Mixed Signals Read online

  “You look happy, Mr. Reese.”

  “I am,” he assured her, guiding her toward the far end of the large, sun-filled room where a half dozen people were gathered around a rectangular table, all eyes on her. “Folks, this is Belle O’Brien, most recently of WTIE Chicago, our midday star.”

  The assembly greeted her with nods and hellos, each face registering its own unique emotion. Curiosity. Surprise. Detachment. Doubt. She arranged her own face to reflect her gratitude at being there and slipped into the one remaining seat, leaving Patrick to plant himself at the head of the table, feet apart.

  It was a stance she knew well. The one that shouted “Patrick Edward Reese, General Manager.”

  His pale blue striped shirt was ironed to perfection, his bright, patterned tie and navy suspenders carefully chosen, she knew, to make him appear both approachable and in charge. Decisive, a problem-solver, with exceptional reasoning skills … the man was a born leader.

  And persuasive didn’t begin to describe Patrick. Hadn’t he convinced her to say yes, twice?

  Patrick clapped his hands, then rubbed them together, his energy radiating in waves. “Officially, then, welcome to WPER. Each one of you was chosen for your specific gifts, for what you bring to this table.”

  Seated inches from his elbow, Belle could feel him gearing up, drawing every eye toward him. She’d forgotten what a captivating speaker he was. It wasn’t an act, either. The man simply had more charisma than he knew what to do with.

  Watch yourself, Belle. Friends, remember?

  “Yes, we’re an oldies station,” Patrick continued, “but the music isn’t the whole story. Personality is what we’re offering. Genuinely talented individuals with something to say and an engaging way of doing it. That’s why our letterhead, our bumper stickers, our Tshirts, will all say this …” He paused, clearly wanting their undivided attention as he pulled a handful of vivid red stickers out of a box in front of him. “ ‘Oldies 95—WPER—We’re the P-E-R in Personality Radio!’ ”

  Nods of approval circled around the table. Belle smiled. So far, so good.

  Tshirts were tossed on the table next and a scramble ensued while the staff grabbed at the various sizes. She stuffed one marked Small into her black satchel and leaned back, trying not to let her gaze settle on Patrick again—no matter how hard that was to resist.

  She’d never seen him look so handsome, so masculine, so utterly in command. Whoa, girl. Remember what we decided last night? She frowned. What was that … ? Oh yes, to “let Patrick find the right woman.” How disappointed will Norah be when she finds out I didn’t mean it?

  Patrick was looking directly at her now, white teeth flashing. “Belle, I know what you’re thinking.”

  She nearly slid out of her chair. “You do?”

  “You’re wondering who’s who around this table.”

  Not exactly.

  “Frank.” Patrick looked down the length of the table. “You’ll be the one to spank the life into this baby tomorrow morning at six. Give us a two-minute introduction. Everybody, this is Frank Gallagher, our morning pro.”

  Frank was seated at the opposite end of the table from Patrick, obviously staking a little ground of his own. He was definitely the senior member of the staff, Belle decided. Looked about fifty-five, though his toupee made his age harder to nail down. Frank stood up, not as a challenge, but rather, she imagined, to garner their attention.

  He soon had it.

  “I’ve been on the air at one station or another in the South or Midwest since 1964.” He cleared the gravel out of his throat, then shot a pointed look at the young blond woman to his left. “Longer than some of you have been alive. I’ve done every format out there, from country to gospel to news-talk. Worked at one station owned by a chicken farmer who lined the studio walls with cardboard egg cartons for acoustics. Did play-by-play for a high school football game by climbing up a telephone pole that overlooked the field and tapping the phone line.

  “And yes—” he gazed steadily at Patrick—“I was better known as Frank the Crank back in ’67 when I was spinning Top 40 tunes on WHBQ in Memphis. My last gig was mornings in Roanoke. When the numbers went south …” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyway, I’m glad to be here.”

  “And we’re glad to have you, Frank.” Patrick led the small group in scattered applause. “Frank was replaced by a couple of young jocks who call themselves the Dual Air Bags.” He snorted in mock disgust. “Roanoke’s loss is definitely our gain.”

