NaNoWriMo: Murder in Wilson Park, Chapter 26

The text from Joe was pretty terse. Story?

No, there was no story yet. She hadn’t written word one about the murder. Not about the original suspect, Charlie 8, or her visit with all the guys at the homeless encampment, or her conversations with Sally and the other Dorothys, or her abbreviated 48 hours of homelessness that involved somebody creeping around her tent, walking halfway across the city for a stupid lunch, and ending up with her new friend Clark’s death on the sidewalk in front of an air conditioner repair shop.

What exactly would the ‘story’ be about? How she looked for answers in all the wrong places? Became friends with people who were probably suspects? That she decided to play pretend homelessness and got freaked out by footsteps at night? None of it mattered to readers who wanted to know who killed the Douglas County park employee near the Senior Center even if she had garnered the energy to write about those things. Anyway, Joe, her grumpy, sexist ‘mentor’ would be all over her for writing human interest stories when she ought to be detailing the progress of the investigation. She lived with a cop, after all, and she was still a zero when it came to reporting on this case.

Even though it was Sunday, and she knew almost no one would be there, Amanda decided to go downtown to the newsroom. Maybe sitting there at her desk in the middle of a sea of reporters’ desks would set her mind going in the right direction. She simply had to stop “frogging around” as her Dad used to say, usually right after or before saying “it was time to fish or cut bait.”

Sunday afternoon meant the newsroom was so deserted that she had to flick the lights on. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, lights on in the sportswriters’ corner, little lamps on their desk. They were all so old school, so short pencil stuck behind their ear reporters, on the phone all the time, going for beers with the athletes they just wrote about. Yeah, incestuous, her journalism professor would say. He was right.

The flash came to her right then.

Was this the first murder to ever happen in Wilson Park?

Maybe the answer to that could be the anchor for a story. Linking the present to the past, providing a sense of history, a bigger picture. She dialed the number for the newspaper archives to see if there was any chance the archivist was around. She’d taken a tour when she started at the paper, and she remembered the guide saying you could never find anything without Shirley. Was Shirley home watching football with her husband or downstairs trying to get a head start on Monday morning’s requests.

“Hi, Shirley? I’m Amanda, the new crime reporter. I work with Joe Jablonski.”

“Yeah, and?”

“I’m working on a story about the murder in Wilson Park and I was wondering if there have been any other high-profile murders there, say, in the past ten or fifteen years.”

“Which is it, ten or fifteen?”

“Okay, let’s say ten for now.’

“Wise choice.”

Shirley gave Amanda the login information for the paper’s archives.

“You can only use that here. No taking it home and sneaking in the files on your own. I have to watch you.”

“Seriously?”

“There’s coffee in that pot over there. Help yourself. Don’t spill anything.”

The keyword system for the paper’s digital archives seemed created in the nineteenth century. It was so amazingly clunky and counter-intuitive that Amanda took to scanning every issue starting from ten years ago and going forward.

She struck it rich in year two.

A foster kid, a teenager, ran away from his placement in November of 2011. He was seventeen and had been in and out of trouble since his parents died when he was twelve. No relatives to take him in, he ended up being placed with the county’s favorite foster parents, a couple who had taken in dozens of teens over the years. A picture of them with about twenty of their grown foster kids accompanied the article about the boy’s disappearance.

Renard Green. That was his name. A young-looking seventeen, smooth-shaven with very short hair, wearing a shirt with a buttoned- down collar, smiling, in what must have been a school picture. The article said he’d gone missing and foul play was suspected. He hadn’t been unhappy or even rebellious staying with his foster parents. He told people he liked it there and wanted to stay until he went to college, if he went to college, he was so hopeful.

But the police investigation resulted in nothing – no explanation, no crime, no next steps. A year later, another article did an update, speculating that maybe Renard had become homeless and was part of the homeless community that lived almost invisibly in Omaha.

None of this would have been remarkable except for this – Renard and his foster family lived across the street from Wilson Park.