Chapter One
I know the whole thing started a hell of a lot earlier, but I always think of the beginning as the second I stuck my key in the back door of the
Monitor building. Maybe I just like the symbolism, since unlocking that one door led to the figurative opening of so many others. Anyway, if I were going to make a movie of this crazy story, I would start with a close-up of the key turning in the lock, and the door opening, and me walking up the back stairs to the newsroom. I had the place to myself, no big surprise at nine on a Sunday morning. The sportswriters wouldn't be in until later, to take high school scores over the phone and leave Pepsi cans and candy bar wrappers on everybody else's desks.
Let me interject one thing here. It's intensely weird to me what I remember and what I don't. Like I know just what kind of bagel I had that morning, and I remember a lot of the books I found up in Canada. But ask me what happened right after I first saw the body? No idea.
I remember the scanner was squawking as usual as I walked in the back door of the newsroom. I dumped my backpack by my swivel chair, right across from where the police reporter sits. My desk offers a lovely view of the cobwebby cables sticking out of the back of the scanner, and thanks to the design I can hear the ambulance calls and fire alarms louder than the cop reporter can. The damn thing goes off at the most inconvenient times, like when I'm getting great quotes or schmoozing with that cute guy from the city planner's office.
I don't know about you, but I always seem to get the worst news when I'm in a really terrifically good mood. Like when my first cat died, I'd just interviewed this hunky pair of marine biologists at Benson University. So I'm thinking how I'm going to marry one of them and take up scuba diving and live happily ever after, and there's this message on my machine: Come scrape your dead cat off my lawn.
This is not to say that somebody drops dead every time I'm in a halfway decent frame of mind. Just occasionally. And this was one of those days. As I said, I was working the weekend shift. Every reporter gets stuck with it once a month or so. The upshot is you get the following Friday off and can leave for a three-day weekend. The drag is to come in on Saturday and Sunday to call the cops and make sure all hell hasn't broken loose. Or maybe more accurately, to make sure said hell is properly documented in the Monday morning paper.
So far, Saturday's calls were less than thrilling: a pair of drunk drivers, a two-car fender-bender, and a minor marijuana bust. Not that I'm hot to cover a big fire or fatal crash, although some reporters live for that kind of thing. But I've got to admit that working cops is a lot more fun if something really heinous happens, like the time this guy killed his wife with a Snap-On screwdriver, grabbed a hostage, and drove around six counties before the police caught up with him. A Snap-On screwdriver. Like I said, it's strange the things you remember.
My actual beat is less exciting, unless you get off on signage and sewage. I cover politics and Gabriel city government, which only really floats my boat during election season. City council meets the first and third Wednesdays of each month, and I've never missed a meeting in the two and a half years I've been on the beat.
But to get back to the day it all started: I wasn't covering government. I was on what I lovingly describe as the flasher beat. I've worked for three papers over the past five years, and-for reasons I prefer not to ponder-I'm always the one who gets assigned to cover nudist colonies. For the Monday page three feature, I'd spent the better part of my Saturday at Shady Acres Nudist Park. If you ever want to visit, it's about twenty miles out of town in Slackville. Dress is ultra-casual. But be warned: One thing I've learned is that nobody you want to see naked ever goes to a nudist colony.
That Saturday, I kept my clothes on. I learned my lesson the hard way, when I was working for a weekly back home in Massachusetts. It was my first flasher story, and when the owner told me I was "welcome to disrobe," I figured, what the hell. The photographer who came out with me swore he wouldn't shoot me, and I was green enough to believe him. So there I am in the newsroom the next day, staring at these negatives of myself, stark raving naked, interviewing a shuffleboard player. The film cost me an entire quart of homemade pesto.
Cooking is pretty much my favorite hobby-second only to falling in love with a succession of smart-ass journalists. I just turned twenty-five, which makes me one of the youngest in the crowd of Monitorites I hang out with. There's only one married couple among us, and most of us aren't even dating anybody, so we spend a lot of time together. The Monitor goes to bed at eleven every night except Saturday-there's no Sunday paper-and most of the newsroom moves over to our favorite bar, the Citizen Kane, until it closes at one. Heavy drinking is one of those clichis about journalists that just happens to be true.
