A Perfect Grave Read Free

the Mirror not to publish his name or picture. “I had nothing to do with that sort of business. I’m begging you to please think of my wife, our daughters, my students. My school. Please.”
    But there was the news photo of Pillar in handcuffs along with the undeniable fact of his arrest, which was not the same as a charge. Even though he wasn’t charged, he looked guilty in the Mirror ’s photo and under that headline. The story also quoted an unsympathetic community activist. “I do not feel sorry for him. When these men are caught with their pants down, they will say anything, except the truth.”
    That morning Jason got a call from a detective he knew.
    “Nice number today on the principal, Wade. We told you he’d been cleared. It was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “It’s not my story. I don’t know why they played it like that. I guess Cassie will have to follow this up by talking to him and clarifying things.”
    “That might be a challenge, Ace.”
    “Why?”
    “Brian Pillar hanged himself in his garage this morning with an extension cord. His oldest daughter found him, managed to cut him down with a hedge trimmer and call 9-1-1.”
    “Jesus, is he alive?”
    “Barely.”
    Brian Pillar survived and recovered, and the Mirror paid him a “six-figure amount” in a quick out-of-court settlement that also involved a front-page retraction and a presentation on journalistic responsibility to be given by senior editors to Pillar’s school board. Before all that happened, Cassie Appleton and Eldon Reep blamed Jason for the mess.
    “How can you blame me? I was never part of Cassie’s story.”
    “She called you for help,” Reep said.
    “And I told her he was not charged, that she’d better be careful.”
    “That’s not Cassie’s account. She’s informed me that you clearly told her,” Eldon picked up a legal pad with handwritten notes, “that all the men had been arrested and charged.”
    “She’s dead wrong!”
    “Are you calling her a liar?”
    Jason met Reep’s cold stare.
    Be careful, he told himself.
    Cassie Appleton was one of Reep’s hires. Reep had replaced Fritz Spangler as metro editor a few months ago. Reep was a Seattle native who’d worked at the rival Seattle Times before leaving for Toronto to help launch the new daily, the Canada News Observer. After sixteen months, the new paper and Reep’s marriage had folded. He wanted to return to Seattle, made some calls, and landed Spangler’s old job.
    Reep wanted to recharge the Mirror ’s newsroom. One of his first new hires was Cassie Appleton. She’d worked at some small midwest triweekly but had won some obscure writing awards. She never smiled. She focused on her ambition to get the city hall beat, to use it as a stepping-stone to the state bureau in Olympia and then the Mirror ’s national bureau in Washington, D.C.
    According to the newsroom gossip, Cassie was a home wrecker who’d been cast out of her small town following a torrid affair with her managing editor.
    Reep was rumored to have a thing for her.
    So be very careful, Jason told himself.
    “Answer me, Wade. Are you calling Cassie a liar?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you can prove this, how?”
    Jason couldn’t prove it and immediately realized what was going to happen. He was going to be the scapegoat for this.
    And he was right.
    Eldon suspended him for a week, then put him on nights indefinitely while he decided his fate, informing Jason that one missed story, or one mistake, would end his employment with the Mirror.
    “— all units…we have a report of a… ”
    The scanners yanked Jason’s attention back to police matters and his desk. He adjusted the settings but was again frustrated by fragmented cross-talk coming out of the Central District area near First Hill—no wait—that’s closer to Yesler Terrace. What the heck was happening out there?
    “ …report of a second car prowling… ”
    Car prowling? Is that all? No story