Kindle Notes & Highlights
I am the reporter at the Castleford Herald-American who argues the most with our editor, which means said editor has more or less assigned Crazy Pete Sabatino and his conspiracy theories permanently to me.
"Right. That's where they're taking the children." When I don't say anything, he stresses, "Look, Sally, I've read about this, I've talked to people about it, and I've seen evidence. I know. I know." Crazy Pete has not always been this way. My neighbor, who used to take piano lessons right after Pete at Mrs. Fothergill's when they were young, said it was only after Pete turned sixteen and refused to play anything but "Tara's Theme" from Gone with the Wind—over and over and over—that people began to suspect he might be slipping a cog or two.
Michelle is an intern who will not dare object if Al cuts out all of the salient facts from her story since she'd do anything to get a job that has a paycheck attached. (It should be explained that the staff of the Castleford Herald-American is actually very good at reporting the news of our four-town area of two hundred thousand people—that is, as long as an unfavorable news story doesn't affect one of Al's fraternity brothers from Dartmouth or anyone serving on the executive golf committee at the Castleford Country Club.)
There's still even some old money in town, big money.
"What?" I finally answer, whipping around and nearly poking my eye out with a tree branch. It's the middle of a hot July afternoon and I am, at this point, tired and very cranky. We've been tramping around for hours, and to my knowledge, no Pulitzer Prize has ever been awarded to a journalist looking for ghosts and aliens.
"Help! Someone please help us!" a woman cries minutes later. "He-e-elp!" a child's voice screams in a dreadful high-pitched voice of terror. "He-e-elp!"
I dash over the rise, panting, and come upon three figures: a man doubled over on the ground, a woman jumping up and down beside him, and a child squatting on the ground next to the man, covering his eyes with his hands and screaming "Hee-elp!"
I smile. "I think you're going to be just fine, Corbett. That you are fine."
This has to be Verity Rhodes and Corbett Schroeder. She is the glamorous editor of Expectations magazine; he is the business tycoon enjoying his second or third marriage.
Everybody says Mother looks a lot like the actress Lee Remick used to: wide, startling blue eyes; honey-blond hair and a round face that seems to gain more cheekbones every year. Add a few inches, darken the hair slightly-actually, fade all of Mother's looks a shade or two-agitate her aura, and that's me. (My little brother, Rob, used to say that Mother is like Lee Remick in The Omen and I'm just like Damien, the evil offspring.)
"The editor of Expectations magazine and a corporate raider named Corbett," Mother says, looking up. She laughs. "Devon stopped by to pick some beans."
"Really," I say, following. Mother has never been without admirers over the years, but the poor guys (usually just divorced, just widowed or just awful, period) rarely got anywhere with her and gave up (or were, I suspect, quickly and politely dismissed). My friends always said not to worry, Mother would remarry when she was ready, but I still wonder. When I was younger, I figured she refrained from dating out of fear of ensuing violence from Rob and me, or because it was genuinely difficult to find a man who could stand up to my father's memory. Whatever, Mother didn't even go out on a date
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But attending a soiree with Mack—this Mack—was news. I had met him twice and this was maybe the tenth time she had mentioned him since. He had been widowed for about three years. He'd been a research physicist—with a Ph.D.—at Pratt Whitney for years, and now was teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown.
Doug has the same complaint. He says he doesn't know what is going on between us and he's in the relationship. I don't know what to say; I love him, but how much, I don't know. Enough to get married? I don't think so. But maybe. But maybe not.
My boyfriend—or as my mother says, beau—Doug Wrentham, is an assistant district attorney in the criminal courts of New Haven. This is important to know if only to understand that even when making an idle comment, Doug can make it sound very serious. And since we are about to arrive at Verity Rhodes's house, the editor of Expectations magazine, I'm hoping this is not a sign that he is itching to misbehave. He doesn't want to be here tonight. He could have gone to the Yankees game, and they're playing the Mariners tonight, his team of all teams.
