From the Heart

journalism was from Harvard. However, she had worked her way up through the ranks of television reporting.
    She had started at base pay at a tiny independent station in New Jersey, reading weather and doing quick consumer spots. She had played the usual game of hopscotching from station to station, city to city—a little more money, a little more air time. She had landed a position at a CNC affiliate in Austin, working her way up in her two-year stay to an anchoring position. When she had been offered the co-anchor spot at WWBW, the CNC affiliate in Washington, D.C., Liv had jumped at it. There were no firm ties in Austin, nor, for years, anywhere else.
    She had wanted to make her name in television journalism. Washington, she felt, was a perfect place to do it. She didn’tmind dirty work, though her smooth, narrow hands looked as if they were accustomed to only the silks and satins of life. She had a seeking, eager, shrewd brain under the ivory skin and patrician features. She thrived on the fast, close to impossible pace of visual news, while on the surface, she was cool, remote and seemingly untouchable. For the past five years, Liv had been working hard to convince herself that the image was fact.
    At twenty-eight, she told herself she was through with personal upheavals. The only roller coaster she wanted to ride on was a professional one. What friends she had made during her sixteen months in D.C. were allowed only a glimpse of her past. Liv kept a lock on her private life.
    “This is Olivia Carmichael,” she told the camera.
    “And Brian Jones. Stay tuned for ‘CNC World News.’ ”
    The quick throb of theme music took over; then the red light on the camera facing her blinked out. Liv unclipped her mike and pushed away from the semicircular desk used by the news team.
    “Tight show,” the man behind camera one commented as she started past. Overhead, the hot, bright lights shut down. Liv shifted her thoughts and focused on him. She smiled. The smile transformed her cool polished beauty. She only used that particular smile when she meant it.
    “Thanks, Ed. How’s your girl?”
    “Cramming for exams.” He shrugged and pulled off his headset. “Doesn’t have much time for me.”
    “You’ll be proud of her when she gets that degree in education.”
    “Yeah. Ah—Liv.” He stopped her again, and she lifted a brow in acknowledgment. “She wanted me to ask you . . .” He looked uncomfortable as he hesitated.
    “What?”
    “Who does your hair?” he blurted out, then shook his head and fiddled with his camera. “Women.”
    Laughing, Liv patted his arm. “Armond’s on Wisconsin. Tell her to use my name.”
    She moved briskly from the studio, up the steps and through the winding corridors that led to the newsroom. It was noisy with the transition from day to evening shift.
    Reporters sat on the corners of desks, drank coffee or typed furiously to meet the deadline for the eleven o’clock broadcast. There was a scent of tobacco, light sweat and old coffee in the air. One wall was lined with television screens, which gave the action but not the sound of every station in the metropolitan area. Already on screen one was the intro for “CNC World News.” Liv headed straight through the confusion to the glass-walled office of the news director.
    “Carl?” She stuck her head in his door. “Do you have a minute?”
    Carl Pearson was slouched over his desk, hands folded, as he stared at a TV screen. The glasses he should have been wearing were under a pile of papers. He had a cup of cold coffee balanced on a stack of files, and a cigarette burned down between his fingers. He grunted. Liv entered, knowing the grunt was affirmative.
    “Good show tonight.” His eyes never left the twelve-inch screen.
    Liv took a seat and waited for the commercial break. She could hear the crisp, hard-line tones of Harris McDowell, New York anchor for “CNC World News,” coming from the set at her side. It was fruitless to talk to Carl when the big guns were out. Harris McDowell was a big gun.
    She knew he and Carl had worked together in their early days as reporters at the same station in Kansas City, Missouri. But it had been Harris McDowell who had been assigned to cover a presidential cavalcade in Dallas in 1963. The assassination of a president, and his on-the-scene reports had rocketed McDowell from relative obscurity to national prominence. Carl Pearson had remained a big fish in a sea of little fishes