by Julie Kramer
My cell phone rang. It was Malik calling. I rushed back to my office before picking up.
“How bad was I?” he asked.
“Pretty bad.” Then I pretended to believe he had thrown the live shot on purpose to end one-man bands and return us to our specialized skills and the newsroom to normal. “But I know you did it for me.”
He rejected the out I was giving him. “No, I didn’t, Riley. I froze. Over the years, I’ve seen reporters freeze going live. And that’s what happened to me.” He drew a deep breath of discouragement. “I’m through with reporting.”
I urged him not to make any sudden decisions. That all he needed was some more training and he’d nail a live shot with the best of us. I reminded him live TV was unpredictable, and a poor appraisal of reporting skill.
“No matter how good you are, Malik, you can have a bad live shot. No matter how bad you are, you can have a good one.”
Then he told me Bryce had texted him to return to the station immediately.
“Malik, you need to point out to him you’ve never received adequate training for a live shot.”
I wished for the glass walls back so I could watch how their discussion went down. My answer came from Malik’s hunched shoulders as he left the news director’s office. At least Bryce didn’t tear his head off like the Amish doll sitting on my desk.
I offered to take Malik out for a comrade drink, but going home where people loved him sounded a whole lot better than being with someone who reminded him of his job.
Home had no particular appeal for me, though, so when I saw Nicole just finishing her shift, I invited her out for a drink and she eagerly accepted.
CHAPTER 41
I’d been trying to avoid my boss lately. And apparently I wasn’t alone.
Nicole and I headed across the street to Brit’s Pub. We were too late for the regular happy hour and too early for the late happy hour. So we both ordered fish-and-chips and a beer. I got an ale, she a lager. I tried to put the calories out of my mind.
I didn’t normally have much time for gal-pal socializing. But I rationalized that this was work-related.
I asked Nicole how she was enjoying the Channel 3 newsroom. Her story was unusual. She’d accepted an entry-level reporting job from Noreen a week before the shoot-out. So she’d never actually worked for the boss who hired her. Instead, Bryce was her taskmaster.
“It’ll be up to him whether I make probation or not,” Nicole said.
“At least he hasn’t made you be a one-man band.”
“I told him I’d give it a try. I have some experience shooting my own video because I come from a smaller market. But he says they will get around to me eventually.”
“Lucky you.”
“I’m worried. That makes me think he’s going to dump me.”
“No. You’re safe because you’re cheap. He’d like to hire more of you. I’m expensive, but he can’t dump me because I’m under contract. So he’s doing everything he can to make me quit.”
She seemed to mull over my words. “What kind of things is he doing?”
“Well, you’ve seen how he’s thrown me out on stories without a photographer and without any camera training. My next job review will score something like ‘fails to meet expectations.’ This is all about getting rid of the high-salary people.”
“Is he doing anything else?” She asked the question like the answer really mattered. Not just small talk.
I weighed just how far I wanted to take our conversation. After all, she and I had sort of just met. I was a senior reporter, she a rookie. But, at the same time, newswomen need to stick together.
“He’s a little more touchy-feely than I like in a news director,” I said.
Relief swept across her face. “Me too.”
Sexual harassment used to be a bigger problem in the early days of women in news. There was still talk about an old cameraman who used to crank the air conditioning in the news cruisers to better see women reporters’ nipples. He was long retired, but I always wore a jacket on the job, just in case. Men were supposed to know better now.
Over the next ten minutes we developed a plan to try to alert each other if Bryce ordered either of us to come to his office. We’d text a * to the other as the signal.
“Then we’ll interrupt the other’s meeting,” I said. “The goal is that neither of us is ever alone with him.”
“Let’s leave his office door open, too,” Nicole said.
“Right, if he wants the door shut he has to say so. Even better, make him shut it himself.”
A lot could go wrong, and probably would. But it seemed worth trying.
Lacking the energy to cry myself to sleep that night, I reminded myself that the average news director’s tenure was only eighteen months. I breathed slowly and deeply into my pillow, repeating over and over, “I can outlast this jerk.”
The only flaw in that logic: my contract was up in a year.
CHAPTER 42
As if deep in a cloudy dream, a voice sounded familiar. A couple seconds passed before I realized my cell phone was ringing, and Michelle Kueppers was on the other end. The clock read just past three in the morning. Unless Josh was missing again, I wasn’t sure I needed to have this conversation now.
“Sorry to wake you.” Michelle explained that she and her husband had just had an online video chat. “You said you’d like to talk to him, and he doesn’t get too many chances to call. He’s game if you are.”
That news woke me in a hurry. “What’s the time difference between us and him?”
“Nine hours.”
She gave me the website and user name as I scrambled for my laptop. Within minutes the three of us were staring at me through video boxes on my computer monitor.
Michelle handled the Internet introductions. She looked stunning, even on low resolution. Because she’d set up this cyberdate, she had time to prepare. Blush, mascara, a low-cut shirt with enough cleavage to make a man homesick. She also mentioned that Josh and his father had schmoozed a few minutes earlier about school and sports before Josh had crawled back to bed.
