This Week’s Story
He’d only been on the job for ten days when the
girl died and the editor called him in and told him they’d want a story
about her for the following week’s paper. McKenna already felt weighed down
by the article he was writing about the firefighter who may or may not have
violated a restraining order when he emptied a police officer’s shotgun as a
practical joke, not to mention the bar that was close to losing its liquor
license after yet another weekend brawl spilled out into the street. When
he’d gone to Billy’s Tavern to talk to the owner at 10:45 on a weekday
morning the place smelled overpoweringly of stale beer and there were
already three guys who looked as though they were physically attached to
their stools.
“Guys sometimes fight when they’re drunk,” the
owner, a big unshaven man with a stained T-shirt, told McKenna. “That my
fault?”
The guy had been glancing up at the TV at the
end of the bar—a fight was on ESPN Classic—and then he turned his head to
the reporter, as if expecting an answer. McKenna looked up from his notebook
and hesitated. The question that came to mind was, “Is that what you’re
going to say to the city council?” but instead he continued on with, “How
long have you owned the place?”—a much safer query.
The girl had been 17, and the morning before,
Thursday, her mother went to rouse her from bed and found her daughter dead
beneath a blanket. The initial word was that the girl, Tricia Dalton, had no
health problems and the mother swore that drugs could not have been an
issue. McKenna knew how that tune went. He had little doubt that the autopsy
would reveal something—a little coke, a hit of ecstasy, some speedball
action—probably mixed with a whole lot of booze. He’d been a teenager once,
and he’d made careless decisions at the time. There had even been a friend
who’d fallen from a second-floor porch and died because he’d been tripping.
“Talk to the mother,” Moore, the editor, told
McKenna. It was almost noon on Friday and the 30-year-old reporter nodded
and scribbled in his notebook. “Talk to her about her daughter’s life. See
what she says. You might want to go to the wake and the funeral.”
McKenna stopped writing. Outside of the
editor’s office telephones rang and the copier whooshed. The ad reps, all
middle-aged women, chattered between their only occasionally successful cold
calls as they perused Portland’s daily and the weekly competition, looking
to win over potential advertisers. An elderly man walked in the front door
of the small office to complain that he hadn’t received his paper the
previous day.
“Really? The wake and funeral?” the reporter
asked as he looked across the desk. It sounded rather crass and would
certainly be uncomfortable.
“Yeah. Let them see you there,” Moore said. He
leaned back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head. Above him a
picture window looked out onto Main Street, desolate except for an
occasional car. “Take note of who’s who, but keep your notebook out of
sight. Find someone who might be receptive to you—a friend of the girl would
probably be your best shot—and see what you can find out from her. She might
even be able to hook you up with the mom for an interview.”
McKenna sighed and started jotted down notes
again. The wake, he was told, would be Sunday evening and the funeral would
follow Monday morning. Back in the newsroom, a cramped twenty-five foot by
twelve foot section of the office, he let his pad drop to his desk and then
he sank into his chair in the same fashion. Three other desks were stuffed
into the space, as well as a shelf unit and a couple of filing cabinets. Two
of the desks were occupied, one by the sports reporter, who was on the
phone, and the other by a reporter who covered two neighboring towns. He was
speedily typing away.
After a minute McKenna reached for the phone and dialed city hall. If
the mayor was in he’d walk down the street to see him and inquire as to his
take on the alleged renegade firefighter.
McKenna reached for his cell phone the next morning when it woke him a short while before noon. It was Moore. There’d been an accident at 3 a.m. on a rural two-lane road on the city’s outskirts, and an SUV had rolled into a ditch. The staff photographer had been there with his camera, but the reporter needed to put together a few hundred words and to get it on the web site ASAP. McKenna mumbled, “OK,” but grumbled after hanging up. Attending the wake was already going to take time from his weekend, and now more phone calls and another story had been tossed his way. Even if it was true that he had little else to do for those two days—except laundry—the time should still be his to waste as he saw fit, especially on a salary of $24,000.
