Truth Like the Sun Read Free Page B

national rankings and blather, even during this current dot-com hangover.
Just look!
they told her, as if the views alone justified the hype. Seattle reminded her of men she’d known who’d been told too many times how handsome they were.
    She spent most of the next hour repeating and affirming what she’d just heard and seen, the editors debating whether “Just jump, bitch” was too inflammatory, and if there was actually a story here at all or just a
brief
, seeing how bridge jumps were fairly common. Those arguments were discarded, though, once KING-5 led with the jump-bitch quote on its noon broadcast. By then it was also clear the jumper had amazingly survived, which opened other doors. The lede for a story on road rage? Ultimately it was deemed a punchy dailywith a follow-up for the social services reporter, who’d been looking for a peg for a story about the city’s suicidal tendencies.
    Still, Helen scrambled to make her twelve column inches breathe. The Aurora Bridge was second only to the Golden Gate in suicide leaps. She looked up
aurora
, and found a Roman myth about
the goddess of dawn
. Is that who the jumper was, or why she survived? She considered checking weather patterns for the last ten jumps to see if anyone ever did it on sunny days. No, she told herself, keep it simple and get back to those insufferable World’s Fair archives.
    Her editor, Shrontz, called her assignment an honor, explaining in vague if glowing terms how the fair was the coming-out party that launched modern Seattle. What a perfect little project, he told her,
for an enterprising reporter who can really write
. The newsroom was still getting used to Helen. She wrote fast yet colorfully, her stories often reading like news-feature hybrids that confused the copy desk. With the fortieth anniversary looming, the
Times
was gonna be
all over the fair
, Shrontz kept telling her. She was hating him again. Liked him, then hated him, respected him, then resented him for confronting her about Elias, as if she’d lied during the interview by not mentioning that she had a son.
    She reloaded on espresso, then camped out in the
P-I
library, skimming books, magazines and newspaper clippings, reassuring herself that they’d let her return to her dot-com drama if she delivered a few nostalgic gems about the fair. What a long shot to beat out New York and land the first American expo in decades, back when world fairs were must-see spectacles and Seattle was a sleepy Boeing bunkhouse without a freeway. Yet from what she could tell, the fair was an artifact of the corniest of American times and, worse yet, a local sacred cow with fawning coverage shamelessly regurgitated through the ten-, twenty- and thirty-year remembrances. By now it was a myth, and with that realization she felt a rebellious desire to expose the truth about the fair.
    Starting cautiously, she prepared a story about it being an unreliable crystal ball, given how the official program predicted we’d be sleeping in rotating houses, commuting in flying cars and eatingscrambled eggs out of aerosol cans by now. She noticed, however, that the fair’s president, Roger Morgan, had the foresight to add this qualifier for the next generation: “If we’re accurate, we will have amazed you. If not, we hopefully will have amused you.”
    She needed to talk to Morgan but kept putting it off, knowing she’d get only one chance to catch
the silver-tongued P. R. Hercules—
as one reporter gushed—off-guard with her questions. People still called him
the father of the fair
or
Mr. Seattle
or, more often, just
Roger
, as if there were only one.
Ask Roger. Call Roger
. Everyone deferring to his memory.
    Reworking her questions now, she was surprised to find his number in the white pages, but hung up mid-dial. Maybe she should start with Ted Severson or one of the other surviving notables, though they’d given bland quotes nine years ago and no doubt would encourage her to talk to the man