Roomful of Roses. Diana Palmer

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      “I’ll call before I come back,” he promised.

      She watched him run for his old pickup truck, and prayed, not for the first time, that it would start. It did, with an ear-splitting roar, and she watched it jerk down the wide street that ran around the tree-lined square with its Confederation statue and old men in overalls sitting on park benches in the shade.

      Edward Keene looked up when she came in. He was standing beside the young brunette typesetter at the computer, his heavy white brows drawn into a scowl over his weather-beaten face. His nose seemed to quiver as he clutched the galley proof in his hand. “I’ll wait to paste this up until you get that correction line, Judy,” he told the typesetter, aiming a glare at Wynn.

      “Who are you?” he asked his girl reporter. “Do you work here? Do you know what day it is? Do you realize that I’m making this paper up alone and trying to help Judy proof copy and set ads...”

      “I got photos,” she said, holding up the camera with a grin. “Big ones, they’ll fill up space.”

      “Pix of what?” he grumbled. “A pond?”

      “And a house fire and that new bypass bridge they just finished in Union City.”

      He beamed. “Really?”

      “Well,” she sighed, “at least that cheered you up for a minute. Kelly will get the wreck, so that gives you at least four pix for the front page, and we could blow them up to four columns each...?”

      “That’s why I hired you.” He nodded with a grin. “You know how to spread news out. Okay, with what I’ve already got, that’ll fill ’er up.”

      “I’ll take it back to Jess in the darkroom,” she said, and started into the other office.

      “Uh, after you do that, come into my office for a minute, will you?” Edward hesitated.

      Wynn glanced at him, puzzled. He looked strange for an instant. She shrugged and rushed to the back with the film. It was press day, she told herself. Everybody looked strange then.

      She handed the film to Jess with a grin at the harassed look that immediately appeared on his thin, aging face. “Yesterday?” he muttered.

      “Please,” she said, agreeing on the delivery date. “All you have to do is three halftones, though, four columns each—one of the fire and one of the new bridge and one of the pond.”

      “I get to pick them out?” he asked with raised eyebrows.

      “Sure! See how good I am to you?” she asked as she headed toward the door.

      “Good! Here I am with three rush jobs, one to get out by two o’clock, I haven’t made the first negative...” He kept right on muttering, and she dashed back into the newspaper office and closed the door.

      Edward was sitting behind the heavily loaded desk, which contained a much-used manual typewriter, half a dozen daily newspapers from which he pirated leads, and some scratch paper. He pulled off his glasses and whipped out a spotless white handkerchief to clean them with.

      “Well, sit down,” he said impatiently, leaning back with his hands crossed over his ample stomach.

      “What is it?” she asked, getting scared. He looked...really strange.

      “Feel okay?” he asked.

      “Sure.” She eyed him warily. “Why? Do I look like a potential stroke victim?”

      He cleared his throat. “No.”

      “It’s Katy Maude!” she burst out.

      “No,” he said quickly. His shoulders lifted and fell. “Why don’t you keep up on what’s happening in Central America? Then you’d know and I wouldn’t have to stumble all over myself.”

      Her blood actually ran cold. She gripped the arms of the chair hard enough to numb her fingers. “McCabe,” she gasped. “Something’s happened to McCabe!”

      “He’s alive,” he said. “Not badly injured at all.”

      She leaned back with a sigh, feeling herself grow weak. All these years, she’d expected it, until today, and she’d been knocked sideways. “What was it? A sniper?”

      “Something like that.” He tossed an issue of the Atlanta morning daily over to her. “Notice the sidebar.”

      She looked away from the banner headline to the accompanying story. “WAR CORRESPONDENT INJURED.” There was a small, very dark photo of McCabe and she strained her eyes to see if he’d changed much over the long years, but she couldn’t even make out his features. She read the copy. It stated that McCabe had been hurt while covering a story, and there was some speculation as to whether the incident was connected to the deaths of the two French correspondents that had been reported earlier that week. According to the story, McCabe had been roughed up and had a torn ligament in one leg and a trace of concussion, but he was alive.

      “It doesn’t say where he is now,” she murmured.

      “Uh, I was afraid you’d wonder about that. Be kind of hard to miss him, of course,” he mumbled.

      She stared at him. Her mind was only beginning to work again after its shock. “Hard to miss him?”

      “Yes. When you walk in your front door, that is,” Edward volunteered. “Big man...”

      “He’s at my house?” she burst out. “What’s he doing at my house!”

      “Recuperating,” he assured her. “Well, the motel’s closed down for remodeling. Where else could he stay?”

      “With you!”

      “Nope,” he replied calmly. “No spare room.”

      “He could sleep on the couch!”

      “In his condition? Couldn’t ask an injured man to do that,” he said.

      “I could,” she replied coldly. “I can’t have McCabe in the house alone with me. Katy Maude’s not due home for several more weeks, she’s just getting over her heart attack, and she couldn’t take the excitement of constant arguing.”

      “You and Katy don’t argue,” he observed.

      “But McCabe and I do,” she reminded him. “Constantly. On every subject. And Andy will go through the ceiling!”

      “Oh, him,” Edward said, dismissing the other man with a wave of his hand. “Andy’s one of those liberal city fellows. He won’t think a thing about it.”

      “Are we talking about the same Andrew Slone?” she asked. “My fiancé, who went on local television to protest a theater advertisement in the Ashton Daily Bugle because it showed a woman’s bare bosom?”

      Edward looked at her over his glasses. “Hmm. You might have a problem there, sure enough.”

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