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  “So spike the story,” I said. It turned out to be a poor choice of words.

  “What are you, deaf?” Marilyn said, segueing to something resembling a snarl. “We can’t spike it. Don’t you think I wish we could spike it? Chester’s really got his undershorts in a twist. He thinks it’s gonna be the goddamn miracle cure for our circulation with the under-thirty crowd. He’s been flogging this thing all over cable commercials and house ads and mother-humping rack cards. …Don’t you even read the paper?”

  “Er…Yeah, sure I do. I guess I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “Okay, here’s how it is,” she said. “Chester’s been promoting this package like it’s the Second Coming, you got it? Marchesi’s AWOL, so somebody else’s gotta cover it. And that somebody would be you.”

  “Why me?”

  Another arm squeeze from Sondra. “Because,” she said, “you’re a really good feature writer. I mean, I know you mostly cover news, but you always have lots of great color in your—”

  “Give me a break.” I glanced out the window, which is not the kind you can open. Leaping to my death did not appear to be an option. “Listen, like I said, I gotta do some follows on board stuff, so—”

  Marilyn didn’t even blink. “Give it to Brad.”

  “Brad? You gotta be—”

  “Anything else?”

  “Um…Yeah. There’s gonna be another town meeting for Deep Lake Cooling on Friday night, so I really have to—”

  She turned to Bill. “Who’s weekend reporter?”

  “Madison.”

  “Perfect. He’s been covering the science end anyway. Hand it off to him.” She turned back to me. “That all?”

  “Er…” I racked my noggin for something good enough to spring me, and came up short. “I guess so.”

  “Super. So be a good girl and go put on your love beads and get the hell out there.”

  “But why can’t we just—”

  “Stop whining and hop to it,” she said.

  I’m not kidding. That’s actually what she said. I decided to get the hell out of there before she told me to shake my tail feather, or worse.

  Bill, being no fool, beat a hasty retreat to his office. I followed Sondra back to the arts-and-leisure desk, which is at the opposite end of the newsroom from Marilyn’s domain. The commute took ten seconds, during which Sondra said, “This is going to be just great!” more times than I cared to count.

  Sometimes I think that journalists, like double agents, should be issued a suicide pill.

  You may be wondering just why I was being such a baby about this. To put it succinctly: The Melting Rock Music Festival is my idea of hell. Until I was conscripted by the Gabriel Monitor’s editorial staff, I’d been there exactly once, and for a grand total of four hours.

  It was the summer I’d moved to Gabriel five years ago, back when I didn’t know any better. Melting Rock sounded kind of charming, and…well… this cute Canadian grad student in materials science asked me to go with him. So I put on a flowy skirt and a tank top to get into the spirit of the thing, and proceeded to experience what was, at least at that time, just about the worst day of my life.

  First off, the guy’s primary purpose for attending the festival proved not so much to be rocking to the groovy beat but hunting down his ex-girlfriend, whom he’d met there the year before. He didn’t actually inform me of this at the time, though I had a sneaking suspicion something was up since I spent most of the afternoon looking at his back as he dragged me from stage to stage.

  You might think, therefore, that my negative feelings toward Melting Rock amount to sour grapes. But the fact remains that the whole event gave me both a stomachache and a migraine. I’m not quite sure what my personal “scene” is, but I can tell you this much: Whatever it is, Melting Rock is the opposite.

  So what’s it like? To start with, it’s hot as Satan’s rec room, and sanitary facilities consist of overtaxed Porta-Johns and rusty taps sticking out the side of a barn. Consequently, the whole place stinks—not only of urine and sweat but also frying foodstuffs, incense, stale beer, and veritable gallons of patchouli. It’s also one of the most crowded events I’ve ever had the misfortune to attend, so there’s no escaping the aforementioned aromas. You’re constantly elbow-to-elbow with young ladies who’ve never heard the words brassiere or disposable razor and gentlemen who equate their shoulder tattoos with the goddamn Sistine Chapel.

