One Fall

  * * * * *

  It began to rain shortly before Steve made it home. He parked in the driveway, taking his mother’s vacant spot, and covered his head with his backpack as he ran to the front porch.

  Once inside, he darted up the stairs and shut himself in his room. He emptied his backpack on his bed, spread the print-outs across the mattress, and plopped down in front of them.

  The Calgary Financial Telegram was apparently circulated among exceedingly honest and boring Canadian Investors. Page One was filled with a dreary article about “gold funds” as a “deflation hedge.” Page Two had a smarmy “Letter From The Editor” behooving Canadian Investors to learn from the mistakes of their neighbors to the south, who insisted on losing their shirts in market fads. Pages three through six were splattered with tidbits, little paragraphs about selected industries and financial sectors. Steve tried to read each one, certain for some reason that the info he wanted was cloaked somehow, not unlike Mr. Anonymous’s emails. The content was so dry he couldn’t help skipping along the paragraph headers. “Pullman Bearish On Bonds”; “British Columbia Utilities Bought Out”; “Skyler Holding To Reorganize”; “Bacon Futures Sizzling” – Steve’s eyes jumped back. Buried in the small text was a word he recognized, “Saxon.” He skimmed the sentence, “...liquidated assets will be reorganized under the new parent company, The Saxon Fund.” His eyes darted to the top of the paragraph:

  Skyler Holding To Reorganize

  On December first, Skyler Holding, LLC, will begin liquidation of its North American assets, following the buyout of all secondary partners. Founded in 2002, the holding company for seven commercial real estate interests intends to sell all properties at appraised values. The liquidated assets will be reorganized under the new parent company, The Saxon Fund, LLC.

  What the hell did that mean? Steve went to his computer, brought up a search engine on the Internet, and searched for “Skyler Holding.”

  “3 documents found.”

  Steve clicked on the first one, “History of Ashwood Park.”

  The site was for a business campus in Calgary, apparently “constructed in 1992" and “home to three of Canada’s most exciting companies.” Steve hit control-F, and typed “Skyler Holding” into the “Find:” window that appeared. The page automatically scrolled halfway down and highlighted “Skyler Holding” in the middle of a sentence. Steve found the sentence’s beginning: “The property is owned by Corinth Realtors, a subsidiary of Skyler Holding.”

  Steve went back to the search engine. He typed “Corinth Realtors.”

  “0 active documents found. 1 cached document found.”

  Steve clicked on the cached document, a web page that was no longer visible on the Internet except through the search engines that saved old web pages on their servers.

  The document took him to what apparently used to be the home page for Corinth Realtors, a “commercial real estate development company founded--”

  Steve’s eyes dashed down the page involuntarily. His peripheral vision had seen a name so familiar to him that it jumped out from the field of words like one’s own name in a buzz of conversation.

  Steve read the name, two words, and everything came together. If that name was on this page then it all made sense. Mr. Anonymous, Skyler Holding, The Saxon Fund, even his court-ordered silence, they were all part of one story, one mega-story.

  And it was his. It was his scoop.

  He hoped.

  Steve typed “www.wrestlingdailytribune.com” into his web browser to check in on the competition.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered as their front page came up. Steve clicked on the entrance link to the main story and then read intently. As far as he could tell, the competition wasn’t on to his story. Unfortunately, they had scooped him on something else.