He did manage to get out the night before, hanging out with the only
friend he had in the State of Maine. He and Jubba had gone to the Old Port
to hit up a few bars and put down a few beers. McKenna had gone to high
school in suburban Philadelphia with Howser—who some called Jumbo and others
Bubba, so that by junior year he was permanently tagged with a combination
of the two—and when McKenna decided that he needed to leave Pennsylvania, he
looked northeast, decided that New York and Boston were too expensive, and
chose Portland because Jubba, who worked for a small public relations firm,
had said good things about it. McKenna had done a little PR work himself,
and he’d also been a long-term substitute teacher for a year. His wife had
been making good money as a nurse, and that allowed them to live in
Philadelphia, but he realized not long into his marriage that it had been a
mistake— that they had been too young and that neither was truly the person
that the other had hoped. He committed, silently, to putting in a little
more effort and not immediately abandoning the relationship, but eventually
he understood that what would be best for him and Carrie would be to end
things sooner rather than later. After a while he had decided that moving
away would help that process move along.
McKenna slid from bed and washed his face with
cold water in the bathroom sink, remembering how much he’d had to drink and
what he and Jubba had talked about. Mostly, he recalled, the topic was his
failed marriage. Besides being burly, his friend was upfront and
straightforward. He’d slap McKenna on the back and say, “Come on. Forget
her. Plenny a fish in this here ocean,” throwing out his arm in some
indication of the women in the bar itself, in the city of Portland or in the
entire world. Jubba never dwelled on specifics.
“Plenny a fish. Right?”
“Right,” McKenna responded, nodding and sipping
from his pint glass.
“I mean it, kid. Forget about the past. You
gotta move on.”
It was just after midnight, the music was loud
and the place was full. People all around were in small groups, everyone
shouting to be heard. One of the two bartenders struck McKenna as kind of
cute. She’d almost caught him looking when she bent over to grab some
recently-washed glasses from a plastic tray on the floor. Jubba had noticed.
“You like, huh?” Jubba raised his eyebrows and
threw on a big smile.
“She’s attractive.”
“You should ask for her number.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Why not?”
“Good looking bartender? You don’t think she
gets hit on every night?”
“So. You don’t catch fish unless you throw your
hook in the water.”
McKenna laughed
“What? You want me to ask her for you?” Jubba
said, making a mock turn toward the bar.
“I’ll start throwing those hooks in when I’m
ready. Not just yet. For now, my rod and tackle box are still packed up.”
“Oh, your rod is packed up alright. It hasn’t
seen the light a day in quite some time.”
They both laughed, and Jubba put his hand up
when the cute bartender was looking. She came over and he ordered another
round.
That had been McKenna’s last, though Jubba
pounded another before closing time. Now, his face washed and a cup of tea
at his side, the reporter sat in front of his computer, checked email, read
the morning’s news and tried to figure out who to call on a Saturday to find
out about the SUV rollover.
The Portland daily had a brief story on Tricia Dalton that Saturday. It
didn’t tell McKenna anything that he didn’t already know, but there was a
small photo—a black and white head shot that had probably come from the
girl’s high school yearbook. She was posed and staring straight into the
camera, the collar of her shirt just visible at the bottom of the frame.
McKenna studied the photo for a few seconds: he noted the dark hair, which
was long and straight; the smile, forced in that way that people do when
their picture is being taken; the features—nice, though not exceptional. She
didn’t strike him as beautiful, but she wasn’t unattractive, and she looked
pleasant enough.
It was a shame, McKenna thought, when these things happened, but they
happened all the time. Teenagers were notorious risk takers. They drove fast
and drunk and without seatbelts; they dove and swam in long-abandoned
quarries; they hitchhiked and accepted rides from whoever would pick them
up; they mixed booze and drugs without a second thought.
Kinslow, the guy who’d fallen from the porch, had done that—after
drinking all night he hadn’t hesitated when someone showed up with shrooms
and then decided that he was going to impress a couple of girls who were
sitting out on the porch by doing a table dance for them. He climbed up on a
rickety plastic piece of deck furniture and started to remove his pants.
They weren’t yet down to his knees when the 18-year-old National Honor
Society vice president fell back and over the railing. The coroner said he
was dead the moment he hit the ground.
McKenna thought back to his friend’s wake, which was the kind of thing
that a person never forgets. Kinslow’s kid sister was so distraught that she
couldn’t even enter the room where the body was laid out. She tried more
than once, but her cries became wails and she was led away. Later, while a
priest was saying a few words, the boy’s mother collapsed and an ambulance
was called. When it came, the woman had revived and wouldn’t leave her son’s
body. Every one of McKenna’s classmates had red-rimmed eyes, including
tough-guy Jubba, who had a half-dozen girls around his large frame at any
one time, clinging to him for support.
