Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) (6 page)

A few more questions and I had the basic details I needed: The time the first alarm came in, the age of the house, the number of units responding. The inn’s wide yard made the chance of the conflagration spreading to the adjoining historic district buildings small, so those residents hadn’t been evacuated from their homes.

With my pen, I pointed to the group of people beneath the tree. “Who are they?” I asked.

“Those are the guests who were staying at the bed and breakfast. There were smoke detectors, so everyone got out safely. The Red Cross will be putting them up for the rest of the night at a hotel, but I don’t know where they go after that,” Jones said. He pointed to the woman. “That’s the owner over there, Susan Jepson. I don’t know if she’ll talk to you or not.”

“Thanks.” I stepped over the web of fire hoses crisscrossing the ground and headed toward the guests.

“Charisma!”

I turned to see Gary McGinnis striding briskly across the blocked street toward me. His khaki jacket flared open as he walked, exposing his shoulder holster and the badge on his belt.

A tall, bearded man, one of the guests huddled beneath the tree, turned sharply my direction. Feeling the flow of the situation, the adrenaline of getting the story, I ignored it. I had an unusual name, after all.

“What’s up, chief?” I asked.

“I’m glad I caught you here. I didn’t even try to call you at the paper—I figured you’d be here,” he said. “We’ve got a homicide.”

“Shit,” I said. I gestured toward the fire scene. “I have to get this story right now. Can I get a couple interviews and then get back to you?”

The chief grimaced. “This is pretty high profile. You guys will want to have it first, before I send a release to the other media.”

‘Other media’ meant our competition, the television stations and newspapers in nearby Collitstown and sometimes, Cincinnati. I’d learned quickly that while in the past, I may have shared stories across different types of media—the new word was “platform”— here in Jubilant Falls, I was back to the old style of journalism where we competed head to head on every story with other out-of-town newspapers and television stations. It was a cardinal sin to have another news organization beat us on a story.

My insides quivered. I’d handled multiple stories at once before, but that had been a long time ago.
What would Addison do or say? What if I couldn’t do it? What if I lost my job?

Behind me, spectators yelled as more flames exploded through the roof.

“Pull back! Pull back!” I heard Jones call through a bullhorn. Without thinking, I yanked my camera back up and started shooting again.

“I can’t leave here right now,” I said decisively. “This scene is too volatile and I don’t think I ought to leave.”

“Don’t worry—I understand. I’ll call Addison,” McGinnis said, resting his hand on his service revolver.

He turned and left; as he did, the tall bearded man stepped from the group of guests and extended his hand.

“Charisma Prentiss? I’m Dr. Leland Huffinger. I left a message on your phone earlier today.”

I stepped back as if his words were poison, seeing familiarity in his face: It was the man who had done a double take at my appearance at the corner earlier today.

“I’m not who you think I am. My name is Charisma Lemarnier,” I said. I flipped a page on my notebook, defensively firing questions at him as I began to write. “Are you a guest here at the Inn?”

“Yes I am.”

“When did you notice there was a fire?”

“The smoke detectors went off and the owner, Mrs. Jepson, came upstairs to make sure we evacuated with our belongings. I wanted to ask you about—”

“Did you happen to smell smoke? See any flames?”

“Um, no. Charisma Prentiss was married to the French journalist Jean Paul Lemarnier. A suicide bomber killed him. I think you’re his widow, the wire service reporter who no one has seen since a big story she wrote was found to be incorrect.”

“That so?” I looked down at my notebook, staring at my hand and willing it not to shake as I wrote. “What brings you to Jubilant Falls?”

“I’m doing research on some of journalism’s more well-known falls from grace. Charisma Prentiss’s story was the first one I thought of.”

Tears welled up in my eyes and I blinked them back. “That so?” I repeated without looking up. In my former life, I would have punched him.

“Yes. I’d like to sit down with you and talk about your experiences sometime.”

