Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series

by H. Laurence Lareau

  “That’s a shame, Karli,” said Mary Rose. “It sounded like you have a really good shot at an award, and it doesn’t get bigger than an Emmy.”

  “If I’m in the running,” and Karli emphasized the if, “it would be great to be here for it. But I’m going to be working in the kind of newsroom where they practically expect Emmy awards. So there will be more opportunities.”

  “Do they have anyone like Jake there?” Mary Rose asked. “Or, for that matter, like moi? You’re going to need an outrageously awesome collaborator if you’re going to be all heroic there, you know. Or have you forgotten your one-man-band days so quickly?”

  “There’s nobody like Jake, of course,” Karli said thoughtfully. And then, more briskly, “Nor like you, either.

  How many crazy characters do you think they can fit in that newsroom?” Karli darted a glance at Scott inviting him to join in the teasing. “But they do have some really seasoned photographers, guys who’ve been shooting news since they used 16 mm film cameras.”

  “So you’re saying those dinosaurs are going to be doing work that’s up to the standard you’ve seen here? Really?”

  “I’ll turn on all of my motivational charms, Mary Rose,” Karli said with an exaggerated wink. “You’ll be impressed, I promise.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll believe it when I see it. You’re never going to find anything like me or Jake again. You’ll be begging us to come take a gig in Chicago.”

  “And I’ll be begging you to land me a gig there,” Scott chimed in. “The sports work in a city like that is world’s different from sports work in Des Moines.” He paused and shook his head slowly. “An entire damned state, and not one single big league team in any sport. If it weren’t for the Hawks and ‘Clones, there wouldn’t be much of anything.”

  Mary Rose stepped in immediately to offer a whole host of sports events unique to Iowa, starting with the Relays and continuing with the thousands of people who ride their bicycles all the way across the state every summer. As Scott warmed to his subject, he countered with tales of old-fashioned six-on-six grandmother league women’s basketball. Mary Rose began to recite a list of Iowa’s Olympians.

  Karli tuned them both completely out.

  She’s right, I suppose. Jake really is an amazing photographer. And collaborator. And. . .what—Boyfriend? That’s an icky word. Friend with Benefits? Um, NO.

  Certainly there have been awesome benefits, but he’s been a lot more than a friend. Lover?

  As she was pondering what she should call Jake, Scott and Mary Rose both pushed their chairs away from the table. Mary Rose took Karli’s plate and replaced it with the slim wallet that held the bill. “This is yours, Karli,” she said. “You offered, we accepted. No take-sie back-sies.”

  Karli blinked, then looked at the wallet and, after a moment, reoriented herself. “Right, is it time to go already?”

  Scott pointed out that they all had to go to work the next day, and things wrapped up with Karli paying the bill and all three of them walking out into the windy cool of the evening.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Tuesday, June 17

  Polk County Courthouse

  Downtown Des Moines, Iowa

  “Okay, Jake, let’s head back,” Sophia Rephai said, scrolling through the notes on her iPad as they walked briskly toward the courthouse exit.

  “Um, Sophia?” Jake bid for the darkly glamorous reporter’s attention. He kept walking and waited as she continued to review her notes and ponder the screen in front of her face.

  Jake shifted the heavy tripod from one hand to the other and sighed. “Hey, um, Sophia?” Her heels clacked sternly against the courthouse’s shining terrazzo floor, and she continued staring at the iPad.

  “Yeah, we’ve totally got enough,” she said. “This is a decent follow-up to that drug series. And we should have plenty of time to write and edit before the 6:00 newscast.”

  “Isn’t this story about heroin killing people?” Jake asked, aware that the impatience was audible in his voice.

  “That’s what we just got, isn’t it?” Sophia snapped. “The County Attorney just told us that three people have died from overdoses in the last month. Police officers are being equipped with that antidote stuff—what is it called? Naloxone?” Jake nodded his head in exasperation. “So we have a problem and some of the steps that are being taken to deal with it.”

