HOWLERS Read Free

Think up an app! Sell it to Apple for millions. What would it be? An app that eats student loan data! An app that blocks wedding-planners’ irritating emails, like the ones I’ve been getting all week: “Roses or Carnations? Boutonnieres for your guys—of course!
    He’d begun forwarding questions relating to his upcoming nuptials to his fiancée, a budding fashion designer who worked for Lululemon. His fiancée was the daughter of a famous Hollywood producer, who was paying a small fortune for their wedding—solely, Miles realized, to impress the man’s horde of Gucci-clad friends, who expected a show. When Miles suggested they not have such an extravagant wedding, and instead donate some of the saved money to charity, the family—including his fiancée—had burst into laughter, thinking he was joking. They were all about the show of power.
    Gazing out the window, Miles thought about the murders in Timberline and a chill went down his back. Like Willis Good, he too would soon be a young husband with responsibilities.  He’d come to realize, too, that his fiancée expected to live as if Miles were wealthy. She was already looking at homes they couldn’t possibly afford. This was it, he thought: student loans and a big fat mortgage. Maybe Willis had been under financial stress and snapped? He wondered what had happened to make Willis murder his wife and children. Willis had to be crazy. 
    He’d covered the story. The accused murderer, Good, had been a close childhood friend, and someone he’d thought he’d known well. If he’d not gone to the house and seen the family’s dead bodies, including the couple’s two little boys, with his own two eyes, he would not have believed it.
    “What do we really know about the world?” Howard Price, the Herald’s managing editor asked, walking up behind him.
    Miles stepped away from the window, gladly putting the murders in Timberline and his fully-mortgaged future aside.
    “Really, what do we know, young man? How do you know that CNN isn’t all fiction, the whole thing?” Price said. He looked at Miles self-satisfied, his fifty-something face fleshy, robbing it of authority. Price was on his favorite tangent: the remarkable and ever present conspiracy of: fill-in-the-blank.
    “And don’t forget Building Seven,” Miles said, “whatever you do.”
    “Exactly,” Price said, turning serious. “Building Seven wasn’t hit by anything but debris and it collapsed like a house of cards! I watched it myself that morning. Concrete and steel don’t just collapse, son. There was a small fire in the building. Hundreds of engineers are saying the official government explanations are scientifically impossible.” Price walked away, checking his Facebook page on his new iPhone.
    Miles had heard it all before. His editor had been fired from his six-figure salary at the LA Times because Price had refused to put down the 9-11 story long after everyone else in the country had moved on. Even in kooky, hippie-dippy Nevada City, most of Price’s colleagues considered him a tin-foil-hat-wearing wing nut. When Price tried to get his reporters to read the reports issued by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, no one bothered. The fact was, no one—even professional journalists—cared about the story. Mainstream journalists who still cared, like Price, found themselves without employment, lucky if they could find jobs on small-town papers.
    “I don’t know,” Miles said, walking to his messy-with-stuff metal desk. “But if it’s true about Dancing With The Stars being rigged, then I don’t want to go on living.” He enjoyed pulling Price’s chain.
    “Don’t believe seventy-five percent of what you read, or what you hear on the Tell-U-Vision. You want to know my formula? I take everything and I divide it by the BS Factor,” Price said, taking off his glasses. His voice trailed off, lost in the clatter coming from one of the paper’s antiquated fax machines. Price