The Bottom

by Howard Owen

  “Girl missing” was the headline, halfway down the front page. Leigh Adkins, then in high school, might have run away from home, but she’d been gone for two days when her mother called the local police. It was not, I imagine, the first time young Leigh had run away.

  But there was no other story, at least not one that I could Google.

  The story had the mother’s name and even the street she lived on.

  I called. The woman who answered admitted, after a certain amount of apprehension about talking to a reporter, that she was Mrs. Emily Adkins.

  As gently as I could, I asked her about Leigh’s whereabouts.

  There was quiet on the other end of the phone.

  Finally, she said, “Do you know where she is?”

  I assured her that I did not.

  “Well, I don’t neither. She just took off. We don’t know where she is. She might be dead for all we know.”

  Her voice breaks a little. I apologize for disturbing her. She says Leigh went out to a dance that night and never came home.

  “She was kind of wild,” the mother says. “Sometimes she would stay over at a friend’s and not tell me. It like to of drove me crazy.”

  After a second night of no Leigh, her mother turned in a missing-person report.

  “Fat lot of good it did,” she says. “The cops didn’t act like they even wanted to find her.”

  I ask about the older sister, only to wish I hadn’t. Leigh’s sister was killed by a hit-and-run driver five years ago.

  “It’s just me now,” Ms. Adkins says. I apologize again for disturbing her and hang up.

  One thing leads to another. One thought sets another one to tumbling, and soon they’re falling like dominoes.

  I’m remembering something I hadn’t thought of in years.

  It must have been six months after Wat Chenault’s fall from grace that I was at the Tobacco Company, having a drink with several other reporters and a few of our fine statesmen.

  I asked one of them, who had sponsored a bill or two with Chenault, if he ever heard anything from his former colleague.

  “Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “He was up here the other day. We had a few over at the Commonwealth Club.”

  And then the senator shook his head.

  “If I was that girl,” he told me, “I think I’d consider moving somewhere else.”

  “Because of the scandal?”

  He took a sip of bourbon and laughed.

  “Nah. I don’t think that town’s big enough for her and Wat Chenault. He said he’d like to wring her scrawny neck for what she did to him.”

  I didn’t mention that it seemed like Wat was responsible for most of the “doing,” and I forgot the whole conversation after sharing it with a reporter or two.

  Now, though, it does make me wonder.

  CHAPTER NINE

  X

  Wednesday

  Andi called me early this morning.

  “Something’s wrong with Peggy,” she said by way of a greeting.

  “More than usual?”

  My daughter explained further. It seems that my mother is on a hunger strike of sorts. This is strange, because Peggy smokes enough dope to give an anorexic the munchies.

  I told Andi I’d be right over.

  Awesome Dude is in the living room when I get there, watching the local fluff show that follows the national fluff show on one of the networks. A guy with a banjo, accompanied by two more guys with guitars, is trying to sing.

  “I was going to call, Dude,” my mother’s more-or-less full-time basement dweller says, “but Peggy wouldn’t let me.”

  Obviously, Peggy’s granddaughter is less afraid of being evicted than Mr. Dude is.

  “She’s lost about ten pounds,” he says, looking away from the TV for a few seconds. “She don’t need to lose any weight.”

  I go into Peggy’s bedroom. Andi’s sitting there beside the bed. Peggy has the covers pulled up to her chin.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” I ask her.

  “Traitor!” she yells at Andi. I suggest that my daughter should maybe go outside and keep Awesome company.

  I take a good look at my mother’s face. I haven’t been paying much attention lately. You can see the shrinkage in the way her eyes look larger, a little more sunken in. The word “careworn” seems appropriate.

  I ask her what she’s trying to prove.

  “Ain’t trying to prove anything,” she says. “I just want everybody to leave me the hell alone.”

  I observe that people who care about other people aren’t really inclined to do that.

  I press her a little more about what’s made her throw her own little pity party, although I already know.

