10

He thought of calling Emmett, but what the hell was he supposed to ask him? Why did you break in last night and steal an old newspaper? Did you kill Frieda MacBride? And how would Kelly react if he accused her father?

Besides, he could not really believe Emmett was the killer. It was one thing to bluster, another to actually kill someone.

He tried to shove the episode from his mind. He could not let anything come between Kelly and him after last night. She should be here any time now and he longed to see her face, feast his eyes lovingly on the sensual curves that had been welded to him only hours before. Unable to wait any longer, he picked up the telephone and dialed her number. It rang six times and then he hung up. Either she was a deep sleeper or she was out running some errands. Or maybe, he thought, she was on the way over.

When the door opened at nine and Ripley walked in, the usual cocky smile on his face, Brady’s hopes rose and fell in the same second. He sat impatiently through a review of weekly advertising revenue and was grateful when the student left. By ten Kelly had still not appeared and he tired of handling telephone calls and trying to finish a story on the last meeting of the parish police jury. He had attended it last Thursday, too late to get anything into last week’s issue, and since some taxes were involved, he knew it deserved a front-page spot. He was halfway through the final paragraph, when the front door opened once more and Emmett came in.

“Morning,” the old newsman greeted him. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve been around your two assistants too long. They getting you down?” He was wearing a loose jacket and his right arm hung down stiffly at his side.

“Could be, Emmett. Is that why you retired?”

Emmett grinned. “Now he’s catching on. By the way, how’s that daughter of mine doing? Seen her lately?”

“I think she’s doing well,” Brady said obliquely, hoping Emmett would drop the subject.

Emmett grunted skeptically. “Anything new on the death of the Dragon-Lady?”

“You’d have to ask Sheriff Garitty about that.”

“Yeah, well, I figure he’ll be the last to know. All that education and public relations training—hell, I say, give me the old timey, no-nonsense kind of sheriff any day.”

Brady leaned back. “Is this the same Emmett Larson that used a couple of acres of trees and a few lakes worth of ink blasting the old-style politics and redneck law and order?”

“Yeah, well, when you’re my age you have a right to contradict yourself sometime.”

And a right to take other liberties? Brady wondered, noticing that Emmett kept his left side to Brady’s desk and his right arm motionless. The old man drifted toward the doorway to the archival room.

“Mind if I just browse in here a minute? Something I want to check out.”

Brady nodded curtly, sure of what would happen now. Emmett disappeared into the next room and Brady heard a file drawer slide open. He thought about getting up, confronting the other man, but decided against it. Better to wait and see afterwards what Emmett was up to.

A blur of red loomed in the front window and a car door slammed. Kelly flashed through the doorway, a smile on her face. She tiptoed over to his desk, bent down, and kissed him on the lips.

“Mmmm, do you feel as good as I do this morning?”

Brady drew back slightly, motioned toward the other room. Emmett was standing in the doorway, watching them.

Kelly straightened suddenly. “Dad.”

Her father’s expression appeared chiseled in stone and Brady thought that he was struggling to hold back some strong emotion.

“I didn’t see you,” Kelly said defensively.

“No,” Emmett said. He shuffled through the doorway, stopped for a moment before the outer entrance, and then went through without another word.

“Well,” Kelly said philosophically, “it’s time for Dad to wake up and realize I’m not his little girl any more.” She leaned toward Brady and touched his lips with her own, but this time Brady got up quickly, his mind still on the missing file.

“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked, her hands on his shoulders. “You’re not going to let an angry father run you off, are you?” The trembling in her voice belied the bantering tone.

Brady’s guts tensed. He had to protect her.

“No. Of course not. But we have a deadline. And I’m going to need your help.”

She frowned up at him, trying to read his expression. “Sure. Anything. And after last night, you know I mean that.”

“I know it,” he said, touching her shoulders lightly with his hands and feeling an electric current flow through him. “Right now, though, there’s a town council meeting and somebody has to cover it and …”

“And you want me to do it?” Her face brightened. “Sure. No problem. I’ll have the story written by noon.”

He smiled and touched her nose with a finger. “See that you do, before you dot another i, Miss Maguire.”

He watched her go, sad at the thought of the deception. Not that he didn’t need someone to cover the meeting. But getting her to go out was only an excuse; he went into the other room to see if his hunch about Emmett’s visit was right.

And, of course, it was.

The missing folder had been placed back in the drawer, in its proper place, as if nothing had happened. He took the folder out again, closed the drawer, and returned to his desk.

