Yesterday's News

by R. G. Belsky

  I ran quickly through everything I knew. The connection between Marston and Joey Manielli. The letter about the six young Mountainboro victims—including how they were abducted and how they died—that I found in Big Lou’s stuff. And the way the trail of evidence all seemed to lead back to him. Even the long-ago murder of his ten-year-old sister. I made the whole thing sound even more damning to him than it really was, suggesting I’d connected all the dots to Lucy Devlin—even though I really hadn’t. But I wanted to make him squirm. I wanted to scare him badly enough to do something.

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line when I finished talking. I held my breath.

  “Okay, let’s meet and talk about this,” Grayson said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  Jesus, I thought to myself.

  This idea might really work.

  “Now you’re being smart about this,” I said to Grayson.

  “But no camera crew this time. Nothing on the air.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just you and me talking.”

  “Where do you want to meet?” I asked.

  “How about my office?”

  I’m not normally paranoid about stuff like this. And the truth was I didn’t really think Elliott Grayson was going to have me rubbed out if I showed up there. But I did have this image of Gwen or some other crazed Grayson fanatic coming at me with a letter opener or a staple gun. Besides, a lot of people who came in contact with Grayson over the years had mysteriously turned up dead.

  “No, I want to do it in a public place.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m the nervous type.”

  “You think I’m going to do something to you?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t want to end up like Sandy Marston.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “How about a restaurant?”

  “I’d be recognized. You, too, probably. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “Outside then,” I said. “A park.”

  “Central Park?”

  “Union Square Park,” I said, because I used to live near there and I knew it well. I’d feel comfortable in Union Square Park. If anything was wrong, I’d sense it better and faster there than in a huge place like Central Park.

  “Okay, Union Square Park,” Grayson said. “Let’s meet there tomorrow morning at ten a.m.”

  “At one of the benches at the north end of the park. Near the Farmer’s Market. Come alone.”

  “You, too.”

  “Oh, and Elliott … one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not going to try to kiss me this time, are you?”

  He slammed the phone down in my ear.

  I took that as a no.

  CHAPTER 50

  IT WAS A beautiful fall morning when I got to Union Square Park. The September sun slanted through the trees, where the leaves were already beginning to change. I’m not one of those people who like fall. Fall generally just reminds me that winter and ice and cold and snow are on the way. But this was like a last gasp of summer, a glorious day that made all that wintertime misery seem far, far away.

  Union Square Park is at 14th Street near Broadway and Park Avenue South. I took the Lexington Avenue subway there, walked through the park from the station, and found an empty bench at the north end. When I first came to New York, Union Square was a notorious haven for drug pushers, hookers, and muggers. Not too many normal, upstanding citizens ventured inside. But, like a lot of things in the city, the park had changed dramatically over the years. Now there was the Farmer’s Market, which sells produce and vegetables; a lot of cute art and antique stands; and outdoor restaurants nearby where people could enjoy the park view. The whole place had a different feel to it.

  I looked around and saw mothers sitting with their babies, young people lounging on the grass, and people walking their dogs. Just a nice day in the park for everyone. Except for me. I was on the job. I was there to meet a man who might be a mass murderer, a horrendous child abductor, a fiend so sick that he made his own sister his first victim. Well, at least I thought he was all of these things. Most of them, anyway.

  Grayson showed up a few minutes later. He looked around as he strode through the park to see if anyone had spotted him. Amazingly, no one recognized him. Here he was, maybe the next Senator from New York and his face on billboards all over the city, and everyone just minded their own business. New Yorkers—you gotta love ’em.

  I thought maybe he’d come with an entourage, even though he promised he wouldn’t. But there was no one else. I saw him looking around behind me, too. Probably figured I was with a cameraman or a photographer. When he was satisfied I was alone, he sat down on the bench next to me.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I thought maybe we should exchange a few pleasantries before getting down to business.”

  “Now why would I want to do that with you?”

  “Because of all we’ve meant to each other in the past?”

  “You’ve never meant anything to me.”

  “What about those sweet nothings you whispered in my ear?”

  “Hey, you had your chance with me, honey, and you blew it.”

  “You’re such a romantic, Elliott.”

  “Cut the crap, Carlson. Just tell me what it is you know—or think you know—so I can get the hell away from you.”

  “Well, I think that just about completes the pleasantries,” I said.

  I went through everything I’d found out with Grayson. His face showed no expression as I told him in even more detail what I knew about Sandy Marston and all the rest. That was okay. He had a good poker face. But I had the winning hand. I was sitting there with a full house, and he had nothing.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I told him. “First, I’m going to call publicly for an exhumation of all of the bodies that were found in that grave. I’m betting the other five dead kids aren’t who you said they were either. Just like Joey Manielli wasn’t. I have no idea why you’d want to misidentify them, what you hoped to gain—or hide—by doing it. But I’m pretty sure that’s what you deliberately did. I think if I stir up a big enough controversy about it, you won’t be able to just stand up and tell everyone to trust you that the other IDs are correct. Sooner or later, those other families are going to demand some answers. And the only way to do that is to dig up every one of those bodies again and find out if you’re telling the truth or not.