  “I just figured,” she said, “that it isn’t going to get any better than this. And this sucks.”

  “Les?”

  “What the hell do you think?”

  OK, maybe my mom’s got a point. Les’s death was a blow. Hell, I miss him, and I didn’t see him but maybe once a week. For Peggy, it was the closest thing to that rarest of all blessings, unadulterated love, that she’s known from the male companions of her life.

  But it’s been a year and a half.

  When I point this out, she says, “Well, I did give it a try. They say wait a year before you make any big decisions after something like this. I gave it an extra six months, just in case.”

  “It could still get better.”

  She snorts.

  “I can’t see how it’s going to get good enough to be half as good as it was.”

  I can’t think of anything else, so I play the guilt card.

  “How is it going to look,” I ask her, “if your great-grandson (we’ve been aware now for two weeks that it’s going to be a boy) has to grow up knowing he never got to meet you because you were too selfish to stick around? How about the stigma you’ll leave, the message that it’s OK to stop living because things suck?”

  She squints up at me, her eyes just above the covers.

  “You’re mean,” she says.

  I think of something.

  “Remember Natalie Brookins?”

  I have to remind her. Natalie Brookins was the little girl with whom I was madly in love in the fifth grade. One day she told me we had to stop talking to each other. Her parents had told her that. They were afraid that little blonde-haired Natalie would somehow get involved with a half-breed like me and despoil the Brookins family name, which included only a couple of convicted felons.

  I didn’t see how things were going to get much better. I already was feeling the weight of hand-me-down prejudice parents passed on to their kids, my classmates. This seemed to affirm that I would live life as a shunned being, denied not just the love of Natalie Brookins, but of all desirable female creatures. At eleven, this was a heavy load.

  It was late spring and warm enough to go to the river after school.

  Peggy got a call from work and had to rush home. I had jumped off the Mayo Bridge over the James, intent until I was maybe halfway down in ending it all and making everyone sorry. Somebody saw it and called the cops. By the time they got there, I had managed to drag myself out of the water, having decided life without Natalie Brookins wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Still, they insisted in making a big deal out of it, including calling Peggy at work.

  She didn’t say much until we got home. I figured she was going to whip my ass. Instead she sat me down at the dining room table. She pulled up a chair and got face-to-face with me. She asked me why. I told her.

  She said she was going to have a chat with the “river-rat, white-trash” Brookinses. I begged her not to, and I don’t know if she ever did or not.

  “In the meantime, though,” she said, reaching forward and grabbing me by the collar with both hands and pulling my face within inches of hers, “don’t you ever do anything like this again. Don’t you dare throw away even a minute of your life. You never know when something special is just around the corner. There will be better
days ahead, I promise you.”

  “Plus,” she said, “if you ever try anything like that again, I’ll kill you.”

  I thought it was ill-advised to point out how self-defeating it would be to thwart a would-be suicide by killing him.

  “So,” I tell Peggy, “I’m telling you just like you told me: you will have better days, I promise you.

  “And if you don’t eat some goddamned food and stop whining, I’m going to kill you.”

  I can hear her laugh, albeit involuntarily, under the sheet.

  “Just do this,” I tell her. “Give it six more months. Wait ’til the baby is born and see if things don’t get better.”

  Peggy says she thinks this is a bunch of bullshit. She does, however, get out of bed. She promises that she will start eating again, even if she doesn’t want to. She promises me she will give life a six-month extension.

  I advise her to smoke more dope.

  Doctor Willie’s work here is done.

  I HAVE ARRANGED a meeting with Jessica Caldwell’s mother at noon. She refused to speak with Baer. One of the small perks of writing for the local paper for more than three decades is that people know you. That, of course, can be a mixed blessing. In this case, though, Maria Caldwell told Baer she would only talk to “that Willie Black fella.” She said she thinks I am a “square shooter.” Baer seems offended that his shooting isn’t so respected. I tell him that it’s probably just his accent.

  I drop by the newsroom first. It is, I am soon informed by several of my colleagues, another red-letter day for the paper.

