The List (39 page)

For the first time in my life, I was sad Payton was gone.

I
didn’t know what to do about Victoria Zajac. I needed direction, an editor. Just
not my editor.

I decided the only direction I did have was Phoenix.

I checked out of the motel and pulled back onto Highway 85. It was a little cooler
that morning. The sky was overcast, and the dark dry July heat didn’t knock you down
like the humidity in Virginia did. I stopped once, at a small convenience store in
Gila Bend, where I leaned against the trunk of the Jeep and drank down a whole liter
of water.

The people around me, a pretty even mix of Caucasian and Hispanic, wore old jeans,
cowboy boots, and T-shirts with faded slogans on them. Some women wore shorts and
flip-flops and led their children by the hand. These were the people who had elected
Stanton. Term after term, they had placed an X next to his name. And in just a few
days’ time, if Upton and Cushing printed my story, I was going to make all these people
regret their decision. People who didn’t vote for Stanton, the few Democrats among
them, might flaunt the fact that they had put their faith elsewhere. But most of them,
these everyday Americans who made twenty thousand dollars a year, maybe less, would
know that they had voted for a man who didn’t have the backbone to resist a girl in
her twenties.

When I got to Phoenix, I drove straight to the architecture firm where Victoria worked.
I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I didn’t care. She was a lead and I wasn’t
going to let it go because I didn’t have a clear line of questioning. “Bell & Assoc.
Architects” read a brass sign on the side of the door. There was a bell that I rang
over and over again, but it wasn’t answered. It was, after all, a Sunday in July at
an office that kept normal working hours, something I had grown completely unaccustomed
to.

I reached for my phone and called the number O’Brien’s daughter had given me again.
If I couldn’t reach Victoria, I thought as the phone rang, I could always drive two
hours back to Ajo and try to talk to her. Ask her why she had given me the number
of an architect in Phoenix. I probably should have done that before making the trip,
but she didn’t exactly write the number on my hand. It didn’t seem like she’d be willing
to talk.

I called Victoria Zajac twenty more times that day from my blocked number. But no
one ever answered. My plane back to Washington was at 7
P.M.
, and it was now five o’clock. I could call her from Washington, I told myself. But
I was here now. I felt so close.

Instead of driving to the airport, I drove to a Holiday Inn in downtown Phoenix, gave
them my credit card, and checked in. I called the airline, paid a fee, and pushed
my flight to the following night. Then, before I could change my mind, I opened my
laptop and wrote an email to Hardy saying I had to take Monday off due to personal
matters. No one at the
List
ever gave a mere ten hours’ notice before taking a day off, and it was hugely frowned
upon to miss Mondays, but I sent the email anyway.

Hardy responded within seconds: “Fine.” A man of few words, but “Fine” was better
than “You’re fired.” Which was what I would be if I didn’t get this story together.

I ate alone at a barbecue joint called Bobby Q that night with my laptop, a very large
beer, and a plate of pulled pork. I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing since the diner
in Ajo yesterday.

I stayed in the restaurant for five hours and wrote. I took an existing draft of my
article on nothing but Stanton and Olivia’s affair and made it meatier, more honest.
I didn’t know if the
List
would run my photos. They were pornographic, and we were a newspaper left out on
tables in the United States Capitol. So I described what I saw. I pulled up small
thumbnails of the photos and wrote what was in them. I wrote about those nights at
Goodstone, their heated fighting in the car, Olivia reporting on Stanton for the
List,
the two of them driving away from Upton’s party together, the staff at the hotel
having a standing order to supply their room with posh firewood—everything I could
piece together from months of accidentally and then purposefully trailing them. And
then I wrote about what I thought they shared. How she pursued him for a reason—a
reason I was still trying to figure out—but how it had become so much more. How it
was still going on. I pulled up the picture of them at the window of the Bull Barn
and described what I saw: Two individually powerful people, who in that moment only
cared about each other.

