St. Martin’s Press

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

ALL OF THE CHARACTERS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND EVENTS PORTRAYED IN THIS STORY ARE EITHER PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY.

“The Nightgown”

Excerpt from “The Girl Next Door”

Copyright © 2012 by Brad Parks.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Contents

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Preview

When ranking life’s more pointless exercises – and I’m including things like ironing your underwear, flossing your dog and watching daytime television – the newspaper writing test deserves special consideration.

It is a time-honored and ritualized form of journalistic hazing wherein a job applicant, after a day of meeting with editors in glass offices, is made to write a fake story on fake deadline. They sit you down with a pile of notes (which you did not actually take), quotes (which you did not actually hear) and color (which you did not actually see) and expect you to produce an article about some imaginary homicide/city council meeting/girl scout jamboree – and craft every sentence as if your future depended on its brilliance.

The idea, of course, is to simulate what the candidate would do with an actual story on an actual deadline. The only problem is it doesn’t really simulate anything – besides, perhaps, how well you take writing tests.

Any journalist worth his ink understands great writing begins with great reporting: the keen eye for detail, the ability to ask the right question at the right moment, the mental horsepower to quickly absorb new information, the narrative instincts to understand what’s pertinent and what isn’t. Writing a story with someone else’s notes is a bit like baking a cake with someone else’s batter.

Nevertheless, there I was, with several sheets of gooey slop in front of me, making like Betty Crocker.

I was interviewing for a staff writer position at the Newark Eagle-Examiner, New Jersey’s largest and most respected news-disseminating organization. This was eight years ago, back when newspapers were still hiring and I was a young cub of 24. Up to that point in my life, the largest newspaper to carry the byline “Carter Ross” was a 40,000-circulation daily out in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania.

Merely walking into the doors of the Eagle-Examiner – whose circulation was roughly ten times as large – was a huge deal for me, especially since I’m a New Jersey native who grew up reading it. Plus, as an ambitious sort of fellow, it was either a perfect steppingstone to something bigger or, even if it never took me anywhere, a pretty good place to end up.

I had managed to get its editors’ attention with some of my recent work, most notably a series of stories that came about when I uncovered a small-town pastor who was inventing imaginary winners to his church’s 50-50 raffle so he could keep all the proceeds for himself.

He got indicted. I got a job interview.

That’s the way it works in journalism, where stars are often made on the stupidity of others. (Even my hero, Bob Woodward, would today be a talented-though-little-remembered reporter for The Washington Post if the Committee to Re-elect the President was any good at breaking and entering).

So, thanks largely to one greedy minister, I found myself in the Eagle-Examiner newsroom, slogging through a writing test. I was trying to take it seriously, inasmuch as it could help change my career trajectory. But I also kept hearing a running dialogue between Assistant Managing Editor Sal Szanto – the guy who would most likely be deciding whether I got hired – and a woman on the night desk. She seemed to be some kind of lesser assignment editor but what I noticed most is that she was a knockout: an attractive, long-limbed, curly haired brunette. She was almost certainly on the other side of 30, a few years older than me, but that didn’t strike me as a big deal – legs like that tend to discourage any thoughts of age discrimination.

From what bits of conversation I heard, I could sense she was growing agitated about something. I just couldn’t tell what. There was news breaking, that much was clear. Someone important had done something of interest and Szanto wanted a reporter dispatched to chase it down.

And, apparently, at 6:30 at night, they didn’t have an extra warm body. As I began eavesdropping more assiduously, I heard the brunette say, “…can’t send Petersen. The last time he left the office we were still using hot type. Besides, he’s doing rewrite tonight.”

“What about Hays?” Szanto asked.

“He left twenty minutes ago, which probably means he’s drunk already.”

“Whitlow?”

“Vacation,” the brunette informed him.

“And there’s seriously no one in the Union County bureau who can hop on this thing? Come on, we’ve got to have someone,” said Szanto, signaling his concern by throwing down a handful of Tums and crunching noisily on them.

As I rose from my chair and walked toward them, I heard the woman protest, “I know, but what am I supposed to do, pull a reporter out of my…”

“I’ll go,” I interrupted.

The woman studied me like I had just fallen out of the Dummy Tree.

“I’m sorry, who the hell are you?” she asked.

“This is Carter Ross,” Szanto said. “He’s a reporter with the Pitts County Patriot. He’s interviewing for Millstein’s old job.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my right hand toward the woman and flashing the smile I usually reserved for bar pickups. “What’s your name?”

“Tina Thompson. But unlike you, I actually work here.”

“And I don’t. Yet. But there’s no reason to hold it against me.”

“If you’re here for a job interview, shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, interviewing with someone?” Tina asked.

“I’m just over there doing some fake writing. Why don’t I do some real writing instead?”

Szanto, who had turned his mouthful of antacid into fine chalk, kept swiveling his attention between the two of us, then turned back his office.

“What the hell,” he said as he passed through the door. “Give the kid a chance.”

Tina was fixing me with a look that registered a 9.75 on the Incredulity Scale, which normally only goes to 8.

“One of these days, I want to know what it’s like to work for a real newspaper,” she grumbled.

I once again gave her my best barstool smile.

“Oh fine,” she said. “That little rag in Pennsylvania give you a laptop and a cell phone?”

“Yeah.”

“You got them with you?”

“Always,” I said, giving her my number.

“Good. Get in your car and start driving toward Carteret. I’ll call you on the way.”

Having grown up just a few towns away from Newark, in a McMansion-intensive suburb called Millburn, I knew the way to Carteret, even if it wasn’t the kind of place where my prep school took regular field trips. Carteret was part of New Jersey’s rust belt, that corridor north of Exit 12 on the Turnpike that the state tourism commission forever wished could be moved somewhere less visible. Like Pakistan.

I had barely settled into my car, an aging Chevy Nova with brakes that could almost stop a 10-speed bicycle, when my phone rang.

“Carter Ross,” I said.

“You already sound too smug,” Tina informed me. “This is a job interview, remember? You should sound deferential and nervous.”

“You mean like: C-C—C-Carter R-R-Ross?”

“Better. Okay, here’s the deal, someone crashed his car into a building at the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson in Carteret. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a big deal, except we’re hearing the someone was Lenny Ryan. You know who Lenny Ryan is?”

“Not really.”

“He’s a State Senator, but he’s more than that. Lenny Ryan has the entire Democratic portion of Union County trapped under his thumb. All the patronage hires, all the municipal contracts, all the political appointments, they all go through Lenny one way or another. And Lenny always gets his piece.”

“Sounds like a real charmer,” I said.

“He is, actually. He’s a classic Irish politician. He’s smart, charismatic, great in front of a crowd and smooth as a baby’s ass. A few years ago, we put one of our best investigative reporters on him for three months. We were going for Lenny’s scalp, but we didn’t even touch a hair on his head. We ended up running this 3,000-word puff piece on him. He’s got it hanging in his office like a trophy, from what I’m told.”

I was speeding down Broad Street in Newark by this point, slaloming between lanes. Yeah, I had spent my last two years in Pennsylvania, but it hadn’t taken the Jersey out of my driving.

“So the fact that he’s hit a building means…?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything,” Tina said. “I mean, was he drunk? Was he high? Was he speeding? You just have to keep in mind this guy is a major player in this state. Anything he does is news.”

“What if it was just an ordinary accident?”

“Then it’s not very interesting news, but it’s still news,” Tina said. She furnished me with directions to the location of the crash, finishing with, “If you get anything good, call me immediately.”

I drove south on the Turnpike, through the more aromatic sections of Elizabeth and Linden, until I reached exit 12. I wound around on Roosevelt Avenue, through commercial and residential areas and into an industrial stretch. Just past a trucking depot, I found what I was looking for: a brick building with a noticeable chunk taken out of its corner and a variety of lesser car parts still strewn around it.

It took me a moment to take it in, but when I did, I nearly hopped out of my Nova and did a victory jig – which is saying a lot, given that my pasty Northern European lineage is not known for its dancing skills. I pulled out my phone and dialed the last number that called me.

“Examiner, this is Tina,” I heard.

“Tina, it’s Carter Ross. I know this may sound presumptuous, because I don’t even work for you, but you may want to reserve a spot for me on the front page.”

“Why?”

“Because, the building at the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson is not just a building,” I said, giving a quick pause before I delivered the punch-line:

“It’s a go-go bar.”

Tina quickly concurred that a powerful State Senator careening into an establishment that offered exotic entertainment – it was called Roxy’s Go-Go, if that wasn’t perfect enough – had significant news potential.

I terminated the call and began trying to figure out what happened. This, however, did not prove as simple as I hoped. The manager of Roxy’s Go-Go was inexplicably publicity shy, a member of the “we don’t want no trouble” school of media relations. He wouldn’t even give me his name, perhaps sensing that if he was seen as too forthcoming about the Senator’s mishap he would suddenly be visited by a very dogged health department inspector.

All I could cajole out of him was that around 5 o’clock he heard a loud noise and felt the building shake. He went outside, saw the car – a black Lexus – crumpled against the building. And he called the cops.

Since that was his first call, I figured it should be mine as well. I got bounced around until I ended up talking with the Police Director, who was about as forthcoming as the manager had been. Yes, he could confirm there had been a single car accident at 5 p.m. at the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson. Yes, the car in question was registered to Leonard R. Ryan of Clark. No, he wasn’t saying anything else.

His official excuse for reticence was that it was a “pending investigation” but I knew the unofficial reason was that he wasn’t born stupid. He knew the score: The Carteret Police Director served at the pleasure of the mayor, who owed his position to the support of the Carteret Democratic Party. The Carteret Democrats, meanwhile, leaned heavily on the Union County Democratic Party, which was essentially a cult of Lenny Ryan’s personality. So while Lenny may not have been very good at controlling the steering wheel of his Lexus, he was quite adept at controlling everything else in a town like Carteret.

