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She actually had an account, and unlike me, she updated it more than once a year. Mine was exclusively hunting and fishing photos. She hadn’t posted anything since arriving in the Beard, but her other posts showed her smiling in groups of friends. In several photos, she was with the same female friend, and they were eating at different restaurants, all with the hashtag brunch.
Avon liked to read. She had posts about books she loved and others where she was pictured with dogs available for adoption, sharing their details.
I closed out the app, mentally scolding myself again. The last thing I needed to know was that the gorgeous redhead I couldn’t keep off my mind volunteered helping shelter dogs. The point was to focus less on her, not more.
Taking a drink of my beer, I turned my attention to SportsCenter, which was playing on a TV screen mounted on the wall behind the bar. Football analysis was a much safer bet than anything involving Avon Douglas.
CHAPTER TEN
Avon
Bess stomped the snow off her boots as she walked into the back door of the Chronicle, doing a dramatic double take when she saw me sitting at my desk as she walked into the newsroom.
“What are you doing here so early?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Easy commute. And I couldn’t sleep.”
“It’s really coming down out there,” she said as she took her long coat off and hung it on the ancient coat tree in the corner.
It was snowing. Again. The view through our windows was almost solid white, the snowfall so thick you couldn’t see anything through it. I had an appointment Friday to get an estimate for a fix on the furnace in the apartment. My new bed was delivered yesterday, though. I’d immediately layered it with flannel sheets, fleece blankets, and a down comforter. Last night I’d burrowed myself beneath the covers at 7:30 p.m. and slept until 4:00 a.m. It was the best night of sleep I’d gotten since getting here.
“Hey, I wrote a feature story about the teacher who got the principal’s job at the grade school. Can you read it for me when you have a chance?” I asked Bess.
“You betcha.”
Bess wore many hats here, and one of them was editor. I’d discovered that by reading some of Pete’s drafts of stories and comparing them to the versions that ran in the paper. She’d cleaned up his grammar and polished awkward sentences. Pete probably should have left the Chronicle to her, instead of his niece who preferred sunshine to blizzards.
My stomach twisted nervously. Surely I was his niece and not his daughter. The thought of my mom keeping a secret of that magnitude hurt me bone deep.
“Andrea from The Sleepy Moose is going to email you about their holiday ads,” I said, focusing on work to keep myself from worrying about questions without answers.
“I assume they’ll do their usual,” Bess said. “They’re pretty good about not making me build new ads all the time.”
“I think they just need you to change the dates of their events,” I said absently.
“Did you stop by 3B and introduce yourself?”
Since firing Dana, the advertising representative who thought work hours were just a loose suggestion, I’d become not just the only reporter for the Chronicle, but also, temporarily at least, the only ad rep. I was comfortable working in sales, but it was hard to find the time to keep up with everything. Usually, I was only able to carve out about thirty minutes a day to keep up with emails for my job back home.
“Uh…remind me what 3B is,” I said to Bess.
“Beard Books and Brews. The coffee and book place down the street.”
I grabbed a hair tie from my desk and used it to put my hair in a ponytail at the nape of my neck. I’d been meaning to stop by the coffee shop for a week now, not just because they were an advertising customer but also because I’d heard they made great coffee.
“Not yet,” I said. “Hopefully I can do it today after I get the roundups.”
Bess let out her sigh of disapproval. “Simone has been buying ads from us for many years. It doesn’t have to be a long meeting, you know. Just stop by to introduce yourself and thank her for her business.”
Because I had nothing else to do. I was putting in at least eleven hours a day, but my to-do list just kept getting longer.
“It’s not that I don’t know what to do, it’s that I haven’t had time,” I said, an edge in my tone.
“Well, don’t be surprised if we lose them as a customer.”
Pressing my lips together, I grabbed my headphones and put them on, then scrolled to the Escape from Bess playlist on my phone and pressed play.
A few hours later, I sat in the waiting room of the mayor’s second-floor office at City Hall. It was a contrast to the clean white and gray tones on the first level of the building, with dark red carpet, leather chairs, and big, framed portraits of past Sven’s Beard mayors.
