Exposé: First of the Sally Harrington Mysteries (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 5)

by Laura Van Wormer

  I shrug. "If you like—"

  "No, I really shouldn't. I need to stick around here for a while." She is dressed in white slacks today and a blue cotton pullover blouse. She is wearing the same strand of pearls, as yesterday, but today her earrings are gold hoops. Her hair is neatly piled on the back of her head again and I wonder what she looks like with it down. And when she wears it down. Or if she ever does, for I have never seen a picture of her like that.

  This time I deliberately take the chair she sat in yesterday and start setting up my gear, explaining that, if she doesn't mind, I would like to ask questions today. What I don't say is that I hope she'll sit on the couch, so I can look down on her this time.

  "I do better that way, anyway," she tells me, dropping down on the couch, crossing her legs and resting an arm along the back.

  I start the tape recorder and sit back in the chair, crossing my legs.

  We talk a little bit about how she has set up DBS, who reports to whom. We trace some of its early history, how she was hired originally as the executive producer of DBS News and very quickly found herself recruiting affiliates to form the network. She explains how desperately they wanted to get on the air early, during the summer reruns, when they had a much better shot at attracting viewers. Then she tells me how she suddenly found herself in charge of The Jessica Wright Show, too, and then the whole dam network.

  She runs down the divisions of DBS beginning with DBS News. Alexandra Waring is managing editor and Will Rafferty is executive producer. Under the news umbrella is the interna­tional news division in London, headed by the division's for­mer executive producer, Kyle McFarland; two news magazine shows that are both produced out of New York; and a docu­mentary and video distribution unit, also run out of New York.

  DBS Talk is headed by Denny Ladler, executive producer of The Jessica Wright Show. The division also includes the new Ali­cia Washington vehicle, Hopeless in the House, and a morning talk show originating from the West Coast.

  Cassy freely admits that DBS Sports, the network's newest division, is covering everything no one else will, which means the lesser tennis and golf tournaments, a lot of soccer and minor league baseball and hockey in local markets. The division has even covered its share of fishing tournaments.

  "It's making money," she is quick to add. "But the bread and butter of the network remains DBS News America Tonight with Alexandra Waring, Monday through Friday at 9:00 p.m., followed nightly by The Jessica Wright Show, at 10:00 p.m. These two hours of programming are broadcast, in English, around the world over the Hargrave World Commu­nications Network to eighty-three countries," Cassy says proudly.

  She gets up to get me a complete list of network officers. "Which brings me to one of the more interesting aspects of DBS," I say, scanning the list.

  Her eyebrows go up.

  "At least half the significant players at this network are women."

  "Yes," Cassy confirms.

  "Which is very unusual."

  "Very," she agrees, smiling.

  I gesture. "Well? Any comment?"

  She shrugs. "I don't know, I guess we simply make use of the best people we can find, and we've found a lot of great women. And since we're successful, it has obviously been the right de­cision."

  "So you're going to tell me your executive in charge of sports is a soccer mom, right? That's why you guys cover it?"

  She laughs. "Well, she is, as a matter of fact. But if you're number four or five in town, why not cover soccer? It's wildly popular with some demographic groups, so for that coverage we go to different sponsors. Trust me, Sally, if it doesn't work, if we can't make money, then we're not doing it. If we are, then you know it's working and we're making money."

  "But you don't have a Jerry Springer-type show."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  She shrugs. "We don't want to."

  "But it would make money."

  "Not enough to get me to put it on the air!"

  We move into her relationships with the staff, who's been here from the beginning, who's new, what she saw in each. Af­ter about a half hour, it is clear that her favorites happen to be the network's two biggest stars, Jessica Wright and Alexandra Waring.

  "To all reports, Cassy, you seem to have a genuine friendship with both Jessica and Alexandra."

  "Oh, yes. We're very close."

  "You socialize, shop together—"

  She is nodding, smiling. "I know they're significantly younger than I am, but I—well, in all honesty, I consider them two of my best friends. Next to my husband."

