The List

by Karin Tanabe

  The problem I was going to have with Stanton was the opposite of the one I had with Olivia and Sandro. There was going to be so much for me to weed through on Stanton that what I was really looking for might stay buried in the mass of information. By now I knew the senator’s family like it was my own. His father and older brother were in government, but the family money came from the John F. Stanton & Company meat processing and wholesale business founded by Stanton’s father. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it sent all three of the Stanton men into public office and helped fund their campaigns. Senator Hoyt Stanton worked as counsel for the company after he got his law degree. He’d had his hands and interests in and out of it his entire career. The plant was located in Maricopa County, Arizona, and according to the website, it was still operational and very lucrative.

  I was working backward and when I got to Hoyt Stanton’s mid-nineties media clippings on the computer, they were starting to thin out. I switched my efforts to microfiche and as with Olivia and Sandro, that’s when my research got interesting.

  After two hours of going back month by month, year by year, I started using “John F. Stanton & Company” instead of “Hoyt Stanton” to narrow down the results. Within ten minutes I found something that had me running to the copier to blow up the text.

  Ajo Cooper News, Western Pima County, 1989—Death announcement for Drew Reader.

  Public Safety officials announced Monday that Drew Reader of Ajo had died in a machinery accident at the John F. Stanton & Company meat processing and wholesale plant where Mr. Reader was employed as a custodian. Paramedics and police who arrived quickly on the scene declared his death accidental. His wife, Joanne Reader, and his young daughter, Olivia, survive him. Funeral services will be held at Ajo Calvary Baptist Church at 4:00 in the evening on Sunday.

  Olivia. The name leapt out of the page like lightning in a flat midwestern sky. Again, it was just a name, and not a terribly uncommon one. But it was in an obituary that mentioned Stanton’s family company. Olivia Reader. Capitolist Olivia would have been young in 1989, probably in first grade, like me. But Capitolist Olivia had a different last name, and she was from Texas. She had a Lone Star Flag tacked up at her desk.

  I circled the girl’s name and checked dates against the background information I’d dug up for the company. Hoyt Stanton definitely worked there as a lawyer in 1989. He was a state representative then—not elected to the United States Senate until 1994—but the future senator was routinely mentioned in other articles about the plant at that time. His father was the CEO of the company but Stanton seemed to be running the operation until he left for Washington.

  Continuing to look up only the company name, I found a second article that was worth printing and highlighting and hiding away as fast as I could. This one was in the Arizona Republic, not some local rag.

  Joanne Reader, the wife of a twenty-nine-year-old man who was killed in a machinery accident at an Ajo, Ariz., meatpacking plant has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against John F. Stanton & Company, which may also be fined by the U.S. Department of Labor in connection with the accident.

  The lawsuit, filed by Joanne Reader, claims that unsafe working conditions led to the death of her husband, Drew Reader.

  A custodian at the plant, Reader accidentally switched on a meat grinder when cleaning it. The other workers present during the incident were not able to turn off the machine before Reader was sucked into it. The accident occurred on May 3, 1989.

  Joanne Reader is seeking wrongful death damages, claiming that the device was not properly locked at the time of cleaning. Hoyt Stanton, the owner’s son and a plant manager, is acting as counsel for the company.

  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is looking into possible safety violations at the plant.

  Not just death, a tragic, gruesome death. With my stomach beginning to churn nervously, I wiped off my sweaty palms and began a search for everything pertaining to Drew Reader and found a legal document stating that OSHA had not found John F. Stanton & Company negligent, and because of the outcome of the investigation, Joanne Reader was barely awarded any financial compensation for the death of her husband. She had his life insurance, which wasn’t very much, and a few other molehills of money from the company, but a decent paycheck was not coming her way.

  I couldn’t believe it. Her twenty-nine-year-old husband was killed in a meat grinder, and she was awarded a few thousand bucks? That seemed absolutely wrong. Even if it was an accident, shouldn’t there have been some kind of accident insurance that assured she wouldn’t be left a penniless, grieving single mother?