Hence, I was being stymied by Lenny Ryan’s perceived power. And I was starting to run out of time. It was already 7:15. I didn’t know the Eagle-Examiner’s deadlines, but as a rule the larger the paper, the earlier you needed to have copy in for first edition.

Just to have something to feed Tina, I pulled out my pad and started taking note of the detritus left scattered about the corner of the building by Lenny Ryan’s automobile – a piece of headlight covering, shattered bits of glass, some green viscous liquid. I was concentrating on a piece of random metal, which I decided I would call an L-bracket, when a tow truck with “Walter’s Auto Body” painted on the side slowed to a halt in the street.

The driver rolled down his window and hollered, “Hey, you with the insurance company? I got that car in my lot, if you want to take a look at it.”

It briefly occurred to me to say, Yes, I’m with State Farm, tell me everything. Except, of course, if the bosses at The Eagle-Examiner heard I had done it, they’d fire me before they even hired me: it’s unethical for reporters to misidentify themselves. So I trotted over to his truck and said, “Actually, I’m here doing a story for The Eagle-Examiner. Mind if I have a look at the car, anyway?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said, then gestured to the other side of the street. “It’s right over there. You can see it from here.”

Sure enough, across the street and mid-way down the block, I could see Walter’s Auto Body. And there, hiding in plain sight, was a black Lexus with a seriously mangled front end. I could see the crease where building had met car. The front bumper was nowhere to be seen. The hood was crumpled about halfway up. The windshield no longer existed. It was clear that while a little bit of the energy of the collision had gone into knocking out a chunk of the go-go bar, most of it had transferred into the car.

“Is it totaled?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet. Takes a lot to total a new Lexus. But I don’t even know if I’m working on the thing. The police called and asked me to tow it. I haven’t heard from the owner.”

Which meant it was possible the tow truck driver didn’t know who the owner was. That was a break for me, to finally get a source who wouldn’t be worried about angering the mighty Lenny Ryan.

“Did you see the accident?” I asked.

“No, but I heard it. It was loud. I thought a truck dropped a load or something. It was a nasty hit. I just hope whoever was driving it is okay.”

I collected the guy’s name and tried to pump some other information out of him, but he didn’t have much for me.

“Did you see the driver?” I asked.

“No, just the ambulance. It got here pretty quick and carted the guy off.”

“Where would an ambulance around here take someone?”

“It was from Carteret Rescue Squad. Unless you tell ‘em otherwise, they take you to Robert Wood Johnson.”

I would probably have to call Robert Wood Johnson but, as a rule, hospitals are worthless to reporters. Ever since the invention of this infernal thing called HIPAA – the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which includes privacy regulations that are the absolute bane of the Fourth Estate – hospitals had become virtual black holes of information: nothing, not even light itself, escapes.

As such, I knew what little time I had left would be wasted there. No, given the apparent reluctance of secondary sources, I had to go to the home of the man himself. Maybe he had been treated and released. Maybe there would be a relative who could tell me what happened. Maybe a concerned neighbor would be dropping off a casserole. Something.

I phoned Tina en route to Clark, exchanging what shreds of information I had gotten for an address and directions to the domicile of Leonard R. Ryan. When I arrived at his nicely appointed home – two stories, three garages – and knocked on the door, I was surprised to see it opened by a tall, smiling, silver-haired gentleman.

“May I help you?” he said, calmly.

“Good evening, Senator,” I said, taking an educated guess this was the man himself and not his twin brother. “I’m Carter Ross. I’m doing a story for The Eagle-Examiner about your accident.”

The Senator smiled pleasantly and, without a hitch, replied, “I think it’s best I not comment. Let’s leave it to the police.”

He wasn’t drunk – or, if he had been at 5 o’clock, he had sobered up in a hurry. He wasn’t high, either. He was as unruffled as if he had just come away from a day at the spa.

“With all due respect, Senator, the police know who you are,” I said. “They don’t want to risk saying the wrong thing, so they’re not saying anything.”

He smiled again. “Well, far be it from me to second guess the police. You’ll have to put me down as a no comment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, tonight is my anniversary and my wife and I are getting ready to go out to dinner.”

Lenny Ryan gripped the door and began pushing it in the direction of my face, which I wasn’t about to let happen. I couldn’t walk away from this encounter with nothing. Sal Szanto would send me packing to Pitts County with an encouraging word about how I should reapply for a job in five years, when I had a bit more seasoning. With all due respect to the fine people of Pitts County, I’d rather eat nails.

So I stuck my foot in the door.

“Look, Senator,” I said. “Here’s how this works. I have only so much time between now and when I need to start writing this thing. Either I fill that time talking to you, or I go back to Roxy’s and keep showing your picture to the dancers until one of them has some faint inkling that she may recognize you from somewhere. Then I call you, ‘Senator Ryan, described by a dancer as a frequent visitor to Roxy’s’ with every chance I get.”

I’ll give Lenny Ryan credit: his tell was very small. Just a brief grinding of his teeth. I was bluffing like hell – that go-go-bar manager wasn’t going to let me within fifty feet of his dancers – but Lenny didn’t know that. I had him.

“Young man, are you threatening me?” he said quietly.

“Senator, I would never threaten anyone. It’s unethical. But as a reporter playing fair, I feel I have an obligation to tell you what might be written about you in the paper. Don’t worry, I’ll call you to get your response. Maybe I’ll even ask Mrs. Ryan for her thoughts here on her anniversary night – for journalistic balance and all.”

He coughed gently into his right hand, then rubbed his neck for a moment.

“Well, I always do pride myself on being cooperative with the media,” he said. “So. Very well.”

He coughed again, then continued: “I was trying to drive while handling a constituent matter – finding an out-of-work father of three a job, if you must know – and I’m afraid I took my eyes off the road. The next thing I knew my car jumped the curb and crashed into the building. That the building was a gentleman’s club was, I assure you, a coincidence. I’ve never been there before. I’m just thankful no one inside was hurt. As an elected official, I ought to be held to a higher standard, and I’m afraid I set a very bad example. I’m embarrassed by my actions, and I’m going to ask the police to cite me for reckless driving. Then I’m going to plead guilty and pay my fine.”

He began closing the door again.

“Now,” he said. “I believe that’s more than enough mea culpa for you to write your story. And I’ll be sure to tell my good friend Harold Brodie the next time I see him that you’re a very determined young reporter.”

Harold Brodie was The Eagle-Examiner’s legendary executive editor. Ryan was returning my threat with one of his own: If I pushed too hard, he’d complain to Brodie. I got the hint.

“Thank you, Senator,” I said as the door closed. “Sorry for your accident. Try to enjoy the rest of your evening.”

I was sure as heck going to enjoy mine. I had stared down one of the state’s most powerful politicians and gotten him to admit to reckless driving. It would make for a good story, one that would show the editors at The Eagle-Examiner I had some serious reporting chops.

Still, something about it wasn’t quite right. One of the toughest things as a reporter is taking the known facts and intuiting what should be there, but isn’t. If you can figure it out, it’ll often point you to a flaw in your story that you otherwise couldn’t see. As I hit the sidewalk in front of the house, the flaw finally occurred to me:

Lenny Ryan had just been in a major car crash. And he didn’t have a scratch on him.

I climbed into my Nova, pointed it back in the direction of Carteret and called Tina, feeding her the Senator’s verbal self-immolation.

“Thanks, Carter,” she said when I was done. “This is terrific, really terrific. I appreciate your help. I’ve got some extra bodies in for the night shift now. We can take it from here.”

“No you can’t,” I said. “I’m not done yet. I’ll call you later with more.”

I hung up before she could dispute me. In later years, ignoring the wishes of editors – Tina, in particular – would become a fairly routine part of my life. Back then it still felt a little dangerous, especially when I was trying to convince the paper I was worth hiring.

But this wasn’t just about getting a job anymore. This was about getting a story. And there was some part of me, perhaps written in a series of A’s C’s G’s and T’s in every one of my cells, that felt compelled to figure out what it was.

It wasn’t at the hospital. That was for sure. And at this point I had a better chance of finding Sasquatch at a tanning salon than finding eyewitnesses. If anyone had seen it firsthand – and it’s not like there were a lot of pedestrians in that part of town – they’d be long gone.

That left me with one unturned stone: the Carteret Rescue Squad.

I pulled off the road just long enough to scam wireless – God Bless people who use Lynksis routers without password protection – and ascertain the Carteret Rescue Squad was housed on Leick Avenue. According to Google maps, it was near Goumba Johnny’s restaurant and something called Yeshiva Gedola. Say what you will about New Jersey, but if there’s strength in diversity, we could beat the snot out of anyone. Especially Pitts County, Pennsylvania.

The rescue squad’s headquarters was an unassuming white rectangular building with a large bay garage and room for two ambulances. It being a nice spring evening, one of the bays was open, which any good journalist takes as a standing invitation to enter.

“Can I help you?” I heard a female voice inquire.

I turned to see three people – two guys and a woman – seated around a small folding table, holding playing cards.

“Hey, sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m doing a story for The Eagle-Examiner about the man you took to Robert Wood Johnson earlier tonight? The guy who crashed his Lexus into the go-go bar?”

I purposefully didn’t say the name “Lenny Ryan” in case they were somehow unaware they had been carting a VIP. But I was treated to the same Dummy Tree look Tina had given me earlier in the night.

Finally the woman said, “We didn’t take a guy to Robert Wood Johnson.”

“You didn’t?” I said, wondering if I got the hospital wrong.

“No,” she replied. “We took a woman.”

I tried not to smile. I may or may not have succeeded. “A woman?” I asked. “You mean the driver wasn’t a distinguished-looked silver-haired gentleman?”

“No, it wasn’t that creep Lenny Ryan, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “Lenny Ryan wasn’t even there. The driver was a…how do I put it…”

She was struggling for the right words. The second guy, who hadn’t spoken yet, helped her: “It was one of the dancers.”

