Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) (2 page)

BOOK: Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5)
6.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

 

Chapter 2: Leland

 

“So, Dr. Huffinger, I’m trying to decide if I want to be a journalism major.”

She was cute in that preppy, in-crowd kind of way as she picked up her iPad from her desk and sashayed toward my desk, wearing one of those cheap, printed cotton sundresses girls found at the stores circling the campus. She must have gotten a head start on her tan in a tanning booth, too: there were no white stripes on her feet beneath the strappy sandals she wore or on her shoulders where a bra should have been.

I blanched inwardly as I realized I was looking at a student like
that
. It really had been too long.

“Why?” I asked. I didn’t look up as I walked around the circled desks, picking up copies of the international newspapers I’d brought in that day.

“I dunno,” she said thoughtfully. “It seems like kind of a cool job.” She was a good student, a freshman. Her writing was clean and she asked great questions in class. She had potential, but then they all did.

“It can be,” I answered slowly, scratching at my ever-whitening beard.

“So what’s it like working for a newspaper every day? I really like to write.”

I shrugged.

I’d heard the questions before. They ask about the pay, they ask about the hours and, sometimes, adult students ask how hard the job is on families. They ask about the opportunities at a major daily and how soon after graduation I think they’ll be hired.

My job was to push them toward believing in all those journalistic clichés: keeping a free press free, writing the first draft of history and speaking truth to power.

The way I felt today, I couldn’t do that. Today, I felt I was part of some sort of educational stockyard, moving students toward eventual corporate soul crushing.

“More than likely the pay will suck, the hours are worse and, in my experience, even the most supportive partner can get sick of what the job demands,” I answered. “And odds are, regardless of how good your grades are, your first job will be at a small-town paper, maybe a weekly, maybe a daily, making minimum wage or a little above, not at the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
.”

“Oh.” The bright light went out of her face.

“But don’t listen to me,” I said quickly. “I’m just a bitter old professor, hiding here in academia. What do I know?” I laughed lightly and she smiled uncertainly.

“It would really be nice to talk to somebody about the reality of the job, I guess, before I make my decision,” she said thoughtfully, pressing her thumbnail against the dimple in her chin. “Somebody who’s been in the trenches, you know?”

“Yes,” I said. My tie closed in around my throat; I loosened it with my finger. This was my last class and she would hopefully be the last student I would deal with until fall quarter began again. The administration, along with its recent memo on dressing professionally while in class, could go screw itself. I was on my own time now.

“My mother says I should go into public relations. She says anybody can write a press release.”

“Well, PR is more than that, and, trust me, not everybody can write a press release.” I finished collecting the newspapers and shoved them into my worn, scratched briefcase. “Truth is, though, you’ll make more money there.”

The tanned freshman knit her perfectly arched eyebrows together.

“OK, thanks, Dr. Huffinger. I need to think about this.” She held the iPad close to her young bosom and walked from the classroom.

Had she —or any of them, for that rate—learned anything this quarter? Who the hell knows? I shook my head and looked again at the stack of newsprint in my briefcase before snapping it shut. I’d collected the papers up during my travels through Europe last summer.

We’d spent the class period in groups, each one dissecting a particular city’s edition and comparing it to US publications and media policies. As part of their final exam, students had a week to look them over and make a group presentation; each person in the class had a paper due by noon today.

Teaching wasn’t what I had planned for the second half of my life, but as more and more newspapers closed, my career options narrowed. My reporting credentials—along with ties to the head of the communications department here at Fitzgerald University—got me into academia, first as an adjunct, then as a full-time professor once I finished my doctorate.

Truth was, I hadn’t been in the trenches for a lot of years, but, like any veteran, the scars were still there: an ex-wife who hated my guts, a son I could only visit at his grave, and a daily AA meeting to keep me on track.

Today was the last day of final exams; I’d have the weekend to grade papers, close up my apartment and travel, like I did most summers, under the guise of research.

Last summer was a series of interviews with European editors and journalists to see how their newspapers were coping with political and social changes, so I could bring that information, along with an edition of their newspapers, back to my students.

