A Murder in Helvetica Bold

by Jessa Archer

  At first, my job had been to put the metal sorts back into the little square boxes inside the type cases for each font. The upper case was always reserved for capital letters, which was where we got the terms uppercase and lowercase letters. At the end of the day, my fingertips and nails would be an inky black from handling the sorts. I quickly learned to paint my nails a dark shade to cover the ink that just wouldn’t yield to soap and water. After a few months, Mr. Dealey began teaching me to set the type on the composing stick, one glyph at a time, backward and upside down.

  By my junior year, I was writing stories as well, although I was never confident enough to compose the type on the fly. That same year, he bought the linotype from a weekly paper over near Nashville that closed down. I thought the machine was the most fabulous invention ever after manually setting the type for several years. It cut our work almost in half. That was probably the only reason Mr. Dealey was able to keep the paper going after his wife died and I went off to college.

  He was happy to let me write up pretty much any story I wanted by the time I graduated, but he always wrote the obituaries himself. One of his quirks was his belief that everyone’s obituary should be special. It was the person’s final bow, their last time in the spotlight, and he wanted that paragraph, no matter how brief, to stand out from all the others that came before. He was determined that their last mention in the Thistlewood Star wouldn’t blend in with the rest of the paper. Times New Roman simply wouldn’t do. “Every obituary should have an individual face,” he’d said.

  That’s why the back room is filled with type cases. There are hundreds of them stacked along the walls. Courier, Goudy, Bembo, Baskerville, Copperplate Gothic, Century Schoolbook, News Gothic, Gill Sans, Palatino, Mistral, Cooper Black. The font inventory list goes on for several pages, most with italic and bold variants. A lot of them also have a name and a date penciled in the margin. Bill Peavy 10/3/82 is jotted next to the entry for Courier Italic. Anna Bellamy 12/12/95 is next to Goudy. Each time someone from Thistlewood died, Jim Dealey would choose a new font for the obituary, never using the same typeface twice.

  It was usually easy for me to tell how much Mr. Dealey liked someone from the font he chose for their obituary. If your entry was printed in an ugly font, or one barely distinguishable from the classified ads, he probably thought the world wouldn’t miss you much.

  When Mr. Dealey died, the paper closed. He had a part-time assistant, but no one to put out that last issue, and I didn’t find out about his death until a few days later. His obituary had already been printed in the Maryville paper, in the same font as all of the others. That seemed wrong to me, so I called in a few favors and a separate notice ran two days later in The Nashville News-Journal, my old employer. It was set in the font Joanna, which had been the name of Dealey’s wife. When she’d died during my senior year in high school, he’d composed her obituary in Joanna Bold, with tears streaming down his cheeks. And while every obituary should have an individual face, I thought that Mr. Dealey would appreciate me keeping the two of them in the same font family.

  I hadn’t been sure the typeface collection would still be there when I bought the paper. Metal type sets are occasionally sold to collectors on eBay, and I thought Mr. Dealey’s son, who moved to Atlanta years ago, might have decided to sell them off. But the cases were still there when I purchased the building, and not just the ones I remembered. Mr. Dealey had added to the collection over the years, including a number of modern fonts that he must have special ordered because they were invented long after most newspapers abandoned ancient presses like ours.

  “Well, Stella,” I said aloud as I entered the press room, “I guess we need to find a font for Edith Morton.”

  Stella didn’t answer back, of course, but I felt her looking on approvingly as I thumbed through the font list. This was the first step to getting the Star back on track. I might have to enter the font on the computer for now, but eventually we’d get the press repaired, and I’d be in here setting the type on Blanche, just like the old days, and cranking out the assembled pages on Stella.

  Edith’s death was the first since the paper was reopened. I scanned through the inventory, looking for something that Mr. Dealey hadn’t used. Since I didn’t know Edith well, or really at all, I wanted to keep things fairly simple. Helvetica had been used for an obituary back in the 1980s, but there was no one assigned to Helvetica Bold. I thought it would do nicely.

  Once I wrote Edith’s name and the date next to the font, I went back to my desk in the front office. Four desks had been left behind when the paper closed down, although I didn’t think there had ever been more than three people working here at any given time. I took the desk at the back, which had been mine before I left for college.

  Every day, as I sat behind the other three desks working on my aging Mac notebook, I couldn’t help but think how sad the office looked. Exposed brick, which once upon a time might have been fashionable by Thistlewood standards, now looked cold and dull. The large plate-glass windows that faced Main Street needed a good washing. There were a million little things, and some quite big things, that I needed to do.

  But first I needed to get the story of Edith’s death written down to be sure I didn’t forget any details. Eventually I’d have to talk to Blevins again to verify cause of death, and I’d need to contact her son, Clarence, about the obituary, but first things first.

  I had barely settled myself behind the desk when the little bell above the door announced Ed Shelton’s arrival. He moved slowly toward the back of the building, favoring the right hip that had been shattered in the accident. It was a blue-eyed miracle that he survived at all, much less managed to walk again.

  “Heard you were at Edith Morton’s this morning,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Bad news travels fast, huh?”

