Chief J. P Holt navigated his aging cruiser through Winston with growing dismay. American flags hung from the front porches of at least half the homes. Red, white and blue bunting decorated many of the rest. On one corner, the Sternwheeler Inn was festooned with both.
How could it be festival time again already?
Claiming a heritage that dated to George Washington, Winston had once been a bustling Ohio River community—a host to paddle wheelers and coal barges and home to boat captains and a riverfront hotel where guests legendarily fished from the mezzanine during the Great Flood of 1937.
These days, Holt patrolled a town of eight thousand people consisting of a twelve-block Main Street of three-story buildings, several leafy in-town neighborhoods, a shopping center, a small industrial park of corrugated steel buildings north of town by the Interstate, and a large new subdivision of split-level homes perched on the low hills just to the east.
Instead of river traffic, the economy depended on farmers who worked the bottomlands outside of town, Social Security checks, one large employer, and Old Fashioned River Days, a start-of-summer festival originally conceived as a weekend sales promotion which had evolved into a ten-day celebration of Winston’s past, attracting tourists from several states who stayed in quaint waterfront Victorian guest houses, took river rides on replica paddle wheel steamers, attended a nightly historical drama in Winston’s riverfront park and oohed and ahhhed at the fireworks after. There was even a carnival.
Everyone loved River Days and eagerly anticipated it for the entire year. Everyone, it seemed, except him.
He eased down Landing Street. Yard signs promoting an Old Fashioned River Days 10K run had sprouted overnight in neat front yards. A run? When had the organizers added that? What a pain. Of course, his over-worked men would be expected to provide traffic control. Naturally, no one had consulted him in advance.
He hadn’t always felt this way. He had just hit the big five-o. That meant his first festival must have been—what? Forty years ago? The wonder he had felt when his father took him for the first time! The crowds! The clamor! The outsiders! Amid his boyhood memories, nothing topped the carnival rides, the shooting gallery, the delights of cotton candy, the thrill of successfully peeking through a tent flap at the girls who entertained at The Green Door.
The thrill was gone by the time he became chief. With festival crowds came petty crime. Events like 10K runs provoked howls from the citizenry about snarled traffic. Even the girls at The Green Door became an annual ordeal because of complaints from the clergy who knew full well the operation violated no local ordinances but demanded that he shut it anyway. He understood the preachers needed their congregations to think they tried. But every year, they wasted his time.
He passed the mayor’s house. He couldn’t count how many times he’d listened to him spout off about the festival’s importance to the local economy. All that was true, but had anybody ever considered the impact on his tiny department? The festival produced lots of extra dollars for local businesses and lots of extra tax revenue for the state. But did any of that make its way back to law enforcement? Was there even an acknowledgement of the increased workload, of the fact that the population of the town suddenly increased by many times? Some decent money for overtime? Maybe even a bonus for his men? For him?
No. He and his department were expected to suck it up. They were taken for granted. Heck, it hadn’t even fazed his old fishing buddy Woody Conroy when he’d pointedly noted there was no money to drag the river for Old Cheese Face. Then again, what could you expect? Conroy was a merchant, current head of the Chamber of Commerce. Maybe this year he’d send ’em a message, explain that his workload meant he no longer had time to be the chief and portray a trapper in the pageant.
He pulled over by the entrance to the Winston Memorial Gardens cemetery and poured a cup of coffee from his Thermos. He was still hung over. He hadn’t gotten to bed until after 2 a.m. His beloved Cincinnati Reds were on the coast. The game with the Giants had gone into extra innings. At least the Reds had won. More important, the line had been Red -135/Giants +105, meaning his $100 bet had produced $135 in net winnings. Before Viggy’s cut, of course.
He took a sip of coffee. Old Cheese Face. He saw the floating flap of flesh and smelled the decay. He spit the coffee back into his cup and fought not to be ill.
A Volvo approached from the other direction. There was only one Volvo in town. It belonged to the newspaper editor, Josh Gibbs.
Holt waved. The editor continued on by, his eyes never leaving the center of the road. I might as well be invisible, Holt thought.
Josh’s head was filled with fears and possibilities. He imagined the worst. Katie was pregnant. No, that couldn’t be, she hadn’t even had her first period. Or had she?
He imagined the more probable. Katie had made a face and called him a worrywart but maybe he’d been right about a stress fracture. He hoped the doctor wasn’t going to tell him she couldn’t attend soccer camp but he was prepared for that. Despite an innately optimistic spirit, Josh had learned from experience that news from doctors was seldom good.
A hole opened in his chest. He loved his daughter so much and still there was so much about her he didn’t know. It was only going to get more difficult as she grew into an adult. She needed a mother—something he could never be. Already, he felt he had failed her.
He parked on Main Street and walked the half-block to the coffee shop. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and then he spotted Allison. She sat away from the other patrons, long legs crossed beneath a wrought iron table, making her black skirt appear very short. Shoulder-length light blonde hair framed her face. Josh searched her expression for some hint of whether the news was better or worse than what he had imagined.
Allison silently cursed medical schools for failing to teach how to deliver bad news.
Medicine could describe the function of almost every organ in the human body and instruct doctors what to do about problems. But courses on how to interact with fellow human beings instead of biological systems weren’t part of the curriculum. State medical boards didn’t test communications skills. It was something she had had to learn on her own.
Many physicians lacked the basic understanding that such communication was important. Allison noticed a correlation with certain specialties. Brain surgeons often saw individuals simply as the product of a series of electrical impulses. Anesthesiologists seemed to prefer dealing with patients who were unconscious. Radiologists generally were more comfortable with pictures, not people. Ob-Gyns and general practitioners tended to be the best at patient communication, although it wasn’t always just about the specialty. She remembered one GP who’d fainted when faced with having to inform a patient he was HIV-positive. And communication wasn’t her father’s strong point, either at the clinic or at home.
Trial and error had taught Allison to have difficult conversations away from her medical office. Everything about it, from the big desk, to the mysterious medical equipment, to her white lab coat, fostered the impression that the doctor was a god delivering a pronouncement of doom to a weak and helpless mortal. Coffee shops, on the other hand, were places where everyone was equal and where friends gathered to share information and solve problems. She’d found nothing in the privacy portions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that proscribed private medical discussions in such places—as long as they weren’t overheard.
Ruling out the Koffee Kafe, which she was sure barely squeaked by its yearly health inspection, and the Cluck N’ Cup, which closed at 3 p.m., she had picked the Java Joynt for her conversation with Josh, confident that so late on a Friday she wouldn’t run into her ex, Vince Bludhorn. The overbearing,