A Confidential Source Read Free

door: I could still be
     serving cosmopolitans.
    From the pavement, I grabbed the stack of the day’s
Chronicles
and took them inside. I put them on the raised Formica counter that guarded the entrance. The stack could be seen through
     the plate-glass window, and often people walked in off the street asking if they could buy a paper. Oddly enough, because
     of union restrictions, we had to tell them no, directing them to Poppy’s Lunch next door or the pharmacy at the far corner
     of the strip mall.
    I went to my desk and threw my jacket around the back of the chair and my knapsack onto the floor. In the bottom-right-hand
     drawer of my desk, there was a piece of marble decorated with a bronze quill and an old-fashioned inkwell. It was an award
     I’d won for investigative reporting on the Tejian profile, the last big story I’d done for the
Ledger.
Most days, I kept the drawer shut.
    I sat down with the phone and a notebook, calling local dispatchers to make the daily police and fire checks. Our office covered
     South Kingstown, Narragansett, and North Kingstown, which were all beach communities. It was generally pretty quiet in the
     off-season. The best I could hope for was a brawl at a keg party at the University of Rhode Island.
    The big news of the morning was a Dumpster fire in the parking lot of the Ro-Jack’s supermarket. As I was transmitting the
     five-inch story to Providence, the front door scraped open and Carolyn Rizzuto, my bureau manager and boss, walked in.
    “Hi,” she said, distractedly sorting through a stack of envelopes in her hand. She was often distracted in the mornings. Although
     she was only eight years older than I was, we were lifetimes apart. At forty-three, she’d had two marriages, two divorces,
     and two daughters whom she was now raising alone.
    She stood over me, a bag of Poppy’s bagels under her arm and a funny smile on her face.
    “What?”
    She dropped the envelope on my desk. “This was stuck in the mail slot, didn’t you see it?”
    I shook my head. Addressed to Hallie Ahern in Magic Marker, the envelope had no postal marking.
    Carolyn breezed past me, taking off her coat, dyed-blue leather, which she hung up in a closet instead of tossing over her
     chair. Then she began slicing open two bagels on a cutting board beside the coffee machine. “You wanna peanut butter and cream
     cheese?” she asked, her back toward me as she began to forage inside our little ice cube of a refrigerator.
    “No, just plain, please,” I replied, tearing open the envelope. Inside was a handwritten note on WKZI stationery.
    Dear Hallie,
    Sorry I screwed up on your name last night. Please don’t stop calling the show.
    Leonard
    I slipped the note into my top drawer as Carolyn approached my desk.
    “That’s why you look the way you do,” Carolyn said, putting the bagel down in front of me on a paper towel.
    She said this almost every morning and when I forgot to pick up cookies on the afternoon tea run. Carolyn was what you would
     call a full-figured woman, not fat, but with a good-size chest and hips that would not slim no matter how many aerobics classes
     she took at lunchtime. I ran every morning at dawn, which tended to keep the weight off, but I was still in need of full-scale
     renovation.
    “Have you seen those new bras at Victoria’s Secret? Very natural looking,” Carolyn would say with a glance at my boyish figure.
     “Even under a T-shirt.”
    “Shoes can make a very big difference,” she’d say, showing me a Nine West catalog. “And better jewelry.” She didn’t think
     the small silver half-moons I wore in my ears even counted as jewelry.
    And then, just last week, as if she’d been giving this an enormous amount of thought, she’d said, “A little azure shadow at
     the crease and under the arch and you’d be amazed by how blue your eyes can be.” She peered at me a little closer. “After
     you tweeze those brows, of course.”
    She was such a true believer