Morning Glory Read online

  “You have to be kidding me.” He looked at his wife, who started tapping her designer heels against the pavement. “I’m beginning to suspect that Oscar’s sending you to me was some sort of practical joke.”

  “You have Pomeroy under contract already, right?” I argued. “It wouldn’t cost anything.”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily solve anything, either,” said Jerry. “He’s useless.”

  “He’s a world-caliber newsman.”

  “He was supposed to do stories for our magazine shows,” said Jerry. “We couldn’t use anything he pitched us.”

  “Nothing?” I asked. Not utilize the hell out of the likes of Mike Pomeroy?

  Jerry’s expression turned sour. “An eight-part series about the United Nations, an interview with a Pashtun warlord, a piece on microfinancing in Asia? Come on. Who cares?”

  Well, no one … yet. But they hadn’t heard it the way only Mike Pomeroy could tell the story.

  Jerry’s wife went from heel-tapping to pointed sighs of impatience. “Jerry—”

  He held up a finger. “One second.”

  “Of course it will be,” she drawled, unconvinced. She leveled the stink eye in my direction.

  “So you’re paying him just to sit there?” I asked. “There must be millions left on his contract. A reporter of his talents—”

  “Becky,” Jerry said. “Is the stress getting to you already?”

  “Pomeroy has reported on every major story of the last three decades with integrity and courage. He was your only anchor to go down to Ground Zero that day. I looked at his Q ratings. They’re unbelievable. And you’re already paying him.”

  Jerry looked at me for a long moment, as if assessing the degree to which he thought I’d gone nuts. “I have to go,” he said at last, turning to walk away. “We can discuss this in the office tomorrow.”

  “I want to look at his contract,” I insisted. “But I need your approval to do that. Just let me see if there’s something there. Please.”

  Jerry paused.

  “Come on,” I wheedled. “What have you got to lose?”

  He faced me again. “No, the correct question is what have you got to lose? I’m going to go inside to this charity dinner. My wife bought a table worth a year of tuition at that college you never bothered to graduate from. Maybe if you had taken a few more broadcasting courses, you would have learned that you can’t run a show without an anchor. Maybe you’d have figured out how much lower your precious morale gets when you’re running one without an anchor.”

  How much worse could it get? And I felt like I should point out to him that we still had Colleen. Though of course, it couldn’t stay that way. I didn’t need to go to college to know that morning shows needed two hosts—that the banter was a big reason the audience tuned in. But that wasn’t Jerry’s point, and it didn’t solve my problem anyway. Better I just make nice and get what I want.

  “I’m going to drink rail liquor and act charitable all night. And you want to spend the evening looking over a contract that, even if you can find your precious loophole in it, isn’t going to do you any good, because there is absolutely no way that Mike Pomeroy is going to help your morning show. And that show needs help. Desperately.”

  I swallowed. Make nice. Make nice, make nice, make nice.

  “So I should say no,” Jerry went on. “Because what you really need to be doing right now is either finding someone new from one of the affiliates, or finding some way to woo back Paul McVee. It might involve a push-up bra.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. Make nice. “You should say no?” I repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re going to say yes?” I refrained from clapping my hands.

  “I just did, didn’t I?” He whipped out his BlackBerry to send in the order for Mike’s contracts. “Hail Mary, Becky Fuller. But either way, you get an anchor in there by Monday or you’re through.”

  “Yes!” I cried. “I will! Thank you!”

  Mrs. Barnes rolled her eyes at both of us.

  7

  I had it on good authority that ever since Mike Pomeroy had started getting money for nothing on his IBS contract, he’d stepped up his hunting schedule. Apparently all the rumors about his guns were truth. Today, his quarry was the pheasants on a small farm outside the city. Hardly my old stomping ground. No, I liked my meat packaged in convenient containers made of Styrofoam and plastic wrap. Mike obviously liked his still wrapped in feathers.