Now I was really having a hard time holding back my smile. Not only had I caught the righteous Senator Ryan in an outrageous lie, I had caught him with what appeared to be a stripper for a girlfriend.

“She got a name?” I asked.

“Come on, you know we can’t tell you that,” the woman said.

“But you took her to Robert Wood Johnson?”

“Sure did,” the woman said. “You can’t use our names in your story, though. We’d get in trouble.”

“Tell you what: you give me the name of the dancer, and I’ll get the whole story from her. I’d never have to mention you guys.”

The three EMT’s exchanged glances, struggling momentarily with their collective consciences, then the woman said: “Lenny Ryan has let our funding get cut three years in a row. Screw him.”

That was how I left the Carteret Rescue Squad a short time later armed with the name Jessica Martin. I knew I couldn’t use it in the newspaper yet – not without better sourcing – but I could at least use it to find her.

And the first place to look was Robert Wood Johnson Hospital. It was true that hospitals couldn’t tell you squat anymore, but there was no gag order on their family or friends, the kind of people who just might be hanging around the emergency waiting room.

I started my search outside, where a few nicotine addicts were sating their cravings, asking each person, “Excuse me, are you here for Jessica Martin?”

Then I moved inside, working slowly around the large, crowded room. If a hospital PR person got wind I was working the waiting room, fits would be thrown, security would be called and a reporter would be expelled. So I kept it quiet.

I was three-quarters of the way through when a dark-skinned Hispanic woman, who was maybe a little younger than me, said, “Yes, I’m her roommate.”

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m working on a story for The Eagle-Examiner. What’s your name?”

“Alison Coutinho,” she said, seemingly accepting that the newspaper must do stories on all car accidents and that it wasn’t at all unusual to be approached by a reporter in an emergency room.

“Is Jessica okay?” I asked.

She let her shoulders slump. “Someone from the hospital called and told me Jessie asked for me. But now that I’m here, the nurses won’t tell me anything because I’m not related.”

I somehow resisted the smartass question about how they figured that out. Alison continued: “But they did say I should stick around and give her a ride home, so that must mean she’s going to be released soon.”

I looked at Alison Coutinho, trying to figure her out. She had on jeans and a T-shirt, hardly what you would call stripper attire. And, without being unkind, I wouldn’t exactly say her figure it was suited to exotic dancing. It was what my very polite mother would call “full.”

“So how do you and Jessica know each other?”

“We go to Kean,” she said.

I’ll be damned. A stripper who really was working her way through college. And a good college, too. Kean University was a small, well-regarded liberal arts school in Union.

“And Jessie, uh…” my voice trailed off, as I tried to be delicate. “She, uh…dances…on the side?”

“I don’t blame her. She makes a lot more money than I do working at the library, that’s for sure,” Alison said. “If I had a body like she does, I’d probably dance, too.”

“Right,” I said. “And how long have she and Senator Ryan been an item?”

Alison slid back in her chair and sat more upright. “You know about that?”

I gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m a newspaper reporter, ma’am, it’s what we do.”

“Well, I’ll let Jessie tell you about that, if she wants to. That’s none of my business.”

“Fair enough. You mind if I slip out and make a quick phone call? I’ll be right back.”

I could feel my hands shaking as I dialed Tina. This was big. Huge.

Tina was, as expected, a little peeved about being hung up on. But she got over it quickly enough when I told her what I had, to the point where she was nearly as excited as I was. Still, her final edict was firm:

“We can’t skewer a prominent man’s reputation on the say-so of three unnamed sources and someone’s roommate,” she said. “You need Jessica Martin on the record, or we’ve got nothing.”

By the time I returned to the waiting room, Alison was in the midst of being joined by a tall, finely boned women with long, straight blond hair. She looked far too high class to be working at a go-go bar in Carteret, which is probably why Lenny liked her in the first place. She had a few superficial cuts on her cheeks and forehead and the beginnings of a nasty black eye, presumably from where her face had mashed into an airbag. She also had her left arm in a sling.

None of which hid the fact that she was stunning.

I’m not saying Jessica Martin’s beauty made it okay for Lenny Ryan to cheat on his wife. I’m just saying she would have made a lot of men question their marriages.

I could feel my heart pounding as I introduced myself, partly because gorgeous women had that effect on me but more because Jessica held my future as a newspaper reporter in her long, delicate fingers.

“Hi Jessie, I’m Carter Ross,” I said. “I’m really sorry about your accident. I’m doing a story about it for The Eagle-Examiner.”

Between her red eyes and runny nose, it was clear Jessie had been crying a lot already this day, and I feared my pronouncement would prompt more sniffling. Or she was getting ready to bury her purse in the side of my head. She was tough to read.

Either way, I knew this was my moment to win her over. It was brief. And there could be no mistake in what I said next. So I went for the kill:

“Lenny Ryan tells me he was trying to find a constituent a job when he lost control of his car and ran it into a building,” I said. “He told me this as he was getting ready to take his wife out for an anniversary dinner. Do you maybe want to tell me a different version of the events?”

A long-dead playwright once warned about the dangers of a woman scorned. Much has changed about the world since he made that observation, but thankfully for this reporter, the fundamentals of it have not.

“Lenny Ryan,” Jessica Martin said, “is a miserably lying worm.”

“Noted,” I said, as I pulled out my pad.

She winced as she adjusted her sling-covered left arm, then calmly said: “You know what that prick told me? He told me he loved me. He told me he was going to leave his wife for me. For six months he had been telling me that. He said he was just going to wait until after the next election, so he could do it quietly. And I believed him. Then he gave his wife a nightgown for their anniversary. A nightgown!”

“This all…this is about a nightgown?”

“Yeah. He had let me borrow his car to run an errand and I found it in the backseat. It had a note attached and everything: ‘To my darling Priscilla, Thank you for 38 wonderful years. Love, Leonard.’ It was from Victoria’s Secret. What kind of man gives his wife a Victoria’s Secret nightgown and writes a note like that if he knows he’s going to leave her?”

“So you found the nightgown in the backseat and…drove his car into a wall to get back at him?” I asked, already dreaming of the headlines that could result from this. Whether it’s Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress or O.J. Simpson’s bloody glove, a big story often needs a small image to make it pop. Mrs. Ryan’s nightgown would serve nicely in that regard.

“He loved that car. He probably loved that car more than me and his wife combined,” she said, then stopped and smiled wickedly. “The fact that I drove it into a wall was purely an accident, of course. I was just so distraught I must not have been paying attention.”

“Of course,” I concurred. “And that will be noted in whatever I write.”

“Thank you.”

“I am curious, though: Why drive it – accidentally, of course – into the go-go bar?”

“Well, you know he owns that place, right?”

For at least the third time that night, I utterly failed at tamping down a grin. “No,” I said. “I was unaware of that. And I’m pretty sure his constituents are unaware of it, too.”

“I know they are. He told me he had it hidden and that the press could never find it. He had made me a part owner and was going to let me manage it so I could stop dancing. I’ve got the paperwork in my purse. Want to see it?”

Within ten minutes we had left the hospital and found a Kinkos, where I made photocopies of all the incriminating documents I needed. Leonard Ryan was assigning a 10 percent stake in the Roxy’s Go-Go to one Jessica E. Martin.

I got Jessie’s cell phone number and a few more pertinent facts about her relationship with the Senator. It had started when the club manager showed Ryan a picture of their newest dancer, this breathtaking blond. The next thing she knew, she was the object of Lenny Ryan’s rather relentless affections – which included everything from poetry and love letters to cash and jewelry.

And, yeah, she promised to dig up some of the poetry for me in the morning. I figured this story was going to have some serious legs. It would be nice to have fresh fodder for the follow.

We parted with an exchange of cell phone numbers and promises to keep in touch, and I pushed my Nova to the very limits of its dubious engineering to make good time back to the Newark offices of The Eagle-Examiner. It was 10 by the time I arrived, and while I had already dictated most of the good stuff to Tina – who had sent it along to her rewrite guy – we had agreed I should do a write-through for the final edition, so I could put it all in my own words.

It was a writing test, all right. But it was a real one. This was my own batter, my own cake. And if I can risk mixing baking metaphors, I was going to turn it into a huge chunk of humble pie for Senator Lenny Ryan.

I was given until 11:30 to write, and I took every second before sending it over to Tina. As she read it, I don’t mind admitting I may have ogled her a little bit. She was sitting in a contorted position, doing some kind of thoroughly impossible stretch that was inspired by either modern Yoga or ancient torture. She had swept her hair up into some kind of clip, allowing me to admire a lovely little cleft where her jaw bone and neckline met. It was the kind of place I decided would require further study someday, if circumstances allowed.

“Not bad for a rookie,” she announced when she was done, shipping it over to the copy desk, which was going to slam it into the three-star edition just before it went to press.

“Thanks for all your help,” I said. “If I may say so, we made a pretty good team.”

She smiled – a broad, full-lipped, lovely smile – but followed it with, “Don’t start liking me. No journalist should want anyone to like them. It makes for bad reporting. You want someone to like you in this business? Buy a cat.”

“I thought it was, ‘If you want someone to like you, buy a dog,’” I said.

“That works for politicians in Washington, but not for reporters at this newspaper. Dogs need people to return home on a regular schedule and walk them. If you get a job here, I guarantee there’d be a lot of nights when you’d come home late to find Rover has peed the rug. Cats are a better fit for reporters.”

“Okay, I’ll get a cat,” I said. “I think I’ll name him Deadline.”

She gave me another alluring smile and we settled into chatting – the where-ya-from, how’d-ya-get-here kind of stuff. Soon, one of the clerks brought up a stack of freshly printed newspapers, making a straight line for me.

“Sal Szanto asked me to give this to you,” she said, then handed me my very own copy of the next day’s edition of The Eagle-Examiner.

