flowers, pictures, handwritten notes, and teddy bears now rose inches from the doorstep where she’d been slain.
The summer and fall were living up to the macabre moniker the Daily News had headlined back in July, SUMMER OF SAM 2, in recognition of the grisly parallels to the searing months of 1977 when David Berkowitz went berserk and every imaginable strain of violence escaped the city’s soul like the foul steamy funk that slipped out of the sewers and tunnels lurking beneath the broiling blacktop of the Big Apple. As Jenna had said in an interview with the up-and-coming correspondent from the Northeast Bureau only two days ago, “Everybody’s got to take a deep breath and try to stay calm because heat and horror sometimes go together.”
Simple as sunshine and dark as death, she reminded herself as she made her way to the club car.
Not that the dairy country she was heading to was any paradise: crops dying, water rationing, ugly struggles over state and federal disaster aid. Upstate New York looked as crispy as California’s Central Valley, which looked as parched as Illinois, Iowa, Alabama, and Georgia. Drought, distress, and despair across the country. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse saddling up.
At least it was cool on the train. She lucked out with a stool at the bar, and ordered white wine. She needed a cold drink, preferably cold enough for condensation. Few things felt better in the swelter than pressing chilly dampness to her brow, even if she were passing through Hades—her eyes alighted on the blighted South Bronx—in air-conditioned comfort.
She’d be riding plenty of trains over the next few days. This afternoon, she was off to meet Dafoe—and stay at a B&B after politely declining his offer of a spare bedroom. They’d talked twice on the phone in the past two days, and she’d sensed very quickly that she wanted to see him under more agreeable circumstances. Then, on Sunday, she would return to Penn Station, where she’d promptly board another train to Washington.
The network would have paid for a flight to the capital but the carbon footprint of train travel was a fraction of flying the same distance. And the hassles of struggling through airports and cramming herself into a shuttle bus made a train trip seem like a vacation. She would have to do some cramming on the train—as in study hard for the first meeting of the Presidential Task Force on Climate Change. She had received word just that morning that the network had no objection to her taking the appointment, further underscoring her nonstatus in the news division. But she’d taken great delight in calling Vice President Andrew Percy’s office to say that she’d be coming aboard. Percy himself got on the phone to tell her how much he appreciated her willingness to serve. There was that word again—“serve”—that made her feel so good about joining the task force.
In her heart of hearts, Jenna knew she wasn’t a dispassionate observer of the Earth’s steady demise, but an advocate of responsible environmental policies. And, in all honesty, she was excited to take an appointment from President Reynolds, who looked likely to be around long enough for the task force to have some effect: He’d increased his lead to a five-point margin in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, a boost fueled by the racy revelation that his opponent, Roger Lilton, had indulged in an affair in graduate school with a woman who was now a leader of the nation’s Pagan community.
Give the guy a break, had been Jenna’s initial reaction. It was forty years ago. But even Jenna had become fascinated by the growing scandal. Not by the sex, though from published accounts it was boldly outré, even by the loose standards of that rabidly libidinal era, but by the woman’s alleged influence on Lilton in the here and now. If he wasn’t careful, his old paramour, a strikingly tall, self-described witch who went by the name GreenSpirit, would become the Jeremiah Wright of his campaign.
Even after the scandal broke, Jenna had been leaning toward Lilton, but then he called the task force “a dog-and-pony show by a president who’s shown a callous disregard for the environment.”
President Reynolds, about to board a helicopter for Camp David, was asked about the dog-and-pony comment. He responded, “Is that what the candidate said? Aren’t those the words that his old girlfriend used just last week?”
Which, to the Lilton campaign’s profound embarrassment, was true.