Otherworldly Bad Boys: Three Complete Novels (73 page)

I liked the picture on the front, because I liked how girls always looked in black and white—their skin perfect and blemish free, their lips and eyes dark, their hair wavy and perfectly coiffed.

And I was sucked into another world. The world of newspapers in the 1940s. I was enamored with Hildy, the brash former reporter who gave it just as good as the men in the business, and who couldn’t give up her career or her hard-boiled editor ex-husband Walter. There was something transformative about it. It was the first time in my life I had seen someone passionate about a job.

My mother hardly worked, and when she did, it was only at diners as a waitress or in hotels as a maid. She was on her feet all day, and when she came home, she swore a lot and hit the bottle. To be fair, my mother hit the bottle no matter what she did. I had to cut her out of my life when I left home at eighteen. It was sad, but she had become poisonous to herself and to me and everything she touched.

I had previously thought of work as something that was only torture. It was a necessary evil, something to be endured in order to get money.

But Hildy…

Hildy was trying to quit the newspaper business, to settle down and have a family.

But deep down, she didn’t want that. All she wanted was to be a reporter, to chase the news, to be part of the excitement of a story.

I was only six years old, but I knew right then that I wanted to be like Hildy. I wanted a passion so big it consumed me. Something I couldn’t run from.

And like Hildy, my passion became the news.

I had never paid attention to newspapers before this, but after seeing the movie, I insisted on having a subscription to our local daily. I didn’t read all of it. Some of it bored me to tears. But I read enough of it that I began to understand intrinsically how to write a news story. My passion began to grow and grow.

In high school, I persuaded the journalism teacher to allow me to join the newspaper staff as a freshman. Generally, only sophomores and older were allowed into the class. She told me that she was moved by the gleam in my eye. She said that when she saw me, she knew that she had to get out of my way and let me do what I loved. I had passion. She saw it.

So, at any rate, I didn’t think that I was a better journalist than everyone out there. But I thought that I might want it just a little bit more than a lot of people did. I had already seen it amongst my fellow journalism majors at college. They had drifted into the major for various reasons. Some were aspiring novelists who thought that they’d use newspaper writing as a job until they landed a major publishing contract. Some had taken a course in high school on a whim and discovered they liked it. Still others liked sports or fashion or some other field and knew that writing about such things would keep them close to their passion.

But there were very few other people who were passionate about the news the way I was.

I loved newspapers.

I felt that reporting was a noble calling. That trying to tell people the truth was important. And that struggling to remain unbiased was difficult but worth doing. It was not the newspaper’s job to tell people what to think or how to think. It was only to provide them the information to think about.

Lauren thought it was important for the people of Aurora to know about the masked man I’d met the night before. She was probably right. The people had a right to know.

But I wasn’t going to tell the whole world I’d kissed the guy.

Maybe that meant I was using a bias on the story. Maybe that made me just a tad less noble.

I was going to have to deal with the guilt.

I sat down at an empty desk. There were quite a few of those, even with all of us summer interns wandering around.
The Sun-Times
had laid off its share of employees recently. Interns were plentiful, of course. Interns were cheap labor that didn’t require health benefits. At any rate, I had my pick of computers.

I logged on, opened up a new document.

And I began to type.

My roommate Airenne Newton was reading aloud from the front page of the newspaper. “This dark and powerful man is watching from the the shadowy underbelly of the city. He is keeping vigil for those who have been taken advantage of by the criminal element in Aurora.” She peered over top of the paper. “You’re a poet, Cecily.”

I flopped down next to her. “Hardly. I can’t believe they ran it on the front page. I guess it’s a good thing that my phone takes good quality pictures.” There he was, seven inches high, sailing off into the night.

“You named him and everything,” said Airenne. She was always complaining about her name, which sounded common to the ear, but didn’t have a typical spelling. She had to correct the way people spelled her name constantly. She hated it.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Lauren did. She wanted me to come up with a name, and I was thinking about calling him Catman or something because he moved so quietly and precisely, like a cat. But Lauren said that cats were feminine. And then I said we should call him Pantherman or Lynxman, and that was when she looked down at my copy and circled the word vigil.”

“Vigil,” repeated Airenne. “It’s a good name for him. ‘The mysterious masked man, only known as Vigil.’”

“Yeah, it’s good,” I said. “Thank Lauren.”

Airenne returned to reading. “According to the masked man, ‘the entire police system in the city is corrupt. The gangs pay off everyone. Three fourths of our fine boys in blue are taking bribes and looking the other way.’ When asked for comment, Police Chief Norman Sanders was unavailable.” She grinned at me. “You’re so ballsy.”

“I’m not. It’s just the truth. He wasn’t available when I called,” I said. “I only had two hours to write that damned story. I called again right before we went to press.”

“It makes it sound like the police don’t care,” she said.

“Well, maybe they don’t,” I said. “There’s a serial killer hacking women to pieces in case you haven’t noticed. And the police don’t even have any suspects. They’re clueless.”

Airenne folded the paper down. “You’re really into that serial killer, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. I had debated explaining to her about my friend Darlene, but the truth was that Airenne and I weren’t that close. We’d hooked up as roommates for the summer on a message board for Aurora interns, thinking it would be perfect considering that we were both journalism interns. However, Airenne was interning at
Bold!
magazine, which meant that she was shallow and mostly interested in clothes and celebrities. I had nothing against either, but I didn’t want to talk about that to the exclusion of everything else. She and I generally had nothing to say to each other.

