Speed of Light (Marauders #3.5)

by Lina Andersson

  He’d mentioned Kathleen because she was the first woman he’d thought was worth mentioning, and she was definitely the first woman he’d been seeing that he could imagine introducing to his mom.

  o0o

  Mace waited for Kathleen outside the City Hall later that night. She’d texted him earlier to let him know she was going there for a council meeting, and that he if he was up for fucking her frustrations away afterwards she’d be very grateful. He thought that sounded like an awesome idea, so he’d decided to wait for her outside to make sure it happened.

  When she came walking down the stairs, he couldn’t help smiling. She wore a white tank top, black cargo pants, and an MC jacket that looked way too warm.

  “Otters,” she said in a low voice when she came closer to him. “They talked about otters raping seals in Monterey Bay for about twenty minutes. I mean, why the fuck would they talk about that?”

  “I have no idea. Why did they?”

  She shook her head with a sigh. “I’m sorely tempted to write that, though. Just to see Harold’s face when he reads it.”

  “Promise me to film him if you do. I wanna see that, too.” He was standing with his arms crossed over his chest and watched her going through her massive bag to find her car keys. “Did anyone notice your late arrival this morning?”

  “Nope. I was still the first one to arrive.”

  “And I’m guessing they’ve all left hours ago, since you’ve worked for twelve hours by now?”

  “Probably. Ah, there they are.” She unlocked the car. “I have to write down some notes while I remember, but you can follow me home and wait while I do it if you want to.”

  “I seem to remember promising to fuck away your frustration, and I’m a man of my word.”

  “That makes you an endangered species,” she muttered and got into her car.

  He didn’t follow behind her. Instead he rode past her with a wave and waited for her outside her house. She didn’t comment on it; she just smiled and unlocked the door, leaving it open behind her.

  She disappeared into the room she used as her home office, and he made himself a cup of coffee while he waited for her. He picked up a newspaper from the counter and went outside for a smoke. Kathleen subscribed to more newspapers than the local library, and he’d asked her if she really read all of them. She’d looked at him with a raised eyebrow and a lopsided smile, and he wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. He assumed it meant she did, though. Or that she at least read the sections she was interested in.

  When she’d been gone for an hour, he decided to go get her.

  Her office was empty besides a desk, a chair, and the file cabinet. She turned around when he entered.

  “I’m just about done,” she said. “Figured I might as well do the most of it tonight. That way I don’t have to think about molesting otters tomorrow.”

  “You should put something on the walls,” he said, and for the first time ever he saw her blush. “What?”

  “No. Just… You should’ve seen what my home office used to look like. When I had actual stories to write.” She shook her head while she chewed her lower lip. “Forget it. I’m done here. Are you hungry?”

  He laughed. Not only because even if he was hungry, whatever she was offering to eat wouldn’t be enough. But also because of her comments about the state of her home office had calmed him down. It hadn’t sounded like something she’d said to throw him off, and she’d even sounded embarrassed about it, but he assumed he could be pretty fucking sure she wasn’t working on her big story about the Marauders.

  “Not to knock your microwave cooking, but do you have any menus so I can order something?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Excuse Me?

  o0o

  KATHLEEN STARED AT THE screen in front of her. The words she’d written felt insulting. “We’re hoping for a good year for Mrs. Johnson and her strawberries.” In this case, ‘strawberries’ weren’t even a euphemism or the name of a group of people. It was fucking strawberries, and Kathleen sighed.

  It wasn’t so much what she was writing that pissed her off, it was her wondering what the hell she was doing with Mace. And she wasn’t sure which version she found most disturbing: That she was fucking a man for a story, or that she was holding off on the story because she liked fucking the man. But at the same time she knew it was neither of the two. There was no story for her, and she liked Mace not because of what he was, but despite it. He gave her a wide birth, just as she needed it, but at the same time he was getting closer; he wasn’t letting her slip away.

