His thoughts drifted to his ex-wife. Maria, he reflected, would have loved a drive like this. In the early years of their marriage, they would rent a car and drive to the mountains or the beach, sometimes spending hours on the road. She’d been a publicist at Elle magazine when they’d met at a publishing party. When he asked if she’d like to join him at a nearby coffee shop, he had no idea she would end up being the only woman he ever loved. At first, he thought he’d made a mistake in asking her out, simply because they seemed to have nothing in common. She was feisty and emotional, but later, when he kissed her outside her apartment, he was entranced.
He eventually came to appreciate her fiery personality, her unerring instincts about people, and the way she seemed to embrace all of him without judgment, good and bad. A year later, they were married in the church, surrounded by friends and family. He was twenty-six, not yet a columnist for Scientific American but steadily building his reputation, and they could barely afford the small apartment they rented in Brooklyn. To his mind, it was young-and-struggling marital bliss. To her mind, he eventually suspected, their marriage was strong in theory but constructed on a shaky foundation. In the beginning, the problem was simple: while her job kept her in the city, Jeremy traveled, pursuing the big story wherever it might be. He was often gone for weeks at a time, and while she’d assured him that she could handle it, she must have realized during his absences that she couldn’t. Just after their second anniversary, as he readied himself for yet another trip, Maria sat down beside him on the bed. Clasping her hands together, she raised her brown eyes to meet his.
“This isn’t working,” she said simply, letting the words hang for a moment. “You’re never home anymore and it isn’t fair to me. It isn’t fair to us.”
“You want me to quit?” he asked, feeling a small bubble of panic rise in him.
“No, not quit. But maybe you can find something local. Like at the Times. Or the Post. Or the Daily News.”
“It’s not going to be like this forever,” he pleaded. “It’s only for a little while.”
“That’s what you said six months ago,” she said. “It’s never going to change.”
Looking back, Jeremy knew he should have taken it as the warning that it was, but at the time, he had a story to write, this one concerning Los Alamos. She wore an uncertain smile as he kissed her good-bye, and he thought about her expression briefly as he sat on the plane, but when he returned, she seemed herself again and they spent the weekend curled up in bed. She began to talk about having a baby, and despite the nervousness he felt, he was thrilled at the thought. He assumed he’d been forgiven, but the protective armor of their relationship had been chipped, and imperceptible cracks appeared with every additional absence. The final split came a year later, a month after a visit to a doctor on the Upper East Side, one who presented them with a future that neither of them had ever envisioned. Far more than his traveling, the visit foretold the end of their relationship, and even Jeremy knew it.
“I can’t stay,” she’d told him afterward. “I want to, and part of me will always love you, but I can’t.”
She didn’t need to say more, and in the quiet, self-pitying moments after the divorce, he sometimes questioned whether she’d ever really loved him. They could have made it, he told himself. But in the end, he understood intuitively why she had left, and he harbored no ill will against her. He even spoke to her on the phone now and then, though he couldn’t bring himself to attend her marriage three years later to an attorney who lived in Chappaqua.
The divorce had become final seven years ago, and to be honest, it was the only truly sad thing ever to have happened to him. Not many people could say that, he knew. He’d never been seriously injured, he had an active social life, and he’d emerged from childhood without the sort of psychological trauma that seemed to afflict so many of his age. His brothers and their wives, his parents, and even his grandparents—all four in their nineties—were healthy. They were close, too: a couple of weekends a month, the ever-growing clan would gather at his parents’, who still lived in the house in Queens where Jeremy had grown up. He had seventeen nieces and nephews, and though he sometimes felt out of place at family functions, since he was a bachelor again in a family of happily married people, his brothers were respectful enough not to probe the reasons behind the divorce.
And he’d gotten over it. For the most part, anyway. Sometimes, on drives like this, he would feel a pang of yearning for what might have been, but that was rare now, and the divorce hadn’t soured him on women in general.
