Yesterday's News

checked. State law says we only have to keep personnel records a year, but we keep them three. Even so, no mention of a Griffin . I talked to some people in the backshop and pressmen from that era. Nobody remembers him. Or her. From the way the story read, though, I can make a guess.”
    “Which is?”
    “An intern.”
    “You mean a student?”
    “Right. Usually a journalism major, working for the summer. The prose was awkward, redundant. Like an editor under deadline throttled it to make the piece presentable.”
    “Go on.”
    “I didn’t copy it word for word, but apparently Hagan and Schonsy interrupted the Meller boy in the course of a burglary. They chased Meller, caught him, then Meller got in a lucky punch with a brick, resulting in Hagan having to restrain the boy, who died of a broken neck.”
    Sounded just like Schonstein’s story. “Any other witnesses?”
    “Just the reporter.”
    “ Griffin ?”
    “Yes. I copied that... yeah, here it is. ‘This reporter saw the altercation from the mouth of the alley, corroborating the police version of the event.’ ” Schonstein had omitted the reporter. “Read me that again.”
    She did. I said, “Would the paper let a reporter write a story when the reporter was involved in it?”
    “Are you kidding? A killing, even an accidental one, is page-one stuff in a town this size. I’d have whip-sawed Arbuckle into letting me write it under byline or tell him he could read my story in the Boston Herald ."
    “I know somebody at the Herald. Would it be worth my while to have him check their morgue on this?” Rendall thought about it, riffling two more pages. “I doubt it. Looks like the Beacon ran only one more piece, when Hagan and Schonsy were officially exonerated. And that was only a page-three item because of two fires and a boat being lost in a storm.”
    “How about photos?”
    “First article had one of the alley, one of Schonstein with blood on him at the hospital, Hagan kind of holding him up. Looked like the Meller boy really nailed him with the brick, by the way. Couple of sentences of bio on the cops, how both were local products, married with kids, that kind of thing.”
    “This Meller have any family?”
    “The piece mentioned a mother, but didn’t give an address, just ‘of this city.’ I tried the telephone directories at the paper, even the old ones we keep, but came up empty.”
    “Anything about the Meller boy’s employment, education?”
    “Unemployed dropout. Sounded like a loner, too. No friends mentioned.”
    “Anything else in the article?”
    Liz skipped back and forth through the notebook a few times. “Sorry. After the big splash, even the paper treated it as pretty much cut-and-dried.”
    “How about the recent stuff on Coyne and Dykestra?”
    “Here and... here. The redevelopment ones are a lot more elaborate. They’re in reverse chronological order.” She stood. “We’ve got cherry pie, fresh baked, with vanilla or coconut almond ice cream.”
    “Coconut almond?”
    “So I splurged a little. I thought I was gonna get lucky, remember?”
    As I watched her climb the stairs, my mind strayed to how close we could have come, six months ago. “I’ll go with vanilla.”
    “I figured you would.”
    The pieces on Coyne were pretty cryptic, probably more an indication of Arbuckle’s judgment than Jane’s passion. The dragnet article named Coyne as one person arrested. The stabbing article mentioned a derelict witness, but no more detail than Hagan and Vip already had told me.
    There were three redevelopment stories in all. Jane’s first one dealt with the concept as applied to Nasharbor in general, mentioning Richard Dykestra only as a teaser toward the next two. The second story was specific and rough, how Dykestra’s dream was being financed by We the People, chapter and verse. The third story contained some unresponsive observations by Little Richard, echoed, as I suspected they would be, by Bruce Fetch at the NRA. I could see Dykestra resenting Jane, but I didn’t see anything she’d done beyond pasting together the effects of a dozen public documents and events.
    Rendall descended the stairs balancing a tray that made clinking noises with each step. I poured out some B & B for each of us, and we finished dessert before we resumed talking.
    I said, “You find any notes on Coyne or the cops in Jane’s desk at the Beacon?”
    “No, nothing. Maybe at her apartment?”
    “I checked when I saw Mrs.