  The day before, Evans had called her, and Kathleen hadn’t jumped at the chance to find out more. If she was lucky, the detective could have something good for her, and normally that would’ve meant she dropped everything to find out what it could be. But instead she was writing about Mrs. Johnson’s strawberries.

  “Jesus Christ!” Harold muttered behind her. “Can someone give me Martha’s number?”

  “Out of line again?” Glenn asked.

  “From the second bloody paragraph and onward it’s just pure speculation, and some of it about the school librarian’s sexuality.” He sighed. “We need younger writers. Half of Martha’s columns are about people who’ve been dead for over a decade. The rest are about how sex is corrupting our community. I might not be down with the kids, but I fucking know this isn’t what they want to read. Hell, I don’t want to read this. The only younger columnist I have is a boy who’s twenty going on fifty.”

  Martha was one of the community correspondents who wrote columns for the newspaper. Just like most local weeklies, the G.O. was dependent on those who wrote on voluntarily basis for them. They had a number of them, and all but one were long past retirement. It was the same thing with the Letters to the Editor page. Most of the contributors there were old, and even the ones that were anonymous were obviously written by senior citizens.

  The guy who was twenty going on fifty had so far written three columns, and they had all been about rare stamps from Europe. Kathleen had almost fallen asleep while editing them, and she doubted he was the guy who could bring in the young readers. She spun her chair around so she could look at Harold and Dan at the same time.

  “Why don’t you get one of the jocks from the basketball team to write a column, Dan?” she suggested.

  Blair nodded. “That would make it cool and might attract others who can actually write.”

  “You saying the jocks can’t write?” Dan asked Blair.

  “I’m saying that the star wasn’t able to spell my name correctly when he handed me a note with his phone number on it,” she answered with a big, fake smile. “Point is, we could help him. I think it’s a good idea.”

  “It is,” Harold nodded. “If we could make it happen, but it’s not like I haven’t tried. They give me one or two columns, and then they give up. We need to figure out a way to keep them writing.”

  “We had one of those thirty years ago,” Glenn started, and Kathleen had to bite her cheeks when Blair rolled her eyes. Glenn always pointed out that things had been done a couple of decades ago. “He didn’t last long either.”

  “We could try to combine it with a few features on more… modern subjects,” Blair suggested in a very diplomatic tone. “I mean, to not only have a popular kid writing, but to try to make the numbers with his columns more directed at a younger audience. That way it wouldn’t be completely geeky to write for us.”

  “I don’t know…” Glenn started, and Kathleen decided to back Blair because it was a good idea, and there were ways to do it while still compromising with those things she already knew Glenn would complain about.

  “We could keep the family pages and letters to the editor as they are. The sports would be the same, too. Those are the pages the older audience like the best anyway. That way they’ll have their favorites intact, but we could try to make the rest more modern.”

  Harold scratched his belly while staring at the ceiling. Then he looked at Kathlee
n and Blair. “Give me a few suggestions by next Tuesday.” He turned to Dan. “Talk to that guy… what’s his name? James?”

  “I don’t know if he’ll be up for it,” Dan tried.

  “I can ask,” Blair smiled. “I think I can persuade him.”

  Kathleen laughed. “Blair, let’s go for a cup of coffee and talk about this.”

  “Thank you,” Blair said when they’d walked half the block from the newspaper to the closest café. “For backing me.”

  “It’s a good idea.”

  “I was thinking about doing something about that theater group, The Green Kittens. I’d like to encourage them. We have a lot of sports and handicraft, but not much in the line of plays and art,” Blair said, and once she’d started talking there was no end to it. She’d obviously thought a lot about it, and she kept talking for thirty minutes straight. By the end of her monologue, they were sitting at Espresso House with a latte each. “There’s a girl I met a while ago who designs and sews clothes and sells them online. She’s got a small office above a Chinese restaurant, and she shares it with a girl who does jewelry. We have a lot of young entrepreneurs here, and I think they should be noticed.”