So, here we are, on Saturday night, my Doug being a good sport and coming to dinner with me.
"Hello!" a voice hails back. It's a woman and she sounds Irish.
The last time I brushed elbows with people like this—people whose names were standard fare in the columns—was in Los Angeles, more specifically, Beverly Hills, when I worked at Boulevard magazine. The name of the magazine is a reference to Sunset Boulevard, which runs through Brentwood, Bel Air, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Boulevard is a high-gloss chronicle of high society in Los Angeles (i.e., anything or anybody with lots of money).
I definitely became the trusted servant at Boulevard. Once I was sent to deliver a Harry Winston diamond necklace and earrings to a photo shoot with Sharon Stone. Another time I was dispatched in a limo to find the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, in a Santa Monica boutique and deliver her to a party in Malibu. And then, by my third year, the big secret was out—Sally Harrington was the emergency rewrite person, the one who could make a publishable interview out of the worst garbled mess.
So by my fifth and final year at Boulevard, one could say I was jaded. Or sick, in the way one always is after eating a lot of sweets and little nutritious food. I wanted to be a journalist, but my skills and personality were making me a very successful "magazine person." There was a big difference.
The problem is, after writing for the newspaper these past couple of years, I've come to love straight journalism. The process feels entirely different. If my writing at Boulevard was like painting a picture to order, then my writing at the Herald-American is like printing a picture of a finished jigsaw puzzle, one whose five hundred pieces require that I first make the necessary connections between them before assembling the whole.
The gardens in back of the house are the kind I see in HG, elaborate and intricately designed, the way one expects the queen's private garden to be at Windsor Castle. Not even my mother's gardener friends who are retired have such gardens; the flowers here are far too expensive and impossible to maintain without strong men in regular attendance.
She must see the surprise in my expression, for she adds, "I have a man who comes to do the heavy labor, but I do the pruning, fertilizing and, believe it or not, most of the weeding. My gardens are why I could never be the editor of Vogue." She laughs, holding up her hands, showing short manicured nails. "I live for them. And for little Corbie, of course." I've been wondering to whom the Irish voice over the intercom belonged, and I find out when a young woman appears at my side with a tray of hors d'oeuvres. "Miss," she says to me with a slight curtsy.
The due diligence I have done on our hosts filled me in on Verity's rise from modest beginnings in the East End of London, her academic achievements as a scholarship student at a posh public school, the style and flair and brilliant editorial instincts she showed even at Cambridge, and then at her first job at Je Ne Sais Quais in Paris. I knew of Verity's vault to editor of Country Elegance in London, her discovery by magazine magnate Seymour Rubin, who brought her to New York to take the helm of the then-faltering Expectations. I read how she met Corbett Schroeder through Donald Trump and
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"What part of Ireland are you from, Meghan?" I take a stuffed mushroom from the tray.
"Since we last met—under such interesting circumstances," the editor continues with a sly wink, "I've had a chance to read quite a bit of your work. Your writing." I am surprised. "At the Herald-American?" "Yes," she says, nodding. "You're rather good, you know."
"At Boulevard?” "Yes. Actually, I talked to several people since it seems your immediate supervisor, the features editor, did not last long after you left."
She sips her wine and lofts one perfectly plucked eyebrow. "So how would you like to try your hand at writing a profile for Expectations?"
Good, you know who she is," Verity says. "Because that is whom I wish you to profile for Expectations."
Creep. "And, of course, your mother will be devastated." "She will not!" I protest. "She'll be relieved I'm living my life. She still thinks I'm hanging around here because I'm scared she'll get sick again."
Doug doesn't stay the night. By the time we reach my house I am far too excited about the profile for Expectations to do anything but start on it. So he drives me down the long gravel drive of Brackleton Farm & Stables, and then turns off onto the rutted dirt road that serves as my driveway. We wind deep into the woods, far from the main house, and emerge at a large clearing where my one-bedroom fieldstone carriage house stands.