  Quite an interesting hobby for a guy who’d once gone ten rounds with the head of the NRA on live TV. Though I supposed that he made allowances for hunting tools that he didn’t for assault rifles. There was also a decided difference between shooting game and shooting people.

  Perhaps I should have donned one of those bright orange vests?

  I found Mike Pomeroy down by the river, clad in a muddied field jacket with worn elbows and clutching a shotgun. His face was upturned as he scanned the mottled gray sky for pheasants.

  The field was pockmarked with rocks and divots in the soil, which made it hard to pick my way across the soft, muddy turf. I should have considered sneakers for this little errand. Oh well, too late now. Besides, I doubted Mike Pomeroy cared about appropriate footwear.

  Though you never saw him from the waist down on TV. He could be addicted to wearing huaraches, for all I knew.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Pomeroy?”

  He whirled around, gun in hand, and I jumped back. All of a sudden, he bore a much closer resemblance to the armed soldiers he’d been embedded with in Afghanistan than to the besuited nightly news anchor.

  “Who the hell are you?” he growled. “You’re going to scare the birds!”

  “I’m Becky Fuller,” I said quickly, raising my hands in surrender. “We met the other day in the elevator?”

  “Nope.” He returned his attention to the sky.

  Well, maybe it would be a benefit to me that he couldn’t recall my humiliation. I took a deep breath and tried not to think of Dick Cheney and the statistics of accidental shootings. “I’m the producer at Daybreak, and, um, we’re looking for a new anchor at the moment.”

  “Then what,” he asked without looking at me, “are you doing here?”

  “It’s funny you should ask—”

  He spun and marched off. “Go away.”

  “Just hear me out.” I followed him. “The show has a lot of potential.”

  He snorted.

  “We’re starting over, basically. With an anchor as esteemed and respected as you—”

  “Go away, go away, go away,” Mike said, still looking up.

  Since I was practically a foot shorter than him, I didn’t know what to do to get his attention back. Grow wings, maybe? Perhaps if I’d rented a plane and done a flyover. The sky banner could have read: “Hey, Mike: Ever thought of Daybreak? Call Becky!”

  Or not.

  “And we’re putting together a new format, some—”

  “Hey, fangirl,” Mike whispered, and stopped.

  I smiled at him expectantly. So he did remember me from the elevator. Maybe he was even flattered?

  “I said go away.” He took aim and fired his gun into the sky.

  I shrieked.

  “You’d better hope I got it.” He took off toward a nearby thicket and I trotted to keep up, more than a little worried that the next time Mike’s shotgun went off, he’d be pointing it at something without feathers.

  “Look,” I said as we shuffled through the leaves and Mike checked under branches and bushes to find the bird. “You’ve been a journalist all your life, since your elementary-school paper. The Beaverton Bee.”

  “What are you?” he said, pausing momentarily to stare at me. “Some kind of stalker?”

  No, I was into news. I knew how to research. Well, I knew how to Google, at least. “You’ve got to miss reporting. News breaks—it must kill you not to be out there.”

  Mike leaned into the rushes and snatched out a dead pheasant. I a
verted my eyes.

  “It might,” he said. “But you’re not out there either, since morning shows don’t. Do. News.” He twisted the neck of the bird. I heard a pop, and grimaced.

  I had informed someone I was coming out here, right? Now, there was some serious news. I mean, if someone were to find the mangled body of a morning show producer in the woods after she pissed off a famous former news anchor with a shotgun. The look on Mike’s face was dark enough to make me wonder if that was truly outside the realm of possibility.

  “Daybreak—Jesus.” He stuck the dead pheasant inside his jacket and kept walking. “Half the people who watch your show have lost their remote, and the other half are waiting for the nurse to turn them over.”

  “But all four of those guys are very loyal viewers,” I said.

  He stopped and gave me an appraising look. I dared to crack a smile, and for a moment, I thought he might listen. Then he shook his head and walked on.

