Snapshot

by Lis Wiehl

  Lisa couldn’t stop thinking about her father. The Radcliffe case was over. The loose ends would be wrapped up in the next few days, and she could quickly succumb to the new cases awaiting her attention. Her son had an upcoming trip across Europe with college friends that might keep her from a visit.

  Despite her father’s neglect of them both, Dad was getting older. He wanted her help. She couldn’t think of one good reason to do so. Except that he was her father.

  Early the next morning, Lisa rose and grabbed her running shoes. Opening a drawer, she caught sight of a faded green T-shirt from a 10K she’d run with her father on St. Patrick’s Day several decades ago. The fabric had worn so thin in places it was nearly transparent, but she slipped it on over a white tank top.

  She didn’t want to run this morning. A night of restless sleep made her feet feel like cinder blocks while her mind jumped from topic to topic. She’d thought of the Radcliffe trial and then her father and on to 1965 and her childhood in Texas.

  After kicking off the blankets, she’d wandered to John’s room down the hall, where she’d succumbed to mothering fears. Had she been a good parent? Why had she shouted at him when he’d broken the television playing catch in the house? Had her drive to fight for justice and make the world a better place stolen pieces of her son’s childhood?

  Lisa had nearly called Drew at three, knowing he might be up working on a project, but in the end she returned to bed, where she tossed and turned as the night ticked by.

  She walked the first quarter mile, stretching her calves and arms as she went. Then she ran from her exclusive subdivision and moved toward the pathways along the Charles River. The water reflected a pink sky with fat, puffy clouds that were cut by the lines of a Cambridge crew team, the coxswain calling out as the rowers moved in perfect unison. The scent of wet grass and flowers, mixed with a hint of salty sea, filled the crisp morning near the wide river.

  Her legs ached before the end of the first mile, and Lisa nearly gave in to the aroma of freshly baked cinnamon rolls and rich coffee as she passed a favorite bakery.

  Her father’s voice in her head pushed her onward.

  Pace yourself. Find your rhythm and then let go.

  Dad had coached her during high school. He’d been an athlete in college before an injury ended all sports except fishing and some golf. He hadn’t been a father who cuddled with his daughter, read her stories, or told her how beautiful she was. But he’d been a good running coach. He was supportive and dependable, never missing one of their early-morning practices even if he’d been on a case the entire night before.

  Hit the ground with the middle of your foot.

  Imagine the world falling back behind you. You don’t feel weary or any pain. Separate yourself from it.

  Set your focus about fifteen feet ahead of you.

  Don’t keep tension in your arms. Let your arms swing naturally. Don’t make a fist.

  He showed her how to touch her thumb and pinkie finger together to keep from balling her hands into fists while she ran. That time was probably the closest they’d been. Lisa had been surprised at his interest in her life. He’d come to her track meets and give her advice, and she could always tell if he was proud of her by the satisfied nod of his head. Their hard work paid off when Lisa placed at nationals her junior year.

  Her mind slowly unwound as she rounded a corner and headed back toward her house. The cluttered thoughts settled, and she ticked through what she needed to do that day, mapping out a schedule for phone calls, meetings, and events for the week ahead.

  This was why she ran. It was the only way she’d found to cleanse her mind. By the time she reached home, she felt ready to conquer the day.

  After her shower, she grabbed her phone and did a quick run-through of e-mail and voice messages. Along with numerous queries from the office, she listened to a message from Drew.

  “Call me back after your run. I think you need to look at that case your dad is working on. Leonard Dubois might be innocent after all.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The photographs offer a lot of information. You brought the originals?” Drew asked when Lisa arrived at his brownstone apartment. She’d forwarded the pictures to him earlier that morning.

  “I don’t have the originals,” she said, following Drew through the cozy brick rooms and up the winding metal staircase to his second-floor studio. The hallway was lined with framed black-and-white photographs from Drew’s international travels as a news correspondent. “My father texted these to me.”

  “They’re fascinating images,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Why do you say so?”

  They entered the open studio, divided into stations for his different projects. One was for photography; another area had his computer with printed news stories covering the desk and bulletin board; a third section was piled with books for research; and in the corner was a small counter with a refrigerator, kettle, coffeepot, blender, and hot plate for stretches when Drew barely left the studio for days.

  He walked to the mini-kitchen and took a freshly made smoothie from the refrigerator. He set it in front of Lisa and then went to refill his coffee cup.

  “You made this for me? I’m impressed. Thank you.”

  “Someone has to take care of you. Have you been eating?”

  “I keep snacks in my bag just in case.”

  “You’d better.” Drew shook his head.

  He’d taken up the role of food police after she’d nearly passed out at his front door. She’d had hypoglycemia for years, but whenever work or life became extra hectic, her self-management suffered. Now with John gone to London for spring semester, Lisa’s refrigerator was often a wasteland of expired yogurt and boxes of old takeout.

  Drew flipped a switch that illuminated a long counter beneath the Fort Worth pictures of Lisa at the civil rights parade. His quality printer had blown the images up to 8 × 10. Even pixilated, his printouts depicted more than she’d noticed on her smaller versions.

