Lippman, Laura (34 page)

“Let me see, Mrs. Hennessey.” Barb tried to swing the computer around on the pedestal that allowed it to be shared by two reporters, but Mrs. Hennessey had cunningly blocked the lazy Susan by piling reference books around it, so she seldom had to share. Barb tapped away, checking the usual traps, but Mrs. Hennessey was right for once: She really had lost her work. When Barb found its ghostly twin in the backup system, it was just a blank template with a story header and the date it had been created, nothing more.

“Did you save as you wrote?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“Well, I tabbed at the end of every paragraph.”

“The tab key doesn’t
save
. You have to execute the save command, Mrs. Hennessey.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Mrs. Hennessey had been around since God was a boy, to use a localism. A thirty-five-year employee of the
Fairfax Gazette
, she had started in the women’s section, as it was then known, and fought her way into the news section, where she had covered the education beat for the last two decades. Her seniority was unmatched, if only because the paper’s most promising reporters seldom stayed for more than two years. She also was rumored to be a Holocaust survivor, but her thick gold bangles hid whatever tattoos she might have. She was, in short, tough as nails, but she reverted to a kittenish, helpless quality when her computer let her down. Or, more correctly, when she let the computer down, refusing to take the simplest steps to protect her work.

“If you hit ‘Function 2’ every ’graph or so, then the computer will store a copy of your file and continue to update it. You never saved this work. As far as the computer’s concerned, it doesn’t exist. It can’t save what it can’t see.”

“What do you mean, it can’t see it? It’s right there,” she said, gesturing at the screen with her be-ringed fingers. “It
was
right there,” she amended, given that the screen was blank. “I could see it. These machines are useless.”

Barb always felt defensive on the computer system’s behalf, flawed as she knew it to be. The
Gazette
, part of a small chain, had the incompatible habits of being progressive in its thinking and tight with its coffers, a combination that had brought them this dinosaur of a system, one that wasn’t intended for newspaper work. “It’s a tool, like anything else. When you used typewriters, there was no copy unless you inserted carbon paper. It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”

The saying, one of her father’s, came out of nowhere. As usual, she felt wistful and sad and anxious all at once, as if this wisp of an echo could unravel her life.

“What did you say to me?” Mrs. Hennessey’s voice abandoned kitten and moved on to lioness. “You impertinent…” Here, she uttered some oath in German or Yiddish, Barb couldn’t be sure. “I will have you fired. I will—” She clambered out of her chair and over the piles of reports she had used to create a makeshift barrier around her desk, and raced to the editor’s corner office on her tiny, perfect heels, quivering all over, as if Barb had threatened her with violence. Even her topknot—dyed into submission and touched up every two weeks so nary a root showed in the fierce chestnut red—shook as if in fear.

Barb might have been worried, if she hadn’t witnessed the same performance at least twice a month since she’d started working in the newsroom last summer. Mrs. Hennessey raged up and down in the editor’s office, shaking her tiny fists, demanding Barb’s ouster. She huffed out of the room and, within seconds, Barb was summoned by electronic message.

“If you could just see your way to being a bit more tactful with her…” the editor, Mike Bagley, began.

“I’ll try,” Barb said. “I do try. Do you ask her to be more tactful with
me
? She treats me like her personal servant. Granted, the computer eats her work every now and then, but most of her problems stem from the fact that she refuses to do the most basic stuff correctly. I’m not her keeper.”

“She’s an”—he looked around as if fearful of being overheard—“an older woman. Set in her ways. We’re not going to change her at this point.”

“So that little tail wags the whole newsroom’s dog?”

Bagley, a large man with thin gingery hair that had faded with age to the color of Tang, made a face. “That conjures up quite an image. Mrs. Hennessey’s tail. My eyes! But look, Barb. Your career path has been unorthodox at best. Your people skills are less than…”

She waited, curious to hear what word he would put to it. Nonexistent? Crippled? But he didn’t even try to finish the sentence.

“We are utterly dependent on you. When the system crashes and you bring it back up, your work saves us thousands of dollars. You know that and I know that. So let Mrs. Hennessey pretend that she’s a person of consequence, as opposed to an age-discrimination suit waiting to happen. Just apologize to her.”