A couple of years back, Jeremy had followed a study about whether the perception of beauty was the product of cultural norms or genetics. For the study, attractive women and less attractive women were asked to hold infants, and the length of eye contact between the women and the infants was compared. The study had shown a direct correlation between beauty and eye contact: the infants stared longer at the attractive women, suggesting that people’s perceptions of beauty were instinctive. The study was given prominent play in Newsweek and Time.
He’d wanted to write a column criticizing the study, partly because it omitted what he felt were some important qualifications. Exterior beauty might catch someone’s eye right away—he knew he was just as susceptible as the next guy to a supermodel’s appeal—but he’d always found intelligence and passion to be far more attractive and influential over time. Those traits took more than an instant to decipher, and beauty had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Beauty might prevail in the very short term, but in the medium and longer terms, cultural norms—primarily those values and norms influenced by family—were more important. His editor, however, canned the idea as “too subjective” and suggested he write something about the excessive use of antibiotics in chicken feed, which had the potential to turn streptococcus into the next bubonic plague. Which made sense, Jeremy noted with chagrin: the editor was a vegetarian, and his wife was both gorgeous and about as bright as an Alaskan winter sky.
Editors. He’d long ago concluded that most of them were hypocrites. But, as in most professions, he supposed, hypocrites tended to be both passionate and politically savvy—in other words, corporate survivors—which meant they were the ones who not only doled out assignments but ended up paying the expenses.
But maybe, as Nate had suggested, he’d be out of that racket soon. Well, not completely out of it. Alvin was probably right in saying that television producers were no different from editors, but television paid a living wage, which meant he’d be able to pick and choose his projects, instead of having to hustle all the time. Maria had been right to challenge his workload so long ago. In fifteen years, his workload hadn’t changed a bit. Oh, the stories might be higher profile, or he might have an easier time placing his freelance pieces because of the relationships he’d built over the years, but neither of those things changed the essential challenge of always coming up with something new and original. He still had to produce a dozen columns for Scientific American, at least one or two major investigations, and another fifteen or so smaller articles a year, some in keeping with the theme of the season. Is Christmas coming? Write a story about the real St. Nicholas, who was born in Turkey, became bishop of Myra, and was known for his generosity, love of children, and concern for sailors. Is it summer? How about a story about either (a) global warming and the undeniable 0.8-degree rise in temperature over the last one hundred years, which foretold Sahara-like consequences throughout the United States, or (b) how global warming might cause the next ice age and turn the United States into an icy tundra. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, was good for the truth about the Pilgrims’ lives, which wasn’t only about friendly dinners with Native Americans, but instead included the Salem witch hunts, smallpox epidemics, and a nasty tendency toward incest.
Interviews with famous scientists and articles about various satellites or NASA projects were always respected and easy to place no matter what time of year, as were exposés about drugs (legal and illegal), sex, prostitution, gambling, liquor, court cases involving massive settlements, and anything, absolutely anything whatsoever, about the supernatural, most of which had little or nothing to do with science and more to do with quacks like Clausen.
He had to admit the process wasn’t anything like he’d imagined a career in journalism would be. At Columbia—he was the only one of his brothers to attend college and became the first in his family ever to graduate, a fact his mother never ceased to point out to strangers—he’d double-majored in physics and chemistry, with the intention of becoming a professor. But a girlfriend who worked at the university paper convinced him to write a story—which relied heavily on the use of statistics—about the bias in SAT scores used in admission. When his article led to a number of student demonstrations, Jeremy realized he had a knack for writing. Still, his career choice didn’t change until his father was swindled by a bogus financial planner out of some $40,000, right before Jeremy graduated. With the family home in jeopardy—his father was a bus driver and worked for the Port Authority until retirement—Jeremy bypassed his graduation ceremony to track down the con man. Like a man possessed, he searched court and public records, interviewed associates of the swindler, and produced detailed notes.
As fate would have it, the New York D.A.’s office had bigger fish to fry than a small-time scam artist, so Jeremy double-checked his sources, condensed his notes, and wrote the first exposé of his life. In the end, the house was saved, and New York magazine picked up the piece. The editor there convinced him that life in academia would lead nowhere and, with a subtle blend of flattery and rhetoric about chasing the big dream, suggested that Jeremy write a piece about Leffertex, an antidepressant that was currently undergoing stage III clinical trials and was the subject of intense media speculation.
