Starknight: Bellefonte Series, Book 1

Chapter 4

The rock, or Breyer, as she tried to get used to thinking, felt bulky in her left shorts pocket, but that was the only place she could carry him other than in her hands. Her right-hand pocket always held her keys. She was walking on the right side, or the north side, of Curtin Street, heading west. The sidewalk on that side of the street was shadier due to the large trees above and the angle of the sunlight. The houses on either side were large Victorians. All she’d seen along Ardell Lane had been the backyards of the houses and the garages that in many cases had housed horses and wagons in the old days.

She ambled along for a while until she remembered she should also drop in at the police station before heading to work and then she started to jog. The rock banged against her hip and she steadied it with her hand.

A long wolf whistle made her glance to her left. An overweight older man was sitting on the other side of Curtin on the steps leading from the sidewalk to a huge, white Victorian. He seemed to be grinning at her. She kept jogging, ransacking her brain to remember the last time a man had whistled at her. She wasn’t sure if that had ever happened before.

The whistle made her uncomfortable for some reason, though. She was an old woman, forty-eight and racing toward fifty, that magical time when every woman turns from a princess to a pumpkin…or something. She turned right on Ridge Street, ran down the hill to Beaver, and took a left to continue jogging downhill on the left side of the street (no sidewalks here).

Breyer’s body seemed to warm up as she was contemplating her uneasiness. She closed her left hand around him without slowing down and thought, “I’m fine,” at him. The warmth dissipated, making her wonder how she had known he could feel what she was feeling. She pushed the question out of her mind as she crossed Allegheny Street at a run before she slowed down to a fast walk when she made it to the sidewalk.

A light-brown SUV came to a halt beside her. The window rolled down and a woman peered out at her from the driver’s seat on the far side of the vehicle.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for the three hundred block of West Beaver Street, but the street seems to end over there, at one eleven West Beaver. Do you know…”

“Yeah, West Beaver continues on the other side of those trees. If you go around the block, you’ll find the rest of it.”

“Great, thanks!”

“You’re welcome.”

The SUV sped off toward Curtin. She walked the short distance to the house, turned left onto a concrete walkway that took her to the steps of the front porch, and went in the door at 611 North Allegheny Street.

She deadbolted the door behind her, then took off her shoes, raced upstairs, and peeled off her clothes. The tank top she tossed to hang over the side of the laundry basket for the sweat to dry off. She didn’t wait until the water was warm to hop into the shower.

Because the shower had been positioned right where the roof slanted down on the north side of the second floor, it was impossible to stand in the shower. Instead, she quickly sprayed off the shower stool and rinsed off her behind before sitting down. The shower took her all of one minute.

Wire duty meant she’d have to dress in better clothes than she usually did. She chose gold-colored slacks and a green top with three-quarter-length sleeves. Going down to the kitchen, she quickly made two tomato-lettuce sandwiches with multigrain bread, filled her aluminum water bottle, stuffed corn chips into a Ziploc bag, and took an apple from a bowl on the counter. All the items went into her thermal lunchbox with two gel packs she took from the freezer. She left Breyer on the ground at the southwest corner of the house near the backyard before she hopped into her car.

The police station was only a few blocks away on the ground floor of the municipal building at 236 West Lamb Street.

“Hi, I’m Allison Pritchard, and I’m here to…”

“Just a moment,” the receptionist interrupted, pushed a few buttons on a phone, said “She’s here” to somebody, and replaced the receiver. The door that led to the police department swung open a few seconds later and the same police officer who had visited her in the middle of the night stepped out.

“Hey, great to see you again,” he said and extended his hand. “Sergeant Mark Papouli; call me Mark. Let’s go in here.”

He ushered her in through the door and led her into a room with one big window that provided a view of desks and computers and the people sitting in front of them. She could see through the window, which she took to mean she wasn’t in one of those suspect-interrogation rooms with the two-way mirrors. They sat down on plastic chairs around a cheap-looking hard-plastic-topped table that had metal feet. A smooth, square recording device was on the table.