  I kept following him as he left the thicket and hiked back to the boardwalk. I wondered if the pheasant in his coat was bleeding all over his shirt. I wondered if it was still warm. “You don’t have to tell me that we don’t have the numbers. That’s why I think we need you. I think you’d be a real draw for the audience that we’d like to see tuning in to Daybreak. And face it, when done right, morning shows can draw huge audiences—”

  “If I wanted to come back,” said Mike, “I could get any job I wanted.”

  “But you can’t work for another network for two more years,” I reminded him.

  “And so in the meantime, I’ll enjoy my life on IBS’s dime.” He hefted his gun and gestured to the overcast view of field and stream. There was also a little bit of remarkably smelly swamp.

  Wouldn’t most people have been enjoying that life on some sandy-white Caribbean beach? No, I had Pomeroy’s number. If he wasn’t interested in doing some news, he wouldn’t have been hanging out at the IBS office that day. He was sniffing around for work—news work.

  I knew exactly what that felt like.

  Mike’s scowl, however, showed he didn’t find in me a kindred spirit. “Least those jackasses could do after disbanding the best news department in history and shit-canning me for no reason.”

  My brow furrowed. “No reason? What about calling the secretary of defense a douche?”

  Mike raised a hand in protest. “He lied to an entire nation—”

  “He’s a politician,” I argued. “You’ve met those before, right?”

  “—And, more important,” said Mike, “he lied to my face.”

  I conceded the point, but just as Mike was about to move on, I took a deep breath and stepped in front of him. “Okay. I didn’t want to have to do this. I really didn’t.”

  “So don’t.”

  “I went through your contract with the lawyers. And you’re right. They have to pay you for the last two years. Unless—”

  He gave me a look that made me start envisioning those CSI scenes again. But I braved my way through the terror.

  “—Unless six months have elapsed without you appearing on the air in any capacity. And then if the network comes to you with an official offer and you don’t take it, they can terminate your contract.”

  Was that click I heard Mike taking the safety off his shotgun? Do shotguns have safeties?

  “And the six million dollars you have left on it,” I finished.

  The expression on Mike Pomeroy’s face was truly terrifying. I’d seen it before. It was the one he’d worn when he interviewed the priest who’d stolen the parishioners’ retirement funds. The one he’d leveled at the manufacturer putting lead in baby toys. The one he’d used to bring the isolationist cult leader to tears on live TV.

  I straightened and tugged at the hem of my jacket. “So here’s me with an official offer: Mike Pomeroy, the IBS network is offering you the position of cohost of Daybreak.”

  Yeah, he was going to kill me. At least it would make a good story for the team at Good Morning, New Jersey. Chip would probably win a Pulitzer.

  “You can’t do this to me.”

  I lifted my chin, though I was pretty sure those hazel eyes of his were burning right through the back of my skull. “Yes I can.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on in the world right now? Do you know what kind of career I’ve had? And you want me to do stories on Baked Alaska?”

  “I—”

  “I don’t ever want to say the word ‘Alaska’ on television unless it’s followed by one of three things.” He held up his fingers to count them off. “Pipeline, earthquake, or governor.” He looked at his third finger. “Actually, not even that last one. I’m tired of it.”

  “You just have to be a little bit open-minded,” I said. “Sure, the morning news has a wider range of stories than—”

  “ ‘Wider range,’ ” Mike interrupted. “Nice euphemism.” He leaned in. “Your show is in the news department—don’t you get that? News is a sacred temple, and you, Becky Fuller, are part of the cabal that’s ruining it with horseshit.”

  I faltered. Mike Pomeroy had just called my entire career horseshit. I caught my breath, feeling like I’d been punched. This wasn’t supposed to be how it happened. The Mike Pomeroy I knew would never use a word like “horseshit.”

  Of course, the Mike Pomeroy I knew was broadcasting through the little box in my living room, not standing in front of me in the flesh. If he used a word like that on air, the FCC would slap him down with a huge fine. I was very quickly learning that the face Mike Pomeroy showed to the world had about as much to do with the real man as the Barbie doll Colleen Peck liked to portray.

