A Voice In The Night Read Free Page B

weren’t too sure either. But after a couple of hours, it smoothed out.
    When they were in a break, the private studio line lit up. Only Eileen and the station manager knew this number. She got through first. “I’ve been listening. It’s good. Really good.” His wife never exaggerated. This he could take to the bank. “Yeah? Ya think?”
    “Yeah. I think. Gotta go. Got sick people here.”
    Zack Osfelder was right behind her. The station manager was a legend in the business for the brutal control that he exercised on the rest of the on-the-air staff. But the ratings proved him right. He had no patience for anything on the air that was extraneous. Night or day he would call the studio to point out unnecessary, empty chatter. “Who goddam cares?” was all he would say, sometimes often enough to drive the guy on the air out forever. One drivetime deejay had to be taken away in restraints after Zack’s repeated needling drove him to tear the music library apart in a fury. He never returned.
    “I don’t know how the hell you’re doing that bit with the callers, but keep it up. This shit is outstanding.” Zack hung up, replaced by a dial tone. Two weeks later, billboards were going up all over town. Voices In The Night.7p.m - 12. Luke Trimble. KOGO 600. Luke and Eileen drove past one with its hand-painted likeness of him. “Geez. That’s close,” she said. “It doesn’t look anything like you.”
    “I’ve got a face for radio, baby.”

Chapter 5
    California was a dream. Nearly perfect weather every day, save for the dense morning fog along the shoreline that burned off by 9 a.m. They snatched up a converted carriage house in La Mesa, on a side street where they could walk to a dozen restaurants and shops. The rent seemed too low to be in, what seemed to them, a resort. Every day was vacation. Regularly there’d be a realization of where they were and how much their lives had been transformed.
    “This is all because of you, ya know. We’d still be back in Connecticut, getting ready to freeze our asses off if you hadn’t started this.” Luke knew what he said was true. He had a big inertia problem. “Thank God one of us has some balls,” he shrugged.
    “Most guys would just say ‘I love you,’ but that’s OK,” she mocked, warmed more deeply by his acknowledgement. “That too.”
    He rose from the table of the outdoor café, moving to her side. He guided her out of her chair and kissed her lightly. A middle-aged couple watched from their quiche Lorraine, longing for their youth and certainty again.“You kinda like me, huh,” she beamed up to him from their embrace, her chin pressed into his chest.
    “Let’s go home and I’ll show ya.”
    They walked the three blocks faster and faster until it became a full-bore, laughing foot-race to bed.
    At the hospital, patients eyed her name tag and asked if she was related to “that one on the radio.” ”Married to him,” was her reply, pleased with the celebrity status it conferred. But she had a status of her own. To her surprise she was a natural at nursing, especially the patients whose barely concealed terror she could calm with a few words of reassurance, or just by listening, stroking their hands while they talked. She wondered where this facility had come from, and came to see that her own happiness had created more emotional space inside her.
    She had become a whole person.
    Her mother noticed too. During one of their weekly telephone visits, she blurted, ”You’re different now.”
    “How?”
    “Just different. You’re grown up. You never seemed that happy when you were a kid. Now you’re  – I don’t know. You’re not mad at me anymore.”
    “I wasn’t mad at you. Just scared. Of everything.”
    Zack had summoned Luke to the station late in the afternoon, to his tiny office with the obsolete title, sales manager, on the door. There was room for his small grey metal desk and two chairs, nothing more. While Zack was clearly in