by J. Wachowski
“I’ll have the list of dealerships to interview on your new desk by tomorrow morning.” He winked. “Thanks, hon.”
“Getting tired of telling you to bite me, Jim. Go away.”
“GM’s in the building, by the way. She’s looking for you.”
I mumbled something creative. Schmed exited with a snicker.
New action item on my list-end Schmed’s good mood.
With the conference call as white noise, I focused on the monitor, committing some pieces to memory, watching for glitches, listening for audio errors I’d need to cut around. My brain knows how to do this stuff on autopilot. Almost like driving-there’s a part of your mind that’s totally focused and another part that’s free. I’m better at the pieces than I am at the big picture. That’s why I prefer stills to video, editing to previewing.
When it came to Tom Jost’s death, I could almost see the bits I didn’t understand coming together, spread like a collage in front of me.
I wished I had the time to follow College to the firehouse. Maybe talk to Tom’s partner Pat again. If Grace was right, Tom’s problem began there.
I still didn’t have an explanation for who’d called the station the day of Tom’s death. What kind of Samaritan would call, but not stop? If they’d only called the cops-maybe. But why call the cops and the local television station?
According to the sheriff, Tom had no phone with him. I know Tom owned a phone; we saw the empty charger in his apartment. What happened to it? I thought of Rachel sitting in the bushes with the phone pressed to her ear. She hadn’t known Tom was dead, hadn’t seen the body. She couldn’t have been the Samaritan.
I picked up my cell phone and hit the new Clarion speed dial for the private extension of Mr. Melton Shotter.
“News.”
“Hey, Melton. What news?”
“Maddy?” He sounded surprised. “How’s that story on Jost going?”
“Not bad. Question for you. How’d you get the tip on Jost? Was it off the police band or what?”
“I got called on my way into work that morning. Can you hold? I’ll check.”
“No problem.” I hit Rewind and toggled the mute button on the conference call to vote fine with me on a local weather graphic preceding local stories.
The guy from Dallas added, “People watch TV to find out what tomorrow’s weather will be. Give them what they want. Get them hooked. This ain’t brain surgery.”
Melton came back on the line with interesting news. “Someone called the paper with a tip. Said there were cop cars and fire trucks along the road. The receptionist who took the call knew I’d pass that exit on my way into work. She phoned me at home.”
“What time?”
“Must have been around ten. That’s when I leave for the office.”
I blew some exasperation his way. “Nice work if you can get it.”
“Hey, I work ’til we go to press on Thursdays. I’m here ’til midnight sometimes.”
“Midnight? That’s all?”
Melton and I traded poor-me stories until we were both sleeping on desktops, surviving on tic tacs and tap water.
The conference call got around to taking another vote.
“Thanks for the help, Melton. I got another call.” I hung up before he could pump me for more on Jost.
After I weighed in on title graphics, I tried to call Ainsley in the truck and got no answer. Either he wasn’t in the truck or couldn’t hear the ring over the downbeat of WKiSS-FM. Guess which one I was betting?
“Ms. O’Hara? I’ve been looking for you.” Shirley Shayla, my new general mother, stood there, hands on hips. She was almost eye level with me, if I slumped in my chair. Aggravation or a long day had crumpled her Donna Karan suit. Not a good sign.
“You found me.” I waved to the line of empty conference room chairs. The machine clucked into standby and the speakerphone suddenly cracked out an “O’Hara?”
I held up a one-minute finger to Shayla and answered, “Yeah. I’ve got a couple stories on the burner right now. For the first week, I like this piece on a local suicide.”
“Details,” the New York guy barked.
“Guy was a refugee from a local Amish community. The suicide had signs of being autoerotic asphyxiation.”
Bits and pieces of my colleagues’ opinions popped through: a snort, a chuckle, a drawn out shiiiit. “Sounds good,” was the final answer.
