The White Night

by Desmond Doane

  Look at that self-righteous smile. She’s proud of her pun. To be perfectly frank, it was a good one, and I’d congratulate her if I didn’t want to take the remainder of my scone and smash it all over her face.

  “So you just happen to be here, in Nye Beach of all places, dressed like you’re ready to walk down the red carpet?”

  Lauren lifts one shoulder in a pronounced “meh” gesture. “Local morning show wanted to do a profile on me. Been up since four thirty, and let me tell you something, it’s not easy to look like this before the sun is up.”

  She’s not forgiven, by any means, but now I’m slightly intrigued. “You came here? What was it? Like one of the public broadcast things filmed on a cheap set? Couple of thrift store loveseats and a coffee table?”

  “That’s the one.” She crosses her arms, leans up on her elbows. “Only it’s a legit station and not Wayne and Garth’s basement.”

  “Interesting.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I thought that would be beneath you at this point.”

  “I grew up around here. Just over the hill and past that little Irish pub.”

  “I thought you spawned somewhere.”

  “Funny.”

  But it wasn’t. Her smirks emotes sticks and stones, dickhead.

  The pause in the conversation gets nine months pregnant, and I have no idea where to go from here, so I occupy my hands and mouth with my coffee mug.

  I check on Ulie and see that he’s curled up on the porch, shivering a little. I feel bad for the guy. It’s chilly out there. It’s chilly in here, too, but for different reasons.

  “So,” Lauren finally says, drumming those pristine nails on the tabletop.

  “So…” I nod in that uncomfortable way that indicates I have reached the limit of things I can, or want, to say to this woman. She’s right, you know. I did publicly apologize, profusely and profoundly, for what happened on that Halloween night over two years ago. Like I said, I earned the public’s scrutiny, and I’m trying my hardest to get some payback for Chelsea, and for my reputation, and yet, that doesn’t mean I have to become instant chums with someone who openly called for me to commit hara-kiri in the middle of Times Square.

  Her words exactly. She was brutal.

  And now she thinks I’m simply going to pretend that the water under the bridge isn’t highly flammable gasoline?

  As if.

  Or, maybe not. Hell if I know. Do I have the energy to fight her? My therapist would tell me it’s healthy—this “forgiveness” thing—and that I should sit down with a pen and a sheet of paper, and write a lengthy letter to Miss Lauren Coeburn. I should tell her that I’ve forgiven her; that I understand why she did it; she had ratings to worry about; she had a team of writers feeding her lines; and I should let her know that I understand how influential a motivated producer can be, because I had gone through that myself with Carla Hancock.

  This scampers around in my mind while she takes another dainty bite of her muffin top, which is likely in direct violation of her personal trainer’s orders to prevent a different type of muffin top, and I assume that she’s desperately trying to savor this dietary break.

  “You want an apology, Ford, I’ll give you an apology,” she says. “I’m sorry. There. But we both know what this business is like. Obligations. Ratings.”

  “You gutted me,” I tell her. “You were like Quentin Tarantino with your wordy violence. Here’s you, and here’s me.” I accompany the last five words with a pantomimed stabbing motion, then imitate a glorified blood splatter.

  “Don’t be such a drama queen. It’s beneath you.”

  “I thought we—I don’t know—I thought we had a thing.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We’d joked around on Twitter. You had reposted some of my crap on Facebook to your fan page. Then you…” I pretend like I’m jabbing a knife into my heart and then I fake a quick death by slumping over in my chair.

  “Are we playing charades? Two words, sounds like…giant pansy.”

  “I’m just saying you could’ve dialed it back a little.”

  “Oh, please. It’s all part of the game.”

  “I guess I thought we were buds. Same team, fame team, you know?”

  “In this business, we’re all playing solitaire. You know that. Regardless,” she says, pinching off one last nibble of the cranberry muffin before she slides it across the table. Roughly a tenth of it is gone. That’s dedication. I’ll give her that much. She continues, “I really am sorry. To a point. We all play solitaire, and we all dig our own graves in this business. I know you got caught up in the moment, and… shit happens.”