“Do you mind if I record this interview?”

“That’s fine.”

“If you would state your full name, then, along with your Social Security number and current address, I can treat this as an official statement, so you don’t need to fill out any forms.”

“Works for me.”

“Great,” he said, and pressed a button on the recording device. He nodded to Allison, who stated her personal information for the record.

“I need to go to work soon,” she said after having recited the address of Tracy’s house. “I wonder…”

The sergeant started talking before she had time to ask if the station had rooms with two-way mirrors.

“Straight to the point, then. Your husband is still missing.”

“Really? Did you try the church? All his friends?”

“He has tons of friends, inside and outside the … church, we’ve spoken to most of them, but nobody’s seen him since Sunday services.”

Allison smiled at Mark’s barely concealed feelings of distaste toward the Church of Zion, an upstart apocalyptic church based three miles east of Bellefonte in the little town of Zion, Pennsylvania. It had sprung to prominence only in the past eighteen months and the fiery pastor gained new supporters every time a natural disaster struck anywhere in the U.S. or the world. Before Allan had joined their ranks, he’d been a youth leader at the Life of Christ, an independent church with Pentecostal influences that she’d never joined. Allan had indoctrinated both their children until they had rebelled in their tween years.

“A few people I talked to said he was probably with his babies or with his family, although they wouldn’t elaborate when I asked what they meant about the babies,” he continued. “Would you have any idea?”

“No. I wonder if Greg Seidman has anything to do with the disappearance?”

“He shouldn’t have, because he was released only yesterday, and by all accounts Allan has been missing for longer than that. Speaking of which, Greg really did pay you a visit last night, correct?”

“He did; I didn’t dream that up. He pointed a gun at me. I guess he got spooked by a passing car or one of my neighbors coming out of their house or something, because he left pretty fast.”

“Interesting,” Mark said, scribbling onto a notepad, an activity Allison found endearing because nobody used pens and paper anymore. The reporters at the newspaper sometimes did, mostly the old-timers, and even then only as a backup to electronic recording devices. All the reporters used their smartphones to record interviews on the field and they had separate recorders plugged into their landline phones at their newsroom desks to record phone interviews.

“Where’d he get a gun that fast?” Allison asked.

“Who knows,” he said wearily. “Our police force is way too small and unprepared to deal with the onslaught of terroristic activities in this area. It seems that as the weather gets more and more unstable, the nastier the criminal element grows.”

“And Centre County still won’t recycle all different kinds of plastic.”

Mark sighed.

“I know. They say it costs too much for us to recycle every scrap of plastic to keep it from creating waste and making the plastic islands in the oceans bigger, and now it’s even possible to make oil from plastic. They’ve perfected a pretty simple, cost-effective way to do that… sorry, I’m going off the subject. Like I said last night, the front door of your house was open when we came on the scene. We placed a combination locking device on the door when we left. Here’s the combination.”

He gave her a piece of paper with a string of numbers on it.

“Thanks. What if my husband showed up and…”

“There are phone numbers on the note we left behind. All he’d have to do is call and he’d get the combination.”

“That’s good.”

“You also need to file a claim with your home insurance provider about the fire. The damage wasn’t bad because a neighbor saw a man, who we think was Greg Seidman, and they called 911 right away, but you should go see the house when you can and take care of things there. You are the only owner of that property who knows of the situation, as your husband is missing.”

“I’ll try to tend to that matter as soon as possible.”

“Good. You mentioned leaving town last night. Are you still intending to do that?”

Allison pursed her lips.

“I might stay.”

Mark straightened up in his chair and looked her squarely in the eye.

“I hope you know what you’re doing. There’s little we can do to protect you.”

“I know,” she said quietly. He seemed to take the business of protecting her almost too seriously. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do. I want to find Allan and take care of the house repairs before I leave. Anyway, I really need to go to work.”

“Sure thing. Here’s my card—call me anytime, day or night.” He handed her a simple business card. She took it and tucked it into the otherwise empty front pocket of her purse.