Carrie hadn’t wanted to go up to view the body, so she and McKenna sat
in the back of the room, quietly holding hands.
He assumed that the Dalton girl’s wake would be the same, and he wasn’t
looking forward to being there. Given a choice, he’d stay far away from such
matters and, instead, listen to the bitching of the firefighter, Vinny
Talbot, whom he managed to get on the phone the previous day. It was a
little joke, Talbot had said, a prank. He was goofing with some friends on
the police force.
“I’ve heard that you took bullets out of the rifle and put them on the
roof of the cruiser. Is that true?” McKenna asked.
“Now that’s not exactly the way it happened. Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me that. I read the report.”
“You did, huh? I thought this was a personnel matter and that those
things are confidential.”
“Are you saying that the report is not true?”
At that point Talbot became angry, said that he wouldn’t comment further
until he talked to his lawyer and that McKenna’s paper should focus on some
real news. Then he hung up. The reporter hadn’t even had a chance to ask
about the retraining order, which the firefighter’s estranged wife had taken
out just a month earlier, and that specifically prohibited Talbot from
handling firearms of any kind, excepting when he was on duty as a National
Guard reservist.
It was a sensitive story. Firefighters were highly regarded by the
public in the post-9/11 world, and making enemies in the fire department or
in city government sounded like a bad way to start his stint at the
newspaper. Still, it had to be better than trying to arrange an interview
with the mother of a dead teenager.
The wake started at 6 p.m. on Sunday, and McKenna had two items to take
care of before then: He needed to wash clothes and to write the firefighter
story. After a trip to the Laundromat, he sat down with his computer and his
notebook in front of him. Writing at home was a necessary evil. It helped
him stay ahead of deadlines and was more comfortable. The process, for
McKenna, included some staring into space, and he always felt that, in the
office, he might appear to be slacking when, in reality, he was
thinking—especially when he was forming the opening sentences of a story.
The lead was nearly everything. Not only was it his only shot to hook the
reader into the rest of the story, but the fledgling reporter had found that
the body of a story wasn’t difficult to get down once he had the framework
of that opening paragraph.
He hadn’t been trained as a journalist, but he did have a communications
degree from Penn, and he read enough to know, broadly, what he was doing. He
had written for the student paper in high school, and at the PR firm in
Philadelphia he’d had to craft messages using words every day. The
difference now was that he wasn’t creating a version of the truth for
consumer consumption in order to sell a product, but rather he was
dispassionately recounting the facts in service of the public good—or, at
least, that was one way to look at it. With the ad reps just a few feet away
in the office—calling out “cha-ching!” after selling an ad or grumbling
“asshole” just after hanging up on a business owner or marketing director
who wouldn’t bite—and the publisher zooming into the office weekly, talking
circulation and sales with the editor and the advertising director, it
wasn’t hard to turn any self-righteous pronouncement on its side and to
instead view newspapers as nothing more than conduits for the dissemination
of advertising, much like the whistle-blowing executive who referred to
cigarettes as “a delivery device for nicotine.”
With the firefighter story, for example: Was McKenna making the public
aware of a guy on the city’s payroll who might be a little dangerous? Or was
he trashing the reputation of a public servant whose slight indiscretion
would result in his personal life being discussed all over town—and maybe
even cost him his job? And was it even possible to sort out the subtleties
of such a matter by talking briefly with a handful of people and summarizing
things in 600 words?
How about the girl, McKenna wondered—his mind now off topic as he leaned
back in his desk chair and looked toward the window and through the upper
slats of the tan-colored mini-blinds, where he saw a bit of greenery, leaves
on the tree in his narrow back alley that were bobbing gently in the breeze.
He reached over and grabbed the folded up City/Region section of the daily
that displayed Tricia Dalton’s photo. What was there to gain, he wondered,
by his newspaper publishing a story on this girl, especially when the cause
of death was likely to be something less than admirable? Dragging out the
family’s pain seemed a steep price to pay for titillating some readers with
the illicit details. If she had been clean, then where’s the story? Either
way, the thought of sticking his notebook and pen in the face of grieving
family members was making him dread this assignment.
