RESERVED FOR EDITOR. AFTER ONLY A WEEK ON THE job, it still gave me a thrill to park in front of the sign. Granted, I'd only taken the job as editor of the Lickin Creek Chronicle on a temporary basis to help out P. J. Mullins while she recovered from major surgery; granted, I didn't have the foggiest idea of how to run a small-town weekly newspaper; and granted, the paper only had two full-time employees, including me, plus a few freelance writers, and a delivery staff all under the age of twelve. None of that mattered; for the present I was The Editor for whom the space was reserved, and that was a necessary ego boost for me, Tori Miracle, recovering journalist and mid-list author.
I couldn't find the key to the back door, even though I was sure I had dropped it in my purse last night when I left. But that was okay; I preferred using the front entrance. Maybe someone I knew would see me-the editor-going in. With them of my sleeve, I wiped a smudge off the little brass plaque on the front door that said the building had been constructed in 1846. Last week, as my first official duty, I'd polished it with Brasso until it gleamed. Inside, the little waiting room stretched the entire width of the building, almost twelve feet. The furniture was red vinyl with chrome arms, dating from the forties, two chairs and a couch, and an imitation-maple coffee table that held an empty ashtray and a pink plastic vase full of dusty plastic daisies.
“Morning,” I called out as I hung my blue linen blazer on a hook behind the door.
Cassie Kriner came out of the back office. “Good morning, Tori. Can you believe this weather?”
“Is it unusual?” I asked.
“Sorry, keep forgetting you aren't local. Yes, it's very unusual for this late in October. Almost like summer.”
In the office we shared, she handed me a mug of coffee. I took one sip to be polite and put it down on the edge of my rolltop desk. As always, it was dreadful, but I hadn't quite worked up the courage to tell her so.
“You had a phone call this morning. From a Dr. Washabaugh. She wants you to call her back.”
“Thanks, I will.”
“Nothing wrong, I hope?”
“Of course not. She's probably just calling to tell me I'm fine.” I smiled reassuringly, but inside I was feeling a little alarm. Would a doctor really bother to call if the tests were all okay?
“She said to call her back, Tori.”
“There's no urgency.”
I hoped I sounded less concerned than I felt. Last week, at the urging, no, nagging, of my friend Maggie Roy, the town librarian, I'd gone for my first checkup in about five years. Pap smear, mammogram, the whole nine yards. Dr. Washabaugh had said she'd call me with the test results. Or had she said she'd call me if the test results were positive? Or did she say negative? Is positive good or bad? I couldn't quite recall what she'd said.
Cassie perched on the edge of our worktable and drank her coffee as if she really enjoyed it. Today she wore a beige cashmere suit that probably cost more than I had earned in royalties from my ill-fated book, The Mark Twain Horror House. At the V of her rust-colored blouse was an amber necklace that looked antique and expensive, and her silver-gray hair was pulled back into an elegant Grace Kelly-style French twist. She always managed to look like a million bucks, I thought, which was a lot less, P. J. had told me, than what Cas-sie's husband had left her when he suffocated to death in a silo a few years ago.
In comparison, I knew I looked all wrong in my favorite navy blue slacks and red-and-white-striped Liz Claiborne T-shirt. When I dressed this morning, I thought it was a perfect outfit for the warm weather, but it was autumn, despite the temperature, and I now realized I had committed a seasonal faux pas. Even worse, the pleats on my pants were making me feel fatter by the minute, and the contrast between my light-colored T-shirt and my dark slacks cut me in half and made me look even shorter than five one. Why hadn't I seen that before I left the house?
The regular Friday morning routine, I'd learned last week, was to check the paper for obvious errors and to make sure all the regular features were in place. I took the front section, Cassie took the middle, and we began to read through the articles. It all seemed to be there, the things our readers expected each week: church schedules, real estate transfers, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, comics, high school sports, and a single column of national and world news. The extension service's column was extra long this week, full of helpful tips about fertilizers, apple storage, and the need to turn over one's mulch on a regular basis to prevent fires.
