Peeled (16 page)

“You think it’s happening here?” I whispered.

She looked at a copy of
The Bee
on a table. “I believe it is.”

“What do we do?”

She smiled. “You know what we learned from living under the rule of Communism?”

“No.”

“We learned to get mad.”

And she told me how it was when she was twelve. “Those were long days. My mother was working in the underground; my father was in jail. My job was to keep things going on the ground. And I learned that I couldn’t do great things, but I could do little things. When people work so hard, when the work is dangerous, you need good food to keep going. So my friends and I learned to cook—I wasn’t the best, but I understood how to get food to the workers. I was good at the plan. When I brought the food, I had messages from the others inside—a letter to one, a warning to another, all wrapped in bread or pastry. We
used food to get the job done. I used my anger to keep going.”

I looked at the photo of hundreds of women pushing against the gate in the shipyards in Poland when the workers’ strikes began.

“It must seem boring to you here,” I said.

“Oh, revolution can’t be forever. But I think it’s going to get a bit exciting here. Don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“My mother,” Minska said, “always told me something when I was going to give up. She said, ‘Sometimes just getting up in the morning and standing at the gate can bring the gate down.’”

Home. In my room.

I punched in the phone number for D&B Security. Donald Lupo was dead, Houston Bule was out of jail—I don’t know why I kept calling. Obsessive-compulsive issues, probably.

“Yeah, hello?” a woman answered.

I sat up, incredulous. “Is this D&B Security?”

“It used to be.”

I tried to clear my mind. “Who am I speaking with?”

“This is Lonnie. Donny’s ex-wife.”

“Donald Lupo?”

“Not Donald Duck.”

Think
, Biddle. “I’m sorry about him dying,” I said, opening my notepad.

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t much of a husband. Look, there’s no business here anymore and I gotta—”

I had to keep her talking. “Did he own the company?”

“Donny pretty much was the company.”

“Do you know why he was at the Ludlow house so early in the morning, when he died, Lonnie?”

“Martin told him to go. He said it was important.”

Martin was the name Houston Bule had mentioned to Judge Forrester. Baker had underlined it in my notes.

“You know, I’ve been trying to get a hold of Martin…,” I said.

“Did you call the office?”

“I don’t have the number, Lonnie. Do you?” I closed my eyes. Please have it.

I could hear rustling sounds at her end. “This place is a mess. I don’t have it, either,” she said.

“So, Donny worked for Martin, is that right?”

“Donny did jobs, you understand? He’d check things out. Look, I’ve got to lug this stinking furniture out of this office.”

“Wait, Lonnie—what’s Martin’s last name?”

“Geez. I don’t remember. He’s a big real estate guy.”

“In Boston?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. Who are you, anyway?”

What should I tell her? “I’m Hildy.”

“Okay, Hildy. Be careful who you get involved with. There’s a lotta jerks out there.”

I
know.
“Listen, Lonnie, could I talk with you again?”

“Nah, ’cause I move on in life.”

I’m writing, I’m trying to think. “Could I just ask you—what kind of jobs did Donny do?”

“You know, I asked him that over the years. He’d say, ‘Babe, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.’ Look, I’m outta here.”

She hung up.

I wrote,
Babe, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

I’m not sure I agree with that.

Morning. Room 67B.

I could hardly sit still as Baker studied my notes from my conversation with Lonnie. I’d numbered them nice and neat, too—not a crumple anywhere.

“She knew she was talking to a reporter?” Baker asked me.

I looked down and gulped. “Well, there was a slight problem with that and—”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“No, because I—”

“Why not?” he demanded.

I closed my eyes. “It all just happened so fast. I wasn’t thinking.”

He slapped the notes in my hand. “You can’t quote her if you didn’t tell her.”

“But she gave me information!”

“You didn’t identify yourself as a reporter, you didn’t state your intentions. That’s outside the code of ethics. People have a right to know who they’re talking to.”

“She wouldn’t have talked to me!”

“You don’t know that.”

“But what about reporters who go underground to get a story?” I shouted.

“That’s not what you were doing, Biddle.”

I slumped in my chair. No, it wasn’t.

“What would you have done, Baker?”

“I would have told her there was a great deal of mystery surrounding her ex-husband’s death and I was trying to get the facts to be balanced in the reporting.”

I wrote that down.

“Tell the sheriff,” he added. “See if you can find Martin, the big Boston real estate guy.”

I nodded. “I won’t not identify myself again, Baker. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a lesson we all have to learn, kid. Better to learn it early.”

After school, I went to see Sheriff Metcalf. He was just pulling his squad car into the parking lot when I drove in.

I got out of the pickup and walked toward him.

“I did something stupid,” I told him, “but I might have found a lead.”

I told him what Lonnie had told me about Martin and Lupo.

“Boston real estate?” he asked me. “You’re sure?”

“Yes. I don’t know if she’s a reliable source, Sheriff.”

“We’ll do our best to find out.”

That was
The Core’s
big, fat headline.

Our lead article was Zack’s survey. The numbers were in.

Seen a ghost—2 out of 434 respondents said yes.

Heard a ghost—4 out of 434 respondents said yes.

Seen something spooky—10 out of 434 respondents said yes.

Heard something spooky—10 out of 434 respondents said yes.

Witnessed a crime—1 out of 434 respondents said yes.

Committed a crime—0.

Called the police or fire department—3 out of 434 had called.

Wish you’d called (see above)—7 out of 434 wished they had.

Don’t get what all the excitement is about—you haven’t seen or heard anything—287 out of 434 respondents hadn’t seen or heard a thing.

