Chapter One
HER NAME WAS ASHLEY SINCLAIR. IF IT SOUNDS FAKE, THAT'S because it is; her real name was Dolores Strunk. My Spanish isn't very good, but even I know that "Dolores" means "pain," which hardly makes for a promising start. Not that changing it did her much good. Becoming Ashley, after all, didn't stop Dolores from dying at nineteen.
But back in October, before her body was found smack in the center of downtown Gabriel, no one was in the mood to think about anything that depressing. It had been an astoundingly hot fall, nearly eighty degrees every day, and nobody was ready to admit it wasn't summer anymore. The municipal pool had been kept open an extra month by order of the mayor, a card-carrying socialist who knows the will of the masses when he sees it. Even the engineering grinds up at Benson University weren't taking school too seriously, and over at Bessler College-an academically flaccid place to begin with-the powers-that-be were threatening to cancel the whole semester if the kids didn't stop sunbathing and come to class. And down in the city of Gabriel, the body politic was preoccupied with precisely two things: global warming and homegrown tomatoes.
You wouldn't think the local paper could get much mileage out of those topics, but you'd be wrong; there was a picture of either a scruffy-bearded master gardener or a pointy-headed meteorologist staring out of the Gabriel Monitor just about every morning. And unfortunately for me, a fair number of those stories had my byline on them.
The reason for all the weather coverage was simple: there was nothing else to write about. After a summer that was voted "Worst Ever" in the annual Monitor readers poll-not because of the rain so much as the escapades of the city's own serial killer, now retired-the fall was shaping up to be positively moribund. And although I wouldn't have admitted it in public, that was fine by me.
It did, however, mean that our daily editorial staff meetings were the journalistic equivalent of raw tofu: dull and extremely tasteless. There are few things more dangerous than a bored reporter, and the stories we tossed around the city editor's office just to stay awake weren't the sort of thing you'd want in a family paper. The most wholesome among them-and one that actually ended up in print-was a feature story on the She-Wolf Sweat Lodge by my friend Jake Madison, the paper's science writer. Apparently, spending three hours in a steaming hot tent with eleven naked women wasn't quite as tasty as it sounded; by the time he got back he was soaking wet, pink as a radish, and demanding combat pay.
"You've got no idea what those chicks do in there," he was still saying three days later. "I mean, they've got this huge ..."
"Christ, I know," I said. "How many times you gonna tell it?"
"Come on, Bernier. This is my manhood we're talking about." He leaned back against the wall, making the Truman-era radiator we were sitting on tilt forward and groan. "I'm never gonna be the same."
"There's a tragedy."
"They called me phallocentric. Can you believe that shit?"
"Shocking."
"Yeah, and they were the ones with this huge wooden-" "Would the two of you please shut up?" This from Bill, our esteemed city editor. "I mean it, Madison. If you don't quit bitching about that place, I swear I'm sending you back. You wanted it, you got it."
"But nobody told me they'd-"
"Don't piss me off." Bill jammed a chopstick into his lo mein, offering vague threats of impalement. "I'm this close to giving you another feature on the Rainbow Peace Camp. Come on, people. Whatcha got for me?"
There were five of us crammed into Bill's cubicle for yet another excruciating edit meeting. This time, though, the mood was less than jovial; we were under orders from the managing editor to come up with something interesting or else. As usual, Bill was leaning back in an ancient swivel chair with his feet propped up on a stack of press releases. Marshall, the business reporter, had snagged the only other chair in the office; Lillian, who's covered schools for one paper or another since my mother was in first grade, had rolled her ergonomic throne over from her desk and was perched in the doorway in the hopes of a quick exit. Having arrived last, Mad and I got stuck on the radiator, which, despite the heat, was presently blowing rusty air up our bottoms.
"So what you got for me?" Bill said again. We stared at the carpet en masse. "Come on, gimme a break. Marshall?"
"I'm workin' on a thing 'bout that new store on the Green," he said in his Dixie drawl. "Little biz profile."
"Economic growth. Great. Publisher'll eat it up. What store is it again?"
"You don't wanna know."
"Not another damn aromatherapy place-" Marshall joined us in the carpet-staring. "Jesus, what's this one called?"
"Er ... 'Centered Scents.'"
"Spike it. Oh, Christ, who am I kidding? It'll probably end up on page one. Gimme a sidebar on the Gabriel aromatherapy boom. Come to think of it, it's probably time to do the damn F.P. again."
