Free Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult Page B

rescue her anyway. I'll be the hero now; soon enough Delia will realize that there's reason to think of me as the villain.
“Sophie!” I yell. “Time's up!” She appears breathlessly at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mommy doesn't have–”
“Get your coat,” I say. “You're going to school.” Sophie is still young enough to be delighted by this news. She runs off to the mudroom, while Delia glances out the window into the driveway. “Did you happen to notice the jackals outside?”
I push aside the image of what Delia will think when she sees tomorrow's paper.
“Yeah,” I say, keeping my tone light, “but I'm one of them, and we don't eat our own.”
“I don't want to go out–”
“But you need to,” I say. The last thing Delia should do is sit around waiting for the phone to ring, letting her mind wander enough to wonder why her mother might not be calling–none of which will lead to the outcome she's dreamed of her whole life.
Sophie skids to a stop in front of me, and I squat down to zip up her coat. “We're dropping her off,” I tell Delia, “and then we're going directly to jail.” This morning I was called into the business offices of the New Hampshire Gazette by my editor, a woman named Marge Geraghy who smokes Cuban cigars and insists on calling me by my full godawful name. “Fitzwilliam,” she said, “take a seat.”
I sank into the ratty armchair across from her desk. The New Hampshire Gazette is exactly what you'd imagine of a paper you can, literally, read in its entirety during a visit to the bathroom–dingy gray walls, fluorescent lights, thrift-store furniture. There is a decent reception area and one nice conference room, for the one time a year when the governor of New Hampshire graces our offices for an interview. It's no wonder that most of the reporters choose to work from their homes instead of their cubicles.
“Fitzwilliam,” Marge repeated. “I want to talk to you about this kidnapping case.” On her desk she has the paper spread open to my article–page A2, because yesterday there was also a murder-suicide down in Nashua. “What about it?” I asked.
“Your piece was missing something.”
I raised a brow. “It's all there. The facts, the history to date, and the plea. If you're looking to make an arraignment more sexy, you'll have to watch The Practice.”
“I'm not criticizing your technique, Fitzwilliam, just your effort.” She blew a smoke ring into my face. “Did you ever wonder why I pulled you off the Strange But True story to cover this instead?”
“Sheer human mercy?”
“No, because of what you could bring to the piece. You grew up in Wexton. Maybe you even crossed paths with this family–at church, at a school graduation, whatever. You can make this personal... even if you have to make it all up. I don't want the legal crap. I want the family drama.”
I wondered what Marge would say if she knew that not only did I grow up in Wexton, I grew up next door to Andrew Hopkins. That, all drama aside, Delia is my family. I wondered if she would understand that sometimes being close to an issue is not a good thing for a writer. That sometimes it means you can't see clearly. But then Marge lifted up an envelope. “An open e-ticket,” she announced. “I want you to follow this guy to Arizona and get the exclusive.” And that, really, was what made me agree. After all, I am a man who has never gotten very far from Delia Hopkins, no matter how I've tried. You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started. If Andrew is extradited to Arizona, and Delia follows, I am going to wind up there sooner or later. The New Hampshire Gazette might as well foot the bill.
I plucked the envelope out of Marge's hand. I would figure out, later, how to explain to Delia that I was writing an expose on her heartache. I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that,