It was still slightly damp. And, sure enough, it had a story stripped across the front page with my byline on it. It also had a piece of Sal Szanto’s stationery taped to it. Szanto, like most good newspapermen, apparently valued brevity. Because his note consisted of just two words:

“You’re hired.”

From

BRAD PARKS

Award-Winning author of THE NIGHTGOWN

Read on for a preview of

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

On Sale March 2012 from Minotaur Books

For three mornings, he merely observed. With a clipboard on his lap and an eye on his car’s clock, he tracked her from house to house, logging every movement. Her consistency was remarkable. She tackled the streets—and the houses on those streets—in the same order. Her time for each road never varied by more than a few minutes. Her time for each house never varied by more than a few seconds. By the end of the third morning, he felt he knew her route almost as well as she did.

And so, on the fourth morning, a Friday, he struck. He decided his best opportunity, there among the tightly packed postwar suburban houses of Bloomfield, New Jersey, was on Ridge Avenue, which seemed to have been expressly designed for a hit and run. It was long and straight and slightly downhill, which would make for easy acceleration. It was narrow and packed with parked cars, which would allow her little room to dodge him. And it was close to the Garden State Parkway, which would provide him ample opportunity to escape.

He had studied his notes the night before, memorizing the order and spacing of her stops. There were twelve houses on Ridge Avenue that subscribed to the Newark Eagle-Examiner. On the three previous mornings, she had reached the first one at 5:25, 5:24, and 5:27, respectively.

So he was ready for her at 5:26 when she rounded the corner of Ridge Avenue and started working her way down the block. The sun had not yet pushed over the horizon, but there was enough dawn that he could make out her car and the small smudge of her body as she scampered toward each front porch, dutifully delivering that day’s edition. It was just the right amount of light—too bright for the streetlights to illuminate much, too gloomy to make out a license plate—in which to commit the perfect crime.

He felt the smoothness of the steering wheel on his Cadillac Escalade, sliding his wedding ring on the wrapped leather. When she reached the midpoint of the block, he twisted the ignition key. The engine quietly came alive and the dashboard it up. The car pinged at him to fasten his seat belt, which he did. He pivoted his right foot a few times, stretching and flexing his calf like a sprinter about to settle into the starting block, and placed it on the brake pedal. Then he shifted his transmission to drive. Timing was everything. For as many mental rehearsals as he had staged, he knew real life would only give him one chance.

He peered once more into the murkiness of daybreak. When he saw the brief flash of white in her brake lights—signifying she had put her car into park—he pressed down on his accelerator, gently but firmly. His eyes briefly tracked the speedometer as it leaped from twenty-five to forty to fifty. Then he turned his attention toward his target.

She had just stepped out of her car, grasping a rolled-up newspaper in her right hand, closing the door behind her. She was too preoccupied to pay attention to the SUV hurtling toward her. Up until a quarter second before impact, he was just another car going a little too fast down a residential street in too crowded New Jersey—hardly unusual in a part of the country where everyone was always in a hurry.

She didn’t notice him until his grill plate was practically on top of her sternum. He was going at least seventy by that point. She had no chance to get out of the way.

That’s when she rewarded him with the look that briefly flashed in his headlights—total shock mixed with complete misunderstanding mixed with utter horror. In the nanoseconds that stretched out before he made contact, his only wish was that she could know this was no accident, that he was the driver and that she was getting what she deserved. Tussle with me, will you, bitch? he wanted to scream as his bumper crushed into her side.

He heard the impact, a solid chunk, but didn’t really feel it. There was nothing to feel. The force of his car—all that mass times all that velocity—was so much greater than her hundred ten pounds of squishy humanity. Her body flew forward, directly into the path of the still-accelerating SUV. He did not even tap the brake pedal as he drove over her, his suspension absorbing the jolt as if she had been nothing more than a worn speed bump.

When he reached the end of the block, he allowed himself one glance in the rearview mirror, where he could see her crumpled form in the middle of the street. Then he concentrated on his getaway.

The number one mistake most hit-and-run drivers make is jamming on the brakes—the squealing alerts would-be eyewitnesses. The second mistake is continuing to drive like maniacs after leaving the scene.

He was not going to commit either blunder. He gradually slowed to a reasonable speed, following all posted signs as he put distance between himself and that bloody, lifeless heap. Eventually, he slid onto the Garden State Parkway, joining that unending stream of fast moving traffic, reveling in its well-traveled anonymity.

Chapter One

To anyone who says newspapers only print bad news, I say: read the obituaries.

For the most part, obits are the uplifting stories of people who led long and full lives, enriched communities with their accomplishments, died at peace with the world, and left behind many loving relatives. And sure, the subjects of these articles have to be more than just slightly dead in order to appear in our pages—that part is, admittedly, a bit of a buzz-kill. But otherwise, obits are some of the happiest news we print.

My paper, the Newark Eagle-Examiner—New Jersey’s largest and most respected news-gathering and content-producing agency—organizes its obits alphabetically, last name first, followed by the deceased’s town and age. And I defy anyone, even the most jaded cynic, to read one day’s worth of obits without feeling at least a little bit better about the state of the world.

Sometimes all you have to do is read one letter’s worth—like, say, the m’s. You start with a guy like Milazzo, Vincent, of Elizabeth, 92, the high school football star who served his country in World War II then worked his way up to foreman at a lawnmower parts manufacturer before enjoying a long retirement. You work your way to Monastyrly, Jane C., of Wharton, 81, the beloved mother of four, grandmother of ten, and great-grandmother of eight who was an avid gardener and won the Wharton Elks Club pie-baking contest five times. Then you finish with Muster, Edward L., of Maplewood, 77, the son of South Carolina sharecroppers who earned scholarships to college and law school, set up his own practice, and became the first black treasurer of the Essex County Bar Association.

All the wrinkles of their days on this planet have been smoothed away and turned into one seamless narrative. All their trials and struggles have taken on the aura of parable. All their successes have been magnified while their failures have been forgotten.

And by the time they “passed on”—or “made their transition” or “entered into eternal rest” or any of those other wonderful euphemisms for the Long Dirt Nap—they seemed to have achieved some kind of understanding of why they walked this planet in the first place.

Or at least that’s how I like to imagine it.

There’s also something about obits that, as an unrepentant newspaperman, I find comforting. Over the past dozen years or so, my business has ceded its dominance in any number of areas—classified advertising, national and international news, sports scores, and so on—to the Internet. But we still have a monopoly on obits. So while you can go anywhere to find out if the Yankees won, you have to come to us to learn if your neighbor is still breathing. It makes the obit pages a throwback to a better day for newspapers, one part of a crumbling industry that has somehow held strong. For me, it’s just one more reason to love them.

Some folks, especially the older ones, scan the obits each day to see if anyone they know has died. Me? I’m only thirty-two. So hopefully it will be a good fifty years or so until anyone has to read about Ross, Carter, of Bloomfield. And it will probably be forty years until my high school classmates start popping up with any regularity.

In the meantime, I read them strictly for the inspiration.

So there I was one Monday morning in July, sitting at my desk against the far wall of the Eagle-Examiner newsroom in Newark, getting my daily dose of good news—once again, from the m’s—when my eyes began scanning the entry for Marino, Nancy B., of Bloomfield, 42.

I read on:

Nancy B. Marino, 42, of Bloomfield died suddenly on Friday, July 8.

Born in Newark, Nancy was raised in Belleville and graduated from Belleville High School. She was a popular midday waitress at the State Street Grill in Bloomfield. Nancy also had one of the largest delivery routes in the Newark Eagle-Examiner circulation area and was proud to serve as a shop steward in the International Federation of Information Workers, Local 117.

She is survived by her mother, Mrs. Anthony J. Marino of Belleville; two older sisters, Anne Marino McCaffrey of Maplewood and Jeanne Nygard of Berkeley, Calif.; and many other friends and relatives.

Visitation will be held today from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home, 332 State Street, Bloomfield. A Funeral Mass will be offered Thursday at 10 a.m. at St. Peter RC Church, Belleville. Interment will be at St. Peter Parish Cemetery following the service.

In lieu of flowers, please make a donation in Nancy’s name to the IFIW–Local 117 Scholarship Fund, 744 Broad St., Newark, N.J. 07102.

Even though we were employed by the same newspaper, I didn’t know Nancy Marino. The Eagle-Examiner has hundreds of carriers, all of whom work at a time of day when I try to keep my eyelids shuttered.

But I have enormous respect for the work she and her colleagues do. The fact is, I could spend months uncovering the most dastardly wrongdoing then write the most brilliant story possible, but we still rely on the yeoman paper carrier to get it to the bulk of our readers. That’s right: even in this supposedly all-digit era, our circulation numbers tell us the majority of our daily readers still digest their Eagle-Examiner in analog form.

So every morning when I stumble to my door and grab that day’s edition—always one of life’s small pleasures, especially when it contains one of those stories I busted a spleen to get—I receive a little reminder that someone else at the paper, someone like Nancy Marino, takes her job just as seriously as I do.

I leaned back in my chair and considered what I had just read. In obit parlance, “died suddenly” was usually code for “heart attack.” But that didn’t seem to fit. A just barely middle-aged woman who delivered newspapers and waited tables was probably in fairly good shape. Something had taken Nancy Marino before her time and the nosy reporter in me was curious as to what.

By the time I was done reading her obit a second time, I had concluded that the newspaper she had once faithfully delivered ought to do something more to memorialize her passing. Most of our obits are relatively short items, written by funeral home directors, who are following an established formula. But each day, our newspaper picks one person and expounds on their living and dying in a full-length article. Sometimes it’s a distinguished citizen. Sometimes it’s a person who achieved local fame at some point, for reasons good or ill.

Sometimes it’s a Nancy Marino, an ordinary person who spent her life serving others—whether it was with newspapers or coffee refills—and whose presence had graced the world for far too brief a time.

