Everyone in the room turned and looked at me. Most of the faces were neutral. A few showed more than healthy skepticism. Jim Schmed looked like he wanted to try out his favorite WWF takedown on me.
Welcome to the family.
Ainsley gave me a little shoulder shove. “Here she is,” he called proudly.
“Shirley Shayla.” She chugged across the room on sturdy legs and gave me the mutual respect shake-solid grip, taking my measure. She stood with her feet a bit widespread, her trunk tilted forward. The way you’d need to stand if people were always trying to knock you down. “Good to finally meet you, Ms. O’Hara. How are you settling in? Anything I can do?”
“Definitely.”
GM’s always ask anything can I do? the first time they meet you. The standard answer is, thanks for the opportunity to join the team, and other similar crap. No GM has ever asked me that question twice. Which is why it’s a good idea to have a list ready.
“For a start, I need an office with a door.”
She tipped her head and stared at me over the top of her frameless glasses. “I’ll see what I can find for you, Ms. O’Hara. See what I can find.”
11:16:00 a.m.
He had to find it. Had to find it all. Now.
Being in the house like this was making his palms so wet, the cornstarch inside the gloves was congealing into lumps.
He searched the top of the medicine cabinet first, trying to think like Gina. She was compulsive about where she kept that kind of shit. She would never leave a bag of medical samples someplace the kid might get her hands on it.
Gina was a good mother.
Next, he searched the bedroom and bathroom. Opening the bedroom door had been a shock. It was like a museum in there. Nothing had been taken away, moved, even touched. There was dust on everything. Not that he was some kind of a clean freak, but he started sneezing the minute he opened a drawer.
Maddy O’Hara might be hot shit in TV-land but she was a lazy bitch when it came to housework.
After an hour of careful searching, he was pretty certain Gina hadn’t hidden the bag in her room. He put everything back exactly as he found it, but he hated the fact that the room was gathering dust.
Someone ought to do something.
That’s when he’d opened the night stand and discovered the stack of photos.
Months ago, right after the accident, he’d snuck back into the house and removed the obvious photos of him-one from the fridge and one from her bedside. “Play it cool” was the plan, especially with a reporter in the family. He’d stayed away from the kid at the funeral. Done everything he could to convince the guys that his relationship with Gina was short-term only.
Nobody understood how bad he felt. Nobody.
He picked the photo off the top of the pile-he was smiling, Gina was smiling, a birthday party?-and he sat down on the bed. Nobody appreciated what he’d done to keep things under control. His sacrifices. His feelings.
Maddy O’Hara was one selfish, lazy bitch all right. This sad, dusty room proved it.
If she continued to make things difficult, more sacrifices would have to be made.
But this time around, Maddy O’Hara was the one who’d be making them.
12:48:38 p.m.
Ainsley kept shaking his head and shooting me sidelong glances while he maneuvered the truck out into traffic.
“What?” I asked. I’d no clue what his problem was; pretty typical manager’s meeting as far as I could tell. I snapped my phone shut. “No answer at any of the Tom Jost addresses. Let’s try the farm. See if we can talk to somebody out there first.”
“Oh sure. Why not?” Ainsley said. He sounded a little on the sarcastic side.
“Just drive.”
It didn’t seem to take as long to get to the Jost farm this time. Either I was getting used to the distances or the absence of Ainsley’s singing improved our wind resistance. He parked the truck on the road and said we should walk to the farmhouse from here. He made a point of mentioning, “It’s considered polite not to park on their property.”
“Okay, Miss Manners. Before we get too close to offend anyone, get me an establishing shot of the whole scene, a view downhill from here of the hanging tree and a nice tight shot of each of the outbuildings.” It was the kind of stuff I could use with a voice-over, while recapping Tom Jost’s childhood.
We went to work. I took my camera out and shot a few stills. The farm buildings were all weathered wooden structures, painted either white or dark red and grouped at the end of a winding drive. There were two black buggies parked in the gravel near the house. No sign of the usual ugly 1950s slab house beside an old picturesque barn like most of the modern farms around here. There were no people to be seen but we heard children’s voices when the wind carried the right direction.
College hung behind me a few steps, but he had the camera up and rolling. As we came up the driveway a rangy-looking dog loped out to greet us, stopped fifty feet away and started barking his head off.
“Camera down,” I ordered. I’ll argue a person to the mat for the chance to hang around and shoot. Dogs don’t negotiate. “Someone will come now. Let’s see what they say before we shoot anymore.”
“‘See what they say,’” Ainsley mumbled to himself. “Right.” He lowered the camera immediately. The old camera jocks I’ve worked with would never stop just because I told them to. Now there’s a benefit to snapping the kid fresh out of college I hadn’t considered.
“Rascal! Rascal, stop that.” A young woman in dark fairy-tale clothes appeared in the doorway of a small outbuilding. Her face was obscured by the brim of her bonnet. “Rascal, come.”
“Good afternoon,” I called. “We’re looking for Mr. Jost.”
The girl took a half step back, into the shadow of the doorway, her long dress and hat cloaking everything but her face and the silver pail she carried in front of her. I knew her face. It was the girl I’d seen hiding in the bushes.
“Hello, again.” I tried a smile.
She remembered my face as well. From her expression, I’d say she considered me unpredictable and potentially disease carrying. “Who are you? Police?”
“No. I’m Maddy O’Hara. We’re from WWST, the television station. Do you watch television?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“Is Mr. Jost around?”
“I’m here,” a man called from the doorway of the barn. He was dressed in the Amish uniform with suspenders to hold up his pants and a straw hat. Together with the wiry, gray beard covering the lower half of his face, he also resembled someone lifted from the pages of a Grimm’s fairy tale. Another much younger man, his whiskers still black, appeared in the doorway behind Jost. On the porch, two women stepped through the front door. A small girl-child peeped curiously from between the folds of their long skirts. Another face appeared in the upstairs window. People seemed to appear from thin air, all eyes on Ainsley and me.
“Good afternoon, sir. I’m Maddy O’Hara with WWST. I know this must be a difficult time for your family. I’d like to ask you about your son Tom.”
“I have no son. You don’t belong here. Please, you will leave.”
“We were told Tom Jost was your adopted son. Mr. Lowe spoke very kindly of the way you took the boy in.”
Jost’s face shifted from blank to grim. “Lowe is a good man. He’d be a better one with his mouth shut.”
“So Tom wasn’t your son?”
“Go away.”
“Father?” the girl called out from the shadowy doorway, her voice high and thin with concern. Inside the shed, a commotion of clucks and caws erupted. She was standing in a chicken coop; I’d never seen one before.
“No, Rachel. Not now.” Jost turned his back and shuffled out of sight, back into the barn.