He opened the folder and stared down at the yellowing newspaper. Thursday, August 6, 1957. Nothing had changed in thirty-odd years, not the masthead, not the layout.

He glanced over the front page. A lead story about the drought and promises of help from the district congressman. An attempted murder in the Negro section, called the Quarters. A reflection on Troy Parish in the election of 1908 by an amateur historian. And in a box at the right of the page was a commentary by Emmett Larson on the vagaries of Washington politics and how they affected the poor farmer at the local level. It lacked the usual bitter note, and Brady realized midway through that Emmett had managed to turn what could have been just another diatribe into a genuinely humorous commentary on bureaucratic mismanagement.

He skipped to the next page. Church news, a meeting of the VFW post, some ads … He went to the third page. Weddings, a lecture by a professor at nearby Fletcher, a minor accident on Main Street …

When he’d finished the last page he turned the paper back over and sat staring down at the masthead. What was it that Emmett had been after? Which one among the innocuous items he had just read had caused Emmett Larson to slip into the office in the dead of night and then return this morning to surreptitiously replace the file?

The phone’s ring jarred him out of his thoughts. He picked it up, resenting the interruption, and was immediately assaulted by a whining female voice:

“Mr. Brady? This is Eulalia Boudreaux. I’ve been meaning to call and tell you that the notice about the Church’s Lenten Fish Dinner was missing from your last issue.”

“Missing?” Something connected and for an instant he forgot the woman was on the phone.

“Yes, I said missing, Mr. Brady.” She gave a choked little laugh. “I know we Catholics aren’t a very big group up here, but I notice the Protestants get all their events in the paper. I’d hate to have anybody think …”

“No, of course, I’m sorry about the omission, Mrs. Boudreaux, and I promise we’ll be more careful in the future.”

He replaced the receiver and stared back down at the old newspaper. Missing. Of course. That was it. It wasn’t something that he’d seen. It was something he hadn’t seen. Something that was missing.

It was the social column by Frieda MacBride.

He glanced down at the old newspaper to confirm his impression. The social column was not there, had not appeared that week, and perhaps that accounted for the levity in the editor’s own writing. Did it mean Frieda had been out of town that week? Or had she and Emmett had some kind of falling out? Was this what was so important that Emmett had crept into the office last night just to remind himself that it had happened?

Trying to dampen the slow burn of excitement, Brady hurried to the cabinets and found the issue for the previous week. He pulled the folder and carried it over to the desk.

The column was there, and there was nothing in it that seemed out of the ordinary. Evangeline Landry to become the bride of Mr. Lawrence Jordan, of King’s Hill. Sergeant Walter Evans home visiting his mother, Mrs. Alice Evans. Wilhelmina Olson ill …

He read the column a second time and then went to the file drawer again. He drew the next week’s column, that for August 13th, and this time his efforts were rewarded.

It was at the beginning of the column:

My readers will forgive me if I took a week off after faithfully writing this column every week for the last seventeen years, but, as some of you now know, it has been my great joy in this past week to become the mother of a baby girl.

Brady stared down at the announcement. Annabelle. It was the week Annabelle had been born! He went on reading.

Of course, I’m only the adoptive mother, but the joy is the same, as all you who know me will agree. This is the fulfillment of a dream and I invite all my friends to visit at the earliest opportunity and see little Annabelle Lee.

Brady drummed the table with his fingers, trying to see where the piece fit. It was no secret that Annabelle had been adopted—she had told him, herself. So what was there about the business that was attracting Emmett Larson’s interest thirty years later?

Brady looked at the masthead again. 1957. Frieda had been in her seventies when she’d died, which meant she was in her mid-forties when she’d taken in Annabelle. Late for an adoption. And Frieda was a single parent.

Which meant that she hadn’t gone through the normal adoption process.

Which, in turn, meant that maybe Annabelle was kin. But if it had been done legally, there would be a record somewhere. If Annabelle was the key to this business, then knowing where she’d been born might be of value. The problem was that the record might be sealed.

But sealed didn’t always mean secret. As a reporter, he’d found loose tongues in judge’s and clerk’s offices.

As he thought, his eyes wandered back over the lines of the announcement, and suddenly he realized he was staring at the first sentence.

