by Diana Palmer
She waved him off to New York soon after they landed in Chicago, and caught a cab back to her apartment. The sense of loneliness that washed over her was nothing new. She felt alone every time she walked away from Jacob. She wanted him, so badly. Would it be very wrong to have an affair?
Her father’s harsh recriminations came back on cue. That kind of woman, he’d raged, his daughter wasn’t going to become. He was going to make sure of it. And he’d harped on permissiveness, on the ills of modern society, on the terror of unwanted children, until he’d poisoned Kate’s young mind. When she and Tom were in high school and went to live with Grandmother Walker, there was no free will left. Kate often wondered what her life would have been like if only her mother hadn’t left. Her mother had been like Jacob’s, according to her father. Her father had often sworn that Kate wasn’t really his child, anyway, but she and Tom looked so much alike that Kate tried not to think too hard about it. That part of her life was over, anyway. Looking back would only bring more nightmares.
As she got into bed, drowsy with weariness, she wondered if Tom had been right, and Jacob really had wanted her for years. She flushed with the memory of that long, speaking look he’d drawn over her body. Yes, he did seem to want her now. And she wanted him, wanted the union, the total belonging of being in his arms with nothing between them.
She turned into her pillow, burning with new desires. If only Jacob had believed her about that misunderstanding… But on the other hand, mightn’t knowing the truth turn him off completely? If Tom was right, and Jacob preferred sophisticated women, wouldn’t he be likely to walk away from Kate if he knew she was a virgin?
On that troubling thought, she closed her eyes and slept.
Chapter 3
The brief vacation from work seemed vaguely unreal to Kate once she was back at her desk at the Chicago daily newspaper where she worked. And, as usual, everything was in a virtual frenzy of confusion.
Dan Harvey, the city editor, was the only man functioning at full capacity. There was an unwritten law somewhere that city editors didn’t fall victim to insanity. Kate often wondered if that was because they caused it.
Harvey presided over the newsroom, and he managed story assignments as if it were delicate choreography. In the hierarchy of the newsroom, there was a state news editor who dealt with breaking stories outside the city and worked with the few stringers, or correspondents, the paper maintained outside the city proper. There was a feature editor, a wire services editor, a society editor, just to name a few, with all of them—Harvey included—under the watchful eye of the managing editor, Morgan Winthrop. Winthrop was a veteran reporter himself, who’d worked his way up the ranks to his present position. Next to the editor in chief, James Harris, and the publisher, Winthrop was top man in the paper’s power structure.
At the moment, Kate was under Harvey’s gimlet eye while she finished the last, grueling paragraph in a rapidly unfolding political story about a local alderman who’d skyrocketed to fame by spending a week in a local neighborhood besieged by crime.
It was just hard to think with a tall, bald man standing over her, glancing pointedly at his watch and tapping his foot. She hoped he’d get bunions, but he probably caused those, too.
“Okay.” She breathed a sigh of relief and showed him the screen on the terminal.
“Scroll it,” he instructed, and began to read the monitor from his vantage point above her left shoulder as she started the scrolling command. Since the word processor screen would only show a portion of the whole story, this command was used to move each line up so that another appeared at the bottom until the end. Harvey pursed his lips, mumbled something, nodded, mumbled something else.
“Okay, do it,” he said tersely and left her sitting there without a tiny word of praise.
“Thanks, Kate, you did a great job,” she told herself as she entered the story into the memory of the computer. “You’re a terrific reporter, we love you here, we’d never let you go even if it meant giving you a ten-thousand-dollar raise.”
“Kate’s getting a ten-thousand-dollar raise,” Dorie Blake yelled across the bustling city room to Harvey. “Can I have one, too?”
“Society editors don’t get raises,” he returned with dry humor, and didn’t even look over his shoulder. “You get paid off by attending weddings.”
“What?” Dorie shot back.
“Wedding cake. Punch. Hors d’oeuvres. You get fed as a fringe benefit.”
Dorie stuck out her tongue.
“Juvenile, juvenile,” Harvey murmured, and went into his office and closed the door.
“Tell Mr. Winthrop that Harvey goosed you behind the copy machine,” Bud Schuman suggested on his way to the water fountain, his head as bald as Harvey’s, his posture slightly stooped, his glasses taped at one ear.
Dorie glared at him. “Bud, they took out the Linotype machine ten years ago. And our managing editor doesn’t listen to sob stories. He’s too busy trying to make sure the paper shows a profit.”
“Did they take out the copy machine?” he asked vaguely. “No wonder I don’t have anyplace to leave my files…”
“Honest to God, one day he’ll lose his car just by not noticing where he parked it.” The older woman shook her red head.
“He’s still the best police reporter we have,” Kate reminded her. “Twenty-five years at it. Why, he took me to lunch one day and told me about a white-slavery racket that the police broke up here. They were actually selling girls—”
“I should be lucky enough to be sold to Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Dorie sighed, smiling dreamily.
“With your luck, they’d sell you to a restaurant, where you’d spend your twilight years washing plates that had contained barbecued ribs,” Bud murmured as he walked back past them.