  “In a town this small? You bet.”

  Ed pulled a wooden chair up to my desk and collapsed into it, giving a little sigh of relief as his weight transferred off his bad hip.

  “Poor Clarence.” Ed’s voice had a deep, almost rumbly quality that I’d liked from the moment we met. “His mom was about all he had. Well, aside from…”

  “Elaine?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Well, look at you. Diving right into the gossip pool.”

  “Wren has her finger on the pulse of the town.” I grinned, enjoying my little joke.

  “Hey, Thistlewood isn’t dead yet,” he said. “You know, you’d probably sell a lot more papers if you added a gossip column.”

  Sadly, Ed was right, but I wasn’t inclined to toss my journalistic standards into the rubbish heap so soon.

  “Getting back to Clarence,” I said. “I know he took care of his mom, but…did he have a job?”

  “Not since he moved back. He lived in Chattanooga for a while. Not sure what he did there.”

  “Do you know anything about their relationship? Not him and Elaine,” I clarified. “With Edith.”

  “She was his mom. What more is there to know?”

  “I’m not sure. Just something Wren said earlier. Something about Edith being hard to live with.”

  “Well, Wren would probably have a better idea than most, since they’re neighbors. She and Clarence seemed to get along well enough to me. But you never know what people’s lives are like behind closed doors. Good thing, too. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need mystery writers, and I’d be spending my days watching Judge Judy or reruns of The Rockford Files.”

  “True.”

  After Ed retired, he’d started writing again. It was something he said he’d enjoyed when he was younger, but he’d never really had the time to pursue it during his years as a small-town deputy and even less once he became sheriff. He wrote police procedurals and mysteries, although he claimed there was some poetry and a teenaged attempt at a fantasy novel stashed away in a drawer. He’d published a few short stories, and then his first book was picked up by a small publisher, Whodunit Press, last year. They modeled thei
r novels after those old cold-case crime offerings of the 1970s. The covers were wonderfully nostalgic—scantily clad women holding firearms in various poses. Pulp fiction at its finest. In fact, it was at a signing for his first book, Double Whammy, at the local library that Ed and I first got to talking.

  “Speaking of,” I said. “How’s the new book going?”

  He frowned. “Anyone that tells you it gets easier is either lying or a complete moron.”

  “That bad?”

  He settled back in his chair. “It’ll work itself out. The people down in Atlanta seem to think so anyway. They’re very happy with the second book. My editor says it’s my best yet, although since it’s my sophomore effort, I guess that’s not saying too much.”

  I gave him a perturbed look. “So, when do I get to read it? I don’t even know the title yet.”

  He smiled, crinkling up the corners of his eyes. That’s another thing I like about Ed—his smiles always seem genuine. “It should be back from the copyedit in a week or so. I’ll let you read it then, after most of my typos are cleaned up and it’s presentable. I don’t want to jinx anything.”

  Ed looked out the window, which reminded me again that it really needed to be cleaned. He had a pensive look on his face, like he always did when he was thinking something through. “So, you’re thinking maybe it wasn’t an accident?”

  “I didn’t actually say that.”

  “Why else would you be asking about her relationship with Clarence? Or saying that Wren thinks maybe she was hard to live with? What did you see at Edith’s house that made you suspicious?”

  I told him about the broken cup at the top of the stairs. “Probably just an overactive imagination, though.”

  “Maybe. But Edith was in good health for her age. I saw her down at the diner just last week talking to Patsy’s mom. Let’s just say I’m pretty sure she’d have beaten me in a footrace. Did you say anything to Blevins?”

  “No,” I said. “I kind of skipped the part about going up the stairs to check it out. He seemed a little annoyed that I went in the house at all. But I’m sure he’ll find it on his own.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. Blevins couldn’t find his butt with two free hands and a road map.”

  The bell above the door jingled again, and we both turned to look. It was Cassie. She gave us a sassy grin.

  “Why, Mr. Shelton!” she said as she pulled up a chair from one of the other desks. “What brings you into the lonely offices of the Thistlewood Star?”

  Ed smiled back at her. “Nothing lonely about this building. I quite like it, in fact.”

  She didn’t back down. “Uh-huh.”

  “Actually,” he said, “now that you mention it, I dropped by to ask your mother if she’d like to join me for dinner tonight.”

  “She’d love to,” Cassie replied. “Wouldn’t you, Mom?”

  I glanced back and forth between the two of them. Why did I feel like they were ganging up on me?

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”

  Ed looked very proud of himself. “Well, it’s settled, then. I’ll pick you up around seven?” He framed it as a question, not as a demand, and that was another thing I liked about him.

  Cassie wagged her eyebrows up and down. “He’s picking you up,” she echoed. “Around seven.”

  “Yes. I was sitting right here, so I actually heard that part. But thanks for translating.”

  Ed laughed and then added, “Would you like to join us, Cassie? You’re more than welcome.”

  I felt something inside my heart warm. While I know you should never compare one man to another, it was hard not to with Ed. He was just about everything Joe wasn’t.

