True believer - Nicholas Sparks [126]
As for the diary, he’d kept that to himself, as he had with Nate earlier.
Later, he made a phone call to Mayor Gherkin. Jeremy’s proposal was simple: Boone Creek would no longer promise visitors on the Historic Homes Tour a chance to see ghosts in the cemetery. The word “haunted” would be removed from the brochure, as would any claims that the lights had anything to do with the supernatural. Instead, the legend’s history would be given full play, and visitors could be informed that they just might witness something spectacular. While some tourists might see the lights and wonder aloud if they were the ghosts from the legend, the volunteers who conducted the tours were told never to suggest as much. Finally, Jeremy asked the mayor to remove the T-shirts and cups from his department store downtown.
In exchange, Jeremy pomised he would never mention anything about Cedar Creek Cemetery on television, in his column, or in an independent article. He wouldn’t expose the mayor’s plan to turn the town into a ghostly version of Roswell, New Mexico, nor would he tell anyone in the town that the mayor had known the truth all along.
Mayor Gherkin accepted the offer. After hanging up, Jeremy called Alvin, whom he swore to secrecy.
Twenty-one
In the days following Jeremy’s unsuccessful meeting with the producers, he focused his attention on trying to return to his previous routines. He spoke to his editor at Scientific American. Behind on his deadline and vaguely remembering something Nate had suggested to him, he agreed to do a column about the possible dangers of a low-carbohydrate diet. He spent hours on the Internet, scanning countless newspapers, looking for other stories that might be of interest. He was disappointed to learn that Clausen—with the help of a high-profile publicity firm in New York—had largely weathered the storm after Jeremy’s appearance on Primetime and was still in negotiations for his own television show. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Jeremy, and he spent the rest of the day bemoaning the gullibility of true believers.
Little by little, he was getting himself back on track. Or, at least, he thought he was. Though he still thought of Lexie frequently, wondering whether she was busy preparing for her marriage to Rodney, he did his best to force those thoughts out of his mind. They were just too painful. Instead, he tried to resume the life he’d been living before he met Lexie. On Friday night, he went out to a nightclub. It didn’t go particularly well. Instead of mingling and trying to catch the attention of the women standing nearby, he sat at the bar nursing a single beer for most of the night, leaving long before he normally would have. The next day, he visited his family in Queens, but seeing his brothers and their wives playing with their kids only made him wish again for something that could never be.
By Monday noon, as another winter storm was settling in, he’d convinced himself that it was really over. She hadn’t called and neither had he. At times, those few days with Lexie seemed like nothing more than the mirage he’d been investigating. It couldn’t have been real, he told himself, but as he sat at his desk, he found himself thumbing through the postcards again, finally pinning the one of the library on the wall behind the desk.
He ordered lunch from the Chinese restaurant down the block for the third time in a week, then leaned back in his chair, wondering about the choices he’d made. For an instant, he wondered if Lexie would be eating at the same time he was, but the thought was interrupted by the buzz of the intercom.
He grabbed his wallet and headed toward the door. Through the static of the intercom, he heard a female