Chapter Four
"Absolutely! Of course! One hundred percent!" Rory exclaimed excitedly only seconds after her mother had spoken. "I wouldn't let anyone else. Maybe Sookie. But only if I was busy or something." Rory beamed up at her mom.
"You might have to take that up with Sookie," Lorelai responded, popping a French fry, that had arrived while she explained everything, into her mouth. At Rory's words, her mother seemed to relax. Rory wasn't sure why her mother had been so nervous about telling her daughter that she and Luke were getting married and asking Rory to be her maid of honour, but Lorelai had obviously been tensed up only moment before.
Rory understood that some children had issues when their parents got remarried, worried that the new spouse would be replacing their parent. But for Rory and Lorelai that wasn't even a passing notion. Christopher Hayden may have been Rory's biological father, but in all the ways that mattered when a little girl was growing up, Luke had been her father figure. Luke was so much more a part of her life than Christopher. Not to mention that Rory was a fully grown woman with a child of her own and not a little girl who needed her parents.
Rory smiled reassuringly at her mother, trying to convey just how excited she was about this prospect.
"So, have you started planning?" Rory asked, hoping that her show of interest would continue to reassure her mother.
"Sookie has already figured out the catering menu, but I wanted you to know before anything happened. I would have told you first except Luke proposed to me in the kitchen of the Dragon Fly while he was helping out with burger day and Sookie was standing right there when he did it." Lorelai's word vomit was accompanied by her waving around a fry, causing Rory to dodge the ketchup that was threating to go flying off of it.
'Ah. So that is why Lorelai was nervous. Rory wasn't the first person to know about the engagement.' Rory and Lorelai were unusually close; they had essentially grown up together, helped raise each other. Going through those struggles together made them closer than mother-daughter or even best friends. And, whenever Rory had news her mother was the first person, she wanted to share it with. Lorelai felt bad that this big piece of news was known by someone else before Rory.
"Well, then I guess we have a lot of work to do!" Rory commented, breezing past the fact that Sookie knew first to show her mom she didn't care about that small fact. The rest of the dinner, and the weekend was spent with the two planning, deciding, and dreaming about Lorelai and Luke's wedding.
Rory Gilmore enjoyed her weekend in Stars Hallow. But like every weekend prior, it was over earlier than she was ready for it to be. Before she knew it, Rory and Ricky were on the train back from Connecticut to New York. Unlike the train they had taken down to Stars Hallow on Friday, this train was nearly empty. The business men whom had occupied the majority of seats on the Friday afternoon train would be waiting until early on Monday to commute to work. Most of them were day-trippers. Rory had tried that one time, when Ricky was about three. It hadn't gone well. No three-year-old wants to be awoken at 4:30 am in order to make it to the city for his mother's job.
Her job. Rory sighed deeply, staring out the window at the passing country. Aside from her conversation with Lane, Rory's job had mercifully left her mind for the weekend. The news her mother had shared had driven any journalistic worries and concerns she'd had. Now, as New York City drew closer and closer, she had nothing to keep her mind from wandering back to her job, and more importantly, the article that was awaiting her.
How would she handle this? How would she write an article about Logan Huntzberger without tipping him off to her true intentions, not letting him get to close (Rory was sure that he still had the power to worm his way back into her life, if he desired to), and most importantly, not letting Logan discover that he had a son.
Rory sighed again. This time, her son was altered to her audible distress and looked up from his book. His large blue eyes, the same eyes she had and the same eyes she'd gotten from her mother, were wide with concern.
"Is something wrong, Mom? You keep sighing," Ricky asked. He searched her face, trying to discern her expression, hoping it could give him a clue. Rory carefully schooled her features, making sure that her own problems did not affect her son. Her smile may have looked a little fake to a trained observer, but her young son seemed to believe it.
"Just tired, Ricky, Planning Grandma's wedding is quite exhausting." Rory smoothed down her son's slightly unruly hair in a comforting gesture and an attempt to assuage any anxiety her son might be feeling. It seemed to work as Ricky nodded his head slightly and then returned to his book without another word.
Rory sat back in her seat and continued to watch her son. He was unnaturally observant, especially for a nine-year-old. She would have to be careful around him as she wrote this story, lest he discover the secrets she had buried down deep.
Rory sat at her small desk, the surface covered in printouts and old newspapers. She had decided that before she started her story, she would see what had already been written about Logan Huntzberger, his family, and his company. It wouldn't do Rory any good to rehash old information; people would accuse her of padding her story or being ill-informed about her own paper's previous work. However, it was a long, fairly boring job.
Having almost been a part of the Huntzberger family and dating Logan for two plus years, she already knew a significant amount about her topic of investigation. Reading stories that only confirmed her knowledge was putting Rory to sleep. Most of the pieces were puff pieces, singing the praises of the successful family, or interest pieces announcing the latest company news. There were even some more gossipy pieces about the Huntzberger's personal lives. Rory was just lucky there was nothing about her in them. Reading that would be embarrassing to the point of causing death.
"Are there any trees left in the State of New York?" a chipper voice asked, pulling Rory from the Huntzberger hole she'd been digging. Rory looked up and was met by the merry face of her closet thing to a friend in New York, Zoe.
Zoe was about the same age as Rory, maybe a few years younger. Rory hadn't asked and Zoe had never divulged that information, but Rory's journalist acumen had figured that there couldn't be more than two years between the two women. They'd started at the New York Times at about the same time; Rory in the major news section and Zoe in arts and culture.