He ushered her out of the department as fast as he had walked her in, said a quick good-bye, and disappeared back into the maze of desks and computers even before the door had closed and cut her view of him. She stepped from cool air conditioning into the humid, hot summer day and hurried to her car. Time was not on her side and a visit to Bishop Street would have to wait.

She drove the short distance down to Water Street, turned left, and exited the town without making any more turns. The road known as Benner Pike took her seven miles out into College Township, where she turned left on Shiloh Road. It wound past the contours of Nittany Mall and she took a left at State Route 26, or West College Avenue. Soon a huge industrial building appeared on her right and she turned onto a parking lot.

The building had once been a bustling plant making glass television screens, but the work had gone to China. The Central State Courier was one of the businesses and organizations that leased space in the building.

As far as she knew, the newspaper had only had two previous homes before the current one: the first in downtown State College, and when the town had started to grow exponentially and that location had become too small, it had moved into the bigger building outside of State College that stood only a few hundred yards from the industrial building. Ironically, the reason they’d had to move from that building was that it had become too big for them. Declining ad revenue and subscriptions meant layoffs and a heavier reliance on freelancers and wire services for news content.

They’d had to give up their own press, too, and all the press workers had had to go. Now the paper was printed by their sister newspaper in Harrisburg and press start check was done via video feed she and her colleagues tapped into from their computers.

At first, when the new operating procedures were announced, Allison had been glad she no longer had to go to the prepress area in the evenings and print plates to the plating machines after the paper gave the boot to one more prepress tech and there weren’t any techs working at night. The plating process was complicated, to say the least, and the computers controlling the procedures were often temperamental.

However, when the paper started to be printed in Harrisburg, unexpected problems cropped up. Because neither paper wanted to make concessions to send their current and breaking news pages earlier than the other paper did, sometimes pages of CSC ended up in the Harrisburg paper and vice versa, resulting in the papers missing delivery deadlines and the waste of huge rolls of paper.

The ability to wait until 10 or 11 p.m. to send pages was crucial to both papers, because often city council and school board meetings would run late as important business was debated and voted on and that news had to be in the physical paper as well as on the papers’ websites. Radio, television, and the Internet had already changed how fast people got updates on breaking news, and if the stories subscribers could get from the paper were habitually outdated, circulation numbers would decline even more.

The entire industry was fighting for its survival. She and her colleagues rarely discussed the impending doom in the newsroom. Some employees had found other work and when they’d quit, their positions had not been refilled. If attrition wasn’t enough, layoffs were inevitable, and the latest round two weeks before had claimed five workers.

Allison was one of only three full-time news copy editors, and as such was irreplaceable. If they cut any more copy editors, the paper might as well call it quits. She and her colleagues were the ones who put the pages together and sent them out when they were done. As far as she was concerned, copy editors were the paper.

Allison hurried up the steps to the door that led to the entrance hall, aka atrium, and from there to the newspaper’s facilities, cursing under her breath because she had to hit the bathroom facilities (shared with other building tenants) before starting work. A keycard she dug out of her left pants pocket admitted her into the newsroom after she’d done her business.

When she arrived at her desk and turned her computer on, the time was already 3:42 p.m., which meant she would have only eighteen minutes to comb through the wire advisories and pick the stories she thought should get into the paper. The editorial meeting should have begun at 4 p.m. every day, although it rarely did. She took a cardigan she kept draped over her chair and pulled it around herself because of the freezing air conditioning.

She opened up the wire budget file she’d saved on her desktop, changed the date on the top to Saturday, July 2, 2016, deleted old story summaries in the text boxes under the headings “Top Stories,” “State,” “Nation,” and “World,” saved the document, made the document window smaller, and moved it to the right side of her screen.

The wire budget document was a QuarkXPress file of two facing US Letter-sized pages, which were 8.5 by 11 inches. Most Quark documents she worked on were big newspaper-size pages, which were 11 by 23 inches these days. The newspaper had gone through two web-size reductions while she’d worked there. Sometimes it was hard for her to believe it had been almost eleven years since she’d started working the swing shift at the paper.

