More Than an Echo (Echo Branson Series) (17 page)

It saddened me that this was how it ended up, but we hadn’t really given ourselves any other choice. She was there and I was here. Tip was pretty angry when I broke it off because she never saw it coming. She assumed I was completely open for her to read, but I had learned a lot more from Melika than she realized. I needed to learn to love myself before getting that deeply involved with anybody, least of all a telepath. I hoped she would understand.

She didn’t.

It took her almost four years to get over it, and almost two years before she would speak to me again. We managed to get beyond the hurt and pain, but it was pretty obvious to us both that she was really in love with me. So, we went our own ways; I dove into my studies and she dove into hers, which was what took her to places like Australia; she loved learning about other people’s powers. Tip became a student of the supernatural and I became a student of the truth. We existed under a tenuous truce and every now and then, she would pop in to checkup on me and my life. We settled into an uneasy friendship that was probably less fulfilling to her than it was to me. I loved her, after all, but not with the depth and intensity that she loved me. It was best we had broken up.

I just wasn’t sure I completely believed that.

At the age of twenty-eight, I was standing in the office of a  man who had recently fired me asking myself the same question I’d asked after I bashed Todd’s head in. Was I crazy? What in the hell I was thinking? It’s not like me to give someone a second chance to bury yet another dagger between my shoulder blades. It wasn’t like me at all. So what was I doing here? Curiosity maybe? Wasn’t the road to Hell paved with the dead bodies of cats, or was I mixing my metaphors? I grinned to myself at the image. Okay...so I was a little curious as to why my old boss had summoned me.

A week ago, my boss, Wes Bentley, who is as snooty as his name suggests, fired me from my lowly peon position as a stringer for the Police Beat section of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. I know...how hard can it be to report on the numerous criminal activities in a place like the City by the Bay? Well, I wasn’t fired for incompetence. I was fired for suggesting a well-known CEO who was being interviewed by our top investigative reporter was lying. Lying through his ten thousand dollar DaVinci veneers.

Okay...so maybe I should have waited before blurting it out right in front of this prominent citizen, but I just couldn’t help it. A foster parent once told me my biggest problem was I lacked stoplights between my brains and my mouth. She was right about me not having stoplights, but wrong about it being my
biggest
problem. My greatest problem was also my biggest gift, and it was this double-edged sword I wielded daily. Unfortunately for me, on the day I called out
liar, liar, pants on fire
, it was a sword I stabbed myself with.

I knew Mr. Bentley didn’t want to fire me that dark day, but his star reporter, Carter Ellsworth, had demanded my head on a rusty platter. Apparently, my pronouncement about his source’s lies had humiliated Carter in front of the scheming, embezzling CEO; and being shown up was one thing that Carter Ellsworth could not abide.

I had just returned from the police station and was walking by my favorite fountain out in front of our building. I have a thing for running water because it often blocks out extraneous emotions. That’s why I wandered over there in the first place. I couldn’t have cared less who he was interviewing or what he was doing because my focus was on the fountain. I hadn’t realized Carter was conducting his interview on the other side of it. As I started by them, I was slammed with a huge wave of deceit, dishonesty and dissembling. Normally, I have mental shields up to protect myself from inadvertent reading. Dealing with everyone else’s emotions is an exhausting endeavor.

On that day, I felt them like a baseball bat to the back of my legs. The darkness of the CEO’s emotions hit me with such force I could not stop myself from blurting out, “What a crock of shit,” as I strolled by. Jumped right out of my potty mouth and landed on a pink slip with my name on it. It didn’t matter I was right, because as an empath, I was in the closet. Out as a lesbian, in as an empath.

Anyway, Carter got what he wanted, and I was let go.

So, why was I here?

When Wes walked in, I did a quick read and decided against raising my shields. Raising and lowering psychic energy forces is a little like the regular Joe putting his hands over his ears to keep from hearing someone. The only thing missing was the “Lalalalala,” and believe me, there were days when I wanted to add that as well.

