He came tear-assing across the house, sending socks flying, beer spilling. On the TV the crackling sounds of a gun battle ricocheted about.
He was too late.
As quickly as it had started, Maureen’s fit—the white intensity of it—had passed, leaving her whimpering but otherwise unharmed. “What in hell is going on?” Hank said.
“She—she had a pain in her stomach,” Susie said as she soothed her daughter, whose crying was subsiding into sniffling. “Oh, Hank, I thought it was—”
“Appendicitis.”
“Yes.”
“I . . . feel a little better now, Mommy,” Maureen said weakly. “I feel better, Daddy.”
Together her parents carried her to bed, kissed and hugged her, then watched over her while she drifted off. Susie waited on pins and needles for a recurrence of the pain, but there was none; whatever it had been (the chowder, right? it was the chowder, wasn’t it?) was gone as suddenly as it had come.
It was two forty-five by the time Maureen was deeply asleep.
It was three-twenty when Dr. Bostwick returned Susie’s frantic call. “Highly unlike appendicitis,” he allowed, “but for caution’s sake, watch her carefully and call back the second there’s any change. My guess? Too early for flu. I’d put my money on that chowder,” he’d said good-naturedly just before hanging up. “Never forget, dairy products spoil more easily than one might imagine.”
It was three thirty-two when the McDonalds felt an insignificant tremor, as if something down there in the earth were grumbling; it passed in less than five seconds. Neither thought much of it, and it was doubtful either would have remembered it an hour later. There often were tremors in the earth around here; they lived near a fault line, or something like that. Nothing at all like the one that ran through California, they’d been assured. This one was harmless.
It was five thirty-five when Maureen tossed off her down comforter and stretched herself awake.
The nap seemed to have done the trick. Until bedtime Susie and Hank watched her like a hawk, but there were no more complaints, not that night or the next day.
Not for more than three weeks.
Not until her first nightmare, which featured a giant bear.
CHAPTER TWO
Thursday, August 7
“Why do I want to leave New York?” Brad Gale repeated.
“Yes. Why would an editor at The New York Times making, let’s see”—the middle-aged man behind the mahogany desk glanced at Brad’s letter and some notes he’d scribbled on it—”making seventy-three thousand dollars a year want to work for a newspaper where a cat stuck in a tree overnight once was page one news with a banner headline and a three-column photo? For barely a third of what he’s earning now? You do understand, Mr. Gale, that twenty-eight-five is nonnegotiable?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And quite unlikely to increase in the very near future. Western Massachusetts doesn’t have the economic base to support heavy advertising, which means our salaries of necessity are low. Livable, certainly, considering what things cost up here—especially compared with New York—but low by almost any other standard.”
“I understand.”
“You also understand that the editor’s position is a salaried one. Not a penny of overtime, not even during your seventy-hour weeks. And you will have plenty of those, I can guarantee you. At my newspaper those are the rule, not the exception. We’re not a large operation here.”
“I’m prepared for that kind of schedule.”
“You will have six reporters, including one in sports; four copy editors; a city editor; one full-time photographer; and a minuscule budget for stringers. Our circulation, let me remind you, has hovered around the twelve thousand mark for years.”
“I understand.”
“You do it all.”
“Yes.”
“Doing it all has meant, on more than one occasion, delivering to a disgruntled subscriber when the paper boy was sick,” Dexter said, not entirely truthfully. In the twelve years since his father had died, turning over control of the paper to him, that had never happened. But it fitted the image he was trying to project.
“As a former paper boy myself, I would consider the duty an honor,” Brad responded.
The man behind the desk, Paul D. Dexter, publisher and owner of the Morgantown Daily Transcript, studied the four-page résumé in front of him. Frankly he had been very, very surprised to receive it in the mail. Those salaries—it wasn’t every day you had someone like this Gale fellow banging down the doors for a position at the Transcript. Mostly the paper got applications from college kids who’d done dissertations on media ethics but couldn’t write a compelling feature on cats in trees, not if their button-down-collar lives depended on it. Either them, or alcoholic burnouts who hoped to wind down their careers in the Berkshires, where the needle on life’s meter usually stayed a few degrees lower than almost anywhere else in the Northeast.