The police blotter was very short, for which I was grateful. The worst crimes Lickin Creek had experienced during the past week were the theft of some plastic flowers from a cemetery plot and some rolls of toilet paper tossed into the trees on the square during the high school's Homecoming Week. It looked like life had returned to normal after Percy Montrose's poisoning death during the Apple Butter Festival a few weeks ago. Despite my role in finding his killer, I knew many locals had added the closing of the medical clinic to the list of things they blamed me for, starting with the burning down of the Historical Society last summer.
After we'd finished our individual sections, we spread the classified section out on the table so we could check it together. The classified ads were of major importance-without them, the paper would fold. We'd found only a few errors before the bell over the front door tinkled, indicating somebody had entered.
“Come in,” I called. “We're in the back room.”
A young woman appeared, and my first thought on seeing her was she had to be about eleven months pregnant. The visitor's chair echoed her groan as she lowered herself into it.
“Only six weeks to go,” she said with a weary sigh.
It flashed through my mind that she must be expecting quadruplets at the very least to be as big as this at seven and a half months.
“I'm Janet Margolies, vice president in charge of marketing and public relations for the college.”
By college, I knew she meant the Lickin Creek College for Women, the only one in town.
“Nice to meet you, Janet. I'm Tori Miracle and this is
Cassie Kriner. How can we help you?” I asked as I pointed out a typo to Cassie.
“Have you heard about the Civil War Reenactment we have scheduled for Parents’ Weekend?”
I shook my head.
“That's the problem. Nobody else has, either. We need some publicity, and we need it fast.”
“If you want to buy an ad, we still have time to get it into tomorrow's paper,” I suggested.
She grimaced. “That's the second problem. President Godlove thought it would be great to do something different this year, something that would pull in townspeople and maybe even some tourists. Trouble is, I don't have any money in the PR budget to promote it.”
I sensed she was preparing to ask a big, big favor and waited to hear what came next.
“I was hoping you could give us some free publicity.” She smiled hopefully. “Please don't say no,” she said as I began to shake my head. “Maybe we can work something out, something that would be beneficial to both of us.”
I ignored Cassie's groan. “Like what?”
“I've got an article all prepared. If you do a big feature about the reenactment this week and next and scatter some ads throughout the paper, we could… we can…” Her voice faded away as she tried desperately to come up with an idea.
“How about listing the Chronicle as the cosponsor of the event?” I asked. “I'd like to get involved in community work.”
“Cosponsor? I'm not sure President Godlove would approve.”
I stood up and extended my hand. “Well, good-bye then. Maybe you'll have better luck with the other paper in town.” The only “other paper” was the weekly shopper, and she knew it.
“Deal,” she said, quickly reaching up and shaking my hand. I suddenly realized she had cleverly manipulated me into doing exactly what she wanted.
She opened her briefcase and pulled out a folder. “Here's the article I mentioned and some camera-ready ads.”
“You've certainly made it easy for us,” I said. Cassie was standing behind Janet's chair, glaring daggers at me.
“Can you attend a planning meeting on Monday?” she asked. “I'll introduce you to the college president and some of the staff.”
“I'll do my best.”
After she left, Cassie smacked herself on the forehead and looked as if she wanted to smack me. “What on earth were you thinking?” she asked. “We don't have the resources to cosponsor anything.”
“You heard her-it won't cost the paper anything, and we'll get a lot of good publicity for being so community-oriented.”
“P. J. never did anything like this,” Cassie said doubtfully. “I sure hope it doesn't backfire on us.”
“Don't worry about it, Cassie. It's a win-win proposition. How could anything possibly go wrong?”
Friday was our short day. After we plunked the article about the reenactment on the front page, put the camera-ready ads on subsequent pages, and finished the proofing, the paper was ready for Cassie to take to the printer in the next town, twelve miles away. It would never win me a Pulitzer, but I found the work very satisfying.
We left the office together. “What're your plans for the afternoon?” Cassie asked as she put on her sunglasses.
