Cheryl Madigan and her partner, Nancy Clay, showed up at the newspaper office at eight fifteen Tuesday morning. Georgie was at her desk in the reporters’ bullpen with her earbuds in, transcribing the interviews she’d done with Nick Welby and others the night before. The newspaper building perched along the riverbank, one wall of windows looking across the frozen water into downtown. Today there was a great blue heron out on the ice, its wings ruffled and its beak tucked down against its chest. The bird reminded her of an old man caught out in a rainstorm and she watched it as her fingers moved over the keys. Just as she got to the part where Welby started telling her that no one at the memorial really knew Abbie Green, a flash of color pulled her attention away from the screen. She turned her head and saw them.
“Holy shit,” she said, pulling the cord so the earbuds popped out and hung from her hand. Madigan and Clay came down the steps from the building’s upper level, where reception, the publisher’s office, and advertising teams were located. The two women looked exhausted and beautiful, wearing oxford shirts and blazers beneath their winter jackets. Madigan was slim and barely five feet tall, with a blond pageboy haircut she kept lacquered to one side with styling cream. Clay was taller, her wavy red hair pooling at her shoulders. Elizabeth West met them at the bottom of the stairs and waved them into her office. Seconds later, Georgie’s phone burbled.
“Join us in here, would you?” Elizabeth said.
As she made her way between the desks she realized it was strange the two women had come alone. No cops. No city council members. No mayor. If Madigan and Clay were going to talk to the media about the arson at their home, she would have expected a show of force from city officials. Instead, it was just them. Georgie dragged a chair over from an empty desk. She backed it through the door while Elizabeth handed out cups of cafeteria coffee. The editor said how sorry they were to hear about Abbie and the loss of their home. She paused to introduce Georgie and they all shook hands.
“Sorry not to call ahead,” Madigan said, “but we just got back and we wanted to get our side of the story out there as soon as possible.”
Georgie slid her chair a little closer and switched on the recorder. Their side?
“You’re going to have to back up a bit,” Elizabeth said. “Just got back from where?”
“Snowed in at Minneapolis,” Madigan said. “We were on our way to spend winter break at a writers’ retreat in Maine. Our connecting flight got canceled and we were still in the airport when the police called late Saturday to tell us about Abbie.”
“It must have been a terrible shock,” Georgie said.
Madigan offered her a tired smile that said: You have no idea. “It took most of Sunday to get home. We spent yesterday being interviewed by the police.”
“Interrogated is more like it,” Clay said. Madigan put a hand on her knee.
Georgie and Elizabeth passed a glance. “Have you been satisfied with the police response?” Georgie asked.
“They have two detectives working our case,” Madigan said. “Two. At this point it’s clear we need to explore other options. Nancy and I are offering a five-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to the arrest of the criminal who destroyed our home and killed our friend. We’ll pay it out of our own pockets and we would like to urge anyone with information about this case to call the city’s twenty-four-hour tip line immediately.”
“Do you have any idea who might have done this?” Georgie asked.
“No,” Madigan said. “None.”
“We’ve had threats,” Clay said. “Ever since Cheryl went public with our relationship.”
“I never took them seriously,” Madigan added. “But there had been some break-ins in the neighborhood recently and we thought it would be best not to leave the place empty so long while we were gone. Now this.”
“Do you really think that’s what this is?” Georgie asked. “An attack on you?”
“What else could it be?” Clay asked. “This was a hate crime, plain and simple.”
“The police aren’t telling us anything,” Madigan said, “but the questions they asked us? You could tell this wasn’t random and it wasn’t an accident.”
Again, Georgie confronted the idea of a deranged zealot burning down the women’s house because they were gay. She still didn’t buy it. Before she could ask a follow-up question, Madigan started in about university benefits for same-sex couples. She said situations like this reinforced how important it was for public institutions to support all kinds of families. She said spousal benefits were as much about dignity and civil rights as about spiritual significance.
“It’s a shame that it took an act of violence to bring that to the front page,” she said. Madigan was a good speaker, eloquent and charismatic, but the last line sounded rehearsed.