  I looked through stacks of microfiche for another mention of Drew Reader, but after his wrongful death case was dismissed, all mention of him vanished. So I looked just for the name Reader. Maybe Olivia Reader had news hits as she got older? A simple last name search was difficult, though, especially with the generic word reader fouling up my results, and I got nothing when I focused solely on her.

  I wished I had someone to confide in. I needed a real editor, but especially now that my days could be numbered, turning to anyone at the Capitolist without a finished story was too dangerous. Olivia was revered by the editors, and it would take a lot for them to kick her to the curb over me. I would have to wait until later and call Payton when she was back from training her miracle horses.

  So I kept looking. My left hand felt heavy from the weight of my lacquer camellia ring, but I kept it on instead of placing it on the table next to me like I usually did when I typed. It was a present from Brady, my college boyfriend. It was pretty, and it reminded me of easier days, but I wondered what he would think if he knew I was still wearing it.

  Joanne Reader. When I went to check the printed microfiche index for specifically “Joanne Reader Arizona Republic” then “Joanne Reader Ajo Cooper News,” I saw that there was one more mention of her in an Arizona publication that didn’t include her late husband, Drew, or daughter, Olivia.

  It was her obituary.

  Joanne Reader, still a resident of Ajo, passed away in the spring of 1992. The notice, in the Ajo Cooper News, was very short. There was no mention of her husband’s death three years earlier, or of a young daughter, or of a funeral or family. It just disclosed that Joanne Reader had “Died after a short illness.”

  What kind of short illness? Surely the woman didn’t pass away from strep throat or the common cold. I picked up my phone, moved to a private study room, and dialed a reliable source of mine, a journalism professor who taught a class on pop culture in media at Syracuse University.

  Even though it was Friday night, he picked up. “Ari, it’s Adrienne Brown from the Capitolist. Thank you for answering. I have a very quick question for you,” I said, looking down at the short obit I had just printed. “If a celebrity, or someone, had their cause of death listed in an obit as ‘died after a short illness,’ would that mean anything? Is that code for overdose or anything like that?”

  “No, not overdose exactly,” he said. “But it’s often a polite journalistic way of saying suicide. That person probably took their own life.”

  It was a horrific reality if it was true, but the sequence of events made sense. Drew Reader was killed in a terrible accident in 1989, leaving behind his wife and young daughter. A few months later, Reader’s death was declared accidental, John F. Stanton & Company paid out a few measly bucks, and Joanne remained broke. I didn’t know if she was indigent, but the widow of a deceased custodian was probably not flush with cash.

  Then, three years after the death of her husband, with no financial remuneration for her loss, she took her own life.

  I understood that the sad story I was piecing together could belong to strangers instead of Olivia Campo. But my heart was steadily beating faster. I had been right when I heard nothing but a first name before, so I had to follow this lead like it was etched in stone. If Olivia Reader was Olivia Campo, then it couldn’t be an accident that she had landed in bed with Stanton. I flashed back to w
hat Sandro had said about Olivia’s early career ambitions. She now covered the White House, but she had been obsessed with Congress. He had even specified the Senate. To have spent her whole life scheming for a way to get close to Stanton, to then take him down . . . it might have seemed far-fetched for most sane women in their twenties, but I wouldn’t put it past Olivia. It would explain why she jumped at the Capitolist before it was a big name—she knew she could make it her all-access pass.

  I stayed at the college library past midnight. I hadn’t found another promising lead since Joanne Reader’s obit, though I did find one more article about the court hearing declaring John F. Stanton & Company not at fault. Hoyt Stanton had been present in the court when the decision was made, along with five men who had witnessed Drew’s death. I wrote their names down in my notebook and drove home.

  The heat of July was bringing the smell of horses up through the floorboards of my barn apartment. I had to ready myself to live with the distinct scent until October. When I walked in, I put all my research on my bedside table and grabbed my landline phone. It was almost three o’clock in the morning in Argentina, but Payton would answer the phone. She never slept at normal hours.