“It's moving day,” I reminded her. This was the day I was to leave the Gochenauer home, where I'd been living for several weeks with Garnet and his sister, Greta Carbaugh, to take up residence as a house-sitter for a college professor who was going to England for a year's sabbatical.
It's funny how things never seem to work out the way I plan. When I accepted the temporary position at the Chronicle to give P. J. time to recover from her lung surgery, I'd done so thinking it would give me time to get to know Garnet Gochenauer better, time to decide if being the wife of a small-town police chief was really the life for me. Ironically, he, not knowing my plans, had accepted a job as a police advisor in Costa Rica and was due to leave this weekend for his training in Washington, D.C. I tried over and over to convince myself that this was okay, that I could use the time alone to finish writing my second novel. Besides, I'd sublet my little apartment in Hell's Kitchen for six months, and I really had no place else to go.
“Good luck with it. See you Monday.” Cassie walked smoothly away on high heels that would have crippled anybody else.
Garnet's blue monster truck was parked under the porte cochere in front of his house, already loaded with my two suitcases, a box of paperback mystery novels I'd picked up for a song at a yard sale, three bags of kitty litter, two 20-pound sacks of Tasty Tabby Treats, various sizes of feeding dishes and water bowls, and two litter boxes. I had a feeling Garnet wasn't sorry to see those last two items go.
I stepped inside, into the dim foyer, where the walls were red, the Oriental carpet on the floor was blue, and the ceiling was paneled with dark brown mahogany. When I flipped the light switch, the hall came ablaze with light from the priceless Tiffany lamp that hung from the mahogany ceiling. In my opinion, the place would look a lot better covered with a coat of antique-white enamel. My two cat-carriers sat side by side next to the door. Noel sat in one, glaring at me with her round gold eyes wide open. The other carrier was open.
I walked into the front living room, where I discovered a body lying facedown on the floor.
The body's head was under the Victorian sofa. What was visible was a crinkled broomstick skirt, a silver concho belt, and a pair of very large feet, clad in Earth shoes. “Hi, Greta,” I said. “What are you doing?”
From under the couch came a mumbled reply. “Trying to get this stupid fat cat out so I can put him in the carrier. Of all the stubborn…”
From my purse I pulled an old prescription medicine container in which I always carried some Tasty Tabby Treats for emergencies like this. “I'll get him, Greta.”
Garnet's sister rolled over and sat up. Her long gray hair was full of dust bunnies. Greta was always too busy saving the whales, the rain forests, and the Chesapeake Bay to worry about something as mundane as housecleaning. She removed a fuzzball from her face and said, “Be my guest.”
Fred always responded to the word treat even when he pretended not to recognize his own name. The poor baby's life was ruled by his stomach. I pulled him onto my lap and plucked lint off his orange and white fur.
Greta sat cross-legged facing me, looking exactly like the aging hippie she was. “You should put him on a diet. He must weigh twenty pounds. And it's all fat.”
Diet. How Fred and I hated that word. “He's just pleasantly plump.”
It took the two of us to get him into the carrier. “I'll get some iodine,” Greta said. “You don't want to take a chance on those scratches getting infected.”
“Maa-maa,” came a plaintive wail from the carrier.
“Did you hear that? He called me mama.” I dabbed at my bloody arm with a Kleenex.
“Mama, indeed! What you need is to settle down and have a real family.”
I saved my snappy retort for later because Garnet chose that moment to come in from the kitchen.
“All ready to go?” In my opinion he sounded much too cheerful for a man whose ladylove was moving out. I thought he could show a little dejection.
“Will you two be here for dinner?” Greta called from the porch as Garnet boosted me into the cab of the truck. “I'm fixing scalloped weiners.”
“No thanks,” we said together, a little too quickly. Garnet and I had fought about any number of things during the past weeks, but we stood united in our dislike of Greta's Pennsylvania Dutch cooking.
