Anne Casey

Anne Casey is a reporter drawn into the story of Pauline, but her most consequential pursuit becomes the life of Jenny Shimada, whom public accounts threaten to reduce to a passing detail. As Anne follows leads from New York to California, she confronts the gap between a story that can command attention and the people whose experiences it leaves unrecorded.

Reporter on the road

Part Four opens with Anne packing books she believes she will no longer need now that something has finally happened. During the previous year, she has been covering Pauline’s story through inaction and boredom, and the overdue books—mostly picture books about the estates built by Pauline’s grandfather—have become an unexpected attachment. Their subject is a world of private kingdoms: Casa Mare, a vast imitation of the Alhambra; Big Red, a faux cattle ranch set amid scarce water; and the secluded McCloud Estate, whose visitors were once blindfolded on the final stretch of the journey. Anne knows these grand properties are not the story she is supposed to tell, yet their details cling to her account like material that cannot easily be sorted into relevant and irrelevant.

Anne’s work has carried her west with colleagues who are also heading toward California. She drives across the Great Plains in a beige rental car with her parrot and her books, part of a crowd of reporters converging on Pauline’s expected trial. The journey makes her both participant in the rush to cover a major story and a small figure within it, working with long odds and incomplete information.

Leads, sources, and uncertainty

An old friend from Anne’s first New York job, Michael Levitz, contacts her about her Pauline assignment. He describes a man who had earlier offered to obtain a tell-all book supposedly written by Pauline. The man would not provide a convincing pseudonym or contact details; he promised a meeting, then disappeared. Michael recalls thinking the voice sounded familiar, but he cannot establish who the caller was. The promise of a revelatory manuscript thus reaches Anne already wrapped in uncertainty.

The source calling himself Joe Smith arranges to meet Anne on a traffic island near Macy’s. He refuses her request to talk elsewhere, will not sit on a bench, and keeps her walking amid the traffic. Joe says the FBI found the farmhouse where Pauline had been hiding and connected her to Jenny Shimada. He claims he had gone to the farmhouse because he hoped to find an old friend who once lived there; FBI agents ambushed and questioned him, but could not hold him because he had done nothing wrong. Anne hears a boastful account from a restless man whose eyelid twitches, and she cannot verify his claims at the time. When she explains that she once worked for Time but was not a staff writer, describing herself instead as a mediocre reporter better suited to features, Joe grows impatient. Before leaving, he writes SHIMADA in her notebook and disappears into the crowd.

Jenny outside the headline

After five days of driving, Anne reaches San Francisco and learns that Joe’s central information was true. Jenny is a known fugitive linked to Pauline, yet Anne had previously checked the name and left it there. She recalls how the year before the arrests filled with contradictory sightings: people said Pauline was in Tibet, riding a Harley, or with someone named Jenny Shimada. Even the FBI could not sort every tip from the noise. A report that Juan had broken a tooth prompted investigators to brief dentists across the country, while a possible sighting of Pauline on an old estate outside Rhinebeck added another fragment to the confusion. Television reporters gave the period the convenient label “the lost year,” a phrase that made it easier to treat the missing information as if it need not be recovered.

For Anne, confirming the Jenny connection does not automatically make Jenny part of the public story. She recognizes that Jenny may still be left out, and decides to pursue her in her spare time because she expects no one else to do so. The investigation also sharpens the distinction between visibility and significance: Pauline’s trial promises to make Pauline legible to the public, while Jenny remains someone whose history can be set aside as unusable detail.

Turning from the story to the family

Anne’s investigation eventually takes her to Jim Shimada, Jenny’s father. She brings an unsealed, unaddressed envelope and explains that a man she believes was one of Jenny’s friends contacted her months earlier. Anne could not substantiate his account or publish the material he requested, but she wanted Jim to know that someone had tried, unsuccessfully, to help Jenny. Her visit is not presented as a successful reporting breakthrough; it is an attempt to pass on a fact she considers worth telling even when it cannot be turned into a publishable scoop.

The envelope contains a smeary, mimeographed newsletter from the Historical Society of Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, its two sheets stapled together and its announcements and advertisements crowded into uneven columns. Anne has loosely circled an entry under “Restorative Tidbits.” The smallness of this object contrasts with the grand estates in the books she has been carrying: instead of a private kingdom or a dramatic revelation, she offers Jim a modest documentary trace. Anne’s movement from Pauline’s headline to Jenny’s family makes her role more than that of a seeker of sensational evidence. She remains a working reporter, alert to what can and cannot be substantiated, but she also recognizes that the story’s omissions have consequences—and that telling someone an unpublishable truth may matter even when it cannot repair them.