Holman arched an eyebrow. “Riley, are you okay?”
He had clearly not anticipated the effect the news that he’d be taking leave to go undercover would have on me. I was a little surprised myself, but the idea of working at the Tuttle Times without Holman had me feeling panicky, like all the air had been sucked out of the room. Or like I couldn’t find my cell phone. I guess I’d come to depend on him more than I realized during the past month.
“A few weeks? Really?”
He shrugged. “The first trip is scheduled for seven days. But if I don’t see anything, I may have to do another.”
For the past few months, Holman had been working an investigative piece on the TransVirginia Shipping Company. A former employee had tipped him off that the company had been ordering its workers to illegally dump barrels of toxic waste in the ocean to avoid the high cost of proper disposal. Holman had found several former employees who corroborated the story, but all refused to go on the record. As the son of a maritime engineer in the Royal Canadian Navy, Holman knew his way around a ship. So he’d been trying to get a job as a handler on one of the ships, which had proven more difficult than he anticipated. But after several weeks, he’d finally been hired. It was a great break for him. For me, not so much.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’re ready.”
“But what if I’m not?” I let my insecurities bubble up to the surface. “I have yet to write a single story without going over it with you first.”
“You bring your work to me because it makes you feel better. Not because you need to.”
“But who will edit me now?”
“Kay, of course,” he said. Kay Jackson was the editor-in-chief of the Times, and although she was technically my boss, I think I’d spoken a total of seven words to her since I started working there. She was nice but scary. And therefore my tenure at the Times so far had been spent comfortably in Holman’s shadow. I liked it there. He had become my personal safety net, my insurance against failure.
“Fine,” I huffed. “Leave me all alone with the jackals.”
“Spencer and Henderson aren’t jackals—”
“Well, they don’t exactly like having me around.”
“—if anything, a more apt comparison would be vultures, as they’re waiting for you to die, metaphorically speaking, of course, so they can pick off your stories,” he completed his thought.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Holman blinked, surprised. “I wouldn’t think so.”
The guys in the newsroom had not been thrilled when Holman convinced Kay to hire me. The Times was a small weekly newspaper, and everyone who worked there had worked there forever and had their own turf. Holman was the paper’s crown jewel, having received the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism some years ago, and I was hired mostly to assist him. But at a small paper, everyone pitches in, and over the past few weeks I’d been assigned stories from multiple departments. This wasn’t always appreciated.
“They think I’m an intern,” I said, sulkily. “Spencer called me Lewinsky yesterday.”
“Who cares what they think. You’re not an intern. You’re a paid employee, same as me.”
“Are you sure you won’t be available at all, even by phone? Text? Email?” My desperation ticked up as he packed up his files and loaded them into his briefcase.
“Listen,” Holman said. “You are going to be fine. And who knows, maybe Flick will even let you help with obits while I’m gone.”
I knew he was just trying to make me feel better. Hal Flick hadn’t let me do anything for the obituary department except research on the “pre-dead.” Even though Kay told him to train me, Flick had stubbornly refused to let me write a single obituary since I’d been at the Times. This was partially because he was an old curmudgeon who didn’t like change, and partially because he and I shared a long and complicated history. Either way, it sucked.
People in small towns read the newspaper for two main reasons: high school football and obituaries. Flick had been lobbying Kay for years to let him expand the obit section to include more than just death notices sent in by families or funeral homes. He wanted to run editorial obits, like the kind in The New York Times, true news stories about people whose lives have influenced our community. Kay finally agreed to give him the space for one news obit per issue, and the response had been amazing. People in Tuttle were loving the longer obits. Personally, I felt vindicated that I was no longer the only person in town who realized the simple beauty of the form. Plus, I was thrilled that I was going to get to learn the craft of obituary writing like my granddaddy had done. But so far Flick had kept the juicy assignments all to himself, leaving me the scraps, spell-checking death notices or doing research for our advances, which basically involves calling healthy people and asking them to verify information to be used . . . “later.” Needless to say, people don’t always appreciate these calls.
“What am I supposed to do if I need you?” I whined.
“You won’t. This will be good for you—a natural way to bring your training to an end. I have provided you with the knowledge, insight, and experience gained during the course of my career to help launch yours. As the sculptor molds the clay, I have been able to shape you—”
“Holman!”
“What?” He looked surprised. “I didn’t mean that in a sexual way, if that’s what you were thinking—”
I held up a hand to stop him. I simply could not have this conversation again. “That was not what I was thinking. That is never what I am thinking. It’s just . . . what if I’m not ready?”
“You’re going to be fine,” he said
