Front Page Fatality (4 page)

“Have a good one, darlin’.” The “g” disappeared into Eunice’s native Virginia drawl. “Enjoy your Friday night.”

“Friday night, hell, I’m out of here until Monday,” I stepped into the elevator with a grin.  “See you then.”

The promise of a whole weekend with nothing to do was thrilling all by itself. I parked my little red SUV in the Carytown shopping district and melted into the collection of people who made up the city I had come to love in the six years since a stinging rejection from my dream employer brought me south to look for a job.

There were impeccably-dressed mothers pushing babies in hip strollers along the sidewalks, teenagers still high on the excitement of school letting out the week before, and couples walking hand-in-hand looking in the shop windows. The eclectic storefronts beckoned passersby with everything from toys and Christmas decorations to maternity clothes and jewelry.

A cobblestone sidewalk led to the heavy oak door of Pages, so picturesque it could have been conjured from the narrative of a nineteenth-century novel. The shop was housed in an old stone cottage, the door flanked by mosaic stained glass windows half-hidden behind climbing roses and jasmine vines, growing thick in twin shoebox-sized gardens and making the summer air sweeter with their perfume.

I turned the brass knob and shoved the stubborn old door, instantly overtaken by a very different fragrance. The smell of ink and paper and aged leather inside the little shop bordered on intoxicating. There were no maps, no sections, no pretty directional signs. Just tall shelves stretching from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the small space, cluttered and piled with a fantastic collection of great stories. Jenna was the store’s buyer, and she spent hours each day hunting down rare volumes and first editions. Pages was no generic bookstore; it was a book lover’s haven.

“Hey.” My friend waved from behind a stack of books perched on the sales counter. “You’re early! How’d you manage that?”

“There was annoyingly little to be written of the story I spent the whole day chasing. I’ll tell you all about it at dinner.”

Shoving her reddish-brown curls out of her face, Jenna turned back to the MacBook that was the only evidence of the twenty-first century in the room and scooted her square, blue-rimmed glasses down the bridge of her nose.

At least she’d remembered them. I was convinced Jenna was going to go blind or kill some random blotch that was actually a person with her car, she forgot her glasses so often.

“Dying to hear all about it,” she said. “Just let me finish one thing and we’ll go.”

I nodded and surveyed the nearest shelf, picking up a fat brown hardcover. My eyes widened when I checked the copyright page: MacMillan Books, May 1, 1936. A first edition of
Gone With the Wind
.

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were,” I recited the first line under my breath as I flipped the book closed and trailed my fingers along the cover, noting the missing dust jacket. But still, an actual first edition. I couldn’t believe Jenna didn’t tell me she’d found it.
There were only ten thousand of these printed
, I thought as I made a mental note to check the asking price with her. I was no rare books expert, but I knew enough about the one in my hands to land a guess in the ballpark, and that park had expensive seats. Even a thousand dollars—which might be a lowball for this one—was usually way above my price range, given that it was more than my rent. But it was
Gone With the Wind
. Maybe I could survive on Ramen for a few weeks.

I laid it on a high shelf and picked up a thick leather-bound Dickens tome. Shopping at Pages was like perusing some great collector’s personal library. Every visit was an experience.

“Almost done,” Jenna called, clicking her mouse and twisting up the corners of her lips, which were seldom more than a twitch away from smiling.

I admired the flowing simplicity of the wine-colored linen dress she wore. Like most of her wardrobe, it well suited her true passion: Jenna was a great book-buyer, but she was a better artist. “The bookstore definitely pays better,” she said whenever I asked if she thought she’d ever buy the store from its retired owner, “and I love the thrill of the hunt in my job. But I will always be an artist at heart.”

I owed her friendship, and by extension my sanity, to the abstract of a mother and child I’d talked her into selling me right off the shop’s wall on my second visit. The painting had given us a reason to start talking, and once we had, we’d never stopped. I loved not knowing what I’d find when I popped into the store, and as I built a collection of books rivaled in my heart only by my shoe closet, Jenna and I had gone from casual acquaintances to the best of friends.

By the time her little boy came along the previous spring, I was planning the baby shower and driving her to the hospital when her water broke at a Friday night karaoke experiment (our unscientific method determined that lack of intoxication made singing off-key in front of strangers a lot less fun, and also that drunk people were surprisingly eager to help when you went into labor in a bar, some more appropriately than others). She was my non-newspaper family.

