Sweet Dreams, Irene by Jan Burke Page B

give Mark time to follow up much. If she’s released, it won’t be in time to counteract the damage on her father’s campaign.”
    Pete and Frank talked for a few minutes more, then Frank hung up.
    I called the paper, but anyone who could have made a difference was long gone. I realized that by now the story was in print and on its way to being distributed. Nothing could be done about it. As I put the phone down, I noticed Frank was sitting with his head in his hands.
    I turned the light out. There was still enough light from the moon and streetlights to make out his features in the dark. I got in bed behind him, and reached up and rubbed his neck and shoulders. It was killing me not to ask him the five hundred or so questions that I had been gathering together for the last three days. He started to relax a little, and reached up and took my hands. He pulled them around his chest and lay back down. He wouldn’t look at me. I moved a hand up into his hair and stroked it gently.
    “Frank?”
    “What?” A whisper.
    “I was there on Thursday, at the harbor.”
    He turned toward me suddenly. “What?” Not a whisper.
    “I was there when—”
    “Oh God, Irene.” He sighed and turned on to his back, looking up at the ceiling. I waited, but he didn’t say more. After a while, he took hold of my hand again and held it between his. “Now you really know what it’s like, don’t you?”
    “What?”
    “Being with a cop.”
    I thought about this for a minute. “No, Frank, that’s not the problem. Yes, I’m afraid for your safety. I’m going to worry about you, but I can live with that. It’s much more difficult to feel distant from you.”
    He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “I just can’t talk about it now.”
    I watched him lying there, tense and troubled.
    Neither one of us slept much that night.

13
    M ANIPULATED by a sixteen-year-old kid. I’m about to become known as the man who changed the course of politics in Las Piernas county on a setup by a teenager.” Mark Baker, usually one of the more easygoing members of the staff, was in a foul mood the next morning.
    “You wrote it as fairly as you could.” Even as I said the words, I knew they would be little consolation.
    “I waited around as long as possible, and they were still questioning her when we hit drop-dead deadline. I had no reason to believe she’d be released. I never said she was charged. I was careful, Irene. But you know no one reads anything as carefully as you write it.”
    “Forget it, Mark. Every reporter has had something like this happen to them at least once.”
    “Aw, crap, I should have known. But nobody here wanted to wait on it.”
    “Understandable. Her timing was impeccable. She must have found out from somebody what time we …” An awful feeling came over me. I picked up the phone on Mark’s desk and called down to Danny Coburn. Sure enough, she’d asked him about deadlines and printing schedules when she was here on Thursday.
    Mark, who had heard only my side of the conversation, was furious. “You saw her here on Thursday? And you didn’t say anything?”
    “Hold on, hold on. I talked to her after I talked to you. And she wasn’t confessing to murder then. That surprised me as much as it did you. And I sure as hell didn’t know she had talked to Danny about our deadlines.”
    He wasn’t completely mollified, but I didn’t have time to smooth his ruffled feathers. I went back to my desk and started working on election stories, which had now been made vastly more interesting by a couple of high school students. I thought about Julie. Monty Montgomery must have wanted to throttle her. In Jacob’s case, he could go to his father saying he was wrongly accused. Julie was responsible for her own predicament; I couldn’t picture her father being very understanding.
    Not an hour had gone by when the phone rang. It was Pete, sounding frantic.
    “Look, something’s happened to