I put the information together, along with some lesson plans, as part of a paper I titled “The Changing Face of Journalism Education: Bringing World Media to Students.” The world was shifting every day, but academia still required you to publish or perish.

The interviews took up just a couple hours of the day. The rest of the time I spent seeing tourist sights alone, catching up with old college buddies who were still lucky enough to have the words “foreign correspondent” beneath their byline.

I stepped into the hallway as I locked the classroom door and, in a few steps, turned the corner toward the stairwell that led to the department’s basement offices.

My own office was the third door from that stairwell. The latest college president had milked some millionaire alumnus for repairs to the gothic old building that housed the English and communications departments; as the final term of the year wound down, the smell of the newly painted hallway and newly varnished doors had almost dissipated.

I plucked the several students’ Post-It notes off the ornate oak door and slipped inside, reading the notes as I sank behind my desk.

“Hey, Huff, did U get my paper? I sent it thru campus e-mail.” There was no name on that one, so I tossed it in the trash. Either the paper was in my inbox or it wasn’t. I wasn’t here to hold hands.

“Dr. H—I can’t get into JOUR211 this fall. Can you get me a waiver? Plz call…” The kid who left that note was a go-getter, the editor of the college paper. I stuck that note on my phone. I would make certain he got into the class. I would call him on Monday morning, after AA and before I left town.

I pulled a framed photo of my son Noah and me off the bookshelf. It was taken during a camping trip just before his death. He had just graduated college, before he started on his own career as a spokesman for an environmental organization. We were smiling at the camera as we enjoyed a beer, the fish we’d caught that afternoon frying over the campfire.

His mother, Bitch Goddess of the Frozen North, often commented on how alike we’d looked. Noah’s hair was in a long, brown ponytail, much like mine had been. Just like me, he had been tall, thin and tanned from his love of the outdoors. We even shared the same space between our front teeth. On that last camping trip, we’d not only brought our fishing gear, we’d each brought our cameras, to capture the stunning wildlife we saw during the days.

Six months later, life would never be the same.

There was a knock on my door.

“Come in!” I called out.

“Last day of the term!” sang a woman’s mellifluous alto voice. It was Audrey Dellaplain, who taught the broadcast classes.

I placed Noah’s photo back on the bookshelf before I answered.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“You got plans? Anything exciting?”

“I’m meeting with a series of US editors to assess the state of open records laws around the country.” At least that was what I was telling people.

“God, you’re a party animal.”

“Well, I think that’s something a lot of students need to know and a lot of working journalists probably have strong opinions on.” I pretended to sift through the papers on my desk so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. In reality, there would be no article, no treatise, no dissection of facts or conclusions or theories on various open records laws.

This summer, I wanted to find those journalists who, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun and, as their wings melted, found themselves falling all too rapidly toward the ground. I wanted to interview those who hit the ground hard and then couldn’t get up again.

I wanted to know the reasons behind the fall. Was it conflict with those further up the food chain? Questionable sources? Expensive lawsuits? Outright plagiarism? And what led up to it? Ego? Fear? Pressure to publish in an increasingly unstoppable news cycle?

In particular, I was looking for one person, someone I wanted to talk to more than anything: the one reporter who flamed out in one spectacular way, then disappeared from sight.

This summer I wouldn’t stop until I found her.

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Charisma

 

“Your name is
Charisma
? Really?”

My reporter’s notebook slapped my thigh in frustration at the deputy’s question. I pushed my short brown hair (which never seemed to lay right anyway) out of my eyes and tried to sound professional. We were beside the highway, at three in the morning, standing behind an ambulance as EMTs loaded two victims of a car accident into the back.

“Yes. I have a sister named Sunshine. She’s twice as bitchy as me.” I tried to smile, but my words didn’t come across as humorously as I wanted. The deputy’s eyebrows rose uncertainly like a farm boy coming face to face with his first big city hooker.

“What happened to Graham Kinnon?” the deputy asked. “He always used to pick up on these things.”

Graham Kinnon was the daytime cops reporter. I took the night beat. It kept me away from the demons that came to visit when the moon was high in the sky and sleep wouldn’t come.

