Read Alpine Zen : An Emma Lord Mystery (9780804177481) for Free Online Page B

staring disconsolately at the now-empty pastry tray on the other side of the newsroom. “Say, Emma, you got some room on the front page?”
    Of course I did—or could, but not for Ed. There wasn’t room for Ed in a lot of places, given his girth. Before the advent of cell phones, I’d always wondered how he dealt with a phone booth. Or the rides at Disneyland, where the Bronskys had made their first splurge after his aunt’s money landed at the Bank of Alpine.
    “We’re pretty tight,” I said. “Summer Solstice, you know.”
    Ed winked and pointed a chunky finger at me. “You got it! A tie-in.”
    “What,” I inquired, trying not to sound leery, “do you mean?”
    “Well,” Ed began, looking as if he’d like to sit down, “I didn’t sell as many souvenirs as I hoped over the weekend. And we didn’t have very good luck with the Mr. Pig float this year.”
    “Yes,” I agreed, “having your float break down at the start of Saturday’s parade was a blow.”
    “It sure was,” Ed mumbled. “Everybody missed the spectacle.”
    “A real shame,” I noted. Except there had been some entertainment involved in the fiasco. Two of the float’s real pigs from the Overholt farm had run away. They hadn’t been found until the next morning, eating out of overturned garbage cans not far from the site of Ed’s souvenir stand. But the only spectacle was when someone threw a firecracker into the float’s cardboard silo and it blew up all over the hood of Mayor Baugh’s aging Cadillac. “I’m glad you weren’t badly hurt when you fell off the float, Ed.”
    “I’m tough. Just got kind of bounced around,” he said. “Bounced” was an apt word for Ed. Before I could say anything, he continued on a brighter note: “I did sell four copies of my autobiography,
Mr. Ed
. They were all tourists, so they had no idea about my life and times in the limelight, especially the Japanese TV cartoon version,
Mr. Pig
. Too bad nobody over here ever got to see it. So how about it? If you need art, I can whip up something by deadline.”
    I felt I’d missed a beat. “What did you have in mind?” I asked.
    “More description of Casa de Bronska’s souvenirs. You know most people here have no idea about different kinds of antique furniture. Take my racuckoo escreetor, for example. How many folks in Alpine—”
    “Your what?” I couldn’t help it. Usually I can translate Ed’s mangling of foreign words, but this time I was stumped.
    “You know,” he said, scowling. “My personal writing desk. Or maybe you never saw it in my private study.”
    “You mean…” I still wasn’t sure what Ed meant, but I took a wild stab. “A rococo escritoire?”
    Ed nodded, the scowl still in place. “Isn’t that what I said?”
    Luckily, I didn’t have to answer. Alison stood in the newsroom doorway, telling me the sheriff was calling. Even Ed could take that hint, though he sighed—heavily. “Guess I’ll have to wait,” he mumbled, waddling off. “You might have more room next week after…”
    I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said from the safety net that was my office. “News?” I asked my husband in an overly eager voice.
    “Not exactly,” Milo said. “Mullins and Gould are going to the dump site after lunch. If you want a picture, tell Laskey. What I want—besides you—is a big T-bone tonight. I’ll barbecue it,but you buy it. Get those baked potatoes to zap in the microwave, but no topping glop on mine. I made two grocery runs last night.” Not surprisingly,
he
hung up on
me
.
    Five minutes later, Vida showed up. She looked remarkably cheerful. My evil self wanted to ask if Roger had been let out on bond.
    “It’s official,” she declared, beaming at me in her toothsome manner. “Bobby Lambrecht is the Bank of Alpine’s new president.”
    I could practically hear a blare of trumpets. Vida’s longtime friend, Faith, was the mother of Bob Lambrecht, and the widow of a minister who’d served for