  But instead of my sister, an enraged polar bear picked up.

  “Buck, it’s Adrienne. I’m sorry to wake you. Is Payton there? It’s important.”

  He groaned out a mix of frustration and testosterone and put Payton on the phone.

  “Are you insane?” said Payton. “It’s ludicrously late. Buck thinks you were just julienned like a potato in a back alley.”

  “I’m sorry, I really am, but you know you’re the only one I’m talking to about this,” I said.

  “Fine, this better be brilliant. You better sound like you’re auditioning for CSI.”

  When I finished telling Payton about the kiss and the Freer and Sandro breaking into my car, she had forgiven me. And when I told her about everything I had found about John F. Stanton & Company and the Readers’ deaths, she said, “I’ll be on a plane tomorrow morning.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Payton’s plane was landing at Dulles Airport at 11 P.M. on Saturday. I was surprisingly excited to see her. I hadn’t seen her for over a year, because this past Christmas Payton had refused to fly back to Virginia from her ski trip in the French Alps. My parents, when I had enlightened them about her new visit, were thunderstruck.

  “But why is she coming home?” asked my mother. “Is she sick? Does she need first world care?”

  “Payton? Coming home just to visit?” my dad said, as if I had just announced that Sputnik was due to land in our backyard. “But why? It’s not a holiday. We aren’t begging her to. She’s just coming home?” My answer was yes, she’s just coming home to see me.

  To see me . . . and help me untangle my thoughts regarding my bitchy colleague, her husband, a United States senator and two deaths that were probably totally unrelated. Just one of those little, pesky problems you ask your sister for help with. Your typical girl talk.

  Payton, with her ability to see the worst in people, would surely help. She would see past the emotion I was now drowning in. In many ways, she was like a less word-savvy, much more attractive version of Olivia: confident and brash and unbiased about mowing down the competition to get her way. Maybe she could analyze Olivia’s warped mind for me and then, maybe, I would have the story that would make my career, or at the very least, save my job.

  When 10 P.M. rolled around, I wrapped myself in clothing Payton might not declare “garbage with elevated price tags” and headed out to my old clunker.

  I was going to send a car service to Dulles Airport to pick her up, because that’s what would have made her happy—what she demanded, in fact—but I decided the sisterly thing to do would be to provide my own car service, a beat-up Volvo station wagon. She would love it! Right away, straight off a thirteen-hour plane ride, she could feel the rumble of the highway and sit directly on the red Gatorade stain that was still shining brightly on my passenger’s seat. The fact that it remained sticky even after I poured half a box of baking soda on it was fascinating in itself—a real scientific mystery.

  I set the scene in my mind as I drove down the almost-empty Dulles Toll Road. Payton would step off the plane, looking fresh as an emperor’s rose. When she found me and my homemade sign that read “Welcome home, sister!” she would cringe and try to avoid me while also assessing which of us was skinnier and chicer, with better skin and bouncier hair. And though my journey would have taken thirty minutes and hers almost a full day, she would win in every category.

  When she walked through the arrivals gate, she took one look at me and stopped in her tracks.

  “You?” she said finally, resuming her strut. “Don’t tell me you’re moonlighting as a sedan driver to supplement your offensively low income.” She let go of her carry-on and walked past me without a hug or smile or any other human display of emotion.

  “It’s lovely to see you, too,” I said as I picked her green Hermès Birkin off the floor. I didn’t want to be helpful so much as I just wanted to touch it.

  “Oh, shut up. I’m glad to see you. I would just be happier to see you with a man in a jaunty black cap holding the keys to a Mercedes,” she finally said, kissing the air around my head.

  I grabbed her face like she was a puppy and gave her a wet smacker right on her perfectly blushed cheek.

  She frowned, looked me up and down, and said, “You’re a child. But I imagine you’re thrilled to see me.”

