Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) (4 page)

“Close the door,” I said softly. Dennis leaned over and pushed it closed. The questions—and the outrage—came all at once.

“Is she out of her mind?” Marcus asked. “And then let people think we do all this in a rat-infested building? She’s nuts!”

“She’s turning us into a joke!” Graham said. “
Again
.”

“People are still laughing about that stupid left-handed edition,” Dennis said.

Only Charisma was silent; whether she was thinking about what an idiot publisher she had or how far she’d sunk following her accident, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t want to ask.

“I think the photo should be of Addison screaming at someone on the phone—I mean if we’re going to paint a realistic picture,” Marcus teased, diffusing the frustration. Everyone laughed.

“You all need to get back to work,” I answered, smiling as I reached for my cigarettes. “I’m going to have a smoke and then see how far my dignity can sink after I meet with her.”

In half an hour, I was downstairs, knocking on the door of Earlene’s baby-chick yellow office.

“C’mon in, Addison! Perfect timing!” Earlene’s adopted Texas drawl stretched each vowel to its breaking point. A woman in a blue suit sat in one of the frou-frou yellow chairs in front of my boss’s Queen Anne writing desk, with her back to the door. She didn’t turn around as Earlene waved me into her office. “I want you to meet an old friend of mine from back in high school. She’s come to town for a little visit.”

The woman stood and turned to face me, extending her hand. The wide, even smile on her face froze as she recognized me.

After nearly forty years, she hadn’t changed all that much. She was still in great cheerleading shape; I could see the muscles in her long, lean calves. Her pinned-up hair was tinted fashionably golden; her face was smooth and her jewelry tasteful. Her eyes were still hard and feral behind her stylish bifocals.

As she stood next to Earlene, all I could see were two high maintenance blondes, two women used to getting what they wanted from everyone else around them, regardless of who they stepped on or how badly they botched it.

“Hello, Eve,” I said. “Welcome back to Jubilant Falls.”

Chapter 5: Leland

I took a few steps toward Noah’s grave before I saw her. Her presence halted me in my tracks.

I hadn’t planned to stop—it had been an unspoken agreement in the divorce that even in death, visitation would be limited to one parent at a time. Through the low-hanging branches of a nearby willow and the cold, white, upright granite markers, I could see Bitch Goddess sitting cross-legged in front of Noah, brushing the tears from her eyes.

Five years after our divorce, she still looked magnificent. Ever thin and perfectly fit, I wondered if she still ran five miles every morning; even in the worst stages of our mutual family illness, she could get up and push through the hangover by pounding through the streets of our suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. It was an act of supreme fortitude—and denial:
A drunk couldn’t do this every morning so therefore I’m not a drunk.

With her long, perfectly manicured fingers, I watched her brush the curly black hair from her face and gaze upward, her lips moving. I understood: I, too, had long, one-sided conversations with Noah. I took a few steps closer so I could see her face, the strong jaw, the prominent nose, and perfectly arched eyebrows. They all still came together magnificently despite the crow’s feet beginning at the corners of those steel blue eyes. I would have called the slight marks from her nose to her red lips “laugh lines” except Bitch Goddess wasn’t known for her hilarity.

Not that I left her with a lot to chuckle over.

Bitch Goddess dropped her head onto her chest and, without looking, slipped a hand into the designer leather bag sitting beside her. Sighing, she pulled out what had been a familiar part of our marriage, a silver flask wrapped in tan leather. We’d gotten matching ones as a wedding present from our coworkers in the newsroom at the Philly
Enquirer
, before she’d moved to TV news.

With a flick of the wrist, she opened the flask.

What was in it? I wondered. Our poison of choice had been vodka.

She looked around, stopping mid-swallow when she saw me.

“Hey!”
she called out sharply. It wasn’t an invitation to join her. It was a warning to leave her alone.

Shaking my head, I turned and walked back to my car, trying to ignore the slurred hate that spewed from her perfect, red mouth.

*****

I spent the weekend at my campus apartment grading papers; Bitch Goddess, after all, got the house in the divorce. Fitzgerald House, named for the founder of the university, accommodated unmarried faculty like myself in one-bedroom apartments and was part of my pay. Most of my neighbors lasted a term or two before falling in love, buying a house or moving on.

I was the only one who’d lived there four years.

By Sunday night, I was done and final grades were submitted. I made myself a ham sandwich and flopped into the brown shapeless recliner in the living room. I grabbed the TV remote and turned on the DVR, pressing buttons to see what I’d watched at least twice a week for the last year.