What followed was a sequence of feelings that were fairly familiar when I sold a story based on salacious spin-relief, shame, and as I met Shayla’s gaze, guilt hunkered down for the long haul.
I hit the mute. “What can I do you for?”
“That’s the story you’re putting together for the premiere?” She made a firm nod in the direction of Grace’s sweet image on my monitor cart, twitching rhythmically in freeze frame. “Former Amish Sex-Death?”
“Actually, I’m not sure what the story will be yet.” Guilt made me sound grumpier than was polite for a new boss. Thumbing toward the phone call, I tried to work the charm as I admitted, “You know how it goes. These conference calls are fairly, um, promotional. Until I have it in the can…” I let it drift into a long pause.
“That topic would certainly sell ads.” Her arms were folded across her bosom and her feet were planted wide and toe out. She was not smiling. “Although, I have to say I’m surprised. It’s not what I expected from you. Rather predictable.”
Amish autoerotic asphyxiation was predictable? Where had she been living?
I opened my mouth, hesitating to stick my foot straight back in there, when the cell phone vibrated. Saved by the bell. “Yeah?”
“Maddy? It’s me,” Ainsley whispered in his undercover voice. “I’m at the fire station.”
“Great.” I started talking, hoping Shayla would lighten up on the hairy-eyeball she was giving me. “Here’s my-”
“You won’t believe the visuals! They’re training on car fires. Torching old beaters in the back lot. It’s incredible. We can totally work it in. Tom-the-Amish-firefighter, lighting a car on fire? Get it? And Pat just came in to pick up his check.”
“What? Ask-”
Ainsley would not shut up. His whispering got fierce. “Pat got all over me when I told them about the bank guy out at the Jost farm.”
“Really?” I went to full stop.
“I’m going to try for an interview.”
“With Pat? He wants to give you an interview?”
“I can handle it. Leave time in the story. I’ll call you later.”
“Wait!” Too late. I hit ring-back and the guy at the firehouse who answered laughed loudly as he passed the phone back to Ainsley.
“That’s three, College Boy. You’re grounded. Never, ever hang up before I do.”
“Right, right. Can I go now?”
“No. Pat’s in this thing deep. Watch yourself. Ask what he fought with Tom about and find out when-before or after Rachel. Ask what he said to Nicky Curzon. And find out how the fire service call came in about Jost. Did they hear through the cops or was it direct?”
“Okay. I can handle this, Boss.”
The words “I can handle it” were a little too scary to let slide. “Don’t get fancy on me, College. Get your shots and get back here. Don’t make me give you the J-school speech again.”
“Anything else?”
He was being such a pain in the ass, I snapped, “Yeah. I need you to pick up Jenny on your way back.” Too late, I thought of Shayla and the fact that I really didn’t want to spread the word I was permanently responsible for a kid these days.
“From school?” Ainsley asked.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. It wasn’t in me to ask for a personal favor without justification but it felt tricky explaining my motives to Ainsley. “I’m going to check something out at the Jost farm and I may run late. If you get her by six, we can rendezvous back at my place and watch whatever you get at the firehouse.”
Silence.
Conference call wen
t lull.
Shayla tapped her foot.
“You want to talk to Mr. Jost again, don’t you?” Ainsley’s mental wheels were turning. “Don’t go back there, Maddy. He’s going to call the cops or something this time.”
“He might talk now that he’s had all day to think about what I dropped off this morning.” Quietly I added, “And there’s something I need to say to him.”
“Oh, man.” Ainsley sounded worried. “Don’t make me give you the J-school speech.”
“Ha. Funny.”
Shayla stood there watching me with one eyebrow cocked, so I could only penalize the boy with the silent treatment. The conference call droned on. A close-up image of Grace flickered before me on the monitor, waiting. I felt caught in a paused moment, waiting for someone to press the button that would release me from the sameness of it all. Something had to change.
“I’ll pick up Jenny by six,” Ainsley relented. “No problem. Maybe call a pizza, too? Delivery to your place?”
