The Good Byline

by Jill Orr

“Who was that other guy with you this morning outside the sheriff’s office?” Holman asked after he downed his first two pieces of pepperoni.

  “Ryan Sanford. My ex.”

  “The guy who moved away?”

  “Yup.”

  “Is he back for good?”

  “Yup.”

  “He’s also very symmetrical,” Holman reflected. “He looks like he could be in a Disney sitcom.”

  I laughed. He was exactly right. Ryan had the wholesome good looks of a guy who could be the lead in a bad teen movie. “Ironic, seeing that his current life-plot isn’t exactly Disney material.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I took a deep breath. “We were together for seven years. He left me in the middle of the night—literally—then got a girl pregnant in Colorado. She’s from Sweden, and he’s moving her here so they can raise the baby around family,” I said in one continuous breath.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The way Holman looked at me, pity emanating off of him in waves, triggered my defenses. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” I said. Months and months of Bless her heart and pitying looks and whispers behind my back had been piling up. Holman’s condolence landed on top like a feather whose slight weight was enough to bring the whole stack crashing down. “It’s Ryan and Ridley you should feel sorry for! I’m fine! I’m over it—way over it.”

  I wasn’t over it, obviously, and just saying that I was sent the sting of tears behind my eyes. I willed myself to regain control. I really didn’t want to cry in front of Holman. His DNA was at least eighty-six-percent robot, and I was sure he wasn’t equipped to handle an emotionally unstable woman.

  “So let me guess,” he said, ignoring the quiver in my voice. “Ryan wants you back now, even though he is going to have a baby with the Swede.”

  “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged. “Investigative reporter. Plus, his body language this morning was pretty territorial.”

  “He says they’re over.” I rolled my eyes. “And that he still loves me and wants us to be together. He says he wants—”

  “What do you want?” Holman interrupted me.

  Good reporters ask good questions. What did I want? I don’t think I even knew. I had spent so long wanting Ryan it was hard to know if the pangs I felt for him now were real or just habit. I knew everything had changed the moment he told me he was having a baby with Ridley.

  “Honestly, I just want for none of this to have ever happened. I want Ryan to never have gone away to Colorado, Jordan to never have died, Ajay to never have been a suspect, Dr. H to never have been threatened—”

  “Wishful thinking is unproductive.”

  “I know that,” I said. “It’s just that everything is just so complicated now. Why can’t life be simple? I had a plan for my life, you know? I was going to move back here after college, marry Ryan, and start a family. We were going to be safe and happy, and everything was going to be perfect. And now, I’m working as an hourly employee at the library, fake-dating a married criminal who is about to dump me, and writing an obituary for an old friend. How did my life get so far offtrack?”

  The question was a rhetorical one, but that didn’t stop Holman from answering it. “It sounds to me like your life derailed when you handed over the controls to someone else—to continue with the train/track metaphor.”

  “What do you mean ‘handed over the controls’?” A flash of anger rippled through me.

  “You made Ryan responsible for your happiness. And when he let you down, you stayed down. It’s a classic scenario, really.”

  “Oh, it’s classic, is it?” Holman either did not pick up on, or decided not to acknowledge, my mounting anger.

  “Yes, oftentimes people fall in love and lose themselves in their partner. When the relationship ends, they feel lost, like they don’t know who they are or what they want anymore. I think that’s what happened with you and Ryan. I think you gave him too much power in your life.” He blinked and cocked his head to the side. He looked like a parrot. A stupid, annoying, infuriating parrot.

  “So you’re saying it’s my fault? It’s my fault that Ryan left me with no warning and got another girl pregnant?”

  Holman’s eyes widened. “No—”

  “Is it my fault that Jordan died, too? Huh? Is it my fault that Ajay lied to me? That he’s working with Romero? That he’s married?” I stood up, shaking with rage.

  “You’re upset.”

  “Really, Sherlock?”

  “I didn’t mean to make you angry, Riley.” Holman looked a little scared.

  “Well, you did!” I turned away from him.

