Conley walked back inside the silent house. Already, she thought, the scent of disuse and decay had begun to settle like a thin layer of dust. Or maybe that was her. She walked around the kitchen and living and dining rooms, letting her fingers trail across the lemon-scented mahogany, the polished silver candlesticks, and the gilt-framed family portraits.
Upstairs, she sat on the bed in her old room, looking out the window at the treetops. She went to the bookcase in the corner of the room and picked out her childhood favorites—Little Women, because, like Jo, she intended to be a writer one day; her favorite Maud Hart Lovelace Betsy-Tacy books, because Betsy wanted to be a writer too; and Anne of Green Gables, because she’d always loved Anne Shirley’s fierceness and ambition.
There was nothing else she needed from this room now, Conley thought. G’mama had told her that the contents of this beloved family home had just been things—things that could easily be replaced. But these books had been what Anne Shirley would call her “boon companions.”
She tucked the books in an old canvas tote bag and walked down the hall to her father’s room again. This time, after switching on the light, she went inside and sat down on a heavy wooden packing crate. She waited for the familiar tightness in her chest. But it never came. This was just a room now. She felt lighter. Skelly had been right. He’d been right about a lot of things.
Conley called Roger Sistrunk from the phone on her desk.
“About damn time,” he said as soon as he picked up. “You playing hard to get all of a sudden? We’ve all been trying to reach you. Me, Tia, even Kevin. Calling, texting, emailing, but nothing.”
“Sorry. My phone was destroyed in the, uh, incident yesterday. What’s up?”
“Wanted to make sure you’re really okay,” he said, his tone gruff. “That was a hell of a story you filed last night. Really powerful stuff.”
“Thanks. Not an experience I ever want to repeat.”
“Hey,” he said abruptly. “The thing is, we’ve got an opening on the national desk, and before we post it officially, I thought I’d give you first shot.”
“On the national desk? I’ve only ever worked city-side.”
Michael Torpy spun around on his desk chair. The kid had no shame about eavesdropping.
“We know that, but these stories you’ve been writing in that little one-stoplight town, you’ve shown me you’re more than ready.”
She stared pointedly at Michael until he finally turned back around.
“I’ll have you know Silver Bay has three stoplights. When would you want me to start?” she asked.
“Right away. You can pack up today and be back at your old desk here in Atlanta tomorrow.”
“And the pay?”
“Awww,” Roger protested. “Are you gonna try to jack me up for a raise after all we’ve been through together?”
“As a matter of fact…” Conley started to say. Her gaze traveled past Michael and landed on Grayson’s office. The door was open, and she glimpsed her sister, gesturing dramatically. She was talking to someone. Conley half stood and saw that Rowena Meigs was seated on the chair opposite Grayson, with Tuffy perched in her lap.
From her standing position, she saw that Michael was working on the Beacon’s website, adding photos he’d shot earlier in the day of a beauty pageant at the local nursing home and a Little League baseball game.
“Conley!” Lillian yelled from across the other side of the newsroom. “Damn it, Conley, I got two more calls waiting on you. Get yourself a phone, you hear? I don’t have time to be messing with your personal business.”
“Hawkins?” Sistrunk was still talking. “You there?”
“I’m still here, Roger. But on second thought, never mind.”
“Never mind the raise? Okay, if you’re gonna be a prima donna, maybe I can squeeze another fifty bucks a week out of the budget.”
“Never mind the job, Roger,” she said. “I love you for offering it, and I will always appreciate everything you taught me, but I think, for now, I could do more good someplace else.”
“Damn it! You’re taking a job with the network, aren’t you? I knew it. Listen to me, Hawkins. You’d hate TV…”
She walked over to Lillian’s desk and picked up her messages. “A messenger came by while you were on the phone and left a package for you,” Lillian said.
“Where is it?”
“It’s outside. You been pissing off a lot of people in this town lately. I’m not fixing to get blown up by one of them pipe bombs,” Lillian said.
Conley found a manila envelope leaning against the brick planter box by the front door. It felt too light to be a pipe bomb, so she slit the flap open with her thumbnail and shook the contents out. It was a plastic transponder. There was no note, but she didn’t need one.
Rowena sailed past Conley’s desk, slowing only to glare at her before exiting the building.
“What’s up with Rowena?” Conley asked, sitting in the doorway of Grayson’s office. “She shot me some major stink eye out there.”
“She came in mad at me because she finally figured out you’ve been rewriting her column so that it’s actually lucid, and then I went and pissed her off even more when I told her no more dictating to Lillian or handing in typewritten columns. I told her she either learns how to use a computer or she hits the bricks.”
“Dayyyyumm, Gray. All of a sudden, you’re a hard-core badass.”
“Not badass. Just fed up. How did the television shoot go?”
Conley sat on the chair across from the desk. “Okay. But it was weird to be talking about myself on camera.”
“I guess you’d better get used to it,” Grayson said gloomily. “Michael says he’s sure they offered you a job.”
“Michael needs to learn to be a little more discreet with his eavesdropping,” Conley said.
“They did offer you a job, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.”
Grayson shrugged. “Congratulations, I guess.”
