But when I pulled into my driveway, Jocelyn and James were waiting on my porch. Jocelyn’s usual happy-as-an-apple face was puckered with anguish. I struggled toward her with my three shopping bags of old cocoa cans. The first words out of her mouth were not exactly promising: “Oh Maddy, I don’t know how to ask you this.”
I put down my cocoa cans and scratched James’ ping-pong paddle ears. He reciprocated by slobbering on my elbows with his big pink tongue. “How long?” I asked.
Jocelyn pulled in her neck, as if I was about to pound her with a sledgehammer. “Five months?”
The last time she asked me to watch James it was for three days. “Five months?”
She started to cry-the kind of crying that includes a lot of shoulder shaking and throaty moans that sound like mating whales. She told me her daughter Deena’s husband had been swept into the Pacific Ocean while collecting mussels for a paella, for their fifteenth wedding anniversary dinner, and now Deena was going to be a young working widow with three daughters at that awkward age. Jocelyn was going to spend the summer in Eureka, California, while the kids were out of school. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, Maddy,” she said, “but if you could take in James until the end of August-I’ll pay for all his food, of course.”
I loved James. But I didn’t want to love him that much. But heavens to Betsy, what could I do? “When do you have to leave?”
“The funeral’s on Wednesday,” she said. “I was hoping you could drive me to the airport tonight.”
And so instead of watching old sitcoms on Nickelodeon, I was starring in a brand-new sitcom of my own: James amp; Me. My only hope was that it would merely be a summer replacement and not picked up for the fall.
Chapter 12
Friday, April 6
I had a nice, peaceful lunch at Ike’s and then took my good old time walking back to the paper. It was only fifty degrees outside but the sun was shining like it was the middle of July. I didn’t dare do it, of course, but I felt like whistling that peppy theme song from The Andy Griffith Show.
On my way through the newsroom I wiggled my fingers at Louise and Margaret and even Ed Boyer in sports. Two out of three wiggled back. Then the second I lowered my happy behind into my chair, Suzie appeared out of the ether. “Mr. Averill wants to see you,” she whispered. “Immediately.”
I let the elevator take me to the fifth floor. I squeaked along the old hardwood floor to the sterile gray office at the end of the hall. I hate to admit it, but I was trembling like a just-hatched peep.
Bob Averill has been editor-in-chief for fifteen years. The owners of The Herald-Union, the Knudsen-Hartpence chain, sent him here to boost the paper’s sagging circulation. They’ve pretty much given up on that impossible dream. Nobody reads newspapers anymore. So Bob’s top priority now, or so it seems, is to coax me into retirement. But as you know, Dolly Madison Sprowls has no plans to hippity-hop into that briar patch any time soon.
I took half a minute outside Mr. Averill’s office to get myself under control-and pick the dog hair off my sweater-then knocked on his door with as much vinegar as I could muster under the circumstances.
“No need to knock, Maddy!”
I was not only confronted by Bob Averill’s sour frown. But also the sour frown of Managing Editor Alec Tinker, and even worse, the sour frown of Detective Scotty Grant. They were slumped in the leather swivel chairs that surrounded the glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the office, a star chamber of medieval inquisitors with a pinch of Larry, Curly and Moe. “My three favorite men,” I said.
There were several empty chairs. Mr. Averill pointed to the one he wanted me to sit in.
I sat. I pressed my nervous knees together.
Tinker handed me a small folded newspaper. It was a copy of the Hemphill College student newspaper, The Harbinger. The story across the top was about a proposed tuition hike. The story across the bottom was about me.
It was not a hard news story, but one of those “notes” columns all newspapers run these days, where style and speculation take precedence over documented fact. The column was cleverly called “Campus Claptrap.” The headline asked this question:
Is Maddy Sprowls At It Again?
As bad as that headline was, it was the byline under it that made me wilt:
By Gabriella Nash
Harbinger Editor
“Heavens to Betsy,” I heard myself hiss, “that horrible girl with the green hair.” I started to read:
Just eight months ago, Hemphill College alumna Dolly Madison “Maddy” Sprowls led police to the real killer of television evangelist Buddy Wing. Now it appears she is trying to beat baffled detectives to the person who murdered archaeology professor Gordon Sweet.
After graduating from HC in 1957, Sprowls went to work for The Hannawa Herald-Union. But not as a reporter. As a librarian. That’s right, the diminutive, 68-year-old Sprowls is the desk-bound gnome who watches over the newspaper’s morgue, where the stories real reporters write are filed away for future reference.
And why is Sprowls so interested in Professor Sweet’s murder? It seems that she and Sweet were old college friends. In fact, both were members of a quixotic band of campus bohemians called The Meriwether Baked…
“Did you get to the sentence about you not being a reporter?” Tinker asked.
“I sure did,” I said. “It’s right above the one that calls me a gnome.”
Tinker was too agitated to let me read in peace. “We’d like to believe this claptrap is exactly that, Maddy.”
Detective Grant seconded the motion. “And so would we baffled detectives.”
I knew it would be hard to plead guilty and not guilty at the same time. But I knew I’d have to try. I finished reading, let out a long, Reaganesque “Welllll” and then launched into a breathless explanation that I hoped would save me from collecting my pension: “It’s true enough that I’ve been asking a few people a few questions, about Gordon’s murder, and other things that may or may not be related, or even important, but I sure as heck didn’t tell that girl at the college what I was up to.”
“Or us,” Tinker pointed out.
“Or us,” Scotty Grant added.
Now Mr. Averill took a turn at me. “So this Miss Nash didn’t give you a heads-up about her story? Didn’t give you a chance to respond?”
“I’m as surprised by this as you are, Bob.”
I watched Mr. Averill’s troubled eyes drift along his office walls. They were lined with a century’s worth of important front pages, in thick black frames, from the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to the most recent addition, the one revealing Buddy Wing’s real killer. “I suppose you’ve earned the right to explain yourself,” he said. “If you think that’s possible.”
So that was the start of my visit to the woodshed. It was the longest damn hour of my life. I apologized for my secretiveness. I apologized for my carelessness. I apologized for my impulsiveness and my loose-cannonness. I agonized out loud over my incurable curiosity, like some bad actor in a Shakespearean play. I also told them everything I knew about Gordon’s murder, who I suspected and why. By the time I finished, they were as exhausted as I was.
Mr. Averill made a motorboat sound with his lips. He drummed his fingers on the armrests. He stood up and buttoned his suit coat over his middle-aged belly. “I don’t think we need to take any disciplinary action here, do you Alec?”
Tinker gave him a terse, “No, sir.”
“How about you, Detective Grant? Mrs. Sprowls hasn’t broken any laws, has she?”
“Not yet,” Grant said.
Mr. Averill walked me to the door. “Now you keep yourself out of trouble, Maddy,” he said. “And if you can’t, I hope you’ll at least keep us in the loop. We do like to sell newspapers around here.”