“Thank you so much for coming in, Branson. I wasn’t sure...well...never mind. It was good of you to come.” Wes Bentley stood in front of me and extended his well-manicured hand. Wes always wore a tanning booth glow; a little too much George Hamilton meets Bob Barker. I shook his hand and took note of his new Christian Dior suit and thousand dollar hand-painted tie. Wes was one of the best dressed men in the city and commanded attention wherever he went. At this moment, however, all pretense of command had been replaced by something I had never seen or felt from him in the seven months I’d been at the paper; contriteness. Yes, the man who cut me loose with the weak explanation, “If Carter wants you gone, you’re gone,” was standing there with his hat in his hand.

Now wasn’t
this
an interesting turn of events?

Carter Ellsworth wielded that sort of power because he had won a Pulitzer for a series of reports he did during the Iraq War and that pretty much gave him
carte blanche
to destroy the nobodies of the world like me. Pulitzer winners are a rare breed, and the majority of them, from what I gather, prefer to keep their fame and fortune on the East Coast, preferably New York. For whatever reason, Carter preferred foggy San Francisco.

“I’m here mostly out of curiosity, Wes.”

Wes moved around to the other side of his desk. “Well, I do appreciate your time, so let me get down to brass tacks. Have you found another job yet?”

Oh, how I wanted to lie; to say, yeah, the
New Yorke
r picked me up and offered me my own column and I’m moving there tomorrow. But the sad truth was, I couldn’t even get an interview with any of the smaller papers in the area and was working part-time at Luigi’s Bakery, the bakery directly below my tiny apartment.

“I’m still looking for something in my field, yes.” I read a sense of relief from him. He wanted something from me. This was getting more interesting every second.

“I see.” Wes folded his leather-tanned hands on the desk and leaned forward. “I’m going to be straight up with you, Branson. Tomorrow, you’re going to be reading Carter’s retraction of the story about Glasco’s embezzlement.” He eyed me carefully as if trying to read
me
.

Wes could look all he wanted, he would never
know
how I was feeling. Looking into his light blue eyes, I understood he was trolling; feeling me out before laying the rest of his cards out on the table. There really was no need to since I saw what was coming next. A retraction for the editor-in-chief of a big newspaper is a little bit like having your pants pulled down in public without any underwear to hide the family jewels. What it means is you didn’t fully do your job. Whenever a story suffers a retraction,
everybody
looks bad, and worse...amateurish. Well, the only amateur who had been fired over this story was me. Apparently, the truth had come out somewhere and now both Carter and Wes were eating crow.

I wondered what crow tasted like and if you served it with white wine.

“So, you found out he
was
lying.” It wasn’t a question, and I made sure it sounded like a statement of fact. I knew it was a fact, but Wes had cut me off so quickly there had been no time to prove it; someone else had obviously done the job for me. My guess is it was one of the fact-checkers who so often bump heads with investigative reporters. One of the best fact-checkers on the staff was Jennifer Ridge. I would have bet my last dollar Jennifer was the one who found out the truth about the lying CEO.

“Near as I can tell, the man has no idea what the truth looks like.” Wes shook his head sadly. He hated retractions.

“Jennifer?”

Wes nodded. “It took her longer than Carter wanted, so he pressured her to sign off on his story. You know how Carter can be.”

I nodded. Jennifer was so good at her job our editors actually invented editorial marks to include her. If an editor was unsure of the fact, she would write AJ in the margin which stood for Ask Jennifer.

“Well, now that we’ve covered that, let’s get down to business. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, Branson, but I am a man who owns his own mistakes. It’s not easy, mind you, but you don’t get to be in a position of power without taking responsibility for both the good decisions and the bad. Under the circumstances, I was wrong to fire you. I assumed Carter’s story had checked out and you had not only been unprofessional, but had made him look bad. Wrong on both counts. I would like to right those wrongs.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I would like to offer you your job back.”

The beauties of my gift are the subtleties of emotions peeking around the obvious ones so  I get a clearer picture of what’s going on with the person. Wes was offering me my job back, hoping I would accept it without playing hardball.

