of promises of undying love, he’d found a new love—a cheerleader, no less.
Life wasn’t fair, and Serenity Hutchins knew it. She probably always had.
She could have moved in with her mother in Bremerton; instead she chose to rent an apartment at Mariner’s Glen in Port Orchard, one of those hopelessly nautically themed apartments that saw great use for rusty anchors, ratty nets, and heaps of silvery driftwood at its entryway. She lived there with her cat, a black-and-white tabby named Mr. Smith.
Her editor, a heavyset fellow who’d worked at papers in Seattle and San Francisco but had come back to helm the tiny Port Orchard newspaper, lumbered toward her. Charlie Keller could have been Serenity’s idol. He’d interviewed a couple of presidents as a part of the San Francisco Chronicle ’s editorial board. He had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice for spot news reporting. He’d even had a long-running column in the Seattle Times. He’d done it all, had it all, and then lost it to a gambling habit.
He’d come home to Port Orchard to finish out his career and die.
That will never happen to me, Serenity thought as she watched Charlie maneuver between the newsroom desks, his beefy frame pounding on the hollow flooring of the modular building that was the modest headquarters of the Lighthouse. I’m going to make a name for myself and stay on top for good.
She smiled at him.
“Hutchins,” he said. “Might have something for you.”
She liked it when he used her last name. It was so All the President’s Men. “What’s up?”
“Missing brush picker out in Sunnyslope. Probably nothing. Probably more about a homesick girl wanting to go back to El Salvador than anything. You want the story? Remember, nothing much happens around here, and that’s pretty much the way they like it.”
Serenity was finishing up an article about a beautification project that had languished for years as downtown Port Orchard merchants griped about the cost.
“What makes you say that?” she asked, dropping the story into an electronic file folder for the copydesk.
“Talked to Josh in the Sheriff’s Office.”
“I’ll run it down,” she said. “Details?”
Charlie looked over by the front door, where a clean-cut man in a blue sweatshirt and jeans was waiting. He had black hair and the faint tracings of a goatee that had either just started or, if it had been growing a while, he ought to abandon.
“That’s the boyfriend,” Charlie said. “Tulio Pena is his name. Let’s put something in the paper. Okay?”
Serenity took a notepad and pen and went toward Tulio.
“See if you can get a picture, okay?” Charlie called out. “We need art, you know.”
“I know,” she said, with the resignation that came with the realization that photos and coupons were the primary reason anyone bothered with the Lighthouse. Text—no matter how good—was needed only to fill the spaces between art and ads. She thought of it as “word mortar designed to keep the ads from falling off the sheet of newsprint.”
The Lighthouse’s conference room was furnished with seven ladder-back chairs and an antique mahogany table that, newsroom legend had it, was salvaged from a near-shipwreck around the Cape by one of Port Orchard’s first settlers, a sea captain who’d planned on retiring in Seattle but instead settled in Sidney, the forerunner of present-day Port Orchard. The back wall had the framed sheet-metal press plates of some of the biggest stories covered by the paper throughout its history: The stock market crash. World War II. Kennedy’s assassination. Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. By the late seventies, not only had the Lighthouse switched to cold-type processing, but several purchases by out-of-state companies had stripped the paper of its pursuit of the big story. In a very real way, the display was a reminder that, outside of a small news hole, the Lighthouse was merely a shopper feeding a shrinking gob of income to an out-of-state owner. It was no longer a paper of daily record. It had gone weekly as a cost-cutting move not long after it changed hands.
“I heard what he said,” Tulio said, indicating Charlie Keller, as he took a seat across from Serenity. He opened an envelope carrying three photos and slid them across the deep, dark wood surface.
Serenity noticed a slight tremor in his hands.
This guy is scared, she thought.
The images were of Celesta Delgado. One had her in a raspberry cap and gown; another in a Mexican peasant blouse embroidered with holly and poinsettias. The last was of the two of them, taken with a flash as the sun highlighted the tops of the Olympics. She was a lovely girl, not much younger than Serenity.
“She’s a high school graduate,” he said. “We both are.” His eyes fixed on the photo; then he looked up at the reporter, trying to detect a flicker of surprise. He’d met enough people who, because his skin was bronze and his accent could not be masked, assumed that he could not be anything but a migrant. One of the invisible who do the jobs no one else wants.
“South Kitsap?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“Any family here? You know, so I can talk to them about Celesta’s background.”
Tulio shook his head. “Her dad died, and her mom and sister moved back to El Salvador. She’s only got me. I am her family. We were going to be married in August.”
Serenity pointed to the photo of Celesta in the Christmas blouse, her hair thick and blue-black.
“Taken at work,” Tulio said. “She is a restaurant hostess at Azteca. She was employee of the month earlier this year.”
“You want us to publish these photos, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The police are doing nothing. We have to find her. I need help.”
Serenity understood. She didn’t blame the Sheriff’s Office. They were understaffed and overworked just like anyone else. Maybe a little story could help.
“Tell me everything about the day Celesta went missing.”
Tulio took a deep breath. “Okay. We left early. . . .”
Within an hour of Tulio Pena’s departure, Serenity put the finishing touches on a short article about Celesta Delgado. The photo-imaging guy at the paper had done a reasonably decent job with the scans, holding the detail that would look beautiful online but surely would muddy up on the printing presses. She finished a bottled water with some leftover eggplant parmigiana that had at most one more day of survival in the refrigerator.
Brush Picker Vanishes Near Sunnyslope
A local woman disappeared while harvesting greens for a floral supply warehouse Sunday afternoon.
The Kitsap County Sheriff responded to a call from Celesta Delgado’s boyfriend, Tulio Pena, at 3 p.m. just off the Sunnyslope highway fronting DNR land.
Delgado, 22, and Pena, 27, were working as brush pickers, along with Pena’s two brothers.
All carried permits issued by the state.
“We were having a good day,” Pena said in an interview with the Lighthouse. “Celesta was taking a bag of salal back to the van, and the next thing we knew, she was gone. Something is wrong.”
Kitsap Sheriff Jim McCray says that his office is investigating.
“We are putting resources on it,” he said, “but we are concerned that this might be the case of a young woman who got tired of things here, or missed her family and went back home. She did the same thing three months ago.”
McCray was referring to reports that Delgado left her job as a hostess at the East Bremerton Azteca Mexican Restaurant without giving any reason. However, a check by the Lighthouse indicated that the departure was a misunderstanding. Delgado was rehired