Nash is hardly another Aubrey McGinty.”
I came around his desk. Propped my rear on the edge so his carefully stacked printouts slid into each other. I poured on the salt and pepper. “I’m not saying she is. I’m just saying your objectivity occasionally wanes.”
“Are you accusing me of sexist hiring practices?”
“Of course not-you’ve hired plenty of ugly men.”
Tinker enjoyed our verbal duels. But he had that budget meeting to get to. So he got right to the point. Or at least tried to. “I know you had a little problem with Miss Nash in the past-”
“Little problem? All that stuff she wrote about me? Without once calling to confirm it?”
Tinker conceded the point with a bobble of his shiny head. “But everything she wrote about you was true. It showed she’s got a nose for news.”
He was right enough about that. That day I went to see Gabriella at Hemphill College, quietly snooping into Professor Gordon Sweet’s murder, she’d quickly put two and two together and came up with a very big scoop for the college paper. And she was only a junior then. God only knows how good she might be now. “But she didn’t color inside the lines, Alec. Rule One of journalism is to let the subject of a story confirm or deny what you’ve got.”
Tinker shooed me off his desk, scooted forward in his chair and gathered up his papers. “And if she had, Maddy? Would you have confirmed or denied?”
“No comment.”
Tinker walked me to the door. “I had the same concerns you had. I talked to her about it. She was genuinely anguished.”
I reached for the doorknob. “Was she now?”
He grabbed the knob before I could. “A lot more than a certain librarian when she was caught investigating another murder on company time.”
“I did not investigate Gordon Sweet’s murder on company time.”
I headed for the morgue. Tinker headed toward his meeting. Both of us were laughing.
My old Dodge Shadow likes June better than any month. It’s neither too cold nor too hot for its delicate insides. I made it all the way home to my shoebox on Brambriar Court without a single warning light on the dash flashing at me. Which was a small but welcome victory given my foul mood.
Good gravy! Gabriella Nash? Of all the hungry kids with journalism degrees out there? If I didn’t know Tinker better, I’d think he hired her just to get my goat. But he’s a serious newspaperman. He wants The Herald-Union to have the best reporters possible. He wants the people of Hannawa, Ohio, to have the best coverage possible. So if Gabriella Nash hadn’t had good grades, a good portfolio of clips from the college paper, and high praise from her professors, he wouldn’t have hired her, no matter how much he wanted to punish me.
And I did deserve to be punished. I’d not only promised Detective Grant that I wouldn’t interfere in his investigation of Gordon Sweet’s murder, I’d refused to give the paper what I dug up.
So I was prepared to coexist with Gabriella Nash. As long as she had the good sense to tread lightly.
James was waiting for me in the kitchen. So were a puddle of spilled water, a chewed up potholder, and a big glob of poop. “Looks like your day was more fun than mine,” I said, scratching his floppy ears.
James, I should explain, was not my husband. That worthless beast was long gone. James was my neighbor’s American water spaniel. An enormous ball of brown knots. A drooling pink tongue the size of an Easter ham. Eyes that could melt the icecaps on Mars.
My neighbor, Jocelyn Coopersmith, left James with me when she went to California to take care of her daughter, who’d fallen apart after her husband was swept into the Pacific Ocean while collecting mussels for a paella. Jocelyn said she’d be out there for five months. That was fifteen months ago.
So after all those years of living alone, I had a dog.
And a man, too, believe it or not.
I cleaned up James’ mess. And before I could stop myself I called that man. “Hi-you have your supper yet?”
“Good Lord, Maddy. It’s only Monday.”
“A bad Monday.”
“I’ll pick up a pizza.”
“Thanks, Ike.”
That’s right. The new man in my life is a man who’s been in my life for a good fifteen years. For a long time Ike Breeze and I were nothing more than coffee shop owner and cantankerous customer. Lunch hour by lunch hour we became buddies. Now all of a sudden we were, well, we were something a whole lot more complicated.
At my age, any man would be a complication. I’d been without one for decades. But Ike and I both came with a few high hurdles for the other to leap. Above and beyond the usual not-putting-the-cap-back-on-the-toothpaste crap. Ike, for example, was a man. And I, thank God, I was a woman. Ike was black. I was white. Ike, for some reason, was a Republican. I, like anybody with a thread of common sense, was a Democrat. Ike went to church. I went past them as fast as I could. Ike was a widower who’d loved his wife to pieces. I was a divorcee who had long ago picked up the pieces. Ike was even-tempered, understanding, excruciatingly tolerant of others, simply a beautiful human being to be around. I was, well, I tended to have trouble in those areas.
2
Sunday, June 25
“Oatmeal, Maddy? On Sunday? What ever happened to bacon and eggs?”
I tilted back my head and looked straight up at Ike’s unshaven frown. “My raging cholesterol.”
He yawned his way to the Mr. Coffee on the counter. Joined me at the table. “So let me get this straight, Mrs. Sprowls-you’ve got high cholesterol and I’ve got to eat oats like a damn horse.”
I went to the stove to get him some. “Can’t sacrifice a little for a beautiful woman?”
He yawned again. This time like a hippopotamus. “I’m sacrificing plenty.”
I knew what he was getting at. It was the one sore spot in our relationship. I spooned more oatmeal into his bowl just for spite. Banged the bowl down in front of him like a surly waitress. “I wait twenty-five years to get another man in my bed and he can’t handle a little snoring?”
Ike scraped half of his oatmeal into my bowl. “It’s not just the snoring. It’s all that thrashing about you do. Kicking out the covers so my feet get cold.”
“I like a man with cold feet.”
Ike is a serious man. A retired high school math teacher who thinks the best way to spend his retirement is to work sixty hours a week running a coffee shop. “A sleep disorder is nothing to joke about, Maddy.”
I sprinkled brown sugar over his oatmeal, a not-so-subtle hint he should shut up and eat. Our medical writer, Tabitha Geist, had done a four-part series on sleep disorders. Sleep centers were popping up like mushrooms. Significant others all over the country were begging their bed partners to get tested. But as far as I was concerned, sleep apnea was just the latest disease-of-the-week. Remember that scourge of the 1970s, hypoglycemia? When everybody was rushing to the doctor to get their blood sugar tested? Still, I could see that Ike was worried about me. And that wasn’t such a bad thing-not that I was going to do anything about it. “I realize sleeping with me can’t be easy,” I said, “but people have been snoring for a million years.”
“Dying before their time for a million years, too.”
“Rub the sleep out of your eyes, Mr. Breeze. I’ve already jumped that hurdle.”
Ike quietly ate his gruel. He’d apparently had enough of my stubbornness for one morning. I let James out the back door for his morning pee and then went to the front door to retrieve my Sunday paper off the four-foot rectangle of cement I call my front porch.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Ike had not only finished his oatmeal, he’d finished mine. I handed him the business section. “You going to church today? You didn’t bring your suit.”
