by Karin Tanabe
“I want to go there,” I replied, pushing the Jeep well over the speed limit.
“You never know,” said Payton. “There could be something identifying about the house. Something that tells us that Olivia Reader and Olivia Campo are the same person.”
Yes, that would be fantastic, but I seriously doubted that there was a mural of Olivia’s face painted on the side of the property.
We drove in silence for a few minutes listening to a classic rock radio station with the air-conditioning blasting so loud we could hear it over the music. The town, which was starting to look more familiar, finally rolled into view and Payton looked down at her notes and instructed me to take a hard right.
“Now left,” she said when the road started to thin and the houses got noticeably smaller.
“It’s down that road there,” said Payton, pointing at a long dirt road with no houses in sight. “Or that’s what I was told anyway.”
“Who gave you the address?” I asked as I hesitated around the turn. The road looked very long and very private.
“A woman in the Laundromat, actually,” said Payton, squinting into the sun as we passed a dog running along the side of the road. “I was just walking past it and realized I had never been inside a Laundromat. I mean, even in college we sent our clothes out. So I walked in and there was this older woman behind the counter and I just asked her if she had known the Readers. I said I was a cousin and I wanted to pay homage to their memory.”
“You’re going to hell,” I said, driving slowly as the car bounced on the uneven road. “You can’t lie about dead people.”
“This from the night-vision nude photographer,” said Payton, laughing. “Plus, you don’t seem to mind very much now.”
She was right. I didn’t mind. I was quite happy to have Payton doing everything that, as a journalist, I really couldn’t do. I knew it was wrong to turn a blind eye to her behavior, but I didn’t really care at this point. I had my career to save.
Payton continued, “I asked about Olivia Campo but she said she didn’t know anyone by the name Campo in Ajo. She said she remembered the Readers, but wouldn’t acknowledge the suicide. Just said that the little girl never came back after her mother died. But she was able to describe where they lived.”
“Children don’t disappear,” I said, driving slower and slower.
“They do if they’re dead,” replied Payton.
I turned the air-conditioning vent away from my face and lowered my window. What we were doing was perfectly normal. I was just following a lead handed out by an old senile woman at a Laundromat. And Payton was making fun of me for getting all my information from senior citizens.
“There it is,” said Payton, motioning toward a small gray house in the distance.
“There are cars in front,” I said, pointing out the obvious. “We shouldn’t go. Someone lives there and they’ll probably just shoot us for trespassing.” I slowed the car to a halt in front.
“This is probably close enough anyway,” said Payton.
We sat motionless, watching the American flag hanging from the top of the porch and waving slightly in the breeze.
The house was small. Very small. Our horse barn was about four times the size. It had light gray wooden siding that looked like it had been repainted every couple of years instead of replaced. Some were sagging a little in the middle while others looked like they were hanging on by one tired, rusty nail. There was a porch and two white plastic chairs on it and a potted plant on the cement stairs leading up to the house. It was tired, bland, colorless, but the flag brought it a little sense of pride and ownership. The inhabitants might be poor, but they were part of the map of America, which I sometimes forgot extended far beyond Washington, D.C.
It was hard to imagine Olivia, who now drove a very expensive BMW and interviewed the president of the United States, living here. If Olivia Campo was actually Olivia Reader, she would have spent her childhood walking out that front door, sitting on that porch, walking down this road. That girl could be the same girl who now verbally spat on her colleagues in one of the most high-powered newsrooms in the country. The grass around the house needed to be cut and there was a rusty shell of an old car in the back. I couldn’t imagine Olivia Campo ever running up those stairs. I thought about the elegant home she shared with Sandro. It was a perfect slice of Washington . . . and it looked about one million dollars and a couple of lifetimes away from the little dilapidated ranch we were staring at. Maybe we were sniffing around a cold lead after all.