To give you a little background: I've worked at the Gabriel Monitor for a little over three years. I started out as a part-timer, covering the towns that surround the city of Gabriel in a rural doughnut. When a full-time slot opened up, I started covering the schools beat, then moved over to the city when one of the other reporters left to follow his girlfriend to Belize. They're still down there, in case you're wondering, and I hear they're getting married next summer.
With a circulation of about twenty-five thousand, the Monitor isn't the smallest paper you've ever heard of, but it's still a fish-wrapper compared to a metro like the New York TImes. There are some pretty good people here, though, and since Gabriel is a college town, they tend to stick around. Nobody at the Monitor does just one job; the features editor runs the computer system, I write the movie reviews, and the city editor is the only one who knows how to unclog the women's john.
The newsroom itself is a study in chaos theory. People are always amazed that you could put out a supermarket circular from the place, much less a daily paper. None of the desks are the same height, and they're all too short since some handyman sawed the legs half off. The carpet is sort of a mustardy yellow, and the walls have faded to kind of a lemon shade; good luck finding two colors that clash more violently. When the newsroom is full and things are hopping, it makes a trading floor look like the ladies' garden club. There's somebody yelling for the plural of "mongoose," and somebody needs change for the soda machine, and somebody else is telling a dirty joke on deadline. Most people don't understand how you can get anything done in a place like this, but I can't imagine working in some cubicle, with the silence ringing in your ears like a fire alarm.
Most Monitor reporters live downtown, but I live up on the hill near Benson University. I rent half of a little two-bedroom house that actually has a picket fence around it. I share space with my dog, my two cats, and my housemate, a law student messy enough to be his own species. Dirk is a great guy and I'd probably be madly in love with him if he didn't have a boyfriend named Helmut.
What else can I tell you? I speak pretty good French and pretty bad Spanish. I see five movies a week and run exactly 3.3 miles every other day in my struggle to stay a size six without giving up pizza. As for romance, I'm fond of saying I've been around the block more times than a beat cop. So far, what I have to show for it is a brief stint in psychotherapy and a cavalcade of ex-boyfriends sprinkled throughout the continental United States, which will probably come in handy if I ever want to drive cross-country. Ex-boyfriends are even cheaper than Motel 6.
Recently, I've come up with three basic rules about men, and this seems as good a time as any to share them with you. The first is simple and nonnegotiable: Never date a man who doesn't like your dog. The second is, never date a man who doesn't wear boxer shorts. Thirdly, never date a man who can't speak at least one foreign language, unless he's a journalist. Rule number three gets tossed most of the time.
To get back to The Story. The first thing I did when I got to the office was make the necessary preparations for my first round of cop calls. To wit: I rescued a legal pad from underneath the Matterhorn of paper on my desk, sucked a few drags from my tub of iced tea, ate half a Long Island bagel with chive cream cheese, and flipped through the want ads in the back of Editor & Publisher. Then I picked up the phone.
"State Police. Dispatcher Belding."
"Hi, this is the Monitor calling," I said. "Is there anything to report this morning?"
"That's negative, Monitor."
I thanked her and hung up, checking out the Cop-to-English Dictionary a long-gone police reporter tacked on the wall. "That's negative" translates into "Leave us the hell alone, you scum-sucking vultures." Underneath it is "No comment," which means "I know, but I won't tell you." That's followed by "You'll have to talk to the chief about that," meaning "I know, but I'll tell the Herald first."
I signed on to my computer and called up the state news wire to give me something to read while I made the rest of my cop calls. The fun stories are usually slugged something like "SCHOOLDECAPITATION" or "MR. SOFTEESLAIN." By the time I got no news from the police and sheriffs in the six surrounding counties, I was browsing through a story on a New York City man arrested for exposing himself at three Hasidic weddings.
Once I ran out of fun stuff to read, I moved over to my directory and started my Monday story. It wasn't too taxing.
By ALEX BERNIER Monitor Staff
Skip and Marge Wilson are wearing his-and-hers silver chains and matching smiles as they lounge outside their camper, festooned with flags and colored lights.
That's all they're wearing.
