Hard News

"Look, Mommy."

Claire twisted her body as far as she could so the unbandaged eye got a good look at the dress, and the way the young woman's damaged face blossomed with love as she looked at her little girl clearly answered the single scorching question that had been consuming Rune since Claire had returned.

When she considered it now, of course, she realized there really had never been any chance that Courtney could stay with her and she was mad at herself for hoping things might turn out otherwise. After all, she'd readThe Snow Princess. She knew how it ended. This business about fairy stories having happy endings -that was bullshit. Sometimes people melt. People go away. People die. And we're left with the stories and the memories, which, if we're lucky, will be good stories and good memories and then we get on with our life.

Claire was reaching forward, awkwardly, across the bed with her good arm, saying, "Did you miss me, honey?"

"Uh-huh." Courtney let go of Rune's hand and tried to climb onto the bed. Rune boosted her up.

Rune said, "So you're going back to Boston, huh? The two of you?"

Claire said, "Yeah, like, we'll live at my mom's until I can get some money saved up but apartments are cheap there. It shouldn't take me much time."

Fight it…

Rune swallowed. "You want, I can keep Courtney with me until you get settled. We're pretty good buddies, huh?"

The little girl was playing with the dinosaur and didn' t hear what Rune said. Or didn't want to. In any case she didn't answer. Claire shook her head. "I kind of want her with me. You know how it is."

"Sure."

"Look, Rune, I never said it but I like really, really appreciate what you did. It was a pretty bad thing, just leaving like that. A lot of people wouldn't have done what you did."

"True, they wouldn't," Rune said.

"I owe you."

"Yeah, you do. You owe me."

"The doctor says I can be transferred to Boston in a couple of days. And, guess what?"

Rune's face burned. "A couple of days?"

"I'm go

And with that Rune realized it was no good fighting it anymore. She'd lost. She took a deep breath and said, "Well, ciao, you guys."

"Aw, come on," Claire said, "stay for a while. Check out the doctors. There's this cute one. Curly hair you won't believe."

Rune shook her head and started for the door.

"Rune," Courtney said suddenly. "Can we go to the zoo?"

Pausing to hug the girl briefly, she managed, somehow, to keep her voice steady and to hold back the tears for the time it took her to say, "Before you leave, honey, we'll go to the zoo. I promise."

Rune remained steady and calm for the few seconds it took her to say this and walk out the door.

But not an instant longer. And as Rune walked down the corridor toward the exit the tears streamed fast and the quiet sobbing stole her breath as if she were being swept away, drowning and numb, in a torrent of melting snow.

"Look at this. Like a damn dragon burned me out."

Piper Sutton looked at her. "You and your dragons."

They stood on the pier, where the glistening, scorched hull of the houseboat floated, hardly bobbing, in the oily water of the Hudson.

Rune bent down and picked up a soggy dress. She examined the cloth. The collar was a little scorched but she might be able to cover it up with paint. She thought about the lawyer, Fred Megler, an expert at repairing clothes with pens.

But she sniffed the dress, shrugged and threw it into the discard pile, which looked like a small volcano of trash. Both the fire and the water from the NYFD had taken their toll. On the deck was a pile of books, pots and pans, some half-melted ru

"The 1950s were indestructible," Rune said, nodding at the frames. "Must've been one hell of a decade."

It was a stu

"You have insurance?" the anchorwoman asked.

"Kinda weird but, yeah, I do. It was one of those adult things, you know, the sort that I don't usually get into. But my boyfriend at the time made me get some." She walked to the water and looked down at the charred wood. "The policy's in there someplace. Do I have to have it to collect?"

"I don't think so."

"I'm going to make some serious money there. I lost some really hyper stuff. Day-Glo posters, crystals, my entire Elvis collection…"

"You listen to Elvis Presley?"

"That'd be Costello," Rune explained. Then considered other losses. "My magic wand. A ton of incense… Oh God, my lava lamp."

"You have a lava lamp?"

"Had,"Rune corrected sadly.

"Where're you staying?"

"With Sam for a while. Then I'll get a new place. Someplace different. I was ready to move anyway. I lived here for over a year. That's too long to be in one place."

A tugboat went by. A horn blared. Rune waved. "I know them," she told Sutton, who twisted around to watch the low-riding boat muscle its way up the river.

"You know," Rune said, "I've got to tell you. I kind of thought you were the one behind the killings."

"Me?" Sutton wasn't laughing. "That's the stupidest crap I ever heard."

"I don't think it's so stupid. You tried to talk me out of doing the story then offered me that job in England- "

"Which was real," Sutton snapped. "And got filled by somebody else."

Rune continued, unfazed, "And the day of the broadcast, when you ad-libbed, the tapes were missing. Even the backup in my credenza. You were the only one knew they were there."

Sutton impatiently motioned with her hand, as if she were buying candy by the pound and wanted Rune to keep adding some to the scale. "Come on, think, think, think. I told you I was on my way to see Lee. He asked me if you'd made a dupe. I told him that you had and you'd put it in your credenza. He's the one who stole it."

"You also went through my desk after Boggs escaped. Da

"I didn't want any of that material floating around. You were really careless, by the way. You trust too many people. You…" She realized she was lecturing and reined herself in.

They watched the tugboat for a few minutes until it disappeared. Then Sutton said abruptly, "You want your job back, you can have it."

"I don't know," Rune said. "I don't think I'm a company person."

A brief laugh. "Of course you're not. You'll probably get fired again. But it's a peach job until you do."

"The local or the Network?"

"Current Events, I was thinking."

"Doing what? Like a script girl?"

"Assistant producer."

Rune paused then dropped a pair of scorched jeans into the trash pile. "I'd want to do the story. The whole thing. About the Hopper killing. And I'd have to include Lee this time."

Sutton turned back, away from the water, and stood up, looking over the huge panorama of the city. "That's a problem."

"What do you mean?"

"Current Eventswon't be ru

Rune looked at her.

"Network News covered it," the woman said.

Rune said wryly, "Oh, that's right. I saw that story. It was about sixty seconds long, wasn't it? And it came after the story of the baby panda at the National Zoo."

"The powers-that-be – at the parent – decided the story should go away."

"That's bullshit."

"Can you blame them?"

"Yes," Rune said.

In her prototype Piper Sutton voice, Piper Sutton snapped, "It wasn't my decision to make."