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  With that as her farewell, she turned from Doug Shaun and continued the trek to her car. It wasn’t far, only a block to the lot hidden away from the pristine lines of the green square, but now it seemed like such a distance. It should, Nell thought; I’ve traveled to so many emotional places since I left the office of the Crier. She fumbled for her car keys.

  “Nell, are you okay?”

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Marion beside her. They had arranged to meet for coffee today—Nell had lost that in the tumult of what had just happened. A tumble of emotions washed through her—fear that she hadn’t noticed Marion approaching, then anger at the fear and how necessary it had become, and finally relief that it was Marion, a friend, with her hand on Nell’s shoulder.

  “I didn’t get beaten up,” was all she replied.

  “No, but you came awfully close.”

  “I was scared,” Nell softly admitted. It was only now that she could comprehend the scope of her fear. Boyce Jenkins had come close to hurting her, even killing her. She felt her eyes tear up. I’m not going to cry, Nell willed herself. One tear still escaped. She hurriedly bushed it away.

  “It’s okay to cry,” Marion said, her hand still on Nell’s arm.

  “Not when you’re a mother and the editor-in-chief,” Nell said, wiping away another tear.

  “No kids or newspaper staff around.”

  Nell wiped away a few more tears. “Thanks, Marion. It’s good to be with someone who doesn’t think that just because I didn’t get the crap beaten out of me everything is okay.”

  “Let me drive you home,” Marion offered as Nell opened her car door.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You just said that you’re not,” Marion replied matter-of-factly. “Let me drive.”

  “How will you get your car?” Nell asked as she fished the car keys out of her purse.

  “My brother Rob is in town. I can call him to come get me.”

  Or Kate could do it, Nell thought but didn’t say. She wasn’t supposed to know that, and now didn’t seem like the time to blurt it out. She handed her keys to Marion. “Thanks.”

  Marion took the keys and took over. She opened the passenger door for Nell.

  As the librarian slid into the driver’s seat, Nell said, “My kids. Where are my kids?” She was thinking aloud. “Lizzie’s at a slumber party and went there with her best friend Leslie, who will bring her home. Josh’s on a camping trip and he’ll call if he needs to be picked up … I hope he hasn’t called yet.” She glanced at her watch. Only fifteen minutes had passed since she’d walked out of the Crier’s office. Can so much really happen in fifteen minutes? she wondered. She answered her question, an answer she now knew too well—it had taken only a few seconds for Thom to die.

  Other than mentioning directions, they talked little on the way home. Nell let some of the pent-up tears out and Marion was sensible enough to just let her cry.

  No children were home, and there was no blinking light on the answering machine indicating that Nell had been a neglectful mother.

  “What works for you?” Marion asked. “Coffee, tea, something stronger?”

  “I have a decent bottle of pinot noir.”

  “Sit, let me do this,” Marion told her. She took the wine bottle Nell had just taken out of a cabinet, then pointed at a chair at the kitchen table. “Just tell me where your corkscrew and glasses are.”

  Nell felt a surge of relief at being taken care of. In the past few months she’d had so many burdens of care—Josh, Lizzie, Thom’s mother, the staff of the Crier—that even these minor moments of being cared for had been denied her. She and Thom had traded care of each other, and he was gone.

  Marion sat a glass of wine in front of Nell, then joined her at the table.

  Nell raised her glass and said, “To … friendship.”

  “Cheers,” Marion replied, touching her glass to Nell’s.

  They didn’t talk about what had happened. Nell didn’t feel able to yet, it was still too raw and emotional for her. She tried not to think aloud; she preferred to have time for reflection and to know that she’d examined not just the immediate emotions and ideas, but also the underlying ones, the consequences beyond the consequences. She knew that she would, at some point, like to talk things over with Marion, who’d lived in Pelican Bay all her life, to see if the librarian’s reaction was similar to her own at Chief Shaun’s rational for the fight.

  Instead they talked of books and covered the ground that new friends cover.

