The Price Of Silence. Kate Wilhelm
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and Toni stopped key-stroking to look at her. From his desk, Shinizer said, “Hold the press! Our interpid girl reporter just came in with the scoop. Little green men snatch local—”
Todd kept walking toward her own office. Behind her, she heard Johnny say sharply, “Cut the crap, Shinny.” Todd entered her office with Johnny right behind her. He closed the door.
She walked to her desk and sat down. Johnny went to the window, looked out, glanced at the papers on her desk, at her monitor with a screen saver of the sphinx morphing to a pyramid, and finally took a seat opposite her desk.
“We have a new ad,” he said. “Germond’s furniture store in Bend. Advertising is on the upswing.”
She nodded, waiting for the real purpose of his visit.
“Look,” he said, “you’ve been here some weeks now. What’s there to do here for teenagers? Anything? It’s a great community for little kids, safe as heaven for them, but for teens? Nothing. They see TV, videos, movies, magazines. They know what’s out there and they want theirs.” He looked past her at the wall. “Ollie says about eighty thousand kids a year take off. Just take off. Pictures on milk cartons, all that. Some of them come from here. Ten, twelve over the past dozen years. Gone a few days, months, even longer, then most of them check in again. A phone call begging for money, a note or postcard, or the girls show up with a baby. Some get picked up here and there on vagrancy charges, drug charges, soliciting. Name it.”
He stopped, as if waiting for a response. She didn’t move, watching him.
He stood up. “Okay, my point is that there isn’t a story here. We get mixed up in it and sooner or later the girl is picked up and brought home, and there’s juvenile court, the children’s services agency, foster homes, a goddamn mess, and no one thanks you for butting in.”
“What if it’s more than that?” she asked when he paused again. “What if she didn’t just take off?”
Johnny shook his head. “They look for evidence. You know, blood, signs of a struggle, a menacing stranger hanging around, the usual suspects.” His grin was a feeble effort as he spoke. It came and went quickly. “Absent any sign like that, it’s a runaway, just like thousands of others. You can’t make a federal case of eighty thousand kids!”
He went to the door, where he stopped and said, “How long do you suppose any outsider would go unnoticed in Brindle on a school morning? People going to work, kids on the way to the school bus. They’ll find her in a girlfriend’s bedroom, or in someone’s rec room, a relative’s house. Bring her home, tears all around, no media circus, and life goes on. Or else in a week or two Mame will get a call or a card or something. She’ll be embarrassed, apologetic, or boiling mad. What are you going to do, chain kids to the water pipes?” He gave Todd a hard look, opened the door and said, “Just leave it alone unless something develops.”
Todd sat at her desk for several minutes after Johnny left. Leave it alone. Don’t rock the boat. Keep it in the family. Mum’s the word…. By next week when the newspaper came out the girl would be back home, back in school, all forgiven, forgotten. She pulled her notepad closer and jotted down two names: Jodie Schuster and Mame Schuster.
At last, she began to look over the papers on her desk—Shinizer’s school board meeting minutes, the water commission meeting, birth of twins to someone or other…. It was no use. Drivel, she thought, gathering the notes and items together and stuffing them into her computer case. Homework. She needed something to occupy the late hours while Barney was away, and with a weekly it didn’t matter where or when she did this kind of work as long as she had it ready by Wednesday. She decided to go to Ruth Ann’s house and do something that might take her mind off Jodie Schuster.
By late afternoon, she felt that Ruth Ann had mastered enough to be comfortable using the computer to write her history.
“I thought I knew the history pretty well,” Ruth Ann admitted, “but there are too many blanks. When exactly did Joe Warden arrive, for instance? No one ever said to my knowledge. How did the two men, Joe Warden and Mike Hilliard, become partners? Why? Another blank. We know Joe Warden had a son but nothing about the child’s mother.”
“How did Jane Hilliard die?” Todd asked, recalling the sad tombstone.
“That I do know,” Ruth Ann said. “She died in the fire when the original hotel burned to the ground.”
“She was so young,” Todd said. “Well, if you run into trouble, give me a call. And I’ll be around to do the scanning when you’re ready.”
“It may be a while,” Ruth Ann said, indicating the boxes. “I have just a bit of reading to do, and notes to make.”
“Just a bit,” Todd agreed, glad that she wasn’t the one to start plowing through all that old material.
Todd had talked to Barney and rewritten Shinny’s notes about meetings and a flu clinic that would be at Safeway in two weeks and then sat looking at the two names she had written earlier: Jodie Schuster, Mame Schuster. She knew about the bands of young people in Portland, hanging out at the malls, congregating downtown, forced to move on with nowhere to move on to. But ten or more runaways from a small community like Brindle? And no one was doing anything about it?
There really wasn’t anything in town for them, no swimming pool, no rec hall where they could get together and listen to music, dance, just fool around. No doubt the school held dances now and then, and there were team sports, maybe a drama group put on a play once or twice a year. But they needed more than that, a place of their own where they could get together regularly.
An editorial, she decided. She would write a series of editorials, research what other small towns did for their young people. Not until Jodie Schuster checked in, she thought, remembering Johnny’s words. Evidently the newspaper had run a story about a runaway, only to be subjected to a lot of criticism for it when the kid turned up again. Maybe, because Johnny had been stung, he had exaggerated about how many kids had run away from Brindle, trying to make it seem commonplace, not worthy of a story. Okay, she told herself. First research, information, then a series of editorials. And have something just a little more interesting than school board meetings and flu clinics in the newspaper.
She could not account for, or even identify, the tingle that passed through her as she picked up her pen to make a note about the missing children of Brindle.
Nine
On Saturday, Todd found many photographs aligned on the dining table. “I tried to put them in chronological order,” Ruth Ann said, “as much as possible, anyway. Most of them don’t have dates, of course. But that’s the original Warden’s Place in the early years, maybe at the start. There are several photos of it, some with him and Hilliard, one with Janey with them. They all lived in it.” The pictures were fanned out, and she spread them a bit so that each one was visible. She put the one with Janey aside. “I know I’ll want that one, but I haven’t decided which of the others I’ll use. The first church,” she said, pointing to the next set. “My grandfather was preacher there.”
She pointed to several other photographs, the first one-room school with a teacher in a rigid pose and six children who looked petrified. Four of them were barefoot. She put that one aside, also. “In,” she said.
“I’ll skim through the diaries and letters and try to get a clue about who all those people were,” Ruth Ann said, “and date them if I can. I want to use pictures with people as much as possible, but only if I can identify them.”
“They all look so grim,” Todd said. The children’s clothes looked either too big or too small, smock dresses on the girls, shapeless pants and shirts on the boys. Women were wearing high-neck dresses with long sleeves, aprons or shawls, and what seemed to be laced boots. So much for the glamorous west of moviedom, she thought.
“I suppose they were grim for much of the time,” Ruth Ann said. “It was a hard life. One of the diaries