Клэр Донелли - Hiss And Tell

“Yeah,” Sunny told him, “life would be so much easier if all any of us needed was a good belly scratch.”

*

The next morningSunny breakfasted with her dad, who was already dressed for his daily hike. “Going up to outlet-land to walk in the air conditioning,” he said. “The weather guy last night said to expect some more hot air,” Mike winked. “He didn’t say whether to expect it from Will, Frank Nesbit, or any of the Kingsburys.”

Whatever the cause, the prediction was right. The air felt unseasonably warm as Sunny walked out to her Wrangler for the ride into town.

Monday-morning traffic flowed more freely than it had on the weekend. At least all the people visiting on Saturday and Sunday excursions had gone home. But Sunny saw plenty of vehicles with out-of-state plates, lazing along, enjoying the scenery—and clogging the roads. Considering her line of work, boosting tourism and booking accommodations at the Maine Adventure X-perience, Sunny realized that the waves of tourists were partly her doing. Obviously, not all—there were things like great scenery, discount goods in the outlets, and a state tourism bureau involved. But her promotional copy and the time and effort she put into the website made a contribution, too. So in a way, one could argue that the traffic-laden roads were a testament to her success.

Be interesting to use that as an excuse if I’m late, Sunny thought.

Either way, she beat the clock into the office, fired up the computer, and started checking e-mail. A few minutes later, Nancy the summer intern arrived and started a pot of coffee. Nancy was supposed to have been working on the local paper but had found publicity and promotional work more interesting than the nuts and bolts of journalism. Sunny didn’t necessarily agree with that herself, but having an assistant web lackey around had made life a lot easier—she’d miss Nancy when the girl returned to school in a few weeks. For now, though, they divvied up the morning’s tasks and set to work.

Around eleven o’clock, they had a real surprise when their boss, Oliver Barnstable, also showed up. Ollie was a local boy who’d left town to make good, then came back to spread his money around his old hometown. The MAX office wasn’t just about tourism, it also served as home base for a variety of his mysterious enterprises. The whole back wall of the office was lined with locked file cabinets containing all the dealings of Ollie’s mini-empire.

“Looking good, Ollie.” Sunny’s compliment was genuine as Ollie maneuvered inside with his walker. Although he was still undergoing in-patient rehab for his broken leg at a facility up near Levett, Ollie had wangled taking a few hours a week off-site, to take care of business. The rehab was doing him a world of good—he was svelter, his eyes were clearer, and his temper was much more peaceful.

Just then, Ollie bumped his walker into the edge of a visitor’s chair and let rip with an expletive.

Well, comparatively more peaceful, Sunny amended. But really, altogether, her boss was much improved from the irascible guy who’d hired her, the one who’d earned himself the nickname of “Ollie the Barnacle.” Sunny suspected that was due to Elsa Hogue, an occupational therapist who had taken more than a professional interest in her patient.

Ollie gave Nancy a key and instructions to open one of the back file cabinets, and he soon had the contents of a folder spread out on a desk, reading them over.

They all worked in silence until an actual visitor arrived in the form of Will Price.

“How goes the campaign?” Ollie asked in the tone of someone with a vested interest. He’d surprised Sunny—and Will, too—by offering to switch his support from sheriff Nesbit to Will’s insurgent candidacy.

“Just dandy.” Will didn’t even try to keep the disgust out of his voice. “I just wasted my whole morning on what looks to be an enormous time-suck.” As Will explained the assignment Nesbit had stuck him with, Ollie’s eyebrows drew together.

“Clever, pushing you off to the sidelines,” Ollie said.

“No kidding!” Will burst out. “I was just up on Neal’s Neck, talking with the head of Kingsbury’s private security, a guy named Lee Trehearne. To put it as nicely as possible, the guy was patronizing. Besides his own guys, he has a detachment of Maine state troopers—the Senator still has pull—plus executive protection details from two other state police forces covering governors Lem and Tom. The way they see it, the contribution of local law enforcement lies in traffic control. I might as well have been assigned to be a school crossing guard.”

“Got to hand it to old Frank.” Ollie shook his head, still admiring. “He’s good at this stuff.”

Under the circumstances, Sunny felt it was only fair of her to take Will out to lunch to lick his wounds. But then another visitor arrived—Ken Howell, the editor, publisher, printer, and pretty much everything else on the local paper, the Harbor Courier .

Sunny assumed he was there for intern Nancy, but instead Ken came straight to Sunny’s desk. “Back when you first came back to town and talked to me about a newspaper job, didn’t you mention you could handle a camera?”

Sunny wondered where he was going with this, but nodded. “I was always pretty good, and after some papers began firing their whole photographic departments and expecting the reporters to shoot pictures, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to look ahead. So I took classes in photography and media—not that it saved my job.” Even though it happened more than a year ago, it still irked Sunny that she’d gotten laid off while on leave taking care of her dad.

“Here’s the situation,” Ken said. “My regular photographer is away on vacation, and his backup managed to break an arm using a hand winch to pull a boat onto its trailer. There’s a press conference this afternoon on Neal’s Neck about the Kingsbury-de Kruk wedding.”

“Yeah, we’ve been hearing a lot about that.” Will still looked disgusted.

“I heard about what Nesbit pulled, and I’m sorry.” Ken’s long, bony face was serious. He was another member of the Kittery Harbor group backing Will. “But we knew he wasn’t just going to hand the keys over to you. You’ll have to pick your appearances for maximum effect—”

“And hope a picture of me directing traffic doesn’t turn up on TV or in a paper,” Will finished for him.

“Not in my paper,” Ken assured him. “At this point, I’m wondering if I’ll get any pictures at all. It’s one thing to cover an event with pictures and interview people later. But this is supposed to be a Q and A , and it’s kind of hard to ask questions while staring through a viewfinder. Can you help me out, Sunny?”

Sunny glanced over at Ollie, and so did Ken. “Can you spare her for a while?” he asked Ollie.

“I can handle things,” Nancy eagerly volunteered.

“You weren’t planning to strip down the computers and polish the insides—anything like that, were you?” Ollie asked Sunny.

Smiling, she shook her head. “Not for another couple of weeks at least. Besides, I won’t be that far away, and Nancy can always call my cell if there are any problems.”

Sunny was trying to play it cool, but she could feel her pulse starting to race. Much as she tried to convince herself that she’d closed the book on her journalism career, she was a reporter at heart. If she had a chance of making a living as a journalist, even on a tiny local operation like the Courier , she’d bag her job at MAX in a heartbeat.

But as Ken had explained, the job just wasn’t there. She’d thought at first he’d just been threatened by the idea of having a big-city reporter trying to horn in on his baby, but the honest fact was he was using print jobs on his presses, doing circulars for local stores and such, to keep the newspaper afloat.