  “Then I’m going to reveal the contents of the package that Sandy Marston and Louise Carbone left behind at her mother’s home. Who was that kid in the picture with you, Elliott? What were you doing with him? These are all questions you’re going to have to be answering once I put this on the air.

  “I’m also going to call for an examination of the ‘suicide’ letter Marston supposedly left behind. All we have is your word that it was him who told you where to find Lucy Devlin’s body. What if you already knew? Because you put it there? That would make it easy to pin the blame on Marston, who wasn’t around anymore to defend himself.

  “Plus, I want the police to reopen the murder case of your sister back in Pennsylvania. I want you to tell everyone again that story about the mysterious drifter you said was talking to her that last day. The mysterious drifter that no one saw but you. You were only twelve years old when you told the police that story. Maybe they won’t believe you as easily this time. Maybe they’ll ask you some tougher questions than they did back then.

  “I can’t prove anything yet, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because when I throw it all out there, there’s going to be a big scandal. And questions about you and your past. A lot of questions. Do you think the people of New York City are going to want to put someone like that in the Senate? Do you really think you can win on Election Day if I put all this out there on the air? Me, I don’t think so.”

  I smiled triumphantly. I wasn’t sure
exactly what was going to happen next. But I had a pretty good idea of the possibilities.

  Either he was going to confess everything, try to explain away some of it by telling me at least part of the truth, or bluff his way through by denying everything.

  Whatever one he did was okay with me. I had him dead to rights, no matter what.

  Except he didn’t react in any of the ways I expected.

  Instead, he just smiled back at me.

  “You’ve got it all figured out, huh?”

  “Pretty much so.”

  “You think you’ve got all the answers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you forgot about one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Lucy’s mother.”

  “What about her?”

  “This is going to have quite a terrific impact on her—one helluva repercussion for her, I’d say.”

  “Anne Devlin is dying. I don’t think that really matters very much at this point.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Anne Devlin.”

  “Then who?”

  “I’m talking about Lucy’s real mother.”

  I looked around the park. The rest of the people were still eating and reading and enjoying themselves in the warm morning sun. But the day didn’t seem so beautiful to me anymore.

  We all make compromises in our lives, we all have dark secrets in our past, we all break the rules we vowed to live by sooner or later. Most of the time, if we’re lucky, no one ever finds out about our moments of weakness. I’d told myself for a long time that’s what would happen to me. But the hard truth is there are consequences—there are always consequences—when we stray from the path of truth and integrity and doing the right thing.

  I thought again about how the Lucy Devlin story had come around and found me again after all these years. And if there was anything I could have done to change that, to avoid being in this park right now talking with Elliott Grayson about Lucy Devlin again. Or were Lucy and I indeed always fated to be linked together no matter what?

  I don’t know the answer to these questions.

  And yet I believed that I had somehow caused myself to be in the very situation that I was right now.

  Caught up in a web of my own lies, my own transgressions, my own sins.

  The same lapses in moral judgement that I always preached so eloquently to others about avoiding.

  I realized at that moment Grayson had been playing me the whole time. I was the sucker in the high-stakes card game—feeling all smug and confident with a full house, never realizing my opponent was holding four aces. Four aces always beat a full house. He’d conned me. He sat there with his best poker face and let me tell him everything I knew. He set a trap for me, and I walked right into it.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to maintain my own poker face.

  But I wasn’t as good at the game as he was.

  “Sure you do,” he said.

  “Who’s Lucy Devlin’s real mother?”

  “Why you are, of course.”

  PART IV

  THE WOODSTEIN MANEUVER

  CHAPTER 51

  I WAS NINETEEN when it happened. A sophomore in college. Young, headstrong, and definitely wild. My father had been very strict with me when I was growing up. No dates, no parties, even no TV—unless he approved of the shows first. When I finally left home and went away to school, I really let loose.

  That’s how I wound up at a campus fraternity party one night. I’d gone with a couple of girlfriends, neither of whose names I can remember anymore. I was drinking heavily and, as the night wore on, my inhibitions—which were never that strong to begin with—pretty much all fell by the wayside. I remember winning a tequila shooter drinking contest at one point. I remember dancing on a tabletop afterward. I remember lifting up my t-shirt and flashing my breasts while guys cheered.

  Most of all, I remember Don Crowell.

  He was a senior. President of the fraternity, star of the swim team—a real big man on campus. He was a dreamboat, too. Wavy dark hair, big brown eyes, sensual lips. I’d seen him as soon as I came to the party. I tried to catch his eye, but he never noticed me. Until I started baring my breasts dancing on the tabletop. That seemed to get his attention.