  “Listen,” he said, “Ryan hurt you in an unforgivable way. I get that. But you let that ruin your life. I think the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can get back in the driver’s seat.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. Will Holman was the last person I needed to take life advice from. I was about to ask him to leave when I felt something touch the back of my elbow.

  “I cut this out for you,” he said. He was holding a newspaper clipping. “I thought you might like it.”

  I turned around and took the paper from him. It was from last Sunday’s Lubbock Avalanche Journal, a newspaper I’d never heard of before.

  David “Big Mouth” Grouper, five-time winner of Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest and past president of the Federation of Competitive Eaters, died at his home in Lubbock, TX. He was 47. Famous for his appetite for life and hot dogs, Big Mouth Grouper was a true Texan who lived by the mantra, “Bigger is better.” Ironically, Big Mouth himself stood at just 5’6” tall and weighed in at “a buck thirty-four, soakin’ wet,” according to his brother, Norman.

  Grouper first gained notoriety on the competitive eating circuit for his unique form of “chipmunking,” where he would hold food inside his cheeks, causing them to swell to abnormally wide proportions. This earned him the nickname that would stick with him the rest of his days. He went on to win several Coney Island contests, as well as a host of smaller, local, and regional competitions.

  But hot dogs weren’t the only things Big Mouth was interested in. Over the years, Grouper was married six times to five different women and would proudly exclaim to anyone who cared to listen, “Not a-one of ’em weighed less than a deuce!”

  Ironically, it was his love of super-size thrills that led to his untimely death. Big Mouth had accepted a challenge by fellow competitive eater Johann Wineski to a hot pepper eating contest. Much trash-talking and taunting had gone on between Big Mouth and Wineski via social media, whipping up expectations among the competitive eating community for the big contest that was set for the end of July. Privately, Big Mouth was said to be worried. In his last training session before his death, Big Mouth chipmunked six bhut jolokias, believed to be the hottest chilies in the world. He eventually swallowed all of them, according to his coach, Steve Jenkins. But Big Mouth later suffered a cardiac event and did not survive. “It was a massive heart attack. The only kind Big Mouth woulda ever had,” said Jenkins with teary eyes.

  I finished reading the clipping and felt calmer. I looked at Holman. “Why’d you give this to me?”

  “I know you’ve been struggling with Jordan’s obit, and when I read this one, I thought it was a really nice example of how a good obituary can illuminate a person’s essence. I also thought it would make you laugh.”

  I was touched. “I’m sorry, Holman. I didn’t mean to get so angry before. It’s been a hell of a day.”

  “It’s okay. I understand. We’ve done enough for tonight. And for the record,” he said, “you can do better.”

  It took me a minute to figure out what he was referring to. Once I did, I rolled my eyes. “Better than someone else’s baby-daddy, or a married would-be gangster?”

  “Both.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And I am not just saying that to make you feel better. I do not just say things.”

  “I know you don’t.�
��

  It was true. As strange as Holman was, there was something comforting about a person whose word you could trust, someone who would always tell you the truth for better or worse. There was clearly a lack of men in my life with that quality. Maybe Holman had more human DNA than I gave him credit for?

  CHAPTER 30

  After he left, I got in bed, exhausted but not sleepy. I wished for the millionth time that Granddaddy was alive so I could talk to him about this. He’d know what to do. He’d be able to sniff out exactly what was off about this situation, unlike me, who could smell something rotten but didn’t know where it was coming from. A brief impulse to call Flick bubbled up, but I squashed it immediately. As helpful as Flick might be able to be, it wasn’t worth owing him.

  I laid in bed and thought about Holman and Ryan and Big Mouth Grouper—all people who wanted to leave their mark on the world, to find a sort of immortality through their legacy. Holman wanted it in print. Big Mouth, in hot dogs. Ryan, in Swedish babies. I think Jordan had been after a legacy too. I could just see her debating whether to open the suspicious letter addressed to Holman. Maybe she thought she’d stumbled onto something big enough to launch her career. It would have been just like her to dream like that. The Jordan I had known wanted fame, she wanted attention, she wanted a big life. There was no way she would have committed suicide when she was on the verge of something she thought was big. And I felt in my bones that that something big was the reason she was dead.

