She’d been pushed from one boring story to another, though once in a while she was actually on television, when statewide news developed near Riggs Crossing. There was a chance that she’d be able to parlay this story into something on camera, and she was ready. Unlike Seamus O’Day, the lead reporter on the missing-woman story. She let out a disgusted snort. O’Day should be put out to pasture. Over sixty and once a sports reporter for the Seattle Times, he’d been shit-canned from that position. Instead of working the Megan Travers story, O’Day would rather be watching a ball game, any effin’ game, while sitting on a bar stool at the local watering hole, the Brass Bullet.

Not Charity.

Uh-uh.

She was on this one.

She smelled a mystery and a scandal, the kind of story that could garner statewide, if not national, attention and just could land her, if not on the television news cycle, then on her own videotaped version. This was just the kind of racy article that could catapult her out of this podunk Nothingsville town with its tiny rag of a newspaper and into something much, much bigger.

If not the New York Times or Washington Post or Chicago Tribune, then one of the national tabloids, anything to get out of Riggs Crossing, Washington!

This story could be her ticket out.

She’d make sure of it.

She drove past snowy fields with sagging fences and stands of fir trees until she spied the inn, an old hotel that James Cahill had brought back to life. Oh, he’d had a vision, she thought, pulling into the gravel-strewn lot and waiting for an elderly couple to back s-l-ow-l-y out of a parking spot.

But then he was a Cahill.

Growing up with the proverbial silver spoon stuck firmly between his teeth.

The rich get richer.

“Ain’t it the truth?” she said to herself as she zipped into the parking slot. She was already working on the story behind her editor’s and sports nut O’Day’s backs, and she’d done some digging on the Cahill family in San Francisco. If she were lucky—and she was today—she’d be able to wangle herself a ticket to the City by the Bay and get some backstory and dirt on the Cahill family.

Wouldn’t that just be the best?

Smiling, she cut the engine, checked her look in the mirror, and added a touch of lip gloss to her naturally pink lips. Dark bangs poked out of her red ski hat; her eyes, smoky gray, were bright, and her skin was a little rosier than usual, but she looked good, and she knew it. She woke up looking good. Lucky that way.

There was that word again.