Pizza, the ultimate Prescott peace offering.
All I could say was, “Thanks. I’m hanging up now. Get back to work.”
“Do I rate your attention, yet, Ms. O’Hara?” Shayla drawled.
“Absolutely.” I stood to face her.
The conference call shouted, “O’Hara?”
I tapped the mute button. “Yeah?”
It was the voice of my New York production counterpart. “Are you going to up-link your story for everybody to preview?”
“No.”
“We’d really like to see it,” the shark from Dallas cooed.
“Oh well, in that case, hell no,” I said with a smile. Shayla can vouch for me.
There was a laugh or two and then someone started to argue about how the stories would be previewed and I was off the hook again, for half a second anyway.
“Sorry. This may go on a while.” I waved at the speakerphone. “Can we schedule something later? We could preview tomorrow before the up-link.”
She wasn’t fooled, but she wasn’t a time-wasting moron either. I was hired to do a job, and she’d been doing her job long enough to recognize when to stay out of the way. “Fine. I’d prefer to see what you do for us, before we talk anyway. So, ‘get back to work,’” she mimicked.
I shot her with my pointer finger and nodded.
That I could do.
6:09:16 p.m.
The sun was all the way down and it was really cold now. It hadn’t even been warm when she got out of the car. Jenny pressed farther under the cover of the bushes. She pulled her knees against her chest.
School was really far away. Home was probably closer. Maybe.
She’d lied. She really wasn’t all that sure where she was. Luckily, she’d gotten pretty good at waiting, giving herself time to figure things out.
If she went home, Aunt Maddy would ask her why she wasn’t at school. What could she say? She had to think of something. She had to have an answer. Something bad would happen if she didn’t think of a way to explain.
Her head hurt.
Everyone at school would be mad at her too, now. Worse than when she hid in the bathroom.
She was gonna be in trouble.
Now her stomach felt horrible, too.
Why was this happening? It was all wrong. She didn’t used to get in trouble. She used to believe she was a good kid. Her mom always said it-like every day.
But that couldn’t be true, could it? Because she was the same kid, and now she was always in trouble and everybody hated her. Being a good kid must be when other people thought you were good.
Grown-ups were so tricky.
Why did he do it? Why did he make everybody mad at her? She thought he was nice. He used to bring her stuff, like candy, and tell her mom to order her a pizza with plain cheese, nothing on it. He even gave her a piggyback ride to bed that one time and everyone laughed.
Jenny felt her nose tickle because of another drip. She looked for a dry spot on her jacket sleeve.
Stranger danger was such a joke. The people she knew were the scary ones.
Her fingers were getting stiff. Jenny tried to push them into the front pockets of her jeans to warm them up and touched the square of medicine tablets. She took it out and looked at it. It was exactly like the one that Tonya had. The thought gave her such a rush of guilt and excitement she stuffed it back in her pocket and shut her eyes.
What would it be like to feel no pain?
A tornado started whirling in her stomach. The inside of her throat got all thick and sticky. If she swallowed she might even vomit.
Her mother always told her to use the word vomit. Not puke or barf. Vomit was a medical word. People got sick sometimes; it was normal. People got hurt, too. And sometimes they needed medicine to get better. Her mother told her that, too.
What time was it? The sun hadn’t quite gone down, but it was so low in the sky the tall trees made it seem like night where she sat. She couldn’t even see lights from houses or anything, only trees and fences and road.
Nothing looked the same. A car passed her on the road, fast and loud.
Jenny pressed her forehead to her knees and folded her arms tight around her legs. She sniffed and rubbed her nose on her sleeve again. It burned.
She was in so much trouble she couldn’t even think what would come next. It was like trying to imagine fifth grade. Those kids had hardcover books and homework, like, every day.
How could she ever do it all by herself?
Jenny wiggled her fingers in her pocket and felt the medicine move under fingers.
What would it be like to feel no pain?
