Bubbles Ablaze (9 page)

Mr. Salvo sighed. “What I want, Yablonsky, is two more
editors on the night desk. As it is, it's just me and Griffin tonight to handle three school board meetings and a profile that's as thick as mud on the mayoral candidates. I'll be damned if I have to unravel some overly complicated forty-inch saga you call in to Cora at the last minute.”

I was silent. Fuming.

“Besides,” he added, “Thursday is poker night. I missed last week and I told the guys I'd get there by eleven.”

I spoke evenly into the phone. “Okay. So I was trapped in a mine, nearly blown up, and I don't get to write anything about that because you have to play cards.”

“You can write a first-person account of the experience. Six inches only. We'll box it and run it as a column next to the AP story. Esmeralda Greene's a seasoned reporter. I'm sure her piece will be as airtight as all her stuff is.”

Air wasn't all that was tight in Esmeralda Greene.

“Don't be too disappointed, Bubbles.” Mr. Salvo's tone softened. “Just bring your notes and those documents your cousin supposedly has to the newsroom next week and we'll go over them together. See if there's credible material. Then we'll present them to Dix Notch and hear what he has to say. That way we won't encounter the same legal problems we came across when you wrote that Metzger story. As you know, if we get sued again, I'm out of a job. This time for good.”

That Metzger story was only the most riveting piece of journalism the
News-Times
had run since it uncovered the ten most dangerous intersections in Lehigh the year before. And it wasn't my fault that Mr. Salvo's job security was sketchy. That he had brought on himself.

Still, seeing as how preppy managing editor Dix Notch was my sworn enemy, I didn't hold out hope that he'd be game to give me another go at investigative reporting. Even if this time I did have notes.

Already I was scheming. “Did you say Cora was on rewrite tonight?”

“Good old Careless Cora. So speak slowly and clearly. Otherwise she'll just screw it up.”

Perfect.

Roxanne didn't realize the wealth hidden in her guest room undies drawer. Stinky, ever the meticulous geek, had retained every letter and memo on the subject of McMullen's coal robbing. There were two maps that he must have copied and sent to his superiors showing where coal had actually been removed. Since the maps were intended for those without degrees in geographical cartography from Carnegie Mellon, even I could understand them.

I was right. McMullen Coal had been violating federal and state regulations by entering the Number Nine mine and digging into the Dead Zone, possibly by as much as two-hundred-and-fifty feet. Stinky wrote in the letters that, although it was not his job to determine why the company had done this, he speculated that perhaps McMullen Coal did not want to wade through the lengthy regulatory process to receive approval to lift the mining ban. A process, he noted, that could take as long as ten years.

At the bottom, hidden underneath a collection of pink phone slips, was a letter to Stinky from Craig Sommerville of the State Bureau of Deep Mine Safety. It opened with Sommerville commenting on their long working relationship and his professional respect for Stinky, whom he called Carl, of course. He went on to thank Stinky for the letters and maps, which he had forwarded to his colleagues on the federal side. He added that he was planning on making a surprise state inspection of the Number Nine mine. This week.

Pay dirt. I dialed the number on the letterhead and got Craig on the second ring. Even though he was only a state bureaucrat, I was so excited to get hold of him he might as well have been Eddie Van Zandt. It was like a journalist's fairy tale come true.

I identified myself as a reporter and told him that I had his
letter in my hand, along with other documentation collected by Stinky indicating that McMullen had been—I stopped myself from using the inflammatory words “robbing coal.”

“. . . had extended its digging beyond the area of its permits.” There. That sounded innocuous enough.

Sommerville didn't say anything. I heard him flipping through a Rolodex. “Here's the number for our public relations department—”

I was prepared for this dismissal. “The public relations department will tell me that they can't comment, which won't help Carl Koolball. I just returned from a press conference where Hugh McMullen himself publicly described Carl as a loose cannon who was a danger to other employees and a likely murder suspect.”

“Jesus Christ.” Sommerville sounded genuinely shocked. “I had no idea.”

I waited. Please, oh please talk. Say anything.

“Write this down,” Sommerville said, new determination in his voice. “Carl Koolball is one of the most thorough engineers I've worked with in my twenty-two years on the job. He considers the safety of the miners and the environmental consequences of mining above all. I spoke to him the day before Bud Price's murder and he seemed perfectly reasonable to me.”

It wasn't getting me what I needed. “To convince my editors that Carl's concerns about the, uhm, overextension are valid, it would help if you could, as a state inspector, validate them. Of course, if you haven't visited the Number Nine—.”

“I made a state inspection yesterday,” he said. “And I have the violation letter in my computer. McMullen Coal Inc. faces at least one hundred thousand dollars in state fines alone and a possible shutdown for digging three hundred feet into the so-called Dead Zone. I can fax you a copy if you want.”

