Deadline. Metsy Hingle

the sirens. The phone began to ring. Fists banged on the door. And the phone kept ringing and ringing…

      Startled by the ringing phone, Tess sat up in bed and looked around the unfamiliar room. Then she spied the phone on the night table. She grabbed the receiver. “Hello.”

      “Good morning, Ms. Abbott. This is your six-thirty wake-up call.”

      “Thank you,” Tess said.

      After hanging up the phone, she fell back against the pillows. And once again she questioned her decision to come back to Grady. What if her grandfather had been right? That she should allow the past to remain buried.

      She also recalled Ronnie’s question. Would she be able to handle whatever it was that she discovered?

      She didn’t know, Tess admitted. But what she did know was that she owed it to her mother, if not to herself, to find out what really happened that night twenty-five years ago.

      Chapter Six

      Tess sat at a table in the back corner of the Grady Public Library. The library itself was small. The two-story brick building was composed of no more than a dozen rooms, but those rooms were filled with an array of books. Everything from Shakespeare to the classics to the latest Sandra Brown thriller and everything in between. But while the library had lots to offer in the way of books, the selection of past newspapers and periodicals left much to be desired—particularly the ones dating from twenty-five years ago. So far, she’d only found a handful of articles that provided details about the murder trial.

      Unfortunately, she’d had little luck with the newspaper search since the library was in the process of microfilming its back issues to free up storage space. It was a wise move, one she was surprised that they were only now getting around to implementing. It was simply her misfortune that the segment of newspapers that were being microfilmed at present were the ones in which she was interested.

      Still, she hadn’t completely struck out thanks to the old, now defunct, town weekly. From it, she had been able to get a bird’s-eye glimpse of the defense attorney who’d been appointed to handle her father’s case—one Mr. Beau Clayton. Research done when she was still in D.C. revealed that he’d long ago left the public defender’s office and was now in private practice in another county between Grady and Jackson. What she hadn’t known, and had only discovered while at the library, was that Mr. Beau Clayton had been a green attorney, not long out of law school, with nothing more than a few petty theft cases under his belt when he had been handed her father’s murder case to defend. She couldn’t help wondering now just how good a defense he had been able to provide Jody Burns.

      Adjusting her glasses, Tess typed in the next call number she’d copied from the periodicals/reserve desk that logged the location of all stored periodicals and newspapers at the library. And as had been the case with most of the call numbers she’d entered, she received the now familiar message: “Microfilm reel—Not Currently Received.” Sighing, Tess typed in the next one on her list.

      “Wanda told me you were hiding in here again today,” a soft female voice remarked in that melodic tone to which Tess was quickly becoming accustomed. “Or did she mean you were still hiding in here because you haven’t bothered to leave?”

      Tess looked up at Anne Marie Gillroy and smiled. “Hi, Anne Marie,” she said to the head librarian whom she had met for the first time when she’d visited the library on Monday. The lady hadn’t exactly fit Tess’s image of what a small-town librarian should look like. In addition to being under thirty, the brown-eyed brunette had the well-toned body of a dancer and a complexion the cosmetics firms would have paid a fortune to be able to duplicate. She also had a wardrobe much more fashionable than Tess would have expected, given the woman lived in a town of less than eighteen thousand people that didn’t boast designer boutiques on every corner. Today Anne Marie wore a rich burgundy pantsuit with a silver and leather belt that accentuated her curves. She’d draped a scarf in striking jewel tones across one shoulder and had anchored it with a silver clip. A pair of smart ankle boots completed the outfit. The added touches took the outfit from simply pretty to chic. “Believe it or not, I actually did go back to the guesthouse last night to sleep.”

      “Are you sure? Because I could have sworn I left you in that very same position yesterday evening.” She leaned closer as though to study Tess’s face. “In fact, I think you were even wearing the same frown.”

      Tess chuckled. Removing her glasses, she stretched. “I feel like I’ve been here all night. But the truth is, I’ve only been at it a couple of hours,” she said. “I was hoping I might have better luck today.”

      “And did you?” Anne Marie asked.

      “Not really,” Tess admitted as she glanced at the small cache of notes she’d made. “It seems just about everything I’ve tried to access for viewing is out being microfilmed. And the few things I have found are pretty much a repeat of info I already have.”

      “Sorry,” Anne Marie said with an apologetic smile. “But getting all those old newspaper issues on storage film was something I’ve been itching to do since I took over this job. It took me eight months to get the council to approve it in the budget because they thought Miss Tilly’s old system worked just fine,” she explained, referring to the retired librarian whose position Anne Marie had been hired to fill. “Once they gave me the go-ahead, I decided I’d better move quickly before they changed their minds.”

      “I understand,” Tess replied. And she did. Although Anne Marie Gillroy held a degree in library science from a major university in Texas, to many of the townspeople she was still little Anne Marie who had grown up in Grady. But apparently Anne Marie was winning them over slowly but surely. She couldn’t help but admire the woman’s dedication and determination to bring the town’s library into the twenty-first century. From what Tess could see, she was well on her way to accomplishing that goal. It was just unfortunate for Tess that the timing for the revamping of the library’s records storage system proved a hindrance to her own research. Deciding it was time to hit another source, she said, “Since I don’t seem to be getting too far here, I think I’m going to try the newspaper office.”

      “That’s probably a good idea.”