Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [55]
“We came up with the idea one evening when she was dropping off her art column. We were drinking tequila and talking about how phony people were, how politicians and public officials were such liars. It started out by being something where we could right some wrongs, hold people responsible for their actions, you know? But with a sense of humor. Sort of a Doonesbury kind of thing. Then she really got into it and started getting juicy stuff on lots of people besides politicians and government people, and, I don’t know, it just sort of snowballed into seeing how far we could push the envelope.”
“But why would she do that?” I turned accusing eyes on him. “Why would you?”
“Shit, I don’t know why she did it. Maybe after all the pain she’d been through she just wanted to inflict a little of her own. A lot of people weren’t very kind when her kid was dying. She did have scruples. She’d never let anything bad be said about nurses. She said they were the only ones who stuck by her while her kid was sick. But I did it for the pure and simple reason it sold papers. Circulation tripled when we started the column. Advertisers were willing to pay anything just to get on the same page as the Tattler. I was close to bankruptcy when we started running the Tattler, and we’re making a profit now. A good profit.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
He shrugged. “That’s business.”
“What about principles?”
“Principles are a lie perpetuated by the bourgeois in an attempt to keep the proletariat from getting ahead.”
I stood up and picked up my coffee. “That’s pretty ironic coming from a successful member of the merchant class himself. Tell me, when was the last time you actually had to get up off your fat butt and work manual labor to bring in the beans? I’ll let Gabe know what you told me. What happens after that is up to him.”
“Question for you, Miss Smart-Ass Harper,” he said. “How many times have you missed reading the Tattler?” He gave me a close-lipped smile.
I whipped around and strode out of the room, glad my hair had grown long enough to hide the red I was certain colored my neck as well as my face. He was right. I wasn’t any better than Nora and him. The readers of trash are just as responsible as the writers. A column like that could have died a quick death if we’d all protested it when it came out by not reading and discussing it as much as we did. Why was that so hard to do?
On the drive home I mulled over the information I’d received from Nick and Will Henry. I was a bit annoyed at Gabe for not telling me about Nora owning the disputed land. What would it have hurt for him to tell me that? With so much at stake, that put a whole new spin on things and opened the murder suspect list to a much larger group of people. The fact that she was the Tattler increased it even more. I’d forgotten to ask Will Henry if anyone else knew that Nora was the Tattler, but I assumed that no one did. The identity of the columnist had been a popular coffeehouse topic since the column started. Everyone had assumed that Will Henry himself wrote the column—it had the sort of sarcastic tone he was known for—but he’d sworn up and down that he wasn’t the author. Now I, for one, knew that was true. I also couldn’t help but wonder what was in this week’s column. I wished I’d kept my cool long enough to ask Will Henry.
When I arrived home, it was obvious that more than the discussion of Nora’s secret identity was on the activity chart tonight. Parked behind Gabe’s Corvette was one of the brown Ramsey Ranch trucks. I looked in my rearview mirror as I pulled in front of the house in time to see my red pickup pull in behind me. Sam waved cheerily from behind the wheel while Rita stretched her head out the window to gaze in the side mirror and poke at her hair. She left with Ash and returned with my stepson. I’m not sure I wanted to know the story behind that. I laid my head on the steering wheel, wondering briefly just who was being delivered by the Ramsey truck, what new things Gabe and his son could fight about