Still, I couldn’t shake an odd sense of recognition. Olivia didn’t act like she came from money. Not like Libby or Julia or the girls who surrounded me in my youth. She didn’t have the ease of it, the casual confidence. Her energy seemed to come from the pit of her stomach, the kind of steely drive I had always associated with people who were used to pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I looked at the front door, worried that someone very big and very angry was going to walk out. The only similarity between Olivia Campo’s house now was the American flag—there was one in Olivia’s kitchen in Washington and there was one hanging here. But there were several million in between, too.
“Let’s go,” Payton finally said after we had been sitting in the idle car for five minutes. “We get it right? Her life—if it was her life—was shit.”
I nodded in agreement and turned the car around.
We spoke to six other people that night, including Manuel Reyes, and they all looked at us like we were crazy. “I’m retired, I golf, I have a new wife, and I sure as hell don’t want to talk to you” was what he said when we found him at home. No one else we asked knew Drew Reader, and they certainly didn’t know his daughter.
“It happened too long ago,” I said when we were back in our motel room. “This is an exercise in pointless questioning.”
“Start writing,” said Payton as she got into bed. “What you already have is simple, and potentially devastating for them.” She was right. I had to finish the piece and get it in print as fast as I could.
Before turning off her bedside lamp, Payton announced, “I’m flying back to Argentina tomorrow morning.”
“You’re doing what?” I exclaimed. “Why? I need you here.”
“No, you don’t,” said Payton, putting her cashmere throw over the pillow like it was made of mold. “You’ve got this. And Buck misses me. He said eating a dozen eggs alone isn’t all that fun. Isn’t that just adorable?”
It was disgusting. Why couldn’t he consume a massive amount of cholesterol alone? I needed my sister’s help.
“You don’t need my help anymore,” said Payton. “You did in the beginning, but you have it all in front of you now. You just need to find the pluck to press send.”
Payton had plenty of pluck. But instead of lending it to my cause, she rolled over and went to sleep.
So I wrote. I rewrote an earlier draft based on what I knew for sure. This meant leaving out 50 percent of what I found interesting, because it wasn’t solid enough, but I told myself that if it didn’t all blow up in my face, Upton and Cushing would be salivating over their Capitolist mugs for me to keep digging.
Once I saw it all actually typed up, I also realized that Payton was right. It was more than enough to undo Stanton’s career, and Olivia’s, for that matter. I could pursue the rest later.
I emptied my purse and my pockets before bed, looking for a few dollars for the snack machine out by the small swimming pool. I found the five-dollar bill the waitress wouldn’t let me give her and the receipt I had crumpled. Both fell to the ground. I bent to pick them up.
But the receipt wasn’t a receipt at all. It was just a piece of white paper with a phone number written on it in thin blue pen. I was surprised I hadn’t seen it when I shoved it in my pocket the first time. Had O’Brien written it? His daughter?
I grabbed my personal cell phone off the table and ran outside with the number in my hand: 555-571-8764. That was an Arizona number, I was pretty sure. Maybe O’Brien was
ready to talk. I put my money in the snack machine and got a Diet Coke, which I drank straight down before dialing.
I held the phone with two hands as I punched in the number and then pressed it to my cheek, turning the volume all the way up. After four rings, it clicked over to voice mail. The number belonged to a woman named Victoria Zajac.
I immediately hung up. Who was Victoria Zajac? It had not sounded anything like O’Brien’s daughter’s voice. I immediately looked at my phone and prayed that I had blocked my number. If not, then whoever Victoria Zajac was had everything. She had my name, my number, could find where I worked in five seconds flat. I ran inside and grabbed my BlackBerry and called my other phone. It came in as unknown.
“Oh, thank God,” I muttered. “Thank you, Jesus and Buddha and Gaya and Krishna and everyone.” I put both phones in my pocket and walked inside. A waitress in Ajo, Arizona, had given me a stranger’s phone number. She could certainly have heard my entire conversation with her father. Maybe she knew something he didn’t. She would have been much closer in age to Drew Reader. She could have even been a friend.