The Associated Press wire advisory and the McClatchy advisory always listed so many stories she’d never have room for all of them in the paper. She picked the ones she wanted to fit in, looking through the national stories first: a story on farmers’ drought fears in the Midwest; a preview of how much people were going to travel for the Fourth of July (that made it into the text box under the “Top News” heading); the requisite global warming lamentation with a chiding for lawmakers who weren’t doing anything to rein in the burning of fossil fuels to make a real difference; an apocalyptic hard news story on the approaching Hurricane Fiona, a strengthening Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale and on course to hit the Carolinas late on the Fourth of July or early June fifth (“Top News”); a run-of-the-mill presidential election story about the candidates’ attacks on each other; and a light piece on college kids popping popcorn with homemade equipment on the hoods of cars roasting in the sun in Milwaukee (the story’s tone was entirely too flippant, considering the ecologic implications, she thought).

She copied and pasted the headline and the first few sentences of the short summaries of the five national stories from the advisories onto her wire budget document, bolding the suggested headlines.

“Hi, Allison.”

She looked up to see the smiling face of Pete Manen, the sports editor. He had been a basketball player in college. He’d gotten softer around the middle after he’d stopped playing and started working at the paper, which had been a year before Allison had come on board. “Didn’t expect to see you here today. Heard about your house, or your former house, I guess.”

“Last night was crazy, and I haven’t even been there yet. The police say the damage was minimal.”

“Hasn’t Allan called you or anything?”

“He’s missing.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah.”

After raising his eyebrows at her, Pete walked to the other side of the waist-high partition wall that let them look around at other people even when they were sitting down. The higher-ups had higher walls that made proper cubicles, but even they didn’t have real offices, except for the publisher, who was also the company president, advertising director, and editorial board chief. The news copy editors had the short wall around their area with six workstations, although usually only two or three were occupied at the same time.

The sports area was the same size as the copy editors’ area. They made do with two full-timers, the sports editor and one reporter, while the rest of the men providing local content were freelancers who often came back to the paper after games to write their stories and shoot the breeze with the guys.

She shook her head, made a conscious effort to forget about the missing estranged husband, and went on with her story selection.

On the international front, the articles that interested her included renewed unrest in Syria and Egypt; Iran’s new leader vowing to use their new nuclear weapons to put the fear of God into the godless hordes of the West; Dutch leaders talking confidently about the improvements to their dikes; and the rising power of the ultra-environmentalist party in Russia. She looked forward to reading that story in full.

The state wire advisory had little of interest, but she included stories on the continued fracking of the Marcellus Shale for gas and the growing number of homeowners in one small town who were moving away because of the water and air pollution they claimed had resulted from fracking; a quadruple homicide in Philadelphia; and the aftermath of flooding in Wilkes-Barre.

The stories she deemed important that didn’t fit in the paper as proper articles could be included in the briefs. The copy editors usually ran six or seven stories that way with small headlines and only a few paragraphs from each story. Thankfully, Tanner had created the pages for the A section of the next day’s paper before he had gone home on the previous night. Looking at the dummies, which were US Letter-sized hard-copy pages showing what ads were set to run on each of the pages, she saw that A2 and A4 had more space than usual, which meant more room for briefs.

They had an eight-page A section for once, instead of six pages, because of all the Fourth of July ads. The C section, or the feature section, was the usual six pages and it had already been done and printed. A few inches of classified ads were tacked onto the bottom of the last page of the section. Some years before, the classifieds had been its own section three times a week. She sometimes cursed Craigslist, even though she used it herself, too.

