Attention Patrons of the Treeline Dining Club
The body copy says: “Have you contracted a treatment-resistant form of chronic fatigue syndrome after eating in this establishment? Has this food-borne virus left you unable to work and live a normal life? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.”
Then there’s a phone number with a weird prefix, maybe a cell phone.
Duncan says, “You think there’s a story here?” and the page is dotted with his spit.
Here in the City Room, my pager starts to beep. It’s the paramedics.
In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished, and observant.
They want you to believe that the news and you are always two separate things. Killers and reporters are mutually exclusive. Whatever the story, this isn’t about you.
My third baby is in a farmhouse two hours downstate.
My fourth baby is in a condo near a shopping mall.
One paramedic leads me to a back bedroom, saying, “Sorry we called you out on this one.” His name is John Nash, and he pulls the sheet off a child in bed, a little boy too perfect, too peaceful, too white to be asleep. Nash says, “This one’s almost six years old.”
The details about Nash are, he’s a big guy in a white uniform. He wears high-top white track shoes and gathers his hair into a little palm tree at the crown of his head.
“We could be working in Hollywood,” Nash says. With this kind of clean bloodless death, there’s no death agonies, no reverse peristalsis—the death throes where your digestive system works backward and you vomit fecal matter. “You start puking shit,” Nash says, “and that’s a realistic-type death scene.”
What he tells me about crib death is that it occurs most between two and four months after birth. Over 90 percent of deaths occur before six months. Most researchers say that beyond ten months, it’s almost impossible. Beyond a year old, the medical examiner calls the cause of death “undetermined.” A second death of this nature in a family is considered homicide until proven otherwise.
In the condo, the bedroom walls are painted green. The bed has flannel sheets printed with Scotch terriers. All you can smell is an aquarium full of lizards.
When someone presses a pillow over the face of a child, the medical examiner calls this a “gentle homicide.”
My fifth dead child is in a hotel room out by the airport.
With the farmhouse and the condo, there’s the book Poems and Rhymes. . .. The same book from the county library with my pencil mark in the margin. In the hotel room, there’s no book. It’s a double room with the baby curled up in a queen-size bed next to the bed where the parents slept. There’s a color television in an armoire, a thirty-six-inch Zenith with fifty-six cable channels and four local. The carpet’s brown, the curtains, brown and blue florals. On the bathroom floor is a wet towel spotted with blood and green shaving gel. Somebody didn’t flush the toilet.
The bedspreads are dark blue and smell like cigarette smoke.
There’s no books anywhere.
I ask if the family has removed anything from the scene, and the officer at the scene says no. But somebody from social services came by to pick up some clothes.
“Oh,” he says, “and some library books that were past due.”
Chapter 5
The front door swings open, and inside is a woman holding a cell phone to her ear, smiling at me and talking to somebody else.
“Mona,” she says into the phone, “you’ll have to make this quick. Mr. Streator’s just arrived.”
She shows me the back of her free hand, the tiny sparkling watch on her wrist, and says, “He’s a few minutes early.” Her other hand, her long pink fingernails with the tips painted white, with her little black cell phone, these are almost lost in the shining pink cloud of her hair.
Smiling, she says, “Relax, Mona,” and her eyes go up and down me. “Brown sport coat,” she says, “brown slacks, white shirt.” She frowns and winces, “And a blue tie.”
The woman tells the phone, “Middle-aged. Five-ten, maybe one hundred seventy pounds. Caucasian. Brown, green.” She winks at me and says, “His hair’s a little messy and he didn’t shave today, but he looks harmless enough.”
She leans forward a little and mouths, My secretary.
Into the phone, she says, “What?”
She steps aside and waves me in the door with her free hand. She rolls her eyes until they come around to meet mine and says, “Thank you for your concern, Mona, but I don’t think Mr. Streator is here to rape me.”
Where we’re at is the Gartoller Estate on Walker Ridge Drive, a Georgian-style eight-bedroom house with seven bathrooms, four fireplaces, a breakfast room, a formal dining room, and a fifteen-hundred-square-foot ballroom on the fourth floor. It has a separate six-car garage and a guesthouse. It has an in-ground swimming pool and a fire and intruder alarm system.
Walker Ridge Drive is the kind of neighborhood where they pick up the garbage five days a week. These are the kind of people who appreciate the threat of a good lawsuit, and when you stop by to introduce yourself, they smile and agree.
The Gartoller Estate is beautiful.
These neighbors won’t ask you to come inside. They’ll stand in their half-open front doors and smile. They’ll tell you they really don’t know anything about the history of the Gartoller house. It’s a house.
If you ask any more, people will glance over your shoulder at the empty street. Then they’ll smile again and say, “I can’t help you. You really need to call the Realtor.”
The sign at 3465 Walker Ridge Drive says Boyle Realty. Shown by appointment only.
At another house, a woman in a maid’s uniform answered the door with a little five-or six-year-old girl looking out from behind the maid’s black skirt. The maid shook her head, saying she didn’t know anything. “You’ll have to call the listing agent,” she said, “Helen Boyle. It’s on the sign.”