  Yesterday was the day Ray Long decided he’d had enough. Ray’s been on the copy desk forever. It is not a happy place to be.

  The first thing newspapers did, when it became apparent that the Internet was going to swallow us whole, was to start cutting bureaus. Check out any state government body, check out Our Nation’s Capital, and you’ll find a fraction of the reporters keeping an eye on the politicians and other rogues as were there twenty years ago. The henhouse has been left to the foxes.

  The second thing to go was copy editing. I can understand, I guess. If you choose between having somebody cover city government and an editor to turn what they write into English, content has the trump card.

  The last straw for Ray was when they cut his hours from forty to twenty-eight, just few enough so that his fifty-four-year-old ass wouldn’t have health insurance anymore. I can relate: Ray and I both are too old to be attractive additions to anybody else’s newsroom staff and too young to die.

  So when Ray came in last night, on one of his four seven-hour workdays, he took matters into his own hands. Somebody else might have used a bit more imagination, once he realized that there wasn’t one other set of eyes between his tired, heavy-lidded peepers and the guy who picks it up out of the gutter and takes it into the breakfast nook the next morning.

  Somebody else might have fabricated some bogus story in which the new publisher has Nazi roots or Wheelie gets caught screwing a male sheep in the newsroom.

  What Ray did was elegant in its simplicity. I think Hemingway, who hated adjectives and big words, would have been proud.

  Needing one more story to fill up A4, where we cram most everything that happens outside the greater metropolitan area, he eschewed picking off a wire story from Kyrgyzstan or Upper Volta.

  Instead, Ray went DIY on us. The headline on the eight-inch prizewinner he created read, “Fuckfuckfuck/fuckfuckfuck.” The copy was more of the same, with the fuck word appearing 358 times, with occasional paragraph breaks. The byline: By Fuckfuckfuck/Staff writer.

  As Ray knew it would, the paper made it outside the building with his story unscathed. What he hadn’t counted on was that one of our pressmen actually decided to read the damn paper. Our printing plant is twenty minutes away from the newsroom, thereby ensuring that we don’t have actual warm-off-the-presses copies of tomorrow’s editions delivered to the newsroom, the way we used to when the presses were right here in the building.

  But this one pressman was going through the A section when he saw something he didn’t normally see in our paper, which draws the profanity line somewhere between “sucks” and “frigging.”

  He called the newsroom. Sally Velez was the only one left, and she probably said the same word that comprised Ray Long’s last journalistic offering. Then she did the thing that all editors love to do. She told the sharp-eyed pressman to stop the presses. Then she had whoever was in charge out there call all the trucks, some of them halfway to Charlottesville by then, and tell the drivers to come back to Richmond. Most of them did, but these guys and gals usually have a second day job, and they don’t have all night to help us clean up our mess.

  And so, we figure about 10,000 readers got the F-word special this morning. The circulation department is not having a good day. Neither is Wheelie or Ms. Dominick, our new publisher. This probably ensures that the rest of us aren’t going to have a good day either. This stuff always travels downhill.

  Still, though, you have to admire Ray Long’s spirit. He cleaned out whatever he planned to take with him before he wrote the fuck story and walked out with it in a grocery bag. I guess he’ll pay a visit to HR sometime soon.

  They’re taking up a collection, very much on the down low. I make a note to treat him to a beer or three sometime soon.

  It seems like a good day not to piss anybody off. I slip away before anyone of the management variety sees me.

  JESSICA CALDWELL’S MOTHER has red hair, like her late daughter. She lives out in the West End, but not the ritzy part. She answers the door in a bathrobe. She looks as if she hasn’t slept for the past week. I want to tell her I can relate, having a daughter and all, but it seems like it would just be piling on to remind her that some people’s daughters were not murdered by a monster last week.

