The night of her interview with Magnus, when she informed Jason quietly after dinner that she had taken the job, he’d merely said, “I’m glad.” A silence followed Jason’s clipped response. He stared down the table at her. Searching for what? Signs that she was staying because of him? It occurred to her he was worried that she was now going to try to entangle him emotionally.
“It seemed like a great opportunity,” Cassie went on quickly. “Even though I was positive I’d blown it at one point. I told Magnus I thought his newsroom could use a little more substance and a bit less style. I was sure that was it.”
“Obviously it wasn’t if he ended up offering you the job.”
“That’s what’s so great,” Cassie went on. “He wanted me to take the job because of how I felt. He wants me to do what I think is right: work deeper, go after more serious stories. I couldn’t believe it.”
“And, frankly, I don’t,” Jason told her, pushing back the heavy oak dining-room chair.
“What do you mean?”
“Just that I know him better than you, Cassie. The one thing he’s truly accomplished at is getting what he wants.”
“You mean he was lying?”
“I mean he’s remarkably skilled at manipulating the truth.”
“Why do you hate him so much?” Cassie heard herself asking. “Is it because of Miranda?”
“I’m ignoring that last question.” He stood behind his chair, his arms folded across the headrest. He looked down the table at her for a few seconds before he added, “But I admit there’s no love lost between Magnus and me. We go back a long way … I knew him years before Miranda did. It’s not necessary to go into all the details, but I will never forget—or forgive—certain things about the man. That’s all I want to say about it, except to assure you my feelings toward him—hate is too shallow a word—have little to do with Miranda.”
“And yet you let her work for him and become his friend?”
“I was never in a position to let Miranda do anything. She did what she chose.”
“And you don’t mind me working for him?”
“As you said yourself, it’s a great opportunity for you. And it will keep you in New York.”
He was turning to leave, when Cassie asked, “Shouldn’t I at least be allowed to know what went wrong between you and him? I could be on guard against it myself. I could be more careful with him. I don’t like living in the dark.”
“It happened a long time ago, Cassie. It has nothing to do with you … or Miranda. Besides, we all live in the dark. All the time.”
Cassie, sitting alone in an empty, windowless room on her first day at work, was beginning to agree with Jason’s assessment of life. More than two hours before, the eighteenth-floor receptionist had shown her to the claustrophobic closet of an office, a full corridor away from the newsroom. She had realized as soon as she stepped off the elevator that she was too early. The place was deserted, except for the sleepy-looking young woman at the switchboard engrossed in a current copy of People magazine.
“Oh, yeah.” The girl’s interest had sparked when Cassie gave her name. “Miranda Darin’s sister. I’m really sorry what happened to her. Well, nobody’s here yet, but come on … I’ll take you down to the room Mr. McPherson cleared out for you yesterday.”
Ian McPherson, Cassie had learned from her visit to personnel, was Breaking News’s executive producer and her immediate superior. She remembered snippets of things Miranda had said about him over the years. “That prima donna, McPherson … He looks so harmless, but he has the temperament of a piranha … What a perfectionist! For chrissakes, this is a television magazine, not a symphony orchestra.”
As Cassie waited in the overheated and stuffy room, she tried to imagine what McPherson had said, in turn, about Miranda. Or what everybody on the Breaking News team had thought of her high-powered, demanding sister. Would they expect her to be the same way? Would they resent the fact that she—a relative nobody without television experience—had stepped into this job as easily as Cinderella into the glass slipper? Would they know that the Prince Charming who’d made it all possible was none other than Magnus? Of course they would, Cassie told herself. In any business, but especially in one as tight-knit and pressurized as broadcast journalism, that kind of gossip was as common as the air people breathed. Before she even started this job, she was going to be resented. And, even worse, she was going to be held to a standard she could never hope to meet: Miranda’s.
“I simply don’t understand,” Kenneth told her when she had called him that past weekend in Raleigh to tell him about her decision to stay. “This is just totally unlike you, Cassie. What do you want with New York? Television? Your life is down here … with the paper … with me.”
