Confessions by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page A

some terrible misstep. “Which in no way compares to what you’ve been through.”
    She stops fully now and turns half away, shaking her head, as one does when admonishing the self.
    “Chris,” I say, and she looks back to me. I close the folder and set it down. “I’ve tried to pretend that I was over Katie’s death. You can’t reopen a wound that’s never healed. All that anyone has ever said to me, or my parents, about Katie’s death is how terrible and senseless it was. You’re the first person to ever express anything resembling an attempt to make sense of it.”
    She faces me now. An air of relief about her.
    “If there is more,” I go on, “I want to know. In fact, I think I deserve to know.” I pause, letting what I feel, what I have come to realize, find its own words now. “She deserves more than being an afterthought.”
    It is not a smile that comes to her face. Just an expression affirming of my words. “Yes, she does.” Her gaze ticks off for a second in thought, working on the initial questions I’d posed her. “The business now, people come and go like trains. There aren’t many reporters left who’d remember Katie.” She pauses again, running through some mental rolodex. “There’s someone at the Trib I can check with. Eddie Kleisner. He’s worked city crime for thirty years. Tight with the police. If they were holding anything else back, he’d be the one to know.”
    “I’d appreciate that, Chris.” I reach my hand out to her and she puts hers in it. It is not the forced exchange of pleasantries we shared at Katie’s grave a few days before. Not cold leather against colder flesh. Her hand settles against my palm, fingers curling softly under, holding me for a moment before easing away. Skin gliding over mine.
    It is a touch, a connection, I have never known.
    Chris looks away from me, too quickly it seems, and takes the folder from my hand. She moves past, back to her desk, and slips the clippings into a drawer. The place she’d buried Katie until our chance meeting.
    “Where can I reach you?” She asks this without looking, then turns toward me to qualify her question. “If there’s anything else to find.”
    I nod and approach, standing next to her at the desk. A disastrously gaudy mug rests there, filled with pens and pencils and a collection of change at the bottom, a pad of post-its nearby. I snag a stubby pencil and begin to jot the rectory’s number down. But I never finish. Despite what I know to be right, and what I know to be wrong, I have taken the first steps on an unknown path which I had, until now, decided to leave untraveled.
    Didn’t deserve it…
    No, she didn’t. By Eric’s own words her death was without reason. Which, in concert with what Chris has shared, makes learning the ‘why’ of her murder more than a desire. It is an imperative.
    Yet I must seek this knowing quietly. In whatever shadows exist along the way to this final truth.
    I cross out what I began to write on the post-it and put my cell number instead. “Call me anytime.” I peel the slip of sticky paper off and hand it to Chris. She takes it, nods, reservation in her acceptance.
    “Does it matter, Michael?” she asks me, the grand breadth of her question not that at all. It is narrow to the two of us. Even intimate. “If this leads somewhere, or nowhere, will it mean anything? Katie will still be gone.” She pauses for a moment, and in her eyes I see something rise. An errant vision she has not expected. A morsel of a yesterday that lives only because it is worth holding on to. She brightens lightly at whatever bubbles within and says, “Katie Kat.”
    But as soon as she speaks that name, a cutesy moniker that existed only between two teenage friends, maybe only for the briefest of times over a summer of sneaking out to sip beers and tease boys, she slips back from whatever whimsy had lifted her. She fixes on me, wanting, it seems, some affirmation. Wanting to believe that,