When I fell asleep late that night in a king-size bed with the TV on, I felt satisfied.
Even without a bulletproof motive, I had something substantial, something good. I
knew once the story was published the truth would come out. Tiger Woods’s pretty Swedish
wife just smacked his car with a golf club, a reporter penned a few paragraphs, and
blammo! His endorsement deals were in the toilet and dozens of hookers were lining
up to write tell-alls.

Because my body was on
Capitolist
time, I was awake on Monday morning well before dawn. I braided my hair, made coffee
in the little pot they had in the room, and reread what I had
typed up the night before. It still felt solid. I just hoped the
List
would chuck their family values for the sake of a story and run the photos.

At 8
A.M.
, I started calling Victoria every fifteen minutes. After an hour, I still had nothing.
I had her machine message memorized, could have given a lecture in her voice. I wasn’t
nervous pushing redial anymore, nor did I have anything prepared to say. So at just
shy of 10
A.M.
when she answered the phone, I sat on my bed dumbstruck, unable to say a word.

“Hello? Hello? This is Victoria Zajac,” a pleasant woman’s voice said again.

What felt like minutes went by before I remembered how to speak. I was sure I was
about to hear the line go dead, but when I started talking, she was still there.

“Victoria Zajac?” I asked nervously.

“Yes, this is Victoria Zajac. Who is this?”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, trying to regain some professional composure. “My
name is Adrienne Brown, I’m a reporter for the
Capitolist
in Washington, D.C.”

“From the
Capitolist
in Washington, D.C. Is that a newspaper?” she asked, sounding much less friendly.

“It is,” I said. “I’m calling because a friend of mine thought you might be able to
help me with a story I’m writing. Would you have a few minutes to talk to me today?
I’m in Phoenix.”

“You’re in Phoenix and you want to talk to me about a story you’re writing.”

“That’s right,” I said. I held the phone with my neck and wiped my hands on my skirt.
They were covered in sweat.

“Why do you think I’ll be able to help?” she asked. “What is your article about?”

I hesitated. Should I say Stanton’s name? The meatpacking plant? O’Brien’s daughter?

“Well, it’s about a few different things. But mainly it’s about a woman named Olivia
Reader.”

There was a long silence.

“Do you know her?” I asked. “Olivia Reader. She’s in her late twenties now.”

I could hear Victoria breathing slowly on the other end.

“I suppose you could say I did know her,” she said finally. “But that was a long time
back. That’s who you want to talk to me about? Olivia Reader? You’re doing a story
just on her? Has she done something wrong?”

Wrong? Well, legally she hadn’t really done anything wrong.

“No,” I replied. “Not wrong, exactly. Would you have a few minutes to talk to me about
her? I could come to you. Maybe have a cup of coffee.”

“All right,” said Victoria, her voice filled with hesitation. “There’s a little café
near my office.”

That I knew already. I had downed a red-eye there yesterday.

“It’s called Lux Central. It’s on North Central Avenue. Do you know where that is?”

“I do.”

“Okay then, I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes. That sound all right?”

That sounded like a gift from God.

“That sounds great,” I said. “I’m pretty tall,” I added. “I have blond hair in a braid
and I’m wearing a yellow dress.”

“Okay,” she replied. “I’ll find you.”

In Monday morning Washington traffic, it would have taken me an hour to cover the
thirteen miles to the coffee shop. In Phoenix, it took me twenty minutes.

When I got there, I sat down at a white plastic table right in the front. It had become
routine for me to drink two shots of espresso first thing in the morning, but I didn’t
want Victoria
Zajac to think I was a neurotic speed demon. I ordered a cappuccino in a mug, a much
friendlier-looking drink.

I drank it slowly and waited. Ten minutes, then fifteen. And just when I was about
to call her again, even though she was probably having my number traced by the FBI
at this point, a woman stood by my table and smiled.

“Are you Adrienne Brown?” she asked. She was a good five inches shorter than me and
a little stout. She looked like she was in her mid-fifties. Her dress was what we
would have generously called haute-hippie or bohochic at
Town & Country,
and she wore a pair of red plastic glasses. Architect glasses.

