Autumn Belfontaine looked at the text message from Brenda Redmond again. I have a problem. Can we talk?
Although Autumn had plenty of work already on her plate, she’d texted back that Brenda should come to the newsroom and they’d find a private place to talk. Brenda wasn’t the sort of person to panic over trifles, or to need her hand held. If she needed to talk, it was something serious.
The newsroom door opened just a hair, and Brenda peeked in. “Are you where you can talk now?”
“As much as I ever will be.” Autumn waved to the multiple monitors surrounding her desk, some showing what few news websites she could manage to reach, but most with reports in various stages of completion, from rough drafts turned in by her junior reporters to polished copy she was ready to read aloud to the mic. “Pull up a chair and sit down.”
“Thanks.” Although Brenda was maintaining her professional voice, she managed to create the impression of breathless anxiety. “Just this morning I got a message from an old friend.”
That ought to be happy news, but I can tell it’s not. However, Autumn didn’t interrupt Brenda, just listened as she told about the e-mail she’d received this morning. Brenda was doing her best to provide a reasonably orderly report, but it sounded like her source material was rather confused.
Perhaps it would be best to take a look at this e-mail herself. “Could you show it to me?”
“OK.” Brenda pulled out her phone, handed it across with a little hesitation that matched the one in her voice.
You’re asking her to show you a private communication. Of course she’s going to be hesitant, wondering if she’s betraying a trust in the process of trying to help.
Autumn read it once quickly to get the gist, then went back and read paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, struggling to sort out just what was happening to the young woman down on Earth. One thing was certain — she had been in a great deal of emotional distress when she’d written it.
“I can certainly understand why you’d be concerned about her situation, especially considering the constraints you’d be facing in any effort to help her.”
“I know.” A hint of bitterness colored Brenda’s voice, for all she tried to hold it professionally neutral, to do herself credit as one of the station’s on-air personalities. “Here I am at the far end of a very skinny data pipe, and I’m not even sure what exactly she told her parents that made them so mad. And I have this awful feeling that if I were to try to contact her parents and intervene, I’d only succeed in making things even worse.”
“That’s always a risk.” Autumn considered what to say. She was a journalist, not a counselor or social worker. “Especially if they consider it a private family matter, they’ll view you as butting in where you have no business, and regard her as a blabbermouth who exposed these things to a stranger.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.” Brenda spoke those words slowly, as if dreading what they might signify. “And if she’s in actual danger, there’s nothing I can do up here. You know as well as I do that the cops aren’t going to intervene on her behalf under her own parents’ roof. If anything, they’re likely to tell her that she’s the problem and needs to be more pleasant and deferential.”
Autumn wished she knew what church Brenda belonged to. She was pretty sure that Ken Redmond had been raised in the Church of Christ like his ur-brother Gus Grissom, but she had no idea what tradition Jen had been brought up in, or whether either of them had brought Brenda up on a faith tradition.
“Brenda, I think it’s probably just as well you came to me rather than trying to do anything on your own. I’m going to try to make connections with some people who might be able to actually make a difference in her situation, rather than ‘help’ by just telling her to chin up and put a smile on her face. Let her know we’re working on things, but don’t tell her anything that might build hopes we can’t follow through on.”
“Got it.” Brenda paused, moistened her lips. “Of course there’s no telling how long it may take for an e-mail to get to her. From the headers I saw, it looks like this one bounced around servers for three or four days before it got up here.”
“At least it got through. That’s the strength and the weakness of store-and-forward systems. In the meantime, let’s hope for the best and concentrate on what we can do up here, not worrying about what we can’t.”