The List (38 page)

“Can you get it in so many words?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he just needs time. I feel closer.”

“You better.”

“How about you pick me up and I’ll tell you about it,” I suggested.

“I will. It’s just I drove out a little far to see this Puerto Blanco scenic drive
thing, so it might take me a second to get back to you.”

“A second?” I asked, trying not to blow up.

“Half an hour. Have some more coffee.”

I walked back into the diner, smiled at the waitress, who let me sit in the same table,
and ordered a cup of decaf. “I’m a little jittery,” I explained when she brought it
to me.

“I understand that,” she said, placing it in front of me along with a receipt, facedown.
“You out here to see the cactuses?” she asked.

“Not specifically,” I replied. “But I did go see them today and thought the park was
pretty spectacular. That’s where I met Michael O’Brien,” I said, explaining my earlier
rendezvous.

“O’Brien, sure,” she said. “He’s a good man. He hasn’t had the easiest life, but he
keeps in good spirits. Comes in here all the time.”

“That must be nice,” I replied. “I’ve always liked that about small towns.”

“He likes to talk to the customers and check up on his daughter,” she said, filling
up my almost full cup.

I looked up at her happy face.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t realize . . . are you—”

“His daughter? I am,” she said. “That’s why I know he’s such a good man.”

Thirty minutes later, when Payton pulled up and honked rudely for me, I reached for
the check to pay it, but the waitress put her hand on mine and said, “That’s on the
house, of course. Thanks for keeping my daddy company like that. He sure loves pie.”

“That was no problem at all,” I said, crumpling the receipt and putting it in my pocket
along with the five-dollar bill I had taken out. “Thank you for the coffee. It was
very good.” I waved goodbye, walked outside, and shoved Payton into the passenger
seat.

“Travis Turner is dead,” I said, pulling the seat up an inch.

“Perfect,” said Payton. “Now what’s your brilliant plan?”

“I have absolutely no idea. We try to find the last one, Manuel Reyes. And then we
just start asking questions.”

“I have another idea,” said Payton. In true Payton fashion, she didn’t offer up the
idea until I asked her about it twice and screamed that I had three weeks to break
this story or I would be out of a job.

“Relax. You have such a neurotic personality,” Payton replied.

I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly to show her just how relaxed I was. “Well,”
said Payton, fiddling with the car’s GPS again. “I’ve once again discovered a delightful
little piece to your puzzle. While you were busy having a leisurely coffee, I asked
a few more questions and now I have an idea of where we should go.”

“What kind of questions?” I asked, spraying the windshield to wipe off the dust. “I
thought you went to Puerto Blanco?”

“I did that, too,” said Payton, turning up the radio. “You took forever.”

“You didn’t bribe anyone this time?” I asked. I was pretty sure that every time I
turned my back Payton was waving around crisp bills to everyone with working vocal
cords.

“No, I did not bribe anyone,” said Payton, smiling. I absolutely did not believe her.
She probably had a thousand bucks cash in her bra.

“But I did find out where Olivia Reader used to live.”

“You did!” I exclaimed, totally not caring if she was throwing her unborn child’s
college fund at total strangers.

“I did. And it’s not far. You want to go there or do you want to have some more intimate
chats with useless old people?”

“I want to go there,” I replied, pushing the Jeep well over the speed limit.

“You never know,” said Payton. “There could be something identifying about the house.
Something that tells us that Olivia Reader and Olivia Campo are the same person.”

Yes, that would be fantastic, but I seriously doubted that there was a mural of Olivia’s
face painted on the side of the property.

We drove in silence for a few minutes listening to a classic rock radio station with
the air-conditioning blasting so loud we could hear it over the music. The town, which
was starting to look more familiar, finally rolled into view and Payton looked down
at her notes and instructed me to take a hard right.

“Now left,” she said when the road started to thin and the houses got noticeably smaller.

“It’s down that road there,” said Payton, pointing at a long dirt road with no houses
in sight. “Or that’s what I was told anyway.”

“Who gave you the address?” I asked as I hesitated around the turn. The road looked
very long and very private.