“Ready?” Jenna appeared at my elbow with her straw bag on her shoulder and her keys in her hand.

“Starving,” I said, laying the book back on the shelf.

We were quiet for a half-block or so, until we reached the brick sidewalk to an old row house painted bright purple and converted into the city’s best Mexican food restaurant.

“You ready to talk about your week yet?” Jenna asked. “You know I get all my thrills vicariously through you.”

“My week started and ended with gross crime scene photos. I think that entitles me to at least one margarita, so I guess we’ll just have to force ourselves to stay for a while.”

“Ah, to not have to be home by the children’s bedtime! Leave nothing out.”

We followed the hostess up the narrow stairs to a square table covered in brightly-hued paint. The top was lavender and each leg was a different shade of the rainbow.

“Did you have time to actually read the paper today?” I asked, sinking into a ladderback chair just as colorful as the table.

She wiggled one hand back and forth as she popped a blue corn chip into her mouth with the other. “I started your story, but I only got through the part on the front page before I got busy looking through the ads.”

Jenna found a lot of the bookstore’s inventory at estate sales. She usually spent Fridays combing through the classifieds for the weekend and calling all the ones that mentioned books.

I filled her in on the gory details of the trial as we waited for our drinks. When I got to the part about the murderer confessing to his mom, the color drained from Jenna’s face.

“So, this kid really just walked into his mother’s kitchen splattered with other people’s blood and sat down and told her what he did?” She gaped at me, her hand fluttering to her throat. “As a mother, you want your kids to trust you enough to tell you anything, but…Oh, my God. I can’t even imagine.”

“I know. That was the most dramatic part of the whole trial for me, when his mother testified. I felt so bad for that poor woman. Here her kid has done this horrible thing and she knows he did it and she kept looking at the victims’ families and telling them she was sorry, but you know she still loves her kid and she’s worried about what’s going to happen to him, too.”

“And she probably feels guilty,” Jenna said. “I know I would. I’d never stop wondering what I did wrong. How my kid grew up to be the kind of person who could murder someone. It would drive me completely batshit insane.”

The first round arrived and we nibbled chips and sipped margaritas (well, I sipped, Jenna gulped) as we studied our menus, the usual hum of other diners’ conversations drowned out by the mariachi band that played on Friday nights.

We smiled thank-yous at the striking Hispanic waitress when she dropped off another margarita for Jenna and a glass of iced tea for me. She turned to the next table after she jotted down our order, and I raised my eyebrows at my friend.

“I wonder what it would be like to be one of those women people turn to look at when they walk by?” I asked, my eyes on the girl’s bobbing ebony ponytail.

“You’re pretty, Nicey.” Jenna smiled. “I’ve never seen anyone with eyes like yours.”

Neither had I, and I wasn’t fishing for a compliment. I knew my striking violet eyes were my best feature. They always made people think I was lying when I said I wasn’t wearing contacts. I also had long legs that were well-shaped by hours at the gym every week, and long, thick brown hair that didn’t need much work in the mornings. I wasn’t knocking my brand of unobtrusive, B-cup-and-brains beauty, just imagining how the chosen few lived. Maybe it was a reporter’s curse. I often mused about what it would be like to be in other people’s heads.

“So?” Jenna prodded as I watched the waitress sashay through a hot pink swinging door into the kitchen. She even had the pretty-girl walk. “What else is going on in the seedy criminal world in Richmond?”

The chips and salsa dwindled to crumbs and chunks of onion as I related the story of Darryl Wright and Noah Smith for the third time.

“I think it might be a vigilante,” I finished. “Though, the cops wanted that kept quiet badly enough to give me a hell of a favor in trade for not running it tonight.”

“My friend, the investigative reporter.” Jenna sighed. “My life is so boring.”

“Exaggerate much?” I snorted. “Investigative reporters bring down corrupt politicians and bust slimy, thieving CEOs. That’s what I want to do when I grow up. I’m afraid I’ve just been working with cops for so long I’m starting to think like one. I think Aaron was only half-kidding this afternoon when he asked if I had ever considered going into law enforcement.”

“Seriously?” It was Jenna’s turn to snort. “Cops don’t make enough money to keep you in shoes.”

“Donald Trump barely makes enough money to keep me in shoes.” I smiled, pausing to thank the waitress as she set a sizzling plate of fajitas in front of me, before I finished my thought. “If I paid retail for my shoe collection, I’d have been in bankruptcy court before I got out of college. Thank God for eBay.”

