In two blocks, I was back in the employee parking lot behind the newspaper. Putting the car in park, I leaned my head on the steering wheel and began to sob.

  *****

  It was nearly nine o’clock at night by the time I finished the story of Julia’s and Andy Dahlgren’s sad deaths and the fire that nearly destroyed their home. It only took an hour to gather myself together and get the story done and up on the website.

  Gary McGinnis wasn’t able to give me much on the deaths of Jimmy Lyle and Eve Dahlgren—the hospital was keeping Addison overnight and they kept him from talking to her. I filled in everything else I’d learned from Betty about Bob Martz’ death.

  A more complete version would come tomorrow morning before deadline. Someone, not me, would have to finish it.

  I pushed myself back from my desk.

  I owed Addison the story of what happened to me in Syria.

  The newsroom was empty. Chris Royal, the sportswriter, was taking a vacation day—he’d left a few canned features on tomorrow’s sports page and Dennis was going to fill the remainder with wire copy. I could work all night and not be disturbed.

  Get it done, a voice inside told me. Get it written and then get out.

  I rolled my chair back to my desk, ready to begin again.

  *****

  I’d covered stories in third-world countries, seen how hard-scrabble life could be, but Aleppo, where every building was marked by bombs or bullets, was the worst.

  Syria was a country bent on sending itself over the edge of oblivion: incoming missiles from government jets, the screams of the wounded, the god-awful smell of burnt plastic mixing with burnt flesh, and blood. I’ve never seen so much blood.

  The day I’d gone to meet my source had been hot. I hadn’t slept—I’d spent the night curled under the table in my hotel room as bombs, both manufactured and improved, fell into the streets.

  The barrel bombs, dumped by pro-government forces, were the worst. A barrel was packed with simple explosives and any shrapnel they could find. Carried aloft by a helicopter, they would be pushed out over populated areas and the craft would hover to watch as those below in the street were killed or maimed.

  They wait ten minutes for the rescuers, medics or anyone who might want to bring aid and then drop another one.

  No one runs in to help the wounded for at least half an hour, now.

  As I stepped into the street that day, the bodies from last night’s bombing were being taken out into the streets. It was mass murder on a governmental scale. I gasped as survivors picked among the dead and their destroyed homes, scavenging blankets, pillows, and shoes. A woman with a dented toaster in her hands met my eyes and shrugged as she stepped over the body of a dead child. His own brown eyes stared back at me, permanently begging from the other side for someone to do something. The people around him, those picking shoes off dead bodies or stealing pots from bombed homes knew no one ever would.

  Those sights must have tipped the delicate balance of my sanity. Between Aleppo and Baghdad, I’d simply seen too much.

  My source, a Syrian man with a red scarf over his face, claimed the government had plans to bomb a refugee camp in Jordan filled with women and children. He opened his jacket to show me the uniform of the Syrian air force—but not the side with his name. It should have been my first hint.

  “I’ve seen the orders,” he claimed. “The raid will happen next week.”

  Reeking with arrogance and pushed from above to run the story, I didn’t double-check my source, just to show Charisma Prentiss was back in the saddle.

  But I wasn’t, not by a long shot, and this time, I paid the price.

  After the wire service fired me, I locked myself into Dad and Kate’s spare bedroom. Memories of Aleppo, Baghdad, Kalil and Jean Paul ricocheted through the frilly white room until sleep or wished-for death wouldn’t bring peace. I began waking up at night, combative and screaming. Dad and Kate brought me to George Washington Hospital’s mental health wing, signing me in under a false name.

  I came back slowly. After a couple months, Dad and Kate brought me back to their condo, set me up again in the guest room.

  Kate found me watching one of the Sunday-morning news shows with tears pouring down my face. There were three talking heads, discussing my future in journalism. On the screen behind them was a huge picture of me, full of bravado and purpose, yellow hair sticking out from beneath my blue helmet, in my bulletproof vest and jeans. Behind me, a convoy of armored trucks headed into the Afghan mountains. To them, I wasn’t a person, someone who’d been horribly injured. I was a has-been, an ego-driven blonde bimbo who wanted face time more than the truth, someone who ruined her career in particular and seriously damaged journalism in general.

