Free Bloodlines by Jan Burke Page B

began writing notes.
    When he hung up, he said, "Chief claims it was all a misunderstanding. You go on home, I'll file this and come by for some follow-up."
    Detectives came to the house. Jack came to the house--often over the next few days--and then other reporters, for other reasons. Friends and family, neighbors and curiosity seekers. None of them were of any use.
    O'Connor hardly mourned Roosevelt's death the next week, and later had no heart for the victory celebrations at the end of the war. Maureen was missing. God knew what was happening to her. And it was his fault.
    Neither of his parents ever said that to him--in fact, once hearing him say it, they protested adamantly that it wasn't so. But he believed that they must, in their heart of hearts, feel it to be true--that perhaps they even said it to each other, and only guilt had made them protest. It hardly mattered--he said it often enough to himself.
    For five years, O'Connor and his parents went through the motions of being a family, but Maureen's absence grew nearly to be a stronger force than her presence. His father's interest in life beyond his room, always something Maureen had cajoled from him, began to fail, and what remained of his health failed with it.
    O'Connor's eldest sister, Alma, had lost her husband in the war, and now she came to live with them to help his mother. His mother, who, like his father, seemed suddenly to age after that one April evening, was grateful for Alma's help.
    Alma was not Maureen, though. O'Connor found himself ill-at-ease with this prim woman, who was seventeen years his senior and all but a stranger to him. In truth, he decided later, the thing that bothered him most was that she was staying in Maureen's room. His mother had packed up Maureen's belongings and placed them in the attic, and she allowed Alma to place her own things on the walls and shelves of Maureen's room. To O'Connor's way of thinking, his mother was giving up on Maureen. Alma was seen by her youngest brother as encroaching and little more than a squatter. Beneath all his resentment of her, he carried the fear that some spiritual connection to Maureen had been broken by these changes in the household, that by moving Maureen's possessions, they had taken away a place for her to come back to, somehow made it impossible for her to return home.
    Jack had been O'Connor's salvation. It was Jack who had talked Mr. Wrigley, the publisher, into promoting his copyboy to general assignment reporter. O'Connor later learned that Jack had support for this idea from an unexpected quarter: Helen Swan.
    "I told the old man the truth," she said when O'Connor asked about it. "I told him Jack was giving you writing lessons, and if they turned out not to be good ones, I'd give you better ones myself, because I could see when some half-pint had ink in his veins, even if Wrigley couldn't."
    He knew of no one who talked back to Mr. Wrigley the way Helen Swan did. He remained in awe of her.
    It had taken him a while to realize that there was a strong friendship beneath the rivalry between Helen and Jack. In the spring of 1936, she left the paper for a little more than a year, not long after Jack's car accident. O'Connor was still a paperboy then, and he began to see that Jack missed her terribly.
    O'Connor was convinced that it was her relentless needling that pulled Jack out of the misery he had fallen into when he was hospitalized after the accident. "Get up off your ass," she said the first time she visited him. "I'll let you set it down again in a room across the hall. There's a blind guy in it. He can't see you pity yourself." Jack had winced, and she added in an angry voice, "So you'll have a limp. There are other people around here who've lost more than that."
    O'Connor gathered up his courage and told her to leave Jack alone.
    Helen stared at him, apparently just realizing he was in the room. "I thought the hospital didn't allow kids under sixteen into patients'