purposefully climbing the stairs to his parents’ bedroom, hearing their murmuring voices, the look of terrified disbelief on their faces when he aimed at them, the concussion of firing, the impact of hailing lead, the splattering of their blood everywhere, even on him, and the smell of gunpowder in the mortal quiet that followed.
FIVE
I N THE MIDDLE OF MAY I received a letter from one of my readers in Birmingham, who claimed the best way to unclog a drain was dumping in baking soda and chasing it with white vinegar. Down in the shallow cavern of my two-hundred-year-old cellar was an old clothes-scrubbing sink whose drain had been clogging and backing up for years, resisting conventional cleansers, and the diligent efforts of plumbers. Watching the bubbling mixture with the same fascination I had when I combined vinegar and baking soda in elementary school, I felt torn. For someone who’d begun a career as a college intern at The New York Times, approaching journalism with the loftiest ideals of exposing fraud, corruption, of developing the instinct to recognize the glimmering, elusive fact that might illuminate the dark soul of an interviewee, here I was watching a practical alchemy that might or might not unblock a drain. It could be argued that I was helping the world of domesticity like the clean-it-fix-it-find-it equivalent of Martha Stewart; however, as popular as my column had become, I sometimes felt a pang of having abandoned my true calling. This despair was obvious to people who were close to me. Matthew used to ask me why I just didn’t take up investigative journalism again. And my answer to him was my answer to myself. I didn’t have the mettle to keep battling egos for the integrity of turns of phrase. I was tired of my prose being rewritten, hacked into more pedestrian form. Once I stepped out of the ring, I just didn’t have the heart, or the drive, to throw myself back in with the big-timers. I guess I discovered that I wasn’t as ambitious as I thought I was.
Instead, I was helping housewives wow their husbands with Moroccan tagines made with lemons that marinated for months in earthenware jars, spreading the word of where to find shoes for tiny feet, or feeding brewer’s yeast powder to dogs to help rid them of fleas—there was something quietly satisfying about this pursuit. With that thought, the cordless phone rang in the pocket of my baggy Carhartt jeans. I wiped my hands with a towel, checked the incoming number and, seeing it was Anthony, trotted up the steep wooden stairs and answered.
“You sound all breathless,” he said to me flirtatiously. “Anybody I know?”
“Dream on,” I said, and then explained where I’d been and the procedure I was testing.
“Let me know if it flies.”
“Read the column, save me the trouble.”
“Catherine, do you really care if I read your column?”
“Of course I care!”
“Whenever you speak about it, you’re always so disparaging.”
“Self-protection of a battered ego,” I explained, heading into my study with the phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear. There was a short lull. “Something tells me this is not a social call.”
“It’s an update call,” he said. First he told me that Roderick Jones, the new guy in my prison writing class who’d exposed himself and forcefully fondled a cashier, had been cleared of suspicion in regard to the River Valley murders. Jones had been able to substantiate he was in Massachusetts the night of Angela Parker’s abduction. “He’s one of those guys who sits on every receipt. And he’s got one from a liquor store in Acton right outside of Boston that we were able to verify. Says 9:07 P.M. So that fairly rules him out. It was a mother of a storm and the roads all over the northeast that night were a complete mess.”
“Good,” I said. “I didn’t relish the idea of instructing the man who dumped a body in our orchard.”
Anthony went on to say that, believing that the
FIVE
I N THE MIDDLE OF MAY I received a letter from one of my readers in Birmingham, who claimed the best way to unclog a drain was dumping in baking soda and chasing it with white vinegar. Down in the shallow cavern of my two-hundred-year-old cellar was an old clothes-scrubbing sink whose drain had been clogging and backing up for years, resisting conventional cleansers, and the diligent efforts of plumbers. Watching the bubbling mixture with the same fascination I had when I combined vinegar and baking soda in elementary school, I felt torn. For someone who’d begun a career as a college intern at The New York Times, approaching journalism with the loftiest ideals of exposing fraud, corruption, of developing the instinct to recognize the glimmering, elusive fact that might illuminate the dark soul of an interviewee, here I was watching a practical alchemy that might or might not unblock a drain. It could be argued that I was helping the world of domesticity like the clean-it-fix-it-find-it equivalent of Martha Stewart; however, as popular as my column had become, I sometimes felt a pang of having abandoned my true calling. This despair was obvious to people who were close to me. Matthew used to ask me why I just didn’t take up investigative journalism again. And my answer to him was my answer to myself. I didn’t have the mettle to keep battling egos for the integrity of turns of phrase. I was tired of my prose being rewritten, hacked into more pedestrian form. Once I stepped out of the ring, I just didn’t have the heart, or the drive, to throw myself back in with the big-timers. I guess I discovered that I wasn’t as ambitious as I thought I was.
Instead, I was helping housewives wow their husbands with Moroccan tagines made with lemons that marinated for months in earthenware jars, spreading the word of where to find shoes for tiny feet, or feeding brewer’s yeast powder to dogs to help rid them of fleas—there was something quietly satisfying about this pursuit. With that thought, the cordless phone rang in the pocket of my baggy Carhartt jeans. I wiped my hands with a towel, checked the incoming number and, seeing it was Anthony, trotted up the steep wooden stairs and answered.
“You sound all breathless,” he said to me flirtatiously. “Anybody I know?”
“Dream on,” I said, and then explained where I’d been and the procedure I was testing.
“Let me know if it flies.”
“Read the column, save me the trouble.”
“Catherine, do you really care if I read your column?”
“Of course I care!”
“Whenever you speak about it, you’re always so disparaging.”
“Self-protection of a battered ego,” I explained, heading into my study with the phone cradled between my shoulder and my ear. There was a short lull. “Something tells me this is not a social call.”
“It’s an update call,” he said. First he told me that Roderick Jones, the new guy in my prison writing class who’d exposed himself and forcefully fondled a cashier, had been cleared of suspicion in regard to the River Valley murders. Jones had been able to substantiate he was in Massachusetts the night of Angela Parker’s abduction. “He’s one of those guys who sits on every receipt. And he’s got one from a liquor store in Acton right outside of Boston that we were able to verify. Says 9:07 P.M. So that fairly rules him out. It was a mother of a storm and the roads all over the northeast that night were a complete mess.”
“Good,” I said. “I didn’t relish the idea of instructing the man who dumped a body in our orchard.”
Anthony went on to say that, believing that the
Similar Books