  Turning to Belle, Patrick softened his voice. “Midday woman, you’re up.”

  Belle debated briefly the merits of staying in her chair, but found herself on her feet an instant later, gently guided by Patrick’s hand cupped under her elbow. She plunged in. “I did college radio at ASU.” She looked toward the far end of the table. “Not in ’64, Frank, but it feels like that long ago.” The staff’s good-natured laughter gave her a moment to shake off her stray bit of nervousness. “My first real job was in Kingsport, Tennessee.” She ran through a thumbnail résumé, watching their expressions alter slightly. Detachment gave way to interest. Admiration. And a question mark.

  “Some of you probably know why I’m not in Chicago anymore.” A few heads nodded; others gave her a blank look.

  She took a deep breath. One more time. Five minutes later, the sordid story was behind her. “The hardest part was seeing my friends out of work, right at the start of the ratings period.”

  The blonde spoke up first. “No offense, but how come you were spared?”

  Belle studied her for a moment, taking in the woman’s abundant blond hair spilling to her shoulders, her barely visible makeup, peachy smooth skin, and blue-eyed innocence.

  She can’t be a day over twenty-two.

  Belle sighed. “They kept me simply because I’m female. The station had run afoul of the EEOC over not having a sufficient number of women on staff, so they created a new position for me.”

  “Your own sports talk show?” the young woman cooed.

  “Not quite.” Belle tried not to groan at the woman’s naïveté. “I have zero interest in sports, as they well knew. So they stuck me in a sound booth and expected me to record all their promotional spots, their top-of-the-hour identifiers, their liner cards, their sports scores—”

  “Great!” The blonde was still enthusiastic.

  “—using the name Belle of the Ball.”

  The men shook their heads, groaning. The blonde looked confused.

  “They also insisted I record them in a breathy, high-pitched, Betty Boop style.”

  The table was silent. The blonde clearly couldn’t help herself. “Who’s Betty Boop?”

  Frank leaned over. “She was a cartoon character from the ’30s. Big eyes, short skirts. Squeaky, little-girl voice.”

  “Ooh!” the blonde squeaked, rolling her eyes.

  Frank winced. “Boop-oop-a-doop.”

  Belle shook her head. “Finally I did what I should have done in the first place. I erased every one of the tapes I’d recorded, emptied my locker onto the new program director’s desk, and quit.”

  The WPER staff broke into spirited applause as Belle eased back into her chair, flipping her braid behind her, feeling her cheeks stinging from the heat that had quickly found its way there.

  She had no intention of sharing that story again, ever.

  When the group settled down, Patrick nodded at the announcer seated next to Belle. “Think you can top that, Burt?”

  The man rose slowly, his protruding belly catching on the edge of the table as he stood. “Naw, Mr. Reese, that’s got me beat. Only thing I’ve heard worse than that was a station that changed to a format of all classified ads. K-ADS. Pitiful.”

  Patrick laughed. “Almost as bad as the all-Christmas-music station I escaped from. Give us your story, Burt.”

  “I’ve spent my whole radio career in Indiana.” He reached under his round stomach and displayed a brass belt buckle shaped like the Hoosier state. “S
ee?”

  What Belle could see was his stomach covering the northern half of his buckle, from Gary, Indiana, south to Muncie.

  “They call me Burt ‘Indiana’ Jones. Been at WGLD as music director for the last ten years, doing afternoons. I’d still be there except Mr. Reese convinced me it was time to move up to program director.” His face split into a wide grin, showing off a sizeable gap between his two front teeth.

  Patrick chuckled. “Burt thinks ‘He’s So Fine’ by the Chiffons was the last decent tune ever recorded. We’re honored to have a man with such discriminating taste running the show.”

  When Burt dropped down into his chair, the collective attention of the group turned toward the young blond woman who’d managed to still her tongue for a full five minutes.

  Patrick nodded her direction, and she spoke suddenly, as if stuck with a pin. “Hi! I’m Heather Young.”

