Kindle Notes & Highlights
I shudder and gasp, shudder and gasp again, clenching my thighs, and then I shake, shake like I'm coming apart, and I make an urgent noise because I am shaking apart. And then I collapse and Spencer grabs me more firmly and moans the most guttural, primitive sound, and thrusts two, three more times—freezes—and then roars "Sally!" in my ear and collapses, holding on to me, gasping for breath.
Oh, my God. The guilt and fear twists deep into my stomach and I wonder how I could have done what I did last night. And then crept back here at four in the morning.
What have I done? How could I do it? But I remember why I did it— I remember how it felt, how I felt—and I cannot keep thinking like this because in a while I won't regret what I've done in the least, but will only want more of it.
I sit down on the bed with a funny feeling in my stomach. I open the envelope and slide out a small leather-covered book that has no title on it. I open it. The title page says 1904. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Thursday, 7:30 a.m. Dear Sally, I am so scared and yet so happy this morning I don't know what to do. I don't know why I'm giving you this small volume, except maybe because I love it and I want you to have it. You have given me a kind of joy and release I have never felt before. Spencer P.S. If you don't want to call me, I'll understand. (Not really, but it sounds like the right thing to say. Please call. I want to see you.)
It is the new DBS house-and-home show with Alicia Washington. Apparently the host, a very bright and attractive young black woman, knows nothing about keeping house, and so the show tackles everything from cooking to laundry to decorating to diapering a baby. It's doing surprisingly well considering it's up against ABC's All My Children.
I like her already. What can I say? From everything I've read, my conversations on the phone with her, and now meeting her in person, I simply like her. Of course, the journalist in me is screaming not to arrive at this decision because this is exactly what my subject no doubt has in mind—to disarm me from the first so I will take her side when it comes to the conflicting stories I will no doubt hear. For there are always conflicting stories about successful people.
"I was curious why you left Los Angeles," Cassy says. "From what I hear, you had started a very promising career at Boulevard."
She is politely managing to convey that her parents screwed her up, big-time, setting her up for future" difficult" relationships. She married young, to a man who would ultimately develop a terrible drinking problem like her father, and she eventually got sick and tired of reacting to his behavior and decided to change hers. She talks of the son she had with Michael Cochran, what a good boy he was and how, finally, years later her dream came true, her husband got sober. The only problem was that after two years of sobriety and twenty years of marriage, he left her.
"Lord, no!" Cassy nearly cries. "Mother was born unhappy. My uncle used to talk about my grandfather building her a tree house in hopes she'd move out." We laugh, but then she looks· vaguely horrified. "Oh, Sally, this isn't good. Please, you cannot—"
Alexandra Waring looks at me. "Expectations, right?" I nod. "Yes." The anchorwoman turns to Cassy as much as to say, Get rid of her.
"No, thank you." And in that moment I remember that my tape recorder's in there, still running. I suddenly feel a little cocky. Don't want me to know what you're talking about, eh? I sit there for quite a while, almost forty minutes. Then Alexandra Waring comes out, followed by the man named Will. She stops in front of me. "I apologize for being rude, but you're in news, so you understand." She breaks into a smile and it transforms her face. She is suddenly much softer, approachable. "At least I hope you understand."
We resume our places and I set the recorder back up on the table and Cassy starts talking about her philosophy of life, how one can change one's thinking and live life differently at any point, and how people, like her, have to. "I used to think the goal in life was to have everything stay the same," she says. "I've learned the hard way that life is about change. Not the essential goodness in us, that should be a constant, but our relationships, our work, our goals should always be in a state of change, be a work in progress—“ She shrugs "Otherwise we're dying, aren't we?" She looks at her
...more
I call the Herald-American and page Joe Bix. I am patched through to him. What Alexandra Waring told me is true. The murder weapon, Joe says, was found this morning in a sewer on Ralston Avenue. It's a handgun that was reported stolen in a burglary from a home in Southampton, Long Island, the year before.
Pang. "What does it matter?" "Yeah-yeah-yeah," he mutters. "What are you getting from your friend at Newsday?"
I consider this. "How about," I say, "I fax you a copy of the article at the same time I turn it in to Expectations?" She looks at me. "Just so you can correct the spelling with Verity and leave me out of it."
I think about this. What do I care? Actually, I should care a lot. If Verity found out I gave anybody an early copy, she'd hit the roof. Any editor would, because it would mean the subject could descend with a team of lawyers before the story ever got on the stands. The editors want the lawyers to descend after the issue is out, the more publicity then the better. So if I say I will do this, I could kiss goodbye any future assignments from Verity or anyone else.
"I see," Alexandra says, typing "Anthony Meyers, Riverhead, New York" into the search engine before hitting Enter. Within seconds the screen is covered with information. "Did you know he has a younger brother, John? And that there's a missing-person report on John in Tampa, Florida?"
A blinking line indicates breaking news, which is his murder; there is also a blinking cross-reference to his brother John. As Alexandra said, the Tampa Police Department has issued a missing-person report on John. I key into this. He was last seen four days ago in Tampa.
"Joe! Get this. There's a missing-person report in Tampa, Florida, for Tony Meyers's brother, John. He was last seen in Tampa the day before Tony got murdered." And then I go into details, moving on all the information I can remember from the database.
"Good point, Mother." When I get off with her, I reach for my pen and make a note. Maybe Johnny Meyers was in on the murder. But why? I saw on the computer yesterday that he's a builder in the Tampa area, nothing big, private homes, an independent contractor.
I realize he is referring to the Herald-American. "I'm impressed that a glamorous New York writer like yourself can still get around out here."
