curious looks. “Knew what?”
“That you’d be back eventually. Send me what you’ve got whenever it’s ready. If I don’t have a spot for it, I’ll make one. How many words, do you think? Three thousand? Four?”
“Hold up. I never said I was writing anything.”
“Please.” She waves a palm through the air, takes a long pull from her glass.
“Please what?”
She rolls her unmascaraed eyes and thunks her glass onto the bar hard enough to send liquid sloshing over the sides. “Please, stop fooling yourself, because you’re not fooling me. The very fact that we are sitting here, talking about Zach Armstrong, is proof you’re already writing the piece in your head. You didn’t tell me about the additional soldier because you were filling me in on what’s been going on in your life. You were looking for validation, and you knew I’d give it to you.”
Well, hell. Does Victoria have a point? Did I come here looking for her to tell me to write the Armstrong story? It’s a theory I hadn’t thought of yet, though I certainly am now, and the answer is maybe.
The truth is, discovering Ricky’s name has cracked something open inside of me, something that feels as if it’s been hibernating for a really long, really harsh winter and now might be ready to step into the early-spring sunshine. And while I’m certainly not already writing the piece in my head, why not hand him over to Victoria instead?
Because he’s my lead.
At the unwelcome thought, a familiar and greedy rush, as uncomfortable as an old, itchy sweater, warms my blood and coats my skin like a rash.
Victoria must read the indecision on my face, because she drains her glass, signals for another round, then twists on the bar stool to face me.
“I’ll tell you what the wisest journalist I know once said, and that is this. Our profession holds the power to be a force for good, and in the end, credit will go to the ones of us in the ring, the ones covered in sweat and blood and tears, and not the ones watching from the safety of the sidelines. Get out there, and be fully informed, fully aware and fully engaged. Be part of a force for good.”
“You said that, last year in a graduation speech at Princeton.”
“Harvard, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is the message. Are you or are you not going to be part of the force for good?”
“I was part of the force for good, remember? Until I became the cause of something bad.”
“How many times do I have to say it?” Victoria leans into me, her tone fierce and forceful. “Chelsea Vogel’s death was a tragedy, but you did exactly what you were supposed to do, and that was report the facts. The decisions and actions were all Chelsea’s. She slept with her female assistant, she took her own life. As much as you seem to enjoy playing the part of martyr, you are not responsible for her death.”
“I’m not sure I agree.” I tell her about Ben Vogel’s surprise appearance at my front door, and my taking another, closer look at Maria in light of her nouveau-riche lifestyle and pornographic internet performance. “Only, if what I now suspect is true and Maria is not as innocent as she led everyone to believe, then I’m even more responsible than I thought.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe Maria didn’t realize her sexual prowess until she gained some with Chelsea. Maybe it took seeing how those videos went viral the first time around for her to come up with a plan to do it again, this time for a wad of cash. My point is, Chelsea’s story is not finished. There’s more to tell, and there’s no one on the planet more qualified—or more justified—to tell it than you. Expose Maria as a conniving slut who ruins lives and sleeps with anything with money or power if that’s what she is. Set the record straight.”
“Maybe she’s not a conniving slut at all. Maybe she won the lottery or...I don’t know, found a pot of gold.”
“Only one way to find out.”
Victoria doesn’t say the rest. She doesn’t have to. She’s telling me to dig deeper into Maria’s story, to do the research, to search out the facts. But she doesn’t have to tell me to do that, either. I’ve already got Floyd on the case. No matter what I end up doing with the answer—handing it over to Ben or stuffing it in a box and pushing it to the very back corner of my mind—I already plan to find out.
But still.
“What if I write something, and it happens all over again? What if somebody gets hurt?”
“Somebody always gets hurt, Abigail.” Victoria lifts her shoulders high enough to brush the ends of her fringy bob, then turns back to her drink. “But if you do your job right, nine times out of ten it’s the bad guy.”
The next time I walk through its double glass doors, Handyman Market looks more like a haunted house than a hardware store. Orange lights and black streamers and miles of fake cobwebs are slung from every display and shelf unit, hanging above tombstones, cauldrons, smoke machines and every other front yard decoration imaginable. I walk down the middle aisle, past the ghouls and ghosts and glow-in-the-dark skeletons, sidestepping a grinning witch straddling a broom, in search of Gabe. I find him atop a ladder in the electrical department, loading boxes onto a top shelf.
Recognition flashes across his face in the form of that extraordinarily ordinary grin.
“Abigail Wolff is back, and less than a week later, which we all know can mean only one thing.” He swings himself down off the ladder, the metal rungs squeaking under his weight. “You flooded your house, didn’t you?”
I pretend to be insulted. “Do you really have that little faith in my abilities?”
He leans in, and his grin widens. “That bad, huh? Come on. I’ll show you where the shop vac and drying fans are.”
“Ha-ha. My bathroom is demolished, and look—” I hold up both hands, wiggle my fingers in the air “—still have all ten. No water damage, either.”
Well, almost none. There was a little excitement when a pipe snapped clean in two as I was unscrewing the showerhead, drenching me and the bathroom floor in the process, but I had the rags and the mop, and the water turned off in thirty seconds flat. The only real damage done was to my blowout and a wall I was already planning to paint over anyway.
He holds out his hand, palm to the sky. “Let’s see it, then.”
For a moment, I’m confused. “See what?”
“Your list.” He steps closer, and I can smell the detergent on his clothes, the sawdust coating his apron, his shaving cream spicy and complex. “Does it have Find Handyman ASAP written anywhere on it, because I’ll bet it does.”
His sarcasm, his teasing tone, his half-cocked grin. So far I like everything about him, and it’s distracting me. His closeness is distracting me. His thick shock of hair is distracting me. His looks as if it hasn’t been combed in days, but instead of making him look ungroomed, it makes him look really good in a way that makes me uneasy. Especially in light of what I came here to tell him.
A