“You must have been pretty close with Abbie if she was going to spend the break house-sitting for you,” Georgie said, trying to move the conversation away from Madigan’s prepared material.
“We started e-mailing each other before she even came to school here. She missed our application deadline two years ago and contacted me to see if we’d still accept her paperwork.”
“So you made an exception for her?”
Madigan nodded. “Her writing sample was phenomenal,” she said. “By the time she got her application in, we’d already awarded all our financial aid for the year, but we offered her admittance and she accepted.”
“She was such a great kid,” Clay said. “So talented.”
“She didn’t even want to be a writer, though,” Madigan said. “Not at first. She was going to law school. Can you believe that? She ended up coming here and we were able to get her a job in the tutor lab. It wasn’t much, but it paid the bills. We got to know her. She came over for dinner a few times. I was going to be her adviser on an independent study in the spring.”
“Where will you live now?” Elizabeth asked. “Will you rebuild in the same spot?”
“We’re not thinking that far ahead,” Madigan said. “Right now I don’t know if I could ever live there again, but this isn’t about us. We’re just committed to getting justice for Abbie.”
Georgie could feel her slipping back into the script she carried around in her head. They spent another fifteen minutes asking questions about the proposed reward and the tip line. The more they talked about it, the more it sounded like a lot still needed to be decided about both. Finally, Madigan and Clay stood and they all shook hands again.
“How did they seem to you?” Elizabeth asked when they were gone.
“Strange, I guess,” Georgie said. “Sad but soapboxy. The thing about the benefits? Madigan had her speech all prepared.”
“The reward and the tip line, too,” Elizabeth said. “Something performative about it, I agree. But at least you’ve got your headline.”
Georgie nodded. “They called it a hate crime,” she said. “Clay did. What do you think about us going with the ID?”
“Let’s wait a bit longer,” Elizabeth said. “We’ve got the Madigan and Clay thing for tomorrow. In another day or two we’ll have autopsy results and then the cops won’t have a choice but to confirm the ID. You’re going to get cranking on the story about the women right now?”
“You bet,” Georgie said.
“That’s my girl,” Elizabeth said.
By five o’clock, she’d published her story on the web under the headline A HATE CRIME, PLAIN AND SIMPLE. It felt weird to leave the building along with the herd of other reporters. She’d gotten used to working late. A bunch of them were going for drinks but she begged off. She had four copies of the day’s paper tucked under one arm and had texted earlier to ask Matthew if she could bring them by. He opened the door to his room wearing the same clothes he’d had on at the memorial the night before. “You’re famous,” she said, passing him the stack. Her eyes swept the cluttered motel room as she came inside.
“Wait until you meet the neighbors,” he said, reading the look on her face. “All the best people stay here.”
He held the papers in his hands and she saw a bubble of pride rise in him. Gary Lange’s front-page story ran across the top. It was just a rehash of how the official investigation had progressed so far, but one of the photos Matthew had taken the night of the fire ran with it. The photo editor had chosen one of the last pictures in his series. It caught the side of the young cop’s face in the pulsing light of a fire truck, the smoking house over his left shoulder and the crowd of neighbors gathered at the opposite edge of the frame. There was real drama in it. Underneath in tiny type it said photo courtesy of Matthew Rose.
She remembered the feeling of seeing her name in print for the first time. Seeing a story she had created memorialized forever on a piece of flimsy newsprint. It was a feeling you couldn’t get from the Internet or looking at something on your phone.
He turned to put the newspaper down on the motel room’s small table and suddenly swore out loud. “Fuck,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, peering over his shoulder.
She squinted, not seeing what it was until he put his finger down on the bottom right corner of the picture. A figure stood in the background of the image, alongside a group of neighbors watching the fire from the sidewalk. Just a head and shoulders visible among the rest of the crowd. He was out of focus, but still recognizable if you knew the shapeless puff of his silly green stocking cap, the little ball resting on top of his head. From the position of his shoulders, it looked like he was standing with his hands in his pockets, just as he’d been sitting when Georgie interviewed him the night before.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“That’s him,” Matthew said. “That’s Nick Welby.”