“Sadist!” Dorie wailed.
“I’ve got three committee meetings, and then I have a news conference downtown.” Kate shook her head, searching for her camera. “Alderman James is at it again.” She grinned. “He’s just finished his week in the combat zone and is going to tell us all how to solve the problem. With any luck, I’ll get the story and have it phoned in to rewrite in time to eat supper at a respectable hour.”
“Do you think he’s really got answers, or is he just doing some politicking under the watchful eye of the press?” Dorie asked.
Kate pursed her lips. “I think he cares. He dragged me out of a meeting at city hall and enlisted me to help a black family in that ward when their checks ran out. You remember, I did a story on them—it was a simple computer error, but they were in desperate straits and sick…”
“I remember, all right.” Dorie smiled at her. “You’re the only person I know who could walk down back alleys at night in that neighborhood without being bothered. The residents would kill anybody who touched you.”
“That’s why I love reporting,” Kate said quietly. “We can do a lot of harm, or we can do a lot of good.” She winked. “I’d rather help feed the hungry than grandstand for a reputation. See you.” She slung the shoulder strap of the camera over her shoulder, hitched up her little laptop computer in its plastic carrying case, and started off. She could use the computer for the committee meetings and even the alderman’s breaking story. She had a modem at home, so when she fed the notes into it, she could just patch them into the newspaper from the comfort of her living room. It certainly did beat having to find a phone and pant bare facts to someone on the rewrite desk.
Unfortunately for Kate, the little computer broke down at the last committee meeting, just before she was to cover the alderman’s speech. She cursed modern science until she ran out of breath as she crawled through rush-hour traffic toward city hall. There was no time to go by the paper and get a spare computer; she’d just have to take notes by hand. Great, she muttered, remembering that she didn’t have a spare scrap of paper in her purse or one stubby pencil!
She found some old bank envelopes under the car seat while she was stuck
in traffic and folded them, stuffing them into the jacket of her safari pantsuit. It was chic but comfortable, and set off her nice tan. With it, she was wearing sneakers that helped her move quickly on crowded streets. She’d learned a long time ago that reporting was easier on the feet when they had a little cushioning underneath.
As she drove her small Volkswagen down back streets to city hall, she wondered if Jacob had been in town and had tried to get her but failed, since she’d been working late. She’d been so excited about that remark he’d made that she’d been crazy enough to invest in a telephone answering machine, but she knew many people would hang up rather than leave a message. She spent her free time sitting next to the telephone, staring out the window at the street below. And when she wasn’t doing that, she haunted her mailbox for letters with a South Dakota postmark.
It was insane, she kept telling herself. He’d only been teasing. He hadn’t really meant it. That reasoning might have convinced her except that Jacob never teased.
He had to mean it. And all her brother’s well-intentioned arguments and warnings would go right out the window if Jacob ever knocked on her door. She’d follow him into burning coals if he asked her to, walk over a carpet of snakes… anything, because the hunger for him had grown to such monumental proportions over the long, empty years. She loved him. Anything he wanted, he could have.
She was curious about his feelings. Tom had said that Jacob didn’t know what he felt for Kate. But Jacob wanted her, all right. Her innocence didn’t keep her from seeing the desire in his dark eyes. It was what would happen if she made love with him that puzzled her. Would he be flattered when he knew she was a virgin? Would he even know it? They said only doctors could really tell. But he was a very experienced man—would he know?
She parked in the municipal parking lot, glancing ruefully at all the dents on the fenders of her small orange VW Beetle. They were visible in the light from the street lamps.
“Poor little thing,” she said sympathetically, glaring at the big cars that surrounded it. “Don’t worry, someday I’ll save up enough to get your fenders smoothed out.”
Someday. Maybe when she was ninety… Reporting, while an exciting job, was hardly the best-paid profession in the world. It exerted maximum wear and tear on nerves, emotions and body, and salary never compensated for the inevitable overtime. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and nowhere near as glamorous as television seemed to make it.
What was glamorous, she wondered as she made her way up to the alderman’s offices, about covering a story on an addition to the city’s sewer system? One of the meetings she’d just come from had dealt with that fascinating subject.
Alderman Barkley H. James was talking to people as reporters crowded in. People from print and broadcast media had begun setting up, most of them wearing the bland, faintly bored look that seemed to hallmark the profession. It wasn’t really boredom, it was repetition. Most of these reporters were veterans, and they’d seen and heard it all. They were hard, because they had to be. That didn’t mean they were devoid of emotion—just that they’d learned to pretend they didn’t have it.
She slid into a seat beside Roger Dean, a reporter on a local weekly. Roger was nearer forty than thirty, a daily reporter who’d “retired” to a weekly. “Here we are again,” she murmured as she checked the lighting in the office and made corrections to the settings on her 35-mm camera. “I saw you yesterday at the solid-waste-management meeting, didn’t I?”
“It was a foul job, but somebody had to do it,” Roger said with theatrical fervor. He glanced at her from his superior height. “Why do they always send you to those meetings?”
“When it comes to issues like sanitary-disposal sites, everybody else hides in the bathroom until Harvey picks a victim.”
