CHAPTER
13
ANYONE OVER THE age of twenty who consumes more than four bourbons is asking for a hangover. A clock chimed six in the morning and Laura pressed at her temples. It felt like her head was stuck in a vise.
“Coffee?” Jasmine called from the hall.
She pried her eyes open and saw the doctor fully dressed and looking sharp in a black pencil skirt and a gray top with a scooping neckline. Laura gave a weak thumbs-up and closed her eyes again. “How can you be showered and dressed already?”
“Tolerance, my child.”
“Tolerance?”
Jasmine nodded solemnly. “When it comes to boozing, practice makes perfect.”
Once Laura had poured two cups of black coffee down her throat, they walked out together to Jasmine’s vehicle. To her surprise, it was a mud-stained black truck, the body rusted through in multiple places.
“Not quite your style, is it?”
Jasmine patted the driver’s-side mirror. “Oh, I don’t know—I think it suits me. My Volvo died just before I left Chicago. Good thing, too, because it never would have made it all the way down here. I flew down planning to buy a used car.”
Laura got it now. “But a lot of the used cars around here are actually used trucks.”
“Yep. But it’s been great. Makes me feel like I fit in.”
They drove down onto Churton past Hopsky’s, now cold and dead in the light of morning, and around the corner to the Dart. Together they unloaded the boxes from the back seat and the trunk into the bed of the truck.
“Don’t worry, I’m on my way into the office right now,” Jasmine said. “I’ll get them all inside in case it rains or something.”
“Thanks. You work on Sundays?”
Jasmine DeVane smiled ruefully. “If only human pain worked nine to five.”
* * *
The door to Laura’s office stood partially ajar, letting some needed air flow in as she worked. Her fingers flew over the keys, synthesizing every bit of information she had gleaned so far. She had missed Bass’s deadline, and there was no way anything she wrote could be in this morning’s paper, but none of that mattered. The deadline was artificial anyway. No publisher could turn down a story this good, no matter what day he happened to get it.
Someone pushed the door open a little farther.
“Hello?”
“Morning, Laura,” Colin Smythe said brightly, and took the one seat in front of her desk.
“Making yourself at home, I see.”
He leaned back in the chair and tented his fingers. “I like that—that’s a great way to put it. This is my home, after all.”
“Well, you’re welcome to the office if you like it that much. We can always switch. Actually, I think you deserve it.”
“I’m not interested in this closet.”
“Could have fooled me. You’re in here all the damn time.”
“Just checking up on you. I wanted to see what you’ve got, and I’m starting to think you’ve got nothing. Bass gave me the story, but he also gave you a chance to get it back.”
Laura’s face fell. She had hoped Bass Herman would give her a fair shot at the story by keeping Smythe in the dark. Instead he had opened her up to sabotage, forced her into the pot with a losing hand.
Smythe saw the look on her face. “Oh, I practically had to beat it out of him,” he said. “He likes you, Laura, he really does. But he also knows which way the wind blows.”
“Still the mayor’s son, is that it?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t ask for it.”
“No, but nobody makes you play that particular card either. And here you are, using it again.”
His face flushed at the implication he was anything less than self-made. “Nepotism or not, it’s over. It’s Sunday morning, the Sunday paper is out, and your name is nowhere on it.”
“Bass ran your interview,” she said, almost to herself.
“Of course he did. It’s gold. This one issue will outsell some months of Gazette circulation.”
“He didn’t give me enough time.”
Smythe waved her off. “Always excuses with women, never results. Face it, Laura. You blew it.”
Something about watching Jasmine DeVane’s cool arrogance in the face of aggression must have rubbed off on her. In a moment’s clarity, all her fear and anxiety—about what violence this man could do to her, about what damage she might do to herself by engaging with him—melted away. It left a hole in her chest that filled quickly with disgust at his naked self-interest and a growing sense of her own superiority. She was better than him, more talented, more insightful. She was everything Colin Smythe wanted to be, and more.
He just didn’t know it yet.
She walked over and sat on the edge of her desk. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet up, pleased with himself.
“Sure, you got the story,” she said. “But that doesn’t make you anything more than the low-rent Machiavelli of a small-time newsroom. I’ve seen guys like you at other papers, just as ambitious, maybe a little smarter. You’re bullies, all of you, determined to climb the ladder by pulling everyone else off it, one by one. Because that’s the only way you make it up a rung.”
He shot up from the chair. “You wouldn’t know a good story if it bit you in the ass.”
“Coming from you, that means nothing. I’ve read your stories, Colin. I read everything you wrote for the last six months, and you know what? It’s all just filler. Fluff. Sure, maybe I blew my shot. So what? I have something you’ll never have: the talent to get shots at stories like this one. And if I keep at it, I’ll get another one, and another one. You may have the story, but that’s only because you were in the right place at the right time. This is the only shot you’ll ever have.”
The whites of his eyes seemed to have doubled in size. Anger came off of him in waves.
“So good luck out there,” she said. “I think you’ll find it’s a pretty brutal world if you ever manage to get out of Hillsborough.”
