The Game Changer, стр. 1
Table Of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Cherry Chocolate Chunk Muffins
About the Author
Sneak Peek of Out of the Picture
The Game Changer
Copyright @ 2019 Jennifer Brown
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereinafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Print ISBN 978-1-947892-41-5
eBook ISBN 978-1-947892-72-9
www.hallmarkpublishing.com
Chapter 1
Mary Jean, my editor at the Parkwood Chronicle Weekly, sat over my three-paragraph article with a red pen and made maddeningly slow circles and comments. A million of them.
“You’ve repeated the word giblets quite a few times here,” she said, not looking up.
Mary Jean—or Mary Mean as I’d heard a couple of the middle school carriers call her behind her back—used this method of editing for every piece submitted to the Chronicle Weekly. Print it out, deliver it to her desk, and then sit there while she pored over it with one of the thousands of red pens that rolled around in her desk drawer.
Mary Mean was a misnomer. Mary Jean was perfectly nice, with kind eyes behind her cheater glasses, of which she had an entire drawer full, just below her drawer full of red pens. But Mary Jean was old school. The whole Parkwood Chronicle Weekly was old school. My life was old school.
At least that was how it felt compared to the life I’d left behind when I moved here a year ago.
But the life I’d left behind included getting phased out of being the youngest lead reporter on the homicide beat—a job I was good at, I might point out—at a certain very high-profile Chicago newspaper. And then getting phased out of a three-year relationship with a very high-profile newspaper cartoonist named Trace, who’d completely broken my heart when he refused to follow my career to Missouri. And then, most heartbreakingly, getting phased out of a friendship with the best and sweetest bulldog ever—my little Tink—because he belonged to Trace, too. So, yes, the life I left behind was much more modern and cosmopolitan than my life in Parkwood, but it was also a life that had been phased into nonexistence.
However, if I’d ever used the word giblets in a story at my old paper, it would have been something along the lines of, The body was discovered buried in the bottom of a standalone freezer in the suspect’s basement, frozen among packaged ground beef and chicken giblets. Forensics examiner Lucy Fang and her team are working to decipher the significance… Not, Giblets are the secret to the chewy bits, and chewy bits are the secret to happy potatoes.
Mary Jean made a circle and flicked her eyes up at me. Seeing that I was watching her, she half-turned the page toward me. “See. Right here.” She tapped the circle she’d just made and read aloud, “‘I really like Esther’s new giblets,’ said customer Roy Bunson. Most residents agree—when Esther put giblets in her gravy, she took dinner, and possibly giblets, to a whole new level.’” She glanced at me again. “Do you hear it? Do you hear how that many giblets in such short space may sound a little…off?”
I winced. “Yes, ma’am.”
She returned to the paper. “You’ve got to read things back to yourself.” She tapped her ear with her finger, the point of her red pen dotting her temple. “That’s what I’m here for. To teach you how to listen to your words before you release them into the world. You’re your first and most important editor.”
It wasn’t that I was so in love with giblets. And it wasn’t that I didn’t know how to self-edit. It was that giblets were just as good for bulking up an article as they were for bulking up gravy, and every giblet got me one word closer to my word count goal—a goal I struggled to hit with every story I wrote.
I was bored. It had taken me a year to admit it to myself, but there it was. Giblets this, sale on soccer cleats that. Sale ads. Obituary after depressing obituary. I missed reporting on the homicides that led to obituaries.
When I’d chosen the job in Parkwood, I was freaked out and fraught. I could have held out for a bigger paper, a bigger town. But at the time, no other offers were coming in—I was too young, too inexperienced, too overpaid, and the industry was too saturated and shrinking too rapidly. I was far from the only out-of-work reporter in the world, and I had student loans to think of. And then when it became obvious that my boyfriend Trace wasn’t willing to relocate to be with me, I was desperate to get out of Chicago altogether to mend my broken heart. Parkwood had extended an offer and a charming, sleepy community filled with trees and historic homes and smiling strangers seemed like the best place to catch my breath, lick my wounds, regain my pride and get over Trace. If I could accomplish that, I could try again. Except, I hadn’t yet tried again. And I hadn’t yet gotten over Trace.
Don’t get me wrong—Parkwood, Missouri, population 4,944, was an adorable little town. One supermarket, one high school, one bowling alley, three gas stations, a bank, more chain pizza joints than you could shake a ball of mozzarella at, and not a single designer shoe store to be found.
No daily rush hour traffic jams. No pollution. Lots of little kids playing on really green