“You’re right,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”
“Listen, it isn’t fair, dumping you into this with hardly any guidance. Do you want me to put a call in to Richard? See if he can handle some of this from home?”
I felt a wave of panic. I did not want the story being taken away from me. That couldn’t happen. “No,” I said, and perhaps too vehemently. “I can absolutely handle it. I want to.”
“Good, then.” Luckily, Erik sounded impressed instead of troubled. “And, Molly, I know better than anyone what it’s like to try to reinvent yourself. Hang in there. You know, one day at a time.”
“Thank you. That’s good advice.” It was, and so why did it make me feel so ashamed?
“We’ll go with your basic announcement online for now and include an update after your exclusive. That’ll be fine,” he said, and more gentle than I’d ever heard him sound. “As soon as you have that first piece, email it to me. I’ll post it right away.”
“That sounds great,” I said. Then I waited for him to close off the conversation. But there was only a long silence, followed by some odd rustling. I wondered whether he had dropped the phone or forgotten I was still there. “Hello?” I asked.
“Yep, I’m here,” he said abruptly, as if trying to hide whatever he was doing on the other end. Was someone there with him? I hoped not a woman or a purveyor of liquor. What kind of emergency was this? “I’ll brainstorm some questions for Steve and send them your way. Use them or not, it’s your story. But I’ve found with high-stakes interviews, it helps to have twice as many questions as you’ll need.”
“Yes, any suggestions would be great.”
“No problem,” Erik said. “Believe it or not, I do remember what it was like starting out in this game. It’s a steep learning curve, but it’s mercifully short.”
After I’d written a quick piece for online posting—two sentences about the body; there was virtually nothing to say—I had enough time before my meeting with Steve to do a little online research into crime rates in Ridgedale, background for the longer print article I was formulating in my head.
I was surprised by the amount of minor crime in Ridgedale—simple assaults, automobile thefts, robberies—but there had been only two murders in the past twenty years. Esther Gleason had shot her elderly husband in apparent self-defense, and an ex-convict from Staten Island had been killed in an off-campus student apartment, a Ritalin deal gone wrong. It was in reading about the second case that I came across the mention of another death, this one accidental, near the Essex Bridge.
Simon Barton was a high school student who’d died when he tripped and fell during a high school graduation party just south of the Essex Bridge. Now there were four dead bodies in twenty years, and half of them had been found in the same spot? Simon Barton, I wrote at the top of my pad.
My phone buzzed with a text. Package delivered, Justin had written. She’s more than fine, I promise. Now get back to work.
I was looking at my phone when the door to the office swung open. When I looked up, Stella was standing in the doorway in a short white tennis skirt and matching fitted sweatshirt. Her dark brown hair was in a high ponytail, and her regal face—strong jaw, long elegant nose—looked beautiful, as usual.
Stella strode into the office, pausing to eye the darkness. She stepped back toward the panel of switches for the overhead lights, flicking them on all at once with a hard swipe of her palm. “Why the hell are you sitting here in the dark?”
Stella was more flamboyant than my friends typically were, but she was exactly what I needed these days: someone to forcibly drag me out when I said I’d rather stay home, someone to make me talk when I was convinced I couldn’t breathe a word. We’d known each other since Justin and I had moved to Ridgedale in August, not even a year. But it felt like we’d been friends much longer.
“Oh, I guess I forgot to turn on the lights. What are you doing here, Stella?”
“I saw Justin at drop-off. He seemed stressed.”
I shrugged. “He can’t miss class.”
“He said that you got called in on some big story. Then I was driving by—because now I have to go to Target to buy a stupid purple sweatsuit—and I saw your car. Thought I’d try to get you to come to The Very Hungry Caterpillar with me. You know how I hate to face the mommy brigade alone.” She looked over at the papers covering my desk. “Not happening, is it?”
“Can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have an interview in half an hour.”
“All right, I won’t stay and distract you.” But instead of heading for the door, she started fishing through the pencils in the cup on my desk, sorting out the dull ones, discarding one that was missing an eraser. “Provided you tell me what the big story is.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“You know, people used to trust me to keep secrets worth millions.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Discretion is one of my strengths.”
Though Stella loved to gossip, so far, she had seemed to know better when anything important was involved. I’d trusted her enough to tell her about the baby, my depression, even what had sent me to Dr. Zomer. She’d handled all those confidences respectfully, with a comforting nonchalance: Hey, we’re all crazy, honey.
“They found a body up by the Essex Bridge, a baby,” I said. “But, Stella, you really can’t tell anyone about it until my story is posted. The police will kill me.”
“Oh my God.” Stella’s eyes got instantly huge. She teared up as she clasped a hand over her open mouth. “That’s horrible.”
“I know,” I said, feeling a little thrown by the intensity of her response. But had I really expected her to make it less bad by laughing it off? A dead baby was a dead baby, even when you’d never had one of your own. “It’s completely awful.”