  “You have the official story from officials, Sophia,” Jake stepped in front of her and stopped so as to get her undivided attention.

  “That isn’t necessarily the story about what the opiate epidemic and overdoses mean in human terms, is it?”

  Sophia shouldered past Jake and kept on toward the exit. “Look, you take pretty pictures, Jake, I get that. But we just got the story that we were sent out to cover. Now we need to go back to the station and put it together to broadcast for our viewers. That’s the job.”

  “Sophia, this isn’t a story about cops and prosecutors. Don’t you get that? This is a story about human tragedy, about lives cut short, about the enslavement of addiction.”

  “Not the story I’m doing, Jake,” Sophia retorted. “If you want to do a different story, you’ll need to get a different reporter. But don’t forget that I am the reporter and you’re just the photographer. I make the decisions about what the story is and how we report it.”

  Jake sighed again, shouldered his tripod and shrugged through the door and out into the afternoon sunlight. Karli would not have put forth the least possible effort to produce the least interesting possible story, he thought to himself. And she would have looked for a human angle—like an interview with any actual person who had actually known anyone who had died from an overdose. He slammed his gear into the news car with unnecessary force as he reflected that the ‘official’ story that Sophia was reporting did nothing other than reinforce the public’s view of opiate addiction as a problem of the underclass—one more deserving of resentment than of compassion.

  He got into the driver’s seat, keyed the ignition, and took a moment to direct a glare at Sophia. She was oblivious, however, her eyes locked onto emails on the iPad. Jake sighed again, put the car into gear, and headed across downtown toward the newsroom.

  As he drove, he reviewed his day so far. He had awoken to blankets tangled around a huge bolster that he used to fill his arms while he tried to go to sleep. He checked out of habit, but there was no half-full water glass to rescue from its precarious perch just on the edge of the farther side’s nightstand.

  He showered and shaved without interruption. He made a single cup of coffee and didn’t bother to steam any milk for it. Instead of firing up the stove and having breakfast with napkins and silverware at the table, he hastily beat and microwaved a pair of eggs in a bowl before dumping them onto whole wheat toast, then munching it all down at the counter.

  On the way down the steps, he snared the previous night’s karate uniform out of the washer, shook it out, and carried it down to the garage to hang on the line next to the steps so it could dry during the day.

  He picked up the morning’s Register where it had been delivered to his doorstep, chucked it into the recycling bin, and got into his truck for the quiet drive to work.

  The drive was quiet—the steady murmur of NPR news washed over him without leaving any trace of meaning. Without the usual punctuation of her announcement of local angles to the national stories, nothing brought the stories out from the radio and into his mind.

  Jake felt the absence of a colleague to commiserate with over the daily frustrations of the work—the deadline pressure that was forever increased by the unavailability of sources, the distance to be driven, the need for one more interview, the effort to shake all of the elements down and organize them into a compelling story.

  He harrumphed to himself that he used to be irritated that the talk about work never stopped. Yet the work never stopped being interesting, and Karli never stopped being interesting, either. Whatever the subject, she was
the most curious, most insightful, most analytical, and most compassionate person he’d ever known.

  Again he turned to look at Sophia. She had flipped down the visor and was touching up her make-up in the little mirror. Noticing him from the corner of her eye, she said, “I think I have a decent stand-up written to link to the parts of the story. How about we shoot that with the station’s big sign in the background?”

  “Seriously?” Jake cried. “You want the Three NewsFirst logo to be the symbol of an addiction crisis?”

  Sophia huffed in indignation. “No, I want the Three NewsFirst logo to be right behind me so our viewers know who they’re watching deliver the day’s news. And that’s what we’re going to do. So turn on the special pretty switch in your camera and make me look amazing.”

  She turned the full power of her smile on him, but he had been inoculated long ago. Jake took a sharp breath preparatory to continuing the argument, then thought better of it. Sophia’s friendships lasted only so long as someone was useful to her. Then they stopped until the next time she could benefit. He bit his tongue, and kept driving to the station.

