Gone to Green (Green (Abingdon Press))

by Judy Christie

  The date would have been more fun if I had not been mulling over what to do about Eva's interest in the newspaper. I had thought of little else since our supper. I had listed the paper with a broker. Eva's timetable put pressure on me to move faster than I wanted. It could open up the Asheville job again.

  “Don’t you think?”

  Walt was talking to me, and I had no idea what he had said. “I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “I have had a lot on my mind. I think I must have zoned out there.”

  “You mentioned you haven’t made it over to Dallas yet, and I was saying it might be fun to go over one weekend, see some movies and eat out. We could go and come in one day if we got an early start.”

  “That does sound like fun,” I said. But I had few weekends left in Green and wasn’t sure I wanted to give them up for an excursion to Texas. “There's a lot going on, though, so I’ll just have to see.”

  I’d put a damper on Walt's enthusiasm, but the rest of our date was enjoyable. I took him over to the paper for a tour.

  “It's been years since I was in here,” he said. “This is great. I don’t remember the press being so big.”

  “Do you remember the newsroom being this cluttered?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  We parted in the parking lot with a quick hug, no kiss. I headed home, longing for some of that peace that Pastor Jean had told me about.

  I opened the door and the phone rang.

  “Lois? It's Iris Jo. Aunt Helen took a fall and is in the hospital. I knew you would want to know.”

  “Up in Shreveport or the little Green clinic?”

  “She's here. They think they’ll discharge her tomorrow, but they want to keep an eye on her.”

  I hurried to the clinic, worried. When I walked into her room, Helen was alone and looked pale and much more fragile than usual. I patted her hand. “So you took a tumble, huh? How are you doing?”

  “I’ve had better days,” she said. “But I’ve also had worse.” Aunt Helen was always looking at things from a different point of view. “How about you?”

  I wanted to talk about Eva's interest in the newspaper, but I knew the time wasn’t right, so I went for the other high-interest topic.

  “I had a date today.”

  “Today?” I had gotten her attention. “Not some lowlife, I hope?”

  “No, ma’am, a lawyer from up in Shreveport. Nice guy. Walt King.”

  “Oh, young Walt,” she said. “I know him. Know his daddy quite well. Used to do some work for the paper. He's done lots of legal work for me over the years. Nearly married him when I was a young woman.”

  Helen rarely said anything about her love life. She had never married but had been engaged to a guy who was killed in some sort of farming accident. I was surprised when she continued. “Most people think that Joe Hudson was the love of my life, and that I never married because he got killed. Truth is, Lois, Walt senior was my true love, and darned if he didn’t break up with me and marry someone else. Nice gal, too, but I still don’t know what she had on me.”

  Maybe Helen was on more pain medication than I realized. I patted her hand again. “Well, if he's anything like his son, he's a nice man,” I said. “But he must not be too smart if he let you get away.”

  “You think this will amount to anything?”

  “Oh, who knows? I sort of doubt it. He's a nice guy, but I’m not a Louisiana girl.”

  “So it's true, huh? You are planning to sell the paper.”

  I will never cease to be amazed at how news travels. When people ask to tell me something off-the-record, I want to laugh. A thousand people probably already know it, or will by the time the day is out. “I’m thinking about it, Aunt Helen. That's been the plan all along. What do you think?”

  “Dumbest idea I ever heard. You were made to run this paper. You’ve been better to this place than anything that's happened in years. I can’t even believe you’d ask me about it.”

  I pulled my chair up closer to her bed.

  “It's always been the plan,” I repeated. “You know the terms of the deal. This paper wasn’t cheap, and there's a hefty note over at the bank with my name on it. I need to take care of that.”

  “Oh, that's baloney. It isn’t the money, and you know it. You’re a smart girl, and you could pay that line of credit and take out more and keep it going. You know how that game works. That paper makes good money, too. You’re just running away.”

  I had been subjected to these kinds of tirades from Helen before, and I knew she didn’t feel good. I should probably coddle her.

