Free Pleasantville by Attica Locke

wish this life on anyone, the nights he sits in his backyard, staring up at the sky, wanting, stars and all, to pull the whole thing back like the lid of a tin can, anything to see his wife again. It’s the reason he drove to Pleasantville last night, the reason he called Lonnie this morning.
    â€œHow much do you remember about the story?”
    â€œDeanne Duchon,” Lon says, starting with the first girl. Jay scribbles the name on a legal pad, taking notes. “She was walking home from a friend’s house. Four blocks, after sunset. But she never made it. Her dad had told her not to drive. She had a brand-new Mustang, but he told her it was a waste of gas to drive it just four blocks. He must have told me that story ten times.”
    â€œThey have a suspect?”
    â€œThere was a name. I’d have to look through my notes.”
    She glances across the hardwood floors of her apartment, past the ratty futon, where there’s a narrow, built-in bookshelf near the front door, and, below it, a sagging cardboard box, which she carried out of the Post ’s offices eighteen months ago, loading it into her VW Golf before heading home, lugging it into her apartment and dropping it by the door, where it’s sat every day since, a dusty reminder that she was once a writer, a real one. She has often prided herself on being less openlysentimental than her colleagues. That April morning last year, when news came that the paper’s owner was pulling the plug, Lonnie had not hung around for the postmortem. While her coworkers stood dumbfounded, so blindsided that they had still been working on stories when their desk phones started ringing, Lonnie grabbed every piece of paper she’d ever scribbled on, combing the corners of her cubicle for anything she might have missed. Short of swiping the desktop Mac she wrote on, she got everything. By the time security started ushering folks out of the building, Lonnie was already a mile up the Southwest Freeway. She would cry later, she told herself. Only, the thing is, she never did. No tears, just beer and cigarettes for breakfast, whole days watching Sally Jessy and Montel. The box was meant as a kind of insurance policy, a way to start over when the time was right. There are at least a hundred stories inside, pieces she’d researched, bits of knowledge trying to find their way to the light of day. She’s pitched a few, tried to sell herself to the Statesman in Austin, the Morning News in Dallas, the Star-Telegram , Texas Monthly , even Texas Highways . But no one local is hiring, and the Chronicle won’t have her back–a feeling that’s mutual. “I can take a look,” she says. “I had started a bit on the second girl last year. The same name came up, I remember. Almost from the beginning, HPD was looking at similarities between the two cases.”
    â€œMaybe you and this Bartolomo guy could compare notes.”
    â€œHa.”
    In the old days it would have been unthinkable, reporters from rival papers sharing information. The whole system was set up for one to keep a competitive distance from the other; however they duked it out on the front pages, chasing scoops and stories, there was an understanding that they made each other better. But Houston is a one-paper town now, the first major city in the country to try to run a democracy with asingle journalistic checkpoint, a single voice guiding four million people through a maze of complex issues.
    â€œThey organized a search, Arlee and the Wainwrights,” Jay says. “They’re block-walking to gather any other information on who might have seen what. If this is what they think it is, then there’s not a lot of time.”
    â€œNo, there isn’t. I’ll give Bartolomo a call, see where they’re at with this. Mike Resner, the detective on the first cases, I think he’s still over in the Northeast Division. Might be worth a call there