by Terri Kraus
Franklin was that sort of town, and The Derrick was that sort of paper.
Cameron took over the desk that had been vacated by Sam Marshall. He had covered city, county, and township government for a dozen years. He’d surprised everyone by taking the editor’s job on a small daily in Bemidji, Minnesota. His duties had been divided among the half dozen staffers. Cameron was assigned all township meetings—a task she found so stultifyingly boring that she wondered how the departed Mr. Marshall had maintained his sanity for so long.
Cameron walked in and nodded to Clara, the gray-haired, very permanent receptionist and customer representative. Her neck seemed to be frozen in a crick—most likely from cradling the phone between her shoulder and cheek for so long. She had turned down innumerable offers of a headset, though, claiming such a contraption would make her look foolish.
She pointed to the phone, arched her eyebrows, and made a jabbering gesture with her right hand. She was obviously talking to one of her friends—something she did often. Cameron smiled and mouthed the words, “Is Paige here?”
Clara turned and pointed to the publisher’s office. The door was closed. Clara mimed someone drinking, then wobbled on her chair and laughed silently. Cameron dismissed her with a happy wave of her hand.
At her desk, Cameron tore out all the sheets from her stenographer’s notebook and cut off the frayed edges. It was one of her personal affectations. She used a lot of stenographer’s pads in the process. She kept one drawer in her desk filled with fresh, blank pads.
When on a story, as she asked questions and took notes, she wrote the answers and quotes on different pages, categorizing them into broad subjects, flipping back and forth as she did. That way, when she began to write her story, she would simply arrange the pages in the proper order. She was quick and organized. Her system produced a well-thought-out story with a logical progression to it.
She adjusted her blouse, buttoning one of the open buttons, and rolled up the sleeves. She tapped her password on her keyboard and waited for the computer to allow her access. As it whirred softly, she stared out the wide windows that faced Fountain Park and the theater. She rolled her head slowly from side to side, her neck making little pops, as she thought about her lunch.
His eyes are gray.
With a crackle, the computer program opened, and Cameron refocused her thoughts. She blinked, then began to tap out the Carter Mansion story, stopping every few minutes to shuffle and reshuffle her notes.
It came together with ease. She had no real research to do to make the facts work. She already had a fair amount of history concerning the Carter Mansion, and she had lots of pictures. The crew had provided some funny quotes and Ethan had given her some insightful remarks. While the story wasn’t pure human interest, she found it easy to compose—and she was very interested in the subject matter.
Ethan hurried up to the third floor and was barraged by a chorus of silent stares—inquisitive and, he thought, reproaching. No one spoke, however.
“It was just a lunch, okay?”
The entire crew seemed to shrug in unison, and, after a moment, the shrill shriek of a circular saw slicing into a two-by-four broke the silence.
Mrs. Moretti had faxed a two-page, handwritten missive to Ethan that he had tacked to a bare stud in the hallway. She wrote much like she talked. Ethan could almost see her hands waving in the air as he read her latest directive.
Dear Mr. Willis,
My, that sounds formal, doesn’t it? Ethan. I can call you Ethan, right?
Ethan … I want you to start on the staircase to the ballroom this week. The architect said that the drawings had been sent via overnight FedEx to you about this. I know you think it takes up too much space, but when I have a formal ball there, how do you think all the elegant ladies are going to make the climb in their hoop skirts if the staircase is too narrow?
Ethan, I’m just kidding. But we need that staircase as drawn. I know it’s bigger than you said we need, but that’s the way I want it.
You should be glad I’m not putting in an elevator! My family tried to convince me of that. I said no. See, you’re already rubbing off on me.
I need to think about the simpler door trim for the third floor that we talked about when I was there last. It may not be the most Victorian of selections, but I think it’s what I like the best. You said that means the trim around every door in the house will have to be replaced. Well, is there a rule written down somewhere that says it all has to match? I don’t know if that’s necessary, but I need to think it over.
I’ll be in town at the end of next week. As long as you’re still doing demolition or building the walls we agreed on, we’ll be fine.
But no more than that. You know how fussy I can be.
When I come the next time, I’ll bring calzone and cannoli for everyone.
Thanks—
CeCe
The crew had more than enough work in demolition alone to keep them busy for days. The trim decision, Ethan knew, was a bit premature. He still had some time to try to make CeCe see the error of her ways.
She’ll have to decide on trim well before all the drywall is installed if it’s going to be custom. But Mrs. Moretti doesn’t seem to be in the mood for custom. That would be a big mistake, Ethan thought as he began measuring the risers for the oversized stairway to the ballroom that was no longer a ballroom. This is going to be a long project.
An hour into work on her story, Cameron saw the door of the publisher’s office open and Paige Drake slip out, closing the door firmly behind her. She saw Cameron and rolled her eyes. Cameron stifled a laugh.