This Gale fellow was something else again.
He wasn’t an alcoholic; a couple of discreet inquiries to old friends Dexter had in the business had confirmed that. No college kid either. This was a thirty-six-year-old thoroughbred who had a good chance of winding up in the newspaper hall of fame if he played his cards right. In his fourteen years in print journalism he’d won damn near every award in the book, including everything the Associated Press had to offer, the Hillman and a Penney-Missouri. He’d been runner-up for the grandest slam of all, a Pulitzer. Number two man in the Times Washington bureau for a while. A stint in Beirut before the shit really began to hit the fan in that crippled corner of the world. Then, like many reporters catching their first whiff of the middle age that’s headed their way, he’d chosen to become an editor—and done well in his two years at it. Awfully damn well. Dexter’s friends at the Times spoke of him as having the potential someday of running the shop, and that was praise not easily pried from such crusty veterans.
“So please tell, Mr. Gale,” Dexter said. “Why does a gentleman who’s headed straight to the top want to run a little backwater paper like ours?”
“Company line or the truth?” Brad asked, wishing like hell he could have a cigarette. In the six years since a growing fear of cancer had broken him of a two-pack-a-day habit, he couldn’t recall wanting one so badly.
“The truth, Mr. Gale.”
“My ex-wife,” Brad said earnestly, “is a cunt.”
He honestly hadn’t intended to use that word—”bitch,” “jerk,” “idiot” had actually been uppermost in his mind—but there it was, happily popping out on its own. Good going, idiot, he thought glumly. I want this job so bad I can taste it, and what do I do? Fire away with the filthiest entry in the Dictionary of American Slang. Not that the word isn’t accurate. I’m not the first one to call her that, nor do I expect to be the last. But for all I know, this Dexter character is a card-carrying member of the Moral Majority.
“I see,” Dexter replied. Brad thought he detected the precursor to a smile on his face, which to this point had been neutral, businesslike, but it must have been his imagination. Wishful thinking. “A . . . cunt,” Dexter said pensively.
Brad didn’t need a weatherman to tell him which way the wind was blowing. “Excuse my candor,” he explained lamely, “but you said you wanted the truth. And it is the truth. If you had the misfortune of knowing her, I’m sure you would agree, although I’m equally sure your choice of word would have been more respectable.”
“I appreciate candor,” the publisher said, with no further clues to his reaction. “Candor makes for good newspapermen. While you’re being so candid, Mr. Gale, why don’t you tell me some more about your wife?”
“Well,” Brad stumbled, “there’s not much to say.”
“Say it anyway,” Dexter insisted, none too politely. “As one man to another.”
“Well . . . she’s an actress. Once upon a time a quite successful one. She’s attractive in a plastic kind of way. She has the emotional maturity of
an eleven-year-old. She drinks too much and has a soft spot for cocaine. We were married almost five years. All but the first were hell. The last was worse than hell. We had one child, a girl. Our divorce took nine months; I figure I’ve put her lawyer’s kid through college, with a BMW to get home on the weekends. On top of everything, there was a very ugly custody battle, most of it behind the scenes, that I eventually won. For that, you can thank my lawyer. He’s the best.”
“How old is she?”
“My ex-wife?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty . . . thirty-three.”
“And your daughter?”
“Almost five and a half.”
“A very nice age,” Dexter said appreciatively. “Very nice indeed. I have three children myself, two girls and a boy, and I recall that stage quite fondly. Please continue.”
“That’s about it.” Story selection, photo display, graphics—these he’d rehearsed on the drive up this morning. But not his personal life. It wasn’t a chapter of the book he liked to open anymore. All those confrontations and depositions had exacted their price.
