“The freezer?”
“What in the hell do you want to put it in the freezer for?”
He can see their reflections in the glass, the questioning glance they share with each other. He faces them, forces a smile. “The thing’s dead, right? So there’s no rush. I don’t want anyone driving over here in this weather, and I don’t want the thing stinking up the lounge either. First thing tomorrow, I’ll make some calls. You leave it to me.”
Chapter 4
SOMETIMES LELA FEELS like her life is a race that she will never win because it will never end. As soon as she fulfills one deadline, another three appear. There’s no time to reflect, to feel any sense of accomplishment. She never looks back. Everything angles forward. She lives in the future tense.
It’s not as bad as it sounds. No reflection means no regret. She lives without regret. How many people does she know—too many—who spend their days unloading their worries on social media or to their therapist, because they keep churning through their mistakes. I shouldn’t have challenged my boss during the meeting, shouldn’t have slept with that guy I met at the bar, shouldn’t have given away my vinyl collection, shouldn’t have ignored my mother when she kept calling out of loneliness. She doesn’t need any lead-weighted anxiety to distract her, burden her, when she lives life at a sprint. The past is past. All that matters is how right now will lead to soon enough.
Work dominates. Work makes her happy. Her sister doesn’t believe this. Her sister often says things like, “When someone’s on their deathbed, they don’t say, ‘I wish I had worked more.’ They don’t reflect fondly upon all the time they spent at their desk. They remember birthday parties and camping trips and church suppers, time spent with family, friends.”
Lela doesn’t bother arguing with her. Her sister lives on another planet where logic doesn’t apply and Jesus hands out candy canes and rides around on a hovercraft made of white clouds. But if she did respond, she would bring up their father, an architect who spent his career blueprinting and supervising the construction of office buildings and restaurants and churches and houses all over the metro. Whenever they were driving, Dad never took a direct route, always going out of his way to visit a building of his, and when they passed it, he would slow and point and say, “I made that.” That’s the kind of satisfaction she feels every time she picks up a paper and sees her byline. “I made that.” As much as she hates fiddling around with computers, she knows that online archives have given her words even greater permanence. They’ll outlive her. That’s her idea of the afterlife, immortality. She prays at an altar built from twenty-six letters.
Because of this she neglects most everything else. Sometimes forgetting to shower, brush her teeth, eat. Never remembering birthdays or anniversaries. A man she recently dated called her self-absorbed, but that was absurd, since she spent no time acknowledging herself, all of her time chasing down the stories of others. She was absorbed, that’s all, lost in the adrenaline-spiked labyrinth of headlines.
She feels bad for her niece, Hannah, who has grown up in a house full of crosses. As if the girl didn’t have enough to feel lousy about—nearly blind and barely a teenager—her mother’s idea of a fun birthday party is a piano recital followed by a Bible reading followed by off-brand Fudgsicles. It’s amazing Hannah hasn’t turned out to be a total freak. Instead the girl is the definition of poise and cool, never complaining, always ready to fire off something witty or interesting. About her mother she says, “I tried paying attention to you, but then I fell asleep for a thousand years.” About an NPR report she says, “Successful sanctions should involve depriving people of cat videos.” About a political debate she says, “I hope this guy wins a Grammy for best broken record.” The kid cracks her up with her smartassness and startles Lela with her maturity. Sometimes she feels like they should swap roles, so that Hannah might be her cool aunt. Maybe Lela should spend less time at the keyboard, if only to spend more time with her.
Lela just got off the phone. A yellow legal tablet sits beside her, its pages ink-scratched with notes. First she talked to the race coordinator for the Willamette 10K. Then she set up an interview and photographer for tomorrow morning, when at the farmers’ market she’ll meet with a local artist who sells birdhouses made from crap she pulls out of Dumpsters. Lela will follow through on both stories—she always does—but god, they’re so boring and pedestrian compared to the one she’s stumbled upon. The Rue. Undertown. The construction site. The deformed skull. The men who pursued her. There’s something here—some wonderful trouble—that thins the line between reporter and detective. That’s her favorite kind of story, the kind that makes her feel like she’s not simply educating or entertaining, but inciting change and potentially thrilling an audience. When you know someone’s pissed about what you’re writing—when you know you’re potentially in danger—that’s when you know you’re doing your job.
Rain drums the hood of her Volvo. The skull sits on the dash. The designs on it draw her attention, and not for the first time she wonders what they mean. The recesses of the eyes and nose remain pocketed with shadows, no matter how frequent or bright the lightning. She has sprayed her hands twice with sanitizer, but they still feel filmed from her handling of the skull, somehow infected. So she wraps her spring roll in a napkin before dipping it into a plastic cup of peanut sauce. A take-out container of pad thai steams on the seat beside her.
She is parked two blocks from the Rue. She wants to return to the site—to investigate the tunnel, to go beneath. The storm must have sent everyone home, but then again, the crew might be working through the night to clear away any evidence. They probably think she’s reported them. She ought to report them. She will report them. But not yet. Because once the police get involved, she will be interrogated and stuck at the station for hours she doesn’t have. And, let’s be honest, she hates working with others. In fact, she’d rather shove a screwdriver in her eye than work with others. This way, she hands over the answers to the PD at the same time she hands over the story to the paper, rather than waiting for some overworked, cigarette-stinking detective in an unmarked Dodge Shadow to slowly, stupidly work his case. It belongs to her. She’s subordinate to no one.