Betrayed by Love

It was insane, she kept telling herself. He’d only been teasing. He hadn’t really meant it. That reasoning might have convinced her except that Jacob never teased.

He had to mean it. And all her brother’s well-intentioned arguments and warnings would go right out the window if Jacob ever knocked on her door. She’d follow him into burning coals if he asked her to, walk over a carpet of snakes… anything, because the hunger for him had grown to such monumental proportions over the long, empty years. She loved him. Anything he wanted, he could have.

She was curious about his feelings. Tom had said that Jacob didn’t know what he felt for Kate. But Jacob wanted her, all right. Her innocence didn’t keep her from seeing the desire in his dark eyes. It was what would happen if she made love with him that puzzled her. Would he be flattered when he knew she was a virgin? Would he even know it? They said only doctors could really tell. But he was a very experienced man—would he know?

She parked in the municipal parking lot, glancing ruefully at all the dents on the fenders of her small orange VW Beetle. They were visible in the light from the street lamps.

“Poor little thing,” she said sympathetically, glaring at the big cars that surrounded it. “Don’t worry, someday I’ll save up enough to get your fenders smoothed out.”

Someday. Maybe when she was ninety… Reporting, while an exciting job, was hardly the best-paid profession in the world. It exerted maximum wear and tear on nerves, emotions and body, and salary never compensated for the inevitable overtime. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and nowhere near as glamorous as television seemed to make it.

What was glamorous, she wondered as she made her way up to the alderman’s offices, about covering a story on an addition to the city’s sewer system? One of the meetings she’d just come from had dealt with that fascinating subject.

Alderman Barkley H. James was talking to people as reporters crowded in. People from print and broadcast media had begun setting up, most of them wearing the bland, faintly bored look that seemed to hallmark the profession. It wasn’t really boredom, it was repetition. Most of these reporters were veterans, and they’d seen and heard it all. They were hard, because they had to be. That didn’t mean they were devoid of emotion—just that they’d learned to pretend they didn’t have it.

She slid into a seat beside Roger Dean, a reporter on a local weekly. Roger was nearer forty than thirty, a daily reporter who’d “retired” to a weekly. “Here we are again,” she murmured as she checked the lighting in the office and made corrections to the settings on her 35-mm camera. “I saw you yesterday at the solid-waste-management meeting, didn’t I?”

“It was a foul job, but somebody had to do it,” Roger said with theatrical fervor. He glanced at her from his superior height. “Why do they always send you to those meetings?”

“When it comes to issues like sanitary-disposal sites, everybody else hides in the bathroom until Harvey picks a victim.”

He shuddered. “I once covered a sanitary-landfill-site public meeting. People had guns. Knives. They yelled.”

“I have survived two of those,” she said with a smug grin. “At the first, there was a knock-down-drag-out fight. At the second, one man tried to throw another one out a window. I was jostled and shoved, and I still think someone pinched me in a very unpleasant way.”

The alderman interrupted the conversation as he began to speak. He told of mass unemployment, of poverty beyond anyone’s expectations. He told of living conditions that were intolerable, children playing in buildings that should have been torn down years before. Slums, he told his audience, were out of place in the twentieth century. The mayor had started the ball rolling with his excellent program of revitalization, Alderman James said. Following the mayor’s example, he vowed to continue the program in this crime-stricken neighborhood.

He’d interested a group of businessmen in funding a mass renovation of the neighborhood, citing figures that showed a drop in crime corresponding directly to the upgrading of slums. He threw statistics at them rapid-fire, and outlined the plan.

When he was through, there was the usual sprint by reporters to call in stories to the rewrite desk on newspapers or to anchor people at radio and television stations. This was the culmination of a story they’d all been following closely for the past week, and that made the alderman’s disclosures good copy.

Kate was almost knocked down in the stampede. She managed to find a quiet corner to phone the office and give them the gist of the speech so that they’d have time to get it set up for the next edition.

She collapsed back against the wall when she was through, watching Roger come toward her slowly as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

“I thought you had a computer,” he said.

She glared at him. “I did. It broke. I hate machines, not to mention you weekly reporters,” she muttered. “No wild dash to file your story, no gallop back to your desk to do sidebars…”

“Ah, the calm and quiet life,” he agreed with a grin. “Actually, they say weekly reporting kills more people than daily reporting. You don’t have to write up your copy then proof it again and do corrections and make up ads and answer the phone and do jobwork in the print shop behind the office and sell office supplies and take subscriptions—”

“Stop!”

