Never Before Noon by Joanne McLaughlin

Author:Joanne McLaughlin [McLaughlin, Joanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781732585225
Published: 2019-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Upstate New York, late June 2011

Modesty was a waste of energy, Fahey believed: If you were good at something, why pretend otherwise? Conversely, if you weren’t, why not admit it and move on? So he was quite immodestly aware of who he was, and where on the vast spectrum of human ability he stood (well, in his view anyway).

Frankly assessing things, he knew he was physically attractive to women, good at making them laugh, good at pleasing them in bed, good at not making them feel like shit when the time came to say goodbye. Men liked him, too. He could kick a football around the pitch with the blokes at work, throw a mean dart, etc., etc. He had good manners, so older folks approved of him. He liked kids, and they liked him back.

All of which had, to a great degree, helped make him the journalist he was, which was a tremendous thing, since he hadn’t trained to be one, per se. Most of the time, he was just going with his gut, having been that capable videographer who five years ago had picked up a microphone and stood in front of his own camera to file a surprising emergency dispatch after an ambush took out the small NATO unit he and his BBC crew were covering in the hills of Afghanistan, killing everyone but him and the Pashto translator. A pleasant face and pleasing voice and friendly demeanor came automatically, so Fahey had reinvented himself as a reporter, because it made feel him somehow less unworthy of the life he got to keep as his mates lost theirs. Over time, he discovered that his pleasant face put people at their ease, sometimes rendering them unaware of his ability to read liars rather well while appearing all the while naïve and unquestioning.

He was no great investigator, no influential foreign correspondent. On the BBC talent scale, he was maybe above average and that totally by happenstance, but they liked his work and he liked it, too. So why was he sitting under a tree somewhere northwest of Ithaca, contemplating whether he would go back to Madrid in less than a week and pick up the life he’d been so satisfied with? The alternative was being with a woman he loved who was unwisely bound by some pledge to her deceitful parents, probably in danger because of them, and, it was beginning to seem, quite possibly delusional. Immodestly, Fahey believed he could help Juliette if he stayed, because she seemed to need sanity and sameness right about now. Modestly, he wondered just how delusional he was if he thought this situation was less perilous than that trip through the hills turned out to be.

He could not get the stench of scorched tires and vinyl bus seats out of his nose. Nor the sweetish bouquet of the Blood of the Bards pinot noir that had doused what was once the Vineyard de la Coeur gift shop after the explosion blew out the front window and sent bottles flying off the shelves.

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