Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (40 page)

Dena could be fun at parties but as a rule, she lived in her own
little dream world and walked around unconscious of the fact that she was viewed by most as some sort of enigma, some sort of mystery to be solved. She took little interest in boys and spent most of her free time alone, at movies or working over at the college theater. Her date-crazed sorority sisters were baffled as to why she would turn down the best-looking boys on campus to work on sets or watch a rehearsal of some stupid play. Pretty soon everyone came to the same conclusion: she must have some incredibly handsome, secret boyfriend. Sookie and Margaret McGruder had even followed Dena over to the theater late one night, but Dena was alone on stage, apparently rehearsing. This secret-boyfriend speculation went around like wildfire and curiosity peaked to the breaking point, especially with Margaret McGruder and Sally Ann Sockwell, who were now so wild to know who he was and what he looked like that they could no longer contain themselves. One Saturday afternoon, when they were sure Dena was at a rehearsal, they sneaked down the hall at the Kappa house in sunglasses and raincoats and knocked on Sookie’s and Dena’s door.

Sookie appeared in a green chenille robe, her red hair rolled up in bubble-gum-pink sponge rollers. She was in the middle of giving herself a facial and looked like she had just dipped her face in a pan of cement, but the girls were used to such sights. Sookie tried to speak without disturbing her mud pack. “What is it?”

“Sookie,” Margaret said, “come on, we just know Dena must have some love letters or some clues or a picture of him in there. We want to see if we can find any.”

Sally Ann, who was dating Sookie’s brother, Buck, said, “Please … we are just dying to know who it is and what he looks like. I’ll bet he’s a Greek god!”

“She won’t know, I promise,” said Margaret McGruder, “we’ll never tell a soul.”

“Nooo! I’m not going to let you come in here and spy on my roommate.”

“Please. We’d do the same for you. Please, we won’t mess up anything; she won’t even know we were here.”

“No, I can’t. She’d kill me if she ever found out.”

Margaret stuck her foot in the door before Sookie could close it.
“We are not going away until you let us in. You know you are just dying to know who it is, too. Come on, Sook, we won’t be but a minute.”

Sookie, usually easily manipulated, stood her ground. “No. If anybody is going to spy on her, it will be me, not you. I’m her roommate.”

“All right,” Sally Ann said, “we’ll wait right here. We’ll be your lookout. And we won’t tell anyone. It will just be between us.”

“Promise?”

“Of course, on our Kappa honor. Do you think we would betray a sister?”

Sookie looked up and down the hall. “Oh, all right. But you stand right there and knock if you see someone coming. If I get caught I’m going to kill you.”

Sookie hated spying but she was dying to find out herself. Now at least she had two accomplices. She went over and quietly opened Dena’s top drawer. She felt around for paper. Nothing. She went through all five drawers and came up empty-handed. She looked under the bed, under the pillows; nothing.

Then she remembered: Dena kept some papers in a box on the top shelf of her closet. She pulled a desk chair over, got the box down, and started shuffling through the papers. No letters, just grade transcripts, a couple of Playbills, classroom notes, a newspaper article on Tennessee Williams, a typed letter from the scholarship board. Then, down at the bottom, she found a personal letter and her heart started to pound. It was postmarked just last week; it looked like a man’s handwriting. She opened it carefully, excited and full of guilt.

And was riveted by what she read.

Sookie carefully folded it and put it in the box and back up on the top shelf. Sookie was not the brightest of girls, but she knew it was something she should never have seen. She felt like a traitor for having read it. She waited a moment, then went to the door to the waiting girls and reported that she could not find a thing. Sally Ann and Margaret were extremely disappointed and went down the hall. After Christmas, when Dena came back from the holiday break and told her all about the wonderful time she had spent with her mother, Sookie said nothing.

After Dena’s grandfather died, Macky went through his papers, looking for a burial policy and anything else as executor he needed to know about. He had to pry open a tin box.

Macky talked it over with Norma and they both decided not to tell Dena. As Norma said, “What good would it do for her to know the person she thought was her mother didn’t exist?”

Dena Nordstrom had ruined Sidney Capello’s one chance to be big in network television, but like a rat in a maze he had quickly scurried in another direction. In the tabloid business, where speed does count, Capello had shot to the top like a silver bullet. He had tired of being a freelance. It was too much of a hassle dealing with editors for a good price, so he cut out the middle man and started his own paper. Stripped of the dead weight of ethics, a conscience, or fear of the law, combined with his willingness to do anything to get a story, Capello and his paper were soon way ahead of the pack. Not fussing over facts was an economy. In less than a year his cheaply produced paper outsold everything on the supermarket rack and his readership was growing stronger every day. And he intended to keep it number one despite growing competition.