  He was drunk by that time. But then, of course, I was, too. So it worked out nicely. We wound up making love in an upstairs bedroom. The lovemaking didn’t last very long, as I recall. Not much foreplay, not much cuddling or anything else afterward. He mumbled something about calling me the next day, and then he fell asleep. He never did call, by the way. I left him there in the bed, found a ride, and headed back to my dorm. It was all over so quickly that I hardly even noticed that we hadn’t bothered to use protection.

  It took me a while to realize I was pregnant. At first, I just wrote the symptoms off as nausea or bad food or the flu. I never even thought about taking a pregnancy test. Finally, one day I went to a doctor, figuring he’d give me some antibiotics to get rid of it. Instead, he came back after the tests and told me the last thing in the world I expected to hear. I was pregnant.

  Most young women in that situation would have had an abortion, and I might have, too. After all, a baby didn’t fit into my plans. I was going to journalism school, I was going to graduate and move to a big city. I was going to become a famous newspaper reporter. I wasn’t ready for motherhood. There’d be plenty of time for that later.

  In fact, my father ordered me to have an abortion when he heard the news.

  I’d never seen him so angry. He called me a tramp, a slut, and lots of other names I didn’t even think he knew. He said I was a disgrace to him and to my mother. He told me how embarrassed they would be if their friends and neighbors and coworkers ever found out about my condition. He wanted to drive me right then and there to an abortion doctor, get the deed done as quickly as possible, and then never talk about it again. My mother listened quietly as he raged on at me, never saying what she thought. Just like she always did.

  I suppose that’s why I decided not to have the abortion.

  Because my father wanted me to so badly.

  The result was an irreparable rift between my father and me. He disowned me, he kicked me out of the house, and he refused to give me any money or support. I quit school, moved in with some friends, and gave birth six-and-a-half months later to a baby girl.

  While I was pregnant, I made the decision that even though I was having this baby, there was no way I could raise a child on my own.

  I made arrangements to have her put up for adoption. It was easy to do. Sort of like donating clothes you don’t want to the Salvation Army. There was only one caveat: The adoption hospital said I could never know the family she went to and I could never have any contact with them or my baby. I said that was fine with me. I figured, at the time, it was a small price to pay. But it was a bill that got bigger and bigger as the years went by.

  I’d like to say it was an emotional moment when I handed my newborn baby daughter over for adoption at the hospital. That I hugged her and kissed her and promised her I’d see her again one day. That I cried for days afterward. But the truth is, it wasn’t like that at all. It was all very perfunctory and routine. I was mostly just glad that the whole thing was over.

  I went back to school, graduated with a degree in journalism, got a job at a small newspaper in New Jersey, and eventually moved to New York.

  It was not until some years after that when I started thinking again about the daughter that I would never see. I’d done a story about a mother whose baby girl died of sudden infant death syndrome when she was only a few weeks old. Listening to her grief as she talked about how she had held her baby in her arms the day she was born, I suddenly remembered doing the same thing with my own. For some reason, that interview set off feelings of maternal instincts in me. I figured they’d go away after a while, but instead, they kept getting stronger.

  I began to think about my daughter all
the time. Imagining what she would look like. Wondering what she was doing. Thinking about whether or not she ever knew her biological mother was out there somewhere.

  At some point, I’m not sure anymore exactly how or when, I came up with the idea of tracking her down. I was just about to turn thirty, and I guess I was going through an early midlife crisis. I was in between marriages, my first and my second. My first husband and I had tried to have a baby at one point in the beginning without any success. I somehow felt it was punishment for me—a message from God or whatever karma existed out there—for what I had done. I mean, I’d had this beautiful baby girl after only a few minutes of drunken sex at a fraternity party. Then I messed it all up. This was my payback.

  Later, in my other marriages, I’d gotten so busy with my career I never really pursued the idea of motherhood. That’s what I told myself anyway. But maybe it was about what happened with the baby I’d once had, too. My guilt over giving her up for adoption. And now my penance was that I could not have another child.

  At least that’s the way I feared it would be for me back then. So, I came up with an idea. Why not find the daughter I actually had? I tried going through official channels, but the adoption agency said their records were absolutely sealed and confidential.

  Then, somewhere around that time, I began dating a guy who worked for a federal hospital regulatory agency. I don’t remember his name anymore. I think it started with a J … Jack or Jim, maybe. Anyway, he was bragging to me in bed about how he had access to any hospital records in the country. In return for me performing certain sexual acts, several of which are still illegal in some states, he agreed to pull my file for me. That’s how I found the Devlins.

  The story about accidentally meeting Patrick Devlin by chance while interviewing him for a story about city construction was always a crock. It was no accident. I came up with the idea of the story just as an excuse to talk to him. I wanted to find out about the man who was the father of my daughter.