  Jessica Caldwell had been something of a problem, her mother says. The track record she relates to me sounds a lot like that of the disappeared Leigh Adkins. Got kicked out of public school. Was sent to an expensive private school that cost all that Lucy Caldwell and her second husband could scrape together. Got kicked out of that school for drugs. Went to live with Mrs. Caldwell’s first husband, Jessica’s father, and his wife. I can only imagine how thrilled the first husband’s second wife must have been about that.

  “They didn’t keep an eye on her like they should have,” Lucy Caldwell says, “but Bobby—that’s my husband—he kind of said I had to make a choice.”

  I can see on her face, one that has aged about ten years since last Thursday, that she will be regretting that decision for the rest of her life. She might not have had any better chance of reining in her wild daughter than her first husband did, but she’ll always think she could have. I would not like to be Bobby between now and the time he moves out.

  I silently thank my stars for Glenn Walker, who married Jeanette after I blew up my first marriage and never treated Andi as anything but his own.

  I ask Lucy, as gently as I can, about her daughter’s movements in the day or so leading up to last Thursday.

  “She called me on Wednesday morning,” she says. “She said she was staying with some friends that had a place down in the Bottom. I asked her if she was working on her GED. She said she was, but I don’t know.”

  Lucy Caldwell sits down.

  “She was so young. She was a smart girl, but after her father left, she just kind of went wild. I had to work, and she didn’t have anybody to ride herd on her.”

  I don’t know how to broach the subject of Ronnie Sax and his camera. There isn’t any good way. I mention that the guy they have locked up was a photographer, and that he sometimes used local girls as models.

  She gets my drift.

  “Oh my God. That son of a bitch. That son of a bitch!”

  I assure her that I don’t know anything that would suggest that Jessica was posing for him, although Peachy has told me enough to make me sure that the police will be coming by soon with images of her underage da
ughter that were gleaned from Ronnie Sax’s perverted files.

  I ask her if she remembered the names of Jessica’s friends down in the Bottom. She said her daughter never mentioned their names. I’m wondering if her “friends” won’t turn out to be just the one, a lizard by the name of Ronnie Sax. From what Peachy told me, she certainly knew the way to Sax’s apartment.

  There isn’t much left to ask her. On the way out the door, I think to ask her about the tattoo.

  “I didn’t know anything about that until they brought me down there to see . . .”

  I wait a moment for Lucy Caldwell to regain control of what’s left of her sense.

  “She never would have gotten one, on her own. She didn’t like them. She said she didn’t want anything that made her hurt . . .”

  I let myself out, feeling like almost as big a creep as Ronnie Sax. He wanted to exploit Jessica Caldwell to make a few bucks. I’m using her mother for an A1 byline.

  Well, I tell myself as I light up, I at least owe Lucy Caldwell a proper resolution to all this.

  I know that’s the cops’ job, but I just want to make sure they do it right. Ronnie Sax is a vile pornographer who preys on young women. Check. He deserves to spend an appreciable amount of time in the kind of prison where guys like Ronnie get a little payback, in kind. Check.

  Is Ronnie Sax the kind of man who brutally murders young women on a regular basis? The cops are no doubt sure of that by now.

  Me, I’m never sure ’til I’m sure.

  CHAPTER TEN

  X

  Thursday

  The “We got him” press conference is at nine thirty. I swear L.D. Jones plans these things so he can ensure that every TV station around gets the story before the paper does. That, and it ensures that I will put in a fourteen-hour shift. No big deal, though. We’ve run pretty much everything worth knowing already. And he’s not lengthening my day that much anyhow, because I’m meeting Philomena and Richard Slade for lunch at noon. I’ll just have time to listen to some bullshit, write it up for the website and head out to the Slades’ place.

  Jones and the mayor are looking somber and proud, ebony and ivory back in harmony now that the bad guy’s been caught and there are no bucks to pass. They explain that they have strong reason to believe that the person they have in custody is the man responsible for the rape and murder of Jessica Caldwell. They are, the chief adds, also looking into the possible connection to three earlier murders. Then he names the other victims.