Written in Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

 
    John Naile could think about nothing else but the future.  

CHAPTER
ONE  
    The building next to City Hall had once been a very small movie theater and had a stage in the back. City Hall itself was even smaller. “I wonder if the city will get the post office once the new post office gets built?”  
    “If you’d read the newspaper, you’d have a better idea what’s going on in town, Jack.”  
    “I’ve got you to read the newspaper and tell me.” Jack Naile drifted the Suburban into the left lane, still paralleling the railroad tracks as they passed the brand-new public-safety complex. He took a U-turn over the tracks at the next crossover, getting over into the right-hand lane. “God help us if that guy wins the presidency, Ellen.” He turned right into the diagonal. They were passing the Methodist church when he added, “I mean, I try and give people the benefit of the doubt, and he’s a convincing speaker. Sometimes I’ve gotta remind myself not to believe a single word he says. And I don’t buy this moderate Democrat crap. Thinking of him with the same title as Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt—ugh!”  
    “There’s nothing you can do but vote for George Bush and hope the rest of the country has the good sense to do the same and reelect him, Jack, so wait until the election before losing your temper. Don’t forget to turn at the post office.”  
    Jack Naile made a left and turned onto the one-block long one-way street, the red-brick and gray stone post office at its corner. He parked the Suburban diagonally while Ellen took her keys from the cup holder at the front of the center console. “Bring back a check, kid.”  
    “We’ll see if it’s there.”  
    “Want me to get your door?”  
    “I’ve got it.” Ellen slipped out of the front passenger seat and closed the door behind her. Jack Naile hit the power button for the radio, hoping to catch one of his tunes. The station played what he mentally labeled as Afro-American elevator music, but he liked it. Ellen did not. Jack Naile watched Ellen as she walked up the steps. She was just as pretty as—really, prettier than—when he’d married her almost twenty-four years earlier.  
    It was the dreaded season—summer. Officially, it was still spring, but that mattered little in northeast Georgia. Summer temperatures had arrived in April, by May the humidity joining them. David and Elizabeth were out of school for three months, and that was great, but summer meant editors and everybody else he needed to do business with would be off somewhere frolicking in the sunshine while the usual nasty game of selling new projects and chasing the money owed for old ones became that much more difficult.  
    Autumn and winter were the best times. Their anniversary was in October. November meant Thanksgiving; Ellen was the best cook in the world, and he’d fight his way past a barbarian horde in order to eat a turkey she’d made—and considering some of the gatherings of relatives they’d had over the years, sword-wielding guys with a permanent case of male PMS would have been a snap to deal with. Just before Christmas, it was their nephew Clarence’s birthday. Clarence was like a son to them, raising him since his teens as they had. Right after Christmas came the kids’ birthdays, both of them born in January, two years apart. Between their birthdays, the SHOT Show, always an excuse to travel to some city or another. It would be in Houston in 1993, easy driving distance.  
    And just before Thanksgiving, of course, there was Halloween, which wouldn’t be anywhere near as spooky as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November might be. With all the negative talk about the economy, it seemed to Jack Naile that the press was building a bad situation that really didn’t exist, merely in the hopes of unseating the incumbent and electing—Jack Naile shuddered at the thought.  
    Ellen came down the post-office steps, her long auburn