“The story on the Old Carter Mansion?” Paige asked.
Cameron nodded. “I’m nearly done. Bart said he had scads of great pictures. Maybe we can use it on Sunday.”
“Maybe. I hate to waste such a good piece in the summer when nobody seems to read anything.”
Cameron leaned back and locked her hands behind her head. “I can make this a two- or three-part story if you’d prefer. Do some on the history. Profile the current owner. Do a before-and-after sort of thing.”
Paige gave a disappointed look. “It’ll be Christmas before they’re done. You can do an ‘after’ article once the first installment runs. Tell Bart to save a bunch of photos. Can you have the first one done for the Sunday edition?”
Cameron nodded, then pulled out a page of her notes. On the top she had written Ethan Willis/Profile. She had not written a single word on that page.
She looked over to the editor. “What do you know about Ethan Willis? He didn’t give me much personal background.”
The phone in Paige’s office began to ring.
“Finish the story. Then come to my office. I may have an old file on him.”
Cameron thought it odd for Paige to have kept a file on a contractor, but she didn’t want to mention it … yet. She shrugged and turned back to her keyboard and screen and began to finish the last dozen paragraphs to the article.
“You have a file on Ethan Willis?” Cameron asked as she tapped at the doorframe of Paige’s office.
“I do. I think I do. I should have. At least I had one,” Paige replied and spun on her chair to face the bank of black file cabinets that lined the rear wall of her office. She opened one drawer and shuffled through the folders. Pages of newsprint peeked over the tops of the folders. Papers lay on top of the folders. Paige brushed them aside. A few clippings fluttered to the floor.
“This may take awhile. Have a seat,” Paige growled toward the files without turning around.
Cameron sat in the creased leather chair in the corner and stretched. The Carter Mansion story had come quickly, and Cameron liked how it sounded—all except for any hint of a background on Ethan Willis.
She slouched in the chair and watched Paige edge along the cabinets, openi
ng one, closing it, opening another. She appeared to have no true system for retrieving information. Every so often, Paige would snort and slam a drawer to open another.
The office was what an editor’s office should look like, Cameron thought. Stacks of papers, letters overflowing an in-box, a real typewriter on the desk, clippings from twenty years ago in frames on the wall, pictures of Paige with an assortment of state officials and even two presidents.
It’s perfect.
Even though Paige claimed to have quit smoking five years earlier, there was still a lingering scent of tobacco faintly smoldering just below the surface.
“The typewriter’s lousy with it,” Paige had snarled one day after Cameron had asked who was smoking in the offices.
On the front of Paige’s gunmetal gray desk, a HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS bumper sticker was placed at a slightly askew angle. Cameron wished she could straighten it. She had this same urge every time she entered the office. On the desk stood a small wood crucifix. On the wall behind her hung an ornate certificate from St. Mark’s Church, naming Paige Drake as the Volunteer of the Year from three years ago.
Cameron heard Paige growl again. She held her giggle.
“I should fire somebody for screwing up my files like this.”
Cameron would have replied that Paige was the only person authorized to open the files, but she held her tongue.
“Good heavens,” Paige snarled. “Here it is. Filed under C—probably for Construction. Why would anyone put it there?”
She spun around and faced Cameron.
Paige, at nearly sixty, showed her age with enthusiasm. She was a big woman, full-figured, with a great crown of white hair that seldom saw the inside of a beauty shop. She combed it back in the morning and let nature take its course for the rest of the day. Her smile was energetic and expansive, but so was her acidic tongue.
It hadn’t taken too long for Cameron to learn the details of her employer’s life.
Clara, the receptionist and office gossip, had entertained Cameron over a long lunch her first week on the job. Clara had been a fixture at the paper for decades and knew amazing details about the personal lives of everyone on the paper—as well as just about everyone in town.
“Paige outlived her first two husbands,” Clara whispered to Cameron that day. “Hard living takes its toll. She just had more stamina than the both of them.”
Paige’s grandfather had founded the newspaper, and her eighty-year-old uncle was now the top name on the paper’s masthead as publisher. Paige was the only child in any of the Drake family with an interest in journalism.
Cameron had asked Clara during their first lunch for hints as to the best way to get along with the paper’s editor. “I have to admit that she scared me a little during my interview. She was kind of cantankerous,” she had told the older woman.
“You don’t have to worry none,” Clara had explained. “She used to be a real pill. But five … maybe six years ago now, after her second husband passed on … well, she went and found religion. She came to the office with that cross and a Bible and a fish decal on her car and, land sakes, she was just a different person. She could be as gruff as a nanny goat in spring, but you could tell that it was all bluster and that wasn’t who she really was anymore. The whole newsroom saw it. The Derrick became a much better place to work.”