The Gabriel natives are celebrating their 25th anniversary as nudists at the Shady Acres Nudist Park in Slackville. This weekend, the camp welcomes nudism neophytes for an open house. On the agenda are volleyball, shuffleboard, a barbecue and a series of seminars on life in the buff.
I was debating whether "in the buff" was going to get past my editor when the scanner went off for real.
"Emergency control to Gabriel monitors. Report of a body in North Creek Gorge. Subject is believed to be a male Caucasian, spotted by a jogger on North Creek Bridge."
After three years of sitting on top of the scanner, I've come to think of it as a funky musical instrument. The warning sirens sound sort of like saxophones; the police, fire, and ambulance responses are repetitive enough to work as lyrics. I call it the "cop opera," and it was going full blast as I crossed to the two-way radio.
"Monitor base to any photographer," I said with no real hope of raising anybody at that hour. When no one answered, I went into the darkroom and checked the work schedule. Jason, the summer intern, was supposed to be on call. I picked up the phone and pushed the button labeled "intern," hoping I didn't get somebody who worked there two semesters ago. No answer. I tried Wendell, the photo editor and a genuine Gabriel weirdo who's been at the paper for something like twenty years, and got his machine. Knowing him, he was probably welcoming the sun at the local ashram.
That left Melissa, whom I'd last seen stumbling out of the Citizen Kane after last call. Great, I thought. I hope she and her hangover have some film with them. The phone rang for a full minute before Melissa picked up. "Good morning, starshine," I said.
"Do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Nine-something."
"Thank you. Can I go back to sleep now?"
"Well, there's this man who wants to meet you."
"Great. Send him over."
"He's at the bottom of North Creek Gorge. We've got ourselves a jumper."
"Call the intern."
"No answer."
"Goddamn students. Okay, where is he?"
"The intern?"
"The jumper, sweet cheeks."
"He was spotted from North Creek Bridge, you know, the one in the middle."
"I'm on my way. Want me to pick you up?"
"Nah, I'll cruise up myself."
I hit the supply shelf for a new notebook and hustled outside. During the week, the cars are packed into the paper's lot so tightly, it can take fifteen minutes to wiggle your way out. I crossed the chessboard of faded yellow lines and aimed my Renault hatchback toward the sirens.
At this point, it might help if I describe how Gabriel is laid out. The city is in the flats between two hills, each topped by an institution of higher education. To the south is Bessler College, a women's school that doesn't seem to know what to do with itself since it admitted men twenty years ago. Across town is Benson University, which is where I was headed.
Benson is one of those hugely endowed brick-and-ivy schools where parents pay a fortune to have their kids taught by stressed-out grad students. The real action, of course, is at the graduate level. The school gets a ton of research money-from the government, corporations, and God knows who else. My friend Mad, the science reporter, tells me there are actually a few floors in the supercomputing tower that are owned by a Japanese electronics company; Benson professors aren't even allowed in without clearance.
Benson's campus is beautiful, a city-state on a hill. It's trisected by two gorges, the more dramatic of which is on the west side. North Creek runs through it and over Gabriel Falls before spilling into Mohawk Lake. Three bridges connect the west side to central campus: a gunmetal-gray suspension bridge deemed so inviting to the melancholy, it's surrounded by eight-foot suicide guards; a one-lane bridge linking the campus to a residential area favored by professors; and, in the middle, the two-lane North Creek Bridge that's the main drag.
There was no point in trying to park near the crime scene. This was my third jumper, and I knew the bridge would be blocked off so rescue workers could fish out the guest of honor. The sirens were silent by then, but I could see the red-and-blue lights of city cops, university security, and an ambulance. A fire engine straddled both lanes, dangling a stretcher over the three-hundred-foot drop.
I looked around for Melissa, but I didn't see her among the crowd, which consisted of twice as many gawkers as rescue workers. A city cop had just finished stretching the yellow tape reading "police line: do not cross" around the perimeter of the bridge. The policewoman was about to shoo me away when she saw my press pass and jerked her head toward two men leaning against the railing.
Continues...
Excerpted from Reliable Sourcesby Beth Saulnier Copyright © 2004 by Beth Saulnier. Excerpted by permission.
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