He shuddered. “I once covered a sanitary-landfill-site public meeting. People had guns. Knives. They yelled.”
“I have survived two of those,” she said with a smug grin. “At the first, there was a knock-down-drag-out fight. At the second, one man tried to throw another one out a window. I was jostled and shoved, and I still think someone pinched me in a very unpleasant way.”
The alderman interrupted the conversation as he began to speak. He told of mass unemployment, of poverty beyond anyone’s expectations. He told of living conditions that were intolerable, children playing in buildings that should have been torn down years before. Slums, he told his audience, were out of place in the twentieth century. The mayor had started the ball rolling with his excellent program of revitalization, Alderman James said. Following the mayor’s example, he vowed to continue the program in this crime-stricken neighborhood.
He’d interested a group of businessmen in funding a mass renovation of the neighborhood, citing figures that showed a drop in crime corresponding directly to the upgrading of slums. He threw statistics at them rapid-fire, and outlined the plan.
When he was through, there was the usual sprint by reporters to call in stories to the rewrite desk on newspapers or to anchor people at radio and television stations. This was the culmination of a story they’d all been following closely for the past week, and that made the alderman’s disclosures good copy.
Kate was almost knocked down in the stampede. She managed to find a quiet corner to phone the office and give them the gist of the speech so that they’d have time to get it set up for the next edition.
She collapsed back against the wall when she was through, watching Roger come toward her slowly as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
“I thought you had a computer,” he said.
She glared at him. “I did. It broke. I hate machines, not to mention you weekly reporters,” she muttered. “No wild dash to file your story, no gallop back to your desk to do sidebars…”
“Ah, the calm and quiet life,” he agreed with a grin. “Actually, they say weekly reporting kills more people than daily reporting. You don’t have to write up your copy then proof it again and do corrections and make up ads and answer the phone and do jobwork in the print shop behind the office and sell office supplies and take subscriptions—”
“Stop!”
He shrugged. “Just letting you know how lucky you are.” He put his pen back into his shirt pocket. “Well, I’m off. Nice to see you again, Kate.”
“Same here.”
He glanced at her with a faint smile. “I could find time to work you in if you’d like to have dinner with me.”
She was tempted. She almost said yes. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of Prince Charming, but she liked him and it would have been nice to talk over the frustrations of her job. “Come on, I’ll buy you pizza.”
She loved that. But when she thought about the unwashed dishes and unvacuumed floors and untidy bed at her apartment, her chores were too much to walk away from.
“Thanks, but I’ve got a mess at home that I’ve got to get cleaned up. Rain check?” she asked and smiled at him.
“I’d start rain for a smile like that,” he said with a chuckle. “Okay. See you, pretty girl.”
He winked and walked off. She stared after him, wondering how anyone in her right mind could turn down a free meal. She made her way out of the building, her thoughts full of the broken computer and of how much information from the meeting would be lost for the follow-up story she had to turn in tomorrow. Well, fortunately, she could always call and talk to the committee members. She knew them and they wouldn’t mind going over the figures for her. People in political circles were some of the nicest she’d ever known.
She drove back to her apartment thinking about the new lease on life that crime-ridden neighborhood was going to get. The story she’d done for the alderman had concerned a black family of six who’d been removed from the welfare rolls without a single explanation. The father had lost his job due to layoffs, the wife had had to have a mastectomy, there were four children, all barely school age.
The father had tried to call and ask why the checks weren’t coming, but the social worker
s had been pressed for time. Someone had put him on hold, and then he’d gone through a negative-sounding woman who’d informed him that the government didn’t make mistakes; if he’d been dropped from the rolls, there was a good reason. So when Kate went to do the story, the first thing she did was to call the social agency to ask about the situation. A sympathetic social worker did some checking and dug into the case, refusing to accept the superficial information she was given. Minutes later, she called Kate back to report that a computer foul-up was responsible. The family had been confused with another family that had been found guilty of welfare violations. The error had been corrected, and now the small family was getting the temporary help it needed. That, and a lot more, because Kate’s story had aroused public interest. Several prominent families had made quick contributions, and the family had been spared a grueling ordeal. But the story had haunted Kate. Society was creating more problems than it was solving. The world, Kate philosophized, was just getting too big and impersonal.
She parked her car in the basement of her apartment building and checked to make sure her can of Mace was within reach. It gave Kate a feeling of security when she had to go out at night. She lived in an apartment building that had a security system, but all the same, crime was everywhere.
It had been a long day. She wanted nothing more than to lie down after a hot bath and just read herself into a stupor. Even with all the difficulties, though, she had a feeling of accomplishment, of contributing something. God bless politicians who cared, and Chicago seemed to be blessed with a lot of them. She wondered if the other reporters who’d been following the story were as pleased as she was.
The elevator was sluggish, as usual. She hit the panel and finally it began the slow upward crawl to the fourth floor. She got off, ambling slowly to her door. She felt ancient.
The phone was ringing, and she listened numbly until she realized that she’d forgotten to turn the answering machine on. She unlocked the door and grabbed the receiver on the fourth ring.