He shrugged. “Just letting you know how lucky you are.” He put his pen back into his shirt pocket. “Well, I’m off. Nice to see you again, Kate.”

“Same here.”

He glanced at her with a faint smile. “I could find time to work you in if you’d like to have dinner with me.”

She was tempted. She almost said yes. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of Prince Charming, but she liked him and it would have been nice to talk over the frustrations of her job. “Come on, I’ll buy you pizza.”

She loved that. But when she thought about the unwashed dishes and unvacuumed floors and untidy bed at her apartment, her chores were too much to walk away from.

“Thanks, but I’ve got a mess at home that I’ve got to get cleaned up. Rain check?” she asked and smiled at him.

“I’d start rain for a smile like that,” he said with a chuckle. “Okay. See you, pretty girl.”

He winked and walked off. She stared after him, wondering how anyone in her right mind could turn down a free meal. She made her way out of the building, her thoughts full of the broken computer and of how much information from the meeting would be lost for the follow-up story she had to turn in tomorrow. Well, fortunately, she could always call and talk to the committee members. She knew them and they wouldn’t mind going over the figures for her. People in political circles were some of the nicest she’d ever known.

She drove back to her apartment thinking about the new lease on life that crime-ridden neighborhood was going to get. The story she’d done for the alderman had concerned a black family of six who’d been removed from the welfare rolls without a single explanation. The father had lost his job due to layoffs, the wife had had to have a mastectomy, there were four children, all barely school age.

The father had tried to call and ask why the checks weren’t coming, but the social workers had been pressed for time. Someone had put him on hold, and then he’d gone through a negative-sounding woman who’d informed him that the government didn’t make mistakes; if he’d been dropped from the rolls, there was a good reason. So when Kate went to do the story, the first thing she did was to call the social agency to ask about the situation. A sympathetic social worker did some checking and dug into the case, refusing to accept the superficial information she was given. Minutes later, she called Kate back to report that a computer foul-up was responsible. The family had been confused with another family that had been found guilty of welfare violations. The error had been corrected, and now the small family was getting the temporary help it needed. That, and a lot more, because Kate’s story had aroused public interest. Several prominent families had made quick contributions, and the family had been spared a grueling ordeal. But the story had haunted Kate. Society was creating more problems than it was solving. The world, Kate philosophized, was just getting too big and impersonal.

She parked her car in the basement of her apartment building and checked to make sure her can of Mace was within reach. It gave Kate a feeling of security when she had to go out at night. She lived in an apartment building that had a security system, but all the same, crime was everywhere.

It had been a long day. She wanted nothing more than to lie down after a hot bath and just read herself into a stupor. Even with all the difficulties, though, she had a feeling of accomplishment, of contributing something. God bless politicians who cared, and Chicago seemed to be blessed with a lot of them. She wondered if the other reporters who’d been following the story were as pleased as she was.

The elevator was sluggish, as usual. She hit the panel and finally it began the slow upward crawl to the fourth floor. She got off, ambling slowly to her door. She felt ancient.

The phone was ringing, and she listened numbly until she realized that she’d forgotten to turn the answering machine on. She unlocked the door and grabbed the receiver on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” she said, her voice breathless and curt. “If that’s you, Dan Harvey, try the rest room. That’s where everybody runs to hide when you need a story covered—”

“It isn’t Harvey,” came the reply in a deep, familiar voice.

Her heart slammed wildly at her rib cage. “Jacob?”

She could almost hear him smiling. “I’ve been ringing for the past hour. I thought you got off at five.”

Her breath was sticking in her throat. She slid onto an armchair by the phone and tried to stop herself from shaking. It had been two weeks since Margo’s wedding, but it felt like years. “I do,” she heard herself saying. “I had to cover a story at city hall and the traffic was terrible.”

“Have dinner with me,” he said in a tone she’d never heard him use. “I realize it’s short notice, but I didn’t expect to be in town overnight.”

She could have died when she remembered almost accepting Roger’s offer of a meal. If she had… It didn’t bear thinking about!

“It’s going on six-thirty,” she said, glancing at her digital clock.

“Can you be ready in thirty minutes?”

“Do birds fly?” she croaked. “Of course I can!”

He chuckled. “I’ll pick you up then.”

“But, wait, you don’t know where I live,” she said frantically.

“I know,” was all he said. And the line went dead.

She looked at the receiver blankly. Well, so much for being cool and poised and keeping her head, she thought ruefully. She might as well have taken an ad in her own paper, a display ad that read: I’m yours, Jacob!