“You can do that?”

“I've apprised all the owners by telephone, why not? It's public record.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Hold on.” I called over to Roxanne, who was smoking a cigarette and flipping through
Woman's World
. “You know of a fax machine anywhere?”

“Down at the stationery store.” Roxy checked her watch. “But you better hurry. They close at five.” She looked up the phone number, wrote it down and slid it to me.

I got back on and gave him the number. “We've got twenty minutes.”

“Will do,” Craig said. “By the way. You running this tomorrow?”

I told him I was, though the paper didn't know it yet.

Sommerville laughed. “Bubbles Yablonsky, huh? That's a name I won't soon forget. More ways than one, I expect.”

A half hour later I had a copy of Sommerville's letter and a call in to McMullen Coal. As the company had closed at five, no one was available to speak with me. So I left a message for head honcho Hugh McMullen at The Inn in nearby Glen Ellen, a ritzy tourist town about thirty miles away. Roxanne had taken a stab that he might be there and she was right. Then again, did she expect him to be staying at the Red Roof?

Once I identified myself as a reporter, the inn's front desk clerk went icy cold.

“Don't you want to leave a message for Chrissy Price, too? Reporters have been calling all day for her.”

“She's there?”

“Yes. But she won't talk to you. She's not taking any calls from the press.”

Then why did he bring up her name?

“Put my name down, anyway, why dontcha,” I said. “I'm feeling lucky.”

As it turned out, I was anything but.

C
ora Rittenhouse answered the phone like I'd roused her from a deep sleep. “Rewrite,” she droned. I pictured Cora at her
News-Times
desk—one hand in the bag of microwave popcorn, one hand on the keyboard and both eyes on the muted TV. One spongy brain on permanent vacation.

“Hi, it's me, Bubbles,” I said with enough energy to be contagious. “I've got two stories for you. A six inch and a twenty-five.”

“Ugh. You correspondents. So verbose,” Cora said. “Give me the twenty-fiver first. Slug?”

The slug was what appeared in the night editor's computerized directory to identify a story. Had Mr. Salvo given me permission to write what I wanted, it would have been slugged something like McMullen.doc or coal.doc. Instead I slugged it—

“PMS.” That should slip the attention of the average male editor.

“Huh?” Cora's fingers were tapping away on the other end. “You writing for the women's pages now?”

“Hmmm. Not quite. Ready?”

“Guess so.”

I slowly and carefully read my story about how Stinky had been fired after persistently urging McMullen Coal to draw its maps correctly and how Hugh McMullen had then publicly painted him as a lunatic the day after a state inspector visited the Number Nine mine at Stinky's urging. It was good. At the last minute I'd managed to contact a United Mine Workers spokesman who provided a scathing quote about McMullen Coal Inc. being comfortable with putting miners' lives at risk just to avoid the tedium of regulation.

“Doesn't sound like it has much to do with PMS to me,” Cora said when I was done.

“You ever meet an angry coal mining union boss?”

“See what you mean. What's the next story?”

The next story was the wimpy personal account of being trapped in the mine explosion. It was slugged coalmine.doc. As I read it over to Cora, Mama was in the next room shouting out incorrect answers to
Jeopardy!
—her “intellectual” moment of the day.

“What is toilet tissue?” screamed Mama, as though Alec Trebek could hear her.

“I'm sorry,” Alec said. “The correct answer is, What is the capital of Tunisia?”

“Damn. Close, though.”

Cora finished and I said good-bye and thanks. She asked if I wanted to speak to Mr. Salvo, but I said I needed to get my mother and her friend down to the Pocono Passion Peak Resort by their bedtime.

“Whatever flips their switch,” she said. “Not my bag, but if that's what your mother and her friend are into, it's cool.”

I hung up and turned to find Mama slipping into her black leather jacket. “I sure hope they got a decent bath at the Passion Peak,” she said. “My bunions need a good soak after being in these boots all day.”

Genevieve was right behind her, reloading the peashooter with refreshed Sominex darts.

“You're not bringing that, are you?” I said.

“Civilians,” she snorted. “Always convinced they're out of range.” She tucked the peashooter in her purse and pulled out a quarter. “Hey, I can use this in the auto massage at the Passion Peak. My back sure is sore after dragging your Stiletto around.”

It was going to be a long, long night.

The first thing I did upon arriving at our scarlet suite at the Passion Peak was to put in a call to Jane. No luck. Since an
inexplicable twist of genetics had rendered it impossible for me to comprehend how to check my messages on the answering machine remotely, I couldn't tell if she had left one.

I called Dan and Wendy, too, but they were out. I'd forgotten. Thursday night was their weekly marriage encounter session, which, as far as I could determine, required Dan to apologize to Wendy for forty-five minutes straight. Fine by me.

