“You’re still missing the point, Maude. All of my hiring and firing decisions have to be based on what they want. Not what I want. It’s what they want, and it’s always been that way. And if I can’t play their game, then they’ll just get another nobody to play it. I have children. I have alimony. I have mouths to feed. I can’t lose this job for nobody. You gambled with your job and lost. I’m not gambling with mine.”
He could tell she was disappointed in him. But she still wasn’t hearing him.
He exhaled. “Truth is,” he said, “the decision to fire you didn’t come from the executive editor. It came straight from the publisher himself.”
This surprised Maude. “The publisher?”
“The publisher himself. He even told me in what manner I had to do it as if he wanted to make certain you were humiliated. It came straight from him. So you know it’s final. Because as I said repeatedly to you but you aren’t hearing me: My hands were tied. And still are.”
He sat erect, as if he was wrapping this up whether or not Maude wanted to wrap up. “And right now, I’m very busy.” He gave her a hard look, although it was tinged with regret and sadness. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an overload of work to do.”
It was a dismissal. And a cold one at that. Which made it all real for Maude. She used to have such faith in Amos. And in The Post. It was all she knew and all she had. Since high school she’d been devoted to that paper. Now they just took that away from her too? First Johnny, which wasn’t a great loss. But now her job? Her very reason for getting up every morning? She figured she could deal with a break up. Even the humiliation of the way he broke up with her. But she wasn’t at all sure if she could deal withthis.
She went to her desk, cleared it out of the little papers and pens and whatnots she kept inside of it, and left. Nobody asked why she was clearing out her desk. Nobody asked why she had that box in her hand. It was as if everybody already knew she was going down, and they relished it. She ran circles around every one of them in terms of work productivity each and every quarter, and they always despised her for it. Now their mediocre asses could continue their mediocrity with no threat of her overwork exposing their underwork ever again. And those were the same ones first to complain about woke and DEI and all that other bullshit as if they were above it all when they were the poster child of it all. She realized, as she was walking out of the city room, that she wasn’t going to miss any of them at all.
But then again, she knew, they weren’t going to miss her either.
But she knew she was going to miss her investigative, hardnose style of journalism. Chasing the story. Tracking down leads. She worked hard for the money they were paying her and she knew she would miss that part of the job mightily. Andespecially the story they forced her to abandon. It was going to be the biggest story of her career. Could even go national. It was going to finally put her on the map. But they took that away too.
By the time she got off the elevator and made it outside again, she turned and looked up at the big writing on the top of the building. DILLON POST-DISPATCH. SINCE 1958. For eleven long years it was her home. Her safe space. Hereverything. Now it was . . . her what? Her yesterday’s news? Her once upon a time? Her past when she hadn’t figured out her future yet?
But then she heard wheels squealing and turned around. That was when she saw a Mercedes convertible double-park in front of the building and a well-dressed older white lady jumped out and began running toward her. “Maude?” She was yelling as she ran. “Maude Drayton you wait right there!”
Maude was about to do the very opposite, but she stopped in her tracks when she realized who was running her way.Natasha? That was Natasha Keating, who used to be an editor at The Post! That was when Maude knew this had to be some stupid-crazy joke. And she wondered once again if she was being punked or on some kind of a gotcha show. Because this was giving crazier on an already crazy day kind of vibe. And then police sirens could be heard in the background. The cops were in on it too?
What in the running white woman world, Maude wondered,was this about now?
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Maude, thank God it’s you!”
Natasha’s voice was frantic. And for good reason. Two police officers pulled up beside her Mercedes, triple-parking, and jumped out of that patrol car and began running behind her.
“Natasha, what’s wrong?” Maude asked her.
“Here.” Natasha pulled a sheet of paper from her purse. “Take this. Take it!”
When Maude just stood there unable to even register what was happening, Natasha reached into Maude’s unzipped shoulder bag and began stuffing the sheet of paper inside her already overfilled bag. “There’s a list of names on this sheet. Contact the people on this sheet and tell them I need their help. One of them has to help me. They have to!”
She looked at Maude as if she understood her. “They’re out to get me just like they got you. But only it’s going to be even worse for me. Much worse.” Her wrinkled face was cracking. “They want to silence me too. They’ll kill me if they don’t help me. They have to!”
Then the cops were getting closer.
“Don’t let them see it,” she whispered to Maude. “My brother is on that list too. He’s my ace in the hole. Go to him only if you have to. Say my name and he’ll let you in. But don’t let them see that list!”
Then her urgency looked more like desperation to Maude. “I’m depending on you, Maude,” she said just as the cops arrived and grabbed her.
She was frantically resisting them until they had to wrestle her to the ground. A second car, an unmarked Ford sedan, drove up. Detective Fry, whom Maude knew well, hopped out and ran across the sidewalk too.
As he was rushing over, Maude sat her box down and put her hand inside her purse. She stuffed that list Natasha gave her all the way beneath everything else in that shoulder bag, which already held a lot of papers. But she knew where the one paper she had planned to use later that day was located inside her purse. She knew it was behind her wallet compartment because it was her grocery list and she hated fumbling for anything once she was inside a store.
“She gave her a paper,” one of the cops said to the detective while the cop was cuffing Natasha. “I saw when she gave her some kind of paper.”
“Hand it over,” the detective said to Maude, his long fingers wagging.
“Hand what over?” Maude acted as if she had no clue what that detective was talking about.
But the detective wasn’t buying what she was selling. “What did she give you?”