He had no qualms about stealing mail, tapping phones, and bribing or even placing maids, gardeners, or chauffeurs in the homes of the well known. His appetite for access to private information was boundless, and FBI files read like first-grade primers compared to his. He knew who was sleeping with whom, when, where, and how they did it, and could come up with one or two “witnesses” and, if necessary and for enough money, he could provide the “other
person” involved, whether that person had been there or not. He had access to medical records, bank statements, private phone conversations. He knew how almost any half-fact could be blown up into a scandal at a moment’s notice. But the main reason for Sidney’s success was his ability to look to the future, to put away something for a rainy day. He had his “insurance” file chock-full of tidbits, photos, documents he could use when that rainy day came. If it had been a slow news week, he simply pulled something out that had been on hold, added a few factoids, and ran it. One aging movie star lost a lead in a movie when her before-and-after plastic surgery photos showed up in color on the cover of Capello’s sheet, for no reason other than it had been a slow week. He liked being on top and he also had what he called a Hot File, ready to go, his get-them-before-they’re-famous time bombs. He sent his staff out gathering information on anybody he even
suspected
might become newsworthy one day—kid actors, musicians, public servants, do-gooders. It was expensive, but what was thirty or forty thousand dollars when one story might sell millions of papers? He wanted to have a head start program of his own: as soon as someone hit it big he wanted to be ready. This is how the Dena Nordstrom file had come into being and now sat, ticking away, waiting for the right moment. Capello was usually strictly business, but he took a personal interest in her story. If it had not been for Nordstrom he might be producing television today. He had put his most expensive, tough-digging researcher, Barbara Zofko, to work on this one. It had been worth it. What she had dug up exceeded even his wildest dreams. Now all he had to do was sit back and wait for the right moment, and he was a patient man. It was a dirty business. But it wasn’t blackmail. Ask him and he would tell you it was simply entertainment news, and news as entertainment, and there was much more money in the tabloid business than there ever had been in blackmail. And it was legal. It sort of made you proud to be an American.

If Sidney Capello was the queen bee, Barbara Zofko was the perfect drone. She served him well. A lumpy, misshapen sort of woman with
thick, slightly pockmarked, shiny white skin, not ugly, not pretty, she had the kind of face that could walk past a thousand people a day and not one would remember her. This characteristic worked in her favor. In fact, she was perfect for her job: she had no human relations to interfere with her work.

Barbara Zofko did not mind eating alone. She preferred it. She was totally focused on her work and the next meal. Her appetite was insatiable and she could eat a bag of cookies, an entire cake, and a dozen doughnuts at one sitting. And, if there was one characteristic that had made her what she had become, it was that hunger. Zofko had come from a small coal-mining town outside of Pittsburgh, one of seven children. The daughter of a taciturn miner and a mother who had been old at thirty, Barbara had never had enough of anything, love, money, or food, and now, no matter how much she ate, she never felt quite full. She was always left feeling just a little bit hungry and that’s why she was Capello’s top bird dog. She had been on this case for several weeks now and so far all she had been able to turn up on Dena Nordstrom was that she had attended schools all over the country and everyone remembered her but few people remembered much about her. It was turning out to be difficult. The hardest target to hit is a moving target and from the age of four, this TV woman had done nothing but move from one place to another. She had not stayed in college long enough to graduate, and when Barbara had gotten a list of the names of her sorority sisters and tracked them down all over the country, it had been a waste. Not one would say anything bad about her and a few said how wonderful she had been. Not only that, the woman in Alabama who had been her roommate in college had almost talked her ear off. She had gone on and on for hours with glowing accounts of what a fabulous girl Dena was. She had a hard time getting the woman off the phone. Zofko figured there must be some kind of conspiracy. She had tracked Dena’s career from one local television station to another and nothing. They all said the same thing. Nice girl. We knew she would do well. Another blind alley.

Time to start on the immediate family. When Barbara made her reservations at the only place in Elmwood Springs to stay, her first
thought was “fried clams.” She always liked the little fried clams at Howard Johnson’s, so she was not terribly upset at having to spend some time there. When she checked in that first day, she was disappointed that they did not have room service, but her spirits lifted when she saw the brochure for the International House of Pancakes and learned it was not too far off. She dumped her bags and did what she always did in a strange town. She drove to the nearest supermarket, got a basket and circled the bread and pastry section like a great white shark, and snatched a variety of sweet supplies to get her through the night. The next morning she knocked on Norma Warren’s front door.

“Mrs. Warren?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t know me but I’m here from the governor’s office in Jefferson City and I wondered if I might talk to you about something concerning your cousin … Dena Nordstrom?”