  “Thanks, Mr. Shelton,” Cassie replied, “but I was planning to catch up on Netflix.”

  “Ed,” he told her. “Call me Ed. And I’ll see you at seven.” He nodded toward me and then made his exit.

  My daughter barely waited for the front door to close before rounding back on me. “Mom! What the heck?”

  “Cassie, he’s just a friend. Seriously.”

  “You know,” she said, “it’s not a big deal that you’re dating. In fact, I totally approve.”

  “That’s nice to know, I guess?”

  “In fact, I think it’s high time you got back in the saddle.” She pushed the wheeled chair back over to its desk and headed for the door.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “I still haven’t made it to the library,” she said.

  “Well, just to give a heads-up, some people may be a little upset. Thistlewood is a small town, and we’ve had a death this afternoon.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, pausing at the front counter. “Is it someone you knew well?”

  “Not really, but I was at Wren’s when the body was found next door.”

  She shuddered. “A funeral home and a dead body. Very glad that I didn’t take you up on that lunch offer.”

  “So am I. But you’re going to laugh at what Wren gave me.” I opened the desk drawer and put on the cap.

  “That is seriously cool,” she said.

  I’d expected snort-laughs, so I gave her a skeptical look, bracing for the punch. But instead, she came over and inspected it.

  “It suits you,” she said, echoing Wren’s assessment. “But you are not wearing it on your date tonight. And speaking of, I’m going to see if they have a copy of Ed Shelton’s book while I’m at the library. It’s not really my genre, but I’m interested now that he’s, you know, dating my mom.”

  “You’re going to keep teasing me, aren’t you?”

  She nodded, grinning widely. “Oh yes.”

  “I have a copy of Ed’s book at home.”

  Cassie reached the door. “Sure,” she said, “but that’s your special copy.”

  “Special?”

  “Yep.” She stepped out into the sunlight, which danced playfully across the purple highlights in her hair. “Signed by the author and everything. I bet it even says Love, Ed.”

  ✰ Chapter Five ✰

  I was actually getting ready for a date. The thought sent my mind racing around in circles. Joe hadn’t really been the romantic type, so we never did the whole date-night thing that some married couples do. It had been well over a quarter century since I’d stood before a mirror prepping for a date.

  At first, I tried telling myself that dinner with Ed wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. We had shared meals before, even grabbed dinner at Pat’s together on a few occasions when he stopped by close to closing time. I’d met him at his place when he hosted poker games. He’d never actually asked me out, though. Never picked me up. And something in his voice back at the paper had been different.

  A date. At fifty.

  Well, why not? I hadn’t exactly planned on this, but Cassie was right. It was time to get back in the saddle. The end with Joe had come without warning. I was stunned to say the least. But I hadn’t been devastated, and as I’d sat there at the kitchen table and listened to all his reasons why, that fact told me more than anything Joe was saying. After nearly thirty years, I should have been devastated, right? But I knew there was some truth in what he was saying. We had grown apart. And Joe had never been exactly easy to live with. I had put up with a lot, mostly for Cassie’s sake.

  Over the next few days, I had cried a few times, but there was only once when it hit me hard. I’d called Wren and told her I was going to talk to Joe that night, beg him to go to a counselor with me. She’d asked if I still loved him and I said of course, but as the words left my mouth, I’d realized they weren’t entirely true. I just didn’t want to be alone. And I didn’t want Cassie feeling responsible for keeping me company. She had her own life. Wren convinced me that what I really needed was to get out of Nashville. Make a fresh start. By the end of the next day, I was packed. I’d taken what I could fit into my Jeep and left the rest for Joe to deal with.

  There was light knock at my bedroom door, and then Cassie stepped in. She cocked her head to
one side and met my eyes in the mirror. “Well, don’t you look gorgeous?”

  Gorgeous might be pushing it, but I did look pretty darn good. I was wearing dressy jeans I’d bought a few years back but never worn. Cassie had loaned me the sweater—a black, shimmery thing that clung to my curves more closely than anything in my own closet. Makeup, earrings, even a quick pass with the curling iron to give my unruly hair a hint of order. The woman in the mirror was still me, just with a bit more polish.

  “I feel like I’m playing dress-up. But I do like the sweater.”

  “It’s perfect. We need to take you shopping, though. Somewhere other than the Bargain Closet.”

  I grimaced, and we both laughed. It’s no secret that I hate shopping with a purple passion.

  She glanced down at the book in her hand, a slim volume with the title Double Whammy in a blocky font across the top and Ed Shelton in smaller letters across the bottom. “This ain’t half bad,” she said, thumbing absently through the pages. “Even if it’s not the kind of book I usually go for.”

  I wasn’t surprised, since her reading habits generally tended toward Dean Koontz. “Could use a few more government conspiracies and alien abductions, though?”

  “An extraterrestrial subplot wouldn’t hurt, but I’m definitely enjoying it. And I can also see similarities to Thistlewood in his story.”

  “The racist sheriff?”

  Cassie wrinkled her nose. “I was thinking more the description of the diner. And the reporter he’s crushing on.”