I took one last look out the side window at the Gochenaur home, at the white gingerbread trim dripping from the eaves, the Corinthian columns on the front porch, the slate-shingled fish-scale roof, and the four round brick towers topped with onion-shaped domes. The southeast tower was still under repair, a reminder of something very scary that had happened to me a few weeks ago. Then I turned face forward and looked ahead, as I had countless times in the past during my many moves as a foreign-service brat.
This one's different, I told myself. This time, Tori, you're only moving a few miles across town, not half a world away. But the familiar sadness was still there.
“Are you crying?” Garnet asked.
“It's the iodine. It smarts.”
Sometimes Garnet shows remarkable sensitivity. This afternoon was one of those times. He took my hand in his and squeezed it gently. I studied him as he drove over Lickin Creek's cobbled streets. His straight sandy-brown hair fell forward on his forehead. He was the kind of lucky person who always looked tan, sort of like Don Johnson on the reruns of Miami Vice, which was one of my TV addictions. Today he wore what I thought of as the Lickin Creek uniform, a plaid shirt, tight jeans, and hunting boots. On him, it looked good.
Within five minutes, Garnet had driven his truck through the rusty iron gates that marked the entrance to the old resort community of Moon Lake. The lake itself marks the southern border of the borough. Great mansions, built before the turn of the century to be the summer cottages for the very rich from Baltimore and D.C., had crumbled there for years beneath ancient trees.
When the so-called cottages were first built, in the days before jet travel made the rest of the world easily accessible, women and children from those cities used to come to Moon Lake to escape the summer heat, bringing with them their servants and huge steamer trunks full of clothes for every occasion. Husbands and fathers visited on weekends. But all good things come to an end, and the “cottages” eventually fell into disrepair as World War I and, later, the stock market crash, put an end to those leisurely, elegant times.
Fortunately, the development had sprung to life again in the past few years, rescued by young professionals, mostly from the D.C. area, who were entranced by the charm of the spacious old homes and wanted to restore them to their former glory. When I'd come for my interview with Ethelind Gallant, it had been nighttime and I hadn't been able to see much. But this morning, with the trees changing from green to autumn gold, and the sun sparkling on the blue water of Moon Lake, I gasped with pleasure. I could hardly believe I was really going to live in a place like this!
While many of the grand old places had been subjected to costly renovation, not so the largest and once grandest of them all, the house owned by college professor Ethelind Gallant, who was soon leaving for mer-rie olde England to collect information about the use of contractions in medieval writings. I had gratefully agreed to house-sit while she was gone. After all, I'd be living there rent-free and I'd only be responsible for paying the utilities and making sure the house didn't collapse while she was gone. Did I think for a minute that heating a house with thirty or more rooms might strain my budget? Of course not. And now, looking at the gloomy structure in broad daylight, I realized there was a real possibility that indeed it might collapse-the front-porch roof had already been propped up with some two-by-fours. A fluttering piece of paper, tacked onto one of the two-by-fours, warned visitors to use the back door.
Garnet stopped in the circular driveway, and I jumped down. Clutching a cat carrier in each hand, I walked around to the back while Garnet followed me pulling my suitcases.
Ethelind greeted us on the enclosed back porch, which was obviously used as a laundry room and a dumping-off place for last winter's coats and boots. She was about Garnet's height, five ten, and shaped like a barrel. I guessed her measurements would be fifty-fifty-fifty. Her hair was dyed Lucille Ball red, and she'd applied her makeup with such a heavy hand that it would have looked artificial even on a stage. In one hand was a skinny brown cigarette. In the other, a half-empty sherry glass.
Her smile of greeting, which showed big yellow teeth smeared with lipstick, faded as she looked down at the cat carriers. “You didn't mention you had cats!”
“Didn't I?” I tried to look surprised, as if I couldn't believe I hadn't told her about Fred and Noel. “I'm sure I did.”
She kept staring at the carriers. “Filthy creatures,” she muttered.
I held my breath and waited. Finally, she shrugged. “Well, nothing we can do about it now. I'll be off for England in a few days, anyway. Come on in. We'll have a drink to celebrate your being here.” She turned her back on us and marched into the house.
