Page 164 of Hello, Summer
“You ever steal anything before? I mean, as an adult?”
“God, no!”
Conley gave her a pitying smile. “That’s the thing, Kennedy. You stay around slime long enough, it doesn’t wash off. Pretty soon, you’re doing slimy stuff too. Have a nice life, okay?”
62
“Where have you been?” Lillian demanded when Conley walked into theBeaconoffice. She snatched up a handful of pink message slips. “People have been calling you all morning long. You can’t answer your own damn phone? You think I’m your secretary or something?”
Conley took the message slips. “I’ve been working. Following leads. Doing interviews. I couldn’t answer my phone because it got smashed yesterday.”
“Nobody ever tells me anything,” Lillian grumbled. “How’s your face?”
“Beat to hell,” Conley said. “Thanks for asking.”
“Go buy yourself a new phone, okay?” Lillian said. “And your sister wants to see you in her office.”
“Is this like a trip to the woodshed?” she asked, slumping into the chair in Grayson’s office.
“Why do you always assume the worst with me?” Grayson asked.
“Maybe because we don’t have a long history of pleasant interactions in this office?”
Conley was leafing through the message slips and stopped when shesaw one from Roger Sistrunk, her old boss at theAJC.Lillian had misspelled his name asSISSTUNKand written in all caps: “WILL YOU PLEASE CALL THIS ASSHOLE? HE’S CALLED HERE FOUR TIMES LOOKING FOR YOU.”
“Not today,” Grayson assured her. “I read your piece about Buddy Bright this morning, and I honest to God cried.”
“You cried?”
Grayson was a notorious non-crier. When she was ten, she’d accidentally gotten her finger slammed in a car door and had been so stoic about the pain that it wasn’t until her fifth-grade teacher sent a note home from school that the family discovered she had a broken finger.
“I did. It was poignant and sad and surprising. And I usually hate first-person in a newspaper story because I find it treacly and self-indulgent. But not this time. Conley, it was just so…”
“Non-sucky?”
“Definitely non-sucky. I had Michael upload it to the website this morning. We’ve had over six thousand likes already.”
“How? We don’t have anywhere near that many followers.”
“I know. But Michael, our boy genius, has been working his magic on social media, taggingThe Detroit Newsand everybody else he can think of. The story’s gotten picked up by a ton of newspapers around the country.”
“Maybe that accounts for all the phone messages Lillian just handed me,” Conley said.
“I know your hotshot NBC producer called and left word that her flight landed and she and her camera crew would be here after lunch,” Grayson said.
“Do you have a problem with that?”
“No. Why do you always assume I’m going to yell at you?”
“Because you usually do?”
“Not this time. As awful and traumatic as yesterday was for you, it’s great publicity for theBeacon.It turns out that Buddy Bright had a huge, loyal local following. People are really responding to your story. Lillian signed up a couple of dozen new subscribers this morning.”
“Then it’s all good,” Conley said, turning to leave.
Grayson put a restraining hand on her arm. “Not all of it. G’mama’s insurance agent called me a little while ago because we’re in Rotary together.”
“I was surprised G’mama wasn’t more upset last night, but she said the house is insured so she wasn’t too worried about it,” Conley said.
