Deadline Man

I ask, “So all that stuff about walking into the lobby of the Chicago Tribune building with your first reporter’s notebook. That was all bullshit.”

“I wish it had been true.”

“Is your name even Amber?”

“Yes.” She gives me a sad smile and brushes back my hair. “It’s not like you never kept a secret from a woman you made love to. Anyway, I told you I was older than I looked.” She uses both hands to pull back her hair. “I didn’t plan what happened. With us.”

I make no attempt to move.

“This is about Megan’s disappearance and it’s about something going on in Olympic International,” she says. “The two are connected. I just don’t know how. That’s why we need to work together.”

“Work together!” I slam a hand on the door’s armrest and let out a string of obscenities. “That begins with trust. Like telling me about this connection. The paper’s going to lay me off anyway!” I hear myself babbling. I keep it up. “Nobody seemed to give a damn about Olympic until I started writing about it. Just Conspiracy Grrl…”

I am watching her face and expect to see a reflex of interest. Instead she stares at her lap and my stomach drops out. “Oh, hell. You were Conspiracy Grrl…”

“I was trying to get you started.”

I shake my head. Part of me still feels as if I am being waterboarded again. I take a deep breath. “The passion page was a nice touch.”

Her mouth parts in a half-smile. “I knew your reputation. Thought it might help get your interest. Now you need to get going.”

“Who is Mister EU? Another agent?”

“He’s you, silly.”

“EU?”

“Emotionally unavailable.” She leans over and kisses me passionately. I hold her as tight as life.

“Now,” she says, “you’ve got to get the story and get it out there so people know what’s going on. I’ve packed a bag for you and swept it for any listening or tracking devices. It’s clean. So be careful what else you might gather along the way.” Then she gives me a precise set of instructions.

“I can’t do that.” The ice is back in my bloodstream. My chest constricts.

“You will do just that,” she says. “Why are you shaking?”

“I can’t do it!”

***

But I do.

Chapter Thirty-four

B-matter.

In my line of work, the term “B-matter” has an elastic meaning. It can be copy that’s written in advance—say, for a notable person’s obituary—to be topped by the “A-matter.” It can also be information that’s less important to the news story—stuff that can be trimmed if there’s not enough space. Or B-matter can simply be background on a story, whether you use it yourself or pass it along to another writer. It might never make the finished article. It’s just there. It happened. But it’s an orphan. No editor ever went to the mat over B-matter.

Here is some of mine: My sister Jill was always a strange girl. Bookish and withdrawn as a child, unhappy about her beauty as a young woman, prone to terrible tantrums over seemingly small things. Only when I got older did I realize that she was reacting to what would now be called a dysfunctional family: alcoholic mother, a dad who was too old to be a hippy but wanted to try, until he found his calling as a crackpot who believed he had a legal right to refuse to pay income taxes. He found many like-minded souls who agreed. Unfortunately, one who didn’t was a federal judge. Fights at home and flights from creditors and ever-present shame. I did my best to protect her.

It was only during college when her mind became a haunted house. She had to drop out. She became afraid of everything. Panphobia, they called it. By this time I was in the Army and could no longer shelter her. Grammy, my grandmother on my mother’s sid

e, had enough money to try to help. Jill would slip in and out of normality—taking part-time jobs and lovers, then falling apart over seemingly trivial things and clinging to a single room.

Jill was hospitalized. She went through a platoon of therapists. She ended up on disability at age twenty-five, living in a little apartment in the U District that had a view of the ship canal. She had her books and music and view. She rarely left this sanctuary. When Prozac came along, she seemed to get better. But the improvements were always temporary, tentative. When I worked for the Free Press the first time, it wasn’t unusual to get her calls, sometimes magically fluent, often raving. I was dear and I was the enemy.

The only thing Jill wasn’t afraid of was the water. She loved swimming as a child and teenager. She was very good—working as a lifeguard during good summers. In college, she became an ocean kayaker—a Puget Sound and Lake Washington kayaker. She likened it to cross-country skiing—as opposed to the high-adrenaline whitewater variety, like downhill skiing. Here, she was fearless and it always seemed to give her the peace that eluded her on land. She returned to it again and again. By the time I took the job back east, Jill seemed to have reached as much equilibrium as was possible, and I gave the kayak credit.

That’s what made what happened so unbelievable.