I Googled the name on my phone, and three women named Victoria Zajac living in Arizona came up on the first ten pages of hits. One was a guide in a tourism company far north by the Utah border, and the other two lived in Phoenix.
The first, based on her work info on LinkedIn, sounded too young. She was just out of college and working for the University of Arizona development office. But the second Phoenix-based Victoria was an architect. She worked for a firm that did a lot of commercial office space. With a few more clicks, I found her title. It had the word partner in it. That had to make her older. I wrote down her firm’s address and walked back to our room. I had to get some sleep.
When I woke up late the next morning, already sweating, I rolled over and saw that Payton was gone. Instead of her frowning face and perfect blond coif was a note that read:
Good luck. Ship my stuff down when you get home. On a plane, not a boat. I expect it to arrive in fewer than five days. Finish your story and see it through till the end. Stop worrying about Olivia and Stanton. Only worry about Sandro a little. You were always far too agreeable of a person. I’m happy to see you’ve developed a little more grit. Goodbye now.
For the first time in my life, I was sad Payton was gone.
CHAPTER 19
I didn’t know what to do about Victoria Zajac. I needed direction, an editor. Just not my editor.
I decided the only direction I did have was Phoenix.
I checked out of the motel and pulled back onto Highway 85. It was a little cooler that morning. The sky was overcast, and the dark dry July heat didn’t knock you down like the humidity in Virginia did. I stopped once, at a small convenience store in Gila Bend, where I leaned against the trunk of the Jeep and drank down a whole liter of water.
The people around me, a pretty even mix of Caucasian and Hispanic, wore old jeans, cowboy boots, and T-shirts with faded slogans on them. Some women wore shorts and flip-flops and led their children by the hand. These were the people who had elected Stanton. Term after term, they had placed an X next to his name. And in just a few days’ time, if Upton and Cushing printed my story, I was going to make all these people regret their decision. People who didn’t vote for Stanton, the few Democrats among them, might flaunt the fact that they had put their faith elsewhere. But most of them, these everyday Americans who made twenty thousand dollars a year, maybe less, would know that they had voted for a man who didn’t have the backbone to resist a girl in her twenties.
When I got to Phoenix, I drove straight to the architecture firm where Victoria worked. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I didn’t care. She was a lead and I wasn’t going to let it go because I didn’t have a clear line of questioning. “Bell & Assoc. Architects” read a brass sign on the side of the door. There was a bell that I rang over and over again, but it wasn’t answered. It was, after all, a Sunday in July at an office that kept normal working hours, something I had grown completely unaccustomed to.
I reached for my phone and called the number O’Brien’s daughter had given me again. If I couldn’t reach Victoria, I thought as the phone rang, I could always drive two hours back to Ajo and try to talk to her. Ask her why she had given me the number of an architect in Phoenix. I probably should have done that before making the trip, but she didn’t exactly write the number on my hand. It didn’t seem like she’d be willing to talk.
I called Victoria Zajac twenty more times that day from my blocked number. But no one ever answered. My plane back to Washington was at 7 P.M., and it was now five o’clock. I could call her from Washington, I told myself. But I was here now. I felt so close.
Instead of driving to the airport, I drove to a Holiday Inn in downtown Phoenix, gave them my credit card, and checked in. I called the airline, paid a fee, and pushed my flight to the following night. Then, before I could change my mind, I opened my laptop and wrote an email to Hardy saying I had to take Monday off due to personal matters. No one at the List ever gave a mere ten hours’ notice before taking a day off, and it was hugely frowned upon to miss Mondays, but I sent the email anyway.
Hardy responded within seconds: “Fine.” A man of few words, but “Fine” was better than “You’re fired.” Which was what I would be if I didn’t get this story together.
I ate alone at a barbecue joint called Bobby Q that night with my laptop, a very large beer, and a plate of pulled pork. I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing since the diner in Ajo yesterday.