And the little girl said, “She’s a witch.”
And the maid closed the door.
Now inside the Gartoller house, Helen Hoover Boyle walks through the echoing, white empty rooms. She’s still on her phone as she walks. Her cloud of pink hair, her fitted pink suit, her legs in white stockings, her feet in pink, medium heels. Her lips are gummy with pink lipstick. Her arms sparkle and rattle with gold and pink bracelets, gold chains, charms, and coins.
Enough ornaments for a Christmas tree. Pearls big enough to choke a horse.
Into the phone, she says, “Did you call the people in the Exeter House? They should’ve run screaming out of there two weeks ago.”
She walks through tall double doors, into the next room, then the next.
“Uh-huh,” she says. “What do you mean, they’re not living there?”
Tall arched windows look out onto a stone terrace. Beyond that is a lawn striped with lawn mower tracks, beyond that a swimming pool.
Into the phone, she says, “You don’t spend a million-two on a house and then not live there.” Her voice is loud and sharp in these rooms without furniture or carpets.
A small pink and white purse hangs from a long gold chain looped over her shoulder.
Five foot six. A hundred and eighteen pounds. It would be hard to peg her age. She’s so thin she must be either dying or rich. Her suit’s some kind of nubby sofa fabric, edged with white braid. It’s pink, but not shrimp pink. It’s more the color of shrimp pâté served on a water cracker with a sprig of parsley and a dollop of caviar. The jacket is tailored tight at her pinched waist and padded square at her shoulders. The skirt is short and snug. The gold buttons, huge.
She’s wearing doll clothes.
“No,” she says, “Mr. Streator is right here.” She lifts her penciled eyebrows and looks at me. “Am I wasting his time?” she says. “I hope not.”
Smiling, she tells the phone, “Good. He’s shaking his head no.”
I have to wonder what about me made her say middle-aged.
To tell the truth, I say, I’m not really in the market for a house.
With two pink fingernails over the cell phone, she leans toward me and mouths, Just one more minute.
The truth is, I say, I got her name off some records at the county coroner’s office. The truth is, I’ve pored over the forensic records for every local crib death within the past twenty-five years.
And still listening to the phone, without looking at me, she puts the pink fingernails of her free hand against my lapel and keeps them there, pushing just a little. Into the phone, she says, “So what’s the problem? Why aren’t they living there?”
Judging from her hand, this close-up, she must be in her late thirties or early forties. Still this taxidermied look that passes for beauty above a certain age and income, it’s too old for her. Her skin already looks exfoliated, plucked, scruffed, moisturized, and made up until she could be a piece of refinished furniture. Reupholstered in pink. A restoration. Renovated.
Into her cell phone, she shouts, “You’re joking! Yes, of course I know what a teardown is!” She says, “That’s a historic house!”
Her shoulders draw up, tight against each side of her neck, and then drop. Turning her face away from the phone, she sighs with her eyes closed.
She listens, standing there with her pink shoes and white legs mirrored upside down in the dark wood floor. Reflected deep in the wood, you can see the shadows inside her skirt.
With her free hand cupped over her forehead, she says, “Mona.” She says, “We cannot afford to lose that listing. If they replace that house, chances are it will be off the market for good.”
Then she’s quiet again, listening.
And I have to wonder, since when can’t you wear a blue tie with a brown coat?
I duck my head to meet her eyes, saying, Mrs. Boyle? I needed to see her someplace private, outside her office. It’s about a story I’m researching.
But she waves her fingers between us. In another second, she walks over to a fireplace and leans into it, bracing her free hand against the mantel, whispering, “When the wrecking ball swings, the neighbors will probably stand and cheer.”
A wide doorway opens from this room into another white room with wood floors and a complicated carved ceiling painted white. In the other direction, a doorway opens on a room lined with empty white bookshelves.
“Maybe we could start a protest,” she says. “We could write some letters to the newspaper.”
And I say, I’m from the newspaper.
Her perfume is the smell of leather car seats and old wilted roses and cedar chest lining.
And Helen Hoover Boyle says, “Mona, hold on.”
And walking back to me, she says, “What were you saying, Mr. Streator?” Her eyelashes blink once, twice, fast. Waiting. Her eyes are blue.
I’m a reporter from the newspaper.
“The Exeter House is a lovely, historic house some people want to tear down,” she says, with one hand cupped over her phone. “Seven bedrooms, six thousand square feet. All cherry paneling throughout the first floor.”
The empty room is so quiet you can hear a tiny voice on the telephone saying, “Helen?”
Closing her eyes, she says, “It was built in 1935,” and she tilts her head back. “It has radiant steam heat, two point eight acres, a tile roof—”
And the tiny voice says, “Helen?”
“—a game room,” she says, “a wet bar, a home gym room—”
The problem is, I don’t have this much time. All I need to know, I say, is did you ever have a child?
“—a butler’s pantry,” she says, “a walk-in refrigerator—”
I say, did her son die of crib death about twenty years ago?