That part wasn’t so hard to imagine.
She could try to remember.
Or she could take some medicine.
6:14:46 p.m.
I was on Peg, so there was no hiding my arrival at the Jost farm. Older bikes, like the Super X, had very little covering around the engine and pipes. Peg roared.
I shut the engine down before I turned into the driveway. I left the bike propped on the far side of the road near the cow fence. Yes, Ainsley, I can be taught.
It was third-world dark out there. No street lights. No landscape highlighting. One window in the entire house showed a glow. Anywhere else in the state of Illinois, you’d think the family had gone out, leaving nothing but a kitchen light to guide their return.
In this house it was a sign someone must be home.
I knocked hard on the front door and called out, “Mr. Jost? It’s Maddy O’Hara.”
My metabolism rarely lets me cool down, but tonight my hands felt frozen stiff. I tried stamping my feet to throw off the nervy chill creeping up my back. I knocked again with the side of my fist, bam, bam, bam.
“Mr. Jost? It’s important. It’s about Rachel.”
His face appeared through the small square of window. The white skin around his eyes and the sharp profile of his nose was all I could see.
“What about my daughter?” he said.
“Open the door, Mr. Jost. I’m not going to talk to you through a door.” The ridiculousness of the situation took some of the edge off.
The door opened slowly. He wasn’t wearing his hat or his jacket. His suspenders followed the line of his chest to the forward hunch of an older man’s shoulders. He didn’t step back. Didn’t invite me in. He was being so obvious about it, I almost laughed. Why was I so afraid of this guy?
“Look, Mr. Jost. I thought you ought to know, your daughter came and spoke to me last Friday. She seemed pretty upset.” I didn’t like narcing on Rachel, but Ainsley was right. I’d feel better knowing that somebody understood how deep she was in. The only one I could think to tell was her father. “I thought you should know, she and Tom were still pretty close. She blames herself for his death.”
“What are you saying to me? What is this?” His voice was aggressive but his eyes winced with confusion. That wiry gray hair, ringing his head from skull to chin, had a life all its own.
“Help her.
She’s too young. Don’t let her blame herself.” I looked him in the eye and said it out loud-the thing he feared, the thing I feared. “You were more to blame than she was.”
He stared at me, silent.
I don’t know why I waited.
“I would do most anything for her,” he told me quietly. “For my daughter.”
“Talk to her. Let her talk to you. Did you and Tom fight before he died?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, no. Quietly, as if he were talking to himself or thought I couldn’t understand, he mumbled, “The sinning comes with knowing.”
“You think you can avoid the sin through ignorance?”
“The road is hard enough. Turn away. Be separate. That is the choice we make.”
“But once you know, what then?” He wouldn’t answer. His whole way of understanding the world made me hot. “Once Tom knew things that no one else around him knew, what could he do? Did he tell you what it was like to be a kid and watch the whole world dissolve or did you make him hold it in to protect your separateness?”
“Not so well enough,” the old man growled. “Oh ja, it came out, all right.” His accent gave the sarcasm an edge. “How could I keep him in this house with Rachel? I had to keep her safe.”
“You brought him here. You were the only father he knew.”
“My pride brought him here. That is my shame. And my error to put right.”
“So you sent Tom away. You banished him.”
Silently, the man who gave Tom Jost a name, shook his head. No.
I couldn’t believe he would deny it. He might not have said the words out loud, but Tom had known he wasn’t welcome. I lost it. Couldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t hear his side of it. I got furious and something clicked. “The sin comes with knowing.” The next thought was whispered. “You knew. You saw him standing there on those boxes. Alone. For how long? You watched him die, didn’t you?”
His eyes popped and his whiskers twitched all directions. Then he growled at me in non-English, stepped back and slammed the door in my face.
My phone rang about three seconds later. I was still standing there facing a closed door.
“What?”
“It’s Ainsley, Maddy. I’m at the school. You won’t believe this. They can’t find Jenny.”