  Working with Sophia to edit the story for broadcast was a protracted exercise in her self-promotion. The story wound up being every bit as soulless and mediocre as Jake had feared. He considered re-writing and -editing the story for the late newscast, realized that he would have to endure an endless series of diva harangues from Sophia, squared his shoulders, and got on with finishing the job.

  When he got home from the dojo later that evening, the carriage house was again silent. He didn’t have to explain what had taken him so long when her workout was long done and she had showered and what were they going to eat and would he like to go out to see the baseball game, the dance recital, the play, the movie, the jazz combo, or whatever it was that she’d gotten wind of tonight.

  The television masked the chewing and slurping of Chinese take-out, yet it provided no real diversion. When Jake realized that he was beginning a third trip flipping through the hundreds of channels, he stopped, turned the TV off, and cleaned up the little folding boxes and chopsticks.

  On his way to the bedroom, he grabbed the sweaty gi from his gym bag, stuffed it into the washer, and turned it on. Taking a lonely scotch and soda with him, Jake crawled into the still-tangled blankets. It was early, yet he was almost painfully fatigued. Leaving his drink untouched, Jake pulled the bolster to his chest and closed his eyes.

  Karli would not be laying next to him, her head propped up on her hand, gesturing and whispering as she reviewed all the most interesting and exciting parts of the evening’s amateur theater or jazz show or stand-up comic. He would not see her sigh with contentment at having fully discussed the event, nor feel her now-calmed arms around his neck. Her scent wouldn’t reach through his nostrils to his hind-brain’s triggers. He wouldn’t feel her nip teasingly at his lips.

  She wouldn’t reveal her astonishing beauty to him yet again as they joined in another night’s passion.

  He remembered the intimacy and he squeezed his eyes tightly in an effort to turn his thoughts away from that lack.

  Tuesday, June 17

  Westin River North

  Chicago, Illinois

  “Holy fire!” Karli nearly shrieked into her iPhone. “Nothing has even happened yet to be news—it’s the welcoming reception for a Vitamin D conference!”

  “Karli, the event is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There are more than 250 scientists there—some of them the nation’s top researchers. You can find a story.”

  “Yeah, breaking vitamin D news,” she sighed. “What odds we start with a shot of the Vitamin D-enriched sun over Lake Michigan?”

  “Go dig for a story, Karli. You’ll find gold—that’s why you’re here.”

  “Right.” Karli pressed the red hang-up button and heaved a sigh. She quickly checked her email and her text messages but found nothing that wasn’t purely work-related or spam. “Okay, Ja— Um, Jim, let’s get some B-roll of the reception room, okay?”

  Jim, the grizzled veteran news photographer, hefted his camera to his shoulder and, without moving from where he stood, started rolling.

  “Uh, that’s a shot of a room, Jim. Don’t you think it might look steadier if you put the camera on a tripod?”

  “Nah, I’m steady enough,” came the reply. “It’s just an establishing shot.”

  Karli clenched her teeth and took a deep breath that had no effect on calming her. “Jim, the story really shouldn’t start out shaky. Can you please put it on the tripod?”

  “I’ve got that shot,” he replied, shouldering his way into the reception and beginning to frame up another handheld shot of the milling scientists.

  Karli fumed to herself and headed into the room behind him to look for someone to interview. About Vitamin D.

  ***

  After torturing herself writing and trying to work around the dreadful video she had to work with, Karli turned in her wretchedly unsatisfying story about research demonstrating that people living at Chicago’s latitudes suffer from seasonal Vitamin D deficiency.

  Then Karli walked straight to the news director’s office. Turning the knob and walking in without waiting for permission, she saw the boss at his desk, writing notes with the telephone cradled between his jowly cheek and shoulder. She stood, arms akimbo and lips tight, and ignored the angry glare he directed at her in response to the interruption. The boss finished his call with a series of uh-huhs, and rights followed by a thanks and a perfect. Then, finally, a good-bye.