After writing about the firefighter and flipping television channels for
a bit, McKenna took a walk to the middle of the city, to a funky little
coffee shop on the main commercial street, mostly to get out of the
apartment and to be around people. He sat at a table near the window,
drinking tea and watching the ebb and flow of foot traffic, and he
remembered something that he hadn’t thought of in a decade: He was with
Kinslow one day, in the fall of their senior year, sitting on a bench in
downtown Philadelphia, and they were people-watching and talking idly. That
had also been a Sunday afternoon, and they had gone into the city to hit up
a CD store and after that they’d gone to a used bookstore, McKenna thinking
at the time that this was the only one of his friends who wouldn’t scoff at
the idea of browsing for books.
They had settled on the bench after McKenna bought a pretzel and his
friend a hot dog from cart vendors, and they pointed out attractive women to
each other and laughed when they saw somebody particularly odd.
“A lot of these people look unhappy,” Kinslow blurted out. “You have to
feel sorry for them.”
McKenna wasn’t sure how to respond. Was his classmate joking or serious?
Then Kinslow turned to him and said, “That’s not going to happen to me. Let
me tell you that, Mac Daddy.”
Kinslow crumpled the napkin that his hot dog had come in. He popped to
his feet, tossed his trash into the barrel next to the bench and stood
before McKenna with his arms crossed.
“My friend, there’s a whole world out there and we only get a brief time
to see it and to explore it and maybe even try to understand some of it. I’m
not sitting on my ass in an office for half my life. I’m not gonna get old
working for someone else.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
Kinslow explained that he’d decided to skip college the following year
and maybe permanently. He wanted to hitchhike across Europe and was in the
process of convincing his parents that it was not a crazy idea.
“You should definitely come with me, y’know? It’ll be great.”
McKenna knew that his parents would never go for such an idea and
without them he had no money. Besides, he would be going off to college that
following September—something he’d been preparing for since grade school.
Kinslow went on for a while, telling his friend that he hoped to write a
book some day and to play his guitar for change on a busy street in a big
city and to spend a few years living in a commune and to take photographs in
Yellowstone National Park and to drink tequila in a small Mexican village
with locals and to drive across the United States with a beautiful woman,
taking turns at the wheel while the other read aloud from
The Grapes of Wrath, then sleeping and making love under the stars.
McKenna had never seen this inspired and romantic side of Kinslow, and
he sat there looking at the boy he’d known since third grade and admiring
his ideals and thinking that his own hopes and plans were so tame and
unimaginative in comparison: do well in college, find a good job, get
married to Carrie.
As if he understood what his friend was thinking, Kinslow sat down on
the bench and clapped McKenna on the shoulder. Kinslow’s shaggy, sandy hair
was in his eyes, but even so, McKenna was conscious of a sparkle that shined
through, a twinkling manifestation of the fiery passion of the young man’s
thoughts.
“Don’t play it safe and don’t settle, my friend,” Kinslow said, leaning
back against the bench with his arms spread wide, as if he were watching all
the possibilities of the universe play out before him, waiting for the right
one to reach out and scoop up. Then he nodded slowly and said softly, as if
to himself, “No surrender and no regrets.”
McKenna had been the first to reach Kinslow after the fall. He was
instantly sure that the injuries were lethal. There was the large puddle of
blood where his friend’s head had struck the pavement, and there was the odd
angle in which the torso seemed to be twisted. Most of all there were
Kinslow’s eyes, which were wide open and looked as flat as those in a
child’s drawing.
The reporter started out with a tie and sweater, then was going with a
sports jacket and tie, but finally settled on the jacket and shirt, but no
tie. He thought that would be fine for the wake. He kept his notebook in his
back pocket and had a pen and tape recorder in jacket pockets, but he didn’t
plan on taking them out at all. Moore had told him to go, so he’d go, but he
would attempt to be as unobtrusive as possible, and he didn’t think he’d
need to stay more than half an hour.
McKenna drove to the funeral home, but couldn’t find a parking spot near
the place, so he put his car in the small lot behind the newspaper office,
which wasn’t far. Main Street was desolate at that end in the evening, the
CVS and sandwich shop closed, the old brick factory across the street still
vacant and the river meandering quietly behind a small, empty park. People
began to appear on the sidewalks as he approached Delacroix & Son, the site
of the wake, and the steps were crowded with groups of two or three going in
or coming out and several people smoking. McKenna paused and watched, took a
breath and then moved up the stairs.
