Amanda showed her engraved invitation to a black-suited man at the door and we entered the grand ballroom. A waiter came up with flutes of champagne and we took two. A moment later, a sweet young thing offered a silver tray of interesting-looking breaded things. Amanda, of course, declined.
When I declined, too, she said, ‘Whoa.’
‘I’m waiting for Peeps,’ I said.
‘You’re nervous,’ she said. She looked at her watch. ‘Let’s stay here at the back, where there’s less chance of being photographed looking unhappy.’
It was true. The still and video photographers were setting up along the walls, closer to the stage.
A gray-haired man stopped to say hello to Amanda. She introduced me, though the man seemed more interested in my yellow bowtie than in anything that might come out of my mouth. I looked around while they talked.
My eye stopped on a man leaning on a cane, standing in front of a panel of multicolored lights half-concealed by a curtain at the right rear corner of the ballroom. Something about him was familiar; he had the burly bulk of someone I knew. Yet this man was clean-shaven and wore a brown plaid sport coat, white button-down shirt and pressed, tan slacks. There was no scruffy beard, no Chicago event T-shirt. And this man’s hair was neatly trimmed, not at all the wild tangle of the person that I knew.
But this man was looking straight at me and shaking his head slightly, as if beseeching me to look away. I knew him then, in that instant. He was Jimbo, Jenny’s cameraman from Channel 8, so changed in appearance as to be almost unrecognizable.
I looked away and tried to think. It was no mystery how he’d gotten in. As a member of the working press he had the credentials of a television cameraman. A puzzle was why he’d shaved, gotten a haircut and put on conservative clothes, but I was more interested in why he was lurking by the panel of colored lights that likely controlled the electronics in the room.
I snuck another look back at him. He was looking up at the huge television screens hanging high above the stage at the other end of the room. There was one for each of Chicago’s five major television stations, each displaying its own stable of analytical geniuses discussing the day’s election returns. I wondered how Jimbo had managed to switch places with the person in charge of monitoring the network feeds. And I wondered whether Jenny had set up something to rock the evening.
Amanda noticed me staring across the room. ‘Dek?’ she whispered as the gray-haired man left.
‘Under no circumstances get near the candidate tonight,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Toxicity.’
‘Here, tonight?’
I nodded, trying hard to not sneak another backward glance at Jimbo.
A waiter came by with more champagne. I gave him my empty and Amanda’s almost full flute and took two fresh ones. And then a matronly woman wearing an impressive amount of brocade, or maybe it was simply sofa upholstery, came up to Amanda. Amanda introduced us, but I would have bet the woman forgot my name as quickly as I forgot hers. For sure, she expressed no interest in my bowtie.
I was relieved. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to see what Jimbo was up to. I snuck another look at the back corner of the ballroom. The curtain had been closed across the panel of colored lights. And presumably, Jimbo.
The upholstered woman went away and Amanda and I chatted about nothing relevant. Too many ears were too close.
At exactly ten o’clock big red letters flashed across the silenced feed from CBS Channel 2. To no one’s surprise, their statistical prognosticators were calling the senatorial election for the Democrat, Timothy Wade. Everyone in the room cheered. Almost. I didn’t cheer. Amanda clapped because it was expected, but it was faint. She was preoccupied, watching me. I snuck another backward look. The curtain was still closed.
The crowd cheered louder as Timothy Wade strode up to the podium and looked up at the big, silent screens. He was dressed somberly in a navy suit and white shirt, but he’d slipped on a festive tie in a yellow similar to mine.
Channels 5,7 and 9 followed Channel 2 within thirty seconds, flashing their own projections that Wade would win an unprecedented sixty-five percent of the Illinois vote. The room roared. People stomped their feet.
Channel 8’s screen, which had been showing a panel of four politically wise people talking noiselessly, suddenly switched to a fire blazing in a dark woods. The room fell silent. Everyone supposed the fire to be a conflagration that had just raged up, serious enough to push aside the night’s election coverage.
I knew better. It was footage from early that morning. Jenny and Jimbo had been the only news people to record the fire.
The crowd gasped as the other four screens were switched to Channel 8 and Jenny’s voice boomed loud from the big speakers spotted throughout the room.
I looked back. The curtain was partially open. Jimbo had moved down along the side wall and was aiming a video camera toward the podium.
Jennifer Gale, always known as a great beauty to television viewers throughout northern Illinois, came into view, live on all five screens. She stood in presumably the same woods, the small, extinguished clearing behind her lit harshly in the night by portable floodlights.