I stood up to shake her hand and offered to buy her a cup of coffee. She said she
would have what I was having. I walked to the bar and felt her eyes watching me as
I ordered. My appearance had to put her at ease. I was a young woman in a yellow cotton
dress. I looked like a Disney character. Surely that was better than an aggressive
old man who shoved a tape recorder in her face.

As I waited for her drink to be made, I thought about what I was going to say. At
this point I just wanted to confirm that Olivia Reader and Olivia Campo were one and
the same. I needed her to talk about the Olivia she knew. Describe her to me physically.
Maybe present me with a stack of photographs. Then I could determine if I was chasing
an invented lead or not.

I sat down and handed her the coffee. I took out my notebook and a pen not made of
enamel and gold and started asking her questions. I should have been nervous. I had
been since I had spotted Olivia in Middleburg eight months ago. But surprisingly,
I no longer was.

“As I said on the phone, I’m writing an article about Olivia . . . Reader. I was told
you might know her.”

“Has something happened to her?” asked Victoria, holding her wide mug in her hands.

“No, nothing quite like that,” I said. “Nothing bad. I mean, she’s fine.”

She’s fine because I have no idea who she is. Olivia Reader could be dead. Or a junkie.
Or part of a girl gang smuggling drugs across the border. What did I know?

“When did you last see Olivia?” I asked.

“It’s been a very long time. Years. I want to say something like twenty years. Maybe
a little less.”

“Was she about eight years old then?” I asked, suddenly filled with adrenaline.

“No, a little older. I would say she was about eleven.”

Eleven years old. Twenty years ago Olivia Campo was eight. But she had said maybe
a little older. It was in the right ballpark.

“Do you mind if I ask how you knew her? Were you friendly with her parents? The Readers?”

“No.” She shook her head and put her mug on a folded paper napkin. “Hot coffee,” she
said, looking down at it. “I never met her parents. I knew her after they had both
died.” She looked across the table at me. “You do know how they died?”

“I do. I do know how they died. Absolutely horrible.”

“It was. Just one of the saddest stories I ever heard. To lose your father so young
and then to see your mother die. That’s why when I was approached, I said yes. How
could you turn down a girl like that.”

“Could you elaborate a little?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

“Olivia . . . ” she said, twisting her gold wedding ring around on her left index
finger. Her manicure was chipped and her ring was cutting into her skin.

“Well . . . Olivia . . . she lived with me, of course.”

My face must have shown too much surprise, because Victoria stopped speaking for a
few seconds.

“Did you not know she lived with me?” she said finally. I
stared at her blankly. “You didn’t, did you. Maybe I’ve said too much.” She looked
down at the table, conflicted, her lined hands tense and intertwined.

“I just don’t do that anymore, now that I’ve gotten remarried. But I don’t know what
the laws today say about the information of kids who have aged out of the system.
Please don’t use any of this if it’s not by the book,” she said, sliding her hands
across the table toward me and grabbing my arm tightly.

“Please don’t quote me on any of this,” she continued, scanning my face. Her voice
was suddenly high and unsteady. “I don’t know how the system works—everything changed
so fast!”

She stood up to go and I reached out my hand and grabbed hers firmly.

The system. And just like that, the front page of the
Capitolist
flashed into my head. Olivia’s series on Stanton’s Foster Care Empowerment Act, which
the president was about to sign. Her name. If she had been in foster care, and then
adopted, it would have been changed. That’s how Olivia Reader could have become Olivia
Campo. That’s how she disappeared.

Victoria sat back down and when she released my hand, it was sweaty and cramped.

“You’re not doing anything wrong,” I said, trying to convince myself as well as her.
“Olivia’s not . . . she’s not in danger or anything like that.”

“I don’t know what’s what anymore. All this,” said Victoria, throwing up her hands.
“I can’t be any help.” She put her head in her hands and I reached out and grabbed
her right one again, this time to comfort her. Foster care. The legislation Olivia
had treated as third-tier news, the cause she had dismissed. Was that it all along?
I needed Victoria to say more.