  “Running away? Running away? Just what is it that I’m supposed to be running away from?” I decided I didn’t want to coddle her.

  “From life, girl,” she said, more gently. “From life. You’ve made more friends in Green in less than a year than lots of people make their whole life. You’ve helped change this place for the better, and you know it. But you’re afraid of letting anyone get too close to you, to commit to sticking around. You’re half scared of failing at the paper, somehow getting deep into debt and not being able to get out. And you’re running from God.”

  “Running from God? I am not running from God. What in the world are you talking about?”

  I was getting increasingly louder, and an aide stuck her head in the door. I lowered my voice. “I am not running from God or from my friends or from anyone. Except I may run from you if you keep at me. Aren’t I supposed to be giving you a sponge bath, or something?”

  “No sponge baths, no chicken broth, and no bedpans,” she said. “But you are running from God. I’ll tell you one thing— you’re going to Nineveh whether you like it or not. So, you can go with good humor or you can keep running. God has a use for you, Miss Lois Barker, and you will not escape, no matter how hard and fast you run.”

  I looked at her, wondering for a moment if she was losing it. “Nineveh?”

  “Yes, Nineveh—where God told Jonah to go. He ran and ran and landed in the belly of a whale and still wound up in Nineveh. One way or another, you’re going to Nineveh.”

  17

  “Thank you to my neighbors in the Caroline community

  who sent me recipes to share with my faithful readers.

  After nearly a decade of laying the groundwork for this

  coup, Sarah Johnson pried her mother's amazing turnip

  green recipe out of her. She calls them the world's finest

  turnip greens because they are. ‘Just serve them with a hot

  pan of cornbread—and don’t expect any leftovers.’”

  — The Green News-Item

  On my third date with Walt, I figured out how Lee Roy was stealing from the paper.

  I made a picnic lunch for us, and we went out to the state park on one of those beautiful Louisiana autumn days that I had fallen in love with. We were eating sandwiches and talking when a flashy boat came by at high speed, with people yelling and laughing. I noticed an older man in an aluminum fishing boat shaking his head as the big boat's wake rocked him back and forth.

  “What kind of an idiot goes that fast when people are close by?” I asked.

  “A rich one, I’d say,” Walt said. “That's a pretty expensive toy right there.”

  As the boat circled around, I noticed none other than Lee Roy Hicks himself at the wheel. “That's Lee Roy. Now how does he afford that boat on his salary?” I said, asking myself as much as Walt. Lee Roy was well paid by Green standards, but hardly made enough money to support his lifestyle, now that I thought about it. He lived in a fancy house out at Mossy Bend, drove a very nice car, and was always dressed in expensive, name-brand clothes. I had wondered how many of those fancy golf shirts he owned.

  Suddenly an advertisement from the Friday paper popped into my mind, a full-page color ad for Lowrey Marine, a big regional boat dealer. Lee Roy had been ecstatic when the contract on Lowrey's came through. “The Lowreys are going to be great customers,” he said, smilin
g more than I had seen him smile in months. “I’ve been trying to get their business for years.”

  But when I had looked at the financials for that day's paper, the revenue from Lowrey's was low. I asked Lee Roy about it, and he gave me a complicated story about how they signed a contract and would pay higher rates later on. “I wanted to hook them good, so I worked with them on the front end,” he said. “They’re going to add at least twenty grand to our bottom line this next year.”

  Suddenly some of the gaps in the numbers came together for me. Had Lee Roy cut better deals for certain advertisers, giving himself a percentage along the way? He was well liked by many of the businesspeople in town, a loud, friendly guy who dressed well and loved to tell a good joke. He was very close to Major Wilson and the McCullers and had not forgiven me yet for the stories we were running and never missed an opportunity to complain about the newsroom.

  He didn’t like me, and I had been especially suspicious of him since Aunt Helen had suggested he might be stealing. But I could never put it all together.

  Resisting the urge to hop up and rush to the paper, I tried to focus on Walt. With a complex theft scheme unwinding in my brain, that was difficult.