  One commentator turned toward the camera, his script clutched self-righteously in his hand. One eyebrow arched and he began to speak.

  “I don’t know what news organization would be either brave enough—or conversely, irresponsible enough—to take on a journalist like Charisma Prentiss. What do you, our viewers, think? We’ll be taking your questions, right after these messages.”

  Kate pulled the remote from my hand and clicked off the television.

  “You don’t need that,” she said, wrapping her arms around me more like an older sister than the stepmother she nearly was. “You’ve got to get out of here, Charisma.”

  “But where could I go?” I wiped my nose with the heel of my hand. “Maybe these guys are right. Who would hire me?”

  “You’re still a good journalist, Charisma,” Kate said. “You can do this job again. What if you went someplace where you could start again?”

  “Like where?”

  “I don’t know. What about a smaller newspaper someplace, a small-market TV station?”

  “As Charisma Prentiss? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “How about under an assumed name?” Kate suggested.

  “I’m not sharp enough up here to react to a new name,” I said, tapping my finger on my temple.

  “What about your married name? Charisma Lemarnier? You and I know most Americans have an attention span of about thirty seconds. They didn’t know who Jean Paul was and wouldn’t know who you were unless you told them. And face it, since you’ve quit dyeing your hair, with all your surgeries, you don’t look the same. I’ll bet you could pull it off. I know you could.”

  And so it began. Kate and I came up with my new backstory, the young widow who lost her parents and her husband in a car crash in Connecticut. I got my brown hair styled; the medications I took to keep the demons at bay added a few pounds. A few of my friends said they’d vouch for me without revealing my identity on a new fake résumé. I used my mother’s address in Salisbury, Maryland, came up with a new e-mail address and sent out inquiries to any small newspaper seeking a reporter.

  Within six months, I was moving into my studio apartment in Jubilant Falls and praying no one would recognize me as I struggled to get back in the saddle.

  *****

  There you have it, world. You wondered whatever happened to Charisma Prentiss? Here it is.

  I hit the ‘save’ button on the computer and stood up.

  I rustled through my desk drawers one more time. There was nothing in particular I wanted to keep with me, nothing I’d become attached to.

  I found a small Post-It note on the copy editing station.

  “Thanks for everything,” I wrote. “I’m gone.”

  I signed my full, real name—Charisma Prentiss Lemarnier— and stuck the note on the computer screen where Dennis would sit tomorrow morning. I pulled my key to the employee entrance off my key ring, laid it on the computer keyboard and walked out.

  Chapter 35 Leland

  By the time I got home to Philadelphia, she was national news.

  It was a horrible flight. I got bumped off the flight from Cincinnati, then found myself in the wee hours of the morning in the Detroit airport, trying to sleep in unnaturally-formed plastic seats, rather than park myself in the airport bar, before catching a dawn flight home to Philly.

  My apartment at Fitzgerald House smelled slightly musty, as if I’d been gone months rather than a little over a week. I set down my bags and flopped into the shapeless recliner, picked up the TV remote and turned on the TV.

  “A reporter who disappeared following a story that sparked a diplomatic crisis has resurfaced briefly in Ohio,” the newsman said. “Charisma Prentiss has been working under her married name Christina Lemarnier for nearly a year at the Jubilant Falls Journal-Gazette…”

  My forefinger hovered over the remote’s power button, tempted to shut it off, ignore the whole thing.

  Addison McIntyre was sitting at a table in front of a cluster of microphones, one arm in a blue sling, tapping the fingers of her other hand. A woman with big, blonde hair and a leopard print blouse sat next to her, smiling inanely. That must have been publisher Earlene Whitelaw, because Addison looked like she was in pain or wanted a cigarette, or both.