  "Really?" I say, making a note. "Won't that make it rather dif­ficult if you have to fire them someday?"

  "Good grief," she says, frowning.

  "And what about contract negotiations? Aren't you trading on a certain amount of goodwill when you do that?"

  "Aren't you the hard-hearted Hannah," she says.

  "Well, it's not exactly normal for management to be that close to the talent," I point out.

  Cassy shrugs. "I don't know how we could be otherwise. We've been through so much together." And then she launches into a description of what it had been like building the network, inventing as they went along, the terrible pressure—the hours, the pace, the underfunding in the early days. I get the picture: they are like soldiers struggling to gain ground and then hold it.

  "In Jessica Wright's autobiography," I say, "she makes no bones about having had a bad drinking problem when she first arrived at DBS."

  Cassy nods once, as if to acknowledge that she knows what I'm talking about.

  "And then she stopped," I say. "She says that if it hadn't been for the people at DBS, she would never have gotten help. Did you have something to do with that?"

  "You'll have to ask Jessica."

  I make a note. And star it. The answer might as well have been yes.

  We talk awhile about Alexandra Waring and she tells me how it was her former husband, Michael Cochran, who origi­nally "discovered" Alexandra anchoring the news in her home­town of Kansas City. Michael brought her to New Y ark to his station, WWKK.

  I am familiar with the story but listen politely as Cassy talks about Alexandra's ratings taking off, her move to network news as a Washington correspondent and how she came to Jackson Darenbrook's notice when she was shot on the steps of the Capitol building. It is quite a story.

  The part I didn't know was that after Jackson signed Alexandra as the face to launch his new TV news network, it was Alexandra who urged him to lure Cassy back into news as their executive producer. Alexandra had been playing the hunch that Cassy was bored being a station manager, even if she had been the first woman to achieve the position at a New York station.

  We circle back into the early days of DBS.

  "Um," I say, biting my lip slightly in apprehension of bring­ing up this next topic, "yesterday you mentioned that it was only after your husband, I think you used the phrase, I got so­ber,' that he separated from you."

  Cassy nods. "Yes, that's right."

  "How did you feel? I mean, presumably the years he was drinking couldn't have been so great."

  She meets my eye directly. "How did I feel about what ex­actly, Sally?"

  "That once he stopped drinking, your marriage wasn't work­ing."

  "Who said it wasn't working?" she asks quietly.

  I hesitate. "Well," I say carefully, "since you got divorced, I am assuming that the marriage wasn't working the way it once had."

  "You mean, like it was broken and we just threw it out?" she asks.

  "I just wondered how you felt."

  Cassy nods thoughtfully, her attention leaving me and drift­ing to the wall of windows. She waits a full minute before speaking. "Let me put it this way," she says, bringing her eyes back, "I took my marriage vows extremely seriously. When Mi­chael stopped drinking, he came to realize that the drinking had held him back in many ways. And quite naturally, I think, he wanted to see the world." She pauses. "He wanted to go­
—and I didn't want to go—and we decided it would be better if he went on to see the world without me."

  "I would have killed him," I blurt out.

  She looks startled. "Excuse me?"

  "I said I'd have killed him."

  "Sally!" She says this in a warning tone, letting me know that my opinion is not a factor. I'm to merely take down what she's so carefully and tactfully phrasing.

  "I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it. But I still had to say it. You have to provoke people sometimes, to get them to further ex­plain themselves. It's rotten, really, but you do what you have to do in this line of work.

  "Michael and I shared a long period of our lives together," she says. "And we have one very terrific son to show for it. And if you talk to, or meet Henry, you'll see that there must have been an awful lot that was right in our marriage to have pro­duced such a man as he."

  "Truly, I apologize," I say again. "It's just that so often it seems like the guy, when he stops drinking, leaves the woman who's propped him up all those years. And the situation is rarely reversed."

  She does not respond to this, but simply looks at me, waiting. There is tension in her jaw line that warns me to back off. But I don't.

  "You must have been upset when he left. For California, wasn't it?"

  "California, yes."

