One

The news didn’t fit.

Gar Kraft struggled not to laugh. Canned tomatoes and flour sacks shelved inside Reggie's Grocery had never evoked comedic episodes in Lilac, Minnesota's last remaining food store.

Gar clamped his teeth tight as he angled his gaze toward four women he recognized to be longtime town residents.  His thoughts jumped to a Wild West movie Main Street scene where townfolk stutter-stepped and reversed direction to avoid the evil gunman, just arrived.

No such event existed in Gar's reality. The four women did their best to avoid a young blond-haired woman dressed in a green, capped-sleeve blouse and beige Capri’s. Two women bumped hips in their effort to circle the nearest aisle endcap as the blonde meandered from the fresh produce bins to the clear-glass meat display case and, finally, to the non-refrigerated prepackaged food shelves.

From in front of him, the words attacked. “Ye not remember what ye came in for?”

Gar gulped; his mind snapped out of its transitory trance with the instant recognition of Angus’s voice. Gazing up from the white butcher’s apron Angus stretched tight across his ample stomach, Gar ignored comment on the apron’s dark-red dried blood. “Coffee, need office coffee.”

“Aisle two,” Angus replied.

Gar inhaled deep and exhaled slowly to retard his lungs from expelling the oxygen he needed to stride with conviction to Aisle Two. He extended his left hand to grip a 26-ounce Folgers can. In his peripheral vision, the shunned woman approached him with measured white sneaker strides, her gaze angled to the top shelf filled with cake mixes.

“Hello, good afternoon.” Gar tried to sound non-threatening. He’d no designs to build an intimate friendship with the never-before-seen woman he assumed to be about his age. However, if the conversation so dictated, he’d be ready to convince her she could profit from grocery coupons printed in the town’s weekly newspaper, which he owned.

She shuffled her feet into a squared fighter’s stance. “You a reporter?” She stared at him, her head tilted slightly upward with her hazel eyes fixed on his nose.

“Was.” He dropped his gaze from the scar near her left eye and refocused on her pale thin lips. “I’ve owned the Lilac Examiner these past three years.”

Her lips broadened into a frown before she then spoke in a dull tone, “Sorry, don’t talk to reporters.” When the words stopped, the frown returned and she rotated her shoulders in the direction opposite him and edged away, gaining speed and forward momentum with each step as if there was a blue light special in the next aisle.

Confused, but understanding the hint, Gar hurried through the express checkout lane. He received a warmer welcome from local Realtor Nancy Sutter on the sidewalk outside Reggie’s. “Say, Nancy, couldn’t help but notice that woman in green. Know who she is?”

“Planning to ask her out?” Nancy’s coy smile flashed and stayed for a few seconds.

“Just curious. Except for summer migrants, and don’t call me prejudiced, I try to make it a point to at least be socially knowledgeable of Lilac’s 2,107 U.S. census residents.”

Nancy glanced in both street directions. “That’s Mary Nunnley. She supposedly got into a sticky gossipy situation in San Francisco and is hiding out with her aunt who lives on Buckley.”

“That doesn’t sound all that bad unless you’re saying she’s a serial killer.”

“Don’t know that.” Nancy lowered her voice. “All I can say is that when I called on her two days ago to pitch my office, she first asked if I was a reporter. When I said no, she replied ‘That’s good. I don’t talk to reporters.’ Her question doesn’t impact me, thou it might you.”

Gar pressed the coffee can to his chest with the crook of his left arm. “Her aunt’s already a subscriber. I doubt I’ll be gaining a subscriber.”

“Well, she did say she’s expecting a van and might be interested in renting a storefront.”

Gar felt the bounce in his spirits. It quickly rolled away when the town’s new arrival passed by both he and Nancy without a token nod. His lips parted to be cordial, but he wouldn’t make a fool of himself in front of Nancy. The women’s store reaction gave him enough of an indication that any mention of the woman’s name along with his wouldn’t be favorable gossip.

Now entering his third year as owner and publisher of the weekly Lilac Examiner, Gar wished Nancy a good day and promised to be by her office in the next couple of days with a proof of her firm’s homes-for-sale ad. On his stroll to the Examiner’s office, he juggled Internet search terms and racked his brain to recall any journalists he knew who toiled in San Francisco. As a New York reporter he’d traveled the United States on assignment. Living undercover had stressed him out to the extent that he’d entered alcohol rehab for six weeks and tilted his life to an equilibrium that trying to become friends with a person who didn’t want him as a friend wouldn’t cut it.