Jeremy took the suggestion, working two months on the story on his own dime. In the end, his article led the drugmaker to withdraw the drug from FDA consideration. After that, instead of heading to MIT for his master’s degree, he traveled to Scotland to follow along with scientists investigating the Loch Ness Monster, the first of his fluff pieces. There, he’d been present for the deathbed confession of a prominent surgeon who admitted that the photograph he’d taken of the monster in 1933—the photograph that brought the legend into the public eye—had been faked by him and a friend one Sunday afternoon as a practical joke. The rest, as they say, was history.
Still, fifteen years of chasing stories was fifteen years of chasing stories, and what had he received in exchange? He was thirty-seven years old, single and living in a dingy one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, and heading to Boone Creek, North Carolina, to explain a case of mysterious lights in a cemetery.
He shook his head, perplexed as always at the path his life had taken. The big dream. It was still out there, and he still had the passion to reach it. Only now, he’d begun to wonder if television would be his means.
The story of the mysterious lights originated from a letter Jeremy had received a month earlier. When he’d read it, his first thought was that it would make a good Halloween story. Depending on the angle the story took, Southern Living or even Reader’s Digest might be interested for their October issue; if it ended up being more literary and narrative, maybe Harper’s or even the New Yorker. On the other hand, if the town was trying to cash in like Roswell, New Mexico, with UFOs, the story might be appropriate for one of the major southern newspapers, which might then further syndicate it. Or if he kept it short, he could use it in his column. His editor at Scientific American, despite the seriousness with which he regarded the contents of the magazine, was also intensely interested in increasing the number of subscribers and talked about it incessantly. He knew full well that the public loved a good ghost story. He might hem and haw while glancing at his wife’s picture and pretending to evaluate the merits, but he never passed up a story like this. Editors liked fluff as much as the next guy, since subscribers were the lifeblood of the business. And fluff, sad to say, was becoming a media staple.
In the past, Jeremy had investigated seven different ghostly apparitions; four had ended up in his October column. Some had been fairly ordinary—spectral visions that no one could scientifically document—but three had involved poltergeists, supposedly mischievous spirits that actually move objects or damage the surroundings. According to paranormal investigators—an oxymoron if Jeremy had ever heard one—poltergeists were generally drawn to a particular person instead of a place. In each instance that Jeremy had investigated, including those that were well documented in the media, fraud had been the cause of the mysterious events.
But the lights in Boone Creek were supposed to be different; apparently, they were predictable enough to enable the town to sponsor a Historic Homes and Haunted Cemetery Tour, during which, the brochure promised, people would see not only homes dating back to the mid-1700s but, weather permitting, “the anguished ancestors of our town on their nightly march between the netherworlds.”
The brochure, complete with pictures of the tidy town and melodramatic statements, had been sent to him along with the letter. As he drove, Jeremy recalled the letter.
Dear Mr. Marsh:
My name is Doris McClellan, and two years ago, I read your story in
Scientific American
about the poltergeist haunting Brenton Manor in Newport, Rhode Island. I thought about writing to you back then, but for whatever reason, I didn’t. I suppose it just slipped my mind, but with the way things are going in my town these days, I reckoned that it’s high time to tell you about it.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about the cemetery in Boone Creek, North Carolina, but legend has it that the cemetery is haunted by spirts of former slaves. In the winter—January through early February—blue lights seem to dance on the headstones whenever the fog rolls in. Some say they’re like strobe lights, others swear they’re the size of basketballs. I’ve seen them, too; to me, they look like sparkly disco balls. Anyway, last year, some folks from Duke University came to investigate; I think they were meteorologists or geologists or something. They, too, saw the lights, but they couldn’t explain them, and the local paper did a big story on the whole mystery. Maybe if you came down, you could make sense of what the lights really are.