  “These are fascinating because, first of all, you were one cute little kid,” he said with a grin.

  “What else would you expect?” She took a sip of the smoothie, savoring the taste of fresh blueberries, yogurt, and a hint of honey.

  “And there’s a history here,” Drew continued. “A story beyond what your father is looking into. It’s like viewing a slice of American history. This was in Dallas?”

  “Fort Worth. It was 1965. We were moved to the area when Dad was assigned to investigate President Kennedy’s assassination right after it happened in November ’63. He spent a good deal of time interviewing Marina Oswald. But by this time he was mostly keeping an eye on local Communists and those connected to Russia and Cuba, and also keeping files on both white supremacist groups and civil rights supporters.”

  “Your dad is a living history book.” Drew leaned over the photos to study them.

  “I suppose,” Lisa muttered. She dug her reading glasses from her bag and moved around the table to stand beside Drew. The light brought further definition to the images, giving a better view of the background where the crowd lined the street in front of marchers walking with placards.

  “This is a moment captured right before a murder,” Lisa said, staring at the photographs. It felt surreal that she was one of the two children in the center. The images could have easily been seen in the pages of Time magazine or in a civil rights museum. She touched her finger to the little girls who were lost in the moment of meeting one another.

  Drew leaned forward, staring at the faces. “You were innocent of the tension all around you. Just two kids getting to know each other, right in the eye of the storm.”

  “Yeah, then the storm’s eye shifted, and we were in the middle of the terror.”

  Lisa rested her arms against the cold counter, studying the photographs with the eye of an investigator. Her father believed these images were part of finding the truth behind the Benjamin Gray assassination, but Lisa needed more than
her father’s conviction to believe that the man on death row wasn’t the killer.

  “Why did your father take you there? It seems like he’d have known there was potential danger to his daughter.”

  Lisa caught the edge in Drew’s tone. He’d witnessed enough injured and dead children while covering news stories that even after a year back home, he still struggled with nightmares.

  “Good question. I don’t remember going places with him as a child, not without my mother. This must have been a rare thing.”

  “Maybe this event ended it.”

  “I should ask Mom. She might have put a stop to all father-daughter outings after this one.” Lisa knew she’d have done the same or more if this had been her son.

  “Ask your father too. You told me that he was overly cautious with you when you were growing up. Paranoid at times, even.”

  “He ran background checks on every date I went on, as well as on the guys’ families. I think that’s somewhat paranoid.”

  “Well, if I were your father, I might do the same,” Drew said, raising an eyebrow. “But maybe he wasn’t like that before this happened. Because a paranoid dad doesn’t sound like the same man who would bring his daughter to this particular civil rights rally. The racial tension would’ve been pretty intense at that time, and in Texas of all places.”

  “I guess it’s easy to forget what it was like back then.”

  They were silent as they studied the images.

  “You know that I encounter racial issues on a fairly consistent basis even now,” Drew said, pulling up two tall stools.

  “What do you mean—you personally?” Lisa didn’t exactly forget that Drew was African American. But he was just Drew. Their friendship had rarely encountered racial subjects. Mostly the topic came up as it pertained to Drew’s travels and coverage of people groups around the world—in the Middle East with the Sunni and Shiite, or in Africa with the many racial and tribal tensions. Lisa’s time with his family brought jokes and good-natured teasing, mainly from them to her, but that was all.

  Drew settled onto the stool. “It surprises me at times, and it’s definitely regional. It’s more pervasive in the South or in rural areas of the country. But it’s everywhere to some degree.”

  Lisa rubbed her forehead as she studied him. “It? What exactly do you mean? And where does this occur? At work? Here in Boston?”

  “It’s here, though rarely in our circles. But when I travel, it might be the high frequency of times I’m called out of an airline security line. And I get pulled over more than anyone I know.”

  “Maybe that’s because you drive too fast,” Lisa chided.

  “Wayne and Jason drive worse than I do, and they were shocked when I mentioned the other day how often I’ve been pulled over since getting back in the States. And taxis often pass me up for a white guy, or sometimes I’ll hear a rude comment.”

  “What kind of rude comment?”

  Drew shrugged. “I’m just saying this to add context to what it was like in 1965. If I get things like that today, imagine it in 1965 Texas. We’re talking about real hatred and real danger. And your father brought his little white girl to this black event where a black group was standing up for themselves. They had to be angry, fighting back—even if only with words. It took either guts or anger to stand up for themselves back then.”

  Lisa had never considered the events of that day the way Drew described them. Why had her dad taken her there?

  “My memory is almost blank on the entire thing. That’s why I don’t understand why Dad wants my help. What can I offer?”

  Drew was thoughtful for a moment and ran a finger over his thick eyebrow. “And you’re sure he’s healthy?”

  “As far as I know.” A tremor of fear coursed through her at the idea that Dad had cancer or some other disease, and this was his way to have time with her and do one last thing before he died.

