Page 111 of Hello, Summer
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“No, ma’am,” Lillian was telling the caller. “We are definitely not affiliated with theNational Enquirer.Yes, I’m positive. Okay. I’ll be sure to tell Ms. Hawkins she’s gonna burn in hell for running that story about our good Christian congressman. Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell her sister too. And her grandmama. You have a blessed day, okay?”
TheBeacon’s receptionist / office manager set the phone delicately back on its receiver. “You owe me,” she told Conley.
“Busy morning?” Conley asked.
“That phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” Lillian said. “Emails, phone calls. We haven’t had that many calls since we quit running the horoscope column. All because of that story of yours and Michael’s.” She handed over a stack of pink message slips. “Most of these people just want you to call ’em back so they can bitch you out personally.”
Conley riffled through the stack. “That’s all? Just fourteen? G’mama had eight phone calls before nine.”
Lillian pursed her lips. “That’s not counting the ones who started off saying, ‘Listen, bitch,’ at which point, I hung up on ’em. Y’all don’t pay me enough money to put up with that cussing shit.”
Conley tore the message slips in half and handed them back. “File those, will ya?”
Grayson was on the phone too. Her expression was pained. She looked up when Conley entered the office. “Okay. I can’t get into this right now.” She spun around in her chair so that it faced the wall. She lowered her voice. “You know it’s my deadline day. I’ll call you tomorrow, after the paper’s out.”
She spun her chair back around and placed the cell phone facedown on the desktop.
“God, what a day!”
“Yeah, Lillian told me the haters are out in force,” Conley said.
“It hasn’t all been bad,” Grayson said. “I hate to admit it, but you were right about the video and putting out the digital edition. The response has been unbelievable. The last time I checked, those videos had been viewed nearly two thousand times. And Michael’s idea to put in a special subscription coupon was genius. We’ve gotten thirty-two new subscribers. He set up the new Facebook page as soon as he got in this morning and made us all administrators so we can all post to it.”
“Cool,” Conley said. “Hey, there’s something I need to let you know about—”
“But like you said, the haters are coming out of the woodwork,” she said. “At last count, Lillian said we’ve had nine subscriptions cancelled. And I was parking out front this morning when a big old white Cadillac came cruising really slowly past me. The passenger-side window rolled down, and these two old geezers both leaned over and flipped me the bird!”
“That’s a badge of honor,” Conley said. “My old city editor at theAJC,Roger Sistrunk, used to say if a newspaper isn’t pissing people off, it’s not really doing its job.”
“Easy to say in a big city like Atlanta, where the readers don’t know your address and phone number and have no compunction about getting right in your face to tell you what they think of you,” Grayson said. And then she grinned. “But I gotta say, this story has been the most fun we’ve had around here in a long time.”
“It’s a thrill, right? And wait ’til you see the video I shot of the press conference.”
She handed over her cell phone and tapped the arrow to show the video. Grayson’s eyes widened as she heard Charlie Robinette’s accusations against his mother.
“Unbelievable,” she said when the video ended. “He comes this close to accusing Vanessa of having something to do with his father’s death. And is that our Kennedy McFall, from the funeral home?”
“One and the same.”
“Huh,” Grayson said. “I had no idea. She’s a little older than he is, right?”
“I think so. Rowena said Vanessa and Symmes didn’t approve of her because she’s divorced and has a kid. Maybe the age thing is part of it. Again, unbelievable irony. This thing is exploding, Gray. There were camera crews there from television stations in Tallahassee and Pensacola. And get this—despite what your buddy Merle Goggins says, I don’t think the cops believe that accident was entirely accidental. They’ve asked Skelly for records of all the prescriptions he’d filled for Symmes—and Vanessa.”
Grayson frowned. “Skelly told you that?”
“On my way to the office this morning, I saw the police cruiser parked outside Kelly’s, so I went inside and sat down at the soda fountain. Weirdly, it was the same deputy who showed up at the crash that night. After he was gone, I kinda wormed it out of Skelly. Also, Robinette’s wrecked car was towed to Silver Bay Auto Body, where Winnie’s nephew Jesse works. That same deputy showed up at the body shop. After he left, Jesse told me the deputy collected what was left of the driver’s-side mirror.”
“Did Jesse have any idea what the cops are looking for?”
“No, but I intend to call the sheriff ASAP and ask.”
“Good work,” Grayson said.
“One more bit of trivia. Jesse saw Symmes holding hands with an attractive young blonde at the Waffle House not far from the crash site two or three weeks ago. He even showed me a picture of them.”
Grayson crossed her eyes. “We definitely can’t run anything about that. Photo or no photo.”
