Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) (16 page)

Could I walk away? In the short months I’d been here, I had gotten better emotionally, at least until this latest setback in the guise of Dr. Leland Huffinger. Addison and the staff had been good to me, never questioning me about my past, but accepting me as a member of the team.

The community had accepted me, too. I’d developed positive relationships with the city school board, the folks at Golgotha College and especially with Assistant Chief McGinnis—at least until today when he realized who I was.

I couldn’t face them again.

I held the camera close to my chest and left the newsroom.

Chapter 25 Leland

“So, what can I get you?”

The bartender, a young woman with a pierced eyebrow, wiped the area in front of me with a rag.

The hotel bar was dark, bland, and semi-shabby, probably only used by guests. Booze sat in three rows in front of a mirror, framed in neon. Tonight, I was the only person there.

Thank God.

I pulled a fifty-dollar bill from my wallet and slapped it on the bar.

“Vodka, on the rocks, with a slice of lime,” I said. “Top shelf.”

Her movements were graceful as a ballerina. She turned to pick up a glass from behind the bar, making sure I got a good long look at her lusciously plump behind filling tight black pants and the full breasts that filled her white tuxedo shirt. In one smooth motion, she filled it with cubes from the ice bin below the bar and poured the vodka. The dance ended when she set the glass in front of me. She caught my eye and gave me a saucy smile with red lips that matched her bowtie.

“There you go.”

A few simple days ago, I reprimanded myself for ogling a female student. Today, this juicy, young thing in front of me didn’t even merit a passing fancy. My mind was still on the damage I’d done to the one woman I wanted.

Breathing deeply, I wrapped my hand around glass. This devil hadn’t come knocking in more than five years. If that glass touched my lips, the slide would begin again.

And why shouldn’t I just lift it to my lips and take a swallow? I’d lost the complete trust of a woman I’d wanted in my life—or at this point, wanted to see if she would fit into my life—thanks to someone breaking the code of AA meetings. I’d been let down by those who had for many years kept me on the straight and narrow. Then I’d let down Charisma. Nothing mattered.

Before I knew how opening my mouth at AA had hurt Charisma, I’d spent my time hunting down where Eve Dahlgren had been since the 1990s. What I’d found put some credence behind Addison McIntyre’s belief that a person—not a tornado—could have killed Jimmy Lyle. I’d found nothing to connect Eve to the death of the young man in the creek, despite the reaction of the demented old lady, but other information I’d found might start putting the pieces together. I’d found out Eve Dahlgren was exactly the evil bitch Addison McIntyre thought she was, but she still didn’t deserve to die. Nothing I found led me directly to her murderer. Or did it?

I was going to tell Charisma tonight at dinner. It was going to be a night of celebration.

Until now.

I made wet circles with the glass on the bar’s black surface.

“You gonna drink that?” The bartender leaned towards me, resting on her elbows. She arched her un-pierced eyebrow at me.

“I suppose so. At some point,” I said, smiling crookedly.

“Well, I’ve got some stuff to do in the back. If you need anything, just holler for me. My name’s Judy.” She stood and smiled.

“Thanks, Judy.” I watched her slink away.

I lifted the glass to my lips, and then set it back down. I knew what would happen if I took that first sip. I closed my eyes as if to hide from what I was about to do.

I’d had vodka the night Noah died, too. Just like what sat in front of me now: on ice, with a slice of lime. He’d been the pride of my life and I’d killed him. How many did I have that night? Six? Seven? Probably more. What did Noah drink? He’d learned at the hands of the master: his poison of choice was bourbon. In high school and college, he mixed it with Coke. The night he died, he drank it straight.

I had handed him my car keys before we left that Philadelphia bar.

I clenched my jaw as the memory of tearing metal, the smell of leaking gasoline flooded through my mind.

The car lay on the driver’s side, the engine compartment crushed between the tree and the front seat where Noah hung, bloody and silent, over the steering wheel.

“Noah!” I’d screamed. “Noah! You gotta get out, son! Noah!”

I remembered how I wiped blood from my face and pushed myself out of the passenger window. Still drunk, I fell to the ground, feeling my left arm snap. The gasoline odor suddenly got stronger—there was a flash of ignition—and suddenly nothing would ever be the same.

Noah’s funeral, the assault, my ruined newspaper career, all of it was the consequences of one ghastly night.

And what I’d done to Charisma was an extension of all that. Telling my story, opening my heart for the first time in years, admitting I’d found someone I wanted in my life to people I didn’t know. It was all too much and she, like Noah and Bitch Goddess, paid the price.

Now she was packing to leave, intent on disappearing into the ether. I’d found and exposed the world’s best-known war correspondent, a woman who only wanted to hide, and caused her more trauma than what she already suffered.

