Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,7

way. “How’s the reunion preview going?”

Joe tugged at his ear. “Don’t take this wrong, chief, but your class was wicked dull. All anybody remembers is stealing the school bell and running somebody’s bra up the flagpole. Maybe because it’s been so long nobody can remember anything interesting.”

“It was only twenty-five years ago.”

Joe whistled at the thought of it. “Man, I haven’t even lived that long.”

It was true—no one on the staff except Barbara was within a decade in age of their editor. The paper couldn’t afford to pay for maturity or experience, and why would anyone with either choose to work in Red Paint, Maine? Simon glanced at the railroad station clock jutting from the back wall as he did reflexively a half-dozen times a day, even though time was stuck there at 7:45. A.m. or p.m.? When exactly did time stop at the Register?

His gaze returned to the front of the room. “Check with Holly Green over at the bank, Joe. She was president of our class. She’ll come up with some stories. Okay, Ellen, what do you have on the features side?”

A woman in jeans and a sleeveless yellow top straightened in her chair. “I got a call from a woman at 33 Larkspur Drive,” she said, flipping through her black reporter’s notebook. “Elizabeth Nichols. She says the Virgin Mary appeared in her backyard.”

Ellen laughed a little, as did Simon, but no one else. “I guess none of you was here when she showed up in the freezer frost at Bay Market,” he said. They looked blankly at him, confirming his assumption. “So Ellen, how has Mary chosen to incarnate herself this time?”

The reporter’s face contorted, as if she were imagining herself in the Virgin’s predicament. “She’s sitting in a mound of dirt. The family was putting in a therapeutic spa for their son …” Ellen checked her notes again. “… John. He’s the boy who was paralyzed from the waist down playing football last year. His mother said that yesterday morning she felt something calling to her to look out her bedroom window, and there was the Virgin. She made the workers stop digging right away.”

Donna, the most timid woman who had ever worked for him, raised her hand, which he had made clear was never necessary in his newsroom. He nodded her way. “How does Mrs. Nichols know it’s really the Virgin?” she said in a voice so low everyone had to lean toward her to hear.

“Because,” Ellen said, “she’s been praying to her for help every day since her son’s accident.”

“Q.E.D.,” Simon said, and Ellen laughed a little, his audience of one. “Seems we’re the only skeptics in this bunch.”

Donna raised her hand again and began talking even before he acknowledged her, a big step forward, he thought. “I wrote the story when Johnny got hurt,” she said. “The way his spine was crushed, the doctors didn’t give him a chance. It was a miracle he survived.”

“A medical miracle,” Simon said. “But the question is how we treat this supposed appearance of the Virgin Mary now on Larkspur. Do we run a straight story, or do we hint that the whole thing’s a ploy to arouse sympathy and donations?” The young reporters exchanged glances.

“Maybe it’s neither,” Ellen said. “Maybe Mrs. Nichols is just seeing what she wants to see.”

“Can I ask something?” They all turned toward David Rigero, standing against the back wall, his foot on a chair. “I know I’m not a writer or anything, but I was wondering something.”

“Shoot,” Simon said.

Rigero fixed Ellen with his eyes in a way that made her look away. “Is anyone showing up there, like from the local parish?”

“Dozens of people,” she said. “Whole families.”

“So why are people around here looking for miracles in dirt?”

Simon wrote Red Paint Looking for Miracles on the easel. “That’s a good angle. Talk to the people making the pilgrimage to the house, Ellen, find out why they’re going there. And take David with you.”

He decided to see for himself. Miracles, even imagined ones, didn’t happen very often in Red Paint. He headed for the western side of town by the Bay Loop, the longer route that dipped and curved so much that even drivers familiar with the road kept two hands on the wheel. Off the right-hand side was Red Paint Bay, sparkling blue-green in the late afternoon sun. As a boy it seemed to him like the ocean itself, as big as it was, six miles around.

At the end of the