CHAPTER 1

Ghosts.

That’s what I thought of on an early-May morning as I stared at the blank computer screen, imagined this newsroom forty or fifty years ago. Certainly there would have been more noise: the steady clacking of teletypes and typewriters, the whole room hot and sweating and loud-voiced. Bustling would have been the word to describe it, like a giant beehive, a fumigated one, for there would be cigarette and cigar smoke bluing the air overhead like a stalled cloud. Everywhere would be men, white men, wearing rumpled suits and ties and suspenders. No bottled water or granola bars on these guys’ desks.

If their ghosts ever wandered back here, they probably assumed the place had been renovated into a hospital wing, for in the second year of a new millennium the fluorescent bulbs spread an antiseptic glow. Faces were shuttered inside cubicles, and the air was smoke-free and 72 degrees year-round. Perhaps most surprising to those men would be the fact that an equal number of women, and of varying skin tones, filled the desks.

A few things had not changed. Thanks to The Messenger’s skinflint owner, Thomas Hudson, salaries were still low, the hours awful, and, as always, looming deadlines provided chronic doses of stress.

My managing editor, Lee Gervais, interrupted my thoughts.

“I do believe Miss Maggie Glenn is daydreaming about me,” he said.

Lee leaned over my shoulder, his eyes rheumy and red-veined as they took in my blank screen. He was thirty-eight, ten years my senior, but he looked older, the flesh on his face pasty and puffy, what hair he had retreating toward the sides and back of his head. Lee wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt. The skin on the undersides of his arms was loose like an old woman’s. He came from a wealthy family, and part of his softness was the result of never using his muscles for lifting anything heavier than a tennis racket or pitching wedge. The rest came from lifting too many gin and tonics.

Yes, I almost said, because I knew Lee would have preferred the newsroom of fifty years ago, a place where he could have told dirty jokes between drags on his cigarette and sips from a whiskey bottle kept in the top desk drawer.

“No, Lee. I’m just trying to get myself motivated on a Thursday morning when I’d rather be sleeping.”

“I think I can help,” Lee said. “How would you like a photographer’s dream assignment?”

“George Clooney coming to town?” I asked.

“Better than that. A chance to work with Allen Hemphill on a sure front-page feature.”

“What’s the catch?”

Lee shook his head. “How did an Oconee County farm girl get so cynical?”