The Unraveling of Violeta Bell Read Online Free PDF Page A

paper, they both had resulted in some very good journalism.

    Then, while I was pondering how I could good-naturedly threaten filing an age discrimination suit, Gabriella Nash appeared in front of my desk. She announced that she was “totally apoplectic.”

    “About what, dear?”

    Like a bad actress in a bad movie, she flung that morning’s front page on my desk. “That is my story, Mrs. Sprowls.”

    I knew what she meant of course. But with my hours at The Herald-Union down to a precious few, I was in no mood for foolishness. Especially hers. I pretended to study the story she was thumping with her finger. “According to the byline, it’s Dale Marabout’s story.”

    She curled her lips at my flippancy like a rabid raccoon. “This is serious business, Mrs. Sprowls!” She went on and on how the story shouldn’t have been taken away from her just because it unexpectedly evolved from a “fluffy piece of shit” into a “hard news murder story.” The Washington Post, she said , didn’t take Redford and Bernstein off the Watergate story when it grew from a third-rate burglary into a constitutional showdown between President Nixon and Congress. She should be allowed to follow the Never Dull story wherever it lead, she said. Redford and Bernstein had been young reporters, too, she said.

    I neatly folded the front page and handed it back to her. “In the first place, it was not Redford and Bernstein. It was Woodward and Bernstein. Robert Redford was the actor who played Woodward in the movie. But I suppose you deserve some credit for at least having heard about Watergate.” Her eyes dropped. I hurriedly crumpled my list of job-saving excuses and slid it off my desk into the wastebasket. “And in the second place,” I said, “you should be telling all this to Alec Tinker—not me.”

    She went from rabid raccoon to vulnerable bunny. “I was hoping maybe you’d go with me.”

    I showed her the most empathetic smile I could. Then I lowered the boom. “I just don’t see that happening, Gabriella.”

    Bob Averill appeared in the newsroom at twenty past twelve. He gave me a big John Wayne thisaway wave. I grabbed my purse and followed him to the parking deck.

    Bob is extremely well paid. And his wife comes from money. But he still likes to think of himself as the regular guy he was forty years ago. So he eschews his reserved parking space by the door and deposits his Mercedes wherever he can find a spot. It’s not one of those big roomy Mercedes. It’s one of those sporty, midlife crisis two-seaters. Yellow as a ripe banana. He wedged his 200 pounds behind the steering wheel with the help of a laborious “Augggghhhh.”

    We headed toward West Apple Street and Meriwether Square. “You think we can get there in five minutes?” he asked.

    “If we don’t get behind too many buses.”

    He chuckled like some old soldier fondly recalling the Battle of the Bulge. “I remember when I had to take the bus.”

    As we buzzed along, I pictured him that morning calling Suzie and asking, “Any idea where Maddy Sprowls likes to have lunch?” And when she answered Speckley’s, him asking, “Where the hell is that?” And when she said Meriwether Square, him harrumphing, “That figures.”

    In case you haven’t spent much time in Hannawa, Ohio, Meriwether Square is our city’s version of Greenwich Village. It’s a four-block strip of coffee shops, thrift shops, and hole-in-the wall bars, each geared toward a particular sexual orientation. The strip is surrounded with wonderful art deco apartment buildings and once-grand turn-of-the-century houses. The brick streets are lined with shaggy oak trees and badly buckled sidewalks. Dale Marabout calls it Differentdrummerville. And he’s pretty much on the mark. Meriwether Square is lousy with angst-riddled college students, old hippies, even older Beatniks, artists who never sell anything, writers who never get published. It’s a real bouillabaisse of