“In what way? I have to try to write objectively, Jacob, no matter who the candidate is.”
“It’s not that.” He looked up at me, deadly earnest. “I need for you to prevent a witch hunt.”
3
“A WITCH HUNT? Jacob, if this is some kind of Halloween prank, I swear I’ll—”
“It’s not! It’s not a prank!” he protested hotly. “And it has to do with real witches.”
Great, I thought. I’m sitting in a walk-in closet with the maniac son of one of the people I’m supposed to be covering. I took a deep breath and said, “Real witches?”
He calmed down. “Well, no. Just people who
“Why don’t you try this from the beginning?”
“Monty Montgomery is about to put out a piece of campaign literature that says I’m involved in a satanic cult. He’s going to talk about it like there’s a bunch of murdering Satanists running around loose in Las Piernas, and that he’s going to put a stop to it. He’s going to say my dad can’t be expected to stop them because I’m one of them.”
“Are you a murdering Satanist?”
“No.”
“Then it’s libel.”
“You know how this works. It will take months or maybe years if my dad sues for libel. The damage will already be done. My dad will spend the next five days trying to deny I’m a member of the cult instead of campaigning on the issues, and Montgomery will win.”
“You seem to know a lot about campaigns.”
He looked at me like I was from Mars. “Well, why wouldn’t I? I’ve grown up with them.”
Since Henderson had only run once before, unsuccessfully against a then-popular incumbent, I didn’t see how twice in four years meant Jacob grew up with campaigning. But I supposed from the perspective of someone his age, it must have seemed constant, given the time his father would have devoted to it.
“If you’ve grown up with campaigns, you know your dad will know how to combat mudslinging. What is it that really bothers you about this?”
He was silent, seeming to be debating about what he should and shouldn’t tell me.
“Off the record?” he said.
A sixteen-year-old demanding to be off the record. He did know something about politics. “That depends. You came to see a reporter, after all.”
“But it’s about something that isn’t true. It’s not news, then, is it?”
And he had grown up with a lawyer. “Okay,” I said. “But if I find out otherwise, expect to see it in print.”
He mulled this over. “Okay. Montgomery has this photo. It’s supposed to show me participating in a witches’ coven.”
“A witches’ coven?”
“Yeah, you know, a group of witches.”
“I know what a coven is — but how did he get a photograph of you and a coven?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I do know, but I don’t know how.” He drew a breath. “What I mean is, I was there, but I wasn’t there as a witch or anything. And I didn’t see anyone with a camera, so I don’t know how.”
“Why were you there?”
“You’re not going to believe me.”
I waited.
He sighed. “I was trying to get a friend of mine to leave. She’s mixed up with the wrong crowd. I was trying to get her to come home.”
“Girlfriend?”
“She’s just a friend. Not my girlfriend.” He looked down at his hands. “We grew up together. I’ve known her since we were little kids. Sammy’s been our neighbor for years.”
“Sammy?”
“Gethsemane — yeah, I know. It’s worse than Sammy. Her parents are real religious types. I think that’s part of why she’s doing this crap with the witches. I don’t think she really believes in it. I think she’s just trying to rebel against her parents or something. Anyway, we’ve always talked, and been… I don’t know, we could always just talk to one another. She’s my friend. Understand?”
“I understand. Do her folks know about the witchcraft stuff?”
“Yeah. They kicked her out. They’re so busy going to church all the time, I don’t think they care about anything else.”
“So where is she living?”
“She was just spending the night with her witch friends, but I talked her into going down to Casa de Esperanza, the runaway shelter. You know about that?”
“Yes.” Casa de Esperanza was, in fact, one of the many gifts Frank’s neighbor, Mrs. Fremont, had given to Las Piernas. She had started it back in the 1970s, when I was in college. One semester I did volunteer work there for credit in a psychology class. She had founded the shelter, but she had since handed most of the administration of the facility to other people. She had kept some of it in the family; I remembered that she once told me her own