I stayed in the restaurant for five hours and wrote. I took an existing draft of my article on nothing but Stanton and Olivia’s affair and made it meatier, more honest. I didn’t know if the List would run my photos. They were pornographic, and we were a newspaper left out on tables in the United States Capitol. So I described what I saw. I pulled up small thumbnails of the photos and wrote what was in them. I wrote about those nights at Goodstone, their heated fighting in the car, Olivia reporting on Stanton for the List, the two of them driving away from Upton’s party together, the staff at the hotel having a standing order to supply their room with posh firewood—everything I could piece together from months of accidentally and then purposefully trailing them. And then I wrote about what I thought they shared. How she pursued him for a reason—a reason I was still trying to figure out—but how it had become so much more. How it was still going on. I pulled up the picture of them at the window of the Bull Barn and described what I saw: Two individually powerful people, who in that moment only cared about each other.
When I fell asleep late that night in a king-size bed with the TV on, I felt satisfied. Even without a bulletproof motive, I had something substantial, something good. I knew once the story was published the truth would come out. Tiger Woods’s pretty Swedish wife just smacked his car with a golf club, a reporter penned a few paragraphs, and blammo! His endorsement deals were in the toilet and dozens of hookers were lining up to write tell-alls.
Because my body was on Capitolist time, I was awake on Monday morning well before dawn. I braided my hair, made coffee in the little pot they had in the room, and reread what I had typed up the night before. It still felt solid. I just hoped the List would chuck their family values for the sake of a story and run the photos.
At 8 A.M., I started calling Victoria every fifteen minutes. After an hour, I still had nothing. I had her machine message memorized, could have given a lecture in her voice. I wasn’t nervous pushing redial anymore, nor did I have anything prepared to say. So at just shy of 10 A.M. when she answered the phone, I sat on my bed dumbstruck, unable to say a word.
“Hello? Hello? This is Victoria Zajac,” a pleasant woman’s voice said again.
What felt like minutes went by before I remembered how to speak. I was sure I was about to hear the line go dead, but when I started talking, she was still there.
“Victoria Zajac?” I asked nervously.
“Yes, this is Victoria Zajac. Who is this
?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, trying to regain some professional composure. “My name is Adrienne Brown, I’m a reporter for the Capitolist in Washington, D.C.”
“From the Capitolist in Washington, D.C. Is that a newspaper?” she asked, sounding much less friendly.
“It is,” I said. “I’m calling because a friend of mine thought you might be able to help me with a story I’m writing. Would you have a few minutes to talk to me today? I’m in Phoenix.”
“You’re in Phoenix and you want to talk to me about a story you’re writing.”
“That’s right,” I said. I held the phone with my neck and wiped my hands on my skirt. They were covered in sweat.
“Why do you think I’ll be able to help?” she asked. “What is your article about?”
I hesitated. Should I say Stanton’s name? The meatpacking plant? O’Brien’s daughter?
“Well, it’s about a few different things. But mainly it’s about a woman named Olivia Reader.”
There was a long silence.
“Do you know her?” I asked. “Olivia Reader. She’s in her late twenties now.”
I could hear Victoria breathing slowly on the other end.
“I suppose you could say I did know her,” she said finally. “But that was a long time back. That’s who you want to talk to me about? Olivia Reader? You’re doing a story just on her? Has she done something wrong?”
Wrong? Well, legally she hadn’t really done anything wrong.
“No,” I replied. “Not wrong, exactly. Would you have a few minutes to talk to me about her? I could come to you. Maybe have a cup of coffee.”
“All right,” said Victoria, her voice filled with hesitation. “There’s a little café near my office.”
That I knew already. I had downed a red-eye there yesterday.
“It’s called Lux Central. It’s on North Central Avenue. Do you know where that is?”
“I do.”
“Okay then, I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes. That sound all right?”