  Belle pressed her lips firmly shut and forced herself to keep a straight face. Heather Young? Talk about typecasting …

  Heather took another gulp of air. “I graduated from Clinch Valley College last May and majored in English with a special concentration in communication.”

  “Ever do any radio?” Frank barked.

  “Well … sort of. I did a commercial once for WNVA-FM in Wise, Virginia. It ran on the air twice.” She beamed proudly at her coworkers. “Here at WPER, I’ll be doing an all-request show from seven until midnight. This is … uh, my first radio … gig? Is that what you called it?”

  Belle felt Patrick’s eyes on her and glanced up. His look was unmistakable. Be nice.

  Hers was equally transparent. Who, me?

  “Welcome, Heather,” Patrick said, his eyes still locked with Belle’s. “Don’t let these veterans intimidate you. They all had a first gig once, right, folks? We have one more greenhorn on the air staff.” He gestured at a wiry young man with an earnest expression and straight black hair. “Rick Anderson, you’re on.”

  “Hello.”

  Two syllables and Belle knew they were in trouble. Rick’s voice was tuned to a pitch somewhere between blackboard chalk and a rusty bicycle wheel. Surely Patrick didn’t intend to use him on the air?

  “I’m nineteen—” the young man’s eager glance danced from one of them to the other—“grew up on my parents’ farm outside Glade Spring, and graduated with honors from Holston High two years ago.” His enthusiasm was disarming. Despite the squeaky voice, Belle liked him already. “I’ll be running the overnight show, basically keeping the music going. And don’t worry …” His smile stretched another inch. “I’m not allowed to use the microphone. Ever. Burt will prerecord all the breaks for me. My job is to push the right buttons. And stay awake.”

  A ripple of laughter traveled around the table as Rick took his seat and the new staff nodded at one another. So it begins.

  Patrick straightened and assumed his managerial stance once more. “That does it for our meeting. You’ll see three more part-timers in and out this week. Make ’em feel welcome, if you will. I’ve invited our behind-the-scenes employees to join us for lunch down at the Grill at noon.” He indicated the cubicles behind him. “That’s Cliff, Jeanette, and Anne back there, busy building a client base for us. David, our engineer, is installing a new loading capacitor at the transmitter site and should be back after lunch.”

  He nodded at his new program director. “Do whatever it takes to get ’em ready for tomorrow, Burt. I expect the newspapers to stop by, maybe some TV types from Bristol.” Patrick grinned like a proud papa. “Dress sharp and come in smiling, folks.”

  He disappeared into his corner office while Belle and the rest of the staff moved into the main studio. Unlike every other station she’d worked at, all of which had been jammed with flotsam and jetsam and covered with a thick layer of dust, the freshly carpeted, neat-as-a-pin studio was a pleasant discovery. David, the mystery engineer, had done an exceptional job.

  Belle listened and nodded as Burt pointed out the “hot clock”—a hand-drawn clock face showing where commercial breaks occurred each hour and what records should be played when.

  “At the top of the hour, I want an upbeat ’60s tune coming out of the news. Sweep the other quarter hours with something farther down the charts, a nostalgia piece.” Burt nodded her direction. “Frank, Belle, you know the drill. Keep the mix interesting. Heather, we’ll create a special music clock for you to fit in the requests, and Rick, I’ll give you a complete playlist each night. Just push the buttons—”

  “And stay awake. I know, I know.”

  Burt showed them the handful of liner cards posted on a clear plastic clipboard mounted on top of the console—single lines like “Abingdon’s Own Oldies 95”—to be read between the songs.

  Belle recalled the days when reciting liner cards was all she felt safe doing when the mike was on. Would Heather have much more to offer? An odd sensation crept up her spine. Heather was so … so young. What could Patrick have been thinking?

  The green-tinged emotion was easy to recognize: jealousy. Belle sighed. Hadn’t she been exactly Heather’s age when Patrick hired her the first time?

  She dragged her attention away from the animated blonde, whose questions about everything in sight had her coworkers smiling indulgently. The rest of the staff seemed likable enough and more than competent. But, as usual, none of the guys were likely prospects for getting her mind off Patrick.