Next she did a quick run-through of the feature advisories. The Sunday paper was still the biggest of the week, and even though she and the other copy editors had already done much of Sunday’s paper on Thursday, the people who worked Saturday would still have to fill a few more pages than they did on other nights. Three features embargoed until Sunday made it into her wire budget document, under the “Top Stories” heading but separated from the daily stories with a subhead of “For Sunday”: stories on the catastrophic reduction in the numbers of bees, bats, and other pollinators; new genetically modified corn and grain crops supposed to be immune to all diseases and to attacks by insects (and which had pollen that many blamed for bee deaths); and a new craze among couples to get married by the mayors of their towns and not tell their families until after the fact, which saved all kinds of money but often enraged family members.

Allison saw Pete collecting papers at the printer/copier and Helen McEvoy, the city editor, doing the same after him. Allison proofed her document and sent it to the machine with instructions to print out seven two-sided copies. Then she pulled out a yellow legal pad from among the row of books standing between glass paper weights on her desk, took a pen from the only drawer her desk had, and headed out to pick up the papers.

She was the last to arrive at the office of Henry Creswell, the publisher with the many hats.

“Hi, Allison. Sorry to hear about your house,” Henry said as she was distributing her wire budgets around the table. He had dark-brown hair and he was tall, lean, muscular, in his early fifties, and he had the perfect romance-novel cover face: Indo-European with a hint of Mafia in the jaw.

“Luckily the damage isn’t too bad,” she said, sitting down on a black leather chair with wheels and pulling up to the glass-topped mahogany table.

“Good to hear,” Henry said, and turned to say something to Helen, who was only around forty and hadn’t let herself gain too many pounds in her early middle age.

On the table in front of Allison were copies of the local news budget and the sports budget Helen and Pete had already doled out. She also picked up an extra local budget to give to Mitchell, the A1 designer, from the center of the table where Helen had left two extra copies.

Allison was fairly certain Henry had no idea she’d moved out of the family home and she didn’t feel like sharing that info. She’d always felt he regarded himself as being so far above her it wouldn’t pay to get to know her better. She was too old for him to flirt with, too.

The others around the table pretended not to hear this short, polite exchange. She was sure at least Pete knew more about her situation, because as soon as she had left the previous night, the remaining copy editors, sports guys, and anyone else still working in the newsroom would have talked about Greg and her life situation extensively. She anticipated she’d get grilled on Greg, the fire, and the missing husband at around 8 p.m. when all the dayside workers were long gone, the nightsiders had finalized their plans of what stories would go where, and people had a few free minutes to check their f******k newsfeeds, eat sandwiches at their desks, watch porn on their devices, or do whatever else they could come up with, like interrogate Allison.

“Everyone seems to be here. Let’s start with photo,” Henry said.

Max Sage, the photo editor, coughed delicately. He was pushing forty, was an inch shorter than Allison, and he was stout and red-haired. The last round of cuts had reduced his staff from three to two, one of them a part-timer.

Max handed Henry black-and-white paper printouts of photos with the cutline and photographer information on the bottom. Henry sifted through them.

“We have shots of the Fourth Fest prep work, standalone art of kids running through a sprinkler, the Church of Zion Funeral Home art, and we’ll have Tyson shooting tonight at the Spikes game,” Max said.

The Fourth Fest, formally the Central PA 4th Fest, attracted 60,000 to 75,000 people to the Penn State University Park campus on a single day. This year the fireworks extravaganza had been reduced to twenty minutes instead of the usual half hour due to environmental arm-twisting—the cost of something frivolous and the pollution it caused were controversial issues.

Spikes was the local minor league baseball team.

“They’re playing against Altoona,” Henry stated, consulting the sports budget they’d all gotten from Pete. “Rivalry’s heating up.”

“Yes, it is,” Pete said, injecting drama.

“Good. Spikes is your centerpiece?”

“Unless the art is unusable.”

Max puffed out his chest.

“Tyson’s gotten personal lessons from me for three months. Stop ripping on him.”

Allison kept breathing evenly to stop herself from laughing out loud. Tyson Johnson was their part-time photog who never seemed to do anything right. The CSC still had him on its payroll because he worked for minimum wage and because Max liked him more than he liked his all-star photog, Melody Lansing.

Pete didn’t bother to look up at Max.

