I should have just driven off at that point, but something told me to go inside and tell her the truth. I’d faced tribal leaders in the mountains of Afghanistan, Syrian rebels and sat down with the leaders of several nations, for Christ sake. I should be able to face Addison McIntyre. Instead, my hands were shaking and my voice quavered.

  Addison leaned back in her chair and glared at me, drawing deeply on her cigarette. Her eyes were hard. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “I guess you know now the resume I gave you was fake. Those were all folks I’d worked with at the wire service willing to lie for me and say I’d worked for them once upon a time at a bunch of made-up, small-town newspapers. The fact you didn’t check my references made it easier for me to hide. Now my old friends don’t even know where I am.”

  “And this Leland Huffinger, this private investigator you conned me into hiring at a hundred bucks an hour? Who —or what—is he, really?”

  “A journalism professor, doctorate and all. He’s the one who found me. He’s the reason I have to quit.”

  “Why quit just because he found you? I don’t understand that. I told you when I hired you that if someone came looking for you, I couldn’t protect you. I didn’t expect you to turn tail and run.”

  “Leland Huffinger exposed my whereabouts at an AA meeting here in town,” I sighed. “He’s a former alcoholic and attends meetings every day. Apparently he went to a meeting here and told the folks there, in a round-about way, why he was in Jubilant Falls. Marvin McGinnis apparently was at the same meeting and figured out who I was. I saw him at the police station and the first thing he says to me is ‘I’m sure Jubilant Falls is pretty boring for you after Baghdad.’ ”

  Addison chewed her thumbnail, but her eyes were still hard. “Marvin’s not known for his subtlety. He lost his first wife to breast cancer a number of years ago. His drinking nearly cost him his job until he found AA. I didn’t know he was still attending meetings.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, well…”

  “Why was Leland Huffinger looking for you?”

  “I was supposed to be part of a project. He was looking for journalism’s most spectacular flame-outs and he wanted to interview them for an article.”

  “So the story about him investigating this accident that you supposedly were injured in was bullshit, too.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought having him investigate Eve Dahlgren’s background for us would help me keep an eye on him, and at the same time, maybe, get us some useful information. I thought it would give me a little control over the situation.”

  “That didn’t turn out so well, did it?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “No.”

  “So what wasn’t bullshit, Charisma? What didn’t you lie about to me?”

  “The fact that I’m a widow. The fact that I have PTSD and don’t know if I can ever work at the same level again. The fact that I came here to Jubilant Falls to hide and to heal and I will be forever grateful for the opportunities you’ve given me to do both those things.” I stood.

  Addison chewed her thumbnail a little more, her eyes softening a bit. Nothing worse than an editor’s anger. Had I escaped?

  “What if I gave you the opportunity to tell your story and we put it on the front page?”

  “Today?” I gulped.

  “Could you write it this afternoon for tomorrow’s paper?” Addison tossed her cigarette out the window into the alley. “Will you stay one more day, just to do that?”

  I looked sideways at her, unsure of her motives.

  “I’m not ready to talk to anybody about what happened to me.”

  “If you do it first, you control the story.” Her anger evaporated, Addison began to pace back and forth behind her desk, energized. “Of course, I can’t guarantee what happens after we put it on the website or send it to the wire—you realize we have to send this to the AP—but the first words the world sees will be yours—not Leland’s. Yours.”

  She had a point. For all his fake promises, I had no idea how Leland was going to tell my story. He could make me look like some ego-driven reporter, burned by my own self-importance and loss of objectivity—or the broken down shell of a person whose emotional and physical wounds keep her from functioning. The truth was, I had been both of those things. I was still somewhere in between, scarred physically and mentally, still slightly brittle, but not nearly as fragile as I’d been when I came here.

  “Addison, I can’t. I need to disappear. Once the word gets out that I’m here, my story will be twisted in ways I don’t even want to think about. When it gets out that I’m here, this town will be crawling with every kind of national media wanting to talk to me—and to you.”

  “You think I can’t handle that? Thanks, but it’s not your problem. Just tell your story and tell it first on my front page.”

  “I can’t, Addison. I can’t.”

  Her shoulders sagged in disappointment.

  “OK. I’m not going to beg you to stay.”

  I turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Addison called sharply. “What did you learn about the Bob Martz murder yesterday? If I’ve got to finish that story, I at least need to get that information from you.”

  Chapter 28 Addison

  “Eve Dahlgren accused Bob Martz of attempted sexual assault eight months before he died? You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.” Charisma slowly shook her head back and forth.

  “If we present the way her mother Betty reacted to the picture of our drowning victim and the letter in Bob Martz’s personnel file, we can tie Eve Dahlgren to both of our unsolved homicides.”

  “Those two ties are just that—ties. They aren’t proof that she killed either one of them.” Charisma seemed refocused and less intent on running away. “With her dementia, Betty’s reaction could be completely off base.”

  If I couldn’t talk her into telling her own story, maybe I could talk her into staying long enough to write down everything she had learned about Eve. I had a lot to add from my own interview with Earlene.

