Read Online Stone Rain by Linwood Barclay - Free Book Online Page B

his desk, we didn’t walk right in. Sarah told his secretary we had arrived, as if that were not immediately evident, and she buzzed him. Through the door, we watched him watching us as he picked up his phone. “Send them in,” we heard him say into the phone.
    His secretary said, “He’ll see you now.”
    We went in. I had a bad feeling.
    “Ah, the Walkers,” he said, not getting up to greet us. That seemed like a bad sign to me. “Take a seat,” he said. I would have felt better had he said, “Please, be seated.”
    We sat down. Magnuson said, “I didn’t bring you in here because you happen to be married to one another. I brought both of you in because I wanted to speak with you, Mr. Walker, and seeing as how Sarah is your editor, this will impact her as well.” He stared at both of us for a while, but mostly at me.
    “I have an old friend,” he said suddenly, “name of Blair Wentworth. We used to work together, as reporters, long ago. Used to get drunk together on a regular basis too. Once, when he’d had a little bit too much one night in the bar, we got into a heated debate about whether Jimmy Carter really had a peanut farm, or whether it was just a load of bullshit, so we walked out, got in a cab, and asked to be taken to Plains, Georgia. Well, that was several hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, and the cabby had some reservations, but we said not to worry, we were newspapermen, and we had expense accounts. Instead of driving us to Georgia, he drove us back to our paper and dropped us off at the front door before we made complete asses of ourselves. If I could find that cabby today, I’d give him a job here. Doing what, I don’t know, but he clearly had more sense than some of the people who work for me here now.”
    I blinked.
    “Anyway, Blair decided to go off in another direction. He was a pretty business-minded individual, got into community newspapers, worked his way up to publisher of one of them. The
Suburban
, out in Oakwood. You might have heard of it.”
    Oh God.
    “We keep in touch, Blair and I, so when something comes across his desk that troubles him, he gives me a call. And I just now got off the phone with him. It was a very interesting call, the most amazing thing. Do you have any idea, Mr. Walker, what it might have been about?”
    Sarah turned to look at me.
    “Yes,” I said as evenly as I could. “I have a pretty good idea.”
    “What is it, Zack?” Sarah asked.
    “Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Walker.”
    I cleared my throat. “I was out to Oakwood for lunch—well, actually, I never had any lunch, come to think of it, only a coffee. Which probably explains why I’m feeling a little light-headed all of a sudden. Edgy. I could use a bite to eat.”
    “Zack.”
    “I had lunch with Martin Benson, who writes a column for the
Suburban
. I think he may have been left with the impression that I was trying to get him to scrap doing a story on Trixie, which is not at all the case.”
    Sarah was speechless. Magnuson was good enough to fill the silence.
    “Blair says this Benson fellow told him that you wanted him to surrender his camera phone so he wouldn’t take a picture of this, this woman known as Trixie, who, I understand, has a rather unorthodox line of work.”
    “She was, yes, that’s sort of true, but she was very frightened that he was going to take her picture and run it in the paper.”
    “That’s what journalists do,” Magnuson said. “We take pictures of people we want to do stories on, and we put them in the paper, whether they like it much or not. I’ll bet you Sarah could explain the whole concept to you if you’re not all that familiar with it.”
    “That’s who called you, isn’t it?” Sarah said. “There was no call about a
Star Trek
convention.”
    Magnuson’s bushy eyebrows went up a notch.
    “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no, there was no call about a
Star Trek
convention.” I was starting to feel that I’d be lucky to cover anything