The reason that Linda Beecham couldn’t be the Spirit of Christmas anything was this: she never smiled, if she could help it, and she never acknowledged Christmas when she was away from the office. The office was always decorated to the hilt, including strings of lights around the entryway that faced Main Street, but home was blank and bare of even so much as a holly wreath. If people sent her Christmas cards, she threw them away. If people showed up with plates of cookies or fruit baskets full of navel oranges, she waited until they’d gone away and then put everything but the oranges down the garbage disposal. She was not an evil-tempered and embittered woman. She didn’t put a lot of venom in her systematic exclusion of all things sentimental. She just went about her life as methodically as possible without actually being transformed into a robot, and when people tried to get her to do more than that, she pretended she hadn’t heard them. Linda Beecham had learned a lot of things in the fifty-five years of her life, but the most important one was this: it was very dangerous for some people to be happy.
At the moment, since it wasn’t even New Year’s Day yet, the decorations were still up on the premises of the Harbor Home News, including a small tree in a wooden pot with bows and candy canes all over it. The tree sat in the window that looked out onto the street, and Linda tried her best to pretend it wasn’t there. In some ways it was too bad that she wasn’t evil-tempered or embittered. If she had been, she could have told the silly little intern who had brought her the tree to shove it up her gilded rich girl’s ass.
On the other side of the office, her best reporter—her only full-time reporter—was setting up a presentation.on a tripod. The tripod had an easel on it and the easel was covered with photographs, most of them in color, even though the Harbor Home News never published anything in color. Linda had a big cup of coffee that she wanted to bury her face in. She sometimes thought that if she ever decided to become a legend in her own time, she’d start spiking the coffee with gin.
“You know,” she said, “there’s a major storm out there. You could go home.”
“You could go home too,” Jack Bullard said. “It doesn’t matter for either of us. We walk. I want you to look at these photographs.”
“They’re very nice photographs. They’re just photographs of silly people.”
“Photographs of silly people fetch a lot of money these days. I’ve got one I haven’t developed yet of Arrow Nor-mand falling into her car dead drunk and probably worse not an hour and a half ago, and I’ll bet you anything I could sell it to the tabloids for a few thousand dollars. And Arrow Normand isn’t even a big deal anymore.”
“Was Arrow Normand ever a big deal?”
Jack Bullard sighed. “These people may be trivial, Linda, but they’re not unimportant. At least, they’re not unimportant to the people who have money to spend on photographs of famous people. And we’ve got lots of photographs of famous people. If you don’t want to run them in the Home News—”
“I don’t.”
“At least consider the possibility of selling them to somebody who does want to run them. These people are here. We get the pictures nobody else gets—”
“How do we do that, Jack? I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“I just don’t look like a paparazzo. Because I’m not one. Although lots of people probably have the same pictures, they just get them on the cameras from their cell phones and they’re not very good quality. Mine are excellent quality. She wasn’t wearing any underwear.”
“Who wasn’t?”
“Arrow Normand. She had on a mini skirt cut up to, well, wherever, and she wasn’t wearing any underwear. I’ve got at least one picture in my camera nobody could print anywhere. Except they do, you know, they show them on tele vision with the wrong place just sort of fuzzed out. It’s really incredible what they’ll do on MTV these days.”
“When I was growing up, the Home News used to run society pages. Parties, you know, and debutante things. Nobody seems to do any of that anymore.”
“Nobody seems to care,” Jack said. “Look, I know what you think and I see your point. These are not stellar examples of human beings. They’re not distinguished except by their publicity and they haven’t accomplished anything you’d say was important.”
“Most of them haven’t accomplished anything at all,” Linda pointed out. “I mean, you can say what you want about the old robber barons, but they built industries. They provided jobs for millions of people. They were good for the economy. What you’re asking me to do is to run stories on people who—”