  "So you and Michael were separated before you started working for Jackson Darenbrook?"

  She nods. And finally she smiles. "Yes, I was separated from Michael and we were getting a divorce. The thing is," she adds, "Jackson didn't know, so when we started working together, he thought I was happily married and acted accordingly."

  "So when did you get interested in each other, before or after he made you president of DBS?"

  She decides not to take my obnoxious question personally. "After." She laughs. "Actually, Jackson and I did not get along in the corporate suite, not at all. If the truth be known, we fought all the time. Langley was the one who promoted me. I think that if Jackson had his way, he would have fired me."

  Suddenly she jumps up. "Come on. I'm getting cabin fever in here." She strides over to the door and opens it. "Chi Chi, I'm taking Sally for a tour."

  She is off and I hastily grab my tape recorder and try to catch up. She leads me downstairs into Studio A, where the sets for the news and now for Hopeless in the House are located; she takes me through Studio B, where The Jessica Wright Show is taped; we go into makeup, the Green Room, the staging areas.

  We walk through the newsroom, upstairs to the electronic research divi­sion where we run into that funny Dr. Kessler, who slips and says, "Ah, she ees back," referring to me. Cassy is utterly astonished.

  "Alexandra brought me here yesterday," I confess.

  "Into here? When?" Cassy says.

  "After our interview." I add, "You'll have to ask her about it."

  "Trust me, I shall," she says. Then she turns around, squint­ing. "Is Alexandra trying to make some sort of a back-door deal? What is she trying to do, get a look at your article?"

  I laugh. She obviously knows the anchorwoman well.

  We continue our tour, and she shows me the breathtaking view from one of the complex's "inner" offices, which looks out, not to the outside, but down into the cavern of Studio A. It is neat.

  Then she whisks me over to B Wing, which houses the offices for DBS. The wing across the park is A, where the executive of­fices of the print divisions of Darenbrook Communications are found. As we walk, Cassy waves to a lot of people. On the third floor, we turn into one of the outer office areas where a young Asian woman is seated.

  "Hi, Marianne," Cassy says. "This is Sally Harrington, who's writing that article on me for Expectations."

  She stands up and shakes my hand.

  "I was wondering what Jessica's schedule looks like next week, if she has time to talk to Sally."

  Marianne makes a groaning noise and flips open a huge date book. "It's pretty crazy," she admits.

  "Well, Sally will call you directly and see if you can work something out."

  "Will do," she promises.

  We walk on to the next office where there is a young man seated. This is Trevor, Alexandra Waring's secretary, and we go through basically the same thing with him about Alexandra's schedule next week.

  Cassy then leads me back to the middle section of West End, but takes me downstairs to pick up a bottle of water from the cafeteria and then down another floor to the day-care center. Cassy is greeted with an enthusiastic "Hi, Mrs. C!" from the lit­tle ones who can talk. Then we walk outside, into the square.

  "The setup of the complex," she explains, leading me along, "was based on the model my mother-in-law used for the Dar­enbrook newspapers and printing plants years ago. That's Jack­son's mother, who is no longer living, Alice May Gaines Dar­enbrook. So if you sense a woman's hand at West End," she says, "it is Alice May's, as learned by her son." She is smiling now. We are standing underneath a maple tree. The breeze is blowing, the sky is blue, and the clouds are moving slowly over the Hudson. This is a very beautiful, serene place.

  "Sometimes," Cassy says, looking around, "I walk out here and wonder how many blessings can I have in this lifetime?" I look down to the recorder in my hand. I'm getting all of this on tape.

  "And I thank God, Sally, for all that I've been given in this life. I am very, very lucky." She pauses. A bird is chirping over­head in the tree. "So whatever has happened to me in the past, no matter how painful it might have been, it has led me here—­to a place where I am profoundly happy."

  Her smile is sentimental. "I am so grateful that Michael is alive and healthy, and that our son loves us both. And that we will be, no matter what, forever a family."

  I don't know quite what to say. Except, perhaps, that she should not repeat this sentiment too many times to her current husband.

