Free Gone to Green by Judy Christie Page A

way of moving ahead.”
     
    My go-to guy had mentioned nothing about snags, bumps, or any other problems.
     
    “We worked that out, Ms. Hillburn, as you know.” He cleared his throat. “That was a silly misunderstanding.”
     
    “I suppose it was,” she said.
     
    Lee Roy looked at his watch and stood up abruptly. “We need to be getting back to the paper, Lois.”
     
    He walked out ahead of me, and I reached out to shake Eva's hand again. She looked me right in the eye and smiled. “It's good to have another woman business owner in town. I can’t wait to see what you do.”
     
    “I’ll need your advice along the way,” I said. “I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”
     
    When we got in the car, I turned to Lee Roy.
     
    “Snags? What snags? Anything the owner might need to know?” I did not like being caught off guard. Plus, Lee Roy's chumminess with Major had gotten on my nerves more than I wanted to say.
     
    “Sorry,” he mumbled, driving back to the paper. “Ms. Hillburn got a bit perturbed over some advertising rates and a story we didn’t follow up on. She pulled her ads for a month. That hurt. We had to go over there and beg her to get them back, me and Dub and Chuck. It was tricky. But she needs us as much as we need her, so I knew she would come back.”
     
    I interrupted. “What was the story she was interested in?”
     
    He rolled his head around on his shoulders, the way you do when your neck feels tight. “She was upset that we didn’t run a story on some problems with pollution in the lake and some concerns raised about Mossy Bend.” Mossy Bend was Major's first big development on the north end of the lake, a gated community of expensive houses owned by local people with money and out-of-towners who wanted a getaway home.
     
    Lee Roy did not continue. I felt the way I had once in a newspaper deposition, where I was instructed to briefly answer the question asked, nothing more. He seemed to have been to the same school of information coaching.
     
    “And the advertising issue?” I asked.
     
    “She was upset, yeah, upset would be the right word, with some rates she was getting.”
     
    “Why? What sort of rates?”
     
    Now he rolled his shoulders, too, as though the muscle pain was more intense and moving down his body. “She thought we were giving her brother a better rate.”
     
    “Her brother?”
     
    “Yeah, Major. You know, he's her brother.”
     
    I had not known, and I was even more annoyed that Lee Roy hadn’t dropped that fact on me earlier. Now that I thought about it, Eva Hillburn did run Wilson's Department Store, and Wilson was Major's last name. I should have picked up on that. I needed to learn quickly who was related to whom, who was divorced from whom, and who had an axe to grind.
     
    Instead of focusing on the omission of key information, I went right to the money/advertising issue. “And were we giving her brother a better price?”
     
    Pulling into the newspaper lot, Lee Roy parked and looked at me. “Yes, we were. He's a bigger player, had more linage, so we went off the rate card for him. That development cost him a lot of money, and we wanted to help him out, help the town. I thought we were overcharging him. Dub and Chuck agreed. It was none of Eva's business, but she's still mad that Major tried to sell the family store out from under her.”
     
    I was ready to call it a day and get out of the car with Lee Roy. I was nearly dizzy, wondering who I could trust and what my role would be in dealing with this cast of characters.
     
    Everything was so unfamiliar.
     
    I didn’t like not knowing what I was doing.
     

7
     
    The nearby community of Lake Village has joined
municipal governments nationwide in approving an
ordinance banning sagging pants on men and women in
public. Councilwoman Lucinda Lovelady authored the
ordinance, calling the display of underwear “outrageous
and an affront to dignity everywhere, and it doesn’t