After eight years with the Eagle-Examiner, I had reached the stage in my career where I was afforded a fair amount of latitude to write what I wanted. Sure, I received the occasional assignment, but otherwise I was left to my own devices. It was a trust I gained the hard way. After earning a job at the paper thanks to a philandering state senator named Lenny Ryan—his girlfriend crashed his car into a go-go bar at what turned out to be a very opportune moment for my career—I put in several years’ hard time in a suburban bureau. After working my way to the main city newsroom, I finagled a coveted spot on our investigations team, where I had won the right to pursue the things that interested me.

Not that it meant I had some kind of blank check. Yes, I could write what I wanted. But if I actually wanted it to run in the newspaper, I had to make sure I cleared it with my editor. And there, my life had recently become a little more complicated. My previous editor had been Sal Szanto, the assistant managing editor for local news and a gruff old-time newsman. We had forged a relatively easy understanding: he had high standards, and as long as I worked tirelessly to meet them, we got along famously.

Unfortunately, Sal had been “invited” (read: forced) to take a buyout in the latest Eagle-Examiner herd culling. In the consideration of the fiscally constipated bean counters who had been given full reign over our newspaper, Sal was “overpaid” (read: fairly compensated). His long experience and many contributions to quality journalism actually counted against him, because he accrued so many raises during the good years. Now, with the good years long gone, he was rewarded with a one-way trip to early and unwanted retirement.

His replacement was Tina Thompson, the former city editor and my former…something. I would say “girlfriend,” but that wasn’t right, because she made it clear to me she wasn’t in it for that. I would say “lover,” but that was also inaccurate, because we never quite did that, either.

My interest in Tina was that, in addition to being fun, smart, and quick-witted—in a feisty way that always kept me honest—she’s quite easy to look at, with never-ending legs, toned arms, curly brown hair, and eyes that tease and smile and glint all at the same time.

Her interest in me was more…chromosomal. Tina, whose age might be best described as forty-minus-one, is keen on trying motherhood. But she doesn’t want to bother with the kind of pesky annoyances some women take prior to childbirth—meeting a man, courting him, perhaps even marrying him. Tina had explained to me, quite matter-of-factly, that she long ago abandoned the idea of actually having feelings for the opposite sex. She claimed her approach was now more practical. She was looking for a tall, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered man of above average intelligence, all in the hopes he would pass on some of those traits to her yet-to-be-conceived child. As I possessed these characteristics, I had an open invitation to jump into her bed three days out of every twenty-eight.

Still, I had never taken her up on the offer. For whatever you may read about the male animal, I don’t believe in emotionless sex—and, even if I did, I’m quite sure I would find it somewhat less interesting than a game of one-on-one basketball. Plus, I never wanted to have to tell my son that his mother chose me primarily for my nucleotides.

Tina’s promotion had alleviated that possibility, at least for the time being. Newspaper policy dictated an editor couldn’t sleep with one of her reporters, even if it was strictly for reproductive purposes. So Tina had gone elsewhere in her search for Mr. Right Genome.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that Tina’s claims to romantic imperviousness were a false front, and that behind them was a woman who really did want to be loved, just like any other human being. And, if I was being honest with myself, I regretted that we hadn’t at least provided ourselves a chance to figure out what we could be together—a failure I hoped to rectify at some point in the future.

As I slid into her office with a copy of Nancy Marino’s obituary in my hand, those unresolved feelings were floating around, somewhere above her desk but below the fluorescent lights.

“Hey, got a second?” I said.

Tina was a yoga fanatic and could usually be found sitting in one contortionist position or another. This time, she had a knee drawn up, with one arm wrapped around it and another stretched at an odd angle while she read something on her computer screen. Call it an Ashtanga Pixel Salutation.

“Please tell me you have a big story for me,” she said, already looking defeated by the day. “If Lester runs another floater photo of some bikini-clad, Snooki-wannabe bimbo on the pretense of it being a slow news day, I’m taking a baseball bat to the morning meeting.”

I grinned. Lester Palenski, our photo editor, was a notorious pervert who dedicated no small amount of resources to documenting the young, female population that migrated toward the Jersey Shore at this time of year.

“Well, it’s a story. Maybe not a big story. But it’s one I’d really like to do,” I said, then slid the obit page at her. “Read Marino comma Nancy.”

Tina moved her attention to the newspaper, frowning as she scanned it.

“You want to write a story about a dead waitress?” she asked.

“A waitress and a newspaper delivery person, yeah.”

“What killed her?”

“Don’t know.”

I grabbed the obit from her desk as she narrowed her eyes at my mouth.

“Were you sleeping with her?”

“Tina! Have some respect for the dead!”

“Well, were you?”

“Oh, yeah, I was shagging her rotten,” I said. “I’d throw a quick one in her every morning. Her customers complained their papers were late if I took more than five minutes so it was always wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”

Tina often claimed I had certain tells when I was lying, though she would never say what they were. For a while I tried sticking to the truth, but it just made me feel even more self-conscious. Since she became my editor, I had changed course and lied to her whenever possible. She knew this, of course. But I had to keep her off balance somehow.

She scrutinized me for a moment then said, “Okay, so you didn’t know her. Why do you want to write about her again?”

“I don’t know. It would just be a nice story about the kind of everyday person you don’t miss until she’s gone—call it a Fanfare for the Common Woman.”

“All right there, Aaron Copland, knock yourself out,” Tina said. “What killed her, anyway? Anything good?”

Only a newspaper editor would describe a cause of death as potentially being “good.” Only a newspaper reporter would know exactly what she meant by it.

“Don’t know yet. I’m sort of curious about that, actually.”

“Well, unless she died of some exotic and heretofore undiscovered strain of swine flu, you’re not going to get more than sixteen on this. So don’t go crazy and file forty or anything.”

We measure stories in column inches, and the Incredible Shrinking newspaper had a lot less of them than it once did—especially in the middle of July, the absolute doldrums of the news calendar. It was a bit of a problem for me, as I was notorious for writing like we still published a paper as thick as a phone book every day.

“I won’t go so much as a word over budget,” I promised.

“How many times do I have to tell you,” she said, as I departed her office. “I know when you’re lying.”

There’s no easier way to report a story about the newly dead than to attend a service in their honor. You have to be somewhat discreet—leaning on the casket, flipping open your notebook, and asking for comment as people pass by is considered a tad gauche. But if you show the proper respect and make it clear you’re just there to write a few kind words about the deceased, you generally get a line of people waiting to chat with you. It’s cathartic for the aggrieved and it gives you everything you need to write a glowing tribute.

My trip to Bloomfield for Nancy’s visitation included a change-of-clothing pit stop at my house, which was not far from the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home. Then again, since Bloomfield is only about five miles square, more or less everything in town is not far.

On a map, Bloomfield looks like a bowling alley—a long, narrow chunk of land with the Garden State Parkway running through the middle of it. The town was carved away from Newark sometime in the early 1800s and now serves as the unofficial dividing line between the parts of New Jersey that scare white people and the parts that don’t. To the north and west are well-to-do towns like Montclair and Glen Ridge, where people are mostly concerned about sending their children on to their first choice four-year college. To the south and east are rough-edged cities like Newark and East Orange, where people are mostly concerned about their children getting shot.

In the middle is Bloomfield, which doesn’t always know what to make of itself. Case in point: when you get off at the Bloomfield exit, you see a BMW dealership on one side of the street and a check-cashing place on the other.

It’s not quite urban, inasmuch as there are no high-rise buildings; yet it’s not quite suburban, either, inasmuch as the houses are packed together so closely you tend to know if your neighbor has a cold because you can hear the sneezing.

The citizenry consists of some young professionals like me, some blue-collar folks, some senior citizens, and a lot of guys named either Tony or Vinnie who like to pretend The Sopranos was really about them.

The Realtors trumpet the town’s diversity because otherwise they’d have to talk about the property taxes, which are levied by the local chapter of the Barbary Pirates. I pay $11,000 a year in tribute, in exchange for which I am spared from having to walk the plank and enjoy curbside leaf pickup.

Oh, and just to get the New-Jersey-What-Exit-thing out of the way: 148 off the parkway.

I pulled into my driveway and waved to my neighbor, Constance, who was watering her lawn. Constance lives alone, having divorced Mr. Constance long ago. She spends a lot of time watering her lawn. She also prunes her roses, weeds and reweeds her flower beds—not that they have any in them—and generally makes my yard look like it is tended by wild rabbits.

Constance is, at most, sixty-five. But she has one of those old-lady perms that ages her appearance a bit. She has two grown children who live in Colorado (I think) and Florida (perhaps), but have not seen fit to give her any grandchildren. I think she plans to move in with whichever one spawns first, which is perhaps part of what dampens their urge to procreate. But, in the meantime, she likes to keep an eye on the neighborhood and inform people about things they already know, starting conversations with, “You came back late last night” or “You were visited by a lady friend.” (Though, sadly, I haven’t had many of those lately).

My house is a tidy, two-bedroom ranch that is perfect for an on-the-go bachelor like myself: one bedroom for me and one bedroom for my extraneous stuff, so the rest of the place can stay relatively uncluttered in the event I do get to entertain a member of the fairer sex. Or at least that’s the theory. Most of the time, I share my home with just one other living creature, a black-and-white domestic short-haired cat named Deadline.

Granted, it’s not always readily apparent Deadline actually is living. The act of sleeping all night exhausts him so much he can only compensate for it by sleeping all day. He has some brief periods of activity in the late morning and early evening, during which time he mostly eats and uses the litter box. Then it’s straight back to dreamland. Some people describe their cats as curious or playful or affectionate. Mine is best described as dormant.

“Don’t let me wake you,” I said as I slipped into my bedroom, where Deadline was snoozing on the radiator cover by the window, bathed in sunlight.

I opened the door to my closet and selected a charcoal gray suit. Not that it was much of a choice. I only own one suit, which is still one more than a lot of newspaper reporters. I bought it my senior year at Amherst College for job interviews. Now that there are no jobs left in print journalism, I use it exclusively for weddings and funerals. I couldn’t begin to count how many people that suit has married or buried.

