Friday, April 1
10:30 a.m.
She walked from table to table examining each of her stories, making note of their placement and any cuts that needed to be made. The front-page story on the completion of Ocean Point Park looked fantastic with its pull-out boxes and accompanying photos.
She had to hand it to Sam, he was a layout machine—a veritable composing-room genius.
“You think he’ll ever cave and go computer?”
Elise glanced up from page five, her hand grazing Tom’s as they reached for the one lone X-Acto blade at the same time. “Oh, sorry. You go first.” She leaned forward against the table, peeking across to the sports section he was painstakingly moving around. “I don’t know if he’ll go to a computer layout. The program is kind of expensive from what I hear, and we all know what we’re doing this way. No downtime for learning, you know?”
The sports reporter shrugged, the left side of his mouth rising along with his nostril. “Yeah, you’re probably right. And I think I catch mistakes better this way.”
“Me too. I just noticed a back-to-back ‘the’ in my zoning meeting story.” She looked back down at her own page, her eyes scanning the rest of the article for any additional typos.
“Here, take this one, I think there’s a backup blade in one of these cabinets.” Tom handed the blade to Elise and started yanking drawers open, his hand rummaging through each one loudly and quickly. “Yup, here it is.”
“Thanks, Tom.” She leaned over the mistake and carefully cut the unnecessary word from the page, repositioning the correct one for better spacing.
“Hey, any more trouble from that Brown kid?” Tom paused with the X-Acto blade in his hand, his gaze meeting hers across the table. “I heard you say something to Sam yesterday about your critique meeting being kind of tense.”
She moved the blade down the article, stopping again in the sixth paragraph to remove an extra s. “It was a mess. We met at Mia’s to read some of our assignments. You could tell he wasn’t happy with my presence, but it didn’t really interfere with the work.”
“Okay, sounds good. So what happened?” Tom smacked his fist on the front page and raised his hands to his face, letting them slide from his forehead to his chin in exasperation. “I’ve looked at this story probably ten times in the past five minutes and it finally dawns on me that I spelled ‘mediate’ wrong—duh!”
“I’ve done that a bunch too. But better to catch it now than when it’s staring back at you from the newsstand at Merv’s, right?” Satisfied that page five was clean, she bypassed page six’s full-page ad and moved on to seven. “Anyway, when our group was leaving, Joni Goodfellow showed up, her henchman—I mean cameraman—in tow.”
Tom walked over to the composing-room computer and sat down. With a click of a few keys the headline program opened and he retyped “mediate” in its correct form. “Goodfellow . . . Goodfellow . . . oh, wait, I know her. She’s the obnoxious chick from channel twenty, right?”
“That’s the one.” Elise read through the article on Chief Maynard’s neighborhood watch program, pleased to see no errors. “She sticks a microphone in Jacob’s face as he’s walking out of the restaurant. Wants to know if Hannah Daltry’s murder is causing issues for his family.”
He snickered, his voice dripping with disgust as he ran the corrected headline through the wax machine. “You mean like the issue she’s raking up by asking that question?”
Tossing the blade into the sill, she walked around the table. “Exactly my point.” She pointed at the sports pages he’d yet to proof. “Want an extra pair of eyes?”
“Absolutely, thanks.” Tom stuck the new headline on top of the old one, declaring his front page free of errors. Again. “I’m going to take a wild guess here, but I’m betting Goodfellow’s question stirred up the guy’s anger with you all over again, no?”
“Yup, that about sums it up.” She pushed a wayward brown curl off her forehead and slipped her feet from her heels. “But I just don’t get why he’s so angry at me. His dad was the one who killed all those people. What did I do?”
“You really don’t know?” Tom straightened up, his tall lean form towering above her.
“No, I don’t.” It was bad enough to know Jacob hated her, but she never took Tom for someone who would project a person’s mistakes onto someone else.
He encased her upper arm with his left hand, tipped her chin upward with his right. “You are a constant reminder of what his dad did. He’s not angry at you. He’s pissed as all hell at his dad. Unfortunately, since the object of his hatred is dead, he’s pushing it onto you—the last one who saw his dad alive. The kid just needs some help.”
She felt the moisture on her eyelashes as she shut them tightly. Tom was right. It made all the sense in the world. But knowing it and fixing it were two very different things.
“Hey, I told you . . . I’m here to help if you need me. Just say the word.” Tom’s voice, low and gruff, cut through her thoughts, forced her eyes to open and focus on the smoldering gray ones peering back at her intently.
She shivered.
Pulling back, she forced her attention onto the table behind her, her eyes not seeing a single word on the page. If Tom was right, how could she ever change Jacob’s anger? And was she imagining it, or was there something in Tom’s eyes she’d never noticed before?
“I’ll be okay, Tom, thanks.” Desperate to diffuse the charged atmosphere in the room, she pointed at his front page. “Um, Tom? You spelled your last name wrong on your top byline.”
“What?” Tom leaned over the page, shaking his head almost immediately. “No, I didn’t.”
“Gotcha.”
He reached across, securing her neck gently in the crook of his arm, his free hand rubbing the top of her head. “Better watch it, sugar, or I’ll sic Dean on you.”
Sugar? Uh-oh.
Carefully extracting herself from the sports reporter’s grip, she moved down the row of tables to the section’s fourth page, anxious to put some distance between them. Maybe teasing wasn’t such a good idea.