"I'm not sure, but if I go to jail for tree murder, will you be my character witness?" Rory joked. She thought about moving some of the pages that cluttered her desk (Zoe often liked to perch on the side of the large pine surface whenever she came to chat), but Rory was worried about upsetting the very careful equilibrium she had created. One wrong move and the entire Huntzberger mountain could come tumbling down on her.
"Only if you tell me why you felt the need?" Zoe's eyes suddenly got large and shiny, making her resemble an anime character, even more than she already did with her pale skin, jet black hair, and round eyes. "Did Miranda finally take her head out of her ass? Did you finally get your own piece?"
At Rory's smile, Zoe squealed, excitedly clapped her hands together, and began crazily dancing around the newsroom, unconcerned about her fellow coworkers. Much like Lane, Zoe believed that Miranda had it out for Rory. Zoe, who had been working at the Times for the same period, had already written several long-form pieces about various arts and culture topics that were seminally important to the high-minded, artistic New Yorkers who subscribed to the Times. She believed that Rory was a better journalist and should have more articles under her belt than Zoe; so, the only logical explanation was interference by Rory's editor. Plain and simple.
"Give me the details girl! What's it about? What's the word count? What's the scoop? What's your angle?" Zoe stopped her dancing and leaned in extremely close to Rory. The brunette reporter shifted back in her seat, still not used to Zoe's lack of personal space awareness despite the number of years they'd worked together.
"I'm supposed to be writing an expose about a relatively new company, Huntzberger Enterprises. Apparently, there are rumors of shady business dealings, potential insider trading and other illegal activities. The Times wants to be the newspaper to bring the corruption and crime to light, and they've tapped me to do it."
At Rory's words, Zoe squealed again and awkwardly hugged Rory. Because Zoe was sitting on the corner of her desk, and Rory was sitting lower down in her chair, and neither women stood up, the hug was more like a shoulder squeeze. Added to that was the fact that Rory didn't, and frankly thanks to her positioning couldn't, return the hug. Zoe, however, didn't seem to notice or care.
"That is a major story, and I know you will do it justice. It will be the biggest, most talked about New York Times story of the year. Your name will be a household name like Woodstein and Brenward!"
"That's Woodward and Bernstein, Zoe," Rory commented, chuckling at the fact that, while trying to make her point about the universality about the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal Zoe had managed to mess up their names.
"Whatever! You get my point! Now, I have to get back to my important, ground breaking stories, but if you need anything from me, do not hesitate to wander over and visit. I am always up for a distraction!" With that, Zoe sauntered off, leaving Rory and her piles of research alone again.
It was a long, monotonous week of research. After Rory had completed her New York Times deep-dive, looking at what the paper had previously reported about Logan Huntzberger and everything associated with him, she began a cursory internet search. Scrolling through forums and business insider websites, Rory looked for even the slightest, most off-handed mention of impropriety on the part of Huntzberger enterprises. If there was something shady going on, people that were involved in the business world would be the first ones to talk about it.
But Rory didn't turn anything up. When people discussed Huntzberger Enterprises it was either with a sense of awe and wonder at the young business man's success, or with envy at that same success. However, even those who were envious of Logan and his business weren't slinging around insinuations of malpractice. Wherever the New York Times' higher ups had heard these rumour, if there even were rumours and not just a jealousy run amok, it wasn't in the places that Rory was looking.
She wasn't exactly an expert at exposes, of cloak and dagger reporting. The one time she'd really done anything like this, it had been back in University. While at Yale, Rory had accidently stumbled across the Life and Death Brigade, and Logan Huntzberger. She'd taken a moment to chuckle to herself that the two times she was writing her first major piece of a paper, an investigative piece at that, Logan Huntzberger was square in the middle.
Rory had done much the same thing then, while researching the Life and Death Brigade, as she'd done while researching Logan Huntzberger. She'd looked online, searched out what was already written about it. She'd uncovered suspicions while at Yale; now she was uncovering nothing.
With a frustrated sigh late on Friday afternoon, Rory pushed back from her computer. It was giving her no new information. She figured she could probably ask Miranda if she had a source or further information that she could provide Rory, a sort of jumping off point to get Rory started, but something was telling her that it was exactly what Miranda wanted. If she had a source, she would have given it to Rory if Miranda had wanted her to succeed. The fact that Rory wasn't given a source meant that Miranda wanted to Rory to fail on her own, to need to turn to Miranda so that the editor could take some, or even all, of the credit of the story.
That was not something Rory was willing to do. She would just have to figure out how to uncover this story on her own, without help from anyone at the New York Times. Aside from Zoe, who wouldn't really be much help, Rory wasn't sure she could trust any of her fellow reporters. They may end up reporting back to Miranda which would leave Rory in the same place as if she'd gone to her editor on her own.
Rory turned back to her thoughts of her time at Yale. She'd managed a story then. Maybe if she followed the same tactics, she could produce a story now. After she'd done her research, what had her next step been? She thought about it for a moment before it hit her.
She'd reached out to Logan himself, someone she was almost positive was a member of the Life and Death Brigade. She'd gotten the inside scoop, worked her way into an event, and gotten her story that way.
How could she pull of something similar here? Asking Logan was not an option. If she tipped him off to her investigation, he would close ranks or temporarily clean up his act. But she would need to get into contact with someone on the inside. A whistle blower, a source of her own.
How she would go about doing that though, was a problem for another day. It was 4:30 pm on Friday afternoon. If she didn't leave now, she would be late for her grandparents' Friday night dinner and Rory did not have the fight for that. She would have to worry about Logan again on Monday. Right then, she had Emily Gilmore to be anxious over.