It was Charisma Prentiss, looming large on the screen behind four panelists. She was beautiful, tan and fit in her blue press helmet, jeans, sand-brown boots and brown tee shirt. I had no doubt she could easily carry the military-issue pack on her back, and probably someone else’s, too. She’d been the reporter’s reporter—print or broadcast, she could do it all, a Bond Girl with a nose for news.

Among her peers, her ego had been as legendary as the stories she filed, fed by her superiors in New York, who needed someone with flair and panache to keep the world focused on the stories that “mattered.”

Her peers may have hated her and the attention she garnered, but the troops she embedded with loved her. She could keep up with the physical demands of an army on the move and painted those stories with words that were more than a little pro-military. In the days following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, none of her editors or supervisors seemed to catch that tendency—or, considering the jingoistic times we lived in, if they cared. She took risks other journalists wouldn’t consider, a mixture of recklessness and arrogance, spiced with a star power that brought ratings and readers to whatever story she provided.

I never met her, but the world knew what happened.

I watched the panel discussion one more time: The fearless way Charisma covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria put many male correspondents to shame. Her series on underground schools for girls in Taliban-held territories was legend. Charisma’s final tale was so ingrained, I could recite it from memory: The car bomb that claimed her husband, her refusal to give in to her injuries and her drive to get back in the game, followed by one wrong story that brought it all crashing down. Then she disappeared off the face of the earth.

I had no idea where to find her, not even an idea of where to begin looking. Was she still working? Had she retired? Changed careers? Was she dead? If the post-traumatic stress syndrome she reportedly suffered was true, suicide was a distinct possibility.

The news business could tear reporters and editors apart; I saw that this afternoon at Noah’s grave. While many police and fire departments have procedures in place to help first responders depressurize after traumatic events, many reporters are left to cope in their own way with the horror they’d just seen.

And, face it: the effect of trauma on reporters was something most liberal arts educations never covered. So, we keep showing up at murders, car crashes and worse, go back to the newsroom, churn out the story and come back the next day to do it again.

Along the way, you begin to internalize the horror, to make tasteless jokes about the victim or the perpetrator and after a while you can’t turn it off when deadline’s past and the adrenaline won’t stop.

No one ever tells you to find a therapist, anybody who will listen. Nobody says don’t drink at night alone, don’t drink at work, or don’t drive drunk—because they’re all doing it too. No one says you need to do it to save your life, your marriage—or your child. But as you hurtle into that dark night, it doesn’t seem to sink in until you’re left at the side of a literal or figurative road surrounded by the wreckage of your life. The darkness in your soul builds and builds until the relationship you counted on the most is shredded and you find the woman you’re married to having sex in the shower with her co-anchor in the middle of the afternoon.

What they
do
tell you is “suck it up,” “be tough,” “this job isn’t for sissies.”

Did anyone say that to Charisma Prentiss? Did she run back out into the field because she couldn’t let go of the dragon that was the news? Or were there other pressures—pressures to publish, sources or editors to appease? Did she go back because she didn’t know to do anything else? Or was it her legendary ego, knowing that nobody could do a story like Charisma Prentiss did a story and dropping out meant she was no longer at the top of the heap?

If I could find her, just for one interview, one conversation…

I stopped the DVR, and used the remote to scratch at my beard.

What would I do? What would she do? I knew what I wanted to ask her, but what was I trying to prove?

I shut off the TV and moved to the computer desk in the corner of the living room. Shaking the mouse brought my sleek Apple computer screen to life. A quick search on Charisma Prentiss brought up the old news of her collapse. Even in the digital world, where everything was traceable, she’d managed to disappear.

What was her husband’s name? I wondered. I typed in the words “French +journalist +killed +Baghdad” and hit ‘enter.’

There it was:
Jean Paul Lemarnier
. The most recent entry was a story written when his name was unveiled in the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial Gallery in Washington D.C., as part of a ceremony recognizing reporters killed while in pursuit of a story. His name was among eighty-two added to the list which brought the somber total to more than 2,200. I clicked on the ceremony video, watching as the widows and widowers of other reporters came forward to speak.

Charisma Prentiss was the only bereaved spouse who didn’t attend.

Instead, Lemarnier’s parents came to the podium and in tearful French, acknowledged the honor.