The ice in my vodka glass clinked as I lifted it to my lips. I took a sip, feeling the familiar burn as it slid down my throat. I had no reason to stay sober any more, no reason to keep my life on track. I could give in to my demons, stay drunk until fall quarter or later and no one would know, or care. What did I have to return to anyway? Visits to my dead son’s grave, with its inherent risk of running into the Bitch Goddess, the first woman whose life I’d ruined? An empty apartment that reminded me daily of how much I’d lost?

I tossed the rest of the vodka down my throat.

“Judy!”

No answer.

“Judy!”

She appeared from the back, wiping her hands.

“I’m coming, I’m coming! Want another drink?” she asked.

“I want the whole bottle and a bucket of ice. You can charge it to my room.”

She nodded, filled a plastic ice bucket and sat it on the bar. She grabbed the vodka bottle and pushed the receipt, along with a pen, toward me.

I signed and picked up the ice bucket, tucking the vodka bottle under my arm.

“I put your drink on that, too,” Judy said. “Don’t forget your fifty!”

“Keep it.” I said as I headed toward the lobby and the oblivion that awaited me in my hotel room. “It’s yours.”

Chapter 26 Addison

“Kinnon, in my office,
now!”

It was Thursday morning and I was still addled from seeing him kissing my daughter the night before.

Graham stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him.

“Do you hit on all of your babysitters or is my daughter just not as immune to your charms as the others?” I pointed at one of the wingback chairs. “Sit.”

“Addison, it’s not what you think.” Graham sat suddenly, like a Labrador obeying a command.

“Then tell me what the hell it is.” Duncan kept me from peppering Isabella with the same question last night.

Graham sighed. “It was just an innocent kiss, Addison. We’re going to go out for coffee this weekend, if—”

I didn’t let him finish. “I cannot believe that you would have the audacity—”

“She’s an adult, Addison,” Graham cut me off. “She’s twenty-two. I’m twenty-eight. Elizabeth was almost thirty-four when she died.”

This time, I sighed, realizing how ridiculous I sounded. If anybody on my staff deserved some happiness, it was Graham.

“OK. It’s just…” I stopped. “Isabella doesn’t date much and of all people on this earth, I never thought it would be one of my staff members.”

“Yeah, well, how do you think I feel? I came to her high school graduation party! She was a kid when I met her. That night she came over to my apartment to babysit, we got to talking and, I think, we really kind of liked each other. We’ve been talking on the phone every night this week. It’s just coffee, Addison, that is, if—”

“If what?”

“If I can get a babysitter.”

I threw my hands in the air. “Sure. What the hell.”

“Thanks,” Graham grinned. I’d been out-maneuvered.

“Just be sure you treat her well. You’re used to dealing with me—you’ve never dealt with her dad,” I said. “Now get the hell out of my office. We’ve got a paper to put out.”

Charisma opened the door and poked her head through. She looked haggard and I could see her hand quiver as it rested on the doorknob. Her voice was hoarse.

“I need to talk to you, Addison,” she said.

Graham nodded in my direction and pulled the door closed behind him as Charisma stepped into my office.

“What’s up? Did my dad have anything helpful for you on the Bob Martz murder?”

“Yes. Yes he did. But there’s something else I need to tell you first.”

My stomach sank. I’d had conversations like this before—I’d almost developed a second sense as to when a reporter was going to give notice. This was that time.

“This isn’t good news, is it?” I asked slowly.

She shook her head and sighed. “I need to leave. This has to be my last day.”

“
What
? You’re not giving me two weeks’ notice?”

I fished in my drawer for my cigarettes. First, I find out my daughter has a date with somebody on my staff and next my newest reporter says she has to quit today? It’s not even fucking eight in the morning.

“I’ve lied to you, Addison. I’m not who I said I was.”

“What is going on here?” I asked as I lit up. It was less than three hours until deadline, I had no idea what my front page is going to look like and I’m spending my mornings dealing with personnel problems. God
dammit.

“Do you remember the reporter who went down in flames over a bad story from Syria?”

“About a year ago? Didn’t she suffer a really bad head injury in Baghdad before all that? Like from a car bomb? What does she have to do with you?”

Charisma looked at me straight in the eye, sweeping her hair away from her face and exposing the scars along the left side of her face. There were more scars on her arm.

As I stared back at her, the uneven cheekbones seem to return to symmetry. The hair wasn’t brown and shaggy and in need of a good stylist: it was golden yellow, impeccably cut. The face I’d seen on the television and whose byline I’d read came into focus and I saw the blonde television reporter standing familiarly beside a convoy of military vehicles, dressed in jeans and a bullet-proof vest, speaking confidently about the situation at hand.

She was sitting right in front of me.

“Oh my god. You’re Charisma Prentiss.”

