3

Wednesday, July 5

Eric Chen pulled the Mountain Dew bottle off his lips and sniffed at my hair like a truffle-hunting hog. “You’re not spontaneously combusting are you?” he asked.

We were clicking our way up the tile-walled stairway to the third floor. The building has an elevator, of course, but it’s as slow as molasses. Anybody who has to get to a desk before noon takes the stairs. “I take it you didn’t come downtown for the fireworks last night,” I said, pulling my head out from under his.

“And you did?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

It took the young genius half a flight of steps to put two and two together. “Ah—you went with Ike.”

“He’s a Republican. What can I say.”

Eric opened the door for me. “So that’s your smoldering love I smell.”

We started across the empty newsroom toward the morgue. “No—that’s the smoke and ash from $40,000 worth of fireworks you smell. There was a damn temperature inversion halfway through the big show. It was like Pompeii.”

I couldn’t blame Eric for being surprised. Or for teasing me. For years I’ve been poooh-poohing the city’s schemes for luring suburbanites downtown. The annual Fourth of July “Star-Spangled Salute to the American Family” is its most atrocious effort. They cram Main Street with carnival rides and booths. The city surrenders the sidewalks to rock bands and hip-hoppers. They befoul the already tenuous air with barbecue sauce and overflowing Port-a-Potties. They finish off the four-day extravaganza with The Hannawa Symphony’s stale tribute to John Philip Sousa and, of course, the damn fireworks, the stench of which I couldn’t shampoo out of my hair.

Eric went to his desk to do whatever it is that he does. I went to mine to get my mug. The message light on my phone was blinking. It was Suzie Burns, the newsroom secretary. Her sugary southern Ohio twang almost always signals a hellish turn of events. “Hiya, Maddy. It’s Suzie. Mr. Tinker wants to see you in his office—right away please!”

“Good gravy,” I growled. “Doesn’t anybody realize a woman my age needs to ease into her day slowly?”

I went to the cafeteria and made my tea. Then, with my mug in front of me like a Crusader’s shield, I headed for Tinker’s office.

Tinker was not alone. Police reporter Dale Marabout was there. Features editor Nancy Peale was there. And Gabriella Nash was there, bawling like a three-year-old who’d ridden her tricycle off the end of the porch.

Tinker smiled weakly at me. “I was hoping you could help Miss Nash through this.”

My first thought was that they’d fired her. That she’d made up a lot of stuff in her story. My second thought was that this was no time for me to gloat. That there’d be plenty of time for that later. I kneeled by Gabriella’s chair and patted her shoulder. “What’s this all about, dear?”

Tinker answered for her. “One of the garage sale ladies was murdered.”

That brought an anguished squeal from Gabriella and a fresh gush of tears. My knees were already beginning to hurt but I stayed put. I even offered the girl a sip of my tea—which she actually accepted. “That’s just terrible,” I said. “Which one?”

Dale provided the facts. “Violeta Bell. They found her on a mat in the fitness room. In her undies. Shot three times in the chest.”

Nancy provided the context. “Gabriella is afraid her story had something to do with the murder.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I snarled. I took my mug away from Gabriella. Struggled to my feet and headed for the door. “I’ve got work to do.”

Nancy bristled at me. “It was her first story, Maddy.”

I bristled right back. “Let’s hope it’s her last.”

Tinker’s hairless head turned into a giant salad tomato. He let me have it. “She admires you, Mrs. Sprowls. For some reason.”

After hearing that you’d think I’d feel awful and apologize, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t feel awful and I sure didn’t apologize. I just fumed while Tinker called me every name in the book. Gabriella, strangely enough, sniffed back her tears and came to my defense. “Leave Mrs. Sprowls alone. I wish I had her backbone.”

Now I did feel awful. I reached out and gently scratched Gabriella behind her ear, the way I scratch James when he surprises me with respect. “What do you say you and I take a walk to the cafeteria,” I said. “Get some fresh tea and maybe one of those big cookies in the vending machine.”

And so we went to the cafeteria. I made the tea and Gabriella bought the cookie. We sat at the table by the plastic bamboo plant. I snapped the cookie in two and gave her the bigger half.

She took a chipmunk-size nibble. “I guess I’ve set the women’s movement back a few years, huh?”

I wasn’t in the mood for a cute back-and-forth. I just wanted to scare some maturity into the girl and get back to my desk. I took the biggest bite of cookie I dared. “That story you wrote wasn’t about you, Gabriella. It was about those four crazy women and that scraggly cabbie who hauls them around.”

“One of them was murdered.”

“So what?”

“What if it was because of my story?”

“Again, so what?”

She slid down in her chair until she looked like a five-year-old sulking at the dinner table. “I guess I had a feeling about her.”

“Good gravy, girl! You talk to some old woman for twenty minutes and you get emotionally involved? You sure this is the right profession for you?”

That got Gabriella’s dander up a bit. Which, I must admit, I liked. “Not that kind of feeling,” she said. “It was just—I don’t know—like she was somebody other than who she said she was.”

I laughed and, unfortunately, sprayed the table with cookie crumbs. “So you don’t think she was really Romanian royalty?”

“I didn’t believe that or anything else she said.”

I liked that, too. “Your shit detector start beeping, did it?”

For the first time that morning she smiled. “Yes, it did. And it just wasn’t the things she said. It was her—what’s a good word for it?”

I’m an old woman. I gave her an old word. “Her countenance?”

“Yeah—her countenance.”

I had no reason to doubt the reliability of Gabriella’s shit detector. It had certainly worked that day I went to see her at the student newspaper office. She’s seen right through my cock-and-bull story about wanting to rummage through the paper’s old files to see what I could find about my own years at Hemphill College. She knew I was digging into Gordon Sweet’s murder. “So why the tears when you heard that Violeta Bell had been murdered? If you had such a bad feeling about her?”

She corrected me. “I didn’t say I had a bad feeling about her. She was a lot of fun. Just like the other three. But I had the sense she was hiding something. Or hiding from something.”

I took a more modest bite of cookie and studied her countenance. Inside that snip of a girl lived a wise woman. “Why would she do the interview then?” I asked. “The pages of a newspaper aren’t exactly the best place to hide. Although nobody reads newspapers any more.”

Gabriella pulled her tea bag from her mug. Let it swing back and forth like a body dangling from a noose. “I think maybe she just wanted to be loved.”

“Just wanted to be loved? For Pete’s sake!”

“I know that sounds like a lot of mushy psychobabble, Mrs. Sprowls. But I think maybe that was it. On the outside she was confident and classy. Inside, totally a mess.”

I couldn’t stop myself. “Just the opposite of me, you’re saying?”

She looked at me the way Aubrey McGinty used to look at me. With exasperation. “I’m saying that maybe she was one of those excruciatingly insecure people who need to be the center of attention no matter what.”

“And so she did the interview knowing she probably shouldn’t?”

“Yeah.”

“And you did the interview knowing she probably shouldn’t, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Because it was your first story and you didn’t want to blow it?”

“Yeah.”

“And so when you heard she’d been murdered—”

“Yeah.”