Garnet put his hand on my shoulder and held me back. “It's not too late, Tori. You can still come to Costa Rica with me.”
The weekend went by so quickly I knew my memories of it would always be blurred. I picked one of a dozen or more bedrooms to be mine, unpacked the boxes sent to me by my next-door neighbor and best friend in New York, Murray Rosenbaum, and tried to adjust to Ethelind Gallant's constant cigarette smoke. While I had thought she was leaving for England right away, it now turned out there was a slight change of plans and she was waiting for a vacancy on the QE II. Then there was the farewell dinner for Garnet at the home of his Aunt Gladys and Uncle Zeke, where I dozed off during dinner and distantly heard someone say, “Probably into drugs. She's a New Yorker you know.”
On Sunday morning, I stood in the Gochenauer driveway with Greta and waved good-bye to Garnet until his rental car turned the corner. To hide my tears, I bent down and hugged Bear, Garnet's German shepherd, whose dark eyes looked as sad as I imagined mine must look.
“Stay for dinner?” Greta asked kindly. “I thought I'd fix a little beef heart.”
I shook my head. The thought of Greta's cooking made me cry even harder.
On the following Monday morning, I drove to Ha-gerstown, Maryland, where a young doctor replaced my plaster arm cast with a soft cast that weighed about a thousand pounds less. I'd broken my arm nearly a month ago when my car was forced off the road during the Apple Butter Festival. Feeling free and mobile without the restricting cast, I checked in at the Chronicle and was assured by Cassie that there was nothing I needed to do there. “Except for calling Doctor Washabaugh,” she added.
“I will,” I said as I left to drive to the Lickin Creek College for Women, where Janet Margolies had scheduled a meeting to introduce me to some of the people who were to be involved in Parents’ Weekend. I was glad to be kept busy. It was a lot better than sitting at home feeling lonely and sorry for myself.
From a distance, the white Victorian buildings of the campus were graceful reminders of days gone by. But as I trudged up the hill from the visitors’ parking lot, I began to notice the flaking paint, the woodwork in need of repair, and the cracked flagstones of the walkways. The Lickin Creek College for Women was in the process of redesigning itself for modern women, but it still suffered from a severely declining enrollment. Was there really a place in today's high-tech, fast-paced world, I wondered, for a small, nineteenth-century, women's liberal arts college? I hoped there was.
I was ushered into a large lounge in the administration building, filled with priceless antique furniture and a half dozen oil paintings of past college presidents. After pouring a cup of tea for me out of a silver teapot on a mahogany breakfront, Janet led me to where a handsome gray-haired gentleman was seated. He stood, smiled, and shook my hand firmly, and I knew he must be someone important even before Janet told me he was President Godlove. “Glad to have you aboard,” he said.
“Former Navy man,” Janet whispered as she guided me toward a large group of people engaged in a lively conversation. They were almost all professors, except for the campus security chief and two members of the senior class. The names whizzed over my head and out the window, but I shook hands with everybody and said “Glad to meet you,” several times.
Janet took my arm and pointed discreetly to two people seated on a red velvet sofa. “You can sit with them,” she said, and I noticed she was wheezing pretty badly.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Nothing that a few weeks won't cure,” she said with a wry smile as she clutched her back. “I feel like the Hindenburg blimp right before it exploded. Maybe I'd better sit down.”
“I can introduce myself to the others,” I told her. “You go take care of that baby.”
The man and the woman on the sofa acknowledged my presence and shifted ever so slightly to make room for me to sit beside them. “I'm Helga Van Brackle, Dean of Students,” the woman said in a voice that sounded as if she were used to scolding people.
“And this is Professor Ken Nakamura, the Academic Dean.”
His shock of thick white hair fell into his eyes as Professor Nakamura took my hand and bowed. “I understand you speak Japanese.”
It took me a second to realize he was speaking that language to me. “Only a little,” I automatically responded in Japanese, using the proper and self-deprecating answer that I knew was expected of me. “Are you from Japan?”