I glanced at the minivan on its top in the ditch and closed my eyes. The screams begin again, an explosion rocks the ground beneath my feet, but I clench my jaw and shake my head to control what I now know is not real—at least not tonight.

“He’s still there, but he’s got a baby to care for now,” I said slowly, trying to look like I was making notes. “I’ve been covering nights for a while.”

“Oh. OK.”

The answer seemed to satisfy him. My vision faded and I got back on track with the story.

“So tell me what we’ve got here,” I continued. “We have two victims being transported, I see…”

The deputy launched into his spiel about the accident: A family—a man, his wife, their nine-year-old son and three-year-old twin daughters—were driving from Delaware en route to Gary, Indiana. Dad was a road warrior: rather than stop for coffee or a hotel room, he was bound and determined to make it to the Hoosier state when he nodded off at the wheel.

Now Dad was dead, Mom and the son were seriously hurt and the only two uninjured parties were the little girls, who’d been safely strapped into their car seats when the minivan went left of center, careened across the oncoming lanes and rolled into the ditch.

I got names, ages and learned the twins would be held at the sheriff’s office until Grandma could get here from Indiana. She would be arriving in a couple hours. The injured would be transported to the trauma center in nearby Collitstown.

The ambulance pulled onto the highway. Our interview over, the deputy stepped back to the crash scene to talk to the responding firefighters and to begin his paperwork. I would follow up on the story as it got closer to our morning deadline, checking on the mother and son’s condition, but for right now, all I had to do was head to the newsroom and write up the first version of the story and put it up on the newspaper’s website.

I walked back to my little red sedan, got inside and closed my eyes, trying to stave off the feral need to run, to scream, to react, building in my stomach.

I was starting over again in Jubilant Falls.

I’d made sure no one could find me. Today, I used the name Charisma Lemarnier, not the one most recognized by the rest of the world.

I sighed, realizing yet again how lucky I was that the editor, Addison McIntyre, even took me on.

As far as she was concerned, I was starting over after losing both my parents and my husband in a horrible car crash, which resulted in the scars that covered my face. Even the résumé I’d given her was false. The references I’d listed were friends and journalists who I could trust to tell the same tale I’d told her, listed as editors of made-up small town newspapers where I’d built my “career.”

She bought the story hook, line and sinker, and never called to check my references.

With Graham Kinnon, another young widower on staff, she believed me when I said my need to hide was partially to come to terms with my disfigurement, and to deal with my widowed grief. At least that much was true.

Tonight, out of habit, I flipped the car visor down and touched my late husband’s photo, suspended there by rubber bands, before turning the key in the ignition and heading back to the newsroom.

Somehow Addison never questioned the need to hide away and heal in order to begin again.

“I want you to work for me, but you need to understand the risk you’re taking,” she said. “I can’t protect you if anything happens or anyone in your family comes looking.”

“Nobody’s going to come looking,” I said. “I’m off everyone’s radar.”

Tucked into a largely agricultural corner of southwest Ohio, I thought Jubilant Falls was a good place to hide.

To look at me, they might never know who I’d been, anyway. It took too much plastic surgery to return my face to the confident young woman I once was. It was close, but I’d never match my University of Maryland graduation portrait, even if you could see past my natural brown hair. A scar ran across my scalp; more started at the edge of my left cheek and puckered back toward my ear, then hop-scotched up my temple and across my forehead. There were reminders of shrapnel wounds across my arms, legs and torso. Only pure, hard chance kept me from losing my left eye.

I hid everything with long sleeves, regardless of weather, and professional-grade make-up, the kind broadcasters began to use when their stations switched to high definition—at least during the day. I didn’t bother when calls like this brought me out in the middle of the night, where it wasn’t likely anyone could see my wounds anyway.

It was a given I would never bare my body to another man again, much less my soul.

I pulled my car onto the highway and waved at the deputy as I headed back to the newsroom, pushing the disaster that brought me here back into the depths of my soul as the white lines on the highway slipped beneath my wheels.