  Even though we had been out several times, I had not invited Walt to my house yet. The drive out to Route 2 made his trip down to Green even longer, and keeping him in town kept him at arm's length. Meeting in the newspaper parking lot was easy.

  He seemed surprised and a little hurt, though, when I wrapped up our date early and asked him to take me back to work. “I’m sorry, Walt, but I just have so much going on. I need to go over some records at the paper and take care of a few things.” As soon as he drove off, I ran into my office and started digging through files. The clues were pretty obvious. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t picked up on this before.

  I called Iris Jo. “I’m so sorry for bothering you at home on a weekend, but is there any way you can come to work for a while?” This was a woman who had worked for the Big Boys for years, so she didn’t seem surprised at all by my request. When she arrived, I was practically dancing around my office, in excitement, anger, and nervousness.

  “You sell the paper?” she asked in a somber tone.

  “What? No, no, no,” I said. Sooner rather than later I was going to have to come clean with all of these people who cared about this paper, this town, and me. “It's something else, something big. I need you to promise me you won’t mention it to anyone, not anyone. Promise me.”

  “I promise. You know I don’t talk about the paper's business, Lois,” she said, sounding a little hurt.

  She was right. She wouldn’t tell any of my secrets. She was loyal, honest, and she liked me. “I know, and I’m sorry if I implied otherwise. I’d trust you with my life, but I’m not sure what we’re going to find out.”

  By now she was totally confused.

  “Have you ever wondered if Lee Roy was stealing from the paper?”

  Her eyes got big, and she hesitated. “A time or two. But I never could pinpoint it. Why?”

  I outlined my theory to her.

  “That makes sense in a weird way,” she said. “I can see where he might not mind taking money from you since it's pretty clear he doesn’t like you. But he's tight with Chuck and Dub. Do you think this started when they were still here?”

  “I’m not sure. I need your help to put it all together.” For the next six hours we pulled invoices for advertisers and compared them to ads that had run in the newspaper for the past six months or so. Consistently we found ads that did not jibe with their bills. As I had expected, the primary recipient of Lee Roy's special ad rates was Major and his real estate business and car dealership. On the other hand, Eva always paid top rate, and her bills coincided perfectly with what she ran.

  The amount of money the newspaper had been shorted was considerable.

  “If this doesn’t beat anything I’ve ever seen,” Iris Jo said, running her hands through her hair. “I should have picked up on this. I am so sorry. I could have saved you a lot of money. This was my job, and I didn’t catch it.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Iris. You had no concrete evidence Lee Roy was stealing, and he chose a pretty slick way to do it. How could you notice money was missing if it never came to the books in the first place?”

  “What are we going to do?” I liked the way she said “we” instead of “you.” I knew she would back me up, no matter how much fur might fly.

  “Well, we’re going to act like nothing is going on, that we’re cleaning out old files. If you’re up to it, tomorrow afternoon we’ll look at some more back editions and try to figure out when this started. Then I’ll probably need to talk to Duke and to Walt, see how to proceed legally.”

  Before we headed home, we grabbed a quick bite to eat at the Cotton Boll and tried to chitchat, but neither of us could quit thinking about Lee Roy, the missing money and the challenges ahead. As we parted, Iris Jo gave me a hug. “You know you’re welcome at church tomorrow if you want to come. We’d love to have you.”

  “Thanks,” I said and climbed into my car, exhausted and wired.

  When I got home, there was a medium-sized dog lying on my front porch. Cautiously climbing out of the car, I headed for the back door. The dog growled and whined and its tail thumped the porch. I looked closer, trying to figure out what was going on. It looked like one of Chris Craig's dogs … Kramer, was it? No, Kramer was the big, lean dog. Mannix? Yes, that was it. Mannix.

  “Hey, fellow, it's okay. You’re Mannix, aren’t you?” I tried to soothe the dog without getting too close. “It's okay. What's wrong with you, big guy? Are you hurt?”