Just inside the door there was a line in front of him and he waited in
it, but then realized it was to sign the guest book, which he wanted no part
of, so he slipped by and was soon in another line, one that led up to the
coffin, which was open and surrounded by large bouquets of colorful flowers
and bathed in soft light from lamps set into the wall. There were sobs
coming from several directions, and he heard sniffles in the line right
behind him. When he glanced slowly back he saw that it was a teenage girl,
who was holding onto the arm of a woman that appeared to be her mother.
McKenna knew that staying in that line would put him face to face with
Tricia Dalton’s family, who stood along the other wall, thanking people
after they said a prayer before the casket. He didn’t want to confront them,
even to just offer his condolences, because he was worried that someone
might recognize him or ask who he was and what would he say to that – a
reporter here to get a glimpse of the evening’s atmosphere? He also didn’t
want to get out of line, which was a conspicuous and maybe even
disrespectful thing to do. Further internal debate, however, was limited by
the fact that the line was moving and the closer he got, the more he’d
attract attention if he jumped out, so he made his move quickly and went
looking for a chair in the back of the room.
He saw the faces of people he’d already run into in the course of his
first days on the job—a secretary from the mayor’s office, the high school
principal, a member of the board of the Friends of the Presumpscot River—
but mostly McKenna saw around him the faces of teenagers, virtually all of
them in some state of tearfulness, many hugging, sometimes three or four at
a time.
The reporter found a chair and tried to look as inconspicuous as
possible. He looked up toward the front of the room, where the girl’s mother
was first in line greeting those who had come to pay respects. She wore a
black dress, and her eyes were puffy and red. After talking for a few
seconds with someone, she’d start to regain her composure, wiping away tears
with reinforcements from the ever-present tissue box, but then that person
would step aside and another person would appear, offer condolences and
bring the mother back to wailing.
Next to her was the dad, a short man with boyish features and brown hair
parted to the right, who McKenna believed was separated from his wife. His
eyes also showed signs of crying, but now he stood with his hands folded
before him and nodded at each expression of empathetic grief that he
received. He didn’t seem to say a word except to the old woman seated at his
right, probably his mother, who would tug on his sleeve every so often to
ask a question into her son’s ear as he bent forward. After the grandmother
were, McKenna guessed, some aunts, uncles and cousins.
People kept coming in and the room was quite crowded. After perhaps 20
minutes McKenna decided that he’d witnessed enough of the proceedings to
render a paragraph or so in his story, and he made his way to the rear
doorway of the room and then headed for the exit. Just before reaching the
foyer, there was a small easel that he hadn’t noticed on the way in, and on
it was a big piece of posterboard covered with a collage of photos that
featured Tricia Dalton—posed and candid, alone and with others, at various
points in her life. The reporter took a step forward and moved his eyes from
image to image: Tricia as a child in a bunny costume for Halloween, as a
teen in a bathing suit in some tropical locale, as an infant in a high
chair. There were a couple dozen pictures, and McKenna saw that the girl had
been much cuter than it appeared from seeing that single yearbook photo.
While he was looking at the collage, McKenna
became aware that a woman had sidled up next to him and was also looking at
the posterboard. Before he could take his leave, she spoke.
“It’s so sad when someone dies this young.”
He nodded, but knew he should say something.
“It really is,” he said. Then without thinking
he added, “A friend of mine died when I was in high school.”
“How?”
“An accident.”
McKenna half-turned to face the woman. She must
have been in her early 30s, and he noticed that her skin had a tan that was
soft but deep, as if she worked outside every day. Her features appeared
orderly, all neatly in their places, but her presence was notable for a red
and brown kerchief that she wore, and it wove through her hair and down,
curling halfway around her neck, like a pet snake that she carried along.
“For Tricia it was just fate,” the woman said.
“There’s no one to blame, but it would have been nice to know the person she
was becoming.”
He nodded, half wanting to leave before this
went any further, but also conscious of the fact that he had before him
someone who apparently knew the girl, and he hadn’t traipsed on anyone’s
space to find her.
“You knew her?”
“I did. She’s my niece,” the woman said, then
put out her hand. “I’m Sara Witford.”
They shook, and he knew that his cover was
about to be blown.
“John McKenna.”
“How did you know Tricia?”
“I didn’t. I never met her, unfortunately.
I’m…” He hesitated, his brain working to construct the best sentence to
convey the information at hand, but when his pause had gone beyond the
fraction of a second that he deemed uncomfortable, he just spoke the truth.
