Don't hesitate, he told himself, sitting in his car outside David Ferris's double-wide, watching the curtains in the window just to the right of the louvered front door. Nick had driven up Federal Highway, practicing the words he'd use when the brother of the dead man answered the door: Excuse me, Mr. Ferris, I hate to bother you. I don't know if you remember me, Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I did some stories about your brother a few years back?
Liar, Nick thought. You don't hate to bother him when there's a good chance that his brother has just been shot dead. You're after a story. You need a comment.
Hello, Mr. Ferris. Nick Mullins from the Daily News. I'd like to verify if you've heard from the Sheriff's Office concerning your brother.
The straight-out-in-their-face technique was at least honest.
Oh, and by the way, if you have heard, could you please spill your guts to me on how you feel about this news for two hundred thousand strangers to read in tomorrow's editions?
When he'd arrived in the correct block, Nick pulled into the entrance of the Palms Mobile Park and checked the address on his pad. But after the first left turn, his memory served him. He eased down the narrow street past Flamingo Trail, Ponce de Leon Court and Anhinga Way. Speed bumps between each block jounced him, and palm trees, all with too-thin trunks and browned fronds, leaned precariously at each corner. Nick once noted that trees did not like to thrive in trailer parks. Maybe it was the cramped space that wouldn't let the roots spread. Maybe the cheap owner associations refused the expense of fertilizers and care. Maybe, as with the natural instincts of animals, they somehow knew better than to grow in places that always seemed to be magnets for tornadoes and hurricanes.
Nick had turned onto Bougainvillea Drive, gone all the way to the end and parked in front of the dusty turquoise-and-white trailer. He then turned off the ignition and made the mistake of letting the quiet form around his ears. When he was a rookie reporter in Trenton, two weeks on the job, the Marine barracks in Beirut had been bombed. Every reporter on the metro desk was given a list of six names, families who had lost sons and husbands and daughters. All had to be interviewed within two days. He had done the same thing years later after 9/11. And he still hadn't learned to avoid hesitating.
He finally picked up the pad from the passenger seat and opened the door. Before stepping out, he took off his sunglasses. You don't ask a man if he knows his brother is dead and not have the balls to show your eyes. He put the pad in his back pocket.
There were no other cars in the drive. The carport, little more than a sheet of tin supported by poles and tacked to the roof of the trailer, was filled with a full-sized washer and dryer, rusted at their edges. A chaise lounge was missing two plastic straps. And water-stained cardboard boxes containing God knows what were stacked alongside the front of a sheet-metal utility shack. Nick kept checking the curtains, waiting for a movement that would tell him someone was inside who didn't want to talk to him.
A woman opened the door just a crack before he could step up onto the metal grated stairway. Nick lowered his eyes, just for a moment, and then looked into the light-colored eyes that peered out.
"Good morning, ma'am. I'm looking for David Ferris. Is he home, please?"
The eyes continued to look out and the crack widened, letting sunlight give blueness to their irises.
"My name is Nick Mullins, ma'am, I'm a reporter for the Daily News."
"I know who you are," the woman said. Her voice was neither accusatory nor contemptuous. Nick took it as a good sign.
"Have I met you before, ma'am?" Nick said.
"You interviewed my husband about four years ago, right here on these steps," she said, opening the door wider, her hand high on the edge of the jamb. The sun glinted off thin strands of blond hair that dangled in front of her face like a spider's web catching light. She was a small, thin woman dressed in a flower-patterned smock and loose matching pants, the kind of outfit a nurse would wear.
"Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry," Nick said. "I, uh, I don't recall your name."
She just nodded, offering nothing.
"David isn't in, then?"
"He just called, Mr. Mullins. They got ahold of him on his cell phone at work. He's on his way home."
Nick looked down again, as though he understood.
"He's still at the Motorola plant, then?" he said, recalling the reporting he'd done on the earlier Ferris stories.
"We're both still working, Mr. Mullins, trying to pay off the lawyer's bills," she said, only now letting an edge into her voice.
Nick shifted his weight. He was still standing below her, looking up now into her face. He thought he'd remembered her being in her mid-twenties on the documents he'd dug up on the Ferris family. But the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes and the pull of skin from her cheekbones did not fit that age. He felt somehow responsible, but could not leave it alone.
"Was the phone call about Steven?" he finally asked and she simply nodded in the positive and looked off into the distance behind him. Again Nick let silence surround them, second-guessing whether she was relieved or saddened. He finally took a step back.
"May I wait for David to get here?" he said.
She fixed her dry blue eyes on his. "He doesn't want to talk with you, Mr. Mullins. Enough has been said," she said. "I know that people can't understand it, why he stood up for his brother after what he did to those children. I don't know that I even understand it."
She looked down for the first time, a crack in her show of defiance.
"But David still loved his brother, sir. And now we have a funeral to plan." Nick nodded his head again, this time in deference, and continued stepping backward.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Ferris," he said and then closed his lips around the air that had started behind his teeth before he could say, Thank you.
By the time he opened his car door, she was gone. He climbed in and the spiral wire of his notebook caught the fabric of the seat. He had not taken it from his back pocket.