“Apologize? It wasn’t my fault.”

“You called her a crappy writer.”

“I…?” She laughed. “I said that it was a poor craftsman who blames his tools. It’s just an old saying. I didn’t say shit about her writing. But she is, isn’t she?” Barb mulled on this. It had not occurred to her before that she was entitled to have an opinion about the words that appeared on the screens she tended. She had been plucked out of the Classified department, a computer savant discovered in the newspaper’s equivalent of Schwab’s. She wasn’t even conscious of reading the paper, but she had been, she realized, and Mrs. Hennessey
was
a crappy writer.

“Just say you’re sorry, Barb. Sometimes the expedient way is the right way.”

She looked at him through her lashes, eyes glowering.
Do you know what I could do to this system? Do you realize I could cripple this whole operation
? In her six-month evaluation, Bagley—who had no right to supervise her, given that he had no inkling what her job involved—had written that she needed to “work on her anger.” Oh, she worked on it, all right. She banked it like a fire every night, recognizing it as her best source of energy.

“And who will apologize to me?”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “Look, I agree that Mrs. Hennessey is a handful. But she didn’t say boo to you. And she
thinks
that you said she’s a bad writer. It’s just easier all around if you apologize.”

“Easier for who?”

“For whom,” he corrected. What an asshole. “Okay, it’s easier for me. And I’m the boss, right? So just say you’re sorry and let me get the hell out of this hen fight.”

SHE FOUND MRS. HENNESSEY in the break room, a grimy alcove of vending machines and Formica-topped tables.

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly

The older woman inclined her head with equal stiffness, a queen staring down her nose at a peasant. That is, she would have been staring down at Barb if she hadn’t been seated. “Thank you.”

“It was just a saying.” Barb didn’t know why she felt compelled to keep speaking. She had done what she’d been told to do. “I wasn’t implying anything about your writing.”

“I’ve been a reporter for thirty-five years,” Mrs. Hennessey said. She had a first name, Mary Rose. It appeared in her byline, but it was never used in conversation. She was always Mrs. Hennessey. “I’ve worked at this paper longer than you’ve been alive. Women like me, we made your career possible. I covered desegregation.”

“Yeah? That was a big issue—” She stopped herself, just in time. She had been on the verge of saying “That was a big issue where I grew up.” But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school. But she wasn’t sure if desegregation had been a big issue in Chicago. Probably, but why risk saying anything too specific? “That was a big issue in the seventies, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was. And I covered it single-handedly.”

“Great.”

She had meant to sound sincerely impressed, but her voice betrayed her as it sometimes did, and the word came out a little sour, sarcastic.

“It
was
great. It was meaningful. More meaningful than tinkering with machines for a living. I’m writing the first draft of history. What are you but a mechanic?”

The would-be insult made Barb laugh. It was just so funny that this was Mrs. Hennessey’s idea of a cutting remark. But her laughter provoked the old woman even more.

“Oh, you think you’re so special, wiggling around the newsroom in your tight shirts and short skirts so the men all look at you. You think you
matter
.”

The editor had told her that she did matter, that she was essential. “I don’t see what my wardrobe has to do with this, Mrs. Hennessey. And I honestly think that your work was great—”

“Was?
Was
? Is. My work
is
great, you, you…guttersnipe!”

Again she wanted to laugh at the older woman’s idea of an insult. Yet this one was more effective somehow, finding a soft spot. Sex, her own sexuality, was a touchy subject for her. She didn’t flirt with the men in the newsroom, or anywhere else for that matter, and her skirts weren’t short. If anything, they were long by the standard of the day, because her frame was petite, so skirts hung lower than they were supposed to, drooping on her hips. With her towering upsweep and high heels, Mrs. Hennessey was almost as tall as she.

Which could explain, perhaps, why she felt it was fair play to pick up the older woman’s Diet Pepsi and pour it over her beautiful, quivering topknot.

THEY FIRED HER. Of course. Actually, they gave her the option of attending counseling sessions or leaving with two weeks’ severance. “No references,” Bagley added. As if she would ask for one, as if it would have any application when Barbara Monroe disappeared and another woman took her place. She took the severance.