  “I am. And very appreciative you came. I hope first class wasn’t too trying. For our journey home, I’ve chosen a Swedish automobile,” I assured her. “Lots of leg room.”

  She put her hand over her mouth and posed in a dramatic film noir kind of way. “Oh no. Not that old Volvo. Hasn’t that been processed at a junkyard by now, or turned into outsider art?”

  “No, no! Running great,” I replied. “And parked right outside. Lot D. Come on, let’s get your bags.”

  By the luggage carousel, Payton tapped her foot impatiently. And when her bags came, I started to laugh.

  “Payton, are you staying through the new year?”

  “I was thinking more like a week. Two, tops. Depends how much I can take. Why do you ask?”

  Why? One, because I was her airport chauffeur. Two, because I was her sister who begged her to come home. And three, because she had checked a monogrammed leather steamer trunk as if she were sailing off on the maiden voyage of the QEII.

  “I bet they thought you were smuggling drugs in this thing,” I said, tapping the leather lid.

  “Some smelly TSA employee did say something about narcotics, but I ignored him,” she replied casually. “He stopped giving me a hard time after I gave him my number. Actually, I gave him your number. His name was Cody something. I don’t remember. Sorry in advance if he stalks you.”

  Why wouldn’t you give your sister’s number to a TSA employee who clearly cared more about getting laid than the safety and security of his own nation? At times Payton was exactly how I would have imagined Lady Macbeth as an American teenager, only less sensitive.

  By the time I had pulled back onto the toll road, Payton was asleep. Twenty minutes later, when I was off the fast roads and stuck going through the stoplights near Middleburg, I got a good look at her face as she lay there reclined way back in her seat. She looked so pleasant, so rational. Nothing like the enraged demon woman I had always thought of her as.

  Payton slept in my room that night because we didn’t want to go into the main house and wake our parents. She was too exhausted to fuss about having to slumber so close to her sister and animals, but I was prepared for her to fume about it in the morning. Which she did. She took three steam baths in a row inside the house and wouldn’t talk to me again until late afternoon, when she broke her silence by calling me the family’s rotten egg.

  After she had cooled down with the help of a Hendrick’s martini at the Red Fox Inn, I convinced her to go ridin
g with me.

  Payton was an absolutely terrific rider. After she graduated from Columbia and then Wharton, she said she was going to breed horses, and no one who grew up with her was surprised. The only surprises were that Buck agreed to do it with her and that they moved to remote Argentina to make it happen. Watching her ride around the pasture we spent our childhood trotting in, I saw that she had only gotten better. I felt like a kid on a carousel next to her.

  When the heavy humidity of July started to break a little, we dismounted in the north end of the grazing pasture and grabbed the reins of the horses. In our mud-covered paddock boots and sweaty tank tops, we walked next to each other with the horses lazily flanking us.

  “Do you remember walking the horses like this when we were little? Because we were scared they would smush us if we were on the outside?” It was something we had done every weekend when we were about twenty years younger, before we learned that we didn’t really need each other for company.

  “Not really,” she replied with her head straight and stern. “Honestly, I don’t remember that much about living here. It feels like a long time ago. Washington, Virginia, the whole area was never for me. I wasn’t really happy until I went to New York.”

  “Payton!” I exclaimed. “You’re not a hundred years old. Don’t tell me that all memories of your childhood are gone. You lived here fourteen years ago.”

  She sighed and gave the black Arabian she was walking a tug. “I just hate that we were raised in the country when there was such an exciting city nearby. Seems like such a waste. I mean, relatively exciting. It’s not all that exciting. But it seemed exciting in high school.”

  “We went to Washington all the time. It’s only an hour away. Mom worked there,” I pointed out. My memories of childhood were still crystal clear.

  “I just remember my first week at Columbia, feeling very out of place. I was thrilled to be in New York, but I felt like a hillbilly compared to those slick Manhattanites,” she said.