Free Superstition by Karen Robards Page B

of the crew watching with bated breath. If, through sheer willpower, they could have conjured a ghost out of thin air, it would have been materializing before them at that very moment. But they were as helpless to change what was happening—or, rather, what was not happening—as she was.
    “Nothing. I’m getting nothing in this room,” Leonora said at last, her voice tight. Her eyes met Nicky’s for a long moment. Nicky knew that look. If the program bombed as badly as it seemed like it was going to, the bigwigs at the network weren’t the only ones who would be howling for her head: Her mother would be, too.
    In the end, when the show was over and the backlash hit, this whole unbelievable debacle was going to turn out to be all her fault, Nicky realized bitterly. Why, why, hadn’t she seen this coming?
    Because she’d been too eager to make tonight’s program happen, and the reason she’d been too eager was because she had known they were looking at her: CBS. They were searching for a new co-host for Live in the Morning, the long-running chatfest that most of America consumed along with their morning coffee. Quite apart from the fact that Twenty-four Hours Investigates was in crisis mode, Live in the Morning was a gig that every female television personality in the country would sell her laser-whitened teeth for. At their request, she’d sent in her audition tape, which had made enough of an impression that she’d been flown to New York for an interview. Things had gone well.
    But she hadn’t been offered the job. They were keeping her in mind, they said, but they were continuing to look.
    A friend in a position to know had told her that they liked her but had reservations: As a foil to Troy Hayden, the handsome, buttoned-down male host, they had envisioned a perky little suntanned blonde, not a tall, milky-skinned, sometimes too-composed redhead; the bulk of her reporting had been for news-oriented shows, from Channel 32 in Charleston where she’d gotten her start to Twenty-four Hours Investigates for A&E; and she had no experience with live TV.
    Well, thanks to her own machinations, now she did. And it looked as though it was going to bite her in the butt.
    After this, not only was she not going to get the job, she probably wasn’t going to be working for Twenty-four Hours Investigates, either. If she didn’t get fired, it would be because they would have no reason to fire her: The news magazine would be cancelled. She would go down in the annals of broadcast history as the reporter who killed the program.
    If CBS ever talked about her again at all, it would be because she was to Twenty-four Hours Investigates what the iceberg was to the Titanic .
    “Leonora James—who, as most of you know, also happens to be my mother—has an amazing record as a psychic medium. On her late, much-lamented-by-fans show The Great Beyond, she was able to put hundreds of families in touch with their deceased loved ones. She has talked to Marilyn Monroe, to Elvis, to John Ritter . . .”
    With the camera now zooming in on Nicky, Leonora felt free to give her daughter a baleful look, which Nicky, still talking, did her best to ignore. Then, head high, posture regal, purple caftan swirling, Leonora glided past Nicky and back out into the hall while the camera, once again focused on her, rolled silently behind.
    “. . . investigated literally hundreds of hauntings,” Nicky continued. “Including Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is said to still walk the boards. . . .”
    In a group just inside the front door, clustered well out of camera range, Nicky caught a glimpse of the onlookers craning their necks to follow the (non) action: several members of the technical support crew; a miniskirted woman she thought was with the local weekly newspaper; the scowling, bulldog-like mayor; and the mayor’s puglike pal, a short, chunky, balding guy she took for a