  “No, we can’t say she killed either of those two men, but don’t you think it’s odd that she’s connected to both of them? And now she’s dead as well? What made you ask Gary about his personnel file?”

  “Your dad told me to look there. He wouldn’t give me the whole story—he said something about a messy situation with your mother—but he just told me where to look.”

  I sighed. My mother June was an emergency room nurse at the Plummer County Memorial Hospital when she met my father. She was also bipolar, un-medicated and, when manic, had a proclivity for sleeping with other troopers and spending wild amounts of cash, behavior that nearly cost Dad his career. She disappeared when I was six, and I was an adult before I learned she died on an Illinois highway, the victim of a drunk driver. My daughter Isabella was her spitting image, down to her red hair and the Lithium she needed to stay on an even keel.

  “Yes. He and Bob Martz’s widow Judy were very close.” No need to say anything else, I thought.

  “He didn’t want to spill the details of what was going on. Said he didn’t want to hurt Judy. I think there might have been an affair going on with Eve and Bob Martz, but I wasn’t able to confirm it.”

  “Tell you what—you write everything down. I’ll call Dad and see if he still has Judith’s number. She’d talk to me before she’d talk to anyone else. If Bob were screwing around, Judy would tell me. In all the follow up stories I’ve done, I don’t think I ever asked her if her husband was unfaithful. I never thought of it and no one ever suggested it.”

  The phone call to Judy Martz was painful.

  “I never wanted anybody to know,” she said. “Every time you called for a follow up story, I worried that someone told you he had been unfaithful, but you never asked. So, I never said anything—it was too embarrassing.”

  “I’m asking now.”

  “Yes, he was involved with a much-younger woman for a couple years. Yes, it was Eve Dahlgren. It was an on-and-off thing.”

  “I’m sorry, Judy.”

  She was silent. “Your dad called the other day to tell me she’d been murdered. I always thought she had something to do with Bob’s death, but nobody could prove anything.”

  “And our story won’t say she killed your husband. We just think it’s odd that she’s connected to both of the county’s unsolved murders.”

  “You and your staff can think what you want, Penny. I’m going to think there’s been some sort of justice served.”

  A few more questions and the post-high school picture of Eve Dahlgren came more into focus, none of it pretty. Behind the well-done blonde hair and the perfectly made-up face, Eve was a driven, hard-edged businesswoman with no compunction about verbally and physically abusing those around her, whether professionally or personally. She had no second thoughts about sleeping with someone’s husband and then sending a fake letter in an attempt to ruin his career when he dumped her.

  An hour later, Charisma’s story about Bob Martz filled the copy desk computer screen in front of me.

  Dennis leaned over my shoulder.

  “You want me to hold the front page for this? We’ve got a little bit of time,” he asked.

  “Sure. Tell the guys in the pressroom to give us about half an hour, probably less. I want this big and above the fold,” I answered.

  In short order, I added what relevant information Earlene told me as well as what Judy Martz’s phone call confirmed. Dennis shooed me out of the copy desk chair and brought up the front page and page two, quickly rearranging the news hole to accommodate the new story, moving the ends of stories that wouldn’t completely fit on page one—called jumps—to the next page.

  “Look good to you?”

  I nodded. No time to print out a proof and check it. I prayed I hadn’t missed any errors.

  “Send it.”

  “Here it goes, then.” He pushed the button to send it to prepress.

  It was just before lunch when Sam the foreman brought copies of today’s edition up to the newsroom. Charisma, Dennis and I jumped, practically snatching them from his hands. Marcus and Graham crowded around as I spread the paper across an empty desk and we all began to read.

  Victim linked to other crimes

  By Charisma Lemarnier and Addison McIntyre

  Journal-Gazette staff

  A woman found dead in a local park has ties to Plummer County’s two unsolved homicides.

  Eve Dahlgren was found dead in her Lincoln Monday. The car was discovered by an off-duty Jubilant Falls’ police officer in Shanahan Park; Dahlgren had been stabbed several times.

  Before Dahlgren’s death, area law enforcement was taking a fresh look at two unsolved homicides: the stabbing death of an unidentified young man whose body was found floating in Shanahan Creek near the Yarnell Bridge in the early 1980s and the death of State Trooper Robert Martz, who was found shot by the side of the road in the 1990s.

  Journal-Gazette publisher Earlene Whitelaw was originally charged with Dahlgren’s murder, but released when Dahlgren’s time of death was found to be Sunday night and Whitelaw had an alibi for that night.

  She was reportedly having dinner with her father, former J-G publisher J. Watterson Whitelaw.

  Earlene Whitelaw and Dahlgren had been friends since high school, attending Texas A&M together, and shared an apartment during that time.

  An investigation by Journal-Gazette staff, originally to look into the unsolved crimes has found Dahlgren is a common factor in both.

  Dahlgren’s mother Betty, who suffers from dementia and is under the care of a home health aide, was questioned recently by J-G staff and identified the man found in the creek as someone who “Eve didn’t like,” although she didn’t give the victim’s name. J-G staff members were asked to leave shortly thereafter.