Marshall looked like he wanted to fall on Bill's chop-stick. The F.P. (or as it's known in the newsroom, the "F.U.") stands for Finger on the Pulse, a regular feature instigated by our publisher last spring to impress the ladies at the Rotary Club. It consists of a map of each storefront in downtown Gabriel, color-coded according to what kind of business it has, plus a forty-inch story on the state of the local economy. The last time they had to put it together, Marshall and the graphic artist made a pact to jump in the gorge if it ever ran again.
"Don't know why I didn't think of it before," Bill was saying. "F.P. it is. Feel free to get the hell out of here and start working on it." Marshall got up to leave, and before I could make a move Mad beat me to the empty chair. "Lillian?"
"Well.... It's Girl Scout cookie time again." She had the good grace to look mortified. "I thought, um, perhaps I might trot out the 'pint-sized entrepreneur' angle."
He opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. "Fine. Find the brat who broke the record last year and follow her around."
"That was my general intention."
"Give the photo request to Wendell. He loves that kiddie crap. Okay, be gone. Madison?"
"Nanofab guys up at Benson are making itty-bitty computer chips."
"You did that last week."
"Yeah, well, now they're even smaller."
"Next."
"Plant sci builds a better broccoli. No?" He unrolled a tube of press releases from the Benson news service. "How about rice breeding? Here's something ... 'millet, the wonder grain.' Oh, and the pomology guys are releasing a new apple."
Bill dropped his feet to the floor and just managed to catch his head in his hands before it hit the desk. Then he made a sort of groaning noise. "Oh, Christ, package 'em and get out of here." Mad had almost made good his escape when Bill opened an eye. "Wait. They name the apple yet?"
Mad looked at him warily. "What difference does it make?"
"Grab a shooter and do a walk-and-talk."
"On what?"
"On what people think they should call the goddamn apple."
"No way."
"It's called a sidebar."
"You gotta be-"
"The walk-and-talk or the peace camp. Up to you." Mad bolted, leaving me alone without even bothering to look sorry about it. I decided it was time to stage a diversion. "So when are we getting a new cop reporter, anyway?"
Bill's head fell back into his hands, harder than you'd think would be good for him. "Damned if I know."
Our last cop reporter, a sweet Midwestern kid who'd fled at the first sign of homicide, had been gone since early last summer. So far, all attempts to replace him had flopped-and the cop beat was rotating among Marshall, Mad, and myself. "What's the deal?" "Never mind."
"Come on."
"Don't worry about it. We'll get somebody sooner or later."
"Curiosity is the hallmark of my profession."
He snorted, which didn't sound like a compliment. "How about giving me something to run in the goddamn newspaper?"
"You mean, like, tomorrow?" I was in danger of being throttled. "Okay, um...." I shuffled through my own meager stack of press releases. "Women's group up at Benson is having a pumpkin-carving contest. 'Great heroines of feminism.'"
"And?"
"You know, you gotta carve a pumpkin that looks like Betty Friedan."
"That's not hard. When's it happening?"
"Next week."
Again with the awful groaning noise. "You're not helping me."
"Well ... there's supposed to be another rally to save the Starlight Theatre."
He perked up, but cautiously. "Next week?"
"This afternoon."
"Cover it." I didn't move. "What's the problem?"
"Do you remember how many people showed up to their last rally?"
"Fifty?"
"Try two."
"Alex, you're killing me here."
"Hey, it's not my fault the whole town's on Prozac." He looked as though he could use some himself. "Okay, how about something on the new exhibit at Historic Gabriel?" I waggled a piece of paper at him. "It's called, um, 'Tunneling into the Past: Nineteenth-Century Manhole Covers as Objects of.... '"
"Skip it. Next?"
"Well, City Hall's putting in a new voice-mail system. You know, 'Punch one for the mayor, punch two to register as domestic partners, punch three to-'"
"Enough. Just go to the goddamn rally."
"But ... "
"Spin it as a roundup of landmark buildings downtown. Maybe get one of those preservationist loons to rank them in order of historical importance."
"That sucks."
"Might as well do a sidebar on the manhole covers while you're at it. Not that I'm going to be around here tomorrow anyway."
"Huh?"
"When the boss hears what page one looks like, she's gonna fire my ass. Maybe everybody else's too."
