Poodle Versus the Mob by Anne Shillolo

Author:Anne Shillolo [Shillolo, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

16

Tuesday had rolled around again, another big deadline day in the community newspaper business. This was a calm week, for a change, and I was hoping we had no last-minute panics so everyone could get away at a civilized time. I decided to put my investigations on hold for the day, and stick close to the office.

I finished up my account of the Homemade Boat Race and the story about the death of Robert D’Angelo which included the updated information provided by Arni yesterday. ‘Following leads, no threat to safety, blah blah blah.’ I certainly hoped that by this time next week we had something solid to report. Like the names of the killers.

I had one photo that showed Bobby D’s final resting place, with no details, just the granite markers around the flowerbed and a pleasant background made up of lake and sky. I sent all the files over to Barbara so she could make some progress on assembling the paper for printing overnight.

Brady was hard at work on his laptop fixing a submitted photo. This one was a touching family portrait of four generations of women. The new baby in her mother’s arms, along with her mother and grandmother. The only problem was that the family dog, a large mutt with a healthy streak of border collie, was seated at the new mother’s feet. He’d chosen the exact moment that the photo was taken to bathe his crotch, one big hairy leg crooked back over his head and his bushy tail extended out along the floor.

The baby’s mom had written, ‘I love this photo and hope you can print it. But can you remove or cut off the dog? Many thanks. P.S. It was the only shot where all our eyes were open.’

At least she had the common sense to address the issue. More often than not, people just sent along their photos assuming we’d print them as is. Now that I thought of it, if I’d had the foresight to save them all I could have made a mint by compiling them into a book and selling it. Sort of like ‘Deleted Scenes’ on a DVD.

Projects involving community contributions were often hilarious. When I bought the paper, it was a going concern with decades of history behind it. And many traditions. One of these was the annual cookbook. Every fall, the text of Billytown Cooking and Baking was hauled out. Back in the day, those pages were pasted up on grids, driven to the printer, and returned for filing until they were needed again the next year. Now, of course, we had a digital file.

The ads sprinkled throughout the cookbook were re-visited each year. Barbara made calls to see if the advertisers wanted to repeat their promotions, or maybe submit new copy.

But I discovered no one ever read the recipes over. They just got re-printed automatically from year to year.

One winter afternoon I was lounging around in the meeting room with a latte. I picked up a copy of the cookbook and idly looked at the recipes.

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