I dressed quickly. It helped I had already been wearing my usual reporter uniform, which included a white shirt and half-Windsor knotted tie. It’s a bit formal by the standards of my profession, which went business casual sometime around the invention of printed type and slowly degraded from there. I get teased by my colleagues for my stodgy attire, but I don’t think that’s fair. I mean, hey, sometimes I wear a blue shirt. Sometimes it even has stripes.

So, yeah, my wardrobe isn’t especially hip. But neither am I. Over the years, I have resisted the flat-front pant revolution, the slip-on shoe insurrection, the hair product revolt, and a host of other rebellious fashion movements I felt would take me farther away from what I really am: an upstanding, prep-school-educated, clean-shaven WASP with freshly cut side-parted hair and absolutely no interest in changing styles.

“Try to keep it down,” I told Deadline as I departed. “I don’t want the neighbors calling in a noise complaint on you.”

Deadline signaled his acknowledgment by keeping his eyes screwed shut and his body unmoving. “Good boy,” I said. I went back outside to my car, a five-year-old Chevy Malibu that often turns women’s heads—but sadly, only because it keeps getting holes in the exhaust line. I’ve been told that driving an aging Malibu isn’t good for my “image,” to which I usually have two responses: one, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on a car in a place like New Jersey, because even if the tailgaters don’t get you, the potholes will; and, two, people who judge others based on what car they drive are idiots.

It took four minutes to get to the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home, a pristine white Victorian with immaculate landscaping. I parked on the street because the lot behind the building was already full of cars driven by people who had come to pay their last respects to Nancy B. Marino.

If you want good attendance at your funeral, die young. Almost everyone you ever knew is still alive and mobile enough to make it out. It’s only the people who hang on to ninety or one hundred—and outlive their would-be funeral audience—who get the lousy crowds.

As such, the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home had put Nancy in the largest of their three viewing rooms, and it still wasn’t big enough. Some of the mourners sat in the rows of white folding chairs set up in the middle of the room. Others stood around the edges. Still more spilled outside into the lobby and down the main hallway that split the center of the building.

I’m sure some of them were fellow employees of the Eagle-Examiner, but I’d have little chance of knowing them—the distribution arm of our operation is so separate from the newsroom, they might as well be different companies. The Belleville High School Class of 1987 also appeared to be well represented, as was the staff of the State Street Grill. It was, all in all, a nice cross section of regular folks from Essex County, New Jersey.

Really, there was only one person in the crowd who didn’t fit. He was a tall, patrician-looking man standing self-consciously against the far wall, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. From his perfectly coiffed ash-blond hair to his waxy pale skin to his insincere blue eyes, I’d know him anywhere: Gary A. Jackman, the not-so-esteemed publisher of the Newark Eagle-Examiner.

It was a nice gesture for him to show up, and I might have even given him credit for it if I didn’t otherwise detest the man. He had come to us from a chain of smaller papers in Ohio or Michigan or something similarly Midwestern. His lone qualification for the job appeared to be that he knew how to cut a budget better than anyone else. He did not have a background in newspapers before that—I think he operated a national chain of sweatshops, or something like that—and I held it against him every chance I got.

In the newsroom, where he was universally despised, he was known by a variety of nicknames. The features desk, with its appreciation of alliteration and poetry, called him “Greedy Gary” or “Scary Gary.” In sports, where the locker room influence tends to make them a little crude, he was “Jackoff.” In my corner of the newsroom, where we’re more direct about things, he was “Jackass.”

In the two years he had been at the paper, he had made it clear to us that he cared deeply about how much money we spent but very little about anything else we did—those forgettable things like telling great stories, uncovering grave injustices, or holding powerful people accountable for their actions. He actually admitted he did not read the newspaper each day, an unforgivable sin in the minds of the people who toiled so assiduously to produce it. Yet his most despicable act may have been that, at a time when he was sacking editors and reporters with lunatic glee, he kept three secretaries. What he did to occupy them was a source of constant speculation.

His personal appearance only made him easier to dislike. He was perhaps best described as foppish, with his expensively tailored clothes, monogrammed cuff links, and—his personal calling card—a predilection for pocket squares. It was also rumored, though never confirmed, that he had a manicurist come into the office once a week to keep his nails trim, as if he couldn’t just buy nail clippers like everyone else.

As I approached him from the other side of the room, he had those well-manicured hands crossed in front of him. He was talking with a man who had stubbornly refused to give in to his male-pattern baldness, with one of the worst comb-overs I had ever witnessed: the piece of hair stretched across his shiny head had come loose and was sticking up and to the left, sort of like a single horn on a lopsided unicorn.

Jackman and the unicorn were having a rather animated conversation—correction: the unicorn was animated, while Jackman just seemed to be tolerating him—and I observed from a distance. The unicorn kept gesturing broadly, occasionally pointing a finger at Jackman, like he was accusing him of something dastardly. Maybe he didn’t like pocket squares? Tough to tell.

I finally got curious as to what had the guy overstimulated, so I closed to within eavesdropping range. But I was too late. All I heard was Jackman end the conversation with, “…I’m sorry, this just isn’t the time or place. We’ll have to talk later. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Jackman rather pointedly turned his body away from the unicorn, who forced out an exasperated sigh then walked in the opposite direction. A small part of me wondered, Not the time or place for…what exactly? Was the unicorn asking Jackass to dance the polka? But a much larger part of me had a story to write and a deadline to respect. I gave Jackman a moment or two to clear his head, then sidled up to him.

“Mr. Jackman, Carter Ross, we’ve met before,” I said in a low voice, extending my right hand. He looked at me disdainfully and did not uncross his hands, leaving my arm hanging in the air. We had met before, on several occasions. He had even presented me an award for outstanding reporting once. Yet he was examining me like I was something that fell out the back end of one of his foxhunting dogs.

“I’m doing a feature obit about Nancy Marino for tomorrow’s paper and was hoping I could get a quick quote from you,” I continued, undeterred by his aloofness. “Could you just say a quick word or two about her?”

Having tossed him the mushiest of all softballs, I slid my note pad out of my pocket to capture whatever dribbled out of his mouth next.

“If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to call my secretary and set up an appointment,” he said in a cool, clipped tone.

During my long career in journalism, which began when I was a freshman in high school and was now nearing twenty years, I had been blown off for interviews plenty of times, and by people far more important than Jackass. But I had never been blown off by someone who, at least in theory, was supposed to be on the same team as me. I did my very best to keep my voice down and remind myself that the man had the authority to fire me on a whim.

“Sir, with all due respect, this will just take a minute or two,” I said. “I’m sure it would mean a lot to the family to have the publisher saying something nice about someone who worked very hard for our newspaper.”

I stressed the “our newspaper” part, but it did not seem to move him.

“Call my secretary,” he said, then turned his back on me and started walking to another part of the room for no other reason than to get away from me.

“Which one of the three?” I shot back, a little louder than was perhaps needed.

“Just call my secretary,” he said again.

I frowned. I’m a big boy. I’ve been spurned before and will be spurned again. It was just annoying that it would have taken this man absolutely no effort to say something that would comfort a grieving family, but he still wouldn’t do it. He had taken perhaps three more steps when I momentarily lost my filter.

“What a douche bag,” I said, in a voice I hoped was loud enough so he could hear it. But he kept walking. My childish insult was lost in the din.

It’s a peculiar thing, being a reporter at a wake. Because you have absolutely no reason to be sad—after all, you’re the only one in the room who never knew the guest of honor—and yet, hanging around a bunch of people in mourning, you’re something less than human if you don’t start feeling a little melancholy, too. Empathy is a burden that way. You start to feel like you actually did know the deceased. And it wasn’t long until Nancy—if you’ll pardon the phrase—started coming alive to me.

The family had assembled some photos of Nancy, who was petite and, while not a knockout by any means, pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way—or at least she was the girl next door if you happened to live in an Italian neighborhood. She had olive skin, brown eyes, dark hair, a nice smile full of white teeth.

The pictures, which had been mounted on poster board and displayed on easels, basically told Nancy’s life story. There was Nancy as a carefree kid at the Jersey Shore, with skinned knees and a summertime tan; Nancy at her first communion, looking like the starch in her white dress was chafing her very soul; Nancy with a face full of braces, wearing a softball uniform that bore the name of a local podiatrist; Nancy as a teenager with a head full of eighties Jersey hair, teased up to elevations that could only be described as alpine; Nancy at her graduation, trying to act like a woman in a cap and gown but still looking like a kid.

After high school, there were fewer photos. It was never Nancy alone after that, just Nancy with family at holiday time, the obligatory Thanksgiving-and-Christmas shots. There wasn’t a single picture of her waitressing or delivering newspapers, the things she spent the majority of her time doing. No one had deemed those activities important or noteworthy enough to permanently record. Such was the life of the common woman.

I pulled my eyes away from the photos and focused on the rest of the room. Nancy’s family was up front, accepting a stream of visitors by the casket, a highly polished—and conspicuously closed—oak-colored box adorned with large sprays of flowers on either side. A closed casket meant one of two things: a long, slow wasting disease that left the deceased withered beyond repair; or a quick, violent end that left the deceased shattered beyond recognition.

Whichever it was, it had obviously taken a toll on the mother. She was sitting in the front row, looking frail and aged. I wondered how many of the years on her face had been applied in the last few days. According to the obituary, forty-two-year-old Nancy was her youngest. You never expect to bury any of your children, much less your baby.

Seated to the left of Mrs. Marino was another woman, and I could guess it was one of Nancy’s sisters. She was dabbing her face with a tissue and swaying gently to some unheard music while she clutched her mother’s hand, patting it occasionally. I surreptitiously slid Nancy’s obituary out of my pocket to refresh my memory with the names of the survivors and immediately pegged this one as Jeanne Nygard, the sister who now lived in California. She had long, salt-and-pepper hair tied into a braid; wore a loose, floor-length floral-print dress; and had those photochromic glasses that turn darker in sunlight, but still appeared to be semi-shaded even indoors. Then there were her feet. Anyone who wears Birkenstocks to a funeral home has to be from Berkeley.

