Roomful of Roses

“I’ve got to go, too,” Mr. Sanders sighed, standing up as Wynn did. “Mrs. Jones worries if I don’t march in and out on the hour. Amazing how I managed to crawl through trenches all over France by myself in the war without Mrs. Jones behind me to push,” he added with a twinkle in his eye.

“You just be grateful you’ve got a housekeeper to look after you who doesn’t charge an arm and a leg,” Mrs. Baker chided, pointing an accusing finger his way.

“Reckon you’re right, Verdie,” he sighed.

Wynn laughed at his hunted expression. “Aunt Katy Maude tends to worry about me, too,” she admitted. “That’s why I moved into the guest house when I got old enough. We get along just fine as long as we don’t live together.”

“It isn’t right for a young girl to live by herself,” Mrs. Baker began, “not with that huge house and only Katy Maude in it.”

Wynn glanced quickly at her watch. “Oops, got to run,” she interrupted with an apologetic smile before the older woman had time to get started on her pet subject. “See you later.” She tossed a quarter onto the counter and made a run for the door, laughing, her skirts flying and her pale green eyes shimmering with humor.

But the humor faded once Wynn had started the small car and was roaring away toward Redvale down country roads that seemed to go forever without a sign of another car or a house. This section of south Georgia was primarily agricultural, and it stretched out like Texas, the land flat or slightly rolling, with only a few farmhouses and country stores to break the rustic monotony.

Thinking about McCabe had upset her. It was ridiculous that it should, that she should let it. He was world-famous now, rich enough to retire and give up risking his life. But he kept on reporting, as if it was a habit he couldn’t break, and Wynn had stopped watching the newscasts because she couldn’t bear to see what was happening in Central America. She couldn’t bear the thought that McCabe might be badly hurt.

It shouldn’t have mattered, of course. They had never gotten along and their last confrontation had been sizzling. McCabe had hit the ceiling when Wynn announced that she was joining the staff of the Redvale Courier. It had been a telephone conversation, one of McCabe’s rare ones, and he’d threatened, among other things, to cut off her allowance. She’d told him to go ahead and do it, she’d support herself. The conversation had gone from bad to worse, and ended with Wynn slamming the phone down and refusing to answer when it rang again. A week later, there was a terse note from him, with a New York postmark, agreeing that a job with a weekly newspaper might not be too dangerous. But he warned her against covering hard news, and threatened to come back and jerk her out of the office if she tried it. “I have my spies, Wynn,” he’d written. “So don’t think you’ll put anything over on me.”

She leaned back hard against the seat, her foot easing down on the accelerator. Arrogant, hardheaded man—she still couldn’t believe that her father had legally had McCabe appointed executor of his will and Wynn’s estate. They were friends, they had been for years. But it seemed ridiculous somehow, when Katy Maude would have been the logical person to put in charge, since she’d had responsibility for Wynn since her childhood, while Jesse Ascot was off covering news.

Where was McCabe now? she wondered. There’d been a report a couple of days before about two reporters being killed in Central America. Wynn had sweated blood when she overheard a conversation about it. She’d butted in, asking if the men had heard who the reporters were. French, they’d replied. French. And she’d gone home and cried with relief. Ridiculous! She was engaged, her life was planned, and McCabe had never been anything to her but a big blond headache.

She drove by Katy Maude’s house on the way back to the office. Her eyes caught sight of a curtain fluttering in the guest house where she lived, and she wondered absently if she’d left a window open. Well, it wasn’t likely to rain again, so what did it matter?

When she got back to the Redvale Courier’s office, nestled between Patterson’s Mercantile and the Jericho Drug Company, Kelly Davis was rushing out the door.

“Hi,” Wynn greeted the tall, thin young man. “Remember me? My name is Wynn Ascot and I work here.”

“Really? You could have fooled me,” Kelly replied dryly. “I never see you, and neither does Edward, which means I get stuck with the really gruesome stories.”

“Like what?” she asked innocently.

“Like the wreck out on the federal highway,” he replied quietly. “One fatality, three injuries. The state patrol just got there.”

“Any names yet?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Hope it’s nobody we know,” he said with a faint smile, and she knew what he meant. This was the really bad part of working for a small-town paper. Two out of three times, you knew the victims, and many of them were friends or family.

“Let us know as soon as you find out, will you?” she asked.

“I’ll call before I come back,” he promised.

She watched him run for his old pickup truck, and prayed, not for the first time, that it would start. It did, with an ear-splitting roar, and she watched it jerk down the wide street that ran around the tree-lined square with its Confederation statue and old men in overalls sitting on park benches in the shade.

Edward Keene looked up when she came in. He was standing beside the young brunette typesetter at the computer, his heavy white brows drawn into a scowl over his weather-beaten face. His nose seemed to quiver as he clutched the galley proof in his hand. “I’ll wait to paste this up until you get that correction line, Judy,” he told the typesetter, aiming a glare at Wynn.

“Who are you?” he asked his girl reporter. “Do you work here? Do you know what day it is? Do you realize that I’m making this paper up alone and trying to help Judy proof copy and set ads...”

“I got photos,” she said, holding up the camera with a grin. “Big ones, they’ll fill up space.”

“Pix of what?” he grumbled. “A pond?”

“And a house fire and that new bypass bridge they just finished in Union City.”

He beamed. “Really?”

“Well,” she sighed, “at least that cheered you up for a minute. Kelly will get the wreck, so that gives you at least four pix for the front page, and we could blow them up to four columns each...?”

“That’s why I hired you.” He nodded with a grin. “You know how to spread news out. Okay, with what I’ve already got, that’ll fill ’er up.”

“I’ll take it back to Jess in the darkroom,” she said, and started into the other office.

“Uh, after you do that, come into my office for a minute, will you?” Edward hesitated.

Wynn glanced at him, puzzled. He looked strange for an instant. She shrugged and rushed to the back with the film. It was press day, she told herself. Everybody looked strange then.

She handed the film to Jess with a grin at the harassed look that immediately appeared on his thin, aging face. “Yesterday?” he muttered.

“Please,” she said, agreeing on the delivery date. “All you have to do is three halftones, though, four columns each—one of the fire and one of the new bridge and one of the pond.”

“I get to pick them out?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

“Sure! See how good I am to you?” she asked as she headed toward the door.

“Good! Here I am with three rush jobs, one to get out by two o’clock, I haven’t made the first negative...” He kept right on muttering, and she dashed back into the newspaper office and closed the door.

Edward was sitting behind the heavily loaded desk, which contained a much-used manual typewriter, half a dozen daily newspapers from which he pirated leads, and some scratch paper. He pulled off his glasses and whipped out a spotless white handkerchief to clean them with.

“Well, sit down,” he said impatiently, leaning back with his hands crossed over his ample stomach.

“What is it?” she asked, getting scared. He looked...really strange.

“Feel okay?” he asked.

“Sure.” She eyed him warily. “Why? Do I look like a potential stroke victim?”

He cleared his throat. “No.”

“It’s Katy Maude!” she burst out.

“No,” he said quickly. His shoulders lifted and fell. “Why don’t you keep up on what’s happening in Central America? Then you’d know and I wouldn’t have to stumble all over myself.”

Her blood actually ran cold. She gripped the arms of the chair hard enough to numb her fingers. “McCabe,” she gasped. “Something’s happened to McCabe!”

“He’s alive,” he said. “Not badly injured at all.”

She leaned back with a sigh, feeling herself grow weak. All these years, she’d expected it, until today, and she’d been knocked sideways. “What was it? A sniper?”

“Something like that.” He tossed an issue of the Atlanta morning daily over to her. “Notice the sidebar.”