His voice came out choked. “You’re nothing compared to me.”
She flipped her hair, impatient now. Just a few days ago she would have considered this man something like her nemesis. Now she looked across the desk at him—red face, hands trembling—and all she could feel was pity. She felt sorry for him.
“Oh, come on,” she said, “This whole thing has nothing to do with the quality of my reporting, or the fact that I left this town as soon as I could. It’s because I’m a woman—nothing more, nothing less.”
His expression froze, the corner of his mouth curled up in contempt. “You’re not built for this work. You don’t have the courage for it. Boston proves that much.”
“Have you read yourself, Colin? Human interest stories about the biggest pumpkin at the county fair, op eds that somehow manage to take a neutral stance and offer no opinion at all. You’ve never taken a professional risk in your entire life, and you couldn’t report your way out of a paper bag. You don’t have the balls for this game.”
He visibly shook with rage—tendons in his neck stood out like ropes and he rocked from foot to foot, filled with pressure, about to burst. “What did you say to me?”
“You’re a coward,” she said simply.
He exploded around the desk, jammed his fist deep into her hair, and got a good handful of it. Then he started twisting. She cried out and he twisted harder, forcing her down to her knees in front of him.
The pain was like a thousand needles injecting her with fire. She feared a chunk of her scalp would tear free. Still, through the pain, she forced herself to look up at him.
His eyes bored into hers; his breathing reached a fever pitch. “This is the only thing a bitch like you is good for,” he wheezed.
Laura squeezed her eyes shut.
And heard a rap on the door.
Before either of them could say anything, it started to swing open. Smythe let go of her hair and stormed through the door, pushing past who
ever had opened it.
Laura realized a few tears had escaped their ducts. She wiped them away with back of her hand and turned to see who had saved her.
Natalie, the assistant, stared back at her open-mouthed. As Laura watched, Natalie’s mouth snapped shut and her lips pressed into a hard white line. Her eyebrows fell, her nose bent into a snarl. She shot Laura a look of pure, unbridled hatred.
“Not enough you had to fuck your way through half of Boston, now you come and try to steal all the good men here too?”
Laura, still on her knees, repeated her in disbelief. “Good men.”
Natalie squared her shoulders and turned up her nose. “Colin’s not like that, though—he’s not going to fall for your tricks.”
And with that, she turned on her heel and disappeared.
* * *
Laura found the bathroom empty, locked the door, and allowed herself five minutes to calm down. Air heaved in and out of her chest. Her blood churned as if in a blender. During the—she searched for the right word. Incident? Attack?—everything had taken on a surreal sluggishness, like a movie slowed down to half speed. It hadn’t seemed real.
Now, alone in the bathroom, she ticked off all the things that had been working against her: the early hour, the nearly empty newsroom, her own secluded office. Worst of all, she had vastly underestimated the depth of Smythe’s insecurities.
Shame burned inside her. A bit because it had been foolish to bait him so openly. But mostly because, once he had revealed himself capable of the violence she had always suspected, she had done nothing. No, she had done worse than nothing. She had allowed him to make her get down on her knees. Had allowed him to force her to genuflect before the idol of his own self-image. And what kind of fight had she put up?
What would Jasmine DeVane have done?
In a flash, she had an image of her friend dishing out a swift kick to the balls, of Smythe crumpling to the floor like a bag of bones. Despite everything, she smiled. Some therapist I found, she thought.
Could she go to Bass Herman, go to the police, report Smythe to anyone who would listen?
She dismissed the idea as soon as it came. Issues like this were “he said, she said,” and in this case it would be more complicated still. Laura didn’t doubt for a moment that little Natalie would do anything to protect her crush’s reputation. It would be two against one, her word against the town’s golden boy. She would not be believed, and then she would be made a pariah, what little reputation she had left stripped away in back rooms and bars, golf games and sewing circles, as the town gossips did what they did best.
No. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
Carefully, precisely, she put herself back together, and when she looked halfway normal again she threw open the bathroom door, collected the papers from her office, shot across the newsroom, and launched herself through Bass Herman’s office door.
He had folded himself into a leather wingback in the corner and was reading Sunday’s Gazette, cigar burning in the ashtray at his side.
“Afraid the Sunday paper’s already been sent to the printers,” he said without looking up. “You know, seeing as it’s Sunday morning and all.”
Laura sat down across from him, reached out, and forced the paper down into his lap.
He gave her an annoyed look. “What do you want? We were clear on the deadline.”
“What I’ve got here”—she tossed the stack of papers into his lap—“trumps any damn deadline.”
Bass put down his paper and started in on the first page. It totaled only a touch over a thousand words, and Laura expected him to be done in five minutes. Instead, he put the story down after five seconds, butted the pages back together, and looked at her over the rims of his reading glasses.
He said nothing.
“Come on, Bass, that story is going to sell a lot of papers.”
“Do you think that’s all I’m in this for, to sell as many papers as possible?”
Laura just shook her head.