The other sister, Anne Marino McCaffrey, was standing, and had assigned herself the job of greeting each successive group of mourners as they came to pay their respects. She was the take-charge sister, the strong one who was holding it together because neither her devastated mother nor her hippie sister were capable of playing that role. She looked businesslike in a black skirt suit and white blouse, with nude hose and sensible pumps. Her hair was short, dark, and bobbed. The three women shared a certain family resemblance, with dark features and curved noses that left little doubt about their Mediterranean ancestry.

The line continued to shuffle forward. Each successive group offered the obligatory hugs and handshakes, paused to stumble over a few kind words, then moved on, relieved to be done with the whole discomfiting thing.

I waited for a slight break in the action then made my move, aiming for take-charge Anne. I introduced myself, finishing with, “I’m writing a story about Nancy for tomorrow’s paper.”

The woman considered me for an instant, then greeted me with all the warmth of gazpacho.

“Thank you, but we’re not interested,” she said, articulating every consonant so there was no misunderstanding. It took me a second to register that I was being blown off again—and again by someone who should have been quite happy to speak with me. I was beginning to wonder if perhaps, on my drive over to the funeral home, I had developed a pronounced case of leprosy. Was my ear falling off or something?

“Maybe I didn’t explain it right,” I said, feeling off balance. “I’m writing a feature obit, which is—”

“We don’t want any more written about the accident, thank you,” she interrupted.

Accident. Of course. That explained the closed casket and, depending on the circumstances, her reluctance to chat with me.

“I’m sorry, I have to apologize, I don’t know about any accident,” I said.

This seemed to surprise her. She studied me for a moment and I returned her gaze. Most people—Tina Thompson notwithstanding—tell me I have an honest face. And since I really was telling the truth, I let my earnest blue eyes do the convincing.

“You don’t?” she asked.

I swiveled my head left-right-left. She took four short steps and bent down, reaching under a chair to pick up her purse. She twisted open a small clasp, pulled out a newspaper clipping that had been folded in half and handed it to me.

It turned out to be a six-inch brief from Saturday’s newspaper. And before I could even begin to read the article, the headline told me most of what I needed to know:

“BLOOMFIELD POLICE INVESTIGATE HIT AND RUN.”

It only took a few more seconds to read the story and pull away the pertinent details. Nancy Marino had been struck by a speeding car while delivering newspapers on Ridge Avenue early Friday morning. An anonymous caller had tipped off the police about the accident but had provided no further details. The Bloomfield Police Department was asking anyone with information to call their tips line, which is cop speak for, “Yeah, we got nothing.”

I was embarrassed I hadn’t seen the story the first time around. Sure, it was a mere six-inch brief buried in the guts of the Saturday paper—an easily ignored spot in our least circulated edition of the week—but that didn’t excuse my ignorance. A reporter doesn’t have to know everything, but he ought to know what’s written in his own newspaper.

Now I understood why Publisher Jackass didn’t want me quoting him. Nancy was killed in the line of duty. He was worried about the paper’s exposure to a lawsuit and feared if he said anything it might be used against him later.

My cynical side—a not insubstantial part of any newspaper reporter—also wondered if that’s why we hadn’t written a bigger story about it. Wrongful-death lawyers read the newspaper like everyone else. An unknown hit-and-run driver is impossible to sue and probably wouldn’t be worth much even if you could find him. But the state’s largest newspaper is a juicy target, one with considerable assets.

All it would take was some lawyer making the argument that because the paper didn’t provide reflective vests for its carriers—or didn’t give them proper training in how to dodge oncoming traffic, or didn’t give them car-repellent deodorant, or whatever—the paper was therefore legally responsible for Nancy’s death. That would open up the possibility of damages for pain and suffering, loss of survivorship comfort, and a host of other things that juries just loved to reward suffering families. Jackass didn’t want any more attention given to this than was absolutely necessary.

At least in theory, the publisher has no say over how the paper covers the news—a division we take so seriously we refer to it as the separation of church and state. But Harold Brodie, the seventy-something executive editor who had run the Eagle-Examiner newsroom for the last quarter century, was inexplicably deferential to Gary Jackman. It was a curious thing, something most of us wrote off as a sign the old man’s Corn Flakes were going a bit soggy. Nevertheless, if Jackass were to make a phone call and apply some gentle pressure…well, let’s just say that while there’s separation of church and state, priests still tend to listen when they get phone calls from congressmen.

I refolded the clipping and handed it back to Nancy’s sister.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”

Anne kept her head bent as she stowed the piece of paper in her purse. I glanced over at Mrs. Marino and sister Jeanne, who was still moving her head back and forth to some disjointed rhythm, one she alone could hear. They were receiving visitors and seemed to be paying no attention to either of us. I turned back to Anne.

“I really just want to write a tribute to Nancy. From reading the obit, she struck me as the kind of hardworking person most folks probably don’t appreciate until they’re gone.”

The sister looked up from her purse, her eyes suddenly moist.

“Nancy hadn’t missed a day of work in nineteen years,” she said, then bit her lower lip. The unflappable sister was struggling to keep her composure.

Not wanting to push her over the edge, I eased back on the emotional throttle.

“You’re her sister, yes?” I said.

“I’m Anne McCaffrey, yes.” She blinked a few times, glanced up at the ceiling for a second, then looked back at me. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time. This has just been so difficult for…my mother.”

“I understand. And I didn’t mean to be a bother.”

“You’re just doing your job.”

“No, actually, this isn’t my job,” I corrected her. “Normally I’m an investigative reporter. This is something I’m doing on my own initiative. If you really don’t want a story done, I’ll walk away right now. Otherwise, I’d like to talk to the people here and get them to say some good things about your sister, which I’m sure won’t be difficult. Would that be okay?”

Anne actually smiled for the first time.

“We’d really like that,” she said. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Carter Ross. Let me give you a card,” I said, reaching into my back pocket for my wallet. I was just pulling out one of my business cards when Nancy’s other sister—who, as far as I knew, hadn’t been following our conversation—suddenly spoke up.

“I’d like one, too,” Jeanne said.

I looked at the woman, with her semi-dark glasses and groovy, Berkeleyesque head swaying. Suddenly, I recognized she wasn’t dancing to any music. She had some kind of neurological disease—Parkinson’s, perhaps—which meant she had little control over her head’s wobbling. The movement made her hard to focus on, and I realized my attempts to do so might create the impression I was staring.

“I’d like a card, too,” she said again, reaching out a trembling hand.

“Jeanne, no,” Anne said, gently but firmly.

“I’m her sister, too, and I have a right to say what I want to the reporter,” Jeanne said. Her voice had a monotone quality to it—another Parkinson’s symptom?—yet she was clearly growing agitated, and her volume was rising to indicate it.

“I know you have a right,” Anne said, making her tone softer as Jeanne’s got louder. “I’m not here to debate your rights.”

“She’s a lawyer, she’s always debating people’s rights,” Jeanne told me, spitting out “lawyer” in a way that made it clear she wasn’t a friend to the American Bar Association. “Could I have your card, please?”

I acquiesced, if only because I wanted her to be able to put her hand down—the longer she kept it outstretched, the more it shook. Anne looked disapprovingly at the transaction. The family dynamic was becoming clear to me: there was Anne, the oldest sister, the controller, always trying to maintain order; Jeanne, the middle sister, the free spirit, trying to keep things disorderly; and Nancy, the youngest sister, the worker bee, who had probably just tried to stay out of the way and keep the peace.

“Jeanne, I don’t know if it’s the best idea for you to—”

“She doesn’t want me talking to you,” Jeanne told me, ignoring her sister. “She’s afraid I’ll say something embarrassing that will hurt her reputation.”

“Jeanne, that’s not fair—”

“Fair? We’re going to talk about fair now? Was it fair that you stayed in law school when Daddy died?”

Anne’s face flushed red and her jaw locked.

“About as fair as you running off to California,” Anne replied tersely, saying “California” with the same kind of vehemence as Jeanne said “lawyer.”

There’s nothing like a funeral to rip open old family wounds. And this was evidently not the first time these two sisters had gone for blood on this particular topic. I wished I hadn’t stumbled into the middle of it. I needed a few nice quotes about Nancy for my obit, not a reprise of some ancient sisterly squabble.

“That is not how it happened, and you know—” Jeanne started until Anne’s low-but-fierce voice drowned her out. “If you could have just stayed around for one year instead of going back to your cult—”

“It was not a cult, it was a—” Jeanne started, but again her voice lacked the strength to compete with Anne, who turned her attention to me.

“I was in my final year of law school when our father died,” Anne said, apparently trying to win me over because Jeanne was beyond convincing. “I couldn’t quit at that point, not when I was that close. Nancy had just started college and she shouldn’t have had to quit, either. But she dropped out to be with our mother because my sister here felt it was more important to spend time with a bunch of strangers in—”

Jeanne was drawing breath to dispute that point when the fight was abruptly halted by a terrible noise:

Their mother began bawling.

There’s nothing like an old woman wailing at a funeral home to send people, particularly the guys, scurrying to action. Men in suits were suddenly diving in from all directions with handkerchiefs and offers of support. At a WASP wake—the kind with which I was more familiar, given my ethnicity—the grieving woman would have been shushed. This being an Italian affair, Mrs. Marino was allowed to moan as loudly as she wanted, but she was not going to do so alone.

In the meantime, two men—cousins or husbands, it was unclear—dove in between Anne and Jeanne, ostensibly breaking up the fight by driving the women into their respective corners. As the jerk who started it all, I found myself trying to slink away quickly so no one could identify me as the culprit.

