CHAPTER 2
The elevator stopped smoothly at the seventh floor, opening its doors to a carpeted gray reception area.
Brenna Rease advanced. Back straight, head high.
Glass doors etched with the EBS logo lay directly ahead, reflecting her in the polished surface.
She was all in black, from the toes of her Cole-Haans to her tailored wool slacks and cashmere top.
Apart from her runner’s watch, she wore no adornment.
Her chestnut-brown hair feathered off her face, meticulously but closely cropped.
In the Balkan city of Kav?ak, having short hair gave her an edge when she had to run. From afar, with her height and slender build, she’d be mistaken for a man and shot. Which beat being recognized as a woman and raped.
Then shot.
She tucked her black leather portfolio under her elbow and leaned into the heavy door with her good shoulder.
She crossed the sitting area to the curved reception desk, not quite able to conceal her limp.
Three days of home rest had made her more aware of how bruised she was, not less.
Not that being contused was out of the ordinary for her—it was the way she had gotten hurt that was troubling.
“Brenna Rease,” she said, announcing herself to a young, brown-skinned woman who was bent over a journalism textbook. “I have an eight o’clock appointment with Grace Alcott.”
“Let me find her for you.” The receptionist set the book aside and glanced at the wall clock. It was a few minutes before the hour. She spoke briefly into the phone, then motioned Brenna to the waiting area. “Her assistant will be right out for you. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?”
Brenna glanced at the proffered sofas, thinking of her throbbing thigh and shoulder.
There wasn’t a couch soft enough. She stood instead and idly watched unremarkable footage slide across six silent TV screens imbedded in the wall.
Three minutes later, a silver-haired woman with a kindly face rustled into the reception area.
“I’m Mildred Pearson. Ms. Alcott and Mr. Chisolm are still upstairs, but I’ve told them you are here.”
Mildred led her down a wood-paneled hallway that doubled as a gallery of the network’s awards.
Brenna slowed. More than a few of them were inscribed with Alcott’s name as executive producer.
Reaching a corner office, Mildred twisted the brass handle on the oak door and let it swing open so Brenna could precede her.
“They should be here in a minute. May I bring you some coffee?”
Brenna preferred OJ, fresh-squeezed, when she was stateside. But today, the ritual of coffee sounded comforting. She accepted with a nod and Mildred disappeared.
Alcott’s office was large and bright, with windows overlooking the revitalized downtown core of Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of the D.C. city line.
Shelves of videotapes lined the wall opposite a polished desk that was piled with work but not chaotic.
Delineated by an oriental rug, there was a conversation area to her right, with a couch, two wing chairs, and a coffee table.
She glanced at her watch, impatient to get this over with. She hated this. She knew she was going to be judged. Exhibit A, Fallen Woman.
The door clicked open behind her and she spun, caught unanchored in the middle of the room with her feelings too close to the surface.
An older white-haired man wearing a western style suit, string tie, and cowboy boots led the way. He stepped forward with his hand extended. Chisolm, she presumed. The man who had contacted her, asking if she was interested in shooting a documentary.
“Miss Rease,” he said, “I’m Sam Chisolm. We've ‘howdied’ but not shook yet.”
He pumped her hand effusively, unaware that each shake sent waves of pain to her tender shoulder. She grimaced, hoping it passed for a smile.
The woman with Chisolm had hung back to re-close the door. Glimpsing her as she now crossed the room behind him, she looked about a decade older than Brenna (mid to late forties?), medium height, physically fit. Surely a lesbian—she carried herself strong and self-possessed.
“This is Grace Alcott,” Chisolm said as she came around his far side. “She’s the Executive Producer in charge of the series.”
Grace stepped fully into view.
Brenna’s breath caught. It wasn’t the lovely symmetry of Grace’s features or the intelligence in her blue eyes that caught her attention.
It was the complex blend of presence, competence, and…
vulnerability?… just beneath the surface.
In the old days, this was the woman Brenna would have flirted with at a cocktail party.
She liked women who were a touch riper than herself.
And this one—well, she bet that at ease Grace Alcott could quite capably hold her own.
But Grace was not the least bit at ease. Her mouth was set in a thin line.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Grace smacked of respectability.
And Brenna was the Envoy’s licentious daughter, object of gossip, headline-maker, back in the U.S. for the first time since she’d fled in shame.
No matter how disconnected from the reality of who she now was, everyone had an opinion about her.
She watched Grace closely, waiting to see what hers was.
Behind Grace’s eyeglasses, blue eyes studied her. For a micro-second, the corner of her mouth flicked downward.
There. Disapproval.
Brenna stepped forward, heart thumping. You debased yourself, Rease. She extended her hand as if the thought didn’t hurt.
“Ms. Rease.” Grace squeezed her hand briefly and dropped it. To her credit, she didn’t wipe her palm on her impeccably tailored suit skirt. “Please,” she gestured toward the seating area, her urbanity obviously deep-seated.
Using the distraction of Mildred’s arrival with the coffee tray, Brenna eased into a wing chair, uncomfortably shifting her weight onto her uninjured thigh.
Chisolm, announcing he had to leave in twenty minutes to catch an air shuttle to New York, monopolized the next few minutes, animatedly pitching EBS’ concept to Brenna.
The series, A Human Condition, aimed to transcend politics and sectarianism to look at the essential, and complex, human experience.
The pilot, which he personally wanted her to shoot in the besieged Balkan city of Kav?ak, would examine violence and the human spirit—what made people able to perpetrate it, and how they survived it.
The concept was Grace’s, he said. The pilot would showcase the series. And was she interested?
Yeah, I’m interested, Brenna thought. It was the story she’d wanted to tell for the past thirty months, her core reason for being in Kav?ak in the first place. But she nodded noncommittally. No need to reveal her passion. There were still terms to negotiate.
Chisolm waxed on, his enthusiasm for hiring her shining like a marquee on Times Square.
Brenna parsed life into frames, separating one moment from the next in fractions of a second, always looking for the instant that best revealed character or situation. If she’d had her old 35mm with her, she could already have shot a roll on Chisolm and pulled out five or six revelatory shots.
Cowboy outfit and ‘Aw, Shucks’ style notwithstanding, Sam Chisolm was all business.
But Grace Alcott? Her eye drifted across the coffee table to the sofa, where she was bent over Brenna’s portfolio, carefully turning the pages.
Identifying the image that represented her would be tricky, if only because she was so guarded.
Physically, she pictured Grace as a swimmer—cutting through water with a constant, measured stroke, then pulling herself onto the deck in one fluid motion.
She’d like to see her that way, the water running down her neck into her cleavage and down her thighs.
She stopped, surprised by the sexual pull, and ordered herself to concentrate.
Superficially, Grace seemed easy enough to peg: dependable, trustworthy, decent.
A woman who found Brenna repugnant but was too well-mannered to say so.
For all her apparent open-faced quality, however, there was a somber undertone at odds with the fine tracery of laugh lines at the corners of her eyes.
Brenna gave herself a mental shaking. Never mind that Grace was attractive.
Never mind what her reserve might conceal.
If she had her way, she would be the first of the Americans to exploit her.
Brenna was coming home to an industry that packaged news like entertainment.
Given the opportunity, even the relatively benign Educational Broadcasting System would feast on the things that made her marketable: on her talent, her looks, her prominent family and, indirectly—her scandalous past.
That was the beauty of salacious behavior. No one had to actually mention it. It had already made the front pages, free publicity.
Still, there were worse things than having all that dredged up again.
The great Brenna Rease had balked.
And she had the bayonet wound to prove it.