Too Close to Home

I could recall times in my previous stint with Randall Finley when, if he showed up at a scheduled event that was clearly going to have less of a publicity payoff than anticipated, he walked. He’d been invited one time to a high school graduation ceremony, but when he arrived and learned from school officials that he wasn’t sitting on the stage as the students came up to receive their diplomas, but instead in the front row, where he would not be on view 100 percent of the time by the parents in attendance, he bolted.

“I gave up two other events that would give me better exposure than this one, now that you’ve got me sitting down with the regular people,” he told the astonished head of student services. “If you’re not putting me on the stage here, I can probably still catch one of them.”

At the time, I sidled up to him and whispered, “People will never forget this if you blow them off.”

And he’d said to me, “And where were you mayor, exactly?”

But Randy wasn’t going to pull any of that kind of shit with Gillian Metcalfe. She had media savvy. Dumping the Swanson House’s soiled carpet on the steps of town hall was evidence of that. So even if no one from the press showed, Randy was going to make sure she was happy, or at least as happy as he was likely to make her with a five-thousand-dollar check. If Gillian was smart, and she was, she’d give that check a limited-enough look of approval to guarantee there’d be another one before too long.

While the mayor was shaking her hand and trying to make small talk as she smiled under duress, I wandered down to the house kitchen, which was about twice the size of one in a standard home. There were two stoves, two oversized fridges, a couple of microwaves, loads of counter space, as well as half a dozen high chairs and plastic bibs scattered about. I could hear one, possibly two, small babies crying upstairs, but the child sitting in one of the high chairs in the kitchen was looking very content as his mother fed him a gooey white mixture I took to be pablum.

“Hey,” I said, trying not to intrude, but not wanting to be rude, either.

The baby’s mother glanced at me, flashed me a smile, but she had to focus on getting the tiny plastic spoon into the mouth of her baby, who looked about ten months old, I guessed.

There was something about the mother that made me look at her more closely. Twenty years old, maybe, but there was still a chance she was in her teens. Dirty blond hair that hung to her shoulders, brown eyes, a stud so small I almost missed it in her nose. A couple of forehead zits, pale skin, no lipstick, a sharp cleft in her chin.

I was trying to place her, almost certain I’d seen her before somewhere. Her outfit-track pants and sweatshirt-was wrong. This wasn’t the getup I’d seen her in before.

“Your baby’s beautiful,” I said, moving closer.

The young woman beamed. “Thank you. His name is Sean.”

“Hey, Sean,” I said. Pablum squirted back out of his mouth and dropped onto the high chair tray. He glanced down, stuck his hand in it.

“And I’m Linda,” the mother said.

“Linda, hi,” I said. I extended a hand. “I’m Jim. Jim Cutter.”

We shook hands. Bits of baby food stuck to my palm.

“Hi, Jim,” she said. “So, you work for the mayor?”

On her way into the kitchen with the baby, she’d seen Randy chatting up Metcalfe.

“I drive him around,” I said. “Actually, this is my first day in a couple of years, working for him. I’m sort of filling in. His other driver, he’s kind of unavailable.”

“He came in here last week and threw up,” Linda said. “Not the driver, the mayor.”

“So I heard. It’s kind of his specialty.”

“Throwing up?”

“Well, making an ass of himself. He has a wide repertoire of techniques at his disposal.”

Linda smiled, got some more pablum on the spoon. “Yeah, no kidding.”

The way she said it suggested she had some familiarity with the mayor’s leadership style.

“You look like you want to ask me something,” Linda said. “You want to know why I’m here, why I haven’t got a husband.”

It was true, I was about to ask her something. But not that. “I don’t think that would be any of my business,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “This guy, Eric, he got me pregnant, and I think maybe he would have married me, but he got sent to Iraq, and I was thinking that when he got back, he’d be a father to this boy, even if he didn’t actually want to marry me, but then he got killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was in a helicopter, and it went down.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“It’s a stupid war,” Linda said.

“That’s what a lot of people think,” I said.

“So I didn’t have a job or any money, and they’re letting me and my baby stay here until I get myself back on my feet, you know?”

“Sure.” I paused. “You’re right, I was going to ask you something, though, but not that. Something else.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You look familiar to me. I feel as though we’ve met before somewhere.”