She pointed at me. “You’re going to try to out the killer in the paper, aren’t you?”

How did she know that? “No,” I said.

“It’s just the kind of thing you would do. You’re the most ambitious person I know.” She looked at the story about Vigil again. “You’ve been here two weeks, and you got the front page.”

“Tomorrow, they’ll use it to line hamster cages,” I said. “It’s not that big a deal. I only did it because Lauren told me to write it.”

“You
are
trying to catch the killer aren’t you?” said Airenne. She consulted the article. “Seems like Vigil is too.”

I’d kept my theory about Hayden Barclay out of the article, even though Vigil had agreed with me about Barclay’s guilt.

Man, here I was calling him Vigil. I guessed the name was going to stick.

“That’s how you found him, isn’t it?” said Airenne. “You two were both tracking the serial murderer.”

“Maybe,” I said. I fished the remote out of the couch. “You know what? I’m home, and I don’t want to think about it. I just want to veg out and watch TV.”

She raised her eyebrows. “All you care about is the news, Cecily.”

She was right. It wasn’t like me to avoid talking about working or the paper. But the truth was, the article embarrassed me. I felt vaguely like I’d sold Vigil out. I hadn’t asked him if I could write about him. I’d taken his picture without permission. He could make a fuss about things like that if he wanted. Considering he seemed to be hiding his identity, it wasn’t likely that he would, but still I didn’t want to upset him. I’d already pressed my lips against his for no particularly good reason. Everything about the situation made me feel like cringing.

And now it was my first front-page story at
The Sun-Times
. I didn’t like it.

I turned the volume up on the television.

It was some gossip show that ran on one of the entertainment channels.

On screen, Callum Rutherford, orphaned billionaire head of Rutherford Enterprises, was coming out of a limo, a thin, big-busted blonde on each arm.

Airenne pointed. “You may have come to Aurora for a serial killer, but that’s why I came here. Callum Rutherford.”

“He’s disgusting,” I said.

“Are you kidding? He’s gorgeous.”

He was nice to look at. He had dark hair and blue eyes, and a fit, muscular body. “He’s good looking,” I said, “but he’s always taking out three girls at once. Didn’t he have
four
girlfriends at one point?”

“Maybe there’s enough of him to go around,” said Airenne. “He lives in the city. And I’m going to meet him before this internship is over. You can count on that.”

I wrinkled up my nose. “I can’t stop you. But I don’t see why you’d bother. He seems like a rich jerk.”

She laughed. “In a perfect world, I’d want a man who was attractive, rich, and kind. But two out of three isn’t bad, is it?”

Really? I didn’t get Airenne at
all
.

I left Airenne swooning over Callum Rutherford and went to take a shower. I didn’t usually take showers in the evening, but Airenne hogged the bathroom in the morning, and I’d had to adjust. I didn’t like it, because sleeping on wet hair meant that I always had bed head when I woke up.

I looked like crap, no matter what I did. I’d bought about fifteen different hair products since moving to Aurora, but none of them could contain my slept-on hair.

It wasn’t that my hair was complicated hair. It was honey colored and a little bit wavy. Not curly. Not straight. Wavy. I wore it long. Lately, I’d had my hair stylist cut a few layers in it.

But I was a wash-and-wear kind of girl. I didn’t usually spend a lot of time screwing around with my hair. Of course, considering I didn’t take showers in the morning anymore, I now had lots of time to play around with it.

Tonight, I’d decided that I was going to put it in one long braid. I figured that, when I woke up tomorrow, I could re-braid it, and it would look pretty good. Braids weren’t exciting, but they were practical. And it would keep my hair back and out of the way. I could live with the idea of having to wear my hair in a braid every day for the rest of the summer.

Of course, if it didn’t take Airenne three centuries to get ready for work every day, then I wouldn’t have any problems.

I supposed that I could have tried to talk to her about it, but I hated confrontation.

Anyway, I didn’t know how she could adjust, so I didn’t know what to ask her for. She already got up at six in the morning. She took a shower, blow-dried her hair, used various curling irons (although her hair didn’t look curly afterward), applied stuff to her face from at least thirty tubes and containers (although she didn’t look like she was wearing much makeup), and did god knows what else in there. At any rate, she didn’t leave the bathroom until about fifteen minutes before I had to leave for work.

I could take fast showers. But not quite that fast.

What could I ask her to do? Cut short her beauty routine for me?

Get up even earlier?

I guessed
I
could get up before her. But I wasn’t going to do that.

I cared about how crappy my hair looked, but not
that
much.

I put on my red silk kimono robe with tiny white orchids on it and left the bathroom after my shower. I was going to comb and braid my hair in my bedroom.

I swung open the door and bent over to towel dry my hair. I rubbed my scalp furiously and then hung the towel up on the hook on my door.

I peered into my mirror and began to run a comb through my hair.

The curtains on my window fluttered over my single bed, which I’d shoved in the corner.

Airenne and I had a pretty tiny apartment. They didn’t make them that big in Aurora. Not unless you wanted to pay a small fortune for them, that was. I could have technically afforded a bigger apartment. My grandparents had left me a nice chunk of money when they passed away. However, I was trying to save my money. I didn’t know when I might need it. I was already stretched thin, considering I’d kept my apartment back in Madison, where I went to school, and I was renting another here in the city. The intern salary I was getting was a joke. No one could live off something so small. I was only managing because of my inheritance.

I furrowed my brow. Had I left that window open all day? I didn’t remember doing that.

Why would I do that?