“I’m a reporter for the Eastfield Chronicle, and I am writing a story about
Tricia.”
He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one
else had heard him.
“Is that the local weekly?”
“Yeah. I’m not trying to be disrespectful or
intrusive. I came for a bit just to—“
“No, no. It was good of you to come,” she said,
waving her hand as if to swat away his rationale attempts.
“I don’t want to disturb her family at all
right now. I was actually just leaving.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to talk to Diane or Tom
right now,” she nodded. “But if you have a few minutes I’d be happy to speak
with you. You should write a story
about Tricia. That would be nice.”
She motioned for McKenna to
follow her, and she turned and walked around the groups of people moving
into and out of the room where the body rested. There was a second viewing
room, but this one had no casket and no mourners, only rows of folding
chairs in the middle and more comfortable furniture on the perimeter. He
followed her across the room and they sat in a pair of high-backed
upholstered armchairs. McKenna could see movement outside the door and hear
indistinct sounds of conversation.
“To be honest,” he said, “I’m somewhat
uncomfortable writing this. It’d be different if this was an older woman who
lived a full life and I could list her accomplishments and her grandkids
names. What if—forgive me—but what if the toxicology report comes back with
some findings? I really don’t want to make anyone’s pain worse than it is.”
The woman nodded her head and leaned back in
her chair.
“I can understand that,” she said, “and it’d be
foolish of me to say that I’m positive that my niece wasn’t using any drugs,
or that drugs definitely played no part in her death. Lots of teenagers use
for different reasons, and Tricia—Can I say something that is off the
record?” McKenna immediately nodded. “Tricia did experiment a couple of
times in the past, like most of us at her age. She told me that last summer
when she came out to see me. We became really close in those two weeks, and
she told me a whole lot. Based on those conversations with her, I’d be very
surprised if they find anything in her bloodstream.”
“Where did she go to see you?”
“I teach on a reservation in New Mexico. Ever
been out there?”
“No. I’ve never been west of Chicago.”
“It’s beautiful out there. I mean…stunning. If
you go, you’ll never want to come back. That’s what happened to me.”
“Oh yeah?”
The woman nodded, as if her senses were being
flooded with a memory.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re from Jersey, Donna and
me. She and Tom moved to Maine after they got married. I went west on my own
and never regretted it. And it’s not just that it’s beautiful, John, but it
changes you. The mountains, the scrubland, the high desert…it has
transformative powers. It touches your soul. I know that may sound corny,
but I’m serious.”
McKenna smiled and nodded.
“I wish I had a chance to get out there and see
it.”
She took a mock glance at his wrists and
ankles.
“I don’t see any chains on you.”
He smiled.
“I know, I know,” she said. “Work, bills. Maybe
family? A woman? Right?”
Now he chuckled and wondered how this
conversation—which had been work-related only moments ago— had taken a
detour and ended up where it was, not that he minded.
“Well anyway,” she started again, letting him
off the hook, “that’s what happened to Tricia. She was really moved by the
experience out there. She came out toward the end of the summer, and we
spent two weeks hiking and camping out, I took her to meet my students on
the reservation, and we took a drive to the Grand Canyon. Now I’m really
glad we did that.”
For a moment it looked as though Sara would
break down, but she quickly popped up from her seat and said, “I want to
show you something,” and went out of the room. When she returned she had a
shoulder bag that had a Southwestern Native American motif, red and brown
geometric shapes in an intricate pattern. She sat down and reached into the
bag, pulling out a photograph in a clear plastic sleeve.
“I wanted Donna to include this in the collage
out there, but by the time I flew in it was too late.”
She passed the 8-by-10-inch photo to McKenna.
In it, Tricia was standing before a wide landscape of eroded stone in
various shades of brown, pink and white. Canyons flared out in all
directions to the horizon, and warm, golden sunlight came into the frame
from the left, falling on west-facing rock, as well as on the girl herself.
McKenna was surprised to see how stunningly attractive Tricia was in the
photo. None of the other images had captured her this way, with her hair
curly and tousled, her cheeks aglow, a smile bursting forth and a glimmer in
her eyes. She stood before the Grand Canyon and she threw her arms out wide
in a gesture of seeming ecstasy.
“Wow,” was all that the reporter could manage.