Brian Kueppers seemed understandably uncomfortable. Me, I looked like I’d just woken up. I’d have preferred the talk was just between Brian and me, so I could be more candid. But I conceded that without Michelle present, he might not say a word. Agreeing to talk to me might be his way of convincing her that he had nothing to hide.
“What’s the temperature in the desert these days?” I didn’t ask for specifics of where he was stationed, because I knew military guys were closemouthed about location.
“About a hundred degrees,” he replied.
I also wished I’d had some notice so I could have recorded our exchange. But maybe they figured ambushing me gave them the interview advantage.
“Tell her what you told the police,” his wife said.
I waited to see if he would, glad that Michelle had brought up that awkward issue about law enforcement, but feeling like the whole thing seemed staged.
“I don’t know anything about this body Josh found,” he said.
True or not, I had a hunch the cops might want more than just his declaration. “Why do you think they’re looking at you?”
“I’m not taking it personally,” he said. “We’ve all got jobs to do. This is just a case of simple elimination. I’m doing everything I can to cooperate.”
“Like what?”
“Like a DNA test.”
That was the last thing I expected him to say. “When are they taking your sample?”
“Hours ago. Now we wait.”
My gut told me anyone with enough confidence to volunteer their DNA must be innocent. But then Michelle started talking about how the whole case against her husband was a pile of coincidences.
And I remembered that I don’t believe in coincidences.
“You’re talking about the location of the body being near your farm, right? And Brian not having an alibi for Sarah’s time of death, right?”
“Right,” she answered. “And us being at the Amish store earlier that day.”
“You were at Everything Amish the day she was killed? Both of you?” I hoped my voice didn’t reflect my incredulity.
“Yes, that’s where Brian bought my going-away present. The entryway table you admired at my house.”
I recalled running my hand over the graceful piece of furniture.
While talking to Brian was a coup, Michelle’s bombshell was bigger. When Josh finished his work with the forensic artist, and Michelle first saw the sketch of Sarah, she sensed something about the dead girl’s face that seemed familiar.
“Like maybe we’d met. Then when I heard on the news that she’d worked at the Amish store, I realized she’d waited on us.”
“You met Sarah Yoder just before she died?”
“Strange, huh?” Michelle said. “That’s probably the biggest coincidence of all.”
During this dialogue, Brian stayed quiet.
During the brief time Sarah worked at Everything Amish, investigators ran all the credit numbers for purchases. So Brian’s name popped up on two lists connected to the murder victim: as a customer and as a property owner. And he also had a police file indicating that he had a temper and might be capable of violence.
I was beginning to better understand why the cops were looking at him.
I decided ending the questions for now was the best interview strategy. We were all on good terms, and I wanted to keep things that way. So I thanked him for fitting me in his overseas schedule and asked him to keep in touch regarding the results of the DNA test. Then we all signed off.
I don’t know how soon sleep came to Michelle, but once again, every time I closed my eyes, Sarah’s face popped up and robbed me of any rest.
CHAPTER 43
A few hours later, another phone call woke me. This time it was my mom, calling to say that a local billboard had been defaced. “Everyone around here’s talking about it, Riley.”
Trying to be nice, I clarified that unless the vandals had scrawled neo-Nazi propaganda over a red, white, and blue billboard supporting our troops, minor vandalism just wasn’t major-market news.
Bryce would go ballistic if I even pitched such a story. He would probably write up a note for my personnel file, using this as an example of my poor news judgment.
“Nobody wrote anything on the billboard,” Mom said. “They just painted over it.”
“What do you mean?”
She explained that a large billboard had gone up outside Harmony a couple days earlier with the Sarah sketch, a headline reading “Call Fillmore County Sheriff’s Office with information about Sarah Yoder’s murder,” and the phone number.
“And someone painted over it?” I asked. “Why?”
“Talk is the Amish did it because they didn’t want her face up there for everyone to see,” she said.
“They don’t like pictures,” I heard my dad yell in the background, trying to be helpful. “So they gave it a good whitewashing.”
The theory made sense. Especially after meeting the rest of Sarah’s family.
If I could pick one Yoder to spend some alone time with, I’d go for Sarah’s younger sister. Out of the mouths of babes. Hannah seemed curious about her sister’s fate, perhaps not old enough to have bought into the “God’s Will” philosophy of her mother. She might even have seen or heard something that made her uneasy, that she needed to share with someone.
But such an encounter seemed unlikely. It’s not like I could dial a number and hope a little girl answered the phone. These were Amish.
Yet our paths had crossed twice. Perhaps the third time could be the charm.
• • •
The news staff was settling down for the morning huddle. Word on the Minneapolis blaze was that a kitchen grease fire destroyed two popular dining spots as well as a shopping complex.
“The fact that restaurants burned down is more interesting than residential homes,” Bryce said. “Viewers only care if it’s their house. Or maybe their neighbor’s. But thousands of people probably dined at those places. Everybody cares about food.”
