Page 3
Back at her desk, Theresa began shuffling through her notes for a faded nearly famous jazz singer’s obituary that was due at the end of the day. Mercifully, the tan telephone on the corner of her desk rang, giving her an excuse to put off figuring out a more delicate way to phrase the singer’s onetime manager’s suggestion that taking cocaine to work and laudanum to sleep in the twenties had probably contributed to the life of general ill health that had ultimately led to the singer’s demise.
“Theresa Johnson,” she said into the phone.
“Miss Johnson? There’s a telephone call for you,” said one of the paper’s switchboard operators.
“Who is it?”
“A woman who says there’s an error in one of today’s obituaries.”
Theresa sighed. “All right, put her through.”
She waited a moment for the operator to connect the outside call and then said, “Theresa Johnson speaking.”
“Miss Johnson? Thank you for taking my call. My name is Adele Pearce. I am concerned about the accuracy of one of your articles that ran in this morning’s paper.”
The woman’s voice sounded strong, but it had the timbre of age and, if Theresa wasn’t mistaken, an English accent lacing through most of her words.
She clamped the receiver between her ear and shoulder so she could grab a reporter’s pad off the stack on her desk and a pencil. “May I ask which article it was?”
“The obituary for Guy Whitley.”
She remembered writing the piece. Former hotelier. Grew up in Chicago and moved to California to make his fortune just before the turn of the century. Fell on hard times before the First World War and seemed to have lived a fairly quiet life afterward. He had one child, a son who had died in Italy during the Second World War, and a wife who had passed away from cancer in 1949. He’d moved into a care home for about five years before dying of natural causes. Phil had given her two hundred words, no space for a photo, and had made her wait weeks for it to run.
“I remember the piece. What is the error you wish to have corrected?” she asked, tapping her pencil against her notepad.
“All of it. The entire article is wrong.”
Theresa’s pencil froze in midair. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Pearce, but—”
“Miss Pearce,” the older woman interrupted.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Pearce, but I can assure you that I researched Mr. Whitley’s life very carefully.”
“Apparently not carefully enough,” the woman said, her tone wry.
“May I ask how you can be certain?” she asked.
“Well, first of all, you said that his wife died in 1949.”
She let out a breath. If the date of Mrs. Whitley’s death was incorrect, it should be a relatively easy correction to issue.
“All right. Do you know when Mrs. Whitley died?” she asked.
“In 1949, as you wrote,” said Miss Pearce.
Theresa frowned. “Then there is no correction needed.”
“Yes, my dear, there is. You see, she was only the second Mrs. Whitley.”
chapter two THERESA
The next morning, Theresa parked her beryl green VW Beetle in front of a wooden gate at the end of a steep short road off East Loma Alta Drive, being careful to make sure the parking brake was firmly on. Since arriving from New York, she’d been all over Pasadena and the surrounding cities and neighborhoods for stories, but she’d never been this high up into the Altadena foothills.
“Drive uphill past the nursery and keep going. You will think you have gone too far, but you will not have gone far enough,” Miss Pearce had told her over the phone the previous day.
Theresa had thought the directions unnecessary given that she never drove anywhere without her Thomas Bros. Popular Atlas stored in the glove compartment to help her navigate, but she soon realized she would have been lost without Miss Pearce’s instructions.
Theresa climbed out of the car, the prickle of sweat on the back of her neck a now-familiar accompaniment to the start of the California summer season. Growing up in Washington, DC, and then going to college in New York, she thought she’d been prepared for heat, but although Pasadena didn’t have the humidity of the East Coast, sometimes living there felt like being baked alive in an oven.
