I sat at my desk in the newsroom pretending to look busy. Again. Kay Jackson, my editor at the Tuttle Times, had been enormously understanding about my level of distraction in the month since Flick’s death, but I knew her understanding had its limits. I wasn’t the only one grieving. Flick had been a member of the Times family and we all felt his loss, Kay included. Besides, practically speaking, we were a small staff, and with Flick gone, we were down one.
I’d taken an entire week off when Flick died and had been coming in to the newsroom since then to do just the bare minimum—editing, fact-checking, updating stories—things that didn’t require much from me. The rest of the team had taken over the beats I normally covered to give me the time and space to work on Flick’s obituary. It was their way of honoring him and his contributions to our newsroom. But now that the funeral had passed, the obit had run, and Christmas had come and gone, it felt like some unseen line of demarcation had been crossed and I was expected to become a fully functioning member of society again—or at the very least, a fully functioning member of the press.
“Knock, knock,” I said as I hovered at the threshold to Kay’s office.
“Come in,” she said without looking up. Kay was always doing the jobs of at least three people, and this necessitated her dropping all extraneous pleasantries like greetings and eye contact.
I sat in the chair opposite her desk. “I think I’m ready to take on—take back—my usual workload.”
Kay put down her blue editing pencil and looked up at me. She lowered her chin. “You sure?”
I nodded.
“Good.” She paused and then added, “Where are you with the other stuff?”
By “other stuff,” I knew she meant my unofficial investigation into Flick’s so-called accident.
“I’m still in touch with Sheriff Clark, but he says there’s not much more he can do at the moment. The case is still open, and he acknowledges that this doesn’t feel like an accident to him, but without any witnesses or cameras in the area, he says they’ve hit a brick wall. I’ve got a call into a guy at the Department of Transportation who used to be on a forensic crash investigative team in Maryland. I’m hoping to pick his brain about what places with bigger budgets do in these situations.” Flick had the misfortune to be murdered in one of the poorest counties in Virginia, which made finding his killer that much harder.
“Good thinking,” Kay said.
The connection to the guy in the DoT was tenuous at best, a friend of my ex-boyfriend Jay, who also worked for the government. I’d left Hank Jorgensmeyer a rambling message reintroducing myself and asked if he might give me some insight into how he would have handled a case like this back in the day. I was waiting for him to call back.
Kay tapped the blunt end of her pencil on her desk. “And the file?”
Before his death, Flick had entrusted Kay with a tattered, brittle manila folder held together by rubber bands and tenacity. He instructed her to give it to me “in the event something happened to him.” She gave it to me the night of the crash.
“Safe and sound.”
“Do you want to tell me where?”
I shook my head. The file contained notes about what Flick was working on, presumably what got him killed. I figured the fewer people who knew the whereabouts of that file, the better.
“You sure?”
I knew Kay well enough to know this wasn’t a challenge. It was a genuine offer of help. I smiled. “Yes.”
“Okay then,” she said, looking back down at the proof sheet she’d been working on when I walked in. “Talk to Henderson and find out where he is with the bridge-repair story. You can pick it up from here. And Skipper Hazelrigg is supposedly announcing his candidacy for sheriff soon—you might want to track that down. Oh, and Holman has been covering the new botanical poisons installation at the Apothecary Museum for you. You can let him know you’re back, though he might want to keep it.”
“Holman does love that place,” I said with a small laugh. I started to leave, then turned around before walking out. “Thanks for being so understanding, Kay.”
She made some sort of noncommittal sound and kept her eyes down on her work. Someone else might have misinterpreted this as dismissive, but I also knew Kay well enough to know she was terribly embarrassed by any show of emotion, even gratitude. It was one of the qualities she shared with Flick—probably why they worked so well together. The second that similarity struck me I left, lest my misty eyes reveal that I might not be quite as ready to move on as I’d claimed.