“I love that photo. She’s embracing the entire
world. She’s 17, smart as a whip and beautiful, and she felt at that moment
like her whole life was before her, and it was. The world was hers, y’know?”
He nodded, and felt the slightest bit of
moisture in his eyes.
“I mean, I was devastated when I heard, John,
but when I look at that photo I know that she felt something that most
people never feel. I feel like she lived as full a life as she could in her
short time.”
They sat silently for a few moments, both
staring at the photo. McKenna took a deep breath to pull himself back, and
then realized he had to have that image to accompany his story. Sara agreed
and the two of them walked down the street to the newspaper office, where he
removed the photo from its sleeve and scanned it, saving a copy on his
computer. While they were there he asked her some questions and jotted down
notes. Then he asked Sara if she could arrange a few minutes with Tricia’s
parents the following day, after the funeral, which she thought would be no
problem.
McKenna gave Jubba a call just after 9 p.m.
that night and convinced his friend to meet him at Three Dollar Dewey’s, a
restaurant and bar near the Portland waterfront. The reporter was on his
second beer when the big man sat across from him at a table in front of the
window.
“What’s goin’ on?”
“Ah, nothing,” McKenna said, taking another
drink as the waitress came over to get Jubba’s order. Then he continued. “I
was at that wake I told you about. For the girl.”
“Musta been pretty sad.”
“Yeah, it was. I—”
The waitress set a pint glass on a cardboard
coaster in front of Jubba, the white foam of the brew cresting over one side
and sliding down the glass. He gently lifted it and tilted his head forward
so as not to spill any on his first sip.
“Jubba,” McKenna said, glancing around the
room, which had customers at half the tables and a few more at the bar,
watching football on a TV hanging in the corner. “When Kinslow fell I was
there. I was right there.”
“I know. You were the first one to reach him.”
“Yeah, but I was there when he fell, too. I was
on the porch. I should have done something. I should have stopped him.”
“It wasn’t just you two, right?”
“Naw…there were two girls—Cindy and
Ka…Kath…Katie…Cindy and Katie Kline—but they were both hammered, y’know? Of
the four of us out there, I was the only sober one. I was the only one who
could have done something. But I didn’t.”
“First of all, you might not have been drunk,
but you were drinking. Second, you had no idea what was going to happen. And
third, it was a dozen yea—“
“I know, I know. That’s all true. I mean, I
wish I’da done something, but I know it was an accident. It’s just weird how
things happen, y’know?”
“Life just happens, man. It’s nobody’s fault.
Like your divorce. How long are you gonna pout over that? Carrie is great.
You’re great. It just didn’t work out. You two met and married too young.
Now it’s time for you to start over.”
McKenna nodded and finished his beer just as
Jubba finished his.
“One more?” the reporter asked, and his friend
nodded.
McKenna was at the newspaper office by noon on
Monday, the funeral and brief chat with Tricia Dalton’s parents having gone
smoothly. There was a note on his desk to call Vinny Talbot, and the
firefighter was calm this time. He explained that he had indeed tinkered
with the shotgun, but the police officer whose cruiser it was had piled some
orange safety cones on Talbot’s car the day before, and the whole thing was
part of a feud between the firefighters and police officers that went back
at least nine months, when they all moved into the new public safety complex
in the center of town. As for the restraining order, his ex-wife did have
one granted by a judge, but that was in a York County court, and his
understanding was that he could not handle a firearm in that particular
county, but up here in Cumberland County it was a different matter.
McKenna felt the story become more and more
confusing. He jotted down everything the firefighter said and pulled up the
story, which he had emailed to himself. Then he adjusted it and entered it
into the newspaper’s system. Moore, who had been on a long phone call when
the reporter first peeked into his office, called him in.
“How’d the wake and funeral go?”
“Fine.”
“Good. We just got a fax from the state police.
The girl was clean. Cause of death, it says here, was myocarditis, an
inflammation of the heart.”
He handed the fax to McKenna, who looked it
over.
“So do we have a story here?” the editor wanted
to know.
McKenna, still looking at the paper, began to
nod his head slowly.
“Hmm?” Moore asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, we do. And we have a great photo
to go with it. We might want to run it on page one.”
Moore told the reporter that the location would
depend on how good the story was, and McKenna went out to his desk, pulled
out his notebook and sat down at his computer. He clicked on an icon and the
photo of Tricia Dalton at the Grand Canyon opened on his screen.