“You what?” I yelped, nonchalance completely out the window. My stomach had fallen to my feet.
“Christmas, too,” Aunt Ruta chirped. “Not for the whole day, of course. Just a stop by kind of thing.”
“You were supposed to leave it to me to tell her,” Mom said, and they launched into another of their squabbles.
“Mom—” I tried. “Aunt Ru—you guys—hello, I’m still here—Mother!”
“Yes?” Mom asked, her innocence as fake as my nonchalance had been.
“Please tell me I heard Aunt Ruta wrong.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard that you invited my ex-boyfriend—emphasis on the ex—to celebrate the holidays with us.”
“Oh, well, yes, then, you heard that correctly.”
It had broken my heart to leave Trace, and I wasn’t over it yet. Part of me thought I would never be over it. My best hope and strategy had been to never lay eyes on him again. And here I would be, eating, drinking, and making merry with him in just over a month.
I lightly pounded my forehead on the desk and groaned.
By the time I got to work Monday morning, I was in no mood for…pretty much anything. I’d spent the greater portion of the night stress-dreaming about Ungrateful Cousin Bart and Trace pelting me with cold, half-eaten dinner rolls with Betsy and Harlowe noshing on chocolate while I tried to save a very-loudly-fallen-and-waiting-for-death-under-the-Christmas-tree Mom and Aunt Ruta. As I was having an extremely bad hair day. And Officer Hopkins was jogging, a half-excited gleam in his eye while I tried to question him about what had happened to Mom and Aunt Ruta. I woke up exhausted and sweaty and hoping it was April and I’d somehow slept through “the festivities.” Was it possible to schedule a stomach flu?
I was going to have to call Trace and uninvite him. Nicely. Which meant talking to him. Ugh. I’d put that one off as long as I possibly could.
Ernie was sitting at Mary Jean’s desk, an open box of doughnuts between them while she bent over his article with red pen in hand. I tried not to notice she was making very few marks on his article. Ernie must have already read his work aloud.
“Oh, hey, Hollis,” Joyce said when I walked in. “Gosh, you look exhausted.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Long weekend.”
“I heard,” she said. “Ernie’s writing a whole story about it.”
“A whole story about what?”
“About how that coach dropped dead right in the high school stadium’s parking lot Friday night.”
I blinked. “Dropped dead?”
She nodded. “Chief Henderson stopped by this morning and told us all about it. Sad situation, really, when you think about it. Dying on enemy turf like that. Would have been much better to die in his own stadium. More apropos or something. Anyway, did you try the hot dogs?”
“He didn’t just—it was a hit and—they’re not investigating—” Once again, I was reduced to partial sentencing. I took a breath, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. Maybe Joyce had it wrong. I about-faced and gave her a smile. “The hot dogs were great. I should get to writing about them now while the taste is still fresh in my mind.”
Ernie had finished up and was headed to his cubicle with his article in one hand, and three doughnuts balanced in a stack in his other hand. He was so worried about dropping the doughnuts, he nearly crashed into me as I headed to Mary Jean’s desk.
“Oh, it’s you!” I was ninety-nine percent sure Ernie called me It’s you because he couldn’t remember my actual name. “Mary Jean’s got breakfast.”
“Great,” I said. I pointed at the paper he was carrying. “Your piece about the homecoming game?”
He studied the paper as if he didn’t realize what it was or why it was in his hand. “Yep.”
“It was quite a loss.”
He nodded sagely. “Nothing too exciting to publish about a game like that.”
A mid-field fight with an open death threat, followed by the recipient of that threat actually ending up dead an hour later with the sole witness giving a description of headlights that just happened to match the headlights on the vehicle of the person who issued the threat? Nope. I couldn’t see any story potential there.
“I hear you’re writing about Coach Farley,” I said. “The coach who…dropped dead?” A corner of my mouth twitched as it tried to dip down. Smile, Hollis, just smile.
“Yeah, I’ll get to that later.”
He took a giant bite of a doughnut, mumbled something that vaguely resembled a farewell, and shuffled toward his desk, happily chewing. I watched in shock.
He would get to that later? Later?
Well, maybe he could put it off until later, but I couldn’t.
I dropped my bag on my chair and marched straight to Mary Jean’s office. I was trained to chase down big stories. To not let anything get in the way of reporting crucial news. To use my reporter’s notebook as a shield and my pen as a dagger. A weapon of truth and justice!
Okay…maybe I was taking that last bit a little far. But I wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to Coach Farley. Because if the police chief was calling it natural causes, he was wrong. And I wanted to set it right. The people deserved to know what really happened. Coach Farley’s widow deserved to know what really happened. The River Fork Otters deserved to know what really happened.
“Hollis! Good morning! How were the hot dogs?”
I planted my hands on my hips to channel the fearlessness I was trying to convince myself I had. “I want the Farley hit-and-run story.”
“Hit-and-run?” She never lost her pleasant expression. “There was no hit-and-run. He just died in an unfortunate location.”
“That’s not true. There was a witness. She said he thump-thumped.”
She took off her cheaters and dropped them onto the desk. “That witness was Agnes Tellerman. She’s one of those professional witnesses. Always the one to see something strange or scary or