Why wouldn’t she come to an event like that? Was she afraid her presence would detract from the event? I had a vision of old Charisma, surrounded by cameras, wearing dark glasses like some Hollywood diva, stiff-arming the circle of reporters who wanted to know where she’d been. I shook my head and discarded that idea. Maybe she didn’t come because she was afraid of being a pariah, whispered about as she entered the gallery, with her fellow journalists stepping back in disgust as she passed by, like a leper in church.

I typed in “Charisma+Lemarnier,” sucking in my breath as story after bylined story scrolled up. Each one—soft, small-town stories interspersed with the occasional breaking news piece—traced back to a small Ohio daily newspaper, the
Jubilant Falls
Journal-Gazette
.

The woman, once arguably the free world’s best journalist is in Ohio, of all places? It couldn’t be her, could it?
I asked myself.
And where the hell is Jubilant Falls?

I dug through the
Journal-Gazette’s
website, looking for a headshot of her. Everyone on the staff except Charisma Lemarnier had one. Unlike a number of small town newspapers, there also was no article or accompanying photo on her first day of work: “The
Journal-Gazette
would like to welcome a new writer…” Instead, her byline just began appearing above stories.

I read through a couple of them: A story on a local college student’s upcoming piano performance and her struggle to become the first in her family to graduate from college, a child seriously injured in a horseback riding accident and the family’s efforts to raise money to pay the rehabilitation bills, an early morning highway accident where the father was killed and the family seriously injured when their minivan rolled.

The content was so much less than what she’d made her name on, but the writing was still solid. It had to be her.

With a little more Internet exploration, I found Jubilant Falls on the map. A few more clicks on a few more websites and I had a plane ticket to Cincinnati, leaving tomorrow afternoon.

Chapter 6: Charisma

“You look like someone I’ve seen before.”

It was Monday afternoon before I could get time to head over to the Jubilant Falls Police Department. Assistant Police Chief Gary McGinnis made the comment as he brought in a stack of files and a cup of coffee for me.

“Yeah, a lot of people say that,” I said, taking the mug from him. I took a gulp before saying any more, letting my brown hair fall in front of my scarred face, hiding it from his piercing gaze.

“No, seriously, you do,” Chief McGinnis was insistent.

“Somebody once told me I look like Paula Abdul, only taller,” I lied. “I told them they were crazy.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

I had a pretty good weekend. With Monsieur Le Chat curled alongside me, I managed to get a full night’s sleep Saturday night on my tiny foldout couch. No bloody bodies flashed in front of my eyes; I didn’t wake screaming uncontrollably or crying out his name. It was progress, and I was thankful for that.

On Sunday, I drove to one of the malls in nearby Collitstown, treating myself to what Dennis told me was a local confection: Cincinnati chili, a Greek-inspired dish flavored heavily with cinnamon and nutmeg, served on spaghetti, covered in shredded cheddar cheese, and served with a side order of oyster crackers. I sat in my booth, pouring over the Sunday
New York Times
, concentrating on the lifestyle section and the book reviews.

I felt semi-normal.

Now, with the chief’s one question, the walls were closing in again.

I turned to the files on the table beside me.

“So tell me, Chief, what’s the deal on this case,” I said, tapping the file with my pen.

“Basically, we had the body of a white male, approximately eighteen to twenty-two years of age, discovered by a farmer and his son who were driving over the bridge on Yarnell Road early in the morning,” McGinnis began. “The bridge at that time was just inside the city limits, so we got the case. The body was face down in the water, hung up on a tree limb. The farmer sent the son to a pay phone to call the police and stayed behind until they got there. When the fire department retrieved the victim out of the water, he had no identification. He also wasn’t in the system anyplace—there were no fingerprints on record anywhere.”

“Any wounds?”

“He’d been stabbed several times, twice in the chest, and had several defensive wounds on his hands and arms. His throat was also cut, which the coroner determined was the fatal wound.”

“Do you think he died there where he was found?”

“No. We think the crime occurred further up Shanahan Creek and the body floated down the creek toward town. We think he was dead when he hit the water because there was no water in his lungs.”

Shanahan Creek was a lot deeper and wider than some rivers I’d seen in my life. I wasn’t surprised the body was able to float that distance.

Before coming to see Assistant Chief McGinnis, I drove to the crime scene, parking my car beside the bridge where the body was discovered and scrambling down the banks.

The landscape wasn’t the same as what I’d read in the original story, but that didn’t surprise me. The fallen tree limb that caught the body was long gone. The photos showed an older bridge, with arching bricks reaching each side of the creek, as police officers lifted the sagging body from the water. Even that was gone, replaced by a modern concrete structure.