“Right now I feel it’s here, Kenneth,” she explained gently. “Heather needs me. And this job is … well, it will be a challenge.”
“Since when did you want a challenge?” he demanded. “What happened to my sweet-natured, easygoing girl? What’s going on up there, kitten?” If Kenneth had hoped that by evoking his pet name for Cassie he was going to be able to reach her emotionally, he was wrong. Cassie felt herself shrinking from the image he had of her: the long blond hair, the dreamy expression, the honey-tinged voice. That’s not who she wanted to be anymore, she realized. More to the point, that’s not who she was.
“Haul ass!” The sudden explosion of the loud voice, along with a sharp knock on the door, snapped Cassie back to the present. The door opened and what at first appeared to be a mop of dark curly hair perched precariously atop a skinny black body leotard burst into the room. It took a second for Cassie to make out the large olive-black eyes beneath the bangs, because what registered first about Sheila Thomas was her smile; it was as large, toothy, and knowing as the Cheshire cat’s.
“C’mon, move it!” the woman yelled, assessing Cassie with one quick, dismissive up-and-down glance. “McPherson’s on the warpath.”
Cassie followed the woman as she hurried down the hall, knocking on doors and barking out orders.
“Conference room. Now. Mac’s pissing mad. Be prepared for massive bloodletting.”
Within five minutes, more than twenty people had crowded into a conference room dominated by a scuffed table and twelve chairs in various stages of disrepair. The room looked out on an airshaft and a solid gray wall of cement blocks. Cassie was among those who arrived too late to get a seat. With one swift glance around the room she understood why Sheila Thomas had eyed her so critically. No one had told her about the dress code. It was a motley combination of jeans and work shirts for the men, baggy sweaters and stretch pants like Sheila’s for the women. Only one other woman wore a dress, and she, Cassie soon realized, ran the coffee concession and left after she’d filled everyone’s orders.
No, it wasn’t turning out to be a great day. Determined to be taken seriously, to follow surely in Miranda’s footsteps, she had raided her sister’s dressing-room closets that morning to find something new and distinctive to wear. She’d opted for a gray-and-blue-paisley Lacroix jacket, a short, tailored charcoal-gray wool skirt that showed off her long legs, and a pair of dark blue suede Ralph Lauren heels that added an extra inch to her already impressive height.
She had so wanted to fit in, to feel like a team player from the start. As she tried unsuccessfully to hide behind some people in a far corner of the room, she felt she looked about as inconspicuous as an ostrich among a flock of pigeons.
“Guys and gals…” He was so soft-spoken that Cassie didn’t hear the rest of Ian McPherson’s greeting. What she did hear was that an immediate, defensive hush spread through the crowded room. His ginger-colored hair was receding. His rimless glasses seemed to have slid down permanently to the tip of his nose, and over them he eyed the room with a jaundiced smile. His fingers fumbled at his breast pocket where cigarettes once had been, traveled through his hair, then drummed nervously at the top of the conference table.
“I have just spent an enormously instructive hour upstairs with our esteemed leader,” McPherson began. “We exchanged views on a wide-ranging number of topics.”
“Whenever he starts talking like the Secretary of State,” Cassie heard a man in front of her whisper to another, “I know we’re in trouble.”
“Hush, children,” McPherson continued, holding up his hand. “First, listen to what your betters have to say. Then, if you’re good, we’ll take questions. I’ll start with the good news. Magnus is firmly behind the continuance of Breaking News. He believes, as I know we all do, that it is bigger and better than just one person. That’s not to say that Miranda will be easy to replace. I’m not saying that at all. Thus, we come to the so-so news. Her replacements. Yes, that’s a plural. Magnus believes that we should give some of you guys a chance to show us what you can.”
“‘Guys’?” a female voice demanded.
“I meant that figuratively, of course,” McPherson assured her. “Tamara Wilkenson … Manuel Cortenzo … Phillip DeMott. You’ll each report segments from now on.”