  The music is okay, I guess, though I can’t say I paid much attention to it. It all kind of blended in together to make this incredibly tedious, drum-heavy soundtrack that was impossible to escape; within an hour I felt like the guy from “The Tell-Tale Heart” who goes stark raving nuts because he can’t get the beat out of his head.

  After about four hours of this, I decided I’d had enough. I told my quote-unquote date that I needed to go home, whereupon he said that was fine with him and went back to searching for his erstwhile lady friend. Which might not have been so bad—if Melting Rock weren’t held in a little village ten miles outside Gabriel.

  I walked home. Honest to God. It was either that or hitchhike, which is something my mother would not approve of. I got back to my apartment after midnight and jumped into the shower with my stinky clothes on.

  These memories were, shall we say, plenty vivid as I sat at the leisure desk listening to Sondra prattle on about what a humdinger of an assignment I’d just been shafted with. To summarize the various points of my misery:

  I was not only going to the goddamn Melting Rock Music Festival, I was going there for the next five days.

  I was actually going to have to talk to people who frequent such events. Then I was going to have to write down what they said and churn out stories that presumably made it look like I gave a damn.

  I was going to have to eat a lot of greasy carnival food. (Okay, maybe this part wasn’t so bad.)

  Any plans to spend the weekend in the boudoir of a very attractive policeman named Brian Cody were out the window.

  And, worst of all:

  I was going to spend the next four nights in a tent. Four. In a tent.

  I was pondering this litany of misfortune when my newsroom compadres finally started filing in. I was on the point of unloading on one Jake Madison when I realized that—big surprise—he was already very much in the know.

  “So you guys knew she was gonna sandbag me and you didn’t even give me a heads-up? Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey, every man for himself.”

  “Lovely.”

  Mad took a seat on the edge of my desk and unwrapped his tuna sandwich. “Human nature.”

  “Yeah, maybe yours.”

  “Come on, you know,” he said, “it’s like that story about the two guys and the bear.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Two guys are walking in the woods and they see this bear, right? So one of them pulls his sneakers out of his backpack and puts them on. And the other guy says to him, ‘What are you doing? You know you can’t outrun a bear.’ ”

  “And?”

  “And the first guy goes, ‘Hey, man, I don’t have to outrun the bear.’ ” He smiled his wolfish Mad smile and poised to take a bite. “ ‘I just have to outrun you.’ ”

  CHAPTER2

  Jump forward half an hour. Since one of the two men in my life was offering me zip in the way of consolation, I decided to go in search of the other. So there I was, standing in the vestibule of the Gabriel police station, talking to a certain red-haired officer of the law. And, okay, I wasn’t just trolling for sympathy; I also needed to ask him to baby-sit my dog and to lend me (ugh) a sleeping bag and a tent.

  To give you some background:

  Detective Brian Cody is thirty-three, as upright as they come, and the most unabashedly nice guy I’ve ever even considered dating. He married his college sweetheart, then got summarily dumped when she decided she’d rather sleep her way up the chain of command of the Boston P.D. Ours is one of those patented opposites
-attract kind of romances; witness the fact that he carries a gun to work and actually enjoys spending the night in the woods sans both TV and air conditioner.

  “You know,” he was saying, “camping out can be really fun. I’ve been trying to get you to—”

  “Come on, Cody. If I never wanted to sleep in a tent with you, what’re the odds I’m gonna like sleeping in a field full of dancing hippies?”

  “Can’t argue with you there. I guess you just gotta try and make the best of it.”

  “Couldn’t you just pat me on the head and say, ‘Poor baby’?”

  “Poor baby.”

  “What about the head-patting part?”

  “Don’t want to mess with my macho image. They giving you hazardous-duty pay for this one?”

  “Since I’m kind of working night and day, they’re giving me a four-day weekend for the next two weeks, which is nice. Just about the only nice thing, if you ask me.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “Keep it up,” I said, “and you might get lucky on Sunday night, after all.”