  Radio men were either happily married or loners, drifting from station to station. The only coworker she’d ever dated was in Philadelphia. They’d had too much in common for real sparks to fly, though she did cherish the set of videotapes he’d given her—every episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, with all the commercials painstakingly edited out, bless his techno-geek heart.

  Listeners made even less likely prospects. They either held her in awe, treating her like a one-dimensional celebrity of sorts, or dated her strictly to earn bragging rights with their friends.

  Most depressing.

  Belle wandered into the hallway, awash in a sudden, inexplicable wave of loneliness. New job, new town, same old longing to love and be loved. She leaned against the freshly painted wall, head tipped back, blinking hard to keep any renegade tears from slipping down her cheeks. She was certain of one thing: Mr. Right wouldn’t be walking through this door anytime soon.

  Sherry Robison knew for a fact that finding Mr. Right wasn’t difficult—it was impossible. Hanging on to him was harder still.

  The late-afternoon sun slanted through the blinds, revealing horizontal glimpses of a seedy Sacramento parking lot, throwing pale yellow bars of light across her paper-thin linoleum floor. The carpet in the living room was worse, an industrial-strength variety with the flimsiest padding money could buy.

  She glanced at the plastic kitchen clock. He’d be home soon, swinging open their front door and heading straight for the fridge. He always arrived home hungry. Insisted he was going through a growth spurt. Maybe she’d beat him to the punch and start dinner early. It’d be sloppy joes. Again. With corn and green beans, his favorites. No ice cream, though. She’d polished off the remnants of the fudge ripple last night before she cried herself to sleep watching The Way We Were.

  Snapping on the gas burner, Sherry pulled down the skillet, seeing her face reflected there for a half-second before the hamburger hit the shiny metal surface. She chopped at the sizzling meat, covering any traces of the woman who’d stared back at her. The twenty-something woman with the familiar short brown curls, brown eyes, and small bow of a mouth. The expression was familiar, too. She’d seen it more and more lately. It was the one that looked suspiciously like defeat.

  She’d headed west nine summers ago, a high school diploma in her back pocket and vinegar in her veins. A small-town girl, determined to make her own way in sunny California. A rebel with no cause whatsoever.

  Her agenda had been simple: get an apartment, get a job, get a man, get happy.

  Piece of cake.

  More like crumbs, she soon r
ealized.

  Money didn’t go far in Sacramento, so the apartment wasn’t much to talk about. Employers turned a deaf ear on an eighteen-year-old girl who’d never held a job—any job—and whose résumé featured four years in pep club as the high point. As for finding a man … well, they were there. But the California guys she met seemed too slow in some ways, too fast in others, the kind of trouble that’d sent her packing in the first place.

  Nobody cared that she was Sherry Robison, a banker’s daughter from one of Abingdon’s nicest families. In the Sacramento Valley, she was merely another disillusioned easterner, too proud to go back home and admit she’d made a mistake. A big one.

  A few pieces of mail scattered by the phone caught her eye. Had she already read those? She stirred the meat while pouring in the sauce, both hands working on autopilot, and squinted at the stack, trying to remember. The Sears bill was on top, then two more past-due notices from the furniture place. A simple white envelope with a Virginia postmark was on the bottom.

  That last one had her thinking hard these days. About doing the right thing. Whatever that was. Nothing made sense anymore. Pinching pennies, juggling aggressive creditors, trying to squeeze in time for night classes so she wouldn’t be working ten ‘til two at the Florin Mall for the rest of her natural life.

  Not a soul back home knew how far she’d lowered her sights these days, how little it took to send her emotions spinning toward the basement. Face it, Sherry. The joy is leaking out of your life. She felt it somewhere deep inside her, dripping like the faucet in their garish, green-tiled bathroom. In both cases, she couldn’t figure out how to stop the leak from slowly driving her mad.

  As if on cue, the front door flew open and a familiar voice hollered a noisy greeting. Despite her melancholy mood, Sherry forced a smile to her face. He deserved that, didn’t he?

  “I’m in the kitchen, honey.” Even as she called out, she knew he was already headed in her direction.