“Hey, how do you know so much about people?” She scanned the page, stopping to insert a missing period. “Like what you said about Jacob Brown a minute ago.”
Tom coughed and leaned over his own page, his face noticeably flushed. “I got a minor in psyche. People fascinate me. I just wish someone would step up and help this kid out. Like Father Leahy or a school counselor. Before it’s too late.”
She let his comments roam around in her thoughts, tried parts of them on for size. The Father Leahy comment made sense. Who better to help Jacob channel his anger in the right direction than the senior pastor at St. Theresa’s?
“Think you’re good with the last few pages of your section?”
“Of course. But why? Where you going?” Tom stopped fiddling with his page and looked up, his brows dipping.
She set the blade down and slipped her feet back into her heels, trying desperately to avoid further eye contact with Tom. The disappointment in his face and stance was unmistakable. The source, though, was in question. Was he simply disappointed she couldn’t help with the last three pages? Or was her internal radar pinging for a reason?
“I’m going to give Father Leahy a call. See if maybe he can help.” She headed toward the door and stopped. “Thanks, Tom. For listening. It helped more than you can know.”
“Any time, Elise. Any time.”
She ventured out into the newsroom, her thoughts torn between calling Father Leahy and the vibes she was picking up from Tom. Surely she was crazy. Wasn’t she? They’d been working in the same office for nearly a year and she’d never had any indication the sports reporter’s feelings were anything other than professional. Until today.
Deep in thought, she rounded the column near the center of the room and smacked into Dean coming from the other direction.
“Whoa, chicky, where are you off to in such a blur?” Dean popped a pretzel into his mouth and held up the snack-size bag. “By the way, thanks for the pretzels.”
She rolled her eyes. “Anyone ever taught you about office etiquette?”
He raised the bag toward the ceiling and emptied the remaining contents straight into his mouth. “Office eti-what?”
“Office etiquette. You know, stuff like not rummaging through other people’s drawers and stuff?”
Dean swallowed his mouthful of pretzels and exhaled through closed lips. “Etiquette, schmetiquette. I’d miss out on perfectly good snacks if I listened to that crap. What do you think I am, stupid? Sheesh.”
Shaking her head with mock irritation, she pushed past the photographer and headed toward her desk.
“Wait! Could you maybe think about getting some crackers or something? The pretzels are getting a little boring.”
She turned and cast her best impression of an evil eye in his direction.
He laughed. “Sweetheart, you couldn’t be a shrew if you tried. So save the effort and just rotate the snacks a little, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’ve got work to do.” She dropped into her chair and reached for the phone, retracting her hand as a thought skirted through her mind. “Hey, Dean?”
The wiry twenty-something retraced his steps, stopping at her desk. “You find a Chip Ahoy! or somethin’?”
Elise waved her hand in the air, her mind rewinding to Wednesday evening. “No. But I was wondering how you know Sierra McDermott?”
He crumbled the empty pretzel bag and sent it sailing in the direction of Debbie’s desk. “I don’t. Who is she? Is she hot?”
She swiveled around in her chair, cocked an eyebrow in the photographer’s direction. “Wait. You can commandeer pretzels from my desk without asking, yet you’ll play coy when I ask you a simple question? I see how this works.” She reached across her arm and retrieved a pen from her desktop, tapping it on her leg.
“See how what works? I have no idea who you’re talking about.” Dean blew outward, a strand of blond hair floating upward.
“Oh, please.” She pulled off her left heel and rubbed her ankle, a blister forming where the back strap met her skin. “Do you usually sit so close to women you don’t know? Wait, don’t answer that. I really don’t want to know.”
Crossing his arms across his old, beat-up Grateful Dead T-shirt, he leaned against the pole. “You’re kinda cute when you’re babbling, you know that?”
She held up her hands, palms outward. “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t you dare start too.”
“Too?” Dean’s mouth curved into his trademark devil grin. “Someone sniffing around Mitch’s girl?”
Ugh.
“No! Just answer the question. How do you know Sierra?” She turned her palms inward, rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands as she waited for a response from the King of Rhetoric.
“I don’t know a Sierra. Why do you think I do?” He reached around her body and yanked open her top left drawer. “Any treats in here?”
She smacked his hand off the handle and threw her body against the drawer. “I think you do because you were sitting in Mia’s with her Wednesday night, hunched over a computer . . . which brings me to question number two. Why on earth were you messing with a computer?”
Dean pushed off the pole, his sickly white skin sporting an unusual red hue across his cheeks. “Oh. Her. Please. Not my type. Not even close. I was just having a hard time figuring out how to turn the damn computer on. She stuck around for a few extra minutes to help. Shows how intense the interaction was when I couldn’t tell you if her name was Sierra or Trixy. Though, if it was Trixy, I’d have remembered. Buh-lieve you me.”
Men.
“But wait. Why do you need a computer?” She stood and followed him down the hallway toward his darkroom. “You despise them, remember?”
Dean stepped into his darkroom and pointed at the Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the door. “There are some things I want to be able to see, and apparently a computer makes that easier to access.”
She felt her face begin to warm, the meaning behind his words hitting her between the eyeballs. Grrrreeeeaaaattt . . .
“Don’t ask a question you don’t want me to answer.” Dean pulled his camera bag from his shoulder and stuck it on the table in the center of his small room. “I would’ve thought you’d have learned that by now.”
Nodding, and feeling more than a little foolish, she turned back toward her desk.
“And Elise? That’s Chips. A. Hoy! Blue package.”