  “He might be trying to reconcile with you.”

  Lisa took another drink and thought of the years without her father in her life. “This is a strange way of showing it. He didn’t ask anything about me. It was total focus on the case, just like I remember as a kid. He’d lose himself in work.”

  Lisa remembered standing at the door of Dad’s den telling him a story he didn’t hear, or Dad sitting at the public pool “watching” her swim but immersed in his notebooks. She’d call for him to see her do a handstand or her first back dive, but he couldn’t tear himself away long enough to watch. Her recollections were of her father with eyes cast down in books and papers or staring off into the sky or hurrying out the door with his thermos and briefcase. The taillights of his car were an image cemented into her memory.

  “Your father is from a generation that rarely shares feelings or confronts emotional issues. If he’s like my father, he probably has no idea he’s reaching out to you. He didn’t plot it out to make this case be his chance to get to know his daughter, but subconsciously that might be exactly what he’s doing.”

  “Or he just needs my incredible legal skills?” she said, hoping to lighten the moment.

  “There is that.”

  Lisa didn’t want to dissect her father or their lack of a relationship. She’d done that years ago in college and when her son was younger. Eventually she had stopped caring that he wasn’t part of their lives.

  Drew studied her face. “So what are you going to do?”

  Lisa didn’t answer. She stood up from the stool and noticed Drew’s double computer screens with different shots of city streets. “Is that Fort Worth?”

  “Yes. I was searching for the location.”

  “Maybe you should help my father. You’d have that guy freed in no time.”

  “There was a lot of controversy about the killing of Benjamin Gray. A lot of people believe that someone other than Dubois shot him.” Drew took another drink of his coffee. “I stayed up late last night.”

  Lisa couldn’t stop her smile at Drew’s weary expression. He’d stayed up late for this, and he’d made her a smoothie. They’d been friends for years, though he was often out of the country covering areas of tension and war in Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Chechnya. Between their two full schedules, they would go for months at a time not seeing each other, yet their friendship was valued by both of them.

  Then a year ago Drew traded in his khakis and combat boots for a suit and tie, or sometimes his sweats and T-shirt when he didn’t leave his studio. His documentary film about the history of war correspondents was now fully funded, and he filmed interviews with former colleagues, retired newsmen, and historians.

  During his last years in news, he had expressed how the overseas work was for younger reporters who had the zeal for it. His passion had waned. He’d seen too many dead women and children, and usually they had died for the greed of someone else. He had made the decision to quit after he was filming a small village in Afghanistan where a school full of children had been bombed. Parents and villagers were sobbing as they frantically dug through the rubble with their hands. Drew filmed but felt nothing until he saw a small foot sticking out from beneath a pile of brick. He stared at the child’s foot and no emotion came to him: nothing for the child, nothing for the families, nothing for the story.

  “I knew at that moment that I better find my soul again before it was lost forever,” he had told her.

  His words had come to Lisa often over the past year, bringing her own toughened soul to light. Survival as either a war correspondent or a federal prosecutor demanded strength. Sometimes it was tough to gauge how much to harden her heart and soul.

  Drew was finding his soul again, and she noticed the change in him nearly every time they met now. A year ago he seemed a decade older, from his haggard voice to his bloodshot eyes. Now he helped fund-raising efforts for war veterans and charities that worked with AIDS victims in Africa and uneducated children in the Ozarks. Lisa no longer even tried to keep up with all that he was doing. Though his job now could seem menial i
n comparison to his previous work, Drew said the time home was like rubbing his foot awake after it had fallen asleep.

  Lisa blamed him for the Radcliffe case hitting her so hard. She had forgotten how painful it was to care deeply for the victims of crimes.

  “Do you think my father has this right?” Lisa asked as her phone buzzed with new messages. She looked at the screen and did a quick preview—all were work related.

  Drew pulled off his glasses. “Well, Texas has exonerated more than a dozen death row inmates who were wrongly convicted. That’s a lot of innocent men who would’ve been executed. Do you trust your father’s instincts?”

  “I did as a child. He was a superhero in my mind, and it sounded exciting to my friends that my dad was FBI. But as an adult … I don’t know. I don’t really know him.”

  “You should do this,” Drew said.

  “Do what exactly?” she asked, avoiding his gaze.

  “You should help your father.”

  “And be part of an old man’s obsession?”

  “Yes. And maybe save a death row inmate, even if it isn’t your usual line of work. Two years ago, what did you write me when my dad was sick?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, giving him an upward glance at her lie.

  “I didn’t want to leave Greece because I was on a story. You said to get on the next plane. You said, ‘There will always be a story.’ ”

  Lisa didn’t comment. Drew had not taken her advice.

  “I have to live with regret. I’d give anything to spend those last days with him. My brother told me that Dad asked for me every day, and that he talked about his childhood and shared stories he’d never told before.”

  An ache for Drew welled up in her chest as she stared at the images on the table. There she was, a little girl, so long ago, and behind that camera was her father, capturing a moment in time. She sighed and leaned into her hands.