  Josh and Lizzie both came home after a while and seemed to find nothing odd about Marion visiting. It was just grown-up stuff and couldn’t compete with Lizzie wanting to get on the computer to email the girls she’d just spent the night with or Josh wanting to compare the plant specimens he’d gathered with the books in his room. Nell gave his handful of leaves a quick glance to assure that her budding scientist wasn’t going to learn how to identify poison ivy the hard way. She was somewhat relieved that neither of her children sensed that anything more than Mom and a friend having a chat in the kitchen was going on. Even the wine bottle didn’t give them away.

  Marion even ended up staying for dinner, helping in the kitchen and allowing Lizzie to escape dreaded dish duty.

  As she watched Marion scrape plates, Nell wondered if she was stealing her away from an evening with Kate, but it wasn’t a question she could ask yet.

  She resolved to make a point in the near future to get together with Marion at a time and place where they could talk—she could ask to reschedule the coffee date and do it then. Nell wanted Marion to know that she didn’t have to hide her true relationship with Kate from her. She suspected that the hidden life was responsible for some of Marion’s earlier reluctance in accepting the coffee date.

  Her new friend left a little after nine. Nell was strict about the ten o’clock bedtime, telling Josh and Lizzie that it was a school night. But her real reason was that, with Marion gone, the tiredness of the day hit her and she needed to go to bed, even if her children didn’t. As she lay down, she heard rustlings and murmurs from the living room, clues enough to tell her that Lizzie had sneaked back to the computer. Nell was too tired to get up and again send her daughter to bed, but decided that Lizzie would get no snooze button mercy in the morning.

  nine

  Monday morning at the office usually started with a story conference. Since the Crier was a weekly paper, published on Fridays, at times Nell missed the adrenaline and “do or die, write now” pace of a daily. But this wasn’t one of those times. The last thing she wanted to do was try to write—or edit—a story about yesterday’s events on the town square. She had a myriad of choices and none was satisfactory. She could just ignore it, but her journalistic standards quelled that; a just-fired police officer threatening the editor of the paper and then having a fistfight with the chief of police, was, by Pelican Bay standards, a major story. Even in a major city it would be a big story—a fistfight between two police officers in Jackson Square would certainly make the front page of the New Orleans paper, she thought. Nell didn’t want to write it herself, though, partly because she didn’t want to relive it enough to write about it. Also, as a participant, however unwillingly, she knew she had no journalistic objectivity.

  If Jacko weren’t already covering the murder of Rayburn Gautier, she could give the story to him and have done with it. But to give him two big stories in a row might be such a blatant act of favoritism that Carrie would retreat permanently into her passive-aggressive persona. In their discussion right now, she was going into great detail about the burden that covering the city council meeting and the school board meeting would cause her.

  “I just don’t know the names of the councilmen like Jacko does …” she was complaining.

  “I can give you a seating chart. They always take the same seats,” Jacko offered.

&n
bsp; “They’d probably switch just to mess me up.”

  If she wanted to attempt to be fair and equal, Nell knew, she should give the fistfight story to Carrie, but she could not bring herself to play witness to the young woman’s fumbling interview questions. Nor did she trust herself not to get revenge when editing.

  “You know how chauvinistic those councilmen are,” Carrie continued. “They accept you and cooperate with you, Jacko, because you’re a man, but with me it’s hey, little lady, come sit on my lap…”

  Nell sighed quietly. What Carrie was saying was true—the city council weren’t men who could manage even fifth place in the most tepid feminist award—but Nell could find little sisterly solidarity with Carrie using their sexism as a way to avoid an assignment that she didn’t want.

  Dolan, who as business manager got to skip these meetings, stuck his head in her office door and broke into Carrie’s monologue. “Nell, there’s someone here to see you. Says he can’t wait.”

  Carrie pursed her lips, miffed at being cut off. When she first started working at the paper, Dolan had been polite; however, now he, like everyone else, had learned that waiting for a natural break in one of Carrie’s “the world is unfair to me” diatribes could take a long time.