  None of this information was included in the creek murder story, which ran Wednesday, due to concerns over Betty Dahlgren’s dementia and the validity of her recollection.

  The Journal-Gazette decided to include the information when investigation into the Martz murder uncovered a letter from Eve Dahlgren accusing him of gross sexual imposition during a traffic stop.

  In a letter, dated eight months before Martz was found shot to death on the side of the road, Dahlgren claims that Martz repeatedly stopped her for speeding and, in exchange for not giving her a ticket, asked her to meet him for drinks.

  Eve Dahlgren’s letter says she repeatedly refused until she finally promised to meet him for a drink, but did not show up.

  Dahlgren, who at that time lived in Texas, was home for her father’s funeral, according to the letter.

  The next day, according to her letter, she was stopped again.

  Dahlgren claims Martz “pulled me forcefully from my vehicle, threw me face down across the hood of my car and, as he held my hands behind my back, he kicked my legs apart and pushed himself against my buttocks, as if to make me think he would sexually assault me. I believed at that point that rape was a distinct possibility, although he never removed or opened his pants.”

  According to his personnel file, Martz was put on desk duty until an investigation could be completed.

  Investigators could not find any proof that Martz ever stopped Dahlgren and he was cleared in the matter.

  Martz’ widow, Judith, who now lives in Indiana, confirmed that Martz had an on-again, off-again affair with Dahlgren two years before his death. The couple would reportedly meet for sex when Dahlgren came into town to visit her family. He ended the relationship in an effort to save his marriage.

  “She was very angry that Bob didn’t want to see her anymore,” said Judith in a telephone interview this morning. “There were phone calls in the middle of the night where she called to beg him to come back to her. I remember he was placed on desk duty for a few days, but I don’t think I ever knew what it was for. I never knew anything about a letter.”

  An interview with Earlene Whitelaw following her release from jail claimed Dahlgren had a long history of anger management problems and physical violence, allegedly stemming from physical abuse she suffered at home.

  Dahlgren returned to Jubilant Falls on a regular basis to check on her mother, Whitelaw said. Dahlgren was financially responsible for her mother’s care and the upkeep of their historic home.

  Dahlgren was also a heavy drinker who suffered from depression and paranoia, Whitelaw claimed.

  One factor that had originally tied Whitelaw to Dahlgren’s death was Whitelaw’s fingerprints on the steering wheel of Dahlgren’s Lincoln. Whitelaw claimed she often drove the vehicle when Dahlgren was incapacitated.

  Assistant Chief Gary McGinnis called the connection between Dahlgren and the unsolved murder “coincidental” but, because these cases are still open, could not comment further.

  “Our investigation into all three homicides continues,” said McGinnis. “Anyone with information on these crimes is asked to call us.”

  The article ended with the police department phone number. Beside the main story was a brief sidebar on the details of Bob Martz’ death and a recap of the young man found in the creek. Pat rounded up a couple of the original photographs from the first article on Martz’s death.

  I looked up at the circle of stunned faces around me.

  “How could one woman have so many connections to so many deaths?” Dennis asked, thoughtfully pushing his thick glasses up his nose.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  It had taken everything I had not to include Jimmy Lyle’s death in the story, despite what Earlene told me, but other than the fact Eve dated him, there was nothing concrete to say she—or anyone else—killed him. Eve’s comments about him ruining her life and getting what he deserved could have been the drama of an overwrought teen drunk on watered-down beer, not the confessions of a killer.

  I pushed those thoughts away and continued. “There’s one more thing that Earlene told me: when they started at Texas A&M, Eve didn’t enter in the fall with the rest of the freshman. Earlene said she started in January because her father suddenly wanted to take her to Europe that fall. I wanted to put it in the story, but it couldn’t be tied to anything else.”

  “What do you think it was?” Graham asked.

  “I have no idea. I have no proof of anything else other than what Earlene said it was: a last-minute trip to Europe.”

  “Hey, Addison,” Charisma spoke up. “Can I see you in your office?”

  Here it goes, I thought. I’m going to lose her. As I followed her into my office, I tried to remember if I had any fresh résumés in my desk I could dig up. God, how had I been so deluded? I, who thought I was going to help some young kid move on to a bigger paper and have a great career, had one of the world’s most sought-after reporters under my nose for four months and I never had a clue. When it came to personal relationships, I never could see what was going on—just like what was apparently blooming between my daughter and Graham.

  I closed the door behind me.

  “So, you’re leaving?” I asked, sliding my butt onto my desk. “I’m going to hate to see you go, Charisma. You’re one hell of a reporter.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Her eyes were sharp and focused; her voice was clear.

  If she could get past the PTSD, maybe she could go back to journalism on a world stage, I thought. I could understand her fear of having her story twisted, but I couldn’t understand her fear of being found. I remembered watching her on the evening news, reporting from all over the world, often wearing a flak jacket and helmet.

  “I think you have accumulated a few days vacation—I’d be glad to pay you for those,” I began. “You also have—”

  “I’m going to do it.”

  I was silent for a moment.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to write my story for you. After I’m done, I’m leaving, just like I said, but you will be the first person to know the truth.”