  “That’s not fair,” I said to him, almost before I realized it. “The first half hour of a morning show is a damned good news broadcast.”

  “Half an hour,” said Mike. “Be still my heart.”

  “And we also do entertainment, weather—everything a newspaper has always done. What’s wrong with that?”

  Mike shook his head in disgust, shouldered his rifle, and sidestepped me.

  I kept up. “We’re like a well-informed neighbor, coming over to chat with people in the morning—”

  He walked faster. I matched his pace.

  “Brokaw did the morning news,” I pointed out. “And Charlie Gibson.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Walter Cronkite did it at the beginning of his career. He cohosted a morning program with a puppet named Charlemagne—”

  Mike stopped dead. Awesome: I’d finally gotten to him. I knew that dropping Cronkite into the discussion would do the trick.

  He glared at me. “Then,” he said, his voice very low, “get a puppet.”

  Hmm. Maybe not.

  The next morning, I reflected on how it might be a good thing that Mike hadn’t taken me up on my offer. After all, I’d tried to sell him a bill of goods about Daybreak’s being a great place for the occasional hard-hitting news story. But what were we covering today?

  Papier-mâché.

  Papier-freaking-mâché, and if the look on Colleen’s face every time the camera cut away was anything to go by, even she was unimpressed with the topic. I doubted she wanted her manicure ruined with little pieces of soggy newsprint. And honestly, I couldn’t blame her.

  But as always, she had her game face on. She beamed with fabricated fascination at our crafts expert as the woman explained why the Daybreak set was littered with strips of paper, bowls of glue and water, and entirely too many lumpy, garishly painted objets d’art.

  “What’s great about papier-mâché,” chirped the crafts expert, whom I was beginning to suspect must be on some kind of heavy-dosage mood elevators, “is that it’s inexpensive and it uses things you already have around the house. You can make globes, hats”—Colleen’s expression flashed a microsecond of horror at the thought of having papier-mâché touch her blond coif—“even piñatas!”

  “Wow, piñatas!” Colleen smiled broadly for the camera. “Now, ‘macher’ means ‘to chew’ i
n French, but we’re not going to eat any of this, right?”

  “Of course not,” said the crafts expert. They both started laughing inanely. I made a note to kill jokes even half as stupid as that one.

  “Coming up next,” Colleen said. “You’ve heard her sing. Well, today we’re going to hear about her sweet tooth. Join us as we bake brownies with Celine Dion’s personal chef.”

  I wondered if anyone out there was buying the idea that Celine Dion would willingly ingest a brownie.

  “All that and more, coming up on Daybreak.” As the camera light switched off, Colleen’s smile was replaced with a look of pure disgust. “Someone get this off me!” she said, flinging out her goop-covered hands. A prop manager rushed forward with a packet of wipes.

  “Okay,” I said, joining her on the set. “We don’t have time for a sit-down on the last piece, so we’ll just run the package—”

  “You okay?” Colleen stretched out her freshly cleaned hand as if in comfort.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up.” Colleen’s tone was dismissive. “You were never going to get him. We all know that.”

  Huh?

  She caught my expression. “Pomeroy,” she clarified.

  “How did you know about that?”

  “Everyone knows,” she said. “You fired my coanchor. You don’t think I’ve been keeping tabs on what other trained monkey you plan to bring in here?”

  “Mike Pomeroy’s not a—”

  “True, but he wasn’t going to come and work at this little dog and pony show, either. Especially not when he’d have to work for someone like … well, you.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Colleen said, checking out her nails to see how much damage her arts and crafts had wrought. “He was a bold choice on your part. I, for one, would have welcomed him with open arms, but—”

  She stopped dead and stared over my shoulder. I suddenly noticed that the entire studio had gone still. Had the camera gone live? Were we sharing this little conversation with the population of the world—or at least, with the few who tuned in to the show?