Kathleen O'Brien - The Stranger

“I’ve got a big problem, Mom.” Mallory didn’t open her eyes. She just held on to her mother’s soft, graceful hand. Elizabeth Rackham was fifty-five, but she didn’t look a day over forty. Everyone said she was the most beautiful woman they had ever met.

“It’s about Mindy. She’s fine right now—the wedding is only eight weeks away. Frederick is crazy about her, it’s really sweet to see them together. But there’s someone—someone who would like to spoil things. I think I can stop this guy, but I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do.”

She felt hot moisture pushing at her eyelids, so she squeezed her eyes even more tightly. She would not cry. Crying over a problem fell into Step B, and strong women never indulged in Step B.

“What should I do, Mom? Should I protect Mindy, no matter what it takes? I just don’t know what she’d do if she lost Frederick now. She’s better, really she is. It’s not like before, when she…when she didn’t even want to go on living.”

Her throat closed painfully as she remembered that horrible time. The blood all over the bathroom, spilling over Mindy’s pale wrists like red lace cuffs.

Finally she opened her eyes, letting the tears fall silently down her cheeks. She looked at her mother. If only she would answer her. If only she would give her some advice, tell her what to do.

But she wouldn’t, not ever again. Elizabeth Rackham looked as if she were peacefully sleeping, but it was nothing as natural as that. She’d had a stroke two years ago, and the doctors told Mallory that, according to all the tests, her mother wasn’t aware that her daughter was in the room.

The next morning, Mallory got in the car, a brown paper package on the seat beside her, and drove carefully through the silver spring rain. She passed the police station. She passed Roddy’s house. She passed the Heyday Chronic Care Center. She found the sign that said “Maryland—Fell’s Point Harbor” and she hit the gas. She’d have to hurry if she was going to be on that ferry before eleven.

TYLER BALFOUR WAS running late, and he didn’t like that. He refused to spend all day playing catch-up, so he pulled out his cell phone, called his assistant and, after about two seconds’ hesitation, told her to cancel his lunch with Sally.

The two seconds were because Sally, a beautiful blonde with the temper of a blazing redhead, had warned him that the next time he canceled a date she would assume he was canceling the whole relationship.

She didn’t mean it, of course. It probably wouldn’t take him more than another two seconds to sweet-talk her out of her snit. But he realized suddenly that he probably wouldn’t bother. Sally was gorgeous, but the thrill was gone. She was too high-maintenance anyhow. Two seconds here, two seconds there…it added up.

On the spur of the moment, he also told his assistant to ditch his three-o’clock interview. That interview was worthless. The guy might be a U.S. Senator, but he wouldn’t ever talk on the record, and Tyler hated anonymous sources.

Besides, he needed to free up some serious time. The man he was on his way to meet right now might be a lot less exalted, but he was a whole hell of a lot more interesting.

Dilday Merle was the chair of academic affairs at tiny Moresville College in Heyday, Virginia, which meant that, in the grand scheme of things, he was pretty much nobody.

But when Professor Merle had called Tyler yesterday and asked for an hour to talk about the Heyday Eight, Tyler hadn’t even hesitated. Hell, yes, he had time. He’d make time. The Heyday Eight had won Tyler a Pulitzer when he broke the story a few years ago, and they were expected to make him a couple of million dollars next year, when he published his detailed hardback version of the scandal.

He’d taken his time finding the right publisher, though several houses had been interested. He wanted to find someone who would let him tell the story straight, not just as pure exploitation. And, of course, he’d wanted a lot of money.

It was ironic, really. Eight ditzy blond college girls who spanked grown men with toy whips, then bedded them for fun and profit, had done what a decade of serious investigative reporting couldn’t do. They had set Tyler free from the underpaid grind of life at a daily newspaper.

No clock-punching for Tyler anymore. Mostly he worked on the upcoming book, which the publisher wanted to call Shenandoah Sex Circus, though Tyler was fighting to keep it simple. The Heyday Eight was good enough.

If he wrote anything else these days, he did it for magazines. In-depth and on his own schedule. In fact, his New Yorker piece should have hit the stands today. He had arranged to meet Dilday Merle in front of Bennie’s News Stand on M Street. If he hurried, he might get there early enough to grab a copy before the professor showed up.

Bennie had been selling Tyler newspapers and magazines for more than ten years, ever since Tyler was a senior at Georgetown and working on the school paper. Back then, Tyler had bought the Washington Post the way some men might buy a lottery ticket, just holding it reverently and praying that maybe, someday, it would be his byline on the front page.

“Hey, there, big shot! Who’s the man?” Bennie hailed Tyler with enthusiasm from the shadows of his crowded counter. Though it was a muggy spring day in D.C., Bennie wore his usual uniform, a pair of black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a hood pulled up over his balding head. He held up a copy of the New Yorker. “Who’s famous today?”

Tyler pulled out a couple of bills and traded them for the magazine. “I believe that would be me,” he said with a smile. He leafed through the pages to his story, scanned it to make sure they hadn’t cut him too much or spelled his name wrong. Good—they’d given him great play. Six pages, with full color.

Snapping it shut, he looked back at Bennie. “Did you read it?”

No one ever actually ever saw Bennie reading the merchandise, but he was the best-informed man in Washington, so Tyler assumed he must be doing it on the sly.

“Yeah,” Bennie said. “You’re slick, man. Real slick. You did a tap dance on that oil boy. You fishing for another Pulitzer?”

Tyler rolled up the magazine and stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s the Ellies when it’s magazines. But no, I’m not fishing for anything. I just tell the truth. I just tell it like it is.”

Bennie stuffed a sweet-smelling slab of gum into his mouth and eyed Tyler speculatively. “So you say. But is it really as easy as that? You gonna sleep okay when oil boy’s busting rocks in the slammer?”

Tyler thought of oil boy and his bankrupt company, his laid-off employees, his creditors who were basically screwed, and his investors who were suddenly destitute. One of them, an eighty-year-old man, had already shot himself to death rather than end up a burden to his children.

“You bet I will,” Tyler said. “Like a baby.”

Bennie looked as if he might enjoy a good debate, but Tyler, who had, as always, been subtly scanning the other customers—just in case the vice president’s wife had chosen this spot to rendezvous with her boyfriend, or the local minister was shoplifting a copy of Penthouse—realized that one of the old guys reading in the back of the store looked vaguely familiar.

He narrowed his eyes. Who was it? Thin, stooped, with shaggy white hair. Even from the back, the man was obviously not a local. His clothes were too ill fitting and tweedy for D.C.

Finally, the light went on. It had been almost three years since Tyler had seen him, but this had to be Dilday Merle.

He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Professor.”

Bennie’s store was small enough that Tyler didn’t even have to raise his voice. Which meant, of course, that Merle must have been able to hear every word Tyler had said since he walked into the newsstand. Tyler wondered why the old man had kept silent so long. The last time they’d met, when Merle had been trying to talk Tyler out of printing his story on the Heyday Eight, he hadn’t exactly been shy.