She sneaked back in that night, using the newspaper’s research tools, crude as they were. The newspaper’s sole librarian was in her debt and had never dreamed why Barb wanted to know so much about the library, its capabilities. He’d been flattered, in fact, to show Barb all the things a well-trained librarian could do with a telephone and a list of reference desks in city libraries. Title searches, which kicked up property and court records, were also valuable, but they required time and money, neither of which she had right now, although she had sneaked a few through the newspaper’s account over the past year. Dave Bethany was still on Algonquin Lane. Miriam Bethany remained missing, as she had been for some months now. Stan Dunham was at the same address—but then, she had never really lost contact with Stan Dunham.

Finally she picked out her new name and existence, just as Stan had taught her to do. Time to start over. Again. It was a burn, not being able to use this job on her résumé, but she had decided that she wasn’t going to stay in newspapers. Once she got the formal training she needed, she would find a more lucrative home for her skills, in an industry used to paying for talent. She could do better than the
Fairfax Gazette
, even if they did have to push her out of the nest. Didn’t it always work that way? Even in the worst situation, she had always needed someone else to force her out, encourage her to move on. How she had cried that day at the Greyhound station, while other people smiled and nodded, thinking she was nothing more than a scared teenager who couldn’t bear to leave home.

Her research done, the last thing she did was write a little code, her going-away gift to the
Gazette
. The next day, when Mrs. Hennessey logged on, the whole thing crashed, taking with it every article in progress, even those that more responsible reporters had diligently backed up. By then she was already in a diner in Anacostia, waiting for Stan Dunham. He had tried to persuade her to drive farther north, but she told him that she wouldn’t cross the district line into Maryland. And to this day, whatever she wanted from Stan Dunham, she got.

“Because she was adopted, you know?”

Dave had been waiting in line for a cinnamon twist when this one sentence managed to break free of the general hum around him, flinging itself at him like a shoe or a small stone. The comment, however, was not addressed to him but was part of a conversation between two placid middle-aged women waiting behind him in line.

“What?” he asked, as if it had been their intent to involve him in their conversation. “Who was adopted?”

“Lisa Steinberg,” said one.

“The little girl in New York who was beaten by her adoptive father? It’s great that the bastard is going to jail. But they shoulda gotten the woman, too. No real mother would have sat idly by while that was going on. No way, no how.”

They nodded, smug and content, the entire world known to them. They were doughy, pasty-faced women, anti-advertisements for the baked goods sold at Bauhof ’s. Dave was reminded of a book that Heather and Sunny had loved,
Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls
, with whimsical drawings by someone of note. Addams? Gorey? Something like that, very clever line drawings. One story was about a boy who ate nothing but sweets until he melted in the sun, just a puddle of gelatinous flesh with facial features.

“How can—” he began, but Miss Wanda, attuned to his moods after all these years as neighbors, diverted his attention the way a mother might have headed off a son’s tantrum.

“Apple turnovers, today, Mr. Bethany. Still hot.”

“I shouldn’t…” he began. Dave was still at his college weight, but his own flesh was pretty doughy, too. Loose, with a slack to it that he couldn’t seem to overcome. He had stopped running a few years earlier, no longer having time for it.

“C’mon, it’s got apple in it. It’s good for you. An apple a day, like the doctor said.” And with the help of a turnover, Miss Wanda had him out of the store before he could lose his temper. A hot turnover, like a soft answer, turneth away wrath.

He had been out of sorts all morning, for the usual reasons and some news ones. His annual caller hadn’t checked in. It had been years since the guy had actually said anything, now preferring the passive harassment of a hang-up call, but the call had continued to come every March 29. Strange to mind that of all things, but it gnawed at Dave. Was the guy dead? Or had he given up, too? Even the creeps were moving on with their lives. Then Dave had called Willoughby. The detective hadn’t forgotten the date, far from it. He had offered the stoic understanding that Dave had come to expect, a wordless commiseration. No “Hey, Dave, what’s up?” No pretense of progress. Just “Hello, Dave. I’m looking at the file right now.” Willoughby looked at the file all the time, but he made a point of having it in front of him on this date.