  Kathleen smiled. “They should. This is really good Blair. I think talking to these people will give us other ideas, too. We’ll have enough for a couple of issues, at least.”

  “I hope Harold lets us do this.”

  “I think he will. He knows we need to attract new readers. The ones we have now are on the verge of dying, and the younger aren’t subscribing, yet.”

  Blair giggled. She seemed eager, and Kathleen could see why. This was a big change, and it had been Blair’s idea. From what she could tell, it was something Blair had thought about a lot, and if it took off it could be a huge boost of confidence for her. Hopefully enough to give Blair the push to get her out of Greenville.

  o0o

  “When are you gonna get a TV?” Mace asked one night while they were in bed.

  “I don’t need one. I haven’t had one in years. If I want to watch something, I watch it online. There’s a TV in the newsroom, and it’s on all the damn time.”

  He turned towards her and puller he closer to him. “And if you want to watch a movie?”

  “Then I watch it on my computer.” She threw her leg over him. “You missing TV when you’re here?”

  “More wondering if you’re even gonna try to make this house into a home. The only personal thing you’ve got is the file cabinet in your office and that rocking chair over there.”

  “The chair was here when I moved in.”

  He laughed and gave her a kiss. “How about pictures, then? You don’t have any pictures of family members.”

  “I know what they look like. Why are we even talking about this?” She hoped that would be enough for him to understand that she didn’t want to talk about her family. They might be getting closer, but they weren’t close enough for the talk about her family yet.

  “Because,” he said and got up to lean on his elbow, hovering slightly over her, “the amount of personal stuff at your place makes me wonder if you’re gonna be here the next time I knock on your door. Looks like you’re about to pack your car and leave at any second.”

  She smiled, but he was more right than he knew. It wasn’t something that was unique for her life in Greenville, though. Kathleen had never liked clutter and stuff, and she’d never felt the need to put up pictures of her family and friends; she had no interest in art or decorative items in that way. She liked art, but she preferred the real deal, and she couldn’t afford that. She didn’t even have any books; instead she borrowed them at the library. The simple reason for it was that she put no value in stuff.

  She grabbed Mace’s beard braid and pulled him closer to her. “As long as my coffee maker is still here, I’m not going anywhere. And the file cabinet weighs a ton, so I’m gonna need your help to get it out of here when I take off.”

  “Okay.”

  She gave him a kiss. “Besides, you have my number. You can get hold of me even if I try to run off.”

  “That’s true.”

  He lay back down again with a sigh, resting his head on his arm, and he kept his other arm draped over her hip. Apparently he was done, and she smiled. He asked the questions most ended up asking her, like about the lack of personal things, but as opposed to most, he accepted her answers without comments about it being strange or weird. Kathleen had been told she was strange, weird, cold, insensitive, and everything even remotely related to those things since she was a kid. Most had tried to ask her ‘why’ in blunt attempts to ‘fix’ her. She didn’t need to be ‘fixed,’ and she didn’t want to be. It was just what she was like, and Mace seemed okay with it. Often he even seemed to like it, and that was just one of the sides of him she was growing very fond of.

  o0o

  Harold was pleased with their ideas. More than pleased, he was eager about them. The only one who didn’t seem to like it was Glenn, but then Glenn liked things the way they’d always been. He’d been truly upset when they changed the streetlights outside the G.O. and any changes to ‘his’ beloved paper didn’t go over well.

  Kathleen was packing her bag to go and interview The Green Kittens. Blair was supposed to do it, but she’d called in sick that morning and asked Kathleen to do it instead. Apparently she’d cancelled on them once before, and she didn’t want to do it again. Kathleen had agreed, since she’d been pretty impressed with their version of Medea. The acting skills varied a lot among the actresses, but the girl playing Medea had been good, and the changes they’d made to the play had made it clear they’d done their homework. They knew what the play was about, and she mostly liked that they seemed to love Medea as much as she did. They’d picked up on tiny details and had managed to truly make the audience feel for Medea despite what she did. Part of that was probably, again, that the girl who played her had been fantastic, and Kathleen was actually a bit eager to find out what they had planned to do next.