Chapter 27 Charisma

“Yes. I’m Charisma Prentiss.”

This wasn’t going the way I wanted it to at all.

I didn’t disappear like I wanted to. After I left the newsroom with my camera, I walked back to my apartment, intent on loading the car and leaving Jubilant Falls forever. Instead, I cried myself to sleep, waking ten minutes before I was supposed to be in the newsroom to start my day.

I should have just driven off at that point, but something told me to go inside and tell her the truth. I’d faced tribal leaders in the mountains of Afghanistan, Syrian rebels and sat down with the leaders of several nations, for Christ sake. I should be able to face Addison McIntyre. Instead, my hands were shaking and my voice quavered.

Addison leaned back in her chair and glared at me, drawing deeply on her cigarette. Her eyes were hard. “Anything else I need to know?”

“I guess you know now the resume I gave you was fake. Those were all folks I’d worked with at the wire service willing to lie for me and say I’d worked for them once upon a time at a bunch of made-up, small-town newspapers. The fact you didn’t check my references made it easier for me to hide. Now my old friends don’t even know where I am.”

“And this Leland Huffinger, this private investigator you conned me into hiring at a hundred bucks an hour? Who —or what—is he, really?”

“A journalism professor, doctorate and all. He’s the one who found me. He’s the reason I have to quit.”

“Why quit just because he found you? I don’t understand that. I told you when I hired you that if someone came looking for you, I couldn’t protect you. I didn’t expect you to turn tail and run.”

“Leland Huffinger exposed my whereabouts at an AA meeting here in town,” I sighed. “He’s a former alcoholic and attends meetings every day. Apparently he went to a meeting here and told the folks there, in a round-about way, why he was in Jubilant Falls. Marvin McGinnis apparently was at the same meeting and figured out who I was. I saw him at the police station and the first thing he says to me is ‘I’m sure Jubilant Falls is pretty boring for you after Baghdad.’ ”

Addison chewed her thumbnail, but her eyes were still hard. “Marvin’s not known for his subtlety. He lost his first wife to breast cancer a number of years ago. His drinking nearly cost him his job until he found AA. I didn’t know he was still attending meetings.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, well…”

“Why was Leland Huffinger looking for you?”

“I was supposed to be part of a project. He was looking for journalism’s most spectacular flame-outs and he wanted to interview them for an article.”

“So the story about him investigating this accident that you supposedly were injured in was bullshit, too.”

“Yes,” I said. “I thought having him investigate Eve Dahlgren’s background for us would help me keep an eye on him, and at the same time, maybe, get us some useful information. I thought it would give me a little control over the situation.”

“That didn’t turn out so well, did it?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

“No.”

“So what
wasn’t
bullshit, Charisma? What
didn’t
you lie about to me?”

“The fact that I’m a widow. The fact that I have PTSD and don’t know if I can ever work at the same level again. The fact that I came here to Jubilant Falls to hide and to heal and I will be forever grateful for the opportunities you’ve given me to do both those things.” I stood.

Addison chewed her thumbnail a little more, her eyes softening a bit. Nothing worse than an editor’s anger. Had I escaped?

“What if I gave you the opportunity to tell your story and we put it on the front page?”

“Today?” I gulped.

“Could you write it this afternoon for tomorrow’s paper?” Addison tossed her cigarette out the window into the alley. “Will you stay one more day, just to do that?”

I looked sideways at her, unsure of her motives.

“I’m not ready to talk to anybody about what happened to me.”

“If you do it first, you control the story.” Her anger evaporated, Addison began to pace back and forth behind her desk, energized. “Of course, I can’t guarantee what happens after we put it on the website or send it to the wire—you realize we have to send this to the AP—but the first words the world sees will be yours—not Leland’s. Yours.”

She had a point. For all his fake promises, I had no idea how Leland was going to tell my story. He could make me look like some ego-driven reporter, burned by my own self-importance and loss of objectivity—or the broken down shell of a person whose emotional and physical wounds keep her from functioning. The truth was, I had been both of those things. I was still somewhere in between, scarred physically and mentally, still slightly brittle, but not nearly as fragile as I’d been when I came here.

“Addison, I can’t. I need to disappear. Once the word gets out that I’m here, my story will be twisted in ways I don’t even want to think about. When it gets out that I’m here, this town will be crawling with every kind of national media wanting to talk to me—and to you.”

“You think I can’t handle that? Thanks, but it’s not your problem. Just tell your story and tell it first on my front page.”

“I can’t, Addison. I can’t.”

Her shoulders sagged in disappointment.

“OK. I’m not going to beg you to stay.”

I turned to leave.

“Wait!” Addison called sharply. “What did you learn about the Bob Martz murder yesterday? If I’ve got to finish that story, I at least need to get that information from you.”