  As it turned out, Cody got lucky roughly fifteen minutes later, when he used his lunch break to squire me over to his apartment to pick up his camping gear. It wasn’t until around two that I finally got into my trusty red next-gen Beetle and drove the ten miles out to Jaspersburg, the one-horse town that has hosted Melting Rock lo these thirteen years. Even a festival basher like myself knows that it’s the quintessential love-hate relationship: The town fathers love the bags of money that Melting Rock drops on their doorstep and hate just about everything else about it.

  I drove down the main drag in search of the so-called VIP parking lot, which proved to be hell and gone from the campground. I, therefore, hauled my tent, sleeping bag, laptop, and backpack full of clothes half a mile through scraggly grass, already starting to sweat and realizing that the only way I was going to get clean was to open my heart to the concept of the communal outdoor shower.

  I stomped around like that for a while before I realized I had no idea where I was going. Eventually, a wiry young man walked by toting a load twice as big as mine, and I yelled for him to stop. He did, and when he turned around, I noticed he had a ring in his nose—not a wee one through the side of one nostril but a honking doughnut of a thing right through the middle, like a prize bull.

  “Uh, excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me how to get to the campground?”

  “Sure, sister. Which one?”

  “Er… The main one, I guess.”

  “Main? You sure?”

  I dug a piece of paper out of my pocket. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m supposed to go to the main campground.”

  He whistled at me, and probably not because I was a vision of loveliness. “Hey, you’re lucky,” he said. “Slots in Main almost never open up.” He gave me an assessing look. “Hey…are you, you know, here by yourself?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Cool,” he said. “How about I crash with you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, can I crash in your tent? We’d have a blast. I got a ton of buds coming, and they’re bringing some really sweet—”

  “Er…I’m afraid not. I’m kind of, um, here on business.”

  “Yeah? Whatcha sellin’? You got E? ’Shrooms? What?” His eyes narrowed. “Listen, I don’t do Oxy—”

  “Oh, er… nothing like that.” He looked rather crestfallen. “So could you maybe tell me how to get to the main campground?”

  “Yeah, okay.” He walked ahead for a few paces and stopped. “Like …you really don’t want me to crash with you? You sure?”

  “As sure,” I said, “as I’ve ever been of anything in my life.”

  MY NEW FRIEND was nothing if not tenacious; he repeated the question at least half a dozen times before we finally got to the campground. At one point I tried telling him that I couldn’t bunk with him because I had a boyfriend, but this did no good whatsoever; he just mumbled, “But, come on, this is Melting Rock…” and proceeded to tell me I was one freaky chick.

  I didn’t contradict him.

  His name, as it turned out, was Doug—a rather conventional moniker for a guy with a pacifier through his proboscis, if you ask me. And though I tried to shake him once I figured out where I was supposed to be headed, in the end I was just as glad he stuck around; somebody had to get the tent to stand up on its own, you see, and that somebody wasn’t going to be me.

  By four o’clock I was settled in my nylon rathole and beginning to contemplate the awful truth, which was that I was going to be calling this place home for the next hundred or so hours. In a vain attempt to cheer myself up, I went in search of sustenance. You’d think that a place as hippie-dippy as this would be all about macrobiotic tabouli, but a lot of the vendors who come to Melting Rock are the same ones who hit the county fair circuit. And to add insult to atherosclerosis, the stuff is more overpriced than movie theater popcorn. I settled on a pizza slice dotted with a few pathetic mushrooms and a small diet Coke. Although I was plenty thirsty, I was determined to keep my Porta-John trips to a minimum. It cost me five bucks.

  Eventually, I couldn’t avoid work anymore; I had to file something pretty soon or Marilyn was going to give me a cellular shellacking. Sondra and I had worked out a tentative story budget that had me doing mainbars that would jump off page one on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday (there’s no Sunday paper), plus a couple of daily sidebars on whatever I happened to dig up.

  That didn’t sound so bad… but neither was it the whole story. Chester, who had recently discovered that there’s this nifty gizmo called “the Internet,” had decided that nothing would be cooler than having dispatches from the festival posted on the Monitor’s spanking-new Web site six times a day. This meant that I had to come up with six story ideas a day (mercifully, only three that first night)—which, in turn, meant that I was what we professional journalists call desperate.

