by Terri Kraus
Marriage had suited Penny, and she had become less shrill than she had been back at Delta Delta Delta.
Armed with directions to the newspaper office—in an office complex on the eastern outskirts of town—Cameron zipped into a visitor’s space and asked for Mr. McElroy at the reception desk.
In less than fifteen minutes, she was alone in a large, windowless room with dozens and dozens of huge shelving system units, each section holding decades of newsprint, bound in full-sized journals. A few years ago the paper had started archiving material in electronic form, but before then, they simply saved the actual newspaper itself.
She knew the date of Lynne’s murder. Retrieving the correct journals was a simple matter.
Unfortunately, and to her great disappointment, the news reports in the Erie papers were not much more complete than what appeared in The Franklin Derrick. The paper had a photograph of the car, canted at an odd angle to the curb with the door flung open. In the background were lines of police tape marking off the accident scene, and a few uniformed policemen, conferring together. One policeman pointed off into the distance. In the foreground of the picture lay a shopping bag with the sleeve of a light blouse or shirt peeking out. There was a dark patch on the asphalt, just by the door. The photo was black and white, so Cameron could not be sure if the stain was blood or not.
She felt a chill.
She paged through the papers for a few days following, just to be sure. No additional word on the murder. Random violence involving an out-of-town visitor must not have warranted a lot of news copy.
She sat back in her chair. The wood squealed softly.
She wondered what she would write if the same thing would happen in Franklin. After a moment, she came to the conclusion that it might not be all that different.
Replacing the volume in the rack, Cameron snapped off the light switch and made her way to Mr. McElroy’s office. He did not look busy, she thought, so she tapped on the door.
He looked up. “Find what you needed?”
“I did, thank you. Your paper didn’t have much more than ours did, unfortunately.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I wish I could offer more help. Penny said to extend all courtesy to you. You must have been close friends back in college. Wild Tri Delt girls.”
“We were,” Cameron said, hoping that she sounded sincere. “There is one other thing …”
“And that is?” he answered, his palms flat against the blotter of his desk.
“Was there anyone on staff then who might know more about this? Anyone working here today that was working back then?”
Mr. McElroy pursed his lips as if tasting a lemon to indicate deep thought. “Well. Turnover has been high …”
Cameron sighed. She knew that was most likely the case. At The Derrick the long-term positions were receptionist and editor. Even the newspaper’s lifestyle editor, often a local maven of long standing, was only five years into the job.
“But … I think Hank was here back then. It’s before my time. He’s been here a long time. Maybe he remembers. It was a quite a ways back, you know.”
She nodded.
“Was this murdered person a friend of yours … somehow?”
She shrugged. “Sort of. A friend of a friend, really. Where is Hank?”
Mr. McElroy sat high in his chair, as if trying to perch on the armrests, and craned his neck about. “Over there. The desk by the window. The fellow who’s smoking.”
Cameron looked. There was a skinny older man, hunched over a newspaper, holding a cigarette in his left hand, above his head.
“I thought this was a nonsmoking place,” Cameron said. “I mean, isn’t everywhere nonsmoking?”
Mr. McElroy shrugged. “It is. If I enforce it, he just stays outside longer and gets less done. I polled the office staff. No one seems to mind. I sort of don’t see it anymore.”
Cameron extended her hand. “Thank you. Thanks for your help.”
He shook her hand longer than necessary. His palm was wet, and Cameron hoped he didn’t see her wipe it on her coat as she left his office.
“Yeah, I remember it,” Hank said, then coughed. “Didn’t write it. But I remember the story.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Pretty girl. I felt bad. Being out of town and having some punk do that. Didn’t seem right.”
He coughed again and reached for another Pall Mall. “This bother you?” he asked, just as he struck the match. The cigarette was already dangling in his lips.
“No. It’s okay.” She hoped it didn’t sound too much like a lie.
He took a deep drag, coughed, then blew out a long cloud of blue smoke. He leaned closer to her. She wanted to lean back but did not.
“Tell you a secret,” he whispered in a gravelly voice. “I could quit anytime, but then I’d have nothing to bug that goofy McElroy kid with. My smoking drives him crazy and I enjoy that.”
He leaned back and took another drag. “No one likes him. That’s why the rest of the office doesn’t complain about me.” He cackled and began to cough again.
Cameron waited until his fit passed. “Do you remember anything else about the story? Did they ever catch anyone?”
“Naw. I heard the cops wanted to pin it on one kid—a minor dealer they said—but he wound up on the wrong side of some drug deal. They found him floating in the lake a few months later. It was an ‘accidental’ suicide murder. No great loss, I guess.”
“Nothing else?”
Cameron wondered if this whole trip had been a waste of time. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find. But she kept seeing Ethan Willis’s face and seeing the hint of something behind his eyes—some graying to his smile. Now she knew what the something was and wanted to know more. She was certain that any enlightenment would not be coming from Ethan. He had a silent something in his bearing and attitude. And even if she found out additional information, she wondered what import it might have.