“I told her I’d think about it,” Conley said.
“And?”
“After they finished the shoot out front, I walked all over the house. I sat in my old bedroom and picked out a few of my favorite books. And then I walked down the hall to Dad’s room and went inside.”
Grayson looked puzzled. “There’s no furniture or books in there. G’mama cleared it out years ago.”
“I know. There are some old files from the bank, and I guess some of Pops’s files.”
“Are you upset? That we’re probably going to have to demolish the house?”
Conley shook her head. “No. I hadn’t been in Dad’s room since the night he died.”
“Ohhhh.” Gray sighed the word. “I forgot. You found him, right?”
“Yeah.” She looked down at her hands and then back up at her sister. “The thing is, Gray, I never told you. G’mama knew, of course, but I never told anybody, until Skelly. And I didn’t really tell him. He mostly guessed.”
“Told me what?”
“It wasn’t a heart attack, Gray. Dad … killed himself. He took an overdose of pills.”
Grayson nodded. “That makes sense.”
“That’s it?” Conley exclaimed. “You’re not shocked or appalled or, I don’t know, horrified?”
“No. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. It was selfish of me, but at the time, I was maybe a little relieved.”
“Jesus, Gray!”
“He’d been so sad, so lonely, for so long. You were closer to Dad than I was. You were always his baby. By the time he died, Tony and I were just starting our life together, and you were at a new job. I secretly always wondered if maybe he’d finally given up on waiting for Mom to come home, but I guess I really didn’t want to know the truth.”
“And I wished I didn’t know it,” Conley admitted.
“That’s why you hardly ever came home, right?” Gray asked.
Conley nodded. “I’ve dreaded it,” she whispered. “Being in that house, just down the hall from where I found him. And then this stuff with Symmes Robinette happened. I had to go back to that same damn funeral home and even the same church. I swear, Gray, sitting in that pew Saturday, I thought I was going to hyperventilate. Even Michael noticed I was acting weird.”
Grayson walked over and knelt on the floor by her. “Honey, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell me about Dad? I’m your sister. You should have told me.”
“I thought it was my fault. I knew how depressed he was, but I went off and took a job out of town and told myself it would be all right. I’ve felt so guilty. Maybe if I’d been around more, I could have done something, been there for him.”
“No.” Grayson was emphatic. “You couldn’t. No matter how much we loved Dad, we couldn’t save him. Nobody could.”
“How can you know that?”
“How can you not and stay sane? Here’s the truth, Conley. Dad’s gone. It’s okay to grieve for him, but you and I have got to move on. I don’t want to be like G’mama, hanging on to a landline, hoping that someday my daughter will magically call home and ask for forgiveness.”
“How do you do that?” Conley asked. “How am I supposed to move on when I still wake up in the middle of the night, hearing his voice?”
“You don’t do it by running away,” Grayson said.
“I’m not.”
Grayson looked dubious.
“I don’t want to work for the network. At least not full-time. And I don’t want to go back to work for the Atlanta paper either. I’ve done that already.”
“Soooo?”
“I was thinking,” Conley said slowly. “What if we can find a way to make the Beacon solvent again?”
“How would we accomplish that? The last week has been an amazing morale booster for all of us, but less than a hundred new subscribers and a handful of new advertisers aren’t gonna cut it.”
“We’ve gotta look for new ways to do community journalism,” Conley said. “Maybe we look for investors—not to buy us out but to partner with us. There are grants too. I’ve read about several foundations that are funding small-scale investigative journalism projects. And if we can hang on to our boy genius out there, maybe he can help us figure out how to monetize our social media.”
“That all sounds really promising,” Grayson said, “but I don’t want you thinking you have to give up your career to save the Beacon out of some misguided sense of guilt. There’s been enough of that in this family.”
“What about you? You gave up a law career to come home and run this paper, and you’ve sacrificed everything to try to save it. Why are you sticking around?”
“Because I believe in what we’re trying to do? Because this is my home, and I want to make this a better place to someday raise my own family?”
“Does that mean you and Tony are on again?”
Gray looked at her watch. “His plane got in a little while ago. I promised him I’d make sure there was gas for the lawnmower and that I’d be home for dinner tonight—deadline or no deadline.”
“Sounds like a sensible plan,” Conley said. “Speaking of deadlines, guess I’d better get over to the cop shop and pick up the incident reports for this week’s police blotter, huh?”
“It’s already done,” Gray said.
“By whom?”
“Our new police reporter, Lillian King. She’s got a lot more free time now that she doesn’t have to retype Rowena’s column. Why don’t you go on out to the Dunes? I think we can cut you a little slack this once, considering what you went through this weekend. In fact, that’s an order. Go home.”
“Thanks. I’ve got one last loose end to tie up, and then I will.”
She called Skelly from her desk phone.
“Hi.” He sounded surprised to hear from her.
“Hi yourself. I realize this is short notice, but I was wondering if you’d care to have a late dinner with me tonight?”
“I’d love to if I can get my mom’s caregiver to stay late. But that shouldn’t be a problem. What time and where?”
“The Dunes. Can you make it by seven?”
“What can I bring?”
“Anything at all, as long as you’re there by seven.”