“That’s great!” someone yelled.
“What’s so-so about that?” someone else asked.
“Well, dears, just one thing,” McPherson replied. “Susan Dearborn from NBC is also being asked to do a piece each week.”
“Shit.”
“The damned thing’s rigged!” Sheila Thomas cried. “Magnus is just toying with us. Dearborn’s going to take over. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Actually, that’s not necessarily the case,” McPherson replied evenly. “No one person will decide who ultimately takes Miranda’s chair again. As usual, when it comes to television, the ratings will decide. Each of the four temporary hosts will be given an hour-long show of his or her own in the next few months. The good people of America will let us know. The one thing Magnus and I agree on is that Breaking News should ultimately have just one host. One style. One voice asking the questions, setting the tone.”
“So what’s the matter with that?” someone asked who was struck, as Cassie was, by McPherson’s look of disapproval.
“It’s about that tone…” he went on slowly. “Our esteemed leader suddenly feels it’s not deep enough. He seems to feel that we’ve been dealing too much on the surface, going after the easy sensationalistic side of the stories.”
“And who the hell’s fault is that?” a man near Cassie demanded.
“I’m not interested in assigning blame, Darrell,” McPherson replied. “But I am damned eager to make one thing absolutely clear to each and every one of you. Guys … gals…” Once again his tone softened so that everyone had to lean forward to hear him. “You have a problem with Breaking News … you have a criticism of some sort—an idea—anything at all—where should you go with that sort of thing? I’ll tell you where you go. You come … to me. Okay? Got that? Understood?” He was looking straight at Cassie, cold blue eyes unblinking in their anger. It was clear that Magnus had let him know from whom he’d gotten his new ideas.
“Yes,” Cassie whispered, her cheeks burning. He glared at her another second or two, nodded in dismissal, and then strode out of the room. Slowly the others filed out after him.
“You Miranda’s sister?” Sheila Thomas had lingered behind.
“Yes. I’m Cassie.”
“And you actually had the balls to tell Magnus what you thought of the show … that’s why McPherson was foaming at the mouth, right?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Okay.” Sheila’s smile seemed to take up most of the bottom half of her face as she extended her hand to Cassie. “A fellow traveler. Welcome aboard.”
So, Cassie told herself, the day had not started out that well … but who knew how it might end?
Twelve
Cassie made friends easily. She always had. As a little girl growing up in Raleigh she had been so easygoing and openhearted that she’d been everyone’s favorite. Perhaps because her competitiveness and jealousies were thoroughly directed at Miranda, she had avoided the petty rivalries common among girls her own age. She was a joiner, always in the most popular crowd, though never the leader. That had been Miranda’s birthright, and Cassie had learned her place. She had long ago accepted the fact that she would be second best, play the supporting role. It was a position that made friendship easy; people always felt comfortable confiding in Cassie. She had no axes to grind.
“God, I cannot believe you emerged from the same genetic pool as Miranda,” Sheila announced one afternoon about a week after Cassie started at Magnus. They were working together in the editing room on a piece that Sheila had originally produced for Miranda a month before and that had never aired. Miranda’s part had now been edited out, and it was Cassie’s job to rewrite the segment that would then be narrated by Manuel Cortenzo, one of the new temporary guest hosts.
“Why do you say that?” Cassie asked, then added, “Whoa … rewind about fifteen seconds, okay? Take a look at the man’s expression. If looks could kill, huh?” The piece they were editing was about the volatile relationship between the brown-uniformed traffic cops—known as “brownies”—in midtown Manhattan and the so-called “violators” whom they were paid to track down to protect the limited parking spaces for law-abiding citizens. In fact, as Sheila had produced it, the piece showed how the average taxpayer was more often than not harassed, bullied, fined, sometimes even jailed—and usually frustrated—by these brownies when trying to find a place to park in the city.