He got no arguments from any of us on that theory.
“We need to be airing more food stories,” he continued. “Within the next week I want everyone here to suggest a story about food. Some we’ll air immediately, some we’ll hold till next month’s sweeps.”
“Food news or food features?” I asked.
“Just food,” he said. “I’ll know it when I hear it.”
I had no objection to covering the food beat. That’s the kind of research underpaid journalists love. Before I became recognizable, the newspaper food critic used to let me tag along during her reviews.
We were back to discussing further coverage of the restaurant fire when Ozzie yelled over from the assignment desk that he had a live one. “The bear’s been collared!”
Apparently the southern Minnesota bear was being tracked, not just by hunters but by scientists. A private donor—curious about bears moving out of forested areas into farmland—was funding research to learn how animals adapted to new habitat.
A researcher from the Bear Center had hit the animal with a tranquilizer gun and banded its neck with a radio collar. No details on the location would be forthcoming because they didn’t want to give clues to hunters.
Especially since today was the last day of hunting season.
Ozzie printed out an emailed photo of a large black bear sporting colorful streamers around its head. Awfully darn cute. He sort of looked like a circus bear, except for trees in the background instead of trapezes.
“They’re naming the bear Walden,” he said, “meaning ‘from the woods.’”
“ ‘Walden’ sounds adorable,” I said. “Any hunter who shoots him is going to get death threats.”
We discussed how naming animals personalizes them for the public. Bryce told me I owned the bear beat and better deliver a follow-up story.
“You know there’s no chance I’m going to get any video of this bear,” I said. “Especially doing the camera work myself. You realize that, right?”
“I dislike such a negative attitude, Riley,” Bryce said. “I’m seeing that in story after story. You were certain you wouldn’t find a photo of the Amish woman, and you didn’t. Now you’re convinced you won’t find the bear. Try thinking positive.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer him. So I merely nodded my head, to show I got his message. And deep down I started worrying maybe he was right about me and negative energy.
Then I decided not to let him beat me down. Maybe he needed a message.
“Speaking of Sarah Yoder,” I said, “and I like to use murder victims’ names to personalize them—well, there’s been some interesting developments in that case.”
I explained about the vandalized billboard and the apparent feud going on between the Yoder family and the law.
“Plus, Sarah was being shunned.”
That announcement brought a round of questions ranging from “what” to “why.” Bryce was the only one not talking over everyone else at the news table. I pretended not to notice he was caught in a management sulk.
“Sarah had turned away from the Amish so the Amish were turning away from her,” I said. “Whether her departure from the community relates to her murder, we don’t know.”
“I’d sure like to know,” Nicole said. “And I bet viewers would, too.”
I smiled at her for the support. She was taking a risk, backing me.
A couple of the producers also seemed interested in the story. As the new boss, Bryce was in a management pickle. Without control, he’d lose respect. But if he dismissed an intriguing story, he might lose more respect.
I needed to give him an out. “I realize my top priority has to be this bear. That’s the story I need to come back with. But how about if the opportunity is there, I poke around on Sarah’s homicide?”
He opted for public peace. “As long as you unde
rstand your primary assignment.”
But when I asked if a photographer could come with me to help with all the ping-pong driving, Bryce shook his head. “Those resources are needed here on other stories within our viewing area.”
I had hoped Malik and I might team up in the field again, but I also grasped that Bryce needed to slap a firm “no” my way as a warning to the rest of the staff to fear him.
CHAPTER 44
A fatal accident on the highway between the Twin Cities and Rochester changed our news plans. Lanes were closed and traffic backed up just south of Cannon Falls, the same stretch where I’d encountered the near miss the other night.
Walden the bear was put on hold. So was Sarah Yoder.
Talk of turning the highway into a freeway came up every time a motorist died. But lawmakers insisted no money existed for such a permanent solution. Dead people can’t (or at least aren’t supposed to) vote. So driving south on that road was like a round of roulette.
The state was experimenting with high-tech signs at the intersection to alert drivers when it was safe to cross, but elevation differences in the lanes created blind spots.
The accident happened within the designated market area—the magic circle of news—so Channel 3 cared enough about the story to send a satellite truck and photographer to join me for a live shot.
((ANCHOR CU))
TWO VEHICLES CRASHED AT ONE
OF THE STATE’S MOST PERILOUS
INTERSECTIONS JUST SOUTH OF
THE TWIN CITIES. NOW A WOMAN
IS DEAD AND A FAMILY INJURED.
RILEY SPARTZ IS STANDING BY AT
THE SCENE.
((RILEY LIVE))
MORE THAN A HUNDRED
ACCIDENTS HAVE OCCURRED AT
THIS SAME LOCATION BEHIND ME
IN THE LAST DECADE.
((NAT SOT))
RESIDENTS WANT ACTION BUT THE
STATE HAS NO MONEY BEYOND
PUTTING UP WARNING SIGNS.
((RESIDENT SOT))
THOSE OF US WHO LIVE AROUND