“He might have a degree from Penn State and he might be getting lessons from you, but he’s still…”

“That’s enough,” Henry said in a tired voice. “Max, don’t you have art for the local page, too? A5?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Melody shot the opening of the new funeral home in Zion, at the Church of Zion. Pretty good.”

“The funeral home or the photos?” Allison asked. Most people around the desk managed a weak smile; Helen actually giggled.

Max grinned.

“The photos. Can’t vouch for the funeral home. I haven’t had to use their services yet myself.”

“Somebody has to be the first one,” Clark Machi said, getting a few laughs. He was the circulation director and had ended up working irregular hours lately, taking on more and more paper routes in the wee hours of the morning. The declining readership had created areas where only a few subscribers lived but somebody still had to deliver the paper to them—a lot of driving with small profits.

Henry tapped the table with his right index finger.

“All right. Sports has Spikes; what else?”

Pete consulted his papers.

“We have the usual baseball roundup, some golf thrown in, and the feature on the Penn State football players’ summer training.”

“Anything new on Jerome Fannin?” Clark asked.

“No. It all depends on what news the doctors give his mother on Monday. Her cancer’s pretty bad.”

“I feel sorry for his mom, but we need this guy,” Henry said. “Now that we’re bowl-eligible again, we need to get the best players on board to get back on top.”

“Yeah, they do need him,” Pete said. “He has three younger siblings. If Mom’s too sick to take care of them, he’ll stay at home. Simple as that.”

Allison noted the change from Henry’s “we” to Pete’s “they.” Tight end Jerome Fannin was a top prospect from Philadelphia who would be a high school senior in the fall and could sign a deal with Penn State or another school of his choice in February.

“Okay, let’s move on,” Henry said. “Allison?”

She went through the stories she liked the most, going down the list she’d compiled. It didn’t take long.

“Good. Helen?”

“The Fourth Fest prep is our biggest for today. Then we have lawsuits being filed by local former Boy Scout members who allege they were sexually abused by their pack leaders. We also have an update on Jerry Sandusky’s condition after he fainted, fell, and hurt his head yesterday. He seems to be recovering, but it’s his second fall this year. We have an obit ready just in case.”

“It’s a black eye on Penn State every time he’s in the news,” Pete said.

“Penn State is climbing out of that mess,” Henry said. “It’s a top rate institution, cutting-edge research done all the time, the prestige is coming back.”

That shut everybody up.

“We also have the Church of Zion Funeral Home story,” Helen continued. “Veronica’s been there yesterday and today and she should be filing soon.” Veronica Romich was one of the paper’s four full-time reporters.

“Did Zion have a funeral home before this?” Clark asked, leaning back in his chair and interlacing his fingers above his massive belly as if praying he wouldn’t have to end up horizontal at the funeral home himself.

“Too small of a place to have one,” Allison said.

“Who’s going to use that place?” Max asked.

“The faithful,” Allison responded with a pained expression on her face.

“Hmm,” Max said.

“Let’s pick the stories for the front,” Henry said. “Fourth Fest for the centerpiece, Sandusky above the fold and Boy Scouts below, maybe Hurricane Fiona as the fourth one. What does everybody else think?”

Clark Machi pinched the sides of his nose.

“The funeral home should be our A1 centerpiece. I mean, they have 100,000 plus followers around the country who see the Internet broadcasts of services and who buy ecological merchandise from the website. And this Promession machine they’ll use to freeze dry and crumble the bodies? First in the U.S., right, Helen?”

“The first one’s in Florida, predictably…” Helen said.

“All those retirees who keel over…” Max completed the thought.

“Right, but the Zionites will have the second one in the country,” Helen continued. “The church’s most ardent followers are already talking about making provisions in their wills to have their bodies transported to be processed in the environmentally friendly machine, then shallowly buried or ‘composted’” (she made quote marks with her fingers) “in the church’s Garden of Memories. The fossil fuels to be burned during body transport are a concern, though, because electric and compressed-air vehicles aren’t that common yet, and of course there’s the question of how the electricity for these vehicles is created, is it clean or dirty, and so on.”