“A woman in the Laundromat, actually,” said Payton, squinting into the sun as we passed
a dog running along the side of the road. “I was just walking past it and realized
I had never been inside a Laundromat. I mean, even in college we sent our clothes
out. So I walked in and there was this older woman behind the counter and I just asked
her if she had known the Readers. I said I was a cousin and I wanted to pay homage
to their memory.”

“You’re going to hell,” I said, driving slowly as the car bounced on the uneven road.
“You can’t lie about dead people.”

“This from the night-vision nude photographer,” said Payton, laughing. “Plus, you
don’t seem to mind very much now.”

She was right. I didn’t mind. I was quite happy to have Payton doing everything that,
as a journalist, I really couldn’t do. I knew it was wrong to turn a blind eye to
her behavior, but I didn’t really care at this point. I had my career to save.

Payton continued, “I asked about Olivia Campo but she said she didn’t know anyone
by the name Campo in Ajo. She said she remembered the Readers, but wouldn’t acknowledge
the suicide. Just said that the little girl never came back after her mother died.
But she was able to describe where they lived.”

“Children don’t disappear,” I said, driving slower and slower.

“They do if they’re dead,” replied Payton.

I turned the air-conditioning vent away from my face and lowered my window. What we
were doing was perfectly normal. I was just following a lead handed out by an old
senile woman at a Laundromat. And Payton was making fun of me for getting all my information
from senior citizens.

“There it is,” said Payton, motioning toward a small gray house in the distance.

“There are cars in front,” I said, pointing out the obvious. “We shouldn’t go. Someone
lives there and they’ll probably just shoot us for trespassing.” I slowed the car
to a halt in front.

“This is probably close enough anyway,” said Payton.

We sat motionless, watching the American flag hanging from the top of the porch and
waving slightly in the breeze.

The house was small. Very small. Our horse barn was about four times the size. It
had light gray wooden siding that looked like it had been repainted every couple of
years instead of replaced. Some were sagging a little in the middle while others looked
like they were hanging on by one tired, rusty nail. There was a porch and two white
plastic chairs on it and a potted plant on the cement stairs leading up to the house.
It was tired, bland, colorless, but the flag brought it a little sense of pride and
ownership. The inhabitants might be poor, but they were part of the map of America,
which I sometimes forgot extended far beyond Washington, D.C.

It was hard to imagine Olivia, who now drove a very expensive BMW and interviewed
the president of the United States, living here. If Olivia Campo was actually Olivia
Reader, she would have spent her childhood walking out that front door, sitting on
that porch, walking down this road. That girl could be the same girl who now verbally
spat on her colleagues in one of the most high-powered newsrooms in the country. The
grass around the house needed to be cut and there was a rusty shell of an old car
in the back. I couldn’t imagine Olivia Campo ever running up those stairs. I thought
about the elegant home she shared with Sandro. It was a perfect slice of Washington . . .
and it looked about one million dollars and a couple of lifetimes away from the little
dilapidated ranch we were staring at. Maybe we were sniffing around a cold lead after
all.

Still, I couldn’t shake an odd sense of recognition. Olivia didn’t act like she came
from money. Not like Libby or Julia or the girls who surrounded me in my youth. She
didn’t have the ease of it, the casual confidence. Her energy seemed to come from
the pit of her stomach, the kind of steely drive I had always associated with people
who were used to pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I looked at the front
door, worried that someone very big and very angry was going to walk out. The only
similarity between Olivia Campo’s house now was the American flag—there was one in
Olivia’s kitchen in Washington and there was one hanging here. But there were several
million in between, too.

“Let’s go,” Payton finally said after we had been sitting in the idle car for five
minutes. “We get it right? Her life—if it was her life—was shit.”

I nodded in agreement and turned the car around.

We spoke to six other people that night, including Manuel Reyes, and they all looked
at us like we were crazy. “I’m retired, I golf, I have a new wife, and I sure as hell
don’t want to talk to you” was what he said when we found him at home. No one else
we asked knew Drew Reader, and they certainly didn’t know his daughter.

“It happened too long ago,” I said when we were back in our motel room. “This is an
exercise in pointless questioning.”

