Free Dead Sleeping Shaman by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

on a file cabinet and a sad, stuffed bear sitting on a corner chair, bent over toward his toes, eyes fixed on the floor, one ear up, one ear down, with a striped tie hanging from one foot.
    Bill sat in front of his computer, head tipped forward, squinting over his glasses at a story he was editing. His heavy dark glasses hung halfway down his nose. I stood for a minute then “ahemed” and took no offense as he turned toward me, adjusting the glasses with his middle finger.
    “Emily Kincaid. Good to see you.” He got up, bent forward over his desk, and shook my hand. “You’re still coming for dinner Friday, right?”
    He nodded and smiled, lighting up one of those almost plain faces that turn handsome when brightened by a smile.
    “I’m coming,” I answered. “The three of us?”
    I got the nod I wanted. He didn’t have a date. So, no little redheads there to surprise me.
    “Got the story. Thanks.” He pawed through one of the stacks of papers on his desk, came up with my email, and waggled it in the air. “Going in tomorrow’s paper.”
    “I’ll keep you up to date.”
    “Awful thing, poor woman. Any idea who did it?”
    I shook my head.
    “You working with Deputy Dolly?”
    “Looks like it.”
    “Brent ok with that?”
    I shrugged. “The woman was staying in Leetsville. It was something happening there that brought her from Toledo, and then she was murdered. So, sure, Brent wants Dolly on it. And Dolly wants me.”
    Time to change the conversation. The day ahead was full as it was. “I came about the column.”
    We talked about things I knew well enough to write about. I told him that could be lonely hearts, how to write a mystery, or maybe about my garden.
    “That’s it.” His face lit up. “Lots of people up here garden. That’s what you write about.”
    “I’m not a master gardener.”
    “Doesn’t matter. Write what you know.”
    “I’ll start with slugs.”
    “Sure. Good enough. Soon as possible.” He looked down at the copy he was editing, dismissing me.
    “Can I borrow a desk?”
    He pointed to an empty office across the hall and I went off to start my new career as expert on something I thought I knew but learned I didn’t every summer when the bugs and slugs and birds and deer got the best of me.
    It was a little like being back at the Ann Arbor Times, sitting in an office writing with voices around me, phones ringing, people walking by, some stopping to introduce themselves. More company than I’d had in a couple of years. It felt good. There was something about a “real” job—other than staying home and writing books—that made me feel legitimate again.
    I took on the slugs, easily turning out 800 words on the slimy, hungry, miserable creatures that plagued my world and had to be removed by hand and dropped into a can of salt where they dissolved, to my extreme glee, which only showed the darkness in my soul.
    Bill was still in his office when I finished. As I handed him the copy, he said my pay would be included in the next check. Good enough, I thought, liking the word “check” for its substantial sound. I waved good-bye and was on my way out his office door when a thought struck me.
    “That murdered woman? You know, out in Deward. She came from Leetsville originally. It seems her mother disappeared when Marjory was a teenager. Would there be anything in the paper’s morgue, you think?”
    “How many years ago?”
    I shrugged. “Marjory was in her fifties. So, maybe thirty-five years.”
    “The college’s got all the old papers on microfilm. Check there.”
    I left, agreeing that I looked forward to dinner at his house and asking if I could bring anything. Unlike Jackson, who usually gave me at least half the dinner to provide, Bill said he was all set, even had a menu written out.
    I couldn’t help but think, as I went out to my car, how being married to a man who planned his own dinner parties, shopped for them, and cooked was the dream every woman writer