Chapter Seven
“Mira, what does the scene look like down there?” Michelle sat back in her chair, her office silent despite two producers and Charlotte all huddling around the phone.
“It is chaos.” Mira’s voice was muffled by the crackle of her heavy breathing from rushing to the scene. “There are fire crews from all over the city, but they are so busy trying to put down the fires, they haven’t set up a really effective perimeter, so people are kind of just milling about watching.” Mira paused, mumbled to someone on her end of the line, then the click of her heels alerted them to her moving, and fast. “The fire chief is going to brief us in about five minutes. I’ll have more information then. But this looks bad guys. I haven’t heard about injuries or anything, but I wouldn’t be surprised given the size of this thing.”
Activity in the background had everyone in Michelle’s small office looking at each other with worry in their eyes. Several people shouted over each other near Mira, all talking at once so no one could really be heard. Finally, it became clear the police had arrived and were trying to push everyone back from getting too close to the burning buildings.
“Mira, this is Charlotte. Which end of the block are you on? The trash fire that had been called in earlier, and appeared to be nothing was on the 500 block of Murray Street.” Everyone in the room held their breaths waiting for a response.
“The press briefing is being held at the opposite end of the activity, almost three blocks away.” The noise died down slightly on her end as Mira made her way to where the fire chief would be giving his statement.
“He’s trying to make sure the reporters are far away from where this all started. From where the heaviest investigation will be.” Charlotte’s hunch was confirmed by Michelle nodding her head on the other side of the desk.
Mira huffed a laugh on the other side of the phone. “That might be true, but it will work because we can’t miss getting whatever it is he is going to say. Even if it is only the stock we don’t know anything yet answer.”
Everyone looked to Charlotte, she was the one with the hunch about an arsonist. She had been the one to be manning the desk each time one of the fires got called in. She quickly realized that they were looking to her for answers. That this is what it would be like if she accepted the promotion to Assignment Desk Manager. Instead of hunching her shoulders and retreating back into herself as she desperately wanted to do, Charlotte took a deep breath and faked it like her life depended on it.
“I already have another photographer en route. I’ll text him and tell him go to the opposite end of the scene, to the address where the trash fire had been last night.” Charlotte forced herself to stop from wrapping a string hanging from the last button on her shirt around her finger. Instead, she placed her palms firmly on her knees, which also helped to stop the shaking in her limbs from becoming obvious to those around her. “Mira, you and Rufus go to the briefing. Don’t ask anything that is going to give away our arsonist hunch unless you see other reporters leaning that direction. I think I might be able to get you a one-on-one.”
“You got it boss.” Mira ended the call on her end, and the silence in the office became almost suffocating.
Had Charlotte made the right call? The other stations would be focusing their efforts where the Chief was. If he planned to give them something big, like a look at one of the houses or even a homeowner, Mira and Rufus would be on their own, while all the other stations probably already had a second photographer on the standby.
“Okay, we’ve got a plan. Charlotte, I want you to fill in Annabelle on everything you know about this suspected arsonist so far, no matter how small the details. Then you get home and get some sleep. You’ve been here all night.” Michelle turned to the other producers, discussing where in their shows to stack the rest of the stories and whether they should dip back into the fire coverage later in their half hour blocks.
Once the plan was in place, Michelle dismissed everyone, but Charlotte held back. Her hands clasped behind her back still shook with the draining adrenaline speaking up in the meeting had produced. “I know you said I should go home, but I’d like to stay.”
“Charlotte, you need your sleep. The last thing I need is for you to be coming down with the same bug everyone else has got.” Michelle picked up a folder from her desk and stood, ready to head to a budget meeting with the station manager and sales manager.
“I know, but this is my story. It is the one I’ve been working on for a few weeks. I have a friend in the fire department that I think might be willing to help us out. Please, just let me stay until Mira and Rufus start editing. Then I’ll go home and watch the news from there.”
Michelle tapped the folder on her desk, biting one side of her mouth and staring Charlotte down. “Okay, but you take a nap in the back if you need to, and call in an order for lunch on my station card. You’re the lead on this while I’m in these stupid fucking meetings this morning. If I hadn’t already rescheduled with the bigwigs once, I would cancel it.”
“Got it. No problem.” Charlotte said the words with such conviction, she almost believed that she really had everything under control. Almost. But not really. Because inside, her head and stomach and heart seemed to all be at war with each other. Her head was going a mile a minute about everything she had to do to make sure they kicked the competition’s ass, and throwing up obstacles about why she would never be able to pull this off. Her stomach churned, and Charlotte prayed Michelle couldn’t hear it from across the room. Her heart pounded inside her chest so hard, she was a little afraid it could cause real damage to the vital organ. She didn’t know which area to focus on calming down first.
Michele turned to the door, but stopped before leaving the office. “You made the right call sending the backup photog to the other side of the scene. At worst Mira, and Rufus will have to scramble to get everything, and Jason doesn’t get more than a few minutes of b-roll. But if we are lucky, he’ll get something that everyone else will miss. Good job.”
The validation quieted everything inside Charlotte for a moment, before bringing it all roaring back. Because now the possibility of letting Michelle down loomed even greater in her mind. The possibility of failure of any sort made Charlotte break out in a cold sweat, but failing Michelle was just about the worst thing she could conceive of doing at work.
Once Michelle left the newsroom, Charlotte slowly closed the door so she was alone in the news director’s office. She sat with her elbows braced on her knees, her head hanging between her hands, and swallowed great lungs full of air to slow her panicking body. When her fingers and hands stopped shaking, Charlotte took out her phone and navigated to the text conversation she and Trey had been bouncing back and forth on.
Charlotte: Let me know if you are safe please. Not sure if you are down at the fire or not.
A minute passed before Charlotte got up from her seat and made her way back out to the newsroom. The room buzzed in a way it never did during her night shift. Reporters raced in and out of the doors on their ways to and from stories. Producers called out to each other for information or help filing graphics. The entire scene was almost foreign to Charlotte. Her world of journalism was usually much quieter. The hum of police scanners and click of her own fingers on the keyboard of her computer were normally the only sounds in her little world.
But an unexpected thrill at this new shift in her routine rolled through her. This is what she worked for all night. To make sure these people had news to cover and shows to put on the air.
“Hey, Charlotte. Ready to give me the lowdown?” Annabelle leaned over the side of the round platform where the assignment desk sat, a small friendly smile playing on her lips.
With a small nod, Charlotte made her way up next to the coworker she rarely ever saw thanks to their opposing shifts and began filling her in on everything having to do with the fire and her theory and the city having a budding firebug on their hands.
Just as they both turned back to their monitors to get to work on tracking down interviews for some of the other reporters working that day, Charlotte’s phone buzzed inside her pocket.
Trey: I’m at the fire, but I’m fine. One of the first to get here actually. It was bad when we first arrived.
Charlotte let out a sigh, acknowledging that at least some of her nervousness had been fear that Trey would get hurt in the line of his job. Knowing that he was okay, and the scene had died down enough for him to text her, helped immensely to ease some of her anxiety.
Charlotte: Good. I was worried.
