The Other Side - J. D. Robb [83]
Mrs. Mortimer had already gone to bed when she’d gotten home tonight, but tomorrow, first thing, Angie would pop the question her landlady had probably wanted to hear all her life but never realized it: “Would you like to go to a séance?”
Ten
Henry liked Paulton. That was curious in itself—he was a big-city man, or so he’d always thought—but even more curious was that Paulton seemed to like him.
“Say, you’re that ghost feller, aren’t you?” Mr. Burt, the barber, asked him on Monday afternoon when he stopped by for a haircut. Three customers put down their newspapers to take a gander at him. He girded himself for skepticism, even derision—he was used to both—but all he got was curiosity and some good-natured joshing. By the time Mr. Burt slapped tonic on his cheeks and whipped the towel off his shoulders, everybody in the shop agreed it would be “a fine thing” if Paulton had its very own genuine, expert-certified haunted house.
It wasn’t just at the barber’s either. Everywhere he went, people were nice to him. After two visits to the Acorn, Home Cooking Fit for a King, he had a regular table and a waitress who called him by his name. On the street, men tipped their hats and women came close to smiling. His fellow boarders at Smoak’s were friendly to a man, and Smoak himself never complained about his odd hours, or even about Astra. At first Henry thought all this politeness was because he was Miss Darlington’s protégé, and the town was tolerating him out of respect for her. Eventually, though, he decided it was just that good manners were part of the Paulton civic character.
“How many people work for you, Walker?”
“Seven or eight, depending. More if you count my news-boys.”
They were in the printing room, where a man was setting slugs at a Linotype machine and another man was jamming wedges into a printing press. The noise, that rackety-clackety click of metal striking metal, flung Henry back into the past like a slingshot. The smells of ink and hot lead almost made him dizzy, they were so familiar, and he’d missed them so much. He hadn’t known how much.
“That makes you kind of a one-man band,” he said as they walked back upstairs to the main office—what, on a bigger paper, he’d have called the city room.
“I guess it does. I’m the news editor, the managing editor, and the chief editorial writer.”
“And the publisher,” Henry reminded him.
“And sometimes the rewrite man and the copy editor. I’m the photographer when my regular man’s too drunk.” He flung himself into the chair behind his big desk, as if listing all his jobs had exhausted him. Reaching into a bottom drawer, he pulled out a bottle. “Care for a—Oh, sorry. Forgot, you’re not a drinking man.”
“No, but you go ahead.”
“Not me.” He put the bottle back. “Just being polite. Got a paper to get out tonight, and my lead reporter’s down with the flu, or so he claims. I think he’s down with the barmaid at Wayne’s Tavern, but I could be wrong.”
A rummy-looking old-timer at a distant desk looked up from his typewriter and chuckled. Another wave of nostalgia washed over Henry. Were all city rooms the same? All over the world?
“Circulation’s up because we’ve got a Springfield edition now, plus Paulton’s spreading out, getting bigger.” Walker stuck his fingers in his thinning hair and pressed down on his skull. “Not enough hours in the day anymore.”
Henry made sympathetic noises. An overworked managing editor was nothing new, but Walker looked done in. “You love it, though,” Henry said to console him. “As tough as it is, you wouldn’t be doing anything else.”
Walker reached into another drawer, pulled out a couple of cigars, handed one over, lit them both with a safety match. They smoked for a while.
“Actually, I would.”
Henry thought he’d heard wrong. “Would what?”
“Rather be doing something else. I inherited all this”—he