These Shallow Graves Read Online Free PDF

the day she’d first seen it. Her father had owned the paper for twenty years, but he left the running of it to his editor in chief. He made regular visits, however, to make sure the Standard ’s tone reflected his views, and had sometimes brought Jo with him—over her mother’s objections. As a child, she’d thought all the noise and commotion was the most wild, wonderful game, but as she’d gotten older, she understood why everyone rushed around so: they were chasing a story.
    How Jo envied them. To have a purpose in life—what does that feel like? she wondered.
    â€œCan I help you, miss?” the harried young woman behind the desk asked brusquely.
    â€œYes,” Jo replied. “I’m Josephine Montfort. I’d like to see Mr. Stoatman. I have a bequest for him from my late father.”
    The young woman’s manner immediately became more accommodating. That often happened when Jo revealed her surname.
    â€œOf course, Miss Montfort,” she said, “and please accept my condolences. Mr. Stoatman’s in a meeting at the moment, but you may wait for him here or outside his office.”
    â€œI’ll wait upstairs. Thank you,” Jo said.
    She climbed the staircase, narrowly avoiding a collision with a copyboy, and emerged in the newsroom. It was one long open space that ran from front to back of the building. Two offices, built out from a wall, stood at the left of the landing—the city editor’s and Stoatman’s—the editor in chief.
    The sound of clacking typewriters was deafening. Reporters were yelling at copyboys and the city editor was angrily crumpling a typed story while bellowing that his grandmother could have done a better job on it. Jo made her way to Stoatman’s office and stood by the closed door, spellbound.
    Her father liked to say that when he inherited the Standard, it was nothing but a small daily devoted to maritime news and that he’d made it into a small daily devoted to marriage-time news. It was the preferred paper of the upper class: sober, genteel, and a stark contrast to Mr. Pulitzer’s and Mr. Hearst’s papers, with their lurid headlines. It reported on city politics, cultural events, and social happenings, and refused to print tawdry tales of murder and mayhem. More important to its readers, it also ran the birth, death, and wedding announcements of New York’s best families.
    Remember Josephine, there are only three times in a woman’s life when her name may appear in the papers, Jo’s mother often said. When she is born, when she is married, and when she dies.
    The merely wealthy, or worse yet—the newly wealthy, searched in vain for their names in the Standard ’s columns. It was the doings of the old Dutch and English families—those whose ancestors had built New York from a rough-and-tumble trading post at the end of the world to a mighty port city in the center of it—that the paper documented.
    â€œYou might be a while, miss,” a voice said. “Would you care to sit?”
    Jo turned, startled. A reporter was standing close by, holding a chair. He looked to be eighteen or nineteen years old and had dark hair, a handsome face, and blue eyes—the bluest she’d ever seen.
    â€œI beg your pardon?” she said, flustered. She wasn’t used to speaking with strange men.
    â€œI said you might be a while. Stoatman’s got some lackey from the commissioner’s office in with him.” He put the chair down next to her.
    â€œThank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”
    She tried to look away, but couldn’t. His eyes were not only impossibly blue, but frank and amused. She felt that they could see inside her, that he could see her heart and its sudden, silly fluttering. Blushing, she sat down.
    As he returned to his desk, she glanced at him from under the brim of her hat. Had she thought him handsome? He was glorious. He wore a