This Jennifer Gale was not beautiful; this Jennifer Gale was as Wade’s guards had left her. One of her eyes was swollen almost shut and her lips were puffy from being hit repeatedly. Big spots of purple, blue and brown covered her face and neck and she looked shrunken in too-large blue jeans and the plain white button-down shirt she wore beneath a blue jeans jacket. Her good eye was narrowed. It was clear she was in pain.
‘Good evening. I’m Jennifer Gale, reporting live tonight from Winnetka.’ She winced as she turned to briefly survey the blackened ground behind her. ‘Setting off what might become one of the most remarkable stories ever to unfold in Chicagoland, this small, otherwise unimportant patch of woods began burning mysteriously shortly after four o’clock this morning. Summoned by an anonymous tip, fire department personnel quickly put it out.’ She paused, obviously trying to summon strength, and said, ‘They believe the blaze was deliberately set.’
She turned to face the lens. ‘Why is this remarkable? Because of what was discovered after the fire was put out.’ She pointed to her left and the camera zoomed in on two rectangular holes dug in the burned ground. ‘The fire exposed a sunken, rectangular section of soft earth where investigators discovered the body of a very recently buried, middle-aged man. Based on information in his pockets they believe him to be John Shea, a former Democratic volunteer worker who left Chicago abruptly over twenty years ago.’
The camera panned slightly to the second hole. ‘The fire also burned away a section of undergrowth where a second grave was found. It contained the corpse of a male presumed to have been buried decades earlier. It might be weeks before identification is made, if ever.’
Jenny turned and the camera followed her as she took five more steps to her left. ‘And then there is this.’ She pointed down to the ground. ‘A third grave, containing the remains of another body. This one, though, was carefully interred in a well-constructed, solid pine coffin.’
My mind flashed back to the scraps of wood I’d seen in Wade’s sunken garage. He’d taken time with that pine coffin, to make it right.
‘Based on brief examination,’ Jenny went on, ‘it’s believed the third person died of some sudden blunt force trauma.’
Killed in the wreck of a Cadillac Eldorado convertible, I could have said, that’s been hidden ever since in a sunken garage, along with a wheelchair that would never again be needed.
Jenny turned almost halfway around and her cameraman turned with her. Behind her now, recognizable to almost everyone in the room, was Timothy Wade’s white frame house, lit up bright in the night. Many gasped. More began to murmur. There was no mistaking the inference.
‘One forensics team member speculated, and cautioned me to clearly call it as such, that the body recovered in the pine coffin might belong to a young woman in her early twenties, perhaps someone who lived nearby.’
‘Oh, no,’ Amanda murmured.
‘Today’s gruesome discovery of three bodies,’ Jenny went on, as her cameraman resolutely kept the Wade house in her background, ‘comes on the heels of yesterday’s search of the estate of Timothy Wade, tonight’s presumptive winner in the race for the US Senate. Though the two locations are across the street from one another, authorities have not indicated that the two investigations are in any way linked.’
Jenny signed off, all five screens defaulted back to the Channel 8 studio and the ballroom fell into a hushed silence. Only the panelists on television were speaking, though they were doing so in hushed tones, having heard the news, too.
Everyone in the ballroom looked to the man at the podium.
As ashen-faced as he’d been when the hatchet and bones came tumbling at him, Wade had stepped out from behind the podium and was flapping his arms crazily at two young aides who were standing below the stage. No one in the ballroom had to guess what he wanted; he wanted the televisions shut off. They nodded and began pushing their way through the crowd, heading toward the curtain at the back. In just seconds, the screens went silent and dark.
Wade suddenly became aware that everyone was watching him. He straightened up, his face a strange contortion of fury and fear. He walked slowly back to the lectern, for there was no place now to run. For a long moment, he looked out at the crowd that had come to cheer his stunning success, a crowd now as silent as mourners at a burial, staring back at him. The horror on their faces told him there could be no words.
I looked to the side of the room where Jimbo stood pressed against the wall, still recording. Jeffries, Wade’s campaign security chief, was walking quickly toward him. I tensed, thinking I might have to run over to pull the security man off Jimbo.
Jeffries slowed and gave Jimbo a nod that might have meant nothing or might have meant everything. And then, without a backward glance at his candidate at the lectern, Jeffries walked out of the room.
I turned to look back at Wade. He still stood stiffly behind the lectern. Only his eyes moved, restlessly. He was looking for someone.
He stopped. His eyes had found mine.
His lips tightened and, for a moment, I thought he was going to scream.
I heard myself speak the four syllables slowly, conversationally. They carried easily across the hushed room.
‘Marilyn Paul,’ I said.