I stuck my foot out from under the table and Jenna smiled at my barely-scuffed latest treasure.

“Ooh, pretty,” she said. “Manolo?”

I lifted my foot to show off the red sole.

“Ah. That’s the other one. Louboutin? I have kids. I have little frame of reference for overpriced, wobbly shoes.”

“Louboutin is right, supermom. Less than a hundred dollars, because of a couple of scuff marks and a tiny wine stain that I took off with a Tide stick. I can’t believe the number of people who wear these once and get rid of them. This pair was twelve hundred last spring.”

Jenna shook her head. “Twelve hundred dollars. For a pair of shoes. If I was going to pay that kind of money for heels, George Clooney had better be in the box with them to give me a pedicure and a long foot massage.”

I laughed. “I think George’s rates for massage therapy would definitely price me out of those. But I do love my secondhand steals.”

“You really have a talent for that. Somewhere, I’m convinced there’s a market for it that you’re missing.”

“Ace reporter, professional bargain hunter.” I held my hands up in a pantomime of scales and furrowed my brow. “I think I’ll stick with the gig I have for now.

“In other news,” I sipped my tea as she flagged the waitress down and ordered another margarita. “It’s entirely possible that, at least in the most technical sense of the phrase, Grant Parker asked me out this afternoon.”

Jenna’s eyes got so big I could see white all the way around the brown.

“What? Where are you going? When?”

“I’m not.” I laughed at her horrified expression. “Don’t look at me like that. First of all, he’s a has-been baseball player, not young Elvis incarnate. I told him thanks for the column he’s running tomorrow on the basketball coach who has breast cancer, and I think he was trying to be nice by asking me to go with him to the game tonight. That’s work, so it’s not an actual date, but it’s the closest I’ve gotten in longer than I care to admit.”

“Who gives a rat’s patootie?” Jenna slammed her glass down on the table for emphasis. “Going out is going out. You could have a t-shirt that says ‘I went out with Grant Parker.’”

“Don’t you use your ‘mom voice’ on me, missy!” I giggled at her chastising tone. “Though, I think you just hit on a viable business idea. There have to be a fair number of women around here who could use such a t-shirt. You could sell them at Pages.”

Jenna carried on about how many women would jump at the chance for a date with Parker, and I drifted into my own world. It had been a long time since I’d been on a date with anyone, a fact that listening to witness after witness detail “Barbie and Ken’s” undying devotion had brought to the forefront of my thoughts that week.

Someone sexy and exciting, who could hold their own in a conversation and knock me off my feet with a kiss—that’s how my internet dating “what are you looking for in a partner?” would read, if I were brave enough to fill one out. I didn’t think that was too picky, though all recent evidence said it might just be.

I didn’t regret any of the big choices I had made, but my eighteen-year-old self had been so sure of her “where do you see yourself in ten years?” list: finish college, embark on a fabulous career as a political reporter for the
Washington Post
, and fall madly in love. And even though I was content most of the time, twenty-nine was just around the bend, and I couldn’t help feeling I had fallen short of what that girl wanted her life to be.

I stared at a bright red tile in the middle of the sun mosaic on the far wall. Almost like I was back there, I saw Kyle’s soft smile as I leaned my head on his shoulder in the front seat of my old Mustang, heard the huskiness that always came into his voice when he told me he loved me.

For a split second, it seemed like yesterday that he was the most important thing in my life. I’d nearly lost myself to the point of giving up on Syracuse and my dreams of the
Post
, which had scared me into a convent-like college existence. He’d walked away when I’d refused to stay, and I still couldn’t bring myself to look him up on Facebook. Maybe some people only get to fall madly in love once.

Whether she was a tiny bit psychic or I was just easy to read, Jenna could almost always tell what I was thinking. She patted my hand, drawing me back to the bustle of the restaurant with a lopsided grin.

“Honey, you have yet to find the great love of your life. Kyle was a high school boy. You need to fall in love with a man.”

I recognized her I-know-more-about-this-because-I’m-older-than-you voice and smiled. She thought being thirty-four made her positively wizened.

“I shudder to think what my life would be like if I had married the guy I was dating at eighteen,” she said. “Last time I saw him he was standing on the side of I-64 wearing an orange vest and holding a ‘stop ahead’ sign. You’re still looking for the right one. He’s out there.”