My readers will forgive me … after faithfully writing … for seventeen years …

Seventeen years. Suddenly he was seized by curiosity as to how she had begun. Emmett had had to play the censor, weed out the libelous parts, but Emmett had only bought the Express after the war. There had to have been an editor before Emmett. An editor who had given her a start. What had her column been like then? Had she started out eager to hurt the world? For that matter, had Emmett always been the cynic he seemed to have been in later years? Had their antipathy been the cause of two not dissimilar world views? Or had the antipathy developed as their own experiences with the world had moved them along parallel paths? Had their hatred really been the mutual respect of similar souls?

He replaced the old newspapers in their folders and reinserted them in the file drawers. Then he went to the year 1945. Emmett, just back from the war. He pulled the folders for the last weeks of the year, but the editor was still Al Grayson. He skipped ahead to 1946, his eyes skimming over accounts of demobilization, inflation, war crimes trials, returning vets.

He found it in the issue for February 21. There, midway down the page, was a smiling, twenty-three-year-old Emmett Larson in the uniform of the Army Air Corps.

LOCAL HERO RETURNS, the heading declared.

Staff Sergeant Emmett Larson returned to Troy this week with a chestful of medals, including the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. He was decorated for service during some of the most dangerous bombing missions over Europe. We know that everyone will be glad to see Emmett back, but no one more than this writer, who had the good fortune to employ him briefly before the war on this newspaper. We want him to know that his old job is waiting for him if he chooses to return.

He checked Frieda’s column, but there was no reference to Emmett’s homecoming. He flipped to the next issue. There was a brief notice to the effect that Emmett Larson had indeed agreed to come back to the Express, and that the management was delighted.

He replaced the paper and went to an issue from late in 1946. There was a story about the efforts to raise money for a memorial to the late Frederick Love Cantrell, who had died during the Battle of the Bulge. A pair of fishermen on New River had overturned their boat and one had drowned. The police jury had voted a two mill tax for paving the streets, and here, for the first time, Brady sensed the pen of Emmett Larson.

The ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia give us pause for reflection. One wonders what taxes were levied on a docile populace by ancient kings and high muck-a-mucks in the name of road paving, but really in order to support their extravagances. The Prophet cried, “Alas, Babylon,” but is there no modern prophet to do us the same service when the local mullahs impose an exorbitant tax?

Brady smiled and went to the next issue. But there was nothing savoring of Emmett’s pen, and he wondered if the young journalist hadn’t had his ambitions checked by the older editor, who would have lectured him on the realities. It had happened to Brady himself, more than once, when he’d been younger.

It was hard to find anything exceptional at all about Frieda’s column, but perhaps Al Grayson had performed the same service as censor that Emmett had when he’d taken over.

For the rest of the year Emmett was quiet—no sarcasm, no accusations, no irony. And then, early in 1947, everything changed.

The issue in Brady’s hand bore a black-bordered box in the center of the first page.

Alvin Tyler Grayson, 1891–1947

Alvin Grayson, longtime publisher and editor of this newspaper died at his house on January 5th …

There was a story at the right of the page, recounting Grayson’s tenure and describing his death as sudden. Brady meditated for a moment and then flipped through to the next issue.

TO THE PUBLIC

Notice is hereby given that Emmett Larson, formerly Assistant Editor and Publisher of the Troy Parish Weekly Express, has taken over management of said Express, effective immediately. Any questions, suggestions, and complaints may henceforth be directed to him.

The regime had clearly changed.

Brady returned all the newspapers to their places in the file drawer and stared at the lines of identical cabinets.

Emmett had been away during the war. But he had worked for the newspaper briefly before he had gone to the army. Maybe, just maybe …

He opened the drawer for 1941. Fifty-two issues and it could be in any of them. Or none. He sighed and reached for a handful of the folders. And stopped. Because the drawer seemed somehow less full than the others.

At first he thought that perhaps the newspaper had added a page during the war, but when he checked the first issue for 1941, he saw that it contained the same number of pages as it did today. There was no doubt about it: some of the folders were missing.

Of course. He remembered Emmett’s stiff posture as he left the office. He would have known then, if he hadn’t been thinking of Kelly. Emmett had not only replaced the file he had taken, but he had drawn some of the files from 1941.

Brady checked the missing issues and wrote down the dates. There were four issues, all contiguous, from July 3rd, 10th, 17th, and 24th. Then he went to his desk and called Jack Frye in the School of Journalism at Louisiana State University.

“All four issues?” the man asked, nonplussed. “You know they’ll want an arm and a leg. The microfilm copies only cover part of every page and …”

“I’ll send you a check as soon as I find out what they cost. But I need them fast.”