  I leaned up to turn my pillow over to the cool side, when I heard a sound outside my bedroom window. I stilled. I heard the sound again. Shoes on pavement. Every nerve in my body at DEFCON 1, I grabbed my phone on the night table and tapped 911. I hovered my finger over the send button as I listened for the noise again. It came again, this time sounding like leaves being displaced. There was someone on my driveway.

  I slipped out from under the covers and crept over to my closet, which thankfully I’d left open, so the creaky hinge didn’t give me away. I hid on the floor behind the rack, sheltered by the bottoms of my dresses, my pulse pounding so hard I could feel it in my eardrums. If I hit send, it would take the police less than two minutes to get to my house.

  Crouched down behind my clothes, I went through the options of what or who could be outside my bedroom window at ten o’clock at night, and none of the answers made me feel any better. Then three things happened at almost exactly the same moment: I heard the sound again, my phone vibrated, and I hit the send button.

  “This is 911. What is your emergency?”

  I looked at the phone in my hand. There was a text from Ajay: Hi! Meeting ran long. Don’t want to scare u but am outside your house. Wondering if ur still up?

  “911, are you there?”

  “Um,” I said to the dispatcher. What was I supposed to say? A possible mobster who is also kind of my boyfriend is outside my house and wants to come in? I went with, “Actually, false alarm! Sorry!” And hung up.

  I crawled out of the closet and turned on my bedroom lamp. I texted back, Sorry. Just went to sleep.

  He replied: You’re sleep texting?

  Damn. What was I supposed to say? Super tired. Can we talk tomorrow?

  His response was immediate. I really need to talk with you. And I have some news about your car.

  I supposed that was what kids felt like when a stranger offered them candy. I really wanted to know what he’d found out about my car, but opening my door to a man who might have tried to blow it up last night didn’t seem like the wisest choice. I must have hesitated too long. I heard a knock on my door. I froze. Should I call 911 again? Should I slip out the back door and run for the neighbors? He knocked again.

  “Riley, you in there?” I could tell by his voice that he was smiling, and it heightened the creep factor. In my panic-riddled brain, I knew that he was obviously here for one of two things: to kill me or to break up with me. What kind of a person smiles when he is about to kill or break up with an innocent librarian?

  “Coming!” I shouted from my bedroom. I grabbed the quiz bowl trophy and hid it underneath my robe. I slipped my cell phone into my pocket and walked, against my better judgment, toward the door.

  I saw through the peephole that Ajay was standing there, cute as ever in a blue golf shirt and khakis. I scrutinized his face. To be fair, he didn’t look like a man about to kill or break up with someone. He had his hands in his pockets and was looking around my house and out toward the street like he was just taking in the scenery. Then, his eyes flicked to the peephole.

  “Riley?”

  Ajay stood on my doorstep waiting to be invited in. Like a vampire.

  I opened the door, but did not back up from it to let him by. “Hey,” I started to say but was cut off by the deafening sound of sirens screaming toward my house.

  Both our heads turned toward the sound. A brown and white Tuttle County sheriff’s cruiser came flying, almost literally, into my driveway, cutting across the grass and skimming the zinnias that I planted around the mailbox by the curb. Carl Haight jumped out of the car, gun drawn, and yelled, “Sheriff’s department! Put your hands where I can see them!”

  Ajay’s arms went up immediately. I put mine up too because I wasn’t in the habit of arguing with people who had a gun. My quiz bowl trophy fell to the ground with a clatter. The little gold question mark hoisted by the faceless man broke off and bounced into the grass. Ajay looked at the trophy, then to me.

  “Riley?” Carl called out. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I shouted and lowered my hands.

  “What the—” Ajay started to say, but then a second cruiser came barreling into my driveway, and this time, Deputy Chip Churner, one of my father’s longtime friends, got out of his car.

  “Sheriff’s department!” he shouted. That was Chip, or Butter, as everyone called him, always a day late and a doughnut short.