  I decided the first Web piece might as well be on something I was already acquainted with, so I did a little eight-hundred-word story on the vendors. This turned out to be a damn good idea, since it got me a complimentary funnel cake as well as a bag of curly fries and a caramel apple, the latter of which I stashed away for a future moment of emotional desperation.

  Once I finished the piece, I figured I might as well file it. I, therefore, went in search of the so-called “media tent,” which I assumed was going to be a pole with a phone line stapled to it. It proved to be an actual army-style green canvas tent containing a cable modem on a folding table and two strapping young fellows checking press passes to make sure nobody else tried to sneak in.

  One down. A feature and a sidebar to go before I sleep. But what to cover?

  I decided a little aimless wandering was in order. So I strolled from the media tent, past one of the minor concert stages, and toward the much-ballyhooed main campsite; then I looped around to where the Jaspersburg Fairgrounds ended in an abrupt (if climbable) two-story drop to a decent-size creek. I peered down the slope and was greeted by the sight of several dozen human beings engaged in some very enthusiastic skinny-dipping. Then I headed toward the epicenter of the revelry, a pancake-flat space known as the Infield. It was barely a few hours into the first day of the festival and already the place was packed with undulating youth. The Infield stage was set off to one side of the oval of trampled grass; on the other was the geological freak-out that gave the festival its name.

  The Melting Rock is maybe fifteen feet tall and looks like a blackish-grayish wedding cake that’s been left out in the sun too long. It has four tiers, which (in kind of a Mesozoic version of American Bandstand) a few of the aforementioned undulators were using as a perch to boogie and watch the musicians howling from the other side of the field.

  One of the fans—a guy of about thirty with a bushy beard and an equally bushy ponytail—was wearing a homemade T-shirt that said ASK ME ABOUT THE ROCK. I did. He turned out to be a Benson University geology professor, and once he fi
lled me in on the origins and composition of the thing, I figured I had a sidebar on my hands.

  That was all well and good—but I still had the next day’s mainbar hanging over my head. I decided my next mission was to track down someone in charge, if such a person existed. I managed to grab a girl in a tie-dyed T-shirt with the Melting Rock logo on the front and STAFF on the back, and she told me I had to talk to some guy named Joe. As it turned out, I had to talk to some woman named Jo—a person so womanly, in fact, that she had one fat baby in a sling on her hip and another one threatening to pop right out of her midsection.

  Jo—short for Joelle—had been in charge of Melting Rock since I’d been in junior high. I interviewed her about how the festival had changed over the years, yadda-yadda, and at one point she let it slip that she was in a “committed relationship” with the drummer for Stumpy the Salamander, the roots-rock band that was the festival’s headliner.

  Jo proved to be a veritable gold mine of story ideas; after sitting on a tree stump with her for half an hour, I found my budget was filled to bursting. There was one about a couple who’d met at the festival two years before and were getting hitched that weekend; the guy who’d had the festival’s ever-changing logo tattooed somewhere on his corpus every year since it started; the bunch of friends from Jaspersburg High who’d been coming to Melting Rock together practically since they were old enough to walk—et cetera, et cetera.

  I didn’t have a strong feeling about which story to hit first, so when Jo told me that the high-school kids always had a picnic by the rock on the first night of the festival, I figured I’d check it out. And there they were, eight teenagers decked out in the Melting Rock uniform of grubby T-shirts and baggy shorts (for the boys) and flowery tank tops and foofy skirts (for the girls).

  They seemed to be having a hell of a good time, kicking back on blankets, smoking cigarettes, and munching on a combination of homemade snacks and vendor food. Normally, I would just have walked up to them brandishing a notebook, but something made me hang back and watch them for a minute. Maybe these kids were a breed apart from the mainstream, I decided after a while, but adolescent group dynamics were universal; this crowd definitely had a caste system.