“Well …” The man on the other end sighed and then capitulated. “You did drive up from New Orleans to give that lecture to my class …”

“I appreciate it, Jack.” He hung up the phone and sat back in the chair.

It might be a useless exercise, but Emmett had considered those issues worth taking out under his coat. That meant he at least thought the issues might contain something of interest.

But about what?

The only clue he had was Annabelle.

Emmett had wanted the newspaper with the announcement of her adoption—which must have occurred shortly after her birth. Then, for some reason, he had wanted newspapers from sixteen years earlier.

He went back to the files and drew some of the issues from May and June of 1941. Frieda’s column was absent. He went to April, then March. No column. Then he reached for the February folder and realized that it was empty. Emmett had taken those four issues, too. But when he turned to January, the column was there, chronicling marriages, visits, births …

Births.… The idea took him by surprise. But then, as he thought about it more, he realized it made perfect sense.

Excited, he went to the files for 1940. Seventeen years. Wasn’t that what Frieda had written? It wasn’t true, of course; she hadn’t written the column without a break for seventeen years—there was the evidence of her absence for at least four months of 1941, which would have made sixteen years. The inference was that her column had begun in the preceding year, 1940.

He found it quickly, the issue for Thursday, September 12: Social Notes by Frieda Payne Troy

How old had she been then? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? And still unmarried. But she had been married once. Her name proved that. What was it Emmett had said? The mister saw the light years ago, took out for parts unknown.… Of course. All the columns for late 1941 were signed by Frieda MacBride …

Who had she married? Was that in the newspapers Emmett had borrowed? And if so, how did it fit in with the other? Well, at least, that was one question he felt he knew the answer to.

He lifted the phone again and caught Jack Frye on the way out.

“I need the issues from February, 1941, too,” he said. “Can you do it?”

“Why don’t I just send you the whole year,” Frye snorted. Brady tactfully thanked him and hung up. The copies might provide confirmation, but it would take two days and there was a killer out there. Maybe there was a way to find out without waiting.

If Annabelle was the key, then he must go to Annabelle.

She was unstable, of course, but that might work in his favor. He had dealt with unstable people before. Sometimes it was what they did not say that counted, and sometimes it was the fantastic lies they told that pointed to the truth. And sometimes the truth just tumbled out as if a sluice had been opened.

He checked his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. Kelly would be finished with the meeting by now and on the way back. And he couldn’t face her right now, anyway. Not until he had dug further.

Annabelle.

He put the CLOSED sign on the door, turned the key in the lock, and started down the street for the big house four blocks away. There was a nip in the air, unseasonable for March, and the breeze made it good kite-flying weather. He thought of his youth and the big open lot in Metairie just a block from where he had lived. The lot had long since been claimed by a doctor’s office, and Skinny Narcisse, the kid with the razor blades on his kite tail, had lost an arm in Nam, while Pete Brady, the boy with the fringed box kite made of blue tissue, had won the Pulitzer Prize. He’d run into Skinny once in a K&B, where Brady went to buy whiskey. Skinny wasn’t skinny any more and his empty sleeve was neatly folded into the front of his shirt. His other arm was around a pretty woman in her thirties, whom he introduced as his wife. They seemed a happy couple, Brady noted. And at that moment, he’d have been willing to give back the prize.

He came to the end of the block and stopped, gazing up at the old house on the hill. The mixed reds and pinks of the azaleas could do little to disguise the essential morbidity of the image. The ancient structure needed no fence to remove it from the flow of life in Troy; its very position, set back and above the rest of the town, proclaimed its apartness, and once more Brady wondered what it must be like to grow up in such a place.

He went up the walk, noticing as he did that the grass needed trimming and the white paint had blistered from the sun in some places. There was a car in the driveway, and he assumed it meant that she was there. He stopped at the door, started to knock, and halted. The sound of a rock band, so incongruous with this setting, was drifting slowly out from somewhere inside.

He raised the antique brass knocker and banged it against the plate a few times. The music continued and he wondered if anyone inside could hear his knocking. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Still no answer.

She was probably upstairs, passed out from the drugs or caught in some schizophrenic reverie. He knocked again, twice for good measure, started to leave, and then, on an afterthought, tried the door. It was unlocked.

Maybe, he thought, if he shouted her name she would hear. He shoved the big door open and stepped inside.

The odor of incense overwhlemed him and he recoiled from the sick-sweet pungency.

“Annabelle.” He waited and then called again. “Annabelle. It’s Peter Brady, from the Express.” No answer, just the rock music throbbing down through the floor from somewhere above.

