Graveland: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

sick. Any display of vulnerability on Lizzie’s part has always cut through him like a knife.
    When she was four years old, or maybe five, she—
    Jesus, Frank .
    “Lizzie, do you want me to come up there?” he says. “I could easily make it in a—”
    “No, Dad. Come on .” She’s laughing now, or at least pretending to.
    And so it goes.
    Later, driving along the back roads to where he’s renting an apartment near West Mahopac, Frank replays the conversation in his head, looking out for clues, a reason, something to explain why Lizzie was so upset. He spins various theories out, elaborate ones, simple ones, but in the end he just doesn’t know.
    And, sadly—experience tells him—he probably never will.
    *   *   *
    All through the afternoon and early evening Ellen Dorsey works on the Ratt Atkinson profile, trawling through his eight-year gubernatorial record and clacking out three and a half thousand words of boilerplate magazine prose. At about nine o’clock she decides she’s had enough, that she can do the rest tomorrow. She then switches her focus to the Jeff Gale story. She’s had the TV on in the background the whole time and for the last hour or so has been checking Twitter—and semi-psychotically, every three or four minutes at least. But there don’t seem to be any developments, none that she can see from the screen in the corner of her living room at any rate. On Twitter, predictably, there’s plenty of the usual idiotic comment and meaningless bile to keep things ticking over.
    She flicks around a few of the news websites, but it’s the same everywhere.
    TOP BANKER SHOT IN CENTRAL PARK.
    That’s it, no details, no explanations, no theories even.
    The thing about instant news is that it’s, well, instant  … but nowhere near fast enough. It’s addictive, but you’re never satisfied. Ellen works hard at what she does—but the inescapable fact here is that she works for a monthly publication.
    A periodical.
    Both of which terms sound like Victorian euphemisms for something else entirely.
    Parallax magazine has been around for more than forty years and has a reputation—it’s known for its investigative reporting, its long-form pieces, and its uncompromising, ballsy attitude. Max Daitch, the latest in a long line of the magazine’s fearless editors, and the one Ellen has mostly worked with, is indeed fearless, but even though he’s young—younger than she is by three or four years—he’s been heard to quote H. L. Mencken and is really just a couple of sandwiches short of wearing a bow tie. Which means that her habits in recent years have been shaped by this traditionalist, analog regime, even though her instincts remain resolutely progressive and digital. Her MO for Parallax, for example, has been to burrow, slowly, patiently, sifting through mountains of information with a view to building a “case.” But these days, no longer in her thirties, what she’d prefer to be doing, and got to do briefly with Jimmy Gilroy back when the John Rundle story broke—and felt she was maybe trying to do earlier today when she went down to Central Park—is identify a breaking story … find a curve, get out ahead of it, and stay there.
    A change of pace.
    You can’t force it, though.
    She tidies her desk for a few minutes, rearranging stuff and clearing a little space. Then she sits back, puts her feet on the desk, and phones her sister. Michelle lives in a beautiful split-level colonial in the suburbs of Philadelphia, is married to the financial controller of a fair-trade import company, and has two exceptionally bright kids. Which is fine, for Michelle … but the thing is, every once in a while Ellen needs a vicarious hit of all this, of the supposed normality of her sister’s domestic setup, so she gets Michelle on the phone and pumps her for information, stuff about the house, about her and Dan, about the kids—what they’re doing at school, what medications they’re on, how many