  “What happened to this being a job where I get to cover the stories that I enterprise? I distinctly recall not signing up to cover Vitamin D conventions.”

  “Karli, we needed to cover that convention. One of our biggest shareholders has a husband who’s a big-wig doctor at the National Institutes of Health. He’s a Vitamin D guy.”

  “Yeah, I get that you needed to cover it,” Karli retorted. “I did not need to cover it. In fact, I recall explicitly discussing that I wouldn’t be covering bullshit stories.”

  “It isn’t bullshit when one of the actual owners wants a story covered,” the boss replied. “In fact, it’s something you’ll cover and be glad for the opportunity. There’s nothing else to be said about it.” Having concluded, he turned his attention back to his notes and reached for the phone.

  Karli stood, quaking with indignation. This is not what I signed up for. After the boss had dialed his call and begun talking and again scribbling notes, Karli realized that he wasn’t going to acknowledge her no matter how long she stood there. She turned and left, stopping just short of slamming the door behind her.

  Back at her desk, Karli decided to blow off the several dozen emails that had accumulated in her inbox over the afternoon and shut her computer down. She walked away from her desk, wondering what had happened to the issues-driven reporting work she’d been promised.

  And the photography had been so very bad. Most shots shook like an old sci-fi set when the starship was under attack. Many were underexposed—except for the interviews, where the subjects’ faces were blindingly lit with a camera-top light that left the entire background as murky as a closing-time alley.

  Stepping onto the elevator up to her apartment, Karli checked her iPhone’s messages. Nothing.

  When she was in Des Moines, she and Mary Rose and Jake and the rest of the news crew had kept up a more or less constant stream of texts, ranging from pet illnesses to good-natured teasing to gossipy nonsense to substantive work.

  The last non-work text message she’d received was from her father. And that had been the day before. And it had been, of course, about how her Chicago experience would very soon permit her to take Charleston by storm.

  She began a new text to Jake, trying to present the problem in a nutshell. After three tries, the awkwardness of texting him at all overwhelmed her. There’s no point in texting him, she thought. I’ll just get some big I-told-you-so.

  The elevator d
oor opened, and she pressed the sleep switch on top of the phone in exasperation. She walked to her apartment and went straight to the bathroom. She pulled a make-up remover wipe from the package and began the tedious process of scrubbing the thick broadcast make-up from her face. The face in the mirror gradually came clean.

  Karli pitched the last wipe into the garbage can and turned to stare at her reflection, which was framed by the furnished apartment’s reflection. Nothing she saw looked familiar or homey. The furniture came from some central hotel supply house, as did the carpet, the draperies, the fixtures, the floors—all of it was as coldly impersonal as a budget hotel, with all the variety of the do-it-yourself styrofoam waffles at the included breakfast.

  Karli finished washing, decided against going to the gym, and went to the kitchen to look for supper.

  Opening the fridge, she found sparkling water, half a bottle of wine, a half-eaten plastic clamshell of pre-cut fruit, and little foil packets of the condiments that had come with take-out meals. She realized she’d worked late—sometimes very late—every night for the last week, which meant she’d distractedly eaten whatever food the station had ordered in.

  She pulled out the wine bottle, filled one of the glasses that had lived in the apartment longer than she had, and took a sip. As she wandered distractedly out of the kitchen, she dragged her fingertips across the table and was surprised to find them dusty.

  Is this really what I’ve been working for? she wondered. I make really good money now, and literally millions of people know who I am. She looked out her apartment’s huge picture window over the Chicago river. Dozens of other tall buildings held hundreds of flashing windows over the river, and she could see into some of them. Some gave glimpses into shiny, impersonal gyms filled with glistening new exercise equipment and glistening people tramping away on treadmills. Others allowed Karli to peek at tired-looking workers pecking away at computers or talking on telephones. A very few opened into some kind of domestic scene—a dining room table standing ready, a living room with a flat, blank television in front of an empty sofa. She couldn’t see any actual people in the apartments.