Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

I tried Jake. Still no answer. I made some coffee so strong it tasted bitter in my throat. I walked into my office and looked over the notes I’d jotted down during my conversations with Jenna and Dennis. I checked the time; it was seven A.M. I had thirteen hours to find out as much as I could about Myra Lyall and about that website before I went to the Cloisters that night.

I know what you’re thinking: that I was at best reckless and foolish, at worst suicidal. What can I say? You might be right.

It was too early to call a hacker-wannabe like Jenna’s ex-beau Grant, but ambitious people don’t sleep in. A young assistant at the New York Times, especially one worried for her job, was likely to be at her desk before the sun came up. I called through the main number at the Times and was surprised and disappointed to get voice mail. I left a message.

“Sarah, this is Ridley Jones. Before her disappearance Myra Lyall was trying to reach me. Some pretty odd things have been happening to me since. I wonder if we can talk, get together for coffee?”

I left my number and hung up. I know, it was a pretty risky message to leave, considering how many ears and eyes might be on my communications-not to mention hers. But I needed the message to be interesting enough to warrant a callback. The phone rang before five minutes had passed.

“Is this Ridley?” Her voice was young; she was practically whispering.

“Sarah?”

“Yeah.”

“You got my message?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can we get together?”

We arranged to meet in a half hour at the Brooklyn Diner, a tourist trap in Midtown where no real New Yorker would ever eat. I wondered at her choice but figured she just didn’t want to run into anyone from the Times.

“How will I recognize you?” I asked her.

“I know what you look like.”

One of the advantages of infamy, I guess.

THE DINER WAS crowded; a cacophony of voices and clinking silverware rose up as soon as I opened the door. Strong aromas competed for attention: coffee, eggs and bacon, the sugary smell of pastries on a tray at the counter. My stomach rumbled. I stood by the door and scanned the room for a woman sitting alone. There was a petite blonde with her hair pulled back severely from her face, but she had her nose buried in a copy of the Post, sipping absently from a thick white coffee cup. A mix of people sat at the counter. A pink puffy family of three, all wearing I NY T-shirts, huddled over a guidebook with the Statue of Liberty on the cover. I said a silent prayer that they wouldn’t get mugged. A businessman chatted loudly on his cell phone, oblivious to the annoyed stares of people around him. An elderly lady dropped her napkin; the young man sitting next to her bent down and picked it up, handing it to her with a smile.

I watched, losing myself as I’m prone to do in wondering about people. Who are they? Are they kind or cruel, happy or sad? What causes them to act rudely or to be polite? Where will they go when they leave this place? Who will die in the next week? Who will live to be a hundred? Who loves his wife and family? Who’s secretly thinking about shedding his identity, hiding his assets, and running away for good? Questions like these move through my brain rapid-fire; I’m barely aware of them. I can exhaust myself with my own inner catalog of questions and possible answers. I think it’s why I write, why I’ve always enjoyed profiles. At least I get the answers about one person-or the answers they want to give, anyway.

I felt a hand on my elbow and turned around to see a fresh-faced girl with hair as orange as copper wire, skin as pale and flawless as an eggshell. The smudges under her bluest of blue eyes told me that she was stressed and not sleeping. The urgency in her face told me that she was scared.

“I’m Sarah,” she said quietly. I nodded and shook her hand; it was cold and weak in mine.

The hostess showed us to a booth toward the back of the restaurant and we both slid in. I noticed that she didn’t take off her jacket, so I left mine on as well.

“I can’t stay long,” she said. “I have to get back to the office.”

“Okay,” I said. I got right to the point. “Why was Myra trying to reach me before she disappeared? I thought originally that she wanted to talk to me about her article, but I know now that it went to bed before she started trying to reach me. What did she want?”

A waitress came. We ordered coffees and I asked for an apple turnover.

“I don’t know what she wanted,” she said, leaning into me. “I know that she was working on the Project Rescue story. It wasn’t a news piece, just a series of profiles on these people who might have been some of the children removed from their homes. She wasn’t that into it, did it more to make a new editor at the Magazine happy. But she learned something during her research that really got her jazzed.”

“What?” I said. There was something skittish about her, as if she might get up and bolt at any second. I had the urge to reach out and hold on to her wrist to keep her from fleeing.

She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

I looked at her, tried not to seem exasperated. “Okay,” I said, releasing a breath and giving her a patient smile. “Let’s start at the beginning. She was working on these profiles…” I began, letting my voice trail off. She picked up the sentence.

“And she was doing some background research about the investigation, about Maxwell Allen Smiley and about you. She talked to some people at the FBI. She got really annoyed one day. She’d just come back from an interview at FBI headquarters and said that she’d never had so much resistance on a ‘fluff piece,’ especially when the investigation was already closed. She said she was getting the feeling that there was much more to the story than had been revealed.”

“So she set out to find out what that was?”

She looked at me with wide eyes. I was starting to think there might be something wrong with this girl. She was either a little on the slow side or scared and reticent because of it. I wondered why she had agreed to meet me.

“I’m not sure. I think so. Everything happened so fast.”

She looked down at the table, and when she looked back up at me, she had tears in her eyes. I was quiet, waited for her to collect herself and go on.

“She was in her office. I heard her phone ring. She took the call, then got up and closed her door. I couldn’t hear her conversation. About a half an hour later, she left her office, told me she was leaving for the day on a lead, and she was gone.”

“You didn’t ask her where she was going? What she was working on?”

She looked at me. “She wasn’t like that. She didn’t talk about her work. Not until the words were on the page. Anyway, I guess she was right about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“During my last review with her, she told me she worried that I wasn’t curious enough, that I didn’t seem to have a ‘fire in the belly,’ as she put it. And that maybe I was more cut out for research than news investigation.”

I could see that the comment had hurt her, but I could also see that it might have been dead on.

The waitress brought our coffee and my pastry. I wanted to shove the whole buttery, sweet turnover in my mouth all at once in an effort to comfort myself.

“When I went to shut down her computer and turn off her light for the night,” she said, after a sip of her coffee, “I saw something strange on her computer.”

I paused my own coffee cup between the table and my lips, looked at her.

“There was a website open. The screen was completely red.”

She slipped a piece of paper across the table. I recognized the website address as the same one I’d seen at my father’s and at Jake’s. That humming I get in my right ear started up. I found myself looking around the restaurant, wondering if anyone was watching us. Just the mention of that website made me nervous. I didn’t know why.