“Fascinating,” Max said. “Yeah, the art’s definitely A1-worthy. Melody got pretty good shots, considering we’re talking about a funeral parlor here. The Promator is in a huge room with glass walls and a huge window overlooking the garden, so mourners can watch it all from inside the building or from the garden. They can watch the body being loaded into the machine and can help later on with the shallow burial of the ‘promains.’ It’s pretty wild.”

“What do you think, Allison?” Henry said as he offered her the photo printouts he’d gotten from Max, which she accepted. All the photos would be going on her pages.

She tried not to blush; Henry didn’t usually ask her opinion. If she had an opinion, she just blurted it out, like everybody else did, but she hadn’t wanted to say anything on the subject of the church. Everybody knew her husband was a member of the governing board. She preferred not to link her environmentalism with a kooky religious doctrine.

“Zionites would sell more single copies than Fourth Fest prep,” she said with an ultra-serious expression.

“My thoughts exactly,” Clark muttered.

Pete nodded.

“Hey, if I didn’t work here and have access to Veronica’s story, I’d buy the paper.”

“Funeral parlor for the front centerpiece, then,” Henry said, letting out a small sigh.

“Fourth Fest for A5?” Allison asked. She had written “A5” beside the Zion story where it was listed in Helen’s local budget, but she crossed it out and wrote “A1” beside it. She waited with her pen poised for Henry’s call.

“Might as well. You can run more photos on A5, correct? I mean, you don’t have that much other stuff for the local page.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“That’s right. I could run at least three photos on A5, make it a big package, and have one or two state stories fill up the rest of the page.”

“Excellent,” Henry said.

“Uh, what about reefers?” Allison asked. They needed at least two stories they could refer to, or advertise to readers on the top of the front page.

“Fourth Fest and Spikes?” Henry said.

“Works for me,” Pete said, and when nobody objected, Allison scribbled the selections onto the top of her wire budget page. She was glad she’d said the right thing about the Zion story and that her building up of the treatment she could give the Fourth Fest had met with approval.

“Everything clear on your end for Sunday and Monday?” Henry asked Allison. Allison collected her thoughts with an effort.

“Sure. Andy’s in charge tomorrow and Sunday and Tanner’s working Monday. Sunday’s front is already half done.”

“Great. All right, folks, that wraps it up. Have a good Fourth of July, everybody.”

“You, too,” Pete and others said before they filed out of the glass-walled office they called the Fishbowl.

Allison walked to her desk and wondered what Breyer was up to. Here, in her familiar surroundings, she was still half-convinced she’d hallucinated the rock.

She took out the dummy sheet for Saturday’s A1 and listed on it the top-of-the-page reefers and the stories selected for it. Mitchell Vargas, their part-time A1 designer, would arrive at around 6 p.m. to work his magic, and he’d be out by 10:30.

She dropped the A1 dummy and the dummy of the designated jump page, A3, on his desk along with copies of the wire budget and the local budget. Now she eyed the two paper-clipped sets of photos and the one single photo printout Henry had given her: One set was for the Church of Zion Funeral Home story and the other would go with the Fourth Fest preparation story. She took the five funeral parlor papers and plunked them on Mitchell’s desk before she changed her mind, taking the photos back to her desk.

Max was in the photo office, but he might not be there when Mitchell came in and the only photog available after that would be Tyson Johnson. The last time Tyson had sampled their front page photos, they’d ended up looking like something from a Halloween haunted house. Tanner had had to dig out the original shots from the maze of files from the photo computer and edit them himself.

“5 columns color, for Mitchell,” she wrote on the sheets of paper showing what she judged to be the two best photos from the funeral parlor, then wrote “4 col b+w Mitchell” on the two next-best ones that would go on the jump page, which was black and white. Melody had gotten good shots, the one of the Promator being almost contest-worthy, she was sure, even though she was seeing them pixellated on a black-and-white paper printout.

