“The investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 is becoming, as you might imagine, a massive operation. Later today the Coast Guard will be joined by the navy’s USS Grasp, up from Virginia. The rescue-and-salvage ship will do much of the heavy lifting of the fuselage and it will provide divers, whose top priority will be to hopefully locate the plane’s two black boxes. At this point it is highly unlikely there are any survivors.”
The helicopter blades beat so much sound into the air Isabel had to shout into her cell phone.
“Sorry! Can you say that again?! I can barely hear you!” She yelled, hoping the helicopter would pass before John started to talk again.
“This is…so be sure not to…okay?” Goodman’s voice was fading in and out.
Isabel kept moving inland from the beach, trying to get better cellular service. “John? If you can hear me, I’m going to call you back from inside the car!”
Another news helicopter was coming up the coast.
It had been sixteen hours since Flight 800 went down off the coast of Long Island. As the day wore on, the number of reporters standing awkwardly in the sand, sweating in their blazers and good shoes, increased exponentially.
It had been fourteen hours since a phone call woke Isabel out of a deep sleep.
“Isabel?” The voice was thick with urgency.
“Yes?” Isabel answered, trying to sound awake. It was one-thirty in the morning.
“Ah, Isabel, this is John Goodman from ANN. Sorry to call at this hour.”
John Goodman?
Isabel had interviewed with him the week before, just days after moving from San Francisco to New York.
“That’s fine. What’s up?”
“Isabel, we have a situation here,” he began. She could hear a lot of noise in the background. “A 747 has gone down somewhere off the coast of Long Island.” He sounded exhausted. “It had just taken off from JFK.”
Isabel was wide awake by this time and was scrambling for the TV remote control so she could see what the networks were already reporting.
“Oh, my God” was all she could say when she finally switched on CNN and saw an animated graphic showing a plane nosediving into the water.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad,” Goodman agreed. “Isabel, we’re gonna need you to do some TV for us. I’m not gonna lie. We’re up the creek staffwise right now. We’ve got someone out on Long Island, but we’re gonna need someone to relieve her in the morning. I’d love to have the luxury of trying you out before something as big as this but I don’t, so I’m calling you to ask you, can you do it? Can you go live for us?”
“Yes.” Isabel didn’t even pause to think about it.
Fourteen hours later, Isabel knocked on the door of the van the network had rented and shyly asked if she could make a phone call from inside, though the hum of the generator was almost as loud as the helicopters.
“John? It’s Isabel. Sorry about that. There’s such bad service out here on the beach.”
“It’s like this—” he wasted no time “—you’re live at the top of the next hour. I want you to know that we’ve been pumping a source at the NTSB and we’ve got a good lead right now. They won’t go on record, but you can get away with sourcing it as someone high up in the investigation. They’re saying—you there?”
“Yeah.” Isabel licked her dry lips and reminded herself to breathe. “I’m here.”
“They’re saying it might have been linked to the center fuel tank. Apparently they’ve had problems with center fuel tanks on 747s but they haven’t drawn much attention to it. Got it? You can go with the info, just don’t source NTSB.”
“Got it.”
One hour later Isabel’s producer told her she was clear and congratulated her just as Isabel’s cell phone rang.
“Mom?” she answered, knowing her parents were the only ones, besides work, who had the number to the cell phone the network had assigned her.
A man’s voice chuckled. “Nope. It’s not your mommy. But after that live shot I wanna be!”
It was John Goodman again. Isabel tried not to sound disappointed. “Why’s that?”
“You were on fire! White-hot! They were only supposed to stay on you for about forty-five seconds and instead they kept you for double that. Wrightman never does that—if anything he dumps out sooner than he says. Welcome to the network, Murphy. Consider yourself hired.”
Isabel felt the flush of the compliment for a moment, but then went back to the only thing that had been on her mind for the past hour.
“Thanks, John. I appreciate it. Hey, by the way,” she said, trying for nonchalance, “you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a network affiliate in Trenton, Vermont, would you?”
“Let’s see. Hmm. I just got out my affiliate guide and it looks like the folks of Trenton, Vermont, will be getting their news from NBC and ABC. We don’t service that market. But who the hell cares about Trenton, Vermont? You got the biggest cities in the country scratching their heads asking ‘Who is this Isabel Murphy?’ and you want to know if they saw you in Trenton, Vermont?”
“Not all of Trenton, really. Just one person.”
Isabel’s heart felt like it was collapsing.
Goodman was uncharacteristically curious. “Who’s in Trenton?”
Isabel watched her foot draw circles in the sand. “My father.”