I scrambled back up the bank to my car and headed down the roads that paralleled Shanahan Creek, hoping to get an idea of the local geography before meeting with the assistant chief.

Past the edge of town and a slew of newly built homes, Shanahan Creek took a sharp turn and I lost my view of the water. At the next road, I turned, hoping to find it again.

It was a lucky move: there at the bend in the creek sat an older home. Its bricks were painted white; four columns flanked two rows of arched windows with glossy black wooden shutters. There was a row of varnished rocking chairs on the porch and an over-landscaped front yard, lush with flowers at the base of old-growth oaks and maples. A newer three-car garage, also built with painted white brick sat off at an angle from the house. I could see a gazebo in the back yard, near the creek, and further back, a new horse barn with white picket fencing surrounding it. It looked today like a picture from a magazine—and the perfect place to commit a murder.

I didn’t stay—my appointment with the assistant chief was in a few minutes. It wouldn’t be a good time to pull up the drive to talk to whoever lived there. I scribbled the address down and headed back to the police department.

Now, as I asked my questions, I found myself casting sidelong glances at Gary McGinnis to make certain he didn’t recognize me.

“Anything odd about the stab wounds you can tell me?” I asked.

McGinnis looked through the coroner’s report. “The chest wounds weren’t at an angle. They were straight in, so likely his killer was the same height, not shorter or taller. The killer probably disabled him with those wounds and then, when he was unable to fight back, stepped behind him and slit his throat. After he died, his killer dumped him in the creek.”

“Do you have any idea where the murder actually occurred?” I asked.

Chief McGinnis flipped through a few pages in the file; even though the murder happened thirty-some years ago, it was still considered an open investigation and, as a result, Ohio Sunshine Laws kept me from rooting through the whole file myself.

“We had the sheriff’s office walk up both sides of the creek, but they never found anything, so we can’t really say for sure where he was murdered.”

“How far did they walk?”

McGinnis flipped through a few more pages and shrugged. “Couple miles, I guess.”

“Are there houses along there? Anybody I could talk to?”

McGinnis pushed a list of addresses toward me. “Most of it was farmland, so there weren’t a lot of houses. A lot of it’s been developed since that time.”

I tried to conceal my excitement: his list included the address of the white brick house I’d visited. If I were lucky, the place was still in the same hands as it was the day a young man’s body fell into Shanahan Creek—a quick check at the courthouse would answer that.

“Anybody else around I can talk to?” I tried to sound casual.

“Believe it or not, it was the old fire chief’s first week as a firefighter. He’s retired now, but I’m sure he’d still talk about it.” McGinnis pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and, with his thumb, scrolled through his contacts. “His name is Hiram Warder. Here’s his number.” McGinnis showed me his phone and I scrawled the information down.

“Anybody else?” I looked at him hopefully.

“Let me check with my brother, Marvin—he’s the chief. He was new on the force and on patrol then. He might have some ideas of who is still around,” McGinnis said.

“Is there anything else you can show me in that file?” I asked.

McGinnis shook his head.

“I’ve given you all I can, legally. It’s still an open investigation, although we are at a complete standstill. We recently sent the victim’s clothing to the state crime lab for DNA testing, but because we don’t know how long the body was in the river, I’m not certain if they can pull anything off of it.” McGinnis pushed a small folder my way, filled with whatever case file copies I was allowed access to. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. Maybe we can shake something loose on this thing.”

I tucked the file under my arm and we stood up. “Thanks,” I said, shaking his hand.

McGinnis nodded. “Glad to have your help. You still look like someone I’ve seen before.”

I tried to laugh it off as I made my way to the door.

I walked the two blocks back to the
Journal-Gazette,
deep in thought. Addison was right—she couldn’t protect me if someone came looking for me. But what if that person was someone I worked with on a regular basis? Could I bring them in on my secret and ask them to keep it for me?

On Sunday, while I was enjoying my Cincinnati chili, I read a
New York Times
story about a well-known comedian who stepped away from his Emmy award-winning show to return to the small Illinois town of his youth.

Everyone in that little town knew he was there and, despite the steady stream of fans that came to scout the small business district in search of him, the residents protected his privacy. The comic managed to live a fairly regular life, putting his kids in the public school system, taking his morning coffee—black, two sugars, please—at the local donut shop. The article compared the little farm town to J.D. Salinger’s hometown of Cornish, New Hampshire, whose residents rabidly protected the notoriously private author’s address and daily whereabouts.