  “What’s going on?” Ajay said, hands still in the air. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to me or the officers. I didn’t think the time was right for a lengthy explanation, so I didn’t say anything. The bright lights flashed against the dark night, illuminating Salem Street like Times Square.

  “We received a distress call from this location,” Carl said in his official police-officer voice as he walked toward us. “Dr. Badal?”

  “Hi, Carl,” Ajay said and started to put his hands down.

  Chip was advancing on my front porch. “Keep them hands up, buddy!” But he, too, changed his tune when he got close enough to see Ajay under the porch light. “Oh, it’s just you, Doc. We thought there was some kind of trouble here.”

  “Can someone please explain what’s going on?” Ajay said.

  I kept up my campaign of silence. My eyes flicked to Ajay. There was no trace of guilt on his face, unlike mine, which was dripping with it.

  Both deputies lowered their guns, apparently so confident that their good buddy Dr. Badal was not there to harm me. “We picked up a 911 call from this address. Must’ve been a mistake,” Butter said. His fleshy cheeks were red, and he was panting.

  Carl cut in, “No mistake. Riley called 911 at 10:09 and then hung up on the operator. It’s standard procedure to dispatch a patrol car in those cases. The person making the call could have been forced to hang up under duress.” Then he said to me, “That’s when someone’s forced under threat of violence.”

  “Thanks, Carl,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “You called 911?” Ajay looked at me.

  “Well,” I started to say, “I heard a noise and was just shaken up after what happened to my car.…” I let myself trail off, hoping someone would say something and save me from having to elaborate.

  “Shame about that,” Chip said, digging into his pocket. “I remember when your mom and dad bought that for you.” He shook his head sadly as he pulled out a fruit roll-up and began unwrapping it.

  Ajay, Carl, and I all stared at him.

  “What? This?” He held up the fruit roll-up. �
�My blood sugar gets a little low from time to time, and Dr. Jarvis suggested I keep these on hand. Marge packs ’em in my pants every night before work.” He ripped off a hunk and chewed it like a cow munching grass.

  We all continued to stare at him.

  “What?” Butter blinked. “You know about this stuff, Doc. Right?”

  “I’m not that kind of doctor,” Ajay said. His voice was quiet, and I knew his mind was still on me and that 911 call.

  “Oh right, sure. Forgot,” Butter said, and took another huge chunk off his fruit roll-up.

  Ajay pulled out his phone. “Riley, I texted you at 10:08. Carl said you called 911 at 10:09.”

  Carl, Chip, and Ajay all looked at me, waiting for me to clear up this obvious misunderstanding. Their faces suggested that I owed them an explanation, like I was nuts to feel threatened by the fantastic Dr. Badal. I started to get a panicky feeling in my chest. I wasn’t crazy. If these officers knew what I knew about Ajay, they wouldn’t be so quick to lower their guns.

  “Did you call 911 on me?” Ajay asked.

  “I—I was just—”

  “Making a false 911 call is a misdemeanor, you know,” Carl said. “That’s a criminal offense that is less serious than a felony but still carries a punishment.”

  “I know what a misdemeanor is, Carl!” I snapped. “Listen, I didn’t make a false 911 call.”

  “So you were scared of me?” Ajay asked.

  “You were scared of the doc?” Butter said, or at least that’s what I thought he said—his mouth was pretty full. “But he’s one of us.”

  “One of you? Please.” I spun around to face Ajay. I’d had enough. “Do the deputies here know you work for one Mr. Juan Pablo Romero?” I said this in the same dramatic fashion that Holman had told me the shocking news, hoping it would have the same damning effect.

  “What?” Ajay said.

  “You’re listed as a consultant on his project manifest for Little Juan Park. I saw it myself.”

  Carl and Chip exchanged glances.

  “So?”

  “So.…” I should have stopped myself right there, but I didn’t. I wanted to prove to them that I wasn’t crazy, that I had real reason to call 911. I felt suddenly desperate to prove that I wasn’t some overwrought nut job. I lifted my chin and said confidently, “So, there is evidence that Romero had something to do with Jordan’s death!”