Then she looked at the seven Fourth Fest prep shots. The photogs always shot at least twenty photos with their digitals and picked the best ones for the editors to look at. She selected the four best ones, wrote “4 col b+w Al” on two of them and ordered the other two in 3 columns black and white, A5 being a black and white page. Photos could always be run smaller than they were sized but not larger.

Max smiled at her when she handed him the papers.

“Could I see the funeral home shots on your screen?” she asked.

“Sure.”

He pulled them up in full color and she made a fuss over how great they looked, which pleased him. He would’ve been over the moon if Tyler had shot those images, she knew.

“The one with the glass-walled Promator room will look great on the front. Here are all the photos we need to get sampled for now.”

Max leafed through the papers.

“What about the wild art of the girl running through the sprinkler? Could you use that on A2?”

A2 was the page where they piled all the national and international briefs. If there was enough space, they ran a central standalone photo on it that was at least three columns wide if it was a horizontal, there being only five columns on the page instead of the usual six. They’d had to go to a five-column format after the width of the pages had been reduced so much in the latest web size reduction that to keep six columns per page would have looked ugly.

“Yeah, we can use it on A2,” she said. Henry had forgotten to designate the standalone photo for A2 at the meeting, so she and Max were making the call. The picture wasn’t great, but Henry and Andy wanted them to use local art whenever possible to remind readers the CSC was still a local publication and as such deserved to be supported by local residents.

“I’ll get the proof,” she added and started to walk out of the photo office.

“No, it’s okay,” Max said. “I can pull it up. How big do you want it?”

“Four columns color.”

“You’ll have it toned and in the right folder by the time I hand you the others.”

“Thanks, Max.”

“You’re welcome,” he said and nodded, his right hand maneuvering around the computer’s touchpad. Allison returned to her desk where she took stock of the pages that needed to be done.

Mitchell had A1 and A3, the page where the A1 stories would jump to. A6 was the editorial page, and Henry, bless his soul, did all the planning for them and had Andy put them together on Quark days ahead of time. That left A2; A4, which was the obituary page and was for some reason done by advertising staff as far as death notices and obituaries went, usually leaving some room for news content; A5, the local page, which could be filled with state wire stories if not enough local content was forthcoming; A7, which today was half-filled with ads; and A8, the weather page, which today had virtually no room for news after the ads and the weather graphic had been flowed in. All in all, not a bad lineup. She and Mitchell could handle it.

She began to go through her wire budget and write names of stories onto the dummy pages. Notations of the page numbers where she was planning on running the stories went next to the story summaries on the wire budget sheet. Some stories she assigned to be included in the A2 briefs. The NewsEdit software folder where local stories were kept showed her there were more than enough local briefs to fill the side of A5 where they ran briefs, leaving a few for A4.

The time was 5:33. Allison heard one of the newsroom double doors open (the hinges needed to be oiled) and, hoping it was Mitchell, looked up. Instead, it was Misty, the young woman with high heels and bright lipstick who was known for flirting with funeral directors to get more obits and ads onto A4. The paper printed death notices for free, but obituaries cost money and brought in needed revenue for the company.

“Here you go,” Misty chirped, depositing an 11-by-17-inch paper proof of A4 on her desk with death notices, obits, and boxes for ads on it. Advertisements were usually flowed in at 6 p.m., just before the last prepress tech left and a half-hour after the last ad deadline. The news content space on the page had been left blank.

“Thanks,” Allison said. Misty gave her an inquisitive look before she turned tail and sashayed out in her high heels.

Allison felt like she was ahead of the game, so she decided to go through the copy that was already on A4. The date, page number, and the name of the paper at the top of the page were correct, something she always checked first whenever she started to edit a page. Next she dove into the death notices at the left-hand side. Five people were listed there, most of them in their seventies or eighties, the one exception being a man named Johannes Allan Pritchard, who had died at age fifty-five.

She clapped a hand on her mouth to stifle a scream and looked over the rest of the page to see if there was an obituary.

There was.