  “Jonathan, are you free to take pictures?” Kathleen asked, but he shook his head.

  “No. Take one of my cameras, though,” he said and flipped the page on the paper he was reading.

  “Do you actually have something else to do, or can’t you just be bothered?” she asked.

  “The game,” he answered without looking at her, probably referring to some sport activity she wasn’t aware was happening. “I need to be there in fifteen.”

  Kathleen picked up a camera and left without saying goodbye. She’d never been able to get Jonathan to take pictures for anything she was doing. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take pictures, but she preferred to have them taken while she was doing the interview rather than before or after. Most people tensed when they had a huge camera shoved in their face, so pictures taken while they were talking tended to be better. That was especially true with teenage girls.

  And twenty minutes later she really, really wished Jonathan had been there. Eight giggling teenage girls weren’t that easy to take natural-looking pictures of even under the best of circumstances. If they weren’t pouting, they were laughing or pushing out their tiny tits in what could only be considered an obscene manner. Finally she gave up.

  “I’m done,” she smiled. “Let’s get to the actual interview.”

  After talking to them for about twenty minutes, she was even more impressed by them. They were smart and very aware young girls. Somewhere in the middle of the interview, a pretty blonde laughed, and said,

  “It’s a bit like the opposite of what theater was for a long time, when they had men playing all the parts. We have girls doing all of them, since it’s pretty damn hard to find plays for an all-women cast. Besides, that never stopped them before, since they even had male leads for Medea.”

  It was the girl who’d played Medea, and Kathleen had reacted when the blonde had given her name, Eliza Baxter. She assumed this was the president of the Marauders’ daughter, but she hadn’t asked. That wasn’t why she w
as there, and she doubted it would’ve been of any use anyway. This was just a sixteen-year-old girl who was really eager and proud about what she and her friends were doing.

  “Also,” another girl interjected, “it’s kind of fun to be a guy. That’s what it’s about—to pretend, and pretending to be a different sex is taking it a step further. And I like stuffing my pants with socks,” she admitted with a loud laugh.

  The next play they had planned was one about Medusa’s origin, who she was before she became a monster, and from what Kathleen could see, it was really interesting. She had decided to stay behind and take pictures while they were rehearsing, and the girls all agreed to that. It took them a while to forget she was there, but once they did, she managed to take some really nice pictures of them. She stayed for the full hour. It was fun to watch them, too, and she was definitely going to make sure to see the play when it premiered.

  Once they were done, Eliza jumped down from stage and came up to her.

  “Do you think you could give us copies of your pictures?” she asked.

  “I have to clear it with Harold, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

  Eliza scribbled something down and handed her the note. “This is our email address. We have some pictures on our webpage, but we need more.”

  “I’m not a photographer, so don’t get your hopes up too much.”

  “I’m sure the pictures are betters than our selfies.”

  If the first photo session, where the girls pouted, was any indication of what their selfies looked like, Kathleen was sure her pictures would be better.

  “Probably. I’ll make sure to send the paper’s photographer to the premier, too. That way you’ll get some when you’re in full costume.”

  When she came home, she uploaded the pictures and wrote down most of the interview and also listened to it a few times. She’d dreaded doing the interview when Blair called her. No matter how much she’d liked the play, she had little patience with schoolgirls, but she’d liked them. The enthusiasm for what they were doing and how much fun they had was almost intoxicating, even when she listened to the recording afterwards. Kathleen couldn’t remember the last time she’d been that excited about anything, and she couldn’t help wondering when she’d lost it. There had definitely been moments in her life when she’d felt the way The Green Kittens sounded. It might be that a certain amount of youthful naivety was required to feel that way, and that it was lost as one got older and more… jaded. Or it could just be that Kathleen was well aware that she was at the very lowest in her career and had no solid plan for how to rectify it.