  “Yes, Charisma Prentiss worked here as my education reporter and my night police reporter,” Addison said. “I knew her as Charisma Lemarnier.”

  “Was she a good reporter for you?” a disembodied male voice asked.

  “She was an excellent reporter,” Addison answered. “I’ve had a number of reporters come and go through this newsroom and I could always pick out the ones who I believed would go on to bigger and better things. I thought Charisma was going to be one of those reporters. I had no idea who she really was.”

  “Why did she decide to reveal her real identity to you?” a female voice asked.

  Addison was silent for a moment. I sat up straight and leaned closer to the TV.

  “It was a personal decision,” she finally answered. “After she told me who she was, we decided it would be beneficial for the community to know the story.”

  I felt like a game show contestant cheering on a team member and shouting “Good answer! Good answer!” when I knew we’d just lost the big jackpot. She kept me out of it entirely, made it look as though a reporter on her staff just happened to wander into her office and reveal she was a long-missing national reporter. Sure, it could happen.

  “And where is she now?” another voice asked.

  Addison shrugged. “I have no idea. I came in to work and her office key and her resignation letter were on the copy desk.”

  The interview ended; there was some old familiar B-roll footage of Charisma in the field, blonde and brash as the world remembered her, followed by a few seconds on her injury, her husband’s death and the Syrian story. That followed with some self-righteous chest pounding about the state of the media today.

  Nothing about the murders that Charisma helped to solve through her work in Jubilant Falls. Nothing about me, the nosy professor who came into town on a hunch based on a name I saw on a byline on a small Ohio newspaper and who inadvertently blew the lid off everything.

  I pushed the power button and the television clicked off.

  Like she told me the first time we spoke, that woman is gone forever—and apparently gone again.

  Unlike her, my question wasn’t ‘Where would I go next?’ I knew where I was headed.

  I was going back to rehab.

  I’d made the phone call from the Detroit airport in the middle of the night, right after the bartender hefted an empty beer mug my direction and waved me toward the army of cleverly labeled craft beers standing at attention behind him. I knew then if I didn’t get a little fine-tuning I’d be right back where I started—and soon.

  I couldn’t do that to Noah’s memory.

  I visited his grave on my way to the clinic.

  Four weeks later, I was back in my apartment, feeling stronger, more centered. I still, though, hadn’t decided what good it would do to tell my part of the Charisma Prentiss story. Maybe my second-year students would hear the story in a couple weeks when fall term started. Maybe I wouldn’t say a word.

  Maybe, too, I’d start venturing back out into the dating world. I couldn’t have Charisma, but she’d shown me I was ready to dip my toe in the waters again. Broadcast instructor Audrey Dellaplain’s office was just down the hall from my office. We’d worked together for several years now. She was divorced, like myself. Maybe she’d have dinner with me. I could drop by her office after the first day of class and ask.

  There was a buzz from the intercom downstairs. Who could that be? Probably someone was looking for one of the new professors who I saw moving into one of the other apartments. I walked over to the box by the door and hit the button.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. It’s me. Can I come up?” The voice was soft and warm and familiar.

  “Oh my God.” I leaned on the button until I heard the door unlock. In a moment Charisma was at my door. She wore tight jeans, and beneath a white gauzy blouse, her breasts swelled inside a pink tank top.

  Without speaking, I pulled her into my arms, drinking in the familiar lavender smell, holding her as tightly as she held me. She looked up into my eyes, a moment of uncertainty in her face. Her hands slid into my graying hair, drawing my face to hers. Our lips met in a deep, passionate kiss.

  “You’re here,” I whispered as we parted.

  I pulled her inside, closing the door behind us.

  “Yes, I am.”

  Once again, her fingers slipped into my hair and her lips softly touched mine. I took her face in my hands and swept her brunette bangs away from her face, exposing the angry red scar along her hairline. I brushed my lips across it, following it down her neck. She gasped as I slid the gauzy blouse off her shoulders, exposing pocked scars along her arms and between her shoulder blades.