“She’s made it rocky for you?” Dexter prodded.
“Rocky—ha! Since February, when the order was issued, she’s made my life unbearable. My daughter’s, too. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say it’s time to pull out of New York, much as I love the place.”
“I see.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’m coming here out of desperation,” Brad added quickly. “For a long, long time I’ve wanted to have my own paper. It’s always been a dream of mine. And if I may be immodest for a moment, I think I have the credentials to do an excellent job of editing the Daily Transcript.”
Dexter shifted his considerable weight, reached to the ashtray for his pipe, and filled it from a fresh pouch of custom tobacco. He tamped it to his satisfaction and leaned back in his leather chair, his right hand clutching an embossed gold lighter. This was a man who took himself very seriously and expected others to do the same. This was also a very wealthy man, if Brad had to guess; his newspaper was probably only the tip of the iceberg. He was probably heavily into real estate, too, or timber, or banking, or pork futures. Something more than small-town publishing to give him the right to gold lighters and leather back chairs.
A minute passed, and then a second minute, and then a third. Dexter wasn’t saying anything. Just comfortably settled into the depths of that wonderful chair, seeming to go over every inch of Brad’s face with a fine-tooth comb. One of Brad’s talents was reading people, but he couldn’t seem to get a line on this one. Inscrutable, his face a Rosetta stone.
It must be the obscenity, he thought. He’s the goddamn publisher, and what’s he think he’s got in his office, trying to worm his way into the number one slot? A loose cannon, that’s what. Somebody who’d get right to work bringing the whole house of cards down in some bloody libel suit.
“A . . . cunt,” Dexter said slowly, as if deriving some secret pleasure from pronouncing the word.
“I’m sorry about using that word,” Brad said. “It’s just that—it’s just that the last year isn’t ever going to make the top ten on my hit parade.”
“There’s no need to apologize,” Dexter said. “Having experienced now for many years the privilege of one myself, I can relate to your appreciation of ex-wives. Ones who are . . . I can’t be quite as candid as you, Mr. Gale, you understand . . . but ones who are, shall we say, irascible? My only hope is that you didn’t get nailed as badly as I did on the alimony.”
“Believe it or not, there isn’t any,” Brad said.
“You must be as brilliant as they say,” Dexter remarked, finally lighting off his bowl. The aroma was pungent, outdoorsy, but not sweet; it conjured up an evening by a roaring fire, a glass of brandy in hand, a golden retriever at the feet.
“I don’t know about brilliance,” Brad said modestly. “It could merely be luck.”
“I trust you would show better judgment in the use of words you would choose to publish,” Dexter said, ignoring him. He ran his fingers through Brad’s résumé again. “Judged by this, you would.”
There is a god in heaven, Brad thought with relief, and he’s chosen this second of this hour of this day to smile down on me.
“Oh, God, I would,” Brad said hastily. “Don’t worry about that.”
“We are a family paper. And events really do move at a different pace up here. We simply don’t have most of the big-city problems, thank the Lord—the drugs and crazy people running through subways with guns.”
“Of course.”
“Not that it’s all cats in trees in Morgantown. That’s just my idea of a little joke. We do have our controversies. We do have our issues, many of them the identical issues people everywhere in this great land of ours are facing. Life may have different rhythms, but there’s no such thing as a truly backwater community anymore. Not in America. TV, the telephone, and the automobile have long since seen to that. Mr. Gale, would it surprise you to learn that AIDS education in our schools is emerging as the issue of the year?”
“No.”
“Not a single recorded case of AIDS in the town, perhaps three, if that, in all of Berkshire County, and yet some of our parents believe now is the time to start if we are to protect our children long term. Naturally, an equally vocal contingent believes that we would be bringing Sodom and Gomorrah one step closer by simply mentioning AIDS in the classroom context.”
“All the ingredients of a classic imbroglio.”