  “Yeah.” I have no argument. I pick up the remnants of her muffin and take a bite. It’s a helluva lot better than the dry hardtack of a scone I’d been trying to suffer through. I tell her, “That still doesn’t change the fact that I’m not saying a word about the documentary. If you’ll pardon the pun, that graveyard is… classified.”

  “Wah-wah-waaaah,” she says, imitating the bad-joke horn from ancient cartoons. “Very funny.”

  “I’m serious, Coeburn. Not a word.” I don’t know why, but I feel like giving her something. A little tidbit. Just enough to sweeten the tea because maybe, just maybe, if I ever get back in the spotlight, she’ll remember I was nice to her once. I wiped the muffin crumbs from my hands. “How ‘bout this? I’ll give you a little nugget, which is one hundred percent off the record, got me?”

  Lauren locks her lips with an invisible key.

  “The only thing I’ll say is that whoever put out that press release is screwed because I haven’t even agreed to the documentary yet. No fancy pens, no dotted lines. Not even verbally. I’m trying to decide how I want to approach it.”

  “Holy shit. Are you for real? They released the news without formalizing it first? Are they mental?”

  “Still off the record, okay?” She nods. “Wild guess says that Carla Hancock realizes that I wouldn’t mind getting back on camera, and this is her way of, you know, dangling the carrot. Something I can’t resist. Baiting me.”

  “I assume you’re going to do something about it.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know. Ask for a retraction? File a lawsuit? Should I go ahead with the filming and earn a few million? It’s all up in the air. And I’m not even sure I want to do it. Anyway, I’ve said enough. There’s your nugget.”

  She may be the host of a reality television review show, but before that she was a standup comedian, and before that, she was a reporter for a mid-sized station down in L.A. Those old journalistic tendencies are crawling out from where she buried them long ago. I can see the curiosity and the excitement in the way she subconsciously licks those fabulous red lips and lowers her voice. “Do you think Mike Long did it? Last time I checked up on him, he was offering to sell whatever soul he had left to the highest bidder. Lots of rumors about his financial situation going around. Maybe he gave the okay to leak it since he’d stand to gain the most.”

  “No comment.” I pick up the remains of her cranberry muffin and take a large bite, as if having a full mouth will block any future words.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if Carla did it. Some scummy shit like that has her name written all over it.”

  I push my coffee away and pick up my worn paperback copy of a Carter Kane novel that I’ve read at least seven times. “No comment.”

  “C’mon, Ford. Give me a little. Friend to friend.”

  If I had any liquid in my mouth, I’m sure I would’ve comically spewed it all over her face because it’s such a ridiculous suggestion. “Friend to friend? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “At least tell me something juicy.”

  “I gave you a nugget and that’s it, Coeburn. No more, no way.”

  “Something behind the scenes. Something that our readers can really chew on. I mean, come on, this is gold. I can get you exposure. We can blow this up. The whole thing. I can help you go public with the fact that
they’re trying to railroad you into this. It’ll be huge.”

  I stand up from the small table and wince when the metal chair legs screech across the slick concrete flooring. Can’t a guy make a dramatic exit without the embarrassing side effects? I tell Lauren, “Nope. Not a chance.”

  “Please?”

  “I’m not going to just hand you higher ratings. Apology accepted, yeah, but that doesn’t wash away all your sins, and I’ll be damned if I do you any favors. Get off my case, get away from me, and take those godawful heels back to L.A. They don’t go with that dress. You look like a hooker that’s trying too hard.”

  Cheap shot? Yep. Damn straight. Felt good, too.

  But really, they don’t go with the dress. That’s no joke. The color scheme is way off.

  ***

  I think that’s the end of it. Turn out the lights, party’s over. Nail in the coffin. Put the baby to bed. Use whatever axiom you can come up with to say that I just ended the conversation on a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth.

  I couldn’t be any more wrong.

