I sent off résumés to any media within commuting distance, knowing damned well they weren’t hiring, but I was unable to surrender to this new state of aimless existence without a fight.
One of the hardest things, at first, was being cut off from the constant flow of information that was part of life in the newsroom. Waiting for local television news to come on and then listening to its four-sentence coverage of city stories was making me crazy. I felt a frustrating sense of isolation.
The police were facing their own frustrations. The woman in the car trunk remained a Jane Doe. There was no ID in the trunk, and her fingerprints didn’t turn up any matches with criminal records. Ben’s work had determined that she was between eighteen and twenty-five years of age and had suffered a stab wound to the temple with a slender object, possibly an ice pick. There was another, similar wound to her heart, one that had been much harder to find beneath the paint. Bruising indicated she had been bound and gagged at some point. Toxicology tests were still pending. No DNA other than her own had been found on her remains. Ben believed she had been thoroughly washed before she was painted, and painted after she was dead.
The coroner’s office had submitted her DNA to the federal database for missing persons cases, but Ben told me that so few jurisdictions were making use of it and so few families knew about it, he didn’t have high hopes of a hit.
The Marilyn Foster case hadn’t progressed any further, either.
The police had no leads on the identity of the killer or killers. They were interviewing some of the people who posted on the Moths’ blog, but that didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Nor did they have any leads on who turned on the hoses in the middle of the night, but they did believe there was a connection between that and the killings. Which was of no comfort to me.
So I didn’t go out too much during those two weeks.
Frank helped me pick up O’Connor’s desk. At first it was in our living room, taking up more of one wall than I expected it to, until I could make space for it in the guest room. Frank kept telling me just to take it easy for a little while.
Ethan helped me move everything out of the guest room and paint it. “Least I could do after staying here rent free,” he said. He helped me keep Cody and the dogs occupied while the floor was refinished. I gave away the desk we’d had in there, along with a small table, which made room for O’Connor’s desk.
At the end of the second week, Ethan helped me put the furniture back into the room. He ran his fingers over the top of the desk. “He smoked?” he asked, looking at a burn mark.
“No, at least not in the years I knew him. The desk belonged to Jack Corrigan before it became O’Connor’s.”
“Wow. O’Connor’s own mentor.”
“And one of my teachers when I was in J-school.”
“How old is this thing?”
I laughed.
“I didn’t mean it like that!”
“I’m not sure how old it is-John Walters and Stuart both thought it was from the early nineteen thirties. It could be older than that. Maybe I’ll visit Helen Corrigan and ask her. She and Jack were at the paper at the same time.”
“I remember the story Hailey wrote about her.”
Hailey Freed, who had been one of the first laid off. “What do you hear from Hailey these days?”
“She’s selling drugs.”
“What?”
“Pharmaceuticals. It’s one of the family businesses. Her grandfather’s, I think. He gave her a job going around to doctors’ offices as a salesperson. She’s really good at it. Making big bucks.”
“Does she like it?”
He hesitated. “Not sure. She likes being good at it, and likes having money. But-I don’t know. It’s always hard to tell with Hailey.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ve got some plans. And an idea for a business,” he said but wouldn’t tell me more. When I started to pry, he suddenly remembered that he had promised to go next door to visit Jack.
So I sat alone at my old desk. At O’Connor’s old desk. At Corrigan’s. I touched an ancient ink stain from a fountain pen. I pulled out one of the slides, could see little worn places where typewriters had sat upon it. Thought of all the words written at this desk.
I felt tired. I had finished my big project of sprucing up the guest room and finding a place for the desk. Now what? Sleep?
I folded my arms on that worn surface, laid my head down, and closed my eyes. I wanted to dream away a world that no longer cared about those words. I fought against a sense of loss so deep, it would have taken a hundred funerals to bury it.
I’m of Irish descent, and I was at a desk that had belonged to two men who were sons of immigrants, each a bit closer to the ould sod than I. So perhaps I can be forgiven for saying that a feeling came over me-others may prefer to say that, between my never-distant fears and an abundance of sentiment brought on by all that reminiscence, I was overwrought. They can explain it that way if it makes them happy. For me, a feeling came over me.
I didn’t hear voices or see a vision or anything like that. But I thought of Corrigan, one of the most determined individuals I’ve met in my life, and remembered how he’d helped O’Connor when O’Connor’s sister had gone missing in 1945. Her grave was found five years later, and O’Connor had taken his grief and forged it into a relentless campaign to ensure that missing persons cases and the unidentified dead weren’t forgotten in Las Piernas. O’Connor had died solving one of those cases.
And the notion came to me that this legacy, of which I was one small part, wasn’t dead. It wasn’t about a building or a piece of newsprint on a driveway. It was about the story, whatever that story might be. Every story was a gift.
I had a story. I needed to go after it. It was as simple as that.
I needed to find out who that woman was, that young woman who had been left in that shabby tomb at the end of my street. Who had been hurt and frightened, who had been demeaned even in death.
I might not solve her murder, but I was going to do my damnedest to name her.
But how?
And almost as soon as I asked myself that, I knew that my search for her name had to begin with another name, one the city had already nearly forgotten: Marilyn Foster. I got up from the desk and made a phone call.
TWELVE
Dwayne Foster had a story of his own, of course. One advantage of not having a deadline was that I had the leisure to let him tell it. By turns he was angry with the police, then cognizant of the fact that they couldn’t work miracles, full of half-formed plans for everything from pulling up stakes and moving to another part of the country to staying and delivering his own form of justice to the killer.
After he wound down a little, we started going over some questions I had. On the night Marilyn disappeared, he had come home at about half past midnight. Dinner had been waiting for him as usual. Marilyn’s habit was to go to bed between ten-thirty and eleven. Police said computer records showed she had been online at about nine-thirty.
“I just want to make sure I’m not making any assumptions about Marilyn’s routines and habits. Did she ever go for long walks at night?”
“No. Even though this is a safe neighborhood-” He broke off, then started again. “Even though we used to think this was a safe neighborhood, she was afraid to do that. Being diabetic, she didn’t like to exercise alone, because, well… she was good about her meds and all that, but she wasn’t always good at gauging what she needed to eat to avoid going too low on her blood sugar. So just to be on the safe side…” The word seemed to catch on him like a small, sharp hook, and he looked away. He took a breath, then went on. “She had routines at the gym, and her trainer there was someone who knew about diabetes and what to do and all that. Sometimes we went walking together before I left for work, but if you’re asking if she could’ve been walking around alone in the neighborhood at midnight or whenever it was, no ma’am.”