A Body at Bunco : Myrtle Clover #8

Chapter Seventeen

 Sloan Jones wasn't in and he hadn't seemed to care enough about the contents of the newsroom to lock the door behind him. Pasha appeared to enjoy the dark space with its paper-laden desks and smell of old books. She darted around the large room, apparently looking for prey. Myrtle wondered, a bit uneasily, if there might be a few mice scampering around.

Myrtle looked for a place to sit and wait for Sloan. Sloan's own desk looked to be the most comfortable. He had a large rolling chair with a high back. The desk in front of the chair was as crammed with papers and old printed photos. Myrtle sat rather primly in the chair, clutching her purse and thinking over what she was going to say to Sloan.

Pasha stopped hunting and leaped up on Sloan's desk, scattering papers wildly. The black cat stared intently at Myrtle, batted some papers out of Sloan's inbox, and then leaped down to the floor to continue her search for a snack.

Myrtle discovered that the contents of Sloan's inbox were rather intriguing. "Precious Pasha," she murmured. Everything in the inbox appeared to be recent, according to the dates. Whenever Sloan got a lead for a story via email, he'd print it and stick it in his inbox. Consequently, it was jam-packed.

Leafing through the papers, Myrtle saw a story about Wilson Mayfield getting his Eagle Rank, high school student Priscilla Truman being chosen as a page in the state house, and Mrs. Flotman's weighty decision to plant peppers instead of continuing with her prize-winning tomatoes.

Frowning, Myrtle pulled the newspaper from her pocketbook. In the paper Myrtle was holding, she saw no mention of any peppers, Eagles, or pages. On the side of Sloan's desk, she saw the previous newspaper and flipped through it, too. No mention of the small-town topics she saw in his inbox. In fact, a running theme in both newspapers were bigger stories that were either taking place in the larger region or more sensationalistic stories—gossipy pieces about local residents.

"This is not good," muttered Myrtle. It wasn't that readers weren't submitting content to him. It was that Sloan wasn't printing it.

But what could she do? Oh, she could try to pressure Sloan. But hadn't she tried earlier? Wouldn't he just placate her, get her out of there, and then just do whatever he pleased? His vision for the newspaper was suddenly radically different from hers. And radically different, it seemed, from what his readers were actually looking for. Sloan needed to be convinced.

That's when Myrtle noticed Sloan's computer on the next desk over. Its screen was dimmed as if it were sleeping. She paused a fraction of a second before scooting the rolling chair over and waking it with a jiggle of the mouse.

Judging from the sounds from the other side of the newsroom, Pasha appeared to have found a real mouse. Myrtle determinedly avoided watching the carnage taking place across the room.

Myrtle squinted at the screen. The homepage appeared to have some sort of scantily clad females on it. She sighed in distaste, hastily studied the shortcut icons on the desktop. She spotted the shortcuts for Facebook and Twitter. And smiled.

Myrtle held her breath as she clicked on the icons and the pages came up. She released her breath in relief as she saw that Sloan, however unwisely, had chosen to have the computer automatically sign him in and remember his passwords.