pockets with rocks and walked into the river when his feed and seed had gone bust. Those corpses were bleached, always bloated, misshapen.
Old Cheese Face was different. Different. And awful.
“You gonna drag the river?” Conroy asked when they had tied up.
“Not with the overtime budget going to River Days. I’ll put it out on the wire, but for now, Old Cheese Face is going to have to keep on rolling. Probably won’t stop until he gets to Possum Island.”
Holt picked up the sack with the lunch they had brought but had left uneaten—cheese sandwiches. He doubted he would ever eat cheese again.
The sky darkened and the wind built. Cyclones of dead leaves danced through the parking lot of the Winston News. Thunder shook the squat prefab building and rain roared against the metal roof. Editor and Publisher Josh Gibbs, thirty-eight, took scant notice of the storm, even though his powers of observation were seldom off high alert. Tie at half-mast, shirt-sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, Josh hunched over a low metal table proofing the News’s upcoming edition. He read each story and headline a third time. Then, just to be sure, he read the headlines again, this time aloud.
Since Josh’s wife’s death, the News had become more than a job. It had become a refuge where he could exert a degree of control over stories and schedules in a world out of control, a place where he could count on the press to run every Thursday at 3 p.m., a place where he always knew what he was doing, and where the newspaper’s relentless demands meant pain was forgotten, temporarily, in the mad crush.
At big city newspapers, the editor and publisher wrote no stories, sold no ads, did no editing. A few might dash off an occasional—or even regular—Sunday column. But in terms of contributing to content, that was about it. If the editor or the publisher absented himself for a week or two, the newspaper would still publish every day—possibly with even greater efficiency. Subscribers would never notice.
Not so at a small town weekly. As owner, editor and publisher of the Winston News, not only did Josh oversee advertising sales, printing, production and circulation, he covered meetings, wrote stories, edited the sometimes barely literate copy of the rural correspondents and handled the inevitable complaints about waterlogged papers. If Josh didn’t show up, there wouldn’t be a paper.
Josh had lived the big city, daily newspaper life once and found it to his liking. He specialized in stories that exposed official corruption or advocated for the powerless against the bureaucracy. Atlanta had been a target-rich environment. He’d attracted some notice. And he’d connected with a young woman there, the daughter of the owner and publisher of the weekly newspaper in a small West Virginia town.
He was a reporter. Sharon Hardesty sold advertising. He was impressed that she respected journalism. She was amazed he understood the business side. They’d breeched the church-state divide between their departments with secret lunches and cocktails after work, had fallen in love and gotten married. After two years of monthly heartbreak and frustration, they rejoiced with the miracle workers at the Emory University Medical Center and welcomed Katie into their happy family.
At the paper, Josh had been promoted to the investigative reporting staff—on track for a Pulitzer, he was sure. Until the scandal. Was that the right word? Sharon’s word, “incident,” was too non-descriptive. The paper had labeled it a “mistake” but he still wasn’t prepared to accept it as such. Scandal was right. Whatever else was said about what happened, “scandal” fit.
In the middle of it all, Sharon’s father died and left her the News. Still stung by what had happened and his subsequent demotion to the night cops beat, Josh suggested that they move with baby Katie to Winston. He’d take over production of the paper.
Quitting had not been easy. He still kept two buttons stuck to a cork board behind his credenza that the Atlanta staff had given him at a beery, sometimes teary, send-off. The buttons commemorated two of his favorite newsroom sayings. One read, “Rake Muck.” The other, “Question Authority.” But when he left for Winston, Josh understood he was forsaking forever investigative reporting, the hope for a Pulitzer Prize and the chance for journalistic redemption. Just as well. He’d had about all the crusading he could stand.
An enormous task confronted him at the News. Technology and innovation had been put on hold during the late publisher’s declining years and Josh found himself deeper into computer issues than he ever hoped to be. On the other hand, the work meant there was little time to look back—except, inevitably, when Pulitzers were announced in April and he suffered until the news cycle moved on.
Socially, the adjustment was easier than he and Sharon had expected. Fueled by new jobs, Winston had started to grow after a century of stagnation. The high school that Katie would soon attend was brand new. Big brick homes owned by executives now perched on the first low ridge that swelled from the flat land. They made friends. The shopping center on the edge of town brought new businesses that proved to be new sources of advertising revenue for the paper.
They’d run the News together until Sharon got too sick. For the last three years, the job had been his alone.
With Sharon, the workload had been manageable. They’d even been able to carve out two weeks of vacation—the week in the summer after the special issue that focused on the town’s Old Fashioned River Days festival and at Christmas when the editions were combined into a special year-end review.
Without Sharon, the workload was crushing. Except for Sunday, which he reserved exclusively for Katie, there was a deadline every day. Monday, correspondents’ copy and editorials; Tuesday, news copy, ad placement and page design; Wednesday, story placement and headline writing; Thursday, proofing, printing and delivery; Friday, ad sales; Saturday, catch up on the business side—the payables and receivables, and the big question: which advertisers he could afford to carry another week before they paid and which he could not. It was an important question. Advertising was not a product like a car or a television that could be repossessed if the buyer failed to pay. On the other hand, it was tough to turn down business as long as there was hope for remuneration.
The pace was perfect for life after Sharon. It was predictable. He was good at the work. It consumed almost every conscious moment of his life that wasn’t devoted to his daughter, filling some of the emptiness, distracting him from his suffering until bedtime stabbed him in the heart again.
He looked at the two silver-framed photos on his desk. His beloved Sharon, poolside, smile brighter than the sun, hair pulled into a ponytail, when she was healthy. Katie in her red and black soccer uniform, one foot perched on a ball. When you’re a father raising a thirteen-year-old daughter by yourself, Josh reflected, it helps to have at least one place where you know what you are doing.
Despite that, he had decided it was time to move on. Weeklies like the News hadn’t yet suffered the circulation and advertising declines of daily newspapers, but who knew how long that would last? Although he wasn’t ready to inform his staff, he’d reached a handshake agreement to sell the News and its commercial printing operation, hoping to close the deal during the summer and relocate to Atlanta in time for Katie to start high school in the fall. He’d asked some of his former colleagues to alert him if they heard about a good deal on a house. He figured the proceeds from the sale of the News would tide him over until he found a job. He was thinking of something in public relations, although appearing before his former colleagues as a supplicant seeking favorable press for a client was going to be awkward.
Josh noticed with relief that the skies were starting to clear. Calls from