That thought had consumed her attention during the ride north to Erie.
As she drove, she had pondered the reasons—and she kept seeing Ethan’s face as he sat across the table from her that day for lunch. In truth, she’d finally realized she really wanted to see him again. She wanted to talk to him again, to sit across from him at a table having coffee. She liked his smile. She liked his sense of reality.
And she wanted to know more about his past. A murder, the loss of a spouse, was not a subject an acquaintance simply brought up out of the blue. But what he must have gone through …
Hank squirmed in his chair. “Don’t think so. Carjacking, robbery—whatever it was, it was just a stupid thing to have happened. That woman was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Was that part of town really so horrible? I wouldn’t think Erie would have such a bad area.”
“Naw. Isn’t the best part of town, for sure. But it isn’t like people are getting shot there all the time. You know, that was one of the few murders that year. Might have been the only one up till then.”
Cameron didn’t know what else to ask. It was obvious that he had little additional information on the incident.
“Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your help.”
Hank took a last drag, stubbed the cigarette out, and half stood. He offered his hand. “You know, the person I feel worst for is that little boy. To see something like that. The poor kid’s gonna be living that nightmare forever. Is he doing okay?”
Cameron stopped. “Little boy? What little boy?”
Hank appeared confused. “Her little boy. He was in the car with her. When she got shot. He was there. In the car. In the backseat.”
The radio blared the entire trip back to Franklin, as if Cameron wanted to drown out her thoughts. Cameron had stumbled back to her car after learning
the news. She had asked a few more questions, then had felt a compulsion to leave, to run away, to turn off the images that ran through her thoughts.
Hank had explained why no report mentioned the fact that the small boy, the woman’s son, was in the car.
“I remember now. They found the kid crouched in the backseat. I bet the jerk who pulled the trigger that day didn’t even know he was there. Tinted windows, I bet. A small town like Erie—well—if the cops ask a reporter to ignore something and you can see the logic in it—well, you ignore it. I bet the cops thought the killer might try and come back for the little boy if the bad guy had known the kid was in the car. So whoever wrote the story left that part out of the newspapers. If the floater in the lake really was the killer, the little boy has nothing to worry about. It has been a long time. I’m betting that whoever it was wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, anyway. To shoot somebody in broad daylight like that.” Hank had shaken his head. “That little boy—seeing his mama shot like that. Had to be hard on him.”
Cameron had listened, nodded, then had stood, saying she had to go.
“Is he okay? That little boy? What was his name again?”
For a moment she could not remember. “Chase. His name is Chase.”
Hank had nodded. “Is he okay?”
Cameron had tried to smile but couldn’t. “I think he’s doing fine.”
To her credit, Cameron made it the whole way to Meadville and kept her car in control, her speed under the posted limit, her breathing regular, her eyes clear.
Then, in a wave of piercing thoughts and emotions, she could do none of those things. She pulled off the freeway and around to the back of a Cracker Barrel, where there were no other cars beside the fence that hid the restaurant’s dumpster. She was gripping the steering wheel so tight that her hands and forearms were white, her muscles only a moment away from spasm.
The poor kid’s gonna be living that nightmare forever.
She closed her eyes and willed the tears not to come.…
She was ten years old. A storm had come up on Rehoboth Beach along the Delaware coast. Just north of Rehoboth, the gray clapboard oceanside cottage with white shutters that her parents rented for a month every summer sat in the storm’s path. The cottage was right on the beach, where Cameron and her brother could haul their rubber rafts, tubes, and floats to the porch each night, only to wait for the sun the next morning, when they would charge off into the surf again.
A storm was at the eastern horizon, not a large storm by storm standards, but with higher winds and bigger waves. Her parents had left Cameron, her little brother, and her older brother, William, alone as they went to the store for groceries.
“No child would go out in that sort of weather,” they had told themselves as they drove away.
Ignoring his babysitting chores, William had busied himself with a book.
Cameron and her younger brother had not.
Always in bathing suits, they had bolted for the deserted beach: to shout at the waves and to wade in, waist high, and let the surf buffet them back to shore. They laughed and taunted the ocean’s power.
Cameron had run to the porch and dragged the rubber raft to the waves. It was an old but large raft—big enough to hold six people, with two canvas seats stretched across the inflatable chambers. Cameron pushed it into the surf and jumped in. As a wave crashed against it and pushed it vertical, Cameron screamed in mock terror.
“You shouldn’t do that, Cam.”
Cameron looked at her little brother, folded her arms under, and squawked like a chicken. “You scared?”
“No!” her little brother shouted back defiantly and jumped into the raft with his big sister. He was no sibling’s chicken.
For twenty minutes they played and paddled and were pushed back, laughing, by the waves. They stood up to be tossed out in the sea and scrambled back on board like little white crabs.