  Nell recognized the man coming up behind Dolan. She’d never met him before, but had watched him more than enough times on his TV commercials: “Deals on Wheels! Feel like some red-hot deals on some red-hot wheels? Jenkins Automotive Superstore for real deals on the best wheels, an army of salesmen at your command”—with the camera showing a long line of not-so-Army-trained salesmen in uniform. “I order my men to give you the best deals,” ended the ad, with a close-up of Wendell in a supremely braided and ribboned general’s outfit. Why does my brain remember this crap, Nell wondered, annoyed at both knowing the jingle and seeing the man in her doorway.

  Wendell Jenkins, Boyce Jenkins’s father, wanted to see her.

  “We’ll continue this meeting later,” she said.

  “But—” Carrie started.

  “Later,” Nell instructed.

  Jacko had already taken the hint and was out the door. Carrie followed him at her wounded pace.

  “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Jenkins?” Nell asked.

  He expressed no surprise that she knew who he was. Nell was somewhat relieved to notice that Jacko and Dolan were hanging out only as far away as politeness dictated, clearly visible to both her and Jenkins through the glass in her office door.

  Wendell Jenkins sat down heavily, a big man like his son, bigger with the weight of good living and his years.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” Nell said, “you didn’t have to come to apologize for your son. He’s an adult and he makes his own choices.” She had no illusions that Wendell Jenkins had any thought of apologizing for his son—she expected he was there to attempt to browbeat her into dropping the charges. Nell had no intention of making it easy for him.

  Jenkins just stared at her for a moment. He obviously had a prepared speech and Nell had just forced him to abandon it.

  “Well, Mrs. McGraw, you’re right, he does make his choices.” The frenetic sales pitch voice of the TV was replaced by the drawl of a man accustomed to being listened to. “But he’s a young boy. Seems a shame to ruin his life over one stupid, hot-headed moment.”

  “That ‘hot-headed’ moment nearly ended with me being physically assaulted, Mr. Jenkins,” she replied. “The only reason your son didn’t batter me was because someone bigger and stronger intervened.”

  “But nothing happened. He didn’t hit you. Seems to me the outcome is what should count.”

  “Your son didn’t choose that outcome.”

  “He wouldn’t have really hurt you. He was just angry and wanted to scare you.”

  “Congratulate him, because he succeeded. He convinced me that I was about to be beaten and end up in the hospital. Or the morgue. I was scared that my children would be left motherless because of your son’s hot-headed moment.”

  “Look, all that boy ever wanted to be was a policeman. He’s lost that. Isn’t that punishment enough?”

  “Clearly, if his reaction to stress is to turn into a renegade bully, then he has no business in law enforcement.”

  “What do you want, Nell? A car? I’ll give you one for exactly what it cost me. Not a penny in dealer markup.”

  Nell wasn’t surprised that Wendell Jenkins wasn’t really responding to what she was saying. But he was oblivious to the anger behind her words. He’d completely misread her stubbornness, thinking it a veiled request for a bribe.

  “I don’t need a car, Mr. Jenkins. Mine is in perfect working order and I can’t see replacing it anytime soon.”

  “You want me to just give you a car for free?” He still thought he could bribe her, just at a higher cost than he wanted to pay.

  “I want you to stop preventing your son from ever feeling the consequences of his actions. If he gets away with it this time, next time he may do more than just ‘scare’ someone. It’s past time he learn that Daddy can’t always cover for him.”

  This time, Jenkins understood what she meant. His face took on an angry purple-red hue. “You’ll regret this, Nell McGraw.”

  “How? Are you threatening me the way your son did?”

  “You’re a hard-assed Yankee bitch, aren’t you?” he hissed, the polite drawl gone.

  “Good day, Mr. Jenkins.”

  “My son goes to jail, you’ll wish you’d found it in your heart to be a little forgiving.”