Slowing to turn, I eased my car off the highway. In a few more blocks, I was pulling into the parking lot of the
Journal-Gazette
.

This job was probably the right one for me right now.

Around the corner from the paper, above a downtown lawyer’s office, I had a studio apartment with a kitchenette, a tiny shower and a pullout couch. I could walk to work if I wanted, but more often than not I had to drive to some outlying crash or fire, so I just left my car in the employee lot behind the building at the end of my shift.

When I wasn’t chasing drug busts or car crashes after dark, I was writing soft stories on the public schools, and Golgotha College, the Baptist school at the edge of town, whatever Addison threw my way. It wasn’t anything close to what I was doing before, but that was the point. Sometimes, the stories were boring beyond belief, but that was OK. Maybe sometime, I reasoned, I could go back to what I’d done before, maybe I could write a book, but right now, as the pieces of my psyche fell back in place, I belonged here.

I picked my notes from the passenger seat and closed the digital police-scanner app on my smartphone as I stepped from my car. I crossed the parking lot and let myself into the J-G through the back door. I passed through the darkened press room and the employee break room on my way to the steps up to the newsroom, marveling at the small town trust which would allow me into this building with just a key at all hours of the day and night. No guards, no alarm codes to punch in, no identification cards to scan, just a single key and my word that the reason I was here was necessary.

It was journalism on a smaller, more intimate scale. Small stories that I wouldn’t have looked at twice became our front page.

If I had a story idea, I went to Addison’s office at the back of the newsroom, knocked on the door and said, “Hey, I was wondering…” Sometimes she gave me the go-ahead and sometimes she let me know the story had been covered recently, but the pace was slower and that was good.

Upstairs, in the newsroom, I turned on the light and slipped into my office chair, flipping on my desktop computer. Chiming an electronic chord, it sprang to life and the story flowed easily from my fingers to the keyboard:
A Delaware man is dead and his family injured following a one-car crash early this morning…

See girl? I told myself as I wrote. You still got it.

The story nearly wrote itself. I gave it a quick edit, then copied and pasted it onto the newspaper website, all before four-thirty in the morning. On the white board behind Addison’s copy-editing station, I made a note that the story was there before I left. Back downstairs in the pressroom, I pulled the employee door closed behind me and walked the brief two blocks to my little apartment. I would catch a few hours of sleep before heading back into work at seven-thirty.

I felt confident as I walked up the stairs and into my apartment. Maybe I was ready to take on a story that was a little more substantial. A series, maybe? An investigative piece? I was ready to cover something more substantial, I knew it.

I shook my head. What the hell could there be to investigate here in Jubilant Falls?

I flipped on the light as the ground began to shake beneath my feet again. I clenched the edge of the kitchenette counter as the rumbling became more intense, trying to steady myself.

In those seconds, I wasn’t in my little apartment anymore. I was back in the past, cries of the injured and grieving filling my ears. There was another sound, one that I never forgot, screaming over my head and sending me diving beneath the dinette table, curling into a fetal position for safety as voices around me wailed in pain and grief.

Then just as quickly, the shaking stopped and in the distance, I heard the whistle of the four forty-five freight train as it rumbled through town. My cat, Monsieur Le Chat, jumped from his hiding place behind the curtains and rubbed his grey and white head against my leg.

“I get it. I get it,” I sighed. I sat up sheepishly beneath my dinette and scooped Monsieur Le Chat into my lap, brushing the floor dust from my hair.

The sobs I heard weren’t real. Neither was the screaming sound that sent me beneath the dinette.

I was in Jubilant Falls, in a tiny little apartment with an overweight cat and once again, reminded how damaged I truly was.

There would be no more sleep tonight. I clasped the cat closer and stroked his head as the tears rolled down my cheeks.

BOOK: Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5)
6.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Loving Faith by Hooper, Sara
The President's Daughter by Jack Higgins
the Pallbearers (2010) by Cannell, Stephen - Scully 09
Broken Promises by Summer Waters
The Last Card by Kolton Lee
Trinity - The Prophecy by Kylie Price
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
More Than a Billionaire by Christina Tetreault