Maxine gave her a mysterious smile.
“What?” Elena demanded, her mouth frothing with chocolate. “What’s that grin?”
Maxine shrugged. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that people have seen you and James around town more and more and more. I can’t help but wonder.”
Elena cackled. “What can’t you wonder? Keep your wondering to yourself!”
But now they were off to the races on their friendship, teasing one another and laughing so much that Maxine’s daughters came to check on them to make sure they were all right.
“James Murphy! Imagine,” Elena said, shaking her head.
But on the inside, she thought to herself,Imagine! James Murphy and I! Imagine!
Chapter Fourteen
It was the morning after Elena’s dinner with Maxine that James Murphy himself came to the newspaper offices with fresh croissants—not just for Elena, but for everyone. Elena watched as her newsroom colleagues paraded by, clutching the soft yet crunchy delights, eager to refill their coffee cops. “Thank you, James!” they called out, eyeing Elena. Everyone knew what Maxine knew. The entire town knew! James was really into Elena.
But was Elena crazy for James?
Oh, he’d been through so much in the past three years. But Elena had felt safe enough with him to tell him everything about her own harrowing three years. What did it mean that she’d felt so comfortable around him? It didn’t have to mean “love,” she knew. But what if it did?
James stood near the box of croissants, unafraid, his eyes on Elena. Her heart did a backflip. Slowly, she moved toward him, sensing the attention of every person in the room. “That was kind of you,” she said, drawing her hair behind her ear.
“I was off work this morning,” James said. “I stopped into the bakery and saw there was a sale and thought, what the heck? ‘Tis the season.”
Elena had to fight to keep herself from wrapping her arms around him. “Would you like to get lunch with me?” she said, surprising herself.
James blushed. Stuttering, he said, “You know, I didn’t do this for, um. I didn’t mean to force you into anything?”
Elena laughed. “I don’t feel forced if you don’t.”
James smiled. “I have a therapy session till one. Pick you up then?”
Elena watched as James left the newsroom with a skip in his step. As soon as the door closed behind him, her colleagues erupted with questions.
“Is it finally happening?” one of them asked. “The official date?”
Elena blushed and put on her best Carmen impersonation. “Back to work, everyone! Nothing to see here.” She sauntered back down the hall, laughing to herself.
But Natalie was hot on her heels. Her face was conspiratorial, and for a moment, Elena was worried that she wanted to probe for more information about James. But that wasn’t it at all.
“Listen, Elena,” Natalie said, closing the office door behind them, “I remembered something. Something I think you should know.”
Immediately, Elena snapped into business mode. “What’s up?”
Natalie pulled up a series of emails from Carmen to Natalie, all sent between September and November—leading up to her collapse. In them, Carmen asked for more specific details regarding the case that Natalie broke open in Connersville. Some of the questions were very specific, suggesting that Carmen knew a great deal more about the situation than she let on. In each email, Carmen pushed Natalie to keep digging. And then, at the end of one of the final emails, Carmen wrote: I believe your piece will be an excellent introduction to a series Ihave planned. The theme is criminality and fraud in our country. There’s so much more of it than first meets the eye.
Elena’s jaw hung open.
“I’m so sorry,” Natalie muttered. “I forgot about these conversations. I saw this more as Carmen being my mentor, watching over me. But I forgot that she had her own series planned. Maybe she has more notes? More information about Judge Drury and the Cranberry Cove?”
Elena’s heart pounded. Hurriedly, she reached for her mother’s laptop, which remained on the second shelf of the desk. She hadn’t considered investigating any of the harder-hitting articles her mother had been working on, mostly because she hadn’t assumed there were any. She’d thought her mother had specialized in Christmas fluff—and that was it.
How wrong she’d been!
Together, Natalie and Elena gathered around her mother’s computer and dug through files. There were all kinds of unfinished documents, articles about basketball teams, child theater clubs, and synchronized swimming teams, articles about National Ribbon Cutting Day and National Ride Your Bike Day, and so on. There was enough material here to fill ten, if not twenty newspapers. It brought tears to Elena’s eyes, thinking of all the work her mother had done for the paper over the years—some of it recognized, some of it not.
But there was nothing on there, as far as they could tell, about Judge Drury or Cranberry Cove. In fact, they were about to give up until they got to her email.