  Nell motioned to Dolan and Jacko. Might as well give them a chance to be heroes, she thought. And, she had to admit, signal to Jenkins that she had some protection of her own.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the two men now just outside the doorway. He stood and angrily pushed his chair back, then thrust his way past Jacko and Dolan, who did nothing to block his exit and needed no pushing to let him leave.

  For a moment the three of them watched Jenkins’s retreating back. Then Dolan said, “Guess when I buy the wife a new car, I’m going to need to head over to Biloxi to do it.”

  “Can we get him for bribery?” Jacko asked.

  “I’m not a public official, I don’t count,” Nell replied.

  “It’s a tradition for Pelican Bay Crier editors,” Dolan said. “They can’t be bought and they drive old cars.”

  Jacko glanced from Dolan to Nell, still young enough not to be sure whether Dolan was just spinning a yarn.

  These are my friends, Nell suddenly thought. No, not deep-unburden-your-soul friends, but good, kind dependable men. She’d been so lost in grief in recent month that they were just Dolan and Jacko, fixtures in the office she said hello and goodbye to. She’d walked through their small moments of kindness, the times when one or the other of them stayed late only because she did, talked to Josh or Lizzie while she was busy, left tuna salad sandwiches on her desk when she was working through lunch—they didn’t ask, they just did it.

  “Speaking of buying,” Nell said, “why don’t we head across the street to Sara’s and let me buy you a cup of coffee? We can listen to Dolan create more stories about Crier editors.”

  “Great! I could use some coffee,” Jacko said. Clearly breakfast wasn’t an important part of his day.

  Dolan smiled and nodded in agreement. Also, Nell felt, in approval. When Thom was alive, they’d often gone across the street for coffee, or out for the special Friday catfish dinner at TJ’s or other “jaunts into the real world,” as Thom had called them. Some of it was to discuss business, but most of the time it was just to be together. Since his death, Nell had come to the office, taken care of business, and gone home to her children. The unscheduled moments had been too threatening, and listening to jokes and banter, relaxing over coffee, had been beyond her.

  So they hadn’t gone out, and had gotten into the habit of not going out. Thi
s was the first time since Thom’s death that Nell had suggested one of their “real world” ventures.

  Dolan had been with the paper for almost twenty years, Nell reminded herself. He’d been hired by Thom’s father. It was more a part of his life than of hers, and he’d patiently waited for her to do something as simple as suggest coffee.

  She linked her arms in theirs. She and Dolan knew how big a change this was.

  They were a happy trio in the coffee shop. Dolan told stories of times gone by, of holding flashlights on the typewriter Thom’s father was pounding a story out on, a hurricane having taken away the power but, by golly, they had a paper to get out. Or the alligator in the town square, with Mr. McGraw determined to get a good picture of it and Mrs. McGraw trailing behind, just as determined that her husband wasn’t going to get close enough to risk having a hand or foot nipped off.

  For the moment, Nell could ignore all the threats in her life, from late-night phone calls to used car dealers.

  ten

  At three thirty, Nell found herself at the school, listening to Lizzie explain that she was going over to Jennifer’s house to practice flute together so Nell shouldn’t have come by for her. Josh had gone with Joey to the Boy Scout meeting.

  “I guess I just forgot about your practice with Jennifer today,” Nell told her daughter, giving Lizzie an out in front of her friends but fooling neither of them that Nell’s “forgetfulness” was the issue.

  “I thought I told you …” Lizzie trailed off.

  “No matter. When will you be home?”

  “Well, they’re having tacos tonight and I usually help cut things up …”

  With a glance at Jennifer’s mother to make sure that it really was okay for Lizzie to stay for dinner, Nell got to the point. “Okay, but if you’re not walking through the door at nine, I want a phone call and you’d better be on your way home.”

  “Okay, Mom. Thanks.” With that, Lizzie and Jennifer bounded off toward the car. Jennifer’s mother gave Nell a wave and followed at a more adult pace.