“Again, Dr. Huffinger, I’m not who you think I am. My husband died in a car crash, along with my parents. I was injured, but I am not, nor have I ever been, who you think I am. Excuse me, I have a story to complete.”

I turned on my heel, put on a brave face and walked back toward Mrs. Jepson. Maybe, as her world was crumbling around her, she’d be willing to talk to me. If I didn’t talk to
somebody
about what was going on
now,
I knew I’d see that bomb explode again in my sleep and my world would do the same.

*****

An hour later, the story was done and I was downloading photos from my camera when Addison rushed in.

“Holy shit,” she said, sliding into her seat at the copy editing station. A newly extinguished cigarette was between two fingers of her left hand and she smelled of cigarette smoke.

“I saw Gary McGinnis at the fire,” I began. “He said there was a homicide?”

“Yeah.” Addison slipped the cigarette between her lips without lighting it and fired up her computer. I don’t think she heard me. “Of all the people on this earth…”

One of the things I was rapidly learning about my boss was that she truly was a reporter in an editor’s body. If she had a chance to go chase a story, she’d take it in a heartbeat.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t go after it when he came and got me…”

Addison looked up at me. “What? You think I’m pissed?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Good God! You were at the fire! Don’t worry about it!” She began scrolling down her computer’s screen. Apparently finding what she wanted, Addison lay the cold cigarette down on the desk beside her.

I relaxed. “So what happened with the homicide?”

Before she could answer, my phone rang and I picked up the handset.

“Newsroom, Charisma,” I said automatically.

“Miss Prentiss, this is Dr. Huffinger again—”

“Don’t call me that!” I screamed into the phone. “Don’t call me here ever again! Do you hear me? That person is gone forever!”

Addison stared at me as I slammed the phone down and burst into sobs.

Chapter 10 Leland

I ended the cell phone call and walked back to the Red Cross van, where a grandmotherly volunteer in a red vest was assembling the displaced, checking off names on a clipboard.

Rooms had been secured for us at one of the hotels on the outskirts of Jubilant Falls, she said.

“I need to stay close,” I told her. “I’ll go ahead and find my own room downtown. I’ve got a rental car. I’m fine.”

She nodded and scratched my name off her list.

I hadn’t unpacked a whole lot, so as we rushed to evacuate, it was easy to grab my small suitcase and lap top computer and run outside. After I got outside, I stashed them safely in the car trunk.

The only thing I’d lost was my bathroom stuff: a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant and a pair of scissors to trim my beard. It wouldn’t be any big deal to find replacements. I hoped it would be as easy to find a room at the Holiday Inn. Staying downtown would enable me to keep an eye on the woman who called herself Charisma Lemarnier.

Despite what she said, I didn’t believe Charisma Prentiss was gone forever. I’d found her. I was going to get her to talk to me, whatever it took.

Waving goodbye to Mrs. Jepson, I jumped in my car and headed the sedan toward Main Street. In a few minutes, I had a room at the Holiday Inn, got settled in and was back out in search of toiletries.

Slowing for the light at the center of town, I saw Charisma again. She was jiggling her keys in a door that apparently led to an apartment above some lawyer’s office. A fat cat looked down at her from the window above, whipping its tail. The key was apparently not working well: she stomped her foot in frustration, then turned the key again. She lowered her shoulder and pushed hard against the door. As the light turned green, the door popped opened and she stumbled through the entryway. I slowed my car as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

I took a quick turn around the next block and came back to park across the street where I could watch unobserved. She’d pulled the curtain closed by the time I’d returned; I could see her silhouette pace slowly back and forth in the flickering blue light of a television. She had a bowl of something in one hand and was spooning the contents into her mouth with the other.

Cereal? Soup? Ice cream? If she was like a lot of other driven, single professionals I knew, it was likely high on calories and low on sustenance. She probably fared better nutritionally while she was embedded with troops, eating the military’s MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that were issued to troops as they slogged through the mountains of Afghanistan’s tribal regions.

