“How’re you doing, Hero?” I said, moving toward him slowly. “Are you the brains behind this paper?” Silently I asked, Do you like to be petted, or do you just put up with it?
Hero pulled himself to his feet and walked toward me.
“Whoa! You must smell good,” Mr. Wittstadt said.
Hey, buddy.
The dog nosed my face gently, then licked me in the crease of my neck.
You like salt, huh? Where do you like to be petted?
Those little dimples behind your ears? I scratched them.
“Are you by any chance related to Iris O’Neill?” the editor asked.
I sighed. “My hair?”
“No, the way you are with Hero. He likes Iris, too.”
I smiled. “I’m her great-niece, Anna. Anna O’Neill Kirkpatrick.”
“Nice to meet you, Anna. I’m sorry about William.”
The editor pulled out his wallet, then dug in his jeans for change. The office was littered with paper — piles of it, balls of it, odd-shaped scraps of it. A worktable occupied the center of the room, with ancient office furniture filling up the rest of the space. The gray walls were decorated with maps and several posters of old music icons; I recognized Bob Dylan. On a shelf above Wittstadt’s desk was a row of bobbleheads, most of them Ravens and Orioles.
“How’s Iris doing?”
“Okay.” I stood up and retrieved the iced tea that I had bought myself. The editor handed me the exact amount for his order.
“You know, I tried to interview her,” he said. “She went psychic on me.”
“Psychic or psycho?” I asked.
I watched him empty out a tall travel mug, giving a drink to a plant, then pour both the double espresso and the regular coffee into the mug. “Psychic. That wily old woman, I think she was faking it. Mind you, I’m not saying she’s a fake. I just think she was pretending at the moment, because she didn’t want to answer my questions.”
“Could be.”
“Has Iris told you what she thinks happened to William?”
“No.”
He sipped. “Got any ideas of your own?”
“No.”
“Doughnut?” he offered.
“No thanks.”
He pulled off a piece with his teeth. “Have you been in touch with McManus?”
“A few days ago, just to find out what the police know so far.”
“Which is?”
“Probably the same thing he told you.”
Wittstadt smiled. “So why are you here, other than to torture a newspaper guy with short answers, all of which he already knew?”
“I’d like to look in your archives.”
“Yeah?”
“I went online. They go back only a year and a half.”
He laughed. “Because I go back only a year and a half.
That’s when I bought this prestigious paper.” He led the way to a rear room. I followed him to stacks that were illuminated by old fluorescent-tube lights, the shelves labeled in a handscrawl that was yellowed over with tape.
“What date do you want?”
I told him the year. “I guess you don’t have an index.”
Wittstadt snorted. “Is there a particular thing you are looking for so we can narrow the possibilities? You know, like a fishing report?”
Despite his easygoing manner, he’d be checking the archives later to see what I was researching. He’d guess it was connected to the O’Neills. But if he was relatively new to Wisteria, he wouldn’t know anything about Mick Sanchez.
“An obituary.”
I saw the light flicker in his eyes. “Well, that’s easy. They are always on the second-to-last page. Always,” he repeated. “I’ve tried to redesign the paper, but each time I do, my advertisers throw a fit. I’m just lucky the old publisher stopped using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ before I took over.”
I smiled.
“I’ll leave you to your search, Anna. Careful with the drink, okay?”
“Sure.”
Since the paper was a weekly and I knew the end date would be mid-August, a week after Joanna’s death, my first search wouldn’t take long. I found the article on her, the one Uncle Will had enclosed with his letter, and reread it. There was a copy machine in the office, but I figured that asking to use it would invite more questions from Mr. Wittstadt. When I retrieved a sheet of paper from a recycle bin and picked up a pencil on the worktable, he watched me but didn’t comment. I jotted down details, then worked my way backward through the weeks of July, June, and May.
In the May 8 edition I discovered a short death notice announcing Mick Sanchez’s services and burial. I turned to the first page and combed through the newspaper, but there was no mention of the accident. Figuring that the death had come as a surprise and Audrey may have needed extra time to make funeral arrangements, I searched the previous edition. On page 3, I found it.
FATAL ACCIDENT ON SCARBOROUGH RD.
On the rainy evening of April 27, at approximately 7:00 p.m., Miguel Sanchez lost control of his vehicle on Scarborough Road about 4.5 miles past Wist Creek Bridge. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The victim, on prescription medication for a heart condition for the last two years, suffered a cardiac arrest. Police believe the medical emergency precipitated the accident. Sanchez, known as “Mick,” came from Chincoteague, Virginia, and had been the gardener for the Fairfax family of Oyster Creek for the last 26 years. He and his wife, Audrey (nee Randolph), also a Fairfax employee, were married for 23 years and lived at the Oyster Creek estate. They had no children. His wife is his sole survivor.
After rereading it several times, I wondered why Audrey or Joanna would have been surprised by his death. People dropped dead from heart attacks without any kind of warning, and the man was known to have a heart condition.
This information was useless, just more evidence that Audrey got obsessive. Still, I copied down the essentials: April 27, 7 p.m., 4.5 miles / WC Bridge Chincoteague, VA. 23 yrs — Audrey Randolph
26 yrs — Fairfax garden — heart condition Perhaps it was the way I arranged the words on the page, or perhaps there was a similarity between my mother’s handwriting and my own, but my eyes, focusing on “garden” and “heart,” suddenly saw those words on a different page.
In my mother’s poem there was a garden shaped like a heart. I remembered that a snake wrapped itself around a heart of flowers, making the flowers wilt. It was a haunting image, a picture of a heart being constricted and killed — a kind of heart attack. Could the poem be about Mick’s death?
Mr. Gill had said that my mother’s failure to foresee Mick’s accident and warn Audrey had upset her. People write about things that really upset them. And she had placed the poem in her client book.
I quickly returned the stack of newspapers to the shelf, snatched up my tea, and said a hasty good-bye to Mr.
Wittstadt and Hero. I ran all the way to my car, impatient to get home and read my mother’s poem. When a psychic wrote poetry, what kind of truths were locked inside her images?
AUNT IRIS’S GOLD sedan was parked in its usual spot.
Climbing out of my car, I scanned the windows of the house, wondering which room she was in. The army of cats greeted me, some mewing and rubbing against my legs as if they wanted to be fed, but when I approached the kitchen door, they backed off and slinked away.
Entering the kitchen, I paused to listen for movement in the house. It was silent. I tiptoed to Aunt Iris’s office, eased the door open, and found the room empty. I was tempted to go straight to Uncle Will’s den and retrieve the notebook.
Then a loud crash made me spin around. I ran toward the noise, through the dining room to the center hall. Aunt Iris stood in front of a mirror that hung above the phone table.