No Reservations Required by Ellen Hart Read Free Book Online

and another one on drug addiction among Minneapolis police officers. The drug addiction series won him an award.
    “What did he do?”
    “I don’t know all the details, but he’s about to be fired.”
    “When?”
    “Today. The scuttlebutt is that he fabricated sources, made up quotes, statistics, cited research papers that didn’t exist. The whole nine yards.”
    Sophie put her head in her hands. That’s when a thought struck her. “Wasn’t his editor—”
    “Yeah. Andy. I don’t understand how he let Irazarian get away with it. I mean, Andy’s good. Better than good. If anything, he’s a little too conservative when it comes to sources. It doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Who’ll fire Del?”
    “Probably Fred Scott. But it came down from Andy. We’re printing a full page of retractions tomorrow morning.”
    “I wonder . . .”
    “Hmm?”
    “Well, you know that Anika Gladstone works at the Maxfield. We’ve become pretty good friends. She mentioned to me a few weeks ago that Andy and Bob weren’t getting along.”
    “You think it was about Irazarian?”
    “It’s possible. Anika said it—whatever it was—was killing Andy. He idolized Bob, always tried to do everything he could to please him.”
    “They were brothers, right?”
    “Half brothers,” said Sophie. “They had different fathers. Bob was, oh, maybe a dozen years older than Andy. I think Andy’s had kind of a spotty job history. Bob was taking a chance by hiring him, but then, from what Anika said, Bob was extremely pleased with his work.”
    “Until a few weeks ago.”
    She nodded.
    “Well,” said Rudy, tipping his chair back and clasping his hands behind his head, “whatever went down between them, Bob Fabian didn’t change his will. Andy still inherited the paper. You ask me, he’s in way over his head.”
    Sophie had to agree.
    “The fallout from what Irazarian did is going to hit this paper like a sledgehammer. If any heads were about to roll, I would imagine Andy’s would have been at the top of the list. Now he owns the paper. He sure got lucky, if you ask me. If Bob hadn’t died when he did, Andy would be working as a checkout guy at Home Depot.”
    Sophie glanced up, caught the look in Rudy’s eyes, and knew what he was thinking. She knew because she was thinking the exact same thing.

9
    Sophie was out on the balcony grilling salmon when Bram got home from the station. It was a warm October evening, what people often referred to as Indian summer. She called out to him to grab himself a beer and join her. She was already on her second. It had been that kind of day.
    Sophie had spent the morning with her father, enduring his smelly cigars and his disgruntled comments as he made broad hints about “the list” he was working on to improve the hotel. Even though she owned the Maxfield now, she could hardly ignore her father’s requests, although she had a feeling that his ideas might be a tad out there. On the round-the-world trip he and Sophie’s mom had just returned from, he’d learned a thing or two about running a hotel right , he said. Sophie could tell they were headed for a major clash. The economy was far worse now than when he’d been running the Maxfield, but he didn’t seem to grasp that. If he continued to constantly look over her shoulder, he would force her to take a stand. For now, Sophie decided to let him dangle “the list” in front of her. Maybe, in time, he’d remember that he trusted her to take over the running of the hotel and that that’s what he should do.
    Bram came through the double screen doors onto the balcony. He’d already removed his sport coat, socks, and shoes. Two years ago, when they’d moved to the Maxfield Plaza, they couldn’t seem to get enough of ordering in room service from the Zephyr Club, the gourmet restaurant on the top floor of the south tower. Now that Bram was watching his diet due to a recent heart surgery, they prepared their own food more often.
    “How