The image of the hard-charging reporter came back to me. While she was a pro at the fire scene, there was hysteria in her voice on the phone. She had changed—a lot. But why hide? She had tremendous support from the entire country. She could have come back as the poster girl for TBI, started a foundation, something to make a difference. Certainly the Syrian story could be explained as a result of her torn and damaged thought processes. Or was there more?

Should I knock on her door?
I wondered.
Or had I scared her back into her shell?
I leaned back in the driver’s seat and caught a whiff of smoke mixed with my own body odor.
Probably best that I don’t make contact until I’ve at least bathed,
I reasoned.

I put the car in drive and pulled into traffic.

*****

Wrapped in a plush hotel bathrobe, I flopped on the queen-sized bed after my shower.

Charisma was still on my mind.

Used to be, when you read her byline on a story, it meant something: troop movements through the deserts of the Middle East or Afghanistan, interviews with generals and presidents, movers and shakers on the world stage.

When she flamed out, she flamed out spectacularly.

It was a single story, asserting the Syrian president was preparing to launch missiles into a Jordanian refugee camp reportedly housing anti-government rebels among the displaced women and children. The story was meant to be the one that could finally convince the western world of the administration’s evil. It could turn the tide for the rebels, justify their cause and show the world the true tyranny of the Syrian government.

According to her story, it took Charisma two days to connect with that source, and then through another winding series of connections, down dusty Aleppo back alleys of ancient stone, where she finally met with the man who assured her the story was true.

Instead of seeking out a second source, she filed the story. Whether that was her own ego or pressure from above, no one knew. The world’s wire services ran with it—and then her editors fired her in the presence of a US State Department employee when the story, now more than just incorrect, but patently false, became the center of a diplomatic crisis. Her source, variously reported to be a CIA plant, a government sympathizer or any number of other devils, disappeared into the night.

Her fall from grace was news itself:
Prentiss fired after flaws found in Syrian story
was one headline. Another headline read
PTSD behind Prentiss dismissal.
The more sympathetic Sunday morning cable news shows ran entire episodes about the cost on journalists of covering so much trauma day in and day out; others concentrated on her ego and the dangerous risks she took to get her stories.

There were hearings on Capitol Hill and several high-ranking news officials took early retirements or were fired.

After a few other stories (
Does Prentiss have a future in journalism? Prentiss still on medical leave
), and her refusal to surface anywhere, the interest stopped.

If she was ashamed of the failed Syrian story, I certainly could understand. But continuing to hide? How many national stories had been discredited without the reporter going down in flames? Reporters came back from worse without crumbling. National news figures had careers that continued long after the famous or infamous stories they were part of made it to journalism classrooms across the country.

You didn’t,
a voice inside my head said.

I sighed and picked my wallet up from the bedside table, pulling out a photo of Noah from my wallet. It was the Stanford University president handing him his college diploma.

No, I didn’t,
I answered.
But my downfall wasn’t something I wrote. It was something I did and kept doing until it destroyed my life, marriage and my family.

*****

From the day Bitch Goddess and I tied the knot in a Philadelphia judge’s chambers, drinking was a part of our marriage. From the matching silver flasks we got as wedding presents, to the mid-day martinis and the after-work beers, our alcohol consumption was legendary. On the weekends, our apartment was the center of the party—whatever party was going on. Sports victories or losses, election night celebrations after deadline, it didn’t matter: Come one, come all to the Huffinger household where the liquor flowed like water.

Bitch Goddess slowed down her drinking when she learned she was pregnant with Noah, but never stopped completely. By that time, we’d moved to Boston, where I covered city hall and she was the restaurant critic and features writer. Before long, we were in Phoenix, then Dallas and back to Philadelphia, where Bitch Goddess’s perfect looks and unflappable style helped her move from the newspaper to morning anchor at one of the television stations so she could be home from work by the time Noah’s school day ended.

