Front Page Teaser

“Look,” Esther said, softening, “you’ll get more lucky breaks. Just spell out every fact.”

“Thanks, Esther,” Liz said, both surprised to see the night editor express encouragement and peeved that Esther seemed to buy Manning’s lie about the incomplete quote.

As Liz crossed the room to her distant desk, Esther used her password to get into Manning’s ATEX materials. Like his presidential namesake, the Banner’s Tricky Dick suffered from overconfidence. Never thinking anyone would check up on him, he hadn’t killed the material Liz had shared with him. There it was. Erik Johansson’s entire statement.

“Hey Liz,” Esther called out. She had to make it loud to carry across the big newsroom.

Liz looked up from her desk, where she was retrieving a fresh reporter’s notebook from amid the clutter.

“I can’t speak for Dermott,” Esther said, “but I’m sure I wouldn’t reject any hard facts you can turn up about the missing mom. It won’t be a breeze to score any Newton news from Worcester, but who knows? Good night.”

Liz still felt wired as she wound her way through silent streets to her digs on Gravesend Street. It was a dead-end street, but not the kind of cul-de-sac that offered respite from traffic. Perched on an embankment bordering the Massachusetts Turnpike, even in the dead of the night the place pulsed with the soundtrack of fast- moving vehicles, syncopated irregularly with the deep backbeat of trucks slamming over potholes.

Liz pulled into the parking space alongside her building, angling the Tracer carefully between a bare lilac bush and the iron stanchion that stood straight beside the two-room house she called home. Another stanchion, wrapped with the thorny stems of climbing roses, stood just beyond the far end of her house. By any standard the abode was small, but a massive billboard placed directly over it added to that impression. Supported by those stanchions, the billboard made the house appear tiny, since the advertisement space was wider and taller than the building itself.

Not for the first time, Liz regretted that she had no say over what was advertised in her air space. Still, she did not dare jeopardize the flow of money she received from renting it to an advertising firm. Those funds allowed her to indulge her love of a career that offered little in the way of medical benefits. The overhead ads not only paid for her medical and dental insurance, but it covered the lion’s share of her monthly mortgage payments on the quirky property.

Craning her head to read the current ad’s suggestive warning, “Don’t be caught without one!” Liz told herself for the hundredth time, “When I get rich, I’ll hire them to advertise Dr. Ecklenbergh’s eyeglasses, like that billboard in The Great Gatsby. I wonder how many Pike drivers would get a chuckle out of that!”

The billboard of the moment was not so bad. It showed a heel-kicking Gene Kelly singing in the rain, umbrella held high. It might have been an ad for umbrellas, but, judging by the bottle of vodka in the dancer’s other hand, this was a pitch for drink.

“Not a bad idea,” Liz said aloud, indulging the habit of talking to herself when on her own turf. Her gray cat, Prudence, rubbed at Liz’s ankles as the reporter placed her keys in her coat pocket. She kept the keys there in the thus-far vain hope that she would have to grab her coat and rush out to cover breaking news. “Blast!” Liz said as she felt the film can in her pocket. “I should’ve asked Rene to process this.”

Rene would have left the newsroom long ago, and there was no way Liz would trust Ellen’s film to the other photographers. They were all too eager to stay in the good graces of Manning. Figuring she could put the film in DeZona’s hands in the morning, Liz poured herself a glass of Chardonnay and put together a meal she’d dubbed “Cask of Amontillado Chicken,” in honor of the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe. Made with chicken, mushrooms, shallots, slivered pecans, and, of course, amontillado sherry, it was one of those dishes that took little time and fuss to make but tasted like it was the result of a professional chef’s labor. She spooned some onto her plate and sat, feet up, in front of one of her luxuries, a gas fireplace that came to life with the flick of a switch.

After eating, she covered herself with her favorite purple and white crocheted afghan. It clashed with her home’s peach and rust color scheme. Its edges were uneven, too. But these characteristics only added to the afghan’s value in Liz’s eyes. Made from donated wool in unfashionable colors, it had been crocheted for Liz by six incarcerated adolescent girls who had opened their hearts to her on the topic of body piercing as self-expression for a Banner feature. Usually, their chaplain had said, they crocheted bedcovers for themselves, but they took a liking to Liz and decided to make one for her, too. Along the way, they proved they could stick with, cooperate, and complete a generous and time-consuming gift.

As one of the girls put it, “A hole in your tongue says as much as words do, sometimes.”

Pulling the afghan up to her chin, Liz decided those words of wisdom were worthy of billboard space, too. “When I’m rich . . . ,” she mused, as she dropped off to sleep, lulled by the sound of passing traffic.

She awoke to the scream of sirens. An accident on the Mass. Pike. Too bad for the people in the fender bender, but terrific for Liz, since she had forgotten to set her alarm. Looking at her watch, Liz saw it was too late to zip over to the Banner to give Rene the film for processing. The city of Worcester and its public library were in the opposite direction.

Shaking off the afghan and Prudence, who was sleeping on it, Liz removed her slacks and crossed the room towards her shower stall and bathroom area. It was located between the main room and kitchen area, behind a custom-designed, curved partition built by a budding architect whom Liz met while writing an article on design solutions for small spaces. After her article about the architect’s transformation of a studio apartment on Boston’s Beacon Hill was published, his career took off. Meanwhile, Liz hired him to help her improve her then-new-to-her digs. When she rejected his offer to do the work without charge, he surprised her by producing the curved, polished cherry partition instead of the boxy divider of painted pine she had hired him to install. He also installed built-in cherry bookcases.

Semi-dressed, Liz made her way to the kitchen to start some coffee brewing before she took her shower. Without her eyeglasses, she saw little. But she was not so blind that she could not see the pair of legs, visible from the knees down, which filled the small window over her kitchen sink. She had not thought to close the blinds on the previous evening.

“You startled me, Tom!” she said at the top of her lungs. But the man whose legs she saw did not hear her through the double-glazed windows she’d had installed to cut down on the traffic noise.

She rapped on the window and then lifted it a few inches.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, startling Tom in turn.

“Jeez! You scared me!” Tom said as his long-waisted torso, chest, shoulders, and head came into sight in that order.

“You startled me, too. It’s not billboard day,” Liz said, opening the coffee canister. Tom regularly changed the billboard advertisements beginning on the first Tuesday of the month, spending an average three days per billboard change. This was the third Tuesday of December.

“I know, but a car dealer wants to make end-of-the-year sales, so I’m putting up a new ad before the month ends. The dealer must have money to burn. I don’t think this ad will be up as long as two weeks. Don’t get me wrong,” Tom said, grinning at Liz’s bare legs. “I’m not complaining.”

Liz shut the blinds on his smile, pulled on some slacks, and then opened the blinds again.

“Tom Horton at your service!” he grinned.

“Cup of coffee?” she said.

“Sure thing!”

“It’ll have to be quick,” Liz said, giving up on taking a shower. “I’m on assignment this morning. I’ve gotta get out to Worcester.”

Tom cleaned his boots on the doormat with care before entering.

“I can really use that coffee,” he said. “It’s cold enough to . . .”

“. . . freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” they said in unison, laughing. Over the year that Liz had lived below the billboard, she and Tom had enjoyed quite a few cups of coffee. The first time, she’d invited him in out of pity. Hanging an ad in below-freezing temperatures, he had muttered that same line only to look down and see Liz gazing up at him.

“It sure is!” she had said. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she’d added, when she saw his sheepish expression. “The phrase doesn’t mean what you think it does, so I’m not offended. Come on in and have a cup of coffee and I’ll tell