Peeled

  Irritation flashed across his face; he walked away from me. “You ask a lot of questions, young lady.”

  How else do you find things out?

  I’ve been asking questions all my life. My first official word as a baby wasn’t Mama or Dada. It was Whazzat?

  All day long I’d point at things.

  Whazzat?

  “Newspaper,” Dad would answer. “Dirt…doggy…doo-doo…Don’t touch that, Hildy!”

  Why is the sky blue?

  Why do birds fly?

  Why does Mrs. Johnson’s breath always smell funny? Mrs. Johnson was my kindergarten teacher.

  Why does Mrs. Johnson’s voice get like that?

  I kept asking until someone looked into it. Turned out Mrs. Johnson had gin in her water bottle. By the time we got to phonics, she was feeling no pain.

  She got a leave of absence and we got a new teacher.

  Who says kids don’t have power?

  A woman in a purple cape was at Allie’s craft stand, holding up an Applehead Doll—the apple heads wrinkled up when they dried, making this a popular gift for people over thirty. She was saying to Allie, “I have seen this craft in my homeland, Romania. A wise woman made them—most respected.”

  Allie liked that.

  That woman in the cape walked down the lanes of the market like a queen, pausing briefly to look at things.

  I followed her and she stopped at our stand, smiling warmly at the BIDDLE FAMILY ORCHARDS sign, picked up a jar of Nan’s chunky applesauce, and held it to the light like she knew something deep about it.

  “How much, dear one?” she asked Elizabeth in a smoky, accented voice.

  “Six dollars.”

  “Where have you been?” Nan asked me.

  “Investigating,” I said.

  The caped woman looked at me; her dark eyes bored through me. She took out a beaded coin purse and slowly unfolded the bills. She handed them to Elizabeth and smiled broadly.

  Then she moved on.

  “Who is that woman?” Elizabeth asked me, putting the money in her apron.

  “Another weird tourist?”

  On Sunday The Bee broke the news.

  RENOWNED PSYCHIC MADAME ZOBEK TO SETTLE IN BANESVILLE

  She was so renowned, The Bee proclaimed, that she was considering an offer to appear regularly on the new hit cable show Hair-Raising Haunts.

  People came to her from all over the world to seek her wisdom. She had come to town because of the Ludlow place. “It drew me,” she explained in the article. “I felt the spirits of the dead calling me to come. I cannot tell how long they will ask me to linger, but I must obey.”

  “Hopefully, not too long,” Minska said when she read the article.

  Tanisha and I were sitting in a window booth at Minska’s. I dipped a deep-fried apple slice into thick caramel sauce, watched the caramel drip slowly onto the plate. Caramel takes its sweet time. It’s my favorite flavor.

  Tanisha took out her latest photos of life in Banesville. “It’s getting harder for me to photograph people who don’t seem a little nervous, Hildy. I see it on their faces.”

  I looked at the photographs of stern-faced growers in the Red Road orchards, of mothers rushing into cars with their children.

  “You see this one?” She held up a shot of Main Street on a Saturday night with not a car in sight. “Since the dead guy was found, people aren’t going out the way they used to.”

  It was dinner time and Minska’s wasn’t packed with people, either—that hardly ever happened.

  I looked at the photos of Minska’s father on the back wall. He worked in the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland. That’s where the protests began that ultimately led to Poland’s freedom. Minska’s father was jailed and beat up, but he never stopped believing that Poland would be free. “The stirring for freedom was everywhere,” Minska told me in our interview last spring. It was the best article I’ve written. People asked for copies of it long after it ran.

  The man in the booth behind us groaned. He’d been groaning for a while now. All I could see was his back. Minska went over to him. She was wearing her billowing black pants, a white shirt, and silver hoop earrings. “Do you need a taxi, sir?”

  “You got taxis in the happy apple valley?” he said, slurring his words.

  “We’ve got one,” Minska responded.

  He moaned again.

  “Do you need a doctor?” she asked.