Cameron nodded. She almost understood. Cameron’s aunt—her mother’s “difficult” sister—had made a similar transformation when Cameron was in high school. Her uncle had suffered a heart attack, and her aunt had started going to church five times a week until his health improved. She declared it a miracle and started carrying and quoting the Bible. It had not made sense to Cameron. Her mother would simply nod and say, “Everyone needs some religion in their life.” But her aunt was a lot easier to live with after that.
Cameron’s recollection ended as Paige flipped the folder closed.
“Not much here. I thought there was more,” Paige said.
“What is it? I could use a little more background.”
Paige glanced at the clippings. “Nothing about him personally. Most of it is about his wife.”
Cameron nodded. “I’d heard that his wife had passed away. How long ago was it?”
A nearly perturbed look crossed Paige’s face. “Passed away? I don’t call it ‘passed away,’” she snapped.
Taken aback by Paige’s harsh reply, Cameron stuttered, “But … well … I mean … I don’t know. Should I say ‘died’ instead?”
Paige snorted. “No, you shouldn’t. She didn’t just die. She was murdered.”
To have said Cameron was shocked would have been an understatement. As a reporter and a self-confessed news nerd, she was well aware that people died in all manner of untimely fashions and in all manner of accidental ways. But she had never known anyone who had been touched by the act of murder. It just didn’t seem real, that’s all, to know someone who had lost a loved one through an act of such violence.
And as she thought of the implications of that act, the act of murder, there was the memory of another incident, an accident, when she was much, much younger. Its terrifying images made yet another attempt to breach her steady defenses and force their way into her consciousness. Once again she did her best to push them—all of them, and that day … all of those days—out of her consciousness and far, far away, where she kept them locked, dark and secret. She could not have them intrude on her here, not in Franklin. The distance between here and there, between Franklin and home, was perhaps the most important unacknowledged reason she had left Philadelphia—and friends and family—to find a place where the memories would not bother her anymore.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts and stammered a reply to Paige. The editor’s phone rang as she did.
“It’s okay,” Paige said with her hand on the receiver. “You didn’t know.”
She handed the file to Cameron, who backed out of the office feeling shame, though she had no real reason to be ashamed. After all, what Paige said was true. She hadn’t known the particulars. If she had, she wondered, would she have treated Ethan any differently during the interview?
She felt fairly certain she would have—but did not know how, exactly.
The file was thin. It consisted of only three clippings.
The first one was a very brief report—probably added just as the paper was going to press that day—stating in two paragraphs that a local woman, Lynne Elizabeth Willis, had been killed in Erie, Pennsylvania. It listed her address and age. It did not indicate how she had died.
The second was nearly as brief, but it contained most of the pertinent information.
Lynne Willis, age twenty-nine, wife of Ethan Willis, of the Willis Construction Company. She had been shot in her car. Local authorities, the report said, were still trying to determine if the incident had been a random shooting, an attempted carjacking, or a robbery attempt.
The third clipping was her obituary.
Cameron paused as she read it. She knew Ethan had a son, of course, but did not realize until she read it that Chase was only five … or maybe six … when his mother had … passed on. She carefully placed the clippings back into the folder and laid it on her desk.
She looked at her watch. It was 7:30. She peered over at Paige’s office. Paige was chatting away with great animation, her feet up on her desk, gesturing at the ceiling.
Cameron glanced at her story again. She knew it didn’t require any additional background information on Mr. Willis. If Paige was inclined to want more, she could always ask Clara in the morning. Or she could talk to Ralph at the chamber of commerce. Ralph, a short, oily man with the worst toupee she had ever seen, had asked her out when she’d first arrived in Franklin. So kind was her refusal that he still asked her out on occasion. She had yet to say yes.
Cameron wa
ved good-bye. Paige waved back.
The air was warm with the hint of a breeze from the river as Cameron walked out of the office. Her car was parked just out front, but she decided not to drive it home. Her apartment over the Franklin Club was only a few blocks away. She began walking and hoped that it would not rain tomorrow morning.
On a sunny morning three days later, Cameron rolled down the windows in her car, opened the sunroof, turned up the radio, and headed north along Route 322, heading toward Erie. By a curious serendipity, Penny McElroy, a classmate of hers from the University of Pennsylvania, had married the managing editor of the Erie Times Standard. To be honest, Cameron had never much liked Penny but called her anyway and asked if she might ask her husband a favor.
All it would cost her was taking Penny to lunch. Afterward she would have access to the archives of the Erie Times and a promise from Penny’s husband to introduce her to anyone who might have any additional information on the murder of Lynne Willis.
Penny did not ask why Cameron needed the information, and neither did Cameron volunteer any reason.
Lunch was pleasant enough, Cameron realized, and it was amusing to keep up with the news of her old friends. She had never been much of a letter writer, but Penny had been. For two hours, Penny told tales of other classmates’ marriages and hires and fires (“Wow!”) and divorces (“So soon?”) and even a death due to a skiing accident in Switzerland.