Still, I was worried about my daughter. It was not like her not to call. Jane's hair may be multicolored, her clothes tattered and grungy, but she was the most upfront, smart and loving kid around. She had never fallen into that snotty teenage girl routine. Personally, I had my doubts about whether most girls did—contrary to what TV would have you believe.

“Now what kind of bathtub is this, Genny?” Mama said, surveying the human-size champagne glass Jacuzzi. “How am I supposed to get in that?”

“Ladder.” Genevieve lay on the bed, her mounded belly jiggling like a Jell-O centerpiece. “I could get used to this. It's orthopedic.”

“Ortho-obscene is more like it.” Mama cocked her chin at me. “This what Stiletto and you do in your spare time, Bubbles?”

We should be so lucky. I tried home again with no luck. “Where's Jane? I haven't spoken to her since jail.”

“Wonder how many mothers get to say that?” Mama asked, stripping off her black leather and turning on the tub. “Well, here goes nothing.”

Three hours later, Mama and Genevieve were sacked out on the red bed, while I, fully dressed, tossed and turned on the couch, constantly checking the digital clock and trying not to fall asleep. At eleven-fifteen I snuck out of the room and ran downstairs to the pay phone where I put in a toll-free call to the
News-Times
night desk.

“Griffin,” answered Bob Griffin, the assistant night editor.

“Hi, this is Bubbles. Is Mr. Salvo there still?”

“Just left. But he edited your story. It's fine.”

I paused for effect. “Story? Don't you mean
stories?
I filed two. A personal account of being trapped in the mine and a twenty-five inch piece on violations against McMullen Coal.”

“Two? We don't even have space for twenty-five inches. Yours is supposed to run as a sidebar to the AP piece.”

“I don't think so. It's supposed to run in place of the AP piece. Check the directory. I called it in around seven-thirty.”

I waited nervously while Griffin checked the directory. “All that's here that's not edited is something slugged PMS. Careless Cora must have sent it to the wrong cue. I'll bounce it over to lifestyle.”

“Why don't you open it just to make sure?” I tried to sound efficient.

Griffin opened it and read. “Yup. Guess that looks like your story. Geesh. That Cora. I'm gonna go over and ream her out. This is inexcusable.”

“Don't do that, Bob. She probably has PMS and it was on her mind. Unless, of course, you'd like to listen to her cry about cramps and bloating and—”

“No, no, no. That's okay,” he said quickly. “So, back to this story. Salvo wanted to run it in place of the AP, you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

He sighed. “Okay. Christ I wish he'd drop poker night. I'm all alone here. You know, one of these Thursdays something bad is gonna happen, some story's gonna get past me that's not supposed to, and I'm gonna get the flak.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “Tonight is not one of those nights. Trust me. This story is supposed to be in tomorrow's paper.”

As I predicted, the phone began ringing shortly after 7
A
.
M
. I lay on the foldout and let it, wagering mentally on who was calling. Mr. Salvo? Dix Notch? Stiletto? Unlikely since he had been up until all hours, probably, partying with Esmeralda Greene. Or maybe—

I snatched up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hey, Mom. Guess what?”

Jane.

“Where were you last night?” I said. “I called and called and there was no answer.”

“Oh, it was sooo cool. You know Professor Tallow who's teaching my Local Celtic History course at Lehigh? The one who's leading the dig we've been working on?”

No. But that was okay. Jane didn't wait for my answer.

“He wore this head-to-toe shroud like a real Druid and led a midnight moonlight vigil around the rocks we found in the woods. It was awesome.”

“Rocks?”

“Yeah. They're ancient Celtic. Baal and all that.”

I didn't know what to say. It sounded
Star Trek
-ese.

“Like Stonehenge,” Jane added.

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I just wanted to ask if I can go back to the dig this morning. I have a couple of classes at Liberty High, gym and Latin, but I'm already through the Ovid due for next month, so is it okay if I miss them?”

Jane was most likely the only senior at Liberty who asked her mother if it was okay to skip school—and not to head over to the Delaware Water Gap or smoke pot behind the Hill to Hill, either.

“Fine by me. Anybody call this morning about my story?”

“That's how come I woke up so early. Salvo and that moron Notch called around five. Notch was bitching so loud I couldn't even make out what he was saying, so you must have done something right.”

I rubbed my forehead. God, I hoped the risk I took was worth it. I'd never live with myself if Griffin, Cora and Salvo lost their jobs over this.

“There was one guy who phoned to say he really liked it, though.”

“There was?” I sat up straight.

“Yeah, although he said you missed a really crucial point.”

I despise nitpickers. “What crucial point?”

“I don't know. He said he's gonna stop by later this morning to explain it to you. But he doesn't want you to tell cousin Roxanne that, since he's in hiding.”

I rolled off the couch. “Ohmigod. Stinky.”