  He waved an arm. “Not sick.”

  Minska walked away, but kept her eye on the man as she dusted the photo of the woman who was a leader in the early workers’ strikes in Poland.

  “She was a factory worker,” Minska had said to me. “So brave; always ready to expose wrongdoings. Her name was Anna. She was my hero. During the strikes she said, ‘I knew that I could not conquer great wrongs myself, so I started with small things.’”

  I ate my apple slice slowly.

  Now we heard ripping noises in the booth.

  Tanisha turned around and asked the man if she could help.

  “Not at the moment,” he snarled.

  She turned back. “It’s code purple, Hildy.”

  Purple stood for “Proceed with caution.”

  I stood and looked. The man was ripping a newspaper up into little shreds. He grunted, “This is the only cure for bad writing.” He tore an article in half.

  I sat back, shocked.

  It was Baker Polton!

  He sure looked disheveled. “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  “Depends on your definition of all right.” He ripped up more of the newspaper, The Albany Register. “This used to be a great newspaper. I used to work at this paper. You know what it is now?” Tanisha picked up a shred. “Puff and puke.” He sat back like he had a headache. “You want to know why I walked out on this job? I was managing editor. They told me I couldn’t write a story that questioned the lousy emissions ratings for a certain kind of SUV that just happened to be sold by one of our biggest advertisers. I told them to stick it.” He looked at me. His eyes seemed a bit cloudy. “Why do you want to be a reporter?”

  I thought for a second. “I care about the news and getting it right.”

  “Do something else. The field’s changing too much. Don’t get sucked in.”

  “But—”

  “They’re going to ask you to believe that entertainment is news. What are you going to tell them? They’re going to put things that don’t matter on the front page and the ones that do on page twenty. They’re going to tell you that flash and sex sell papers and that’s all people are looking for these days. They’re going to reduce your copy to sound bites and slogans and if they can figure out how to make a scratch-and-sniff midsized daily, believe me, they’ll do it.”

  “My dad was a reporter, Mr. Polton.”

  “Mine, too.” He looked out the window. “Chicago Tribune. City Desk. He knew Royko.” I decided not to mention our fly. Baker Polton sat straighter. “Where’s your dad working?”

  “He died.”

  He glanced at me. He had flecks of gray in his thinning hair; he had a thick neck, too. He went back to examining his beer bottle. “What are you working on?”

  I told him about the Ludlow place, how the fear in town was growing. “I’m not sure how to write about fear.”

  “Don’t write about fear. Write about people who are afraid.” He finished his beer.

  “That’s really good advice, sir.”

  He pointed a finger at me. “And remember what Pete Hamill says—during the first twenty-four hours of any big breaking story, about half the facts are wrong.”

  I didn’t know that. “How do you figure out what’s true?”

  “Keep questioning people. Confirm everything.”

  “You know a lot,” I said.

  He looked sad. “About some things.” He signaled Minska behind the counter. “Could you call me that cab?”

  “I already did.” Al’s Apple Taxi pulled up in front of the restaurant.
br />   Tanisha and I walked him out to the cab.

  “Where’s home, pal?” the driver asked.

  “Home…” Baker Polton said it like it didn’t exist. “I’m at my cousin’s place. Renshaw Road.”

  Home.

  In my room. Laptop ready.

  I sent the e-mail, short and sweet.

  Mr. Polton,

  How do you stand up for truth?

  Chapter 9

  Baker Polton stood rumpled at the front of Room 67B and looked at the VERITAS sign that was still hanging crooked on the wall. He was wearing gray pants and a stained blue shirt. Mr. Grasso stood in the doorway. There was hardly room for all of us.

  I walked up. “Mr. Polton, thank you for coming.”

  “Somebody had to rescue you from Grasso.”

  Mr. Grasso cracked his knuckles and grinned.

  “And by the way,” he added, “I appreciate persistence.”

  I smiled and found a seat.