  We talk for almost another hour and I am getting hot. Now that I've got her talking, I'm beginning to wonder how I will get her to stop. She seems unfazed by the heat. She is cool, confi­dent now, yet her tone is sincere. Sometimes she talks about her life in such general terms that it sounds like a philosophy les­son.

  Do I dare say it? I'm getting bored.

  A shadow suddenly falls over us and I whip around to see an athletic-looking man, in his fifties or so, with the friendliest blue eyes I've seen in quite some time. Of course I know who this is.

  "Well, hi there, gorgeous," a deep Southern drawl says, ad­dressing Cassy. He moves around the bench to slide in beside her and places his arm around her shoulders. "What I want to know is, why the heck are you giving an interview to Schroe­der's wife and not to one of my magazines?"

  "Because that would be nepotism, dear," she laughs as he proceeds to give her a warm kiss hello. "Jack, this is Sally Har­rington."

  He gives me an energetic handshake. "Hello there, Sally. No offense about Verity's magazine. It's just she's got lousy taste in men."

  "Jackson!" Cassy says, pointing to my tape recorder.

  "What? You think Verity's going to print in her magazine that I said her husband's a total jackass?" He leans over to ad­dress the tape recorder. "Hi, Verity! How are ya? How's the boy? He's a nice kid. Your husband's a jerk!"

  "Jack," Cassy says.

  "That's the real story, Sally Harrington," he says to me. "How Corbett got so rich. You should ask him how many peo­ple's work he's chopped up like firewood and sold by the road­side like it was just so much junk."

  Cassy turns to me. "Sorry."

  "Oh, no," I protest, "I'm interested."

  "I bet she is!" she says to her husband.

  There is a little beep signaling that it's time for me to change cassettes again, which I do while Cassy and Jackson talk about the trip to Georgia he has only just returned from. Although the couple do not touch each other, I suspect they long to. I wonder if Darenbrook's boyish charm is a characteristic Michael Coch­ran shares.

  It's clear that our interview is coming to a close, primarily be­cause Jackson
is now standing up, fidgeting, wanting to know when they can leave for the country. "We've just got that one monkey-suit wing-ding this weekend, right?"

  "Just that one," she confirms.

  Cassy tells him she'll pick him up at his office in a little while and then they will go. He goes bouncing off to the building and Cassy waits until he is inside before speaking.

  Her eyes are twinkling. "So you've met Jackson."

  "He's got a lot of energy."

  "He's a powerhouse, all right," she agrees. "I apologize for his cracks about Corbett."

  "That's all right. I don't really even know him. My dealings have been with Verity."

  "I'd invite you to come over to our house this weekend," Cassy says, "but I promised Jackson it would just be us this weekend. We're just over in Cornwall, you know."

  "I know."

  She shakes her head. ''I'm still a little amazed Verity thinks I'm worthy of a story like this. I'm doing a shoot with a fashion photographer, if you can believe it. I'm a nervous wreck."

  I can see that she's serious. "You'll do fine," I tell her.

  19

  Listen," Spencer says to me a bit breathlessly when I call him, "I've got to go out of town, but I think I can get back to the city tomorrow. Can you come in? And stay over at my place?"

  Go home tonight and come back tomorrow, on Saturday?

  My body reacts viscerally before my weary brain can even think about it. My body wants to be with him. But I can't do it. I have to go home and think about what has happened; I need to shake this. After two nights I feel like an addict, sick without Spencer—this man I scarcely know—and I'm only perking up at the thought of being with him. Alone. And what is that about? Wanting only to be alone with Spencer, touching him, not wanting to waste time going out, eating dinner or even see­ing a movie. In other words, getting to know him.

  "I wish I could," I say, "but I have to stay home this week­end."

  A pause. "Are you going to see him?"

  It hurts to hear that. It hurts because Doug doesn't deserve it and after two days Spencer's hardly in a position to lay claim over me.

  What a mess. I've been acting like a lunatic. Actually, there is another word for what I've been acting like, but that profession usually gets paid money for doing what I have been doing.