He looked around him. For the first time he took note of the decor and he realized he was seeing a vignette from the twenties: an antique escritoire in one corner, a buffet from the last century against one wall, an ancient Underwood typewriter on a stand, and a brick fireplace with an old-fashioned mantle and wrought-iron fire dogs. On each side of the fireplace were book shelves, and curious, he walked across the rug to see what Frieda had kept for reading material.

After the first row of titles, he stood up, perplexed. Green Light, by Lloyd Douglas; So Big, by Edna Ferber; The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington; Goodbye, Mr. Chips, by James Hilton; and American Epitaph, by Frederick Love Cantrell. All best-sellers in their time, but that time was long past. It was as if she had stopped buying books after 1940. Then he looked up and thought he understood.

The man staring down at him from the gold picture frame was not the kind to invest in what was written today. The stern eyes and the square jaw told of a no-nonsense view of life and a refusal to compromise. Judge Creswell Troy, the erstwhile political boss of the Long era, a man who would have found offensive any book not suitable for reading to the entire family. The Cantrell book was an exception, of course, but it was probably the fact that its author was a local that gained it the important dispensation.

He would have been a hard man to grow up with, just as his daughter had become a difficult mother for a girl born when Frieda was in middle age.

He was still staring at the judge when he heard the noise.

It sounded like something had been dropped and he turned quickly. “Annabelle. Is anybody home?”

No one answered, but then he heard the noise again. A door closing. Or perhaps a window? He stepped over to the foot of the stairs, the sound of his feet swallowed by the soft rug. The noise had come from upstairs.

He put a hand on the bannister and started up, one step at a time, acutely aware of the creaking of each board.

“Annabelle? Are you here?”

No answer. The smell of incense was stronger now, mixed with another, harsher smell that was all too familiar to him. Marijuana. It looked like she had been celebrating her emancipation with a surfeit of drugs and music.

He came to the top of the steps, and all at once the music stopped. He froze, waiting for a sound, but there was none. He realized then he was sweating, the way he had sweated that endless afternoon when he had driven to Pass Manchac. Suppose, he thought, she’s not alone.

He really had no right to be here. If she were in bed with a lover things could get sticky.

The music went back on, and he realized it must be a tape playing over and over. He started into the hallway, muscles tense. There was a closed door facing the landing and another closed door to his back. The music, however, was coming from an open door at the end of the hall, and with each step the pungent odors increased.

The slamming sound came again, and this time there was no doubt it was coming from the room ahead. He froze, but then, as he listened, he realized there was another sound almost buried by the music. It was a metallic squeaking and he relaxed slightly. He tiptoed to the open doorway and looked in.

The dormer window had been left open and a shutter was swaying in the wind. Even as he watched, a gust caught it and sent it against the house. One mystery explained.

Then he looked over at the bed and saw Annabelle.

She was asleep, dressed in a white negligee that left little to the imagination. Her pale hair spilled over the pillow like strands of gold thread and, with the dark flower in her hair, she seemed childlike, even innocent.

He stepped closer, and that was when he realized that the dark spot was not a flower at all, but a mass of clotted blood. He touched her face and drew back his hand.

Annabelle MacBride was not sleeping. She was dead.

He looked over at the open window, but he saw the screen was in place. Whoever had killed her, then, had probably come up the stairs, just as he had, and left the same way. He walked to the side of the bed, gazed down at the candleholder. The wax had melted into a pink puddle. The ashes in the crystal ashtray were cold. The room, however, had been ransacked, and the pillows and fluffy animals that might have made it look like a doll’s house had been ripped to pieces, their stuffing scattered over the floor. Only Annabelle seemed peaceful, a sleeping princess in the midst of chaos.

He tiptoed through the destruction, not sure what he expected to find. Whoever it was had been searching for something, and he wondered if it had to do with the tiny pieces of paper she had scattered over her mother’s grave. Annabelle’s words came drifting back: I may be able to help you and maybe you can help me. It had the sound of blackmail, and he wondered if that was what this was about. She had something, something in writing, and had been trying to peddle it to the highest bidder. But one of the bidders wasn’t willing to play the game.

He bent over and picked up a small framed photo, careful to hold it by the cardboard support at the rear. It was a portrait of a young woman, not as old as Annabelle, but bearing a remarkable resemblance to her in the eyes and mouth. Brady put the picture back where it had fallen and tiptoed out of the room, as if any noise might awaken the dead. He had one more piece of the puzzle.