“Why don’t we freeze on him right there, okay?” Cassie went on as they both examined in close-up the outraged expression of a man who—having run into a stationery store for change—came out to find his car being hooked up to a tow truck. “The subtitle could be something like ‘Why are you torturing me like this?’ or … ‘Maybe we should move to Denver after all.’”
“Yeah, that’s good,” Sheila said, running the tape forward again. “Then we could speed up here as the car gets towed … and you could have Manny come in with some pithy round-up. This is good. I’m impressed, Cassie, and I like to think that I don’t impress easy. It’s this kind of thing that makes me think maybe you were adopted and nobody told you.”
Cassie had thought of the Keystone Kops routine the first time she saw Sheila’s piece, and since the segment had to be reedited anyway, it had been a simple enough matter to go back and cut in spots that could be humorously subtitled. It was a breeze to construct tongue-in-cheek narration for Manuel. It was really just a matter of fitting the words to the pictures. Once she’d learned how to use the Steenbeck machine, she’d spent hours running Sheila’s film back and forth, rewinding, speed-forwarding, and she now knew the nine-and-a-half-minute spot by heart. Actually the work had been more than easy, it had been fun.
“You’re just being nice.”
“No, I don’t do nice,” Sheila retorted. “And I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but neither did Miranda.”
“She was … hard to work with?” Cassie asked casually. Though she already felt comfortable with most of the Breaking News staff, Cassie couldn’t help but notice that nobody mentioned Miranda in her presence. After the initial expressions of regret over Cassie’s loss, Miranda’s name had been simply edited out of the office. At first Cassie thought it was done out of kindness to her; perhaps people felt it would be easier on Cassie not to keep bringing up a painful subject. But lately she had begun to suspect that the subject of Miranda was a painful one for everybody. That, like any difficult or traumatic experience, Miranda was something these people wanted to get behind them—fast. Sheila was the first person in a week to raise Miranda’s name voluntarily.
“That would be putting it mildly,” Sheila replied. “Now, what do you think about music? How about some upright piano stuff, you know, a little ragtime maybe, like in the old movies?”
“Great,” Cassie said as the film rewound. “But could we go back to Miranda for a second? Why is it that no o
ne ever talks about her around here? I never hear any—well, you know—Miranda stories. And her office. I stopped by just to take a look at where she used to work. It’s just totally empty. Almost scrubbed out. It’s almost like—”
“We all wanted her to go?” Sheila finished Cassie’s thought for her as the film flickered before them in the darkened room. “Well, that’s exactly what each of us did want, Cassie, to tell you the truth. And now that we all got our secret wish, I think we’re all—collectively and individually—feeling guilty as hell. Things were bad. We were all miserable. But believe me, nobody wanted her to go that much.”
“But … what was so bad? Breaking News has been one of the ten top-rated shows for the last three years. And its Nielsens were only climbing. What was so terrible?”
“Cassie, she was your sister, and I’m sure you loved her a lot. But let me tell you, Miranda Darin was a living hell on wheels to work with. She was just a grab-all-the-glory bitch. On every piece I ever did for her the one thing she ever really cared about was how she was going to come across. She didn’t give a fuck about the story, or the truth, or the problems of whatever poor schlub we were interviewing. She didn’t even mind ruining a guy’s life if it made her look good.”
“You’re being pretty tough, Sheila.”
“I’m calling it like I saw it. You asked, baby, and the truth of it is, this is a pretty tough business, especially if you’re a woman. Maybe Miranda started out different, idealistic and kind, but believe me by the time I was put on the show, your sister had developed balls of steel. She had one of those iron-clad contracts that insured her more perks than a G.M. executive: personal hairdresser, makeup artist, wardrobe mistress, recently even a fucking personal security guard, for chrissakes…”
“Why a bodyguard?” Cassie interrupted. At first, terrible as it seemed, Cassie had been somewhat relieved by the news that Miranda had not been universally adored. Hate, however, was another matter, and something far deeper than professional envy simmered beneath Sheila’s embittered tone. “Had she been getting threats?”
Heart and Soul Page 9