“No, I didn’t think so. Someone pointed you toward a thirty-year-old story, and now you want to reprint it with some new conclusions. Am I right?”
“Just read the story.”
“Look at this damn headline—‘The Return of the Kid.’ Could you be any more melodramatic?”
“It’s just plain dramatic, Bass. I didn’t inflate the facts, and I didn’t juice them up with purple prose. It’s all there in black and white. The connections speak for themselves.”
He stood and walked around behind his desk. “Spare me this tabloid tripe. Everyone in this town who was old enough to talk thirty years ago remembers the Kid. Hell, you think people haven’t been talking about it ever since the Hanson girl showed up in that field? But that’s all it is. Talk. People bring up the Kid every time someone goes missing. It’s the local ghost story.”
“Just read it, Bass.”
With a sigh, he pushed his reading glasses up his nose and started plowing through the sheets of paper. Five minutes later he looked up at her and whistled.
“Your boyfriend is going to get in a lot of trouble for this.”
Laura shrugged.
“He’s your source for all this, right?”
“No comment.”
Bass shook his head. “Don’t know what could have gotten into him. I like Frank Stuart, I do—but when we print this, he’s going up in flames.”
“There’s no evidence he told me a single thing,” Laura said. “And I notice you said when, not if.”
“Forget about proof. You two are an item, and everyone knows it. Two plus two equals four.”
“Whatever. When can we print it?”
He scratched his sideburns. “It’s good, Laura. The quotes and confirmations from law enforcement make it a lot more than rumor.”
He needed a push. Quickly, Laura spelled out the follow-up. The psychology of a killer courtesy of Dr. Jasmine DeVane.
“And she’s agreed to do it?” Bass asked.
“We’re set to go. I can schedule the interview and then write it up anytime. All I need is your go-ahead.”
He paused, thinking. “I don’t know. That whole premise is tangential to the story itself.”
“Of course it is,” she said. “But it’s a big story. Huge. It needs to be fleshed out. It needs context.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“And it will sell papers. Enter the mind of a killer? Find out what makes the Kid tick? It’s the sort of voyeurism that will capture the public interest. It’s a slam dunk, and you know it.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay. It’ll be on the front page tomorrow morning.”
She walked back to her office half as quickly as she’d left it. Her anger, the hot red coal that had rented space in her chest for the past month, seemed to bleed out onto the floor. All she could feel was the tingle of anticipation running up and down her spine. All she could think about was her name back in print again.
CHAPTER
14
WHEN SHE PUSHED the kitchen door open, the phone was already ringing. She shoved the two overstuffed brown paper bags onto the counter and flinched as a gallon of milk ripped through the bottom and hurtled toward the floor. Her mother had been right about the town gossip, and it left her with a need to bury the hatchet. Restocking the kitchen was an act of service, however small, and she hoped it would assuage her guilt.
The gallon of milk hit the linoleum and bounced. It didn’t break.
She sighed. One less thing to fight over.
She picked up the phone and said hello, an edge of irritation creeping into her voice.
“It’s me.”
“I told you never to call me here, Frank. What if my mother answered?”
“So what if she did?”
“I’ve told you a million times, she would never approve.”
“I get it, she doesn’t like me.”
“It’s nothing to do with you. She wouldn’t approve of any man calling here, asking after me
. In her mind, I’m still fifteen years old. In her mind, I’m a little slut.”
“If she already thinks you’re a slut, what does it matter? You already hate the old bitch.”
Laura said nothing. Frank Stuart did that sometimes—said things calculated to cut. It was one of his least attractive features. He was quick to say them, and just as quick to take them back. She usually deployed a tactical silence, let whatever venom he had spit hang between them until it couldn’t be ignored. It forced a moment of self-reflection, and usually it induced an apology.
Just not this time.
“I need to see you,” he said.
“If you think acting like an asshole is the way to my heart, you’ve got—”
“Can we skip the banter and the judgments, just for today? I need to see you.”
“Why the rush?”
“Not on the phone. I’m coming over there.”
“Wait, wait—whatever rules we have about calling this house, they go double for actually showing up. Do not come over here.”
“I need to see you, Laura. I’m coming over. You can leave if you want. Then it’ll be just me and dear old mom.”
Laura felt panic rise in her chest. The thought of Frank and her mother in the same room, discussing her, was among her worst nightmares. Neither person would ever look at her the same.
“What if I came to you?” she said.
“You’ve been dodging my calls since that fight Saturday morning. I know you don’t want to see me.”
She took a deep breath. “Listen, Frank, I haven’t been dodging anything. I just haven’t been home.”
She could practically hear his hackles go up, even through the phone line. “Kick me while I’m down, why don’t you?”
“Look, that came out wrong. I wasn’t with anyone else. It was just to get away from her. Tell me where you are and I’ll come to you.”
He paused. “Fine, I’ll be at home for the next hour. If I don’t see you before then, I’m getting in my car and heading out to the Chambers farm.”
Laura cringed at the thought. “No need for that. I’ll be there,” she said, and hung up.
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