I immediately head toward the comer of my living room that doubles as an office and turn on the computer. Then I go into the kitchen to start some coffee and pick up the phone to call a lawyer friend in California whose firm, I know, represents a lot of Los Angeles writers. Would he look over an agreement for me, for a piece in Expectations? Just make sure it was all right? I'd pay him of course.
I tell him he's a big-city jerk who's out of touch with America. What the hell does he mean the Joe Schmo Gazette? At least we report the news, not who is sleeping with animals or renting hookers like most of his clients do. I thank him and promise to fax the agreement as soon as I get it.
I find Cassy Cochran with very little problem. And I am somewhat startled by how beautiful she appears to be. It's the kind of beauty that usually demands a career in front of the camera, and I can see how a profile of her will work well in Expectations. She gives great face, as they say.
Three years later Cassy was lured over to the newly formed DBS group to build the network's national news division. Within six months she was named president of the entire network and, for all intents and purposes, proceeded to invent DBS. She built—and sold—DBS to the affiliates largely around a talk show, The Jessica Wright Show, and DBS News America Tonight with Alexandra Waring.
Well, that did it. I had turned down two offers already in hopes Doug would ask me, but he hadn't, and the idea that someone was going to have to fix me up was simply too much to bear. Doug, at that moment, was getting a soda out of the Coke machine and so I walked right over and tapped him on the shoulder. "Doug, will you take me to the homecoming dance? Because if you don't they're going to make me go with somebody else and I'd rather go with you."
"Really?" she said, openly surprised. "You and Doug?"
"I didn't even know you knew him," she confessed. (I suspected something then that would be confirmed months later, when Susie got loaded after graduation and cried on Doug's shoulder that she had always loved him.)
I was into LaLa Land big-time. My roommate was the daughter of a producer whose movie had made a hundred million dollars the summer before (she was hardly the postman's daughter, in other words) and her family simply loved me because, well, compared to Morning (I swear that was her name; can you imagine?), I knew how to behave and they knew their daughter. In other words, I started to move in a very fast, very rich crowd. But still, you know what? I never did more than kiss another boy (or man) for the duration of my relationship with Doug. I would say no to more than a few beers, violently
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And then we had our tenth high school reunion. I was told that Doug was not coming to the reunion so I made a point of going. The first person I saw was Susie the cheerleader, who was married and living in Cheshire. Her beautiful porcelain skin had already started cracking, no doubt in part due to the three children she had already given birth to. "You mean, Sally, you haven't heard?"
"How could you possibly be related to your mother?" he wants to know.
I hurry to the conference room on our end of the floor and luckily it is vacant. The TV there, as it always is, is tuned into CNN Headline News. I turn the VCR on, push the tape in and wait.
—My lawyer friend from L.A., confirming he has received the fax of the proposed agreement with Expectations.
He smiles slightly. "No, you call me, and we'll come get him." "Ah,” I say, and I think, Oh, Pete, what have you done?
Scotty goes romping outside and I quickly read the fax my lawyer friend has sent me back from L.A. The agreement with Expectations, he says, is fine as worded and far more generous than their standard contract. He wants to know who I'm sleeping with.
"My God, Sal," Doug's voice booms, "you found that body over in Castleford? Why didn't you call me?"
"Does anyone know who the victim is?" I ask absently. There is a pause and then he says, "What is the matter with you? You're supposed to be finding out who he is!"
"The biggest story of the year and you're focusing on some crap for Expectations?"
I look at him. "So Pete, you sent me out to the woods to meet with the big beefy guy who was chasing you?"
By five-thirty the next morning I have talked Crazy Pete into meeting one of New Haven's better criminal attorneys at the police station. In the meantime he has napped, eaten again and I have filed another story on the murder for the Herald-American, based on the more sensible things Pete has told me about the victim appearing at his house.