  I looked deep into her eyes, uncertain of what would happen next. This time, I saw no fear, no pulling back. She laced her fingers through mine and brought them to her lips.

  “You terrified me the last time you kissed my hand,” she said. “Back in my apartment in Ohio.”

  “Was that it?” I asked. “I wasn’t sure what I’d done.”

  “I didn’t want you to see how I really looked. When you pulled my hand to kiss it, you could see the scars on my arms. I wasn’t ready for that.”

  Don’t ruin this, not now.

  “What are you ready for?” My voice was hoarse.

  “Oh, Leland,” she said.

  I kissed her, sliding my arms down her back, feeling the softness of the tank top, clutching her firm bottom in my hands. Wrapping her arms around my neck, she moaned as I buried my head on her shoulder. In one quick jump, both of her legs were wrapped around my waist; I held her tightly and walked us into the bedroom.

  *****

  The sun was setting when she awoke. I smiled at her as she stretched like a cat.

  “Hey there,” I whispered, running my finger across her collarbone and down between her breasts.

  She snuggled closer, tucking her hands beneath her head.

  “Hey there,” she purred.

  “So I have to ask. Where have you been?”

  She hooked her left leg across mine and I caught a glimpse of the long thin reminder of one of her first surgeries in Frankfurt. Blue shrapnel lay just below the surface of her left leg and among the scars on her arms. She sighed, contentedly this time.

  “I drove around for a couple days, staying in hotels. Then I couldn’t stand traveling with Monsieur Le Chat any more, so I spent a couple weeks with my parents—some with my mother in Maryland, some with Dad and Kate in DC.”

  “What made you come to see me in Philly?”

  She propped herself up on her elbow and laid her hand on my cheek.

  “Something you said, about rebuilding that old house. I decided that it was time to tear down some of those old walls. I want to start again. I’ve come to terms with the fact I’ll probably never be like I was before, and that’s OK. I just know I want to start again with you.”

  “That’s what I want, too,” I whispered, drawing her into my arms. “That’s what I want, too.”

  Chapter 36 Addison

  I stood next to Gary McGinnis as a city worker ground Jimmy Lyle’s name off of the tornado memorial in front of city hall.

  “So, the next time I have suspicions about a murder, are you going to listen to me?” I asked.

  We shoved our fingers into our ears as the periodic scream of metal against granite interrupted the conversation. There was a brief silence. Gary opened his mouth to speak as the grinder started again. He shook his head.

  A month after the story ran, Jimmy Lyle’s parents asked that his name be removed from the memorial; city council had quickly agreed. The event was going to be our lead story tomorrow, and I wanted to be the one to write it.

  Pat Robinette circled the monument, shooting photos as the name was ground off.

  “Go ahead, Penny, rub it in,” Gary finally managed to say. “You and I both know we wouldn’t have ever known about half of that stuff if Julia Dahlgren hadn’t confessed to you and Betty hadn’t told that reporter the other half. How’s the arm, by the way?”

  I moved my fingers to demonstrate. “Now that I’m out of that damned cast, I’m feeling a lot better,” I said. “I’m almost completely back to normal.”

  Gary shook his head. “I still can’t believe all that stuff happened in one family. We had the sister in mind as a suspect, all along. When we thought the time of death was Monday, and you said that Earlene Whitelaw had left work early that day we had to check her out. The fingerprints, we thought, sealed the deal at the time.”

  “I never knew Eve had a sister, all through school. And you, damn you, never told me you had a suspect.”

  “I don’t have to tell the press everything, even when it’s you. You know that. If I’d said anything, you’d have had it all over the front page the next day.”

  I punched his shoulder gently. “Probably.”

  We stopped talking as the grinder began screaming against stone again. My mind wandered back to what had been happening behind the brick walls of the old Shanahan house.