Unfortunately for him, hardball is my specialty. What little I remember of my childhood, I did not grow up in a warm and loving environment. I did not grow up in a soft cushy life. I grew up moving from one home to another in the ghettos of Oakland, California. You don’t last there as a white kid if you can’t hit a fastball, and I was one hell of a hardball player. I knew I had been unjustly fired, but the problem with my power is it’s impossible to explain without uncovering exactly what I am. Few people in my life know what I am. I wasn’t about to unveil that part of me to anyone other than my closest friends. So no, I wasn’t going to make this easy on him. “I appreciate your offer, Wes, but the police beat isn’t really for me. I came here with the idea of being a journalist. I have the drive, the talent and the instincts for it. I think I would rather wait until a real offer comes along.” I rose and extended my hand. “But thank you. I do appreciate knowing I was right about Glasco.”

Wes quickly rose and scooted around the enormous desk. “Well then, consider yourself offered a real position here. I like your style, Branson. You don’t miss a beat, you’re quite astute, and you don’t mince your words. You’re right about those instincts, too. All of those are essential ingredients in being a top-notch reporter working for me.”

The swing and a miss sound you heard was
my
bat whiffing at the curveball Wes just threw past me. I was so stunned I barely knew what to say. “Reporter?”

Wes nodded. “Liz Pensky is going to the
Post
, so I need a new IR. The job is yours if you want a shot at it.”

Now
that
was a job offer...and one I wasn’t expecting. I could tell by the look in his eyes he enjoyed the surprise. I blinked several times and thought carefully about my response. I could be a good investigative reporter; a
really
good one. I wanted to use my expensive Mills College education for something other than running around collecting short pieces for the Police Beat. This was my chance.

“What about Carter? Won’t he have something to say about this?”

Wes got all puffed up. “I run this paper and I make the decisions around here. I gave him what he wanted when I thought he was right. He wasn’t. I checked on his
source
and the guy was looking for a better business advantage. He was willing to use
my
paper to get it, the little prick. Ellsworth should have dug deeper.”

“Can we recover from it?”

“Oh hell yes. The little worm isn’t going to put us in any trouble. Glasco has waved a slander suit in my face, but all they really want now is positive PR, which I willingly give them. Don’t worry. I’ve handled worse threats. So, do you want the job or not?”

“I accept.” I reached out and shook his hand. “When do I start?”

“How does tomorrow morning sound?”

“I’ll be here.”

“Excellent. Then stop by HR before I saddle you with a pro. You’ll be working with someone until you get the hang of it.”

Nodding, I opened the door to his office. “I appreciate the opportunity, Wes. I swear you won’t regret it.”

Wes stepped so close to me I could smell the coffee he had had for breakfast. “How did you
know
?”

“That Glasco was lying?”

“Yes. Carter said you sounded so cocksure of yourself. How could you have been so sure?”

Grinning, I stood on tiptoe and whispered, “Like you said, I have great instincts. Would you believe me if I told you I read his emotions?”

Wes pulled away and eyed me once again. “Read? Like telepathically?”

I nodded. “Yep. I looked at him and knew he was lying. It’s a gift I have.”

Wes tossed his head back and laughed, as I knew he would. “You know, Branson, I like your style. You can read my mind any day.”

I already had.

When I finished up with Mrs. Malone at Luigi’s Bakery, I grabbed the day olds and took a hard left to the stairway leading up to my apartment.

Luigi’s Bakery had been in the same place for sixty years. His father, Luigi Sr., opened it shortly after landing in San Francisco, when Luigi was about eight. I managed to get the apartment when Luigi’s mother passed away and he inherited her house on Nob Hill. He rented it to me for a song because he didn’t need the money and because I do errands for him. I also covered whenever he needed a break to go to the bank or the store. Anyone who thinks running a bakery sounds easy is a fool. It’s hard work and a labor of love that is quite physically demanding. Since I moved in several years ago, shortly after my graduation from Mills, Luigi and I have looked after each other.