  I only make it about twenty yards down the sidewalk, with Ulie trotting happily beside me while he licks the remainder of his dog treat from his chops, before I hear the distinct click-clack of platform pumps on a sidewalk.

  “Ford!” Lauren calls after me.

  Fed up, rolling my eyes, I turn just in time to see her twist an ankle on the curb and go down in a mass of blonde locks, exotic bird colors, and a couple of well-placed expletives. She whimpers a bit, grits her teeth, and puts a hand around her ankle as she rolls up to her butt. Legs splayed out, she doesn’t appear to care that she’s showing off panties that—you guessed it—match the heels, the fingernail polish, and the lipstick. Talk about coordination. Jesus. I can barely find matching socks each day.

  I retrace my steps and reach down to help her up. Ulie, friend to everyone, gives a few sloppy licks to her shin. I tug on his leash when that pink, slobbery tongue goes for her face. She’s laughing, but clearly in pain, and takes the hand I offer. She curses again on the way up. The platform pumps come off and she limps over to the nearest street-side trashcan and slings them in.

  “You were right,” she says. “I hated those damn things but my stylist says I’m a summer.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.”

  The coastal rain has picked up, increasing steadily from a petite shower to plump drops, and Lauren isn’t wearing a jacket. Plus, she’s now standing in a puddle.

  Mentioning the color of her toenail polish might be overkill. Needless to say, it matches.

  “Here,” I say, wriggling out of my windbreaker. “Take this.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Take it.”

  Lauren sighs and drapes it across her shoulders without putting her arms through. Her left ankle is already swelling and I’m sure the blues and purples aren’t far behind.

  “You need to get that looked at.”

  “Later.”

  “Suit yourself. Keep the jacket if you want.”

  That’s my singular moment of playing nice-nice because I can’t be absolutely certain that she didn’t construct the damsel-in-distress moment to manipulate me. Talk about dedication to the craft—she’s hardcore, sacrificing an ankle like that.

  I back away, and before I can leave her standing, she reaches out with a hand and steps closer. “Wait. Talk to me.”

  “Forget it.”

  “The show went over the top. I know we did. Let me make it up to you.”

  “No, Coeburn. Go back to L.A.” I’m on the move again, Ulie trotting beside me, oblivious to the drama and happily wagging his tail.

  “We can make a deal, okay? Give me inside access while you’re filming. Give me the first look, and we’ll push the hell out of the documentary for you. Nothing but good things. Millions of fans, Ford. You’ll have people camping out for tickets.”

  “Conversation over. Don’t you get it?” I spin to face her, violently enough that it spooks Ulie, and he takes a couple of hesitant steps to the side. “I have nothing else to say to you, and I’ve already told you too much. You said it yourself, I know how this game works, and I can’t trust a damn word that comes out of your mouth. You want a quote? You want something you can take back to your producers? Huh? Then listen to me now… I screwed up. I know I did, and I regret it every single waking moment of my life. I eat, sleep, and dream about screwing up with Chelsea Hopper in front of millions of people. Yes, I earned that shame. Yes, I earned that punishment.

  “But let me tell you this, goddamn it, that thing that attacked her? That demon? It doesn’t deserve to win. It’s not going to win. Everything I have done over the past two years, since that night, has been to make my soul right with the world. Yeah, I could use a little redemption. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe part of that is about me, but I have to do that to get through the rest of the days I have left. So I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what your producers think. I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks—if I do decide to do that documentary, if I do decide to get back into the spotlight and take that demon down, it won’t be because Mike Long, or Carla Hancock, or you, or anyone else talked me into it. It’ll be because Chelsea deserves some peace. And just like I earned my shame, I’m going to earn my redemption. It’ll be because I worked hard and absolutely not because of exploiting that little girl’s story—again—to get it.”

  I march away, leaving Lauren Coeburn behind in the downpour, regretting everything I just said. Sure as shit, the only thing she’ll take out of that entire tirade is me saying, “I deserve it!” That’ll be the lead story. That’ll be the quote across the top of every tabloid tomorrow morning.