Chastened, I retreated into the hallway, where I eventually began interviewing a representative sample of the people who had been in Nancy’s life: high school classmates, fellow Eagle-Examiner carriers, coworkers from the State Street Grill.

I got a good dose of the usual clichés—everyone liked her, she never said a bad word about anyone, she didn’t have a single enemy, and so on—but also managed to ferret out some of the details of Nancy’s life.

She had been an outstanding student at Belleville High, graduating in the top ten percent of her class and making All-County in softball. After high school, she enrolled at College of New Jersey, then known as Trenton State, a well-regarded small public college. Her father died a few weeks into her freshman year and Nancy moved back home to be with her mother. And, somehow, that’s where she stayed. She got a job as a waitress. A few years after that, she took over the newspaper route. And that became her life: she worked two jobs, kept her mother company, and maintained her friendships from high school and the neighborhood. She didn’t have much time for anything else. She was never married. She dated occasionally, but there hadn’t been anyone special in that capacity for quite some time. Friends said she seemed content, never considering what life might have held for her if her father had stayed alive or if she had gone back to school.

Eventually, she saved enough money to buy her own house, a source of pride. It was just a few blocks over from her mother’s place, but in that part of New Jersey—a jigsaw puzzle of tiny towns fitted next to each other—a few blocks crossed a municipal boundary. So it was she ended up living in Bloomfield, not Belleville.

Beyond those biographical details, I mostly heard about Nancy’s kindness and generosity of spirit. She not only had two jobs that involved serving others, she did it in her off-time, too. It seemed Nancy was everyone else’s biggest fan, the kind of person who always knew when someone had done something good and was the first to congratulate them for it.

“She just existed to cheer on other people,” one of her friends told me. “It’s like her hands were made for clapping.”

It was the perfect first quote. And being as it was nearing three o’clock, the end of the afternoon session at the funeral home that made it the perfect time to get back to the office and start writing.

I was on my way out the door when I recognized one last person who could make for a useful interview: Jim McNabb, the executive director of IFIW–Local 117 and a well-known figure on New Jersey’s political scene.

Local 117 was a large conglomeration of unionized employees, encompassing workers who could loosely be considered in the communications business—everything from newspaper deliverers to bulk mail assemblers to cable TV installers to the people building the latest wireless network. All told, it claimed something like a hundred thousand members, which made it a force in the state capital, where vote-hungry legislators remained cognizant of the need to pander to its leadership.

For as long as anyone could remember, that leader was Jim McNabb, who greatly enjoyed being the recipient of said pandering. His primary talent was knowing all the players and, more importantly, where they buried the bodies. (And, this being New Jersey, I mean that literally). He was a gregarious guy with a full head of silver hair and a stocky frame, and he was like the politicians he lobbied in that he enjoyed working a room.

Unlike the politicians, though, I actually liked him. He had a gift for names and faces, and once he met you the first time, he treated you like a long-lost best friend every time he saw you thereafter. To some that might seem disingenuous, inasmuch as he reacted to everyone that way. But to me, you couldn’t be that enthusiastic about other human beings unless somewhere, deep down, you really liked them.

Plus—and this always counted for something in a newspaper reporter’s estimation—he was a colorful quote, the kind of guy who was always available for comment and could be relied upon to say a bit more than he probably should.

So we had some good history and as I approached he greeted me with a quiet-but-enthusiastic, “Carter Ross! How is the star investigative reporter!”

“Hey, Jim, pretty good. Wish we were seeing each other under different circumstances, but—”

“Is there something to investigate here?” he interrupted, not bothering to hide his intrigue.

“Not a thing. I’m just doing a little appreciation piece about Nancy for tomorrow’s paper.”

“Are you sure there’s no smoke here?” he quizzed. “Because you know what they say about places where there’s smoke.”

His natural friendliness aside, McNabb was the kind of guy who was always looking to exploit any angle that might help the union cause, or at least get his name out there. If I told him I was doing a piece on businesses that refused to let their workers eat hot dogs, he would launch into a windy sermon about the health benefits of the roasted wiener—all of which he would have invented on the spot—and rail against anyone who deprived employees of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Oscar Mayer.

“Nope,” I said. “No smoke, no fire.”

“Okay, okay,” he replied. “Well, it’s real kind of you to do a story about Nancy. She was a terrific kid.”

We chatted for a few minutes about Nancy, whom he described as one of his Best shop stewards. He said the obligatory nice words about her, sharing the opinion that she was a loyal employee and a trustworthy friend. Then, as we began to wrap up, he jerked his silver mane in the direction of her coffin.

“Hit and run. Hell of a way to go, huh?” he said. “I just hope they catch the bastard that did it and tie him to the center lane of the Turnpike so we can run him over.”

By the time Jim and I parted it was after three, and the funeral director was gently shepherding the crowd out onto the street. He was subtle about it—a funeral home can’t exactly announce last call—but people were getting the hint.

I climbed into my Malibu, feeling my reporter’s notebook pressing against my thigh. I don’t know what it is, because ballpoint-pen ink barely weighs anything, but a full notebook just feels heavier than an empty one. And I knew I had stuffed this one with enough good stuff to easily get me to sixteen inches.

My favorite anecdote was shared by one of Nancy’s fellow paper deliverers. As any longtime resident of New Jersey knows, one of the Eagle-Examiner’s nicknames is “the bird.” For one of her shop meetings, Nancy made T-shirts with a picture of a guy tossing a rolled-up Eagle Examiner onto someone’s front porch, Frisbee-style. Underneath, it read, IFIW–LOCAL 117: PROUD TO FLIP YOU THE BIRD!

I wasn’t sure whether I could get that line past some of our prissier editors. But as I returned to the newsroom and started writing, I figured I owed it to Nancy to try.

The words were just starting to flow onto my computer screen when my cell phone rang. The caller had a 510 area code, which was neither a New Jersey number nor one I recognized.

“Carter Ross.”

“Mr. Ross?” said a monotone female voice on the other end, and I knew who it was before she could say her name. “This is Jeanne Nygard, Nancy Marino’s sister. We met earlier today.”

“Hi, Jeanne. Thanks for calling.”

The line hissed with the sound of no one talking, though I could faintly hear her breathing. I shifted my weight, and my chair creaked in response. I cleared my throat and soon found myself talking, because I felt like someone ought to be.

“I’m sorry if I triggered a little bit of a spat at the viewing,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stir up ill will.”

“My sister and I don’t always get along,” Jeanne said, and I fought the urge to reply, No, really?

“She’s not a happy person,” Jeanne continued. “She seeks fulfillment in worldly things, in money and power. They will never lead her to enlightenment.”

Okay there, Siddhartha, I nearly replied. But again I resisted. And since I didn’t want to enter into a conversation about Anne’s self-actualization, or lack thereof, I asked, “So what can I do for you, Jeanne?”

“My sister would be angry if she knew I was talking to you,” Jeanne said, which didn’t exactly answer my question. “She said I should keep my mouth shut. But I gave up trying to please my sister a long time ago. Do you have siblings, Mr. Ross?”

“An older brother and a younger sister.”

“So you know what it’s like.”

“Family can be a joy and a pain,” I confirmed.

The line hissed silence.

“I’m sorry, is there something I can help you with?” I said, trying to prod the conversation toward…wherever it needed to go. “The story about your sister is going in tomorrow’s paper, so I’m on a bit of a deadline.”

“I wanted to call you because your card says you’re an ‘investigative reporter.’ Is that true?”

I put my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t say something like, No, Jeanne, I’m actually a taxidermist with an active fantasy life.

I gave myself half a beat, then removed my hand and said, “Yes, it’s true.”

More faint breathing was followed by, “Don’t you think it’s odd, her being killed in a hit and run?”

“I’m not sure I would choose the word ‘odd.’ I would just say it was a terrible tragedy.”

“The police said it was probably a drunk driver. What do you think about that?”

“That people shouldn’t drink and drive?” I said, trying not to sound like a smartass.

“I’m told bars around here close at two. Would anyone still be drunk at six in the morning?”

I sighed. Where was she going with this? “People get drunk places other than bars, so there’s—”

“And there were no skid marks,” Jeanne interrupted, her voice managing to rise above the flatness of Parkinson’s disease to gain some inflection. “The police said they didn’t find any skid marks on the street. Don’t you think the driver would have slammed the brakes after hitting something as large as a person?”

“Depends. The guy might have been so bombed he didn’t even realize he hit someone. It happens.”

Jeanne took a moment to consider this. She was nothing if not deliberate.

“Your card says you’re an investigative reporter,” she repeated. “Are you going to investigate the accident any further?”

“I’m not planning on it, no.”

I tilted forward in my chair and rested my elbow on my desk. The bottom right corner of my computer read 5:17. Obits, which are not considered breaking news, have to be filed by six, no exception. I wanted to be considerate to Nancy’s grieving sister, but I had to find a way to gracefully exit this conversation.

“I need to know if I can trust you, Mr. Ross,” Jeanne said.

“And why is that?”

“Because I have something I think you should investigate,” she said.

“Okay.”

Another pause. Then: “It wasn’t an accident.”

“You mean Nancy’s death?”

“Yes. It wasn’t an accident. I believe Nancy had reason to fear for her life. I believe someone killed her.”

“What makes you think that?”

“She’s my sister. Sometimes sisters just know things about each other.”

“Yes, but do you have any proof?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Then, after a pause, she added: “And yes.”

“I’m listening.”

“I was the last person to talk to my sister before she died. She called me at ten on Thursday night—that’s one in the morning, her time. Mr. Ross, my sister went to bed at seven-thirty and woke up at three-thirty. She never had trouble sleeping like that.”

“So what was bothering her?”

“She was having…problems at work.”

“What kind of problems?”

The line went quiet again, causing me to press my ear to the phone. From somewhere in the background, I heard a door open. Jeanne drew in her breath sharply.

“Jeannie, whatchya doin’?” I could hear a male voice inquire.

And at that, Jeanne promptly hung up.

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