Now that Cole is off the bridge, I spend the night worrying about his children.
It’s a sickness, almost, this need I have to focus on other people’s problems. I wonder if this is how my mother feels when she’s doing the things she does. It makes me feel better, more in control, so I spend the night typing up a list of lawsuits and accusations the Trendalls have been behind, along with my observations about them giving Ava to a man she clearly fears. I write that I don’t have his name, but I give them his car tag number and mention he may work at the Cumberland Auto Parts Junkyard. I also write that Ava has mentioned to a friend that a man named Fred has been hurting her.
I get up Saturday morning and take special care with my looks, rounding my eyes with my eyeliner, shadowing them more carefully than usual, even contouring my nose a little so that it looks longer and narrower, and marking shadowed slashes under my cheekbones to make me look more hollow-faced. I tease my hair and leave it messy.
Then I find a Kinkos where I print out two copies of the list. When I get to the local TV station, I sit in my car and study myself in the rearview mirror again. I don’t see myself through all the makeup and the darker hair and sunglasses, so I hope they won’t either.
My stomach feels full of butterflies with flapping wings, and my hands are shaking. A voice in my head tells me this is crazy, to turn around and drive away. But I think of Cole sitting on that bridge, his children crying for their mother in a DHS shelter, his wife in agony and wondering how their family got here. And I think of little Ava’s fear as she hunkered in a bathroom stall with her feet pulled up.
I grab the envelope where I’ve put the list and go inside. There’s a little waiting area with a TV playing what the station is broadcasting right now. There’s a woman at a desk behind a counter, and she glances up and pushes a notebook across the counter toward me. “Sign in, please.”
I wonder who she thinks I am. “Um . . . I don’t have an appointment or anything. I just—”
“Everyone here for Midday Dallas has to wait over there and the producer will come get you,” she says.
I look at the others in the waiting room. A girl in an evening gown with a tiara and a sash that says “Junior Miss Dallas” is fidgeting next to a woman who looks like an older version of her, and there’s a portly man with an index card in his hand. His foot is tapping with a staccato rhythm that tells me he hasn’t gone on TV many times before. A couple of seats down is a woman who seems calm and is watching the TV screen.
I turn back to the receptionist. “Is it possible for me to see someone in the newsroom? Like a reporter or someone?”
“They’re on the air,” she says impatiently, pointing to the screen. “You can see them when they come for you.”
I look at the TV and see that the anchor is on, and then they cut to the weather girl. “No . . . I mean someone who actually writes the news. Is there someone . . . ?”
A girl who looks like she’s in high school, carrying a clipboard, comes to the doorway. “Miss Dallas?”
The beauty pageant girl looks up. “Junior Miss.”
“Okay. Mr. Salahay?”
The man nods and stands.
“And Beth. Everybody come on back.”
As they file out behind her, I leave the receptionist desk and fall into step, like I’m with one of the guests. When we get to the studio, she says, “Mr. Salahay, you’re up first, then Junior Miss, and Beth, you’ll go last. We might have to cut you or add depending on how the first ones go, like usual. Cute dress. Where’d you get it?”
“T.J. Maxx,” the woman named Beth says. “Got it for forty bucks. Check out these shoes.”
I look around for a newsroom, but I don’t see one. There’s a room next to us with computers and TV monitors on the wall, but only one guy in there.
The producer opens a door to a small green room and asks them to wait in there until they’re called, then she takes Mr. Salahay with her. I go into the waiting room, but I don’t sit with the rest of them. I stand at the glass door and watch the man following the producer into the lit-up area across the hall.
Then I slip out and walk up the hall, looking for a reporter. I finally find a room with people in it, sitting at computers. I recognize one of them as one of the field reporters who comes on at night.
I make a beeline to her. “Excuse me.”
She doesn’t stop typing as she looks up at me. “Midday Dallas is up the hall.”
“No, I need to talk to a reporter. It’s about a news story.”
She stops typing and looks around, then calls, “Harris!”
A man leans out a door from another room. “Yeah?”
“Talk to him,” she says, and goes back to her keyboard.
I step over to him. “Hi,” I say. “I’m Miranda. I have some information on a story you guys are reporting on . . . the Cole Whittington story?”
He looks past me to another guy. “Run in there and tell them to adjust the lighting on Kay. She looks like death warmed over.”
The guy goes, and the man turns back to me. “I’m sorry, which story?”
“Cole Whittington. The vice-principal accused of child abuse?”
He looks at me fully now. “Yeah. What about it?”
“I have some information you need to know about the family who’s accusing him.” I open my envelope and pull out the sheets I’ve typed up. “They’re professional litigators,” I say.
“Lawyers?”
“No, I mean they live off money from settlements from lawsuits they initiate. They’ve got a long history of accusing people and suing them.”
I have his attention now, and he takes my sheets and looks at them. “That doesn’t mean their child wasn’t abused.”
“No, it doesn’t. But there’s someone else who may have done it.”
“What are you, a neighbor?”
I draw in a breath before I lie. “Yes.”
He looks at the information again. “You could have emailed this in, you know.”
“I know,” I say, “but I didn’t want you to overlook it. I wanted to make sure you understood. A good man . . . an entire family . . . is being horribly impacted by this. He’s lost his job. His children are suffering for it. If there’s a chance that this accusation could be false, that these people are just using it as a reason to sue the school system for damages, and if you could keep a child from being abused, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t that be a story?”
He glances at the monitor, where the weather girl is wrapping up. “That’s better,” he says to the guy who went to see about the lighting. “But why did that guy wear that tie? You should’ve given him another one.”
I look at the monitor. Mr. Salahay is fidgeting at a table, off-camera, as the anchor fixes her collar. On the monitor next to them is the screen with the news they’re playing. It’s national news from the network. They’re covering a train accident in Portland. Suddenly the clip ends and I see my own face fill the screen.
“Police officials in Shreveport are still searching for Casey Cox, the woman who allegedly stabbed her friend to death . . .”
I freeze. I can’t even breathe, or I’ll give myself away. I wait for him to look at me and point and call the police or handcuff me himself, but instead he says, “Joanie, are you the one working on the child abuse story over at that school?”
“Yeah,” someone says from the other side of the computer bank.
“Got something for you,” he says.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “It’s all there. I appreciate . . . your time.”
I stumble from the room, wanting to get out of there before someone looks up and realizes that I’m the girl on the screen.
Will they pay any attention to the leads on the papers I just gave them?
I’ll just have to wait and see.