Page 93 of Hello, Summer
“I’ve got some news too,” Grayson said. “I just sold Sean Kelly a three-month contract for advertising, both in the print paper and the digital edition. And I managed to talk the IGA, Silver Bay Motors, and Gulf Coast Orthodontics into doing a digital ad buy too.”
For the first time since she’d come home to Silver Bay, Conley thought, her sister seemed animated, excited even. It was the first glimpse she’d had of the old Grayson.
Lillian’s jaw dropped. “Now we’re running ads with the announcements? Who’s gonna make that work?”
Grayson draped an arm around Michael. “You know how to do digital layout, right?”
“Sure,” Michael said. “I was production manager on the college paper. We embedded video, music, and advertising graphics all the time. No problem.”
Conley regarded her colleague with frank admiration. “How old are you, Mike?”
Michael was seated at his desk, eating limp french fries and tapping away at the keys on his computer. “Twenty-three.”
“They taught you all that in journalism school?”
“Some I learned in class, some I picked up from my friends working on the staff of the school paper. But a lot of stuff I figured out from watching YouTube videos.”
“Maybe sometime you’ll teach me,” Grayson said. “But not today.”
Conley spent the next two hours on her story, combining the more lucid details of Rowena’s “exclusive” with her own, while tall, skinny Michael kept jumping around, pacing the room between paragraphs, radiating a kind of crackling energy that lit up the shopworn newspaper office. He had his earbuds in place, and she could hear faint notes of the rap music he favored.
As they tapped away at their computer keyboards in tandem, she found her young colleague’s enthusiasm contagious and welcomed the adrenaline buzz that came from working on a hot story on deadline.
She was her own worst critic, always, and as she reread her story, shewished again that she’d been able to interview Vanessa Robinette and again regretted that she still didn’t have answers to her nagging questions about the nature of Symmes Robinette’s fatal accident.
But that was the nature of news gathering. There were always more questions, not enough time. What her story really needed, she decided, were photos that illustrated the schizophrenic nature of the late congressman’s complicated domestic life.
“Lillian?” she called.
The receptionist looked up from her own computer. “What now?”
“Can you look in our photo files and see if we have any old photos of Symmes Robinette with his family? Maybe at a ribbon cutting? Or some local function?”
“I’ll look,” Lillian said warily. “But those files are a big mess. We had a leaky roof a couple of years ago, and some of ’em got wet and ruined. No telling what’s in there.” She got up and walked slowly toward the bank of ancient gray file cabinets flanking the right side of the newsroom.
Finally, Conley was satisfied with her work—or as satisfied as she would ever be. She yawned, got up, walked around the room, and looked over Michael’s shoulder as he was working on his own story about Charlie Robinette’s announcement.
“I found this,” Lillian said, tossing a couple of black-and-white photos on her desk.
In the first photo, dated 1984, Symmes Robinette had a full head of dark hair and was standing in front of an American flag, his hand on a Bible held by an attractive woman beaming up at him. Taped to the back of the photo was a typed-out cutline:SILVER BAY RESIDENT C. SYMMES ROBINETTE SWORN INTO CONGRESS WITH WIFE EMMA TODD (“TODDIE”) AT HIS SIDE.
“This is perfect,” Conley said. She picked up the next photo, dated 1988, which showed Robinette, standing with a group of men, holding a ceremonial shovel. The cutline for this one said:U.S. REP. SYMMES ROBINETTE MARKS CONSTRUCTION OF NEW VETERANS ADMINISTRATION CLINIC.
It struck Conley that this must have been shortly before Winnie had flung a handful of her sister’s ashes at Robinette.
“That’s all you could find?” Conley asked.
“I was lucky to find these,” Lillian said.
“Wish I had a photo of Robinette with Vanessa and Charlie,” Conley said.
“Oh, we got something like that,” Lillian said casually. “The funeral home sent it over to run with the obituary. I told Kennedy McFall that was gonna be an extra $150, but she said that’s what Vanessa wanted and she didn’t care what it cost. I’ll email it to you.”
She went back to her own desk, and a minute later, Conley was looking at a black-and-white wedding photo of Symmes and Vanessa Robinette, staring blissfully into each other’s eyes. Symmes wore a suit and tie with a white boutonniere and had his arms wrapped around Vanessa, who wore a short white dress and a floral headpiece. The Capitol Rotunda was in the background.
“Jackpot,” Conley said, rubbing her hands together. She clicked to see the second photo, which was of the Robinette family gathered around a Christmas tree. Charlie was a gawky preteen, with traces of acne and braces on his teeth.
At four o’clock, Grayson strolled into the newsroom. “How’s it coming?”
