But no previous Master or Mistress of the Revels had had to cope with a murder during the course of the festivities. I sighed. I wasn’t sure this was a distinction I wanted.
I jumped as a loud sneeze suddenly resounded through the office. I whirled around to see who had come in, but the door was still closed.
I heard another sneeze, and realized it was coming from near the floor. I peered down and saw Spike standing with all four feet braced against the force of a third enormous sneeze. Then he sniffed slightly and looked up at me as if registering a complaint.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell Michael he needs to dust more often.”
Spike sighed, trotted over to a chair that stood against the wall, and curled up underneath it.
I turned back to the computer, though I kept glancing over my shoulder. Maybe, along with the dust, I should speak to Michael about having Rose Noire feng shui his office. I recalled her saying that it was very bad to put your desk so you had your back to the door of the room. I could see why. I kept nervously looking over my shoulder to see if someone had snuck in. I’d have locked the door, but it was the old-fashioned kind that could only be locked with a key. If I kept feeling so jumpy, perhaps I’d hunt Michael down and get the key.
The last half of Werzel’s sidebar about the parade pretended to give some of the highlights of this year’s parade. As I expected, Werzel had gone out of his way to make us seem ridiculous. He didn’t feature any of the beautiful or ingenious floats—only the few really peculiar ones I hadn’t been able to keep out, like the boom lift and the canine carillon. I was already annoyed by the time I got to the next-to-last paragraph. Werzel had cornered Caerphilly’s mayor and asked if he or the town council had considered canceling the parade out of respect for the murder victim.
“Well, no,” the mayor was quoted as saying. “I guess that would have been up to Ms. Langslow.”
Gee, thanks Your Honor. See how fast you can pass that buck. I could hear him saying it—not that he’d ever said anything that brief, but I could imagine Werzel plucking that one quotable sound bite out of ten or fifteen minutes of blather.
Then I read the last paragraph and exploded.
“Ms. Langslow was not available for comment.”
I snarled a few words I didn’t normally say aloud. Spike lifted his head and watched with interest as I pounded the desk a few times. Not available for comment? The man had slept by our fire, eaten our bacon and eggs for breakfast, and been introduced to our llama. I’d answered countless questions from him throughout the course of the day, and if he’d asked me that one, I’d have answered it, too. I was perfectly capable of spinning out a decent answer to Werzel’s question—something suitably sentimental about knowing that Mr. Doleson wouldn’t want to upset and disappoint the children who had loved him in his Santa role for so many years.
I searched the Trib’s Web site until I found a page about how to make complaints and submit corrections. With a phone number. I picked up the receiver and then made myself put it down.
Bad idea. Not complaining to the Trib—that was a very good idea. But a bad idea to call now, when I was still hopping mad and would come off like a crank or an idiot. I realized I should give myself a few hours to calm down and then decide what to do—write a brilliant and incisive letter of complaint, citing all the facts and all Werzel’s omissions and misstatements? Or call to confront his editor in person, once I’d regained my cool and could adopt the icy precision Mother used to such devastating effect in such situations?
Then I smiled. “What would Mother do?” had never exactly been my mantra. But in this case, I realized, I should do exactly what Mother would do.
I consulted the address section of my notebook, picked up the phone, and called one of my cousins.
Cousin Heather had been knocking around the journalistic scene in Washington for a decade or so, and was currently doing her crusading reporter thing at one of the city’s alternative papers, writing exposés of political and financial scandals. She claimed that she was blissfully content with her current job and wouldn’t even consider a move to the cold, corporate world of the Trib. Of course, as far as I knew, the Trib hadn’t done anything rash, like offering her a job, that would force her to prove her dedication to alternative journalism.
But however scornful she was of corporate journalism, what she didn’t know about the Trib and every other media organization in Washington, large or small, wasn’t worth knowing.
“Mur Cromuf!” she said, on picking up the phone. Maybe I was imagining the sound of crumbs hitting the mouthpiece.