Somewhere along the line Noah absorbed our alcoholic ethos, but we didn’t see the damage it was doing. A suspension in high school for drinking was funny the first time. By the third time, I was pissed—not that he’d done it, but that he couldn’t hold his liquor.

“For Christ sake, if you’re going to drink, do it right, and don’t get caught,” I said.

Of course, that was the wrong message to send. Noah did just what I told him: drank more and hid it better, the same thing Bitch Goddess and I did, day after day.

We switched to vodka when our bosses expressed concern. At the time, rehab wasn’t anything that was covered by the newspaper’s health care. Even if it was, neither one of us wanted to admit we had a problem.

I wasn’t a drunk! I was a
newspaperman
! I yelled at my editor. And my wife doesn’t have an alcohol problem either! She runs five miles a day, for god sake. No
drunk
could do that!

Then came the winter night celebrating a scoop on some shenanigans at city hall that brought my life as I knew it to an end.

Noah was home for the weekend from his job. We eschewed the Pen and Pencil, the press club where many of Philly’s journalists did their drinking and met at another bar downtown. By midnight, Noah was as drunk as I was when he got behind the wheel of my car and we headed home that awful snowy night.

I passed out somewhere along the forty-minute drive home, I came to as I felt the car swerve. Metal moaned as it smashed against a tree; the car rolled into the ditch, followed by Noah’s groan, then sickening silence. Teenage girls screamed from their car, stopped after swerving to avoid us. I pushed my way out through the passenger door above my head as the gas tank caught fire and the vehicle, with Noah in it, burned.

Firefighters found me, broken, bloody and sobbing, by the side of the road, screaming Noah’s name as the moonlight and the snow fell around me.

Bitch Goddess blamed me, of course. In many ways, she was right. But in many other ways, we were both responsible. Drinking was the way we celebrated, the way we grieved and the way we coped. After his funeral, we welcomed friends into our home with a shot of their choice of liquor on the rocks. Instead of taking time off, we ended our workdays filling glasses with the contents of the crystal decanters that sat on the sideboard in our formal dining room.

But this time, the liquor couldn’t mask our pain.

The words between us got nastier. We were Philadelphia’s journalistic equivalent of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ In our grief, we said things to each other no couple should: bitter, drunken, eviscerating words that did nothing to alleviate our grief and everything to intensify the guilt. Our friends, embarrassed by our viciousness, fell away and the parties at our apartment slowed, then stopped completely.

Through it all, Bitch Goddess kept running every morning and she kept drinking. I just kept drinking.

By the time we hit bottom, I was sleeping on the couch and she was sleeping with her morning co-anchor. I came home early from work to find them having sex in the shower. She hadn’t climaxed like that with me in years.

I grabbed Bitch Goddess by her curly wet hair and pulled her out of the shower. She screamed when I charged inside and with one punch, broke the bastard’s nose. The damage kept him off the air for six weeks.

When he filed charges, it hit the local media with a vengeance. I lost my job, then my wife, and my house. Only then did I go to rehab and realized how powerless I was against alcohol.

A buddy who taught at Fitzgerald University let me bunk at his place while I taught night classes in freshman composition and worked on the doctorate. When he became the communications department chair, I became the journalism professor. If any of my students knew Noah’s story, they never said anything and I never volunteered.

Only a few ever asked about the camping photo of Noah and me on the bookshelf in my office.

“Is that your son? You guys sure look a lot alike.”

“Yes. That’s my son. What can I help you with?” Like Bitch Goddess, I lived by the adage “Never apologize, never explain” and as fast as I could, I would change the subject.

As the memories cascaded around me, for a split second, I considered getting dressed and going downstairs to the hotel bar, then stopped. I’d worked too hard to get to this point. I had five bronze sobriety coins—one for each of the years I’d been sober—mixed in with my small change on the hotel room dresser.

What I’d done was wrong, but you could say I’d come back, at least to a point.

Why couldn’t Charisma?