“Start writing,” said Payton as she got into bed. “What you already have is simple,
and potentially devastating for them.” She was right. I had to finish the piece and
get it in print as fast as I could.

Before turning off her bedside lamp, Payton announced, “I’m flying back to Argentina
tomorrow morning.”

“You’re doing what?” I exclaimed. “Why? I need you here.”

“No, you don’t,” said Payton, putting her cashmere throw over the pillow like it was
made of mold. “You’ve got this. And Buck misses me. He said eating a dozen eggs alone
isn’t all that fun. Isn’t that just adorable?”

It was disgusting. Why couldn’t he consume a massive amount of cholesterol alone?
I needed my sister’s help.

“You don’t need my help anymore,” said Payton. “You did in the beginning, but you
have it all in front of you now. You just need to find the pluck to press send.”

Payton had plenty of pluck. But instead of lending it to my cause, she rolled over
and went to sleep.

So I wrote. I rewrote an earlier draft based on what I knew for sure. This meant leaving
out 50 percent of what I found interesting, because it wasn’t solid enough, but I
told myself that if it didn’t all blow up in my face, Upton and Cushing would be salivating
over their
Capitolist
mugs for me to keep digging.

Once I saw it all actually typed up, I also realized that Payton was right. It was
more than enough to undo Stanton’s career, and Olivia’s, for that matter. I could
pursue the rest later.

I emptied my purse and my pockets before bed, looking for a few dollars for the snack
machine out by the small swimming pool. I found the five-dollar bill the waitress
wouldn’t let me give her and the receipt I had crumpled. Both fell to the ground.
I bent to pick them up.

But the receipt wasn’t a receipt at all. It was just a piece of white paper with a
phone number written on it in thin blue pen. I was surprised I hadn’t seen it when
I shoved it in my pocket the first time. Had O’Brien written it? His daughter?

I grabbed my personal cell phone off the table and ran outside with the number in
my hand: 555-571-8764. That was an Arizona number, I was pretty sure. Maybe O’Brien
was ready to talk. I put my money in the snack machine and got a Diet Coke, which
I drank straight down before dialing.

I held the phone with two hands as I punched in the number and then pressed it to
my cheek, turning the volume all the way up. After four rings, it clicked over to
voice mail. The number belonged to a woman named Victoria Zajac.

I immediately hung up. Who was Victoria Zajac? It had not sounded anything like O’Brien’s
daughter’s voice. I immediately looked at my phone and prayed that I had blocked my
number. If not, then whoever Victoria Zajac was had everything. She had my name, my
number, could find where I worked in five seconds flat. I ran inside and grabbed my
BlackBerry and called my other phone. It came in as unknown.

“Oh, thank God,” I muttered. “Thank you, Jesus and Buddha and Gaya and Krishna and
everyone.” I put both phones in my pocket and walked inside. A waitress in Ajo, Arizona,
had given me a stranger’s phone number. She could certainly have
heard my entire conversation with her father. Maybe she knew something he didn’t.
She would have been much closer in age to Drew Reader. She could have even been a
friend.

I Googled the name on my phone, and three women named Victoria Zajac living in Arizona
came up on the first ten pages of hits. One was a guide in a tourism company far north
by the Utah border, and the other two lived in Phoenix.

The first, based on her work info on LinkedIn, sounded too young. She was just out
of college and working for the University of Arizona development office. But the second
Phoenix-based Victoria was an architect. She worked for a firm that did a lot of commercial
office space. With a few more clicks, I found her title. It had the word
partner
in it. That had to make her older. I wrote down her firm’s address and walked back
to our room. I had to get some sleep.

When I woke up late the next morning, already sweating, I rolled over and saw that
Payton was gone. Instead of her frowning face and perfect blond coif was a note that
read:

Good luck. Ship my stuff down when you get home. On a plane, not a boat. I expect
it to arrive in fewer than five days. Finish your story and see it through till the
end. Stop worrying about Olivia and Stanton. Only worry about Sandro a little. You
were always far too agreeable of a person. I’m happy to see you’ve developed a little
more grit. Goodbye now.