The From-Aways (26 page)

“We’ve got twenty minutes,” she says. “We’ve got to make copies of all of this and get the hell out of here.”

“Isn’t that kind of illegal?” I say.

Leah grins. “What would Woodward and Bernstein do?” she says.

31

Leah

W
hen we show Charley the files she immediately heads for her office, shouting over her shoulder, “I’m calling the printers. Our account maxes out at three hundred copies and I think we’ll need more than that.”

“Our circulation is three hundred copies?” I say.

Charley throws her hands up. “We print that many and I know for a fact half of them get used as wrapping at Deep’s,” she says. “But if you write me this goddamn story next week, we’ll increase the run.”

She slams the door.

I sit down on my desk.

Charley opens the door again. She’s cradling the phone to her ear and fumbling with a cigarette. “I’m supposed to say ‘good work,’ right?” She lights the Marlboro and says, “Hello?” Someone has picked up at the printers. She closes the door.

“This means we’re running it,” I say. It means a lot of things, because if we run this piece I can’t say for sure what will happen with the Dorians but I am pretty sure they won’t be looking for a full-time landscaper. We’d be fine, Henry and I, on just our two paychecks, but that’s not how Henry will see it. Not if I’m the one who wrote the article.

Something else has been bothering me too. All those files. The easements. The fencing exceptions. How could Henry not have known? Could he really have been breaking that many rules with this project and not at least suspected something seriously illegal was going on?

“Hell yes, we’re running it,” Quinn says. She puts her chin on the desk. “But first we’ve got to tell Carter,” she says.

“So call him,” I say.

“It will sound better coming from you,” Quinn says.

I shrug and pick up the line. Charley has already established that we’ll need to run more copies with the printer and now the guy is telling her all about last night’s Sox game. “Oh really,” Charley says, which is odd because I’ve never heard her encourage anyone to talk longer before. Is Charley flirting?

“Sorry, I need the line,” I say, and press the button to disconnect them.

“Hey!” I hear Charley yelp from her office.

Quinn looks green as I dial Carter. The phone rings twice.

“What’s happening?” she says.

“It’s ringing, what do you think is happening?” I say.

“Hello,” Carter says, his voice so deep I feel like I’m phoning in a request to the radio station.

“Carter, this is Leah Lynch at the
Menamon Star.
Quinn Winters and I have some documents we’d like to discuss with you.”

“Certainly,” he says. I get the impression he’s humoring me.

“Could we meet you somewhere?” I say.

“The Stationhouse?” he suggests.

“We could be at the Stationhouse in . . . fifteen minutes?” I say.

“No! No!” Quinn is hissing right next to my face. “It’s too public. Tell him he doesn’t understand how sensitive these documents are.”

“Do you want to get on the phone?” I say. “Or do you want to let me do this?”

Carter is laughing on the line.

Quinn looks at me expectantly. Her eyes are enormous and her mouth is half open. “What’s he saying?” she says.

I hold the telephone away from my face so she can hear. “He’s laughing,” I say.

Quinn bangs on the desk.

“Carter?” I say into the phone.

Carter laughs once more. “She’s just like her mother, is the truth,” he says. “But don’t tell her that. We can meet at my place.”

“See you in fifteen,” I say, and hang up.

“What? What is it?” Quinn says. She’s wearing these thin old jeans, holey at the knee, and a yellow T-shirt so faded it’s almost white. Her hair has grown long; it is snarled but almost down to her waist. She is full of all this anxious, angry energy. I’ve never known anyone else like her.

“You’ve saved my ass a couple of times, you know that, Winters?” I say.

“You looked like you might drown yourself in that pool,” Quinn says.

W
HEN WE GET
out of the lobster pot at Marks’s house, we hear him shout, “I’m around the back.” Quinn and I head toward the other side of the house and unlatch a tall wooden door with a pineapple shape cut out of it. It swings open grandly, and there, reclining in a pink velveteen armchair in a corner of the yard, is Carter. Next to him stand a holey, overstuffed brown chair with enormous arms and a squat blue corduroy chair, stunted legless on the ground.