  The dog didn’t get up when I walked around and into the house, instead giving a halfhearted bark and a whimper. I, on the other hand, let out a loud sigh. This was just what I needed tonight. Digging around for the tiny Green phonebook, I found the coach's number and dialed it, only to get no answer. I walked to the front of the house and used the screen door as a barrier between the dog and me, just in case he decided to bite. He whimpered again, gave a short growl and put his head down. His tail was still wagging, and I thought that was a good sign.

  I dug out my emergency flashlight and shone it on him. Sure enough, there was a big smear of blood on his back, and his fur was matted where it had soaked through and dried. I had no idea what to do. I was deathly afraid of dogs, worn out, did not know how to go about getting this one treated, and was certain that my top-ranked employee was stealing me blind.

  Desperate, I looked up a veterinary clinic in town and called. They suggested I carry the animal to my car and bring him in for a check up.

  I put a towel in the back seat and nervously approached the dog. “Easy, Mannix. I’m going to help you, buddy.” The dog whimpered, but did not growl. I gingerly picked him up and carried him to the car. When I laid him down on the seat, he growled, but it was feeble and not very threatening.

  I drove by Chris's house, hoping he would have come home, but the place was dark. I even turned around and drove back by a couple of his ponds, but didn’t see him.

  A nice young woman answered the night bell at the animal clinic and came out to help me carry Mannix. A quick check showed the dog had a deep laceration on his back. “I’m not sure if he's been hit by a car or gotten hung on something sharp,” she said. “It’ll require a closer look. He definitely needs stitches, but I don’t think we’ll have to do surgery.”

  I signed the paperwork, hoping I was doing the right thing. I noticed people out in the country were crazy about their dogs—but treated them differently than city people treated theirs. They let them run around in the yard, and they didn’t seem to baby them so much. What if Chris thought that taking his dog to the vet was a stupid idea?

  When they took the dog back to the treatment area, I called Chris again and again, using the phone on the sign-in counter. Finally, I tried Iris Jo and told her what had happened.

  “He just left here frantic about Mannix,” sh
e said. “He’ll be so relieved. I’ll let him know.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Chris rushed into the clinic, and I quickly updated him. He came across the waiting room and gave me a big, tight hug. “Thank you so much, Lois. I don’t know how I can ever repay you. Thank you. He's probably sort of a dumb mutt to you, but I love that animal, really all three of them. I didn’t think he could get out of that fence. I feel terrible.”

  “Well, I think I’ll head on back home. I’m glad everything worked out.”

  He stood up and hugged me again. That man could hug. He was a big, tall guy, sort of a forty-year-old version of the young athletes he worked with. “I owe you big time. I’ll buy you dinner or something soon.”

  “You don’t owe me, Chris. That's what neighbors do for each other. And besides you cleaned up my yard and didn’t even take credit for it.”

  I opened the clinic door. “Well, I guess I do have one favor to ask. Stop by or give me a call in the next few days and let me know how Mannix is doing.”

  Driving home, I didn’t feel quite so tired. I felt good about tackling my fears and getting the dog to the vet. Truthfully, I was somewhat touched by Chris's gratitude and the two warm hugs. Maybe this was a guy I could be friends with, since he lived just down the road. Of course, I wouldn’t be here much longer, but maybe we could stay in touch.

  I thought of him again just before I fell asleep and wondered what his wife had been like.

  The next morning I overslept and woke up with that weird feeling where you know something is wrong but can’t quite remember what it is.

  Immediately it hit me.

  I had uncovered Lee Roy's illegal actions at the newspaper and had to deal with them. No way could I leave that for the new owner. That brought to mind other topics always hovering near the surface of my brain—Eva's interest in the paper and the Asheville job. If I didn’t give Eva a shot at The News-Item, I’d be cheating her in a way—and possibly even the people of Green. She knew how to run things and make money. But wouldn’t she also make a great mayor? What if I kept dragging my heels on Asheville? They were impatient already.