  Mrs. Kutash gushed that, as our principal, she was delighted to announce that Mr. Polton had agreed to be our adviser for the rest of the semester, and did we realize how fortunate we were to have a journalist of his standing to help us with the paper?

  “Adults who selflessly volunteer their time to further the cause of education give a great gift to the school and future generations.”

  “We’ll see,” Polton said.

  Mr. Grasso cleared his throat in a kind of warning.

  Mrs. Kutash smiled nervously.

  Baker Polton sneered at the whiteboard in the corner that listed some upcoming stories for our next edition:

  Great date movies

  Joys of the harvest

  Ongoing roof repair

  New football uniforms

  Someone had written All Ghost, All the Time. Lev, probably.

  Then Baker Polton shook out the last issue of The Core; pages fell on the table. “What are you working on that people will care about next week?”

  Darrell, Tanisha, T.R., Elizabeth, Lev, and I looked at each other.

  No one wanted to go first.

  He turned to the whiteboard and wrote: NOBODY WANTS OLD NEWS. He underlined it.

  “This is a newspaper, kiddies. A newspaper needs stories. What have you got?”

  Darrell mumbled that we were following the Ludlow house story and the murder.

  “Alleged murder,” Baker corrected. “What have you got that’s new on Lupo?”

  Darrell looked desperately at me.

  “I got some good quotes from the sheriff,” I explained.

  Hands on hips. “What have the rest of you got?”

  Lev half raised his hand. “We’re doing in-depth interviews with our best advertisers.”

  “Why?”

  “We thought they’d give us more money if we did.”

  Baker Polton tapped his marker on the whiteboard and wrote DON’T SUCK UP. “It’ll always come back to bite you in the butt.” Mrs. Kutash’s face reddened.

  T.R. said, “I’m thinking about doing something about the dangers of football injuries—concussions, things like that.”

  “Now, that’s a feature.” Baker Polton wrote it on the whiteboard. He put a slash through New football uniforms.

  “What’s news?” he asked us.

  We looked at each other.

  “What’s news?” he asked again. He held up a copy of Sunday’s Bee. “It’s not this.”

  BANESVILLE BRACES FOR MORE ATTACKS

  “Well?” Baker Polton demanded.

  We turned to Darrell because editors are supposed to know these things. He stammered, “Well, it’s, uh…it’s kind of, in actuality…reporting what’s going on.”

  Baker Polton half nodded. “So that means a newspaper can report anything that’s going on.”

  Darrell shook his head. “No, not exactly. I mean, it could, but that’s not the point.”

  Baker Polton stared at him. “What’s the point?”

  I gulped and added, “The point is it has to matter.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the readers,” T.R. offered.

  “And who decides what matters?”

  There was a long silence, except for coffee sipping.

  “We do,” I said.

  “And it’s hard,” Darrell added.

  Baker Polton squashed his Styrofoam cup. “If it ever gets easy, do something else.”

  It didn’t get easier.

  “He’s kind of angry,” Elizabeth whispered to me.

  “I’d say he’s really angry, Elizabeth.”

  “How come we got him for an adviser?”

  I decided not to confess.

  “He scares me, Hildy. I don’t think he’s going to like my writing.”

  That was probably true—Elizabeth’s strength was in visual design, not sentence structure.

  “I don’t think he likes much of anything,” Tanisha said.

  We were getting ready to have our egos decimated by Baker Polton. He had asked each of us to give him what we thought was our best recent piece of published writing, and now we were going to discuss it. He took a seat at the table. We shoved our seats around him.

  “There’s more room in an elevator,” he said gruffly. “Let’s hit the ground running. Elizabeth Biddle.”

  She raised a timid hand. “Present.”

  Baker Polton put his feet on the table, leaned back in his chair, and read, “‘The long, lonely high school corridors seemed to be filled with the whispers of the graduating seniors who had left their marks on us all.’”

  Elizabeth smiled nervously.

  He looked up. “Did the seniors draw on you with laundry markers?”