He shook his head. “Nisei. From southern California. Welcome to the college.”
His eyes smiled warmly at me, and I could imagine him being the surrogate grandfather of hundreds of young women students.
The three of us chatted for a minute or two until we were interrupted by a student passing a tray of pastries. I took one, then wished I hadn't, since President Godlove tapped his cup with his spoon to get everyone's attention. With a glance at his watch, he announced he had no intention of waiting any longer. The grandfather clock in the corner told me the meeting was twenty minutes late in getting started.
“He's never on time,” Helga mumbled.
“Who?” I asked.
“Shh,” someone cautioned. Helga's infuriated look would have scared anyone, but not the student who had done the deed.
President Godlove introduced me to the stragglers who had just come in, then asked Janet Margolies to go over her plans for Parents’ Weekend. I nibbled at my pastry and admired the furniture while she described at long length the Friday night activities, including a banquet, a tour of the dormitory, a poetry reading in the library, and a short production of The Tempest as adapted by a local playwright and alumna, Oretta Clopper.
From the groans that greeted this announcement, I guessed Mrs. Clopper was not everybody's favorite writer.
Janet shushed the crowd. “I know, I know, but it won't kill any of us to sit through it. This brings us to Saturday. After coffee and pastry in the dining hall, we will all move outside for the reenactment.” She smiled at me and said, “Generously cosponsored by our friends at the Chronicle.” A smattering of applause greeted this announcement.
“As some of you know,” she continued, “The chairman of our board of trustees, Mack Macmillan, has agreed to play the part of the condemned man.”
I jerked around to stare at her. What was she talking about?
She ignored me. “As you all know, Mack Macmillan is a well-known Civil War historian and will provide his own costume. Because of his years in the public sector as a United States congressman, he is highly visible and his participation will be a great asset…”
“Excuse me,” I said rather timidly. “What do you mean by ‘condemned man’? I thought this was to be a Civil War battle reenactment.”
“It is,” Janet said, not looking at me. “Sort of.” She looked relieved as the door opened and a tall, stately man with a vaguely familiar face entered the room. Although he was dressed in the Lickin Creek uniform of jeans, plaid shirt, and boots, he gave off an aura of aristocracy that set him apart from the citizens of the borough.
“Congressman Macmillan,” Ken Nakamura said softly. “The great man himself.”
Mack Macmillan worked his way around the room, shaking hands, slapping the men on the back, and kissing the women, until he reached me. “This is Tori Miracle,” Helga said.
“I had an Aunt Dorie,” he said, gazing into my eyes. “Lovely woman. Lovely name. So nice to meet you, Dorie.”
He moved on before I had a chance to correct him.
“Anybody seen my wife? I thought she was going to meet me here?”
“Problem at the stable,” the security chief said. “She's probably down there.”
“Then I'll just pop into the dining room and see if I can't catch her.” He paused in the doorway with one hand raised. “Carry on. I know Janet's got everything under control.”
I must have looked confused, because Ken said softly. “Stable-table. Tori-Dorie. He had a viral infection five or six years ago that left him deaf. He can only read lips if someone talks slowly and directly at him. Most of the college people can deal with it. The rest of the time he depends on his wife to interpret for him. It's what ended his career in Congress.”
Helga Van Brackle frowned at us, and Ken stopped talking to me and smiled innocently at her.
“Let's get back on task,” she said in a rasping voice. “Where were we?”
I raised my hand as if I were back in school because that's the way she made me feel. “Janet was starting to talk about the plans for the Civil War reenactment.” I turned to Janet, whose face was flushed. “Something you said about a victim confused me. Can you explain to me in detail what's going to happen?”
Janet took the floor as Helga sat down and told us of her plans for the reenactment, while I listened in shock.
I could already hear Cassie saying, “This is not the kind of event P. J. would want the Chronicle involved in.”
When the meeting ended, I left fuming. The least Janet could have done was be up-front with me when she asked me to cosponsor the event. However, the wheels were in motion, the publicity was out, and there was nothing I could do about it now.