Here in Jubilant Falls, my co-workers in the newsroom only knew me as a young widow coming back to work following a horrible car accident. I wasn’t ready to socialize with them, much less tell them the truth about myself. But if the assistant police chief thought he recognized me, other people probably did too. Could I trust anyone, let alone an entire town, to keep the secret until I was healed and ready to tell the world myself?

I stopped at the corner, clutching the file to my chest. My plan was to check in with Addison and then visit the homes along the creek bed, much as the Plummer County sheriff’s deputies had those many years ago.

I looked to my right as a man stopped on the sidewalk beside me, both of us waiting on the traffic light. Bearded and tall, he had a gap between his front teeth and wore khaki shorts and a dark, maroon tee shirt. His thin, muscular legs looked like they belonged to a hiker or a runner; on his feet he wore sandals and rag wool socks. His eyes were incredibly sad; white streaks in his beard and hair made their blueness stand out like winter sky.

Without thinking, I swept my hair behind my ear, exposing the pockmarked scars on my arm. I nodded at him and he did a double take. Before he could speak, I felt fear rise in my chest. Maybe it was my scars that horrified him—maybe it was something else. I didn’t want to ask. I turned and walked the other direction.

*****

Back at the newspaper, I put my desk phone on ‘do not disturb’ and disappeared into the morgue, where old editions were kept, and scoured through the stories on the dead man in the creek.

The probing questions of Chief McGinnis and the reaction of the man at the corner destroyed any confidence I had thought I’d built over the weekend.

Times like this made me question the ruse I lived under. I couldn’t confide to anyone my fears over Gary McGinnis’s questions and the double take of the man at the corner. Until I could calm my nerves, it was best that I just hide. This afternoon, I had the excuse that I needed to research the story. As the newest reporter in the newsroom, nobody would think twice about it.

As the afternoon progressed, I forgot about my fear of being discovered. Instead, I dug deeper into the bound editions, getting a picture of Jubilant Falls in the early 1980s, but little or no insight into the dead young man in the river.

Chapter 7: Leland

That woman at the corner, that couldn’t have been Charisma Prentiss, could it? I tugged thoughtfully at my beard as I walked back to my bed and breakfast, the Jubilant Country Inn.

My search couldn’t have been that easy, could it? Those scars on her arm were horrible—but that face!

It had to be Charisma.

The hair was brown now, no longer blonde, with bangs hanging over her forehead. Did she hide wounds there, too? The even, high cheekbones I’d seen on the national news looked different somehow, but familiar. I caught a glimpse of more puckered, red disfigurement along her scalp.

Clearly the woman, even if she wasn’t Charisma, saw my unfortunate reaction. Who could blame her for the way she’d spun on her heels and walked the other direction? I cringed at the emotional pain I, once again, didn’t mean to cause.

But I was at least here in Jubilant Falls.

The drive north from the Cincinnati airport hadn’t been too bad. I could see why Charisma (if the woman I saw really was Charisma Prentiss) would choose to begin again here. Once off the highway, I felt calmed by the green farmlands and the slower-moving traffic. As I pulled into town, I thought I’d crossed from reality into the set of a slightly worn Frank Capra movie.

I passed a hotel by the highway without stopping to get a room: the flashing neon sign advertising the bar warned me off. Instead, I cruised through the historic district close to the downtown and found a bed and breakfast with a room available on a week-to-week basis.

The owner pointed me in the direction of the Methodist Church, where I could find a daily AA meeting, and a diner called Aunt Bea’s for lunches and weekday dinners. On weekends, when every room in the B&B was full, there would be large family style breakfasts and dinners I could enjoy.

My room was small and furnished with 1920s antiques. There were reproduction pictures of Abraham Lincoln in antique frames hanging on the flowered papered walls and a novel about Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg on the dresser. Across the double bed lay a quilt with rows of fabric flowers; a lacy white throw lay across the foot of the bed. A small antique desk and chair sat next to the door to my private bathroom.

I flopped onto the bed and wondered what my next step would be.

I couldn’t just walk into the newsroom and introduce myself—or could I? There was a possibility that she wouldn’t grant me an interview, however I approached her and I would return to my empty apartment at Fitzgerald House with nothing except a few summer weeks in a small Ohio town under my belt.

What would I ask that I didn’t already know?

What happened after the bomb exploded and Jean Paul Lemarnier was killed was the subject of endless news broadcasts. In an induced coma, Charisma was airlifted to the military hospital at U.S. Army's
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center
in
Germany
, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. After several weeks there, she was released to another hospital closer to her father’s home in Washington D.C. for further treatment and cosmetic surgery.