For his brief encounter with Mary, he’d not seen any listless eyes or sluggish verbal responses. Should he have asked her to display her bare feet to verify no needle marks between her little piggies? Maybe he missed another visible clue to her having had a hard life that caused her to  lash out against the news media? He chuckled to himself. With all the modern conveniences, airplanes, luxury cars, and indoor porcelain plumbing fixtures, no one today had a hard life when compared to Mormon handcart pioneers or sod-busters on the Minnesota prairie.

Gar let the screen door to the newspaper office’s bang. Eileen shook her head with disgust. He didn’t like calling a seventy-year-old woman he employed by her first name, but she insisted. And he couldn’t afford to lose his one and only employee and the best proofreader he’d ever encountered.

“Looks like you’ve met the woman of your dreams?”

“Don’t try that on me again, Eileen. I’ve come straight back with the coffee. See?” Gar held the Folgers can one-handed above his head.

“Angus called. Said you were in a daze at Reggie’s. And, there were only women in the aisles, that is, except you of course.”

“For heavens sake. I went for coffee and a bit of air. Only conversation I had was with Nancy Sutter and that was related to her real estate business.”

Eileen gave Gar the nod he understood to be a polite public gesture that disguised the internal belief that Eileen didn’t believe a word being said.

“We need to have Nancy’s ad completed by tomorrow. I promised her. And,...” Gar stared straight at Eileen, “and, that’s the sum total of my walk to Reggie’s.” Gar slid the coffee can across the counter to be next to the coffee pot and headed past Eileen to his office, the only private place on the first floor of the thirty-by-eighty foot space. He only composed the pages here. The presswork he contracted out at a central facility in Beaver Dam, twenty miles to the west.

“Angus said there’s a new young woman in town.”

Gar halted his stride to his office in mid-step. He twisted his shoulders toward Eileen, and without thinking, he called out in a loud voice. “You know about her?”

The sparkle in Eileen’s emerald eyes jumped from low to high beam. “Could?”

“Probably just gossip.” Gar shuffled his feet toward Eileen so that he didn’t have to shout as he was required to do on days when Eileen’s hearing aid battery needed recharging. He squared his shoulders. “Unless you tell me she stopped by to order a subscription or buy an ad, don’t know that anything else about her would interest me.”

“Maybe I don’t want to come and clean your apartment again.”

“Whoa, Nellie. That was one time, over a year ago. You can’t bang that over my head forever. I only capitulated because you said you’d quit working here if I didn’t agree.”

Eileen’s lips parted with an engaging smile. “Guess I did. Bet those spiders haven’t come back after I laid that trail to Boot Hill for them?”

“My apartment’s fine.” He knew that realistically there was little probability of Mary stopping into the newspaper office this day since he’d been in all day except for the afternoon walk to Reggie’s, but he’d been out of town yesterday. “Now did Mary stop in?”

“So, you know her name.” Eileen’s hands rose in a boxer’s victory clasp.

“Keep my ears open, I do. Been trained as a reporter, you know. And I think Nancy mentioned her name a few minutes ago. I told you she and I talked.”

“The girl’s, sorry, the woman’s aunt is in my Methodist women’s sewing circle. That girl’s been persecuted. Big City people are cruel if you ask me. More than flower children these days in California. Just look at our sin cities closer to home, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Who’d want to live in either of them. The crime. Old and young aren’t safe on the streets.”

“Let’s not go there again. We have our proportion of crime here. It’s just that we don’t print most of it, preferring to fill our columns with births, weddings, and obits. So, if you wanted my interest, you have it. What did the aunt say about her niece?”

“She was a big name stage star. Traveled to New York and Hollywood, although her aunt said Mary, and I’ll use the name since you know it, liked to live in the hills around San Francisco. Guess she graduated from Berkeley. That’s near there isn’t it?”

Gar nodded. He could check college locations later. He knew that if he didn’t keep Eileen talking, she’d clam up and there was something intriguing about the woman he’d just met, apart from her aversion to reporters. If she’d been an actor, that could account for the standoffishness. But her voice inflection hinted at something deeper. “It is. Did she act under her given name?”

“No.”

‘So, what was her stage name?”

“Aunt didn’t say.”

v