  I don’t turn around. Ulie does. He whimpers like he knows something.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mike Long

  I find Dakota Bailey standing at the bottom of her beachside steps, feet buried in the sand, arms crossed and shaking as she stares up at the large white mansion in front of her. A home. A prison.

  Ford was always distrustful of houses, haunted or not, until he’d gotten to know the rhythm of one. It used to bug the shit out of me, like how back during the glory years of Graveyard: Classified, he’d insist on arriving at our next shoot at least three or four days ahead of time so that he could familiarize himself with the place we were investigating. Sort of like how you gingerly dip a foot in water, no matter what the temperature, until you get used to it. He never seemed to care that I had a growing family to consider, and all those extra days on the road had deepened the divide between my wife, my children, and me. “Safety first,” he’d say. “It’s for your own good, dude. We don’t trust a place until we do, remember?”

  Ford Atticus Ford. Always right, always wrong. I wonder what he would do if he were here right now? Probably try to hit on Dakota.

  I can’t say I’d blame him.

  Disregarding the situation, somewhere down inside my mind, where instinct, hormones, and the desire to procreate with the best of the species intersect, my lizard brain takes over while I take her in. Briefly, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer celebrity-ness of her, and then I glance down at her toned and tanned legs in a pair of salmon pink yoga shorts, tracing my eyes up to a matching sports bra.

  She looks exactly like she did on the show. Long, lean, beautiful, and ready to run a marathon, which is exactly how she stays so thin, even after working in a kitchen and being around all that delicious food day after day. I remember that from the show, specifically. She’s a runner. Boston and New York marathons each year. They did a profile piece during her second season showing how she had qualified for the main Ironman triathlon in Hawaii. Amazing.

  There’s her kind of in shape, and then my kind, which is why I huff and puff up beside her. I dropped the extra pounds. I’ve defined a muscle or twelve, but my cardio sucks.

  She’s so focused on the menacing house that she doesn’t hear or see me coming, and then emits a shrill yelp when
I say, “Dakota?”

  “Oh, shit, you scared me,” she says, putting a hand up to her forehead. She keeps it there, forming a shield over her eyes, as she turns toward the rising sun. The smile is forced, I can tell that easily, because her bottom lip subtly vibrates. “You got here fast.”

  I salute her, and hold on to my bravado and pride for about three seconds before I double over, trying to deeply inhale my way back to a natural breathing pattern. “You… You okay? On the phone… Sounded like…”

  “For now, at least.” She puts a hand on my back, pats me. “Hey, raise up straight. You’ll never get a good breath like that. Take it in deep, from here,” she says, poking at the center of my abdomen.

  I obey the orders, remembering that it’ll open up my lungs if I put my hands behind my head. The cordless phone that I managed to haul with me goes into a thigh pocket of my cargo shorts, and I stand there, grimacing. “You saw something in there?”

  Dakota squints up at the house, hands on her hips. Her hair is back in a ponytail, minus a few loose strands that flail in the breeze like the beachgrass beside us. A seagull squawks, swoops over the roof, and is gone. Low waves crash, once, twice, three times, and then slide back into the ocean before she finally speaks. “I’m almost scared to even talk about it, Mr. Long—”

  “Just Mike.” I want her to have that level of familiarity with me. I want to be “Just Mike” to Dakota Freakin’ Bailey.

  “Yeah,” she says, as if it’s not really registering. “Mike.”

  My name sounds fantastic coming out of her mouth. Like honey on a—

  Dude. Stop. She’s scared. She’s vulnerable. She called you for help.

  Go away, lizard brain. Business. Professional.

  Dakota Bailey needs you.

  Right?

  It feels good to be needed, if only from a distance by someone who is officially a stranger. I haven’t felt that in so long. Toni needs me to hang a heavy picture frame or to change the oil on her car. Or to take the kids to school when she has a spa appointment early in the morning. Those are chores, not needs, mind you. It’s different.