DBS Talk is headed by Denny Ladler, executive producer of The Jessica Wright Show. The division also includes the new Alicia Washington vehicle, Hopeless in the House, and a morning talk show originating from the West Coast.
"It's making money," she is quick to add. "But the bread and butter of the network remains DBS News America Tonight with Alexandra Waring, Monday through Friday at 9:00 p.m., followed nightly by The Jessica Wright Show, at 10:00 p.m. These two hours of programming are broadcast, in English, around the world over the Hargrave World Communications Network to eighty-three countries," Cassy says proudly.
She laughs. "Well, she is, as a matter of fact. But if you're number four or five in town, why not cover soccer? It's wildly popular with some demographic groups, so for that coverage we go to different sponsors. Trust me, Sally, if it doesn't work, if we can't make money, then we're not doing it. If we are, then you know it's working and we're making money." "But you don't have a Jerry Springer-type show." "No." "Why not?" She shrugs. "We don't want to." "But it would make money." "Not enough to get me to put it on the air!"
"Really?" I say, making a note. "Won't that make it rather difficult if you have to fire them someday?"
She is off and I hastily grab my tape recorder and try to catch up. She leads me downstairs into Studio A, where the sets for the news and now for Hopeless in the House are located; she takes me through Studio B, where The Jessica Wright Show is taped; we go into makeup, the Green Room, the staging areas.
"Into here? When?" Cassy says. "After our interview." I add, "You'll have to ask her about it."
"Hi, Marianne," Cassy says. "This is Sally Harrington, who's writing that article on me for Expectations."
"Well, hi there, gorgeous," a deep Southern drawl says, addressing Cassy. He moves around the bench to slide in beside her and places his arm around her shoulders. "What I want to know is, why the heck are you giving an interview to Schroeder's wife and not to one of my magazines?"
"Jack," Cassy says. "That's the real story, Sally Harrington," he says to me. "How Corbett got so rich. You should ask him how many people's work he's chopped up like firewood and sold by the roadside like it was just so much junk."
A pause. "Are you going to see him?" It hurts to hear that. It hurts because Doug doesn't deserve it and after two days Spencer's hardly in a position to lay claim over me.
I hear something that sounds close to panic. "Sally, you are going to see me when you come back."
I wish I could laugh, but I can't. Because something is obviously wrong with me. Why else would I be sitting here, thirty years old, telling a stranger that I've been having sex with for two days that I need to tell the man I know I love that something's wrong with our relationship?
"Buddy tells me you're writing an article for Expectations. That's so exciting!"
"Are you joking?" she asks me. "If I came home and found Scotty gone without a trace, do you think anyone in Castleford would have slept last night?"
I hear someone in the background on mother's end of the phone and I am stunned. I know it is Mack. He couldn't have stayed over last night, could he have? With Mother?
Phew. I don't think I can handle two loose women in our family. "So you're really going to build it?"
"So that's the Expectations writer," Alexandra's voice says, as if I am a new species of animal.
This gets a rise out of him. "Don't let him back into your house, Sally."
Insurance crosses my mind. My shoulders are aching and I am thinking about my father while I continue to work. He would be here. Though Castleford has a truly wonderful fire-fighting force of five companies, there is always the small-town backbone that brings everyone out to help in an emergency. In a way, I think, it's pathetic that we are using these sandbags. They are designed for floods. But it's what we're used to doing here, building walls out of sandbags, and I'm sure even if we're in the way, the firemen wouldn't dream of stopping us. I miss you, Daddy.
Which, of course, makes me wonder if perhaps there was something in the auto body that needed to be burned...
I'm not sure Joe has ever really gotten the local angle of the paper, that "local" means the people we know, and that our readers are hungry for news about them and that is the only edge we have over the Courant, the Register or the New York Times.
On the other hand, I am supposed to be going national writing for Expectations magazine, so why am I sitting here in a hometown bar, thinking I should be at the paper knocking out a firefighter story? Why do I want to spend time pursuing the solution to a local murder when I should be in New York working on my opportunity of a lifetime?
Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. Dry, bare-bones copy.
When I finally reach home, Scotty is glad to see me. Since I was too lazy to turn on the circuit breaker to turn the lights on in the ladies' room at the paper, I had used the facilities in the glow of the Exit sign. And so when I go into my bathroom and look into the mirror, I can't help but burst out laughing. I can't believe no one said anything to me. I look like a chimney sweep, a bad chimney sweep, who has destroyed her blouse, slacks and nails, to say nothing of giving her hair a complete filth makeover. I strip down and jump into the shower. Then I get out, put a towel around my head,
...more
I sigh. I don't know what to do. And I'm too tired to figure it out now. I walk through the kitchen to the back door to call Scotty. I need to feed him. He comes across the yard but then stops about three feet away, standing there, half smiling. He growls in play. He is tired of being ignored for days on end. I am your best boy, he is reminding me.
"I know a lot, Sally," he whispers. "Right," I mutter, directing him to a chair at my breakfast table. I am not in the mood for this.
"Listen to me," I say, swinging around and putting my hand on my hip, "I know you know a lot of things, Pete, but I don't think you know anything about this murder. I think some people thought you did, but it's not George Bush and the Masons and the aliens!"
"Barbara Walters. Diane Sawyer. Henry Kissinger. Dan Rather. Peter Jennings. Tom Brokaw. But the other organization the inner circle uses is the Trilateral Commission. And when a man belongs to two or more of these groups, you know he is at the top of the chain, the closest to the inner circle you can get. George Bush is all three, a Mason, CFR and TLC. Bill Clinton is in all three, too."