Then a wave had come up that was different than the waves preceding it. It was larger … not by much, but it knocked over the raft with indifference, then hurried back to the sea. It pulled with a great force, so much stronger than any wave that had crashed earlier that same morning.
Cameron’s little brother shouted … shouted something Cameron did not understand.
Cameron swam as hard as she could and grabbed him by the wrist. In a moment, the raft bobbed farther out to sea, heading into the darker ocean, farther from shore. The waves broke harder and higher and saltier and blacker.
“Cammie!” her younger brother screamed, his shriek a pitch higher, more terrified, more panicked.
“I’ve got you,” Cameron yelled back. “I won’t let you go.”
Her screams had been all but drowned out by the next wave, crashing between them, tumbling and turning. Then a turbulent roll and Cameron no longer had the arm and wrist and fingers of her younger brother.
She screamed and screamed as a wave took her up. She couldn’t see anything but water … the raft so very far away … and the shore. Another wave and her head went underwater. Arms flailed. Another wave came, then another …
When she woke, Cameron was in the surf, on her knees. Her older brother stood in the surf up to his waist; her father farther out, swimming hard. Her mother was standing at the shore, afraid of water, afraid of this salty sea, screaming, her hands over her mouth, her screams taken by the wind.…
Cameron could never remember past that scene. Her older brother, William, told her that her father had made it to the raft in hopeless hope of finding her younger brother clinging to it.
But of course he was not.
Her mother had collapsed to her knees in the sand and held her head in her hands, sobbing, screaming, then ran to Cameron and clutched her young daughter so very, very tightly.
Her brother had told Cameron later that her mother knew Cameron had gone in to save her impetuous little brother who, no doubt, had jumped into the waves against her command. When William had told her this, a week after the memorial service, he had waited a long, long moment, to see if Cameron would validate that statement. Cameron had said nothing. She remembered nothing.
She never told anyone of the horrific feeling of her younger brother’s tiny fingers, slipping, clutching, and grasping, as the sea took him away from her and carried him to heaven.
You can’t forgive
what you refuse to remember,
any more than you can
seek treatment for a disease
whose symptoms you have yet to notice.
—Carol Luebering
When we forgive evil …
we look evil full in the face,
call it what it is,
let its horror shock and stun and enrage us.
And only then do we forgive it.
—Lewis B. Smedes
CHAPTER FIVE
SINCE HER TRIP TO Erie, Cameron had felt disconnected, as if her internal clock was blinking twelve and she had lost the instructions on how to reset it to the proper time. The recurring image of a small boy, hiding in the backseat of his mother’s car, cowering from the sound of gunshots, continued to haunt her.
She kept wondering what Chase had gone through but refused to again revisit her own past. She was most expert in keeping that memory buried—the vivid memory of her wrongdoing, the one that no one else needed to know. It would do no one well to open that box, that hidden compartment, again. So she closed the door and locked it, letting the pain stay right where it was supposed to stay.
It’s better this way, she thought.
She awoke early on Saturday morning. Other than the mellow clang of church bells, the town was quiet under a brightening blue-orange sky. Her apartment on the top floor of the old Franklin Club was small and not entirely tidy. The place consisted of one bedroom, one bath, a
tiny galley kitchen, and a large living room with ten-foot ceilings. It also came with a turret that was filled with tall windows all around, overlooking the street.
The first thing Cameron had done when she moved in was to fill the benches of the window seat in the turret with big, colorful pillows. It became her favorite place to read. She had brought little of her own possessions, other than a TV, some basic furniture, a couple of large framed exhibition posters from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, her clothes, her computer and CD player, her books, and a small collection of photographs of her family and friends. When she first moved in, she told herself it would only be for a year or two, so she hadn’t planned on doing much decorating. But somehow making the turret her most comfy and welcoming place had been important.
She had only enough coffee for a single cup, which was two less than her normal allotment for a Sunday morning. She flipped through the newspaper, but not a single headline held her attention. She remote-controlled through a dozen news programs on television, but the thought of spending an hour listening to the minutiae of politics today made her shudder.
A red leather-bound book lay nearly buried on the bottom shelf of her bookcase. She bent down and flipped the blank journal open. Only the first page, front and back, bore her writing. She had purchased the journal, discounted by 50 percent, during her last trip home. It was her intention to keep a journal of these days by herself in Franklin.
She had not done well with the task.
Am I this much of a perfectionist? she asked herself, as she grabbed a pair of scissors from her desk and carefully cut out the first page with the quick scrawls on it.
If I’m going to start this again, I’m going to start clean. And neat this time.
She grabbed a favorite pen, slipped on her sneakers, and made her way into the warm sunshine.
Ethan peered out the open second-floor window of the Carter Mansion. He had heard a car door slam, and he looked down as CeCe Moretti and another woman walked up to the house carrying several colorful shopping bags and a rolled-up blueprint.