Tamarack River Ghost (32 page)

“I did a bit of editing to the piece. It was wordy, and some of it made little sense,” explained Josh.

“Well, who in hell gave you permission to tamper with a customer’s writing? Who in hell gave you permission? Answer me that!” yelled Lexington. His face was even redder than before.

“I believe it is part of my job to edit the