This was way below the town average as reported in
The Bee.

A new feature, “Let Us Know What You Think,” prompted this week’s question:
The Ludlow house—scare or scam?

That got kids talking.

Darrell’s feature, “Voices,” included twelve letters of protest that had been sent to
The Bee
but were never published. People were writing to us now. “It’s time to take the Halloween masks off and see what we’re dealing with,” Darrell proclaimed in his editorial.

That got the community involved.

Tanisha now had her own page called “Faces,” where her photographs of Banesville’s residents and visitors were featured.

Overnight
The Core
was hot.

The mayor’s office asked for free copies.

I saw Sheriff Metcalf reading the paper in his squad car.

“All right,”
Baker Polton barked like an Army sergeant. “I want smart reporting from you guys. I want you crawling over every facet of this story like ants on a watermelon.”

We can do that!

“Find out what they’re doing to combat the graffiti at
Lull’s Cheap Gas. Talk to the people who are watching the house. Hildy, I have an assignment for you. I want you to interview Pen Piedmont.”

I choked on my unfiltered apple juice.
What?

“I want you to go over there and ask him two questions—that’s all. Where does he think the Ludlow story is going? And where did he work before?”

“You want me to go
there?”

He nodded and adjusted the photo of his wife and son on his desk.

“Baker,” I shouted. “The
Bee
is enemy territory!”

“She’ll get ambushed,” Tanisha said.

Baker shook his head. “Piedmont’s not that stupid.”

“But he’s powerful!” I said. “He’s got more advertising than we’ve even dreamed about. He’s—”

He leaned back in his chair. “Are you telling me you’re afraid?”

Yes.
But I’d rather not admit it.

“Do you want me to go with you?” He dusted the picture of his ex-wife.

Actually, I want
you
to go, Baker. I’ll stay here.

“Hildy’s not afraid,” Lev assured him.

“That’s touching, Radner. You go with her.”

“The thing is,” Lev muttered, “I…”

“I’ll go,” Zack said quietly.

Baker looked at me with something close to confidence. “Show him how we play the game here.”

“Okay.” I waited for more detail on how we play the game. There wasn’t any.

I guess we were making it up as we went along.

Papers piled everywhere.

Phones ringing.

The office of
The Bee
seemed ready to blast into orbit.

“If you want to run an ad,” the woman at the front desk said to Zack and me, “we’re full up for three weeks.”

“Darn,” Zack muttered.

I uttered my inane request. “We’d like to interview Mr. Piedmont for our school paper.”

“You have an appointment?”

“No.”

“He’s very busy.” She put on lipstick. “And you are… ?”

“Hildy Biddle and Zack Coleman from
The Core,”
I half whispered.

The woman froze. This ranked among the truly bad ideas of our time.

“Could you see if he has a few minutes?” Zack asked with confidence. If I’d had a paper bag, I would have been blowing into it.

She picked up the phone and told Piedmont we were here. “No, I’m
not
kidding,” she added. She pointed toward the windowed office in the back. “He said he’s got three minutes.”

We walked past a row of desks to Pen Piedmont’s office. He motioned us in. His desk was piled high with papers. On the wall was a blowup of the front page with circles drawn around it like a dartboard.

Pen Piedmont threw a dart at the front page. It landed in the
ONTO
.

“Nice shot,” Zack said.

I had my two questions written down in case I was struck dumb by the stupidity of this. Pen Piedmont snarled, “How can I help you?”

I took out my notebook. “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Piedmont. We’d like to ask you a few questions for our high school paper.”

“The high school paper that’s questioning the quality of the reporting we are doing here?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. That’s the one.”

He looked at me. I didn’t look away. He was shorter than I remembered. His thick black glasses were dirty. He put his hands behind his head, bony elbows pointing out. “When you start interviewing other journalists, you haven’t got much of a story.”

“Mr. Piedmont, you are part of this story, an important part. Where do you think it’s going?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “You actually want me to tell you where this story is going? You want me to give you information that my reporters have been chasing down for weeks?”

Why did Baker want me to ask that?

“That’s not what she meant,” Zack said.

But then I got it.

I smiled. “Actually, sir, I’m interested in where
you
think the story is going.”

He smirked. “I think it’s going big-time is what I think.”

I wrote that down. “How so?”

He paused. “Instinct.”

Great transition for me. “You’ve been in this business a long time then?”

“You’ve got that right.”

“Where did you work before?”

His voice changed slightly. He looked at his computer screen. “I started out as a paperboy and worked my way up in various places in the Midwest.”

I smiled bigger. “Which papers were you at?”

He waved his hand. “Oh, a few have gone belly up.”

A jaw-breaking grin from me. “Which ones, sir? What were the names?”

A cough. “Ah, let’s see.
The Des Moines Sentinel, The Green Bay Ledger,”
he said quickly. I wrote those down. I knew he was lying. Lev always talked fast when he was lying.

I said, “Thank you, sir.”

“That’s all you wanted?”

Zack stretched out his hand. Piedmont shook it. In the corner of his office there was a sign:
The pen is mightier than the sword.

I went for serious eye contact. “Mr. Piedmont, thank you for your time.”

“We’re all in this together,” he muttered.

Mmmmm…maybe not.

Back at school, Zack and I checked on
The Des Moines Sentinel
and
The Green Bay Ledger
and couldn’t find anything.

“You’re sure that’s what he said?” Baker asked.

“Positive.”

Baker ran a check, too. The papers never existed. “Call him back and double check,” Baker directed.