Absent Friends

Marian led Laura Stone into the small conference room. Someone else might have a meeting that required the large one, and while, as director, Marian's needs trumped everyone else's, she did not approve of such flagrant assertions of power and avoided playing that card whenever she could.

And also: the windows of the smaller room faced west. From here, in the gap between the buildings, you could see the smoke crawling skyward, see the dinosaurlike cranes, see the smoldering, twisted ruins where so many—and one was Jimmy McCaffery—had died. Marian seated Laura Stone so that Stone would have that view. Elena, warmly efficient, followed them into the room with a carafe of coffee, fresh mugs, three kinds of cookies arranged on a tray. Laura Stone turned down an offer of coffee, but the carafe and the mugs and the tray remained. Marian made the small bet with herself that she always made: how long it would take a guest who had gained an upper hand by refusing hospitality to decide her point had been made and give in to covetous tastebuds or falling blood sugar or the very human hope for reassurance through food. In the case of this thin, harried-looking young reporter, Marian predicted it wouldn't be ten minutes.

“Well.” Marian nodded as Elena withdrew and she and Laura Stone arranged themselves. The reporter, not looking at Marian, rooted in her large canvas shoulder bag, retrieved a notebook, two ballpoint pens, one of which she frowned at and tossed back, and a tape recorder the size of a cigarette pack.

“Is this all right?” Laura Stone asked, lifting the recorder.

“Yes, of course,” Marian said placidly; what had Marian Gallagher to hide? She went on, silkily seizing the high ground. “I was sorry to hear about Mr. Randall's death,” she said. “As you might imagine, I'd been . . . dismayed . . . to read some of the things he'd written. About me and about people I know. Still . . .” She shook her head, leaving the rest unspoken, because some people were superstitious about the word suicide.

“Mr. Randall was a major figure at my newspaper,” Laura Stone said, flipping the notebook open. “I'd like to ask for your comments about him—the stories he was working on, his approach when he interviewed you and your friends. His death. Anything you'd like to say.”

A ragged edge to Stone's clear midwestern voice pricked Marian's awareness. Her sympathetic smile still lingering and her eyes still frank, Marian reinventoried the reporter's looks. Thin, she'd thought on first seeing her; but perhaps the word was drawn. No makeup, but that might be a statement, something political: Marian had gone makeupless herself when younger. Eyes dark-circled, restless. The way all New Yorkers' eyes were these past weeks.

Or was this something more? Were Stone's eyes ashamed, and suspicious, and hoping to hide their hurt, as the eyes of someone who had for the first time been betrayed?

As by a lover, who left without warning.

As by a lover, say, who had killed himself.

“I'm not sure how I can help you,” Marian said, watching Stone as she spoke. At the sound of Marian's voice, the reporter glanced up, her eyes filled with something like hope, which faded but did not vanish when Marian's words registered. Marian softened her tones, speaking as a woman does in the presence of another who is bereaved. “Mr. Randall only came here twice, and we spoke on the telephone a few times.”

Stone looked back to her notebook, where she had written nothing. Marian allowed herself a tiny, relieved smile. Not that another woman's loss and pain gave her any pleasure, of course not. But perhaps this interview would not be, as each of the interviews with Randall had increasingly been, dangerous with traps and snares. Perhaps Laura Stone was not looking for the truth, but only for the ghost of Harry Randall.

In a voice from which the shiver had all but disappeared (and Marian admired this, the reporter's dogged attempt at control) Laura Stone said, “What did you think when you heard about Mr. Randall's death?”

“What is there to think? Or to say?” Laura Stone had lifted her eyes to Marian again, and Marian met them comfortingly. Even before the attacks and the collapse of the towers, when death was a private, individual calamity, Marian had never found any words worthy of it, though she had delivered eulogies when asked and muttered sincere consoling nonsense as she pressed the hands of the grieving. Laura Stone's pen traveled over her notebook page. Marian couldn't see what she was writing, but from the rhythmic movements she suspected it was not notes, just strokes, just a way to keep control.

She almost offered the reporter the plate of cookies, but that would be unfair.

Stone, her eyes still on Marian's, said: “What if you were told Mr. Randall's death wasn't suicide?”

Marian stared at the young woman. “Not—you're saying you think someone killed him?”

“Can you tell me who might want to do that?”