Kay ignored us both. “Riley’s going to take this one,” she said. “Flick, I want you to help her. Give her the benefit of your experience. We need to train new blood around here.”
He started to object, but Kay talked over him. “You won’t live forever and when it comes time for the Times to write your obit, it’s probably gonna be Riley who does it, so teach her well.” She winked at me and blew down the hall to put out the next fire.
The look on Flick’s face said Over my dead body, which was kind of ironic given the situation.
“I’ll get you a draft soon,” I said, trying, and failing, to keep the smugness out of my voice.
“You know this isn’t some sort of eulogy obit like the one you wrote for Jordan. This is a news story, as in real journalism. You’re going to need to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes.” But I knew I wouldn’t convince him with just talk—there was too much water under our particular bridge. I’d have to prove myself through my work.
He stood up the way old men do, leading with his head and shoulders, and then slowly straightened out. He lumbered around to his antiquated army-green file cabinet and pulled out a manila folder. “This is the advance file we have on Davenport. You know that research I’ve had you doing that you hate so much? Well, it’s times like this that stuff comes in handy.”
I took the file without saying anything. I felt a bit chastened. I had assumed Flick was just having me doing that research because he didn’t like me.
I went back to my desk and began to work my way through the folder, making notes in the margins. One of the advantages of working for a weekly paper as opposed to a daily was that we could take more time with our stories. At a daily newspaper, a reporter had maybe four or five hours to write an obit. At the Times, I was grateful that we usually had at least a few days. Especially in this case where the cause of death was murder—and an unsolved one at that.
I was just about to pick up the phone to check on Tabitha, when Kay Jackson’s voice called out from her office, “Ellison, can you come in here a sec?”
I’d never been called into Kay’s office before. It made me a little nervous. “What’s up?”
“Sit down. Close the door.”
Uh-oh. My nervousness instantly upgraded to dread.
“Mayor Lancett just called,” Kay said. “She wanted to thank us for the excellent reporting in the Davenport case.”
I felt relieved. That was a good thing, right? I mean, I doubt it was every day that the mayor called to thank the newspaper for something! But my joy was short-lived . . .
“Then she started talking about how tourism plays a big part in the economy of Tuttle Corner and how the perception of multiple murders in our town could have a disastrous effect on local businesses, etcetera, etcetera. And how the town was still healing after ‘that nasty business’ with Sheriff Tackett.”
I wasn’t sure I understood what Kay was telling me.
“She didn’t come out and say it, but my guess is this little phone call was a not-so-subtle suggestion to tone down our coverage of the Davenport murder.”
“What?” I said, shocked. The mayor wanted to censor our newspaper because it might mean James Madison’s Fish Shack gets a few less reservations this summer? That was ridiculous—and unethical.
Kay rushed in to reassure me. “Listen, I don’t want you to worry, we don’t answer to the mayor. Our responsibility is to our readers and to the truth.”
“Okay,” I said, still surprised at the mayor’s subtle directive. “So what do we do?”
“We do what we always do. But you will need to be extra careful, Riley. Every detail, every quote, every line has to be one hundred percent accurate, and one hundred percent verifiable.”
I braced myself for her to ask who my anonymous source was. I wasn’t going to tell her—not until Tabitha said I could. I may have been a journalist for only a month, but that was long enough to know that you never betray a source. Not to mention a friend. (Or a frenemy, as the case may be.)
“I understand that sometimes you need to print information from an anonymous source, but it’s not ideal. Next story we publish on this, I’d like to be able to go on record with an attributable source.”
I exhaled, relieved I didn’t have to refuse her any information.
Kay exhaled too. She was tough as nails, but I could tell the mayor’s phone call had rattled her cage a bit. She confirmed my suspicion when she smiled at me and said, “Hell of a time for Holman to be out at sea, huh?”
CHAPTER 8
Tabitha lived in a condo complex just off the main square that was no more than a three-minute walk from the Times offices. The complex consisted of a series of eight row houses in the Victorian style, each painted a different color, with wrought-iron roof cresting and bright white gingerbread scrollwork. The effect was charming, if a little Stepford. In fact, some residents threw a fit when the units were built, calling them an aesthetic insult to the architectural integrity of Tuttle Corner. I thought that was a little dramatic—they were cute, maybe a bit planned, but cute nonetheless. Grant St. Simon, Tabitha’s father, built the complex and let his daughter live there rent-free.
Tabitha lived in the blue condo on the west end of the complex. She hadn’t answered any of my calls or texts, so I decided to pop over to see
