay Jackson’s warning about chasing alternative theories. But Holman was an award-winning reporter. If he thought so too, I told my little voice, I must be on the right track.

  He drove me back to my car and thanked me for the food. “Try to find out more about who Jordan was seeing, okay?”

  I had the door open, one
foot out. “Okay. I’ll call you if—”

  “Don’t call me. I’m pretty sure they’re bugging my phones.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  Holman nodded gravely. “Exactly.”

  “No really. Who?”

  “Who indeed, Riley. Who indeed.”

  “Holman. I’m actually asking you who you’re talking about.”

  In response, or maybe of no relevance at all (who could tell with him), he tapped the side of his nose and drove off.

  “Most families want the stories of their loved ones told—as long as they’re approached by someone who they believe will treat the story with care. I try to meet with families in person whenever possible, look through scrapbooks with them, look at the dog-eared pages of their favorite books. I want to know not just what is gone, but what remains. In the end, it inevitably ends up a cathartic experience for the family, because at a time when most people don’t know what to say (so some say nothing at all), I can show up with my notebook and give them the opportunity to talk about the one thing that consumes them—stories about the person who has died.”

  —JIM SHEELER, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Final Salute, in an interview on Poynter.org

  CHAPTER 10

  I spent the rest of the evening looking over my shoulder for Holman’s mysterious “they.” If “they” were responsible for Jordan’s death and were now after him, did that make me a target, too? I locked my door as soon as I got home, something I rarely did, even at night. I’d always felt safe in Tuttle Corner, but after Holman’s talk of drones, bugged phones, and murderous strangers, I felt a little on edge.