“Then there is me. Before he handed the reins over, my father instilled in me the grave responsibilities of a free press according to his interpretation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. I have embraced that philosophy in its entirety, and so, while we seek primarily to entertain and inform, we also believe in slaying dragons when it is within our modest power to do so. We may not have mass circulation, but we do have an impressive insurance policy and a Boston libel lawyer, also a personal friend, who happens to be one of the best in the business. We do not shy away from the big stories, Mr. Gale. As an example, I would point to the county corruption story we did three years ago. Two people are still serving sentences as a result of our work. I believe I mailed you a photocopy.”
“You did. It was a fine piece of journalism. Worthy of a Pulitzer.”
“That’s your territory,” Dexter said, smiling.
The publisher paused, ruminating. Again, Brad didn’t have the faintest clue to what might be going through his mind. And Brad wasn’t about to be a brave little boy and ask, the way he might have had the tables been turned—him interviewing Dexter. No, Dexter was the kind of man who took his good time and expected to do so without challenge. For the second time in under an hour, Brad wished he had a cigarette. Dexter’s pipe smoke had filled the room with a pleasant bluish haze, which Brad found very inviting.
“Just one of the many battlegrounds with my ex.” Dexter chuckled emotionlessly, his free hand stirring up the smoke. It was as if he’d been able to read Brad’s mind. “It used to drive her absolutely batty. I’ve always thought that’s precisely what turned me into the incorrigible smoker I am today, her endless hounding.”
Brad laughed in understanding.
“Mr. Gale,” Dexter said, pulling himself out of the depths of his chair.
“Please call me Brad.”
“OK, Brad. When could you start?”
“You mean—”
“That I’m hiring you just like that? Yes, I am. I had fully expected to offer you the position before you arrived. That is, if, after meeting me and seeing our little shop, you’re still interested.”
“God, yes,” Brad said, feeling somehow silly, reduced.
“When could you begin?”
“Yesterday wouldn’t be too soon,” Brad said, “but realistically, I’ll have to give two weeks’ notice. The Times has been good to me. I owe them that at least.”
“Naturally.”
&nbs
p; “Let’s see,” Brad said, fumbling around inside his blazer for his calendar. “If I were to phone this afternoon, that would put my last day there the twenty-second. Then I’d need a week to find a place to live.”
“If you have trouble, you would be most welcome to stay with us,” Dexter offered, “you and your little girl. What did you say her name was?”
“Abbie.”
“Abbie. And you needn’t worry about the, ah . . . ex. She’s long since out of the picture.”
“Thanks for the invitation. I hope I won’t need to take you up on it. Anyway, I could start . . . let’s see . . . Monday, September first.”
Dexter looked at his appointments book. “You’re certainly welcome to start then”—he chuckled—”but I’d just as soon give you it off. You may be in for seventy-hour weeks, but you also get a few holidays off. September first is Labor Day.”
“You’re right, it is.”
“How about Tuesday, the second? That’ll give your little girl a few days to get the hang of Berkshire County. School doesn’t start until Monday, the eighth.”
“Mr. Dexter?” Brad said, rising. He extended his hand. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
CHAPTER THREE
Friday, August 8
Jimmy Ellis, Maureen McDonald’s friend, was the second.
It began for him five days after Maureen, when he wandered away from his back yard the way five-year-old boys with a spirit of adventure and a good set of legs have forever.
It happened while he was clandestinely playing Rambo, a game his mother had outlawed for reasons he didn’t buy. She said it had to do with guns being bad and there being altogether too much violence in the world—especially America, where two Kennedys had been ass-sass-inated, which he understood to mean killed in a particularly bad way. Jimmy felt plenty sorry for the Kennedys, even though he had no clear idea who they had been, but Mommy’s patient explanations still didn’t cut it. Couldn’t she see Rambo was just a game? Nobody got ass-sass-inated with toy guns. If you got shot, all you did was lie down, count to ten, then get back on your feet again, as good as new.
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