The Truth Hurts by Nancy Pickard Read Free Book Online Page A

Time magazine and Fox News, wanting to interview you! This is so great! Do you want me to have them call you? Or should I get their numbers and tell them that you’ll call them?”
    “Great,” I say, unhappily.
    Oh, Connie, if you only knew, which you will soon enough. You’re going to have a hell of a publicity challenge facing you now. I suspect the head of publicity will step in and take over, after consultations with the president, publisher, my editor, and my agent. Publicists get used to handling anything—canceled airline flights on book tours, bad reviews, drunk authors, and signings where nobody shows up. Like a jack-in-the-box, they pop right back up. But this may finally test their resilience. How are they going to put a good “spin” on an author labeled “racist”?
    If Time and Fox are on my trail, can Newsweek and CNN be far behind? There’s no hot scandal consuming the news right now, so I’ll make a tasty little bit of filler for them. I can just imagine myself as an item in sneering columns of celebrity news. But maybe not just yet, not if they can’t find me to get a denial, or a “no comment.” While I feel a bit calmer since talking to Franklin, I don’t feel sufficiently sanguine to talk to any journalists, not even to tell my side of the story. But then, what is my side of it, and what is the story? All I can say is, “I was a baby. I never knew my parents. And I don’t know much about them.”
    Quickly, I place a call to Connie to tell her why I’m suddenly so “hot”—if she still doesn’t know—and to ask her to see if she can find out the real name of the “source.”

    When I return to my living room, I find my assistant curled up on the couch, reading the chapters I’ve written about my parents. So much for getting any real work done today, I guess. But I pass on by without saying anything, and just head on into the kitchen to fix us some lunch. Let her read. As fast as Deb reads, and as short as that partial manuscript is, it won’t take her long to finish.
    And after all, it’s not as if she holds the whole story in her hands.
    I don’t know if anybody does.

B ETRAYAL

    By Marie Lightfoot

    —•—

CHAPTER FOUR

June 12, 1963
Sebastion, Alabama

    E ulalie and Clayton Fisher had invited the upper social stratum of Sebastion over for a supper in their backyard that night, the evening of Monday, June 12, 1963. The news had been so alarming all week long that people felt they surely deserved one night off to take a breath, to chat comfortably at the Fishers with folks they’d known their whole lives long.
    Eulalie planned a casual, elegant picnic of fried chicken, boiled shrimp and crawdads, Alabama bayou jambalaya, sweet potato pie, cold rice salad, sliced garden-grown tomatoes, corn on the cob, pecan pie, gallons of sweet iced tea, and sufficient mint juleps to drown a mule. Hostel members and segregationists alike were invited, as usual, on the assumption that the one group didn’t even know of the existence of the other one.
    Shortly before the party, the news got out around town that the president was fixin’ to give a big televised speech on civil rights that same night. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were no icons in the white community of rigidly segregated Sebastion; liberal idols to be toppled, was more like it.
    “This is goin’ to be painful,” Eulalie observed to Clayton as they dressed in their rooms upstairs before the party. “Even worse than it usually is. I am truly dreading it. We’re going to have to turn on that big TV so everybody can watch the speech, and then we’re going to have to listen to those bigots hoot and holler at our president.”
    “We have to do it, Eulalie,” Clayton reminded her.
    “Well, I think I know that,” she snapped back at him.
    He was dressing in baby blue and white seersucker; she was slipping on a soft white dress. They were in their early forties then, he the president of a local bank, she the