Her eyelashes blink once, twice, and she says, “Pardon me?”
I need to know if she read out loud to her son. His name was Patrick. I want to find all existing copies of a certain book.
Holding her phone between her ear and the padded shoulder of her jacket, Helen Boyle snaps open her pink and white purse and takes out a pair of white gloves. Flexing her fingers into each glove, she says, “Mona?”
I need to know if she might still have a copy of this particular book. I’m sorry, but I can’t tell her why.
She says, “I’m afraid Mr. Streator will be of no use to us.”
I need to know if they did an autopsy on her son.
To me, she smiles. Then she mouths the words Get out.
And I raise both my hands, spread open toward her, and start backing away.
I just need to make sure every copy of this book is destroyed.
And she says, “Mona, please call the police.”
Chapter 6
In crib deaths, it’s standard procedure to assure the parents that they’ve done nothing wrong. Babies do not smother in their blankets. In the Journal of Pediatrics, in a study published in 1945 called “Mechanical Suffocation During Infancy” researchers proved that no baby could smother in bedding. Even the smallest baby placed facedown on a pillow or mattress, could roll enough to breathe. Even if the child had a slight cold, there’s no proof that it’s related to the death. There’s no proof to link DPT—diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus—inoculations and sudden death. Even if the child had been to the doctor hours before, it still may die.
A cat does not sit on the child and suck out its life.
All we know is, we don’t know.
Nash, the paramedic, shows me the purple and red bruises on every child, livor mortis, where the oxygenated hemoglobin settles to the lowest part of the body. The bloody froth leaking from the nose and mouth is what the medical examiner calls purge fluids, a natural part of decomposition. People desperate for an answer will look at livor mortis, at purge fluids, even at diaper rash, and assume child abuse.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
The shortcut to closing any door is to bury yourself in the little details. The facts. The best part of becoming a reporter is you can hide behind your notebook. Everything is always research.
At the county library, in the juvenile section, the book is back on the shelf, waiting. Poems and Rhymes from Around the World. And there’s a poem. A traditional African poem, the book says. It’s eight lines long, and I don’t need to copy it. I have it in my notes from the very first baby, the trailer house in the suburbs. I tear out the page and put the book back on the shelf.
In the City Room, Duncan says, “How’s it going on the dead baby beat?” He says, “I need you to call this number and see what’s what,” and he hands me a proof sheet from the Lifestyles section, an ad circled in red pen.
Three columns by six inches deep, the copy says:
Attention Patrons of the Meadow Downs
Fitness and Racquet Club
It says: “Have you contracted a flesh-eating fungal infection from the fitness equipment or personal-contact surfaces in their rest rooms? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.”
At the phone number in question, a man’s voice answers, “Deemer, Duke and Diller, Attorneys-at-Law.”
The man says, “We’ll need your name and address for the record.” Over the phone, he says, “Can you describe your rash? Size. Location. Color. Tissue loss or damage. Be as specific as possible.”
There’s been a mistake, I say. There’s no rash. I say, I’m not calling to be in the lawsuit.
For whatever reason, Helen Hoover Boyle comes to mind.
When I say I’m a reporter for the newspaper, the man says, “I’m sorry, but we’re not allowed to discuss the matter until the lawsuit is filed.”
I call the racquet club, but they won’t talk either. I call the Treeline Dining Club from the earlier ad, but they won’t talk. The phone numbers in both ads are the same one. With the weird cell phone prefix. I call it again, and the man’s voice says, “Diller, Doom and Duke, Attorneys-at-Law”
/> And I hang up.
In journalism school, they teach you to start with your most important fact. The inverted pyramid, they call it. Put the who, what, where, when, and why at the top of the article. Then list the lesser facts in descending order. That way, an editor can lop off any length of story without losing anything too important.
All the little details, the smell of the bedspread, the food on the plates, the color of the Christmas tree ornament, that stuff always gets left on the Composing Room floor.
The only pattern in crib death is it tends to increase as the weather cools in the fall. This is the fact my editor wants to lead with in our first installment. Something to panic people. Five babies, five installments. This way we can keep people reading the series for five consecutive Sundays. We can promise to explore the causes and patterns of sudden infant death. We can hold out hope.
Some people still think knowledge is power.
We can guarantee advertisers a highly invested readership. Outside, it’s colder already.
Back at the City Room, I ask my editor to do me a little favor.
I think maybe I’ve found a pattern. It looks as if every parent might have read the same poem out loud to their child the night before it died.
“All five?” he says.
I say let’s try a little experiment.
This is late in the evening, and we’re both tired from a long day. We’re sitting in his office, and I tell him to listen.
It’s an old song about animals going to sleep. It’s wistful and sentimental, and my face feels livid and hot with oxygenated hemoglobin while I read the poem out loud under the fluorescent lights, across a desk from my editor with his tie undone and his collar open, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. His mouth is open a little, his teeth and his coffee mug are stained the same coffee brown.
What’s good is we’re alone, and it only takes a minute.
At the end, he opens his eyes and says, “What the fuck was that supposed to mean?”