Lethal Little Lies (Jubilant Falls Series Book 3) by Debra Gaskill Read Free Book Online

Kinnon living the life of an ascetic, in a sparsely furnished efficiency apartment. If he’d been raised a Catholic, he would have made one hell of a Jesuit. He could have been raised Catholic—I didn’t know. Nobody did. At any rate, I was sure by the third day of his furlough, he’d worn a circle in the living room rug out of sheer boredom.
                  I was right: he picked up on the first ring.
                  “Kinnon,” he said.
                  “It’s me, Addison. I need you to come back into work. I’m cancelling—or at least postponing—your furlough.” Quickly I filled him in on the situation with Kay Henning. “Call the assistant chief, Gary McGinnis, and let him know you’re covering the story now at my direction. He’ll keep you informed about what’s going on. Got a pencil? Need his cell phone number?”
                  “Already have it—and his home number. Will do.” A few more basics on the situation and we hung up. No chatter, no small talk. That was Graham. I could count on the story getting done and getting done right.
                  Time to go. I pulled my large shapeless purse out of my bottom desk drawer and gazed across the empty newsroom before I walked out.
                  Right now, it was those few hours of quiet between the end of the day shift and the evening when the sports staff—reduced to one full-time and a part-time writer—would come in write their stories. They would mock up their two pages afterwards, finishing nearly at one in the morning, and, if needed, I would finish them in the morning, adding early-morning copy from the sports wire or short news briefs to fill in the spaces.
                  I loved this job. I’d been here for more than twenty years, starting as a reporter, covering everything from high school graduations to ribbon cuttings but never more in my element than when I was on a crime scene, something I probably got from my father Walter Addison, retired commander of the local Ohio State Patrol post.
                  Very few people know my first name isn’t Addison—it’s Penny. Only those who know my past called me by that name: my husband, my father, my best friend Suzanne, every cop and sheriff’s deputy in this county—those who’d known me forever.
                  I gazed at the blue computer screens on the empty desks, wondering if I could leave it behind for a PR job.
                  There was no doubt newspapers as I knew them were dying. Advertising, which drove page count, had all but tanked following the October 2008 crash and the growth of the Internet. Newspapers that had regularly been thirty pages a day six days a week dropped first to twenty, then sixteen, and now we thanked God for the days when advertising brought in enough for a twelve-page press run.
                  There was even talk of cancelling the Monday paper, which usually had the least amount of advertising.
                  The furloughs, ironically, made it harder to sell ads and shot single copy sales in the ass. When we weren’t generating local stories, we were forced to run wire stories, and folks wouldn’t buy newspapers when there weren’t any local stories on the front page. If circulation dropped, advertisers didn’t want to buy ads if no one was going to see them.
                  It was a vicious cycle.
                  But could I leave it behind? I flipped the overhead light off. Depending on what Fisher Webb had to tell me tonight, maybe I’d know.
    ****
                  Webb’s big shiny, red Cadillac was parked next to Duncan’s battered F-150 farm truck as I pulled up the long drive to the farmhouse. Some long-ago McIntyre decided that there was more sense in farming the land between the road and the white frame farmhouse set back off the road. Every night as I