  “Why, no…”

  He slashed through her copy, wrote in red, We won’t forget the graduating seniors. “Keep it simple, kid. This is journalism, not creative writing.”

  Elizabeth’s face fell.

  He read a few more lines about “‘their dreams for the future wafting up like clouds floating in the deep blue sky.’”

  Elizabeth squirmed.

  He pushed back his reading glasses and looked around the table. “Less is more. Less description, more facts. Only describe if it means something. The killer had one arm. The mayor was seven feet tall. The hero was deaf. For now, let’s not care if the sky was blue. If it’s plaid, mention it.”

  He put a piggy bank on the table. “From now on, each unnecessary word costs you one dime.” That could wipe us out, particularly Elizabeth. Baker Polton picked up my article on the Ludlow house. “Hildy Biddle…is this paper a family-run operation?”

  “We’re cousins,” Elizabeth explained.

  I held my breath.

  He waved his glasses. “Good, tight opening, nice quotes from the sheriff, but here’s where you lose me.” Glasses back on. “‘Many neighbors wonder about the safety of a house that seems to hold so many mysteries.’ What does that mean?”

  “I was just trying to show that—”

  “You lost the color.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did you interview the people?”

  I nodded.

  “What did they say?”

  “I was just trying to get everything in and—” I lowered my head. Did I really just say that?

  “But you had space for this: ‘The mayor’s office said that the town was looking into the situation.’ Does that refer to the house or the murder?”

  “That’s what they said when I called.”

  “Did you ask to speak with the mayor?”

  “Not for this article. I did talk to him at the market on Saturday.”

  “But in this piece you didn’t. Polton’s First Law—Always ask three follow-up questions.”

  He made it sound so easy.

  “Could you give us an example?” I asked.

  He ticked them off. “Who’s looking into the situation? What’s being done in case of an emergency? When will the mayor be taking questions from the press?”

  I wrot
e those down. “Thanks.”

  “You might not get an answer, but they’ll know they can’t ignore you.”

  I asked, “Mr. Polton, how do we get people to take us seriously?”

  “Start by taking yourselves seriously.”

  I checked with the sheriff to see if the coroner’s report was out yet. It wasn’t.

  I called D&B Security to see if anyone wanted to spill their guts about Houston Bule and Donny Lupo. I got the answering machine again.

  I went home, dragging my seriousness with me.

  It wasn’t easy there, either.

  Hildy, did you take the supplies to the field?

  Hildy, the school tour is here.

  Hildy, please stop wasting time and get down here now.

  I’m not wasting time—I’m writing!

  I closed my laptop and headed down the long stairs past the old grandfather clock. My great-grandmother had painted apple blossoms on the wood.

  How many generations of Biddles had walked down these stairs?

  Sweated over the harvest?

  Prayed for good weather?

  Kept going no matter what came at them?

  I walked into the kitchen. The big blue work calendar was on the yellow wall. Being fall, there was so much going on.

  HILDY—

  Wednesdays (3-5), School Tours.

  Fridays (5-8), Work at Farm Stand.

  Saturdays (5-3), Farmers Market.

  Elizabeth’s schedule was just as crazy, except for Wednesdays. She was too sweet to keep little kids in line—she helped Nan with the baking for the market instead.

  Uncle Felix was reading The Bee. “Who’s writing this stuff?” he asked, throwing it down.

  This paper sure got thrown down a lot.

  I picked it up. “If people don’t work hard to get the truth and print it, this is the best we’ll get,” I told him. “If people just get mad at the paper and don’t demand better reporting, nothing will change. I’m trying to change things.”

  He looked at me. “You sound like Mitch.”

  I smiled. Mitch was my dad.

  Felix sighed. “He was the fighter, I was the farmer.”

  “You fight the weather,” I reminded him.

  “Mitch was always marching off to right some wrong.” Felix looked miserably at his bag of rice cakes. “Might as well gnaw on cardboard.”