With that, he invited me to get the hell out of his office and went back to taking his aggressions out on his lo mein. I wandered around the newsroom looking for sympathy, but everybody had phones stuck to their ears. That left me no choice but to actually do some work, so I called the historical society to get a few comments on the goddamn manhole exhibit, which I'd been half hoping would turn out to be a practical joke; no such luck. I wrote it up-including a quote about how the objects in question weren't just sewer covers but also "place-conscious historic signifiers"-and decided I'd earned my lunch. I dragged Mad away from his story on transgenic broccoli long enough for a couple of pitas on the Gabriel Green, the city's much-loved (and entirely paved) pedestrian mall.
"What time's this protest of yours?" Mad was saying through a mouthful of hummus.
I swiped at the tahini dripping down his chin. "They ought to be parading around any second now."
"Then I'm outta here."
"Come on, keep me company. There's probably going to be all of five of them anyway."
"What kind of loser gets all hepped up over some rotting old building?"
I took another bite of my falafel. "Bored professors' wives, mostly. One of them's married to the head of chemistry."
"Sissy Dillingham?"
"You got it."
"Man, she's a piece of work."
"Didn't you have your manly way with her one time?" He shoved me with a tahini-covered hand, smearing the stuff all over the sleeve of my leather jacket. "Piss off, Bernier. I did not bang the woman. What I said was she grabbed my ass at the chem department Christmas party. I never said I took her up on it. Jesus, I've never been that drunk. Give me some credit."
"You don't even have an ass anyway. There's nothing there to grab."
"Yeah, well, she was so crocked on Sambuca she didn't notice. Lucky for me, she probably doesn't even remember it."
"Actually, she asks after you every damn time I see her."
"And she's going to be at this thing?"
"Probably."
He shot up so fast his paper plate went spinning across the Green like a Frisbee. "I am definitely out of here."
"I thought you wanted fro-yo. I'm buying."
"Raincheck," he said, and hustled his nonexistent butt toward the paper.
I went into Schultz's Deli and got a chocolate-and-vanilla twist cone from their newly installed frozen yogurt machine; since I talked them into buying it I feel a moral duty to partake at least once a day. I licked my way out of the store and returned to perch on the edge of the Green's fountain, which has been turned off ever since an environmentalist shackled himself to it during a mid-eighties drought.
The so-called Save Our Starlight rally was scheduled for one o'clock. It was already five after, and nobody had shown up. There was still no action by the time I polished off my wafer cone, so I fished the press release out of my backpack just to make sure I hadn't gotten the day wrong or something. But there it was, complete with yet another obnoxious acronym from the Gabriel protest set. The headline screamed "S.O.S.!!!!!!" in two-hundred-point type; underneath, it said, "Rally to Save Our Starlight, one P.M. Wednesday, the Gabriel Green." Right place, right time, no protesters.
I stuck around for another fifteen minutes; obviously, this rally had lured even fewer people than the last one-two fewer, to be exact. I was on my way back to the newsroom when it occurred to me that, given Bill's frame of mind, returning empty-handed was probably not a good idea. I muttered some nasty words loud enough for an aromatherapy-shopping matron to tell me to watch my language, then dug out the press release again. There were two contact names at the top of it: Cynthia (a.k.a. Sissy) Dillingham, who lived up in the posh professorial enclave of Benson Heights; and Barry Marsh, a retired banking type who served as head of the Gabriel Arts Coalition. Marsh and his arts group had been dragged into the Starlight thing by his wife, a former ballerina who ran a perennially failing dance school and just happened to be Sissy Dillingham's best friend.
I decided to drop by his office, just so I'd have something to defend myself with when Bill read me the riot act. Despite the fancy name, the Arts Coalition is headquartered in all of two rooms on the fifth floor of the Walden County Savings Bank building, where Marsh used to work. Since the bank is in the center of the Green, I was practically standing in front of it anyway.
Walden County Savings is housed on the first two floors of a six-story granite building with offices above. The elevator is constantly out of order, so I hoofed it up four flights of stairs, then walked down a narrow hall past a string of doors with names of lawyers and accountants stenciled on milky glass; Perry Mason would feel right at home. The lights were on inside the Arts Coalition office, and since "PLEASE COME IN" was painted right on the door I didn't bother to knock.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Fourth Wallby Beth Saulnier Copyright © 2005 by Beth Saulnier. Excerpted by permission.
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