“Nice patio set,” I say as we cross the yard. Quinn shuffles behind me like a hiding child.

“Why don’t you girls have a seat,” Carter says. Quinn sits in the tattered brown chair with the big arms. She holds her fists in her lap like Alice in Wonderland, small in her seat and trying hard to be well behaved. I hold up the file folder.

“Are these the very sensitive documents?” Carter says.

Quinn blurts, “The town is taking money from the Dorians to bend all the building laws.” She leans forward but her body stays rigid.

Carter makes a face, like he’s not sure he believes it, but takes the copy of the files I’ve made. He flips through the pages. When he has examined half the packet he looks up. “They shouldn’t be allowed half the stuff they’re doing up there,” he says.

“Not the serial borders, not the alternate driveway,” I say. “They’re not supposed to be building a chicken coop on most of that land, much less a house. The parts that used to be the backyards on Lots One and Three? That’s scenic easement.”

“Their fences,” Carter says.

I nod. This is the part I hoped would not have to be a big deal, but of course it is.

“Legally their fences can only go around two-thirds of the property. The fence that’s going up on Lots One and Three is technically in the scenic easement. It’s illegal.”

Carter looks at me. “Deer fencing,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “Deer fencing, which— ” I hesitate. I don’t know whether I should say what I know or keep my mouth shut. I want to find a way to break this story and protect Henry too, but it seems impossible to do both. I
have
the information. I
have
the news. How can I not share it? It would go against every part of who I am to not share news like this.

“Which,” I start again, the betrayal rolling, “according to some research I’ve done, will be eight feet high.” These specifics are from Henry’s blueprints. The ones he rolled out for me in the kitchen. The ones I told him he shouldn’t be showing me. I have retained all the details, and now, it seems, I’m going to use them. “According to town law, they can’t go that high. Fences can only be six feet.”

“Six feet won’t keep a deer out,” Quinn says.

“It would seem that’s why the town has received about five thousand dollars for the Downtown Business Improvement Initiative,” Carter says.

“Five thousand is just for the fences,” I say.

Quinn says, “They’ve paid the town about thirty grand total to bend the rules.”

“And screw the loons,” I say.

Carter looks up from the file. “You gonna write this up?” he says.

“Yes,” Quinn says. In my head I say “maybe.” Maybe I will write this up but maybe I’ll be a good wife instead. I shouldn’t write it, like I shouldn’t have told them about the fences, but I’m a newspaperwoman. How can I not?

“If I said to wait until after the benefit, would you do it?” Carter says.

“We can’t write it that fast anyway,” I say. “It’ll take a few days to get everything confirmed.”

“Why?” Quinn says.

“I just want the benefit to be a good thing,” Carter says. “No mudslinging.”

“If you don’t want our mud,” Quinn says, “then don’t take it, okay? Give us back our files.” I see her clench and release her fists.

“I want it,” Carter says to Quinn. “Just not until after the benefit.” He looks at me next. “Are you going to put your name on it?”

“Charley, our editor, Charlene Lynch, she’ll stand behind it. I’m not sure about me.”

Carter nods. “Does Hank know about what they’re doing?”

This, of course, is the question. Does he? In my stomach I think the answer has to be no, Henry wouldn’t. But I saw the drawing. Henry’s penciled-in eight-foot fences.

“That’s what I’m going to find out now,” I say. I point at Quinn. “I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll start then.”

I’
M DRIVING HOME
when I see Henry’s truck parked at Deep’s. I wheel into the lot. The glass storefront is all steamed up and the front door is open. Inside, I see they’re laying down a bed of new ice chips in the case. A million little shavings in a heap. There’s ice all over the wet floor and a man is sweeping it out the front.

“Hey!” I hear. I walk around the shop and find Billy Deep in a black rubber apron and knee-high rubber boots hosing down the docks. He grabs a bucket and heads for me. His shiner has melted away. “You looking for Hank?”

“What’s Henry doing here?” I say.

“He came to apologize for my eye and all,” Billy says. “I told him it was fine, but that I didn’t have much to say to him. No offense or anything.”

“Where is he now?” I ask.

Billy points to a shack down near the docks. “Shucking room,” he says. “I told him my eye might feel better if he shucked the rest of my oysters.”

The shack’s doorframe is open, plastic flaps hanging down. It’s a small room. Three long tables are covered in burlap sacks. The smell is briny and every possible thing is wet. Henry stands at the end of one table, next to a transistor radio tuned to the classic-rock station that plays a sea shanty an hour every hour. He is also wearing a black rubber apron. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and his arms are wet to the elbow, the hairs slicked down. His cheeks are red. He is shucking fast, for the sport of it.

“I thought your father was a lobsterman,” I say.

He looks up, still shucking. “Hey,” he says.

“I saw your truck,” I say.

“Doing penance,” Henry says. “Two Hail Marys, one Our Father, and ten dozen oysters.”

I cross to him and the shells crush and splinter underfoot like a whisper traveling through a crowd. I sit on the table next to the radio. I watch Henry from the side. He may have picked up his pace since he realized I am watching. The Henry I love would want me to see him be good at this. And he is: bits of shell flake off like paper as he digs the knife at the crevice, searching for the sweet spot. He splits the shell open with a hard crack of his knife and the muscle that holds the halves together gives way, exposing the meat.

“So what’s up?” he says. “Unless you just came to say hi.” He smiles at his hands as he says this.

“The Dorians are having you build in the scenic easement,” I say.

“Hrm,” Henry says. He keeps shucking, angling the blade into the roof of a shell, popping the top off. “I thought that might be so. Property that big.”

“And they’re building on a loon nesting ground,” I say.

“Oh my,” he says.

“It’s environmentally protected!”

Henry gives me an
oh please
look but doesn’t stop shucking. “You hate the loons,” he says.

“Not homicidally. Henry, listen,” I say. “The Dorians have paid almost thirty grand in bribes to build that house. The money is being used to turn the waterfront into a shopping district that will drive out the Deeps. And probably make more Elm Parks.”

Henry is not asking any questions, or looking surprised. He is focusing on the oyster in his hand and how to crack it. I wait for him to say anything, but he doesn’t.

“Did you know?” I say.

“Does it matter?” Henry says. He watches his hands doing their work together, the one holding and the other popping, a perfect efficiency of motion. He stops, and looks up at me. I had not counted on this but I know that he is right.

The question that’s important isn’t whether or not Henry knew, it’s whether or not it matters. To me.

Henry is always thinking about us when he makes choices. And sometimes, I’m just not. Sometimes, I’m thinking about the news, or I’m thinking about what
I
want, and he knows this, because he knows me. He has forgiven this fault before, but now he is showing me the way to do the right thing for us. He is asking me to choose him instead of the news. To choose us, instead of how much I want to write this piece.

I want to rail against the injustice of Henry having asked this of me, but I know that’s not really what matters. It’s not about anyone
asking
me to do anything. When you’re a child people ask you to do things and you balk, or obey, but grown-ups give up things they want of their own accord. They make this sacrifice, not easily, or lightly, but willingly. Because that is how you grow a family.

Did he know and does it matter.

“I have files, Hen. Proving it. We’re going to run a story.”

If there’s a hitch in his movements I am too slow to spot it.

“Is my name in the files?” he asks.

“I don’t care what’s in the files; I care what you’re telling me,” I say. “I want you to tell me whether you knew.”

Henry shakes his head. “No, you don’t.” He tosses another oyster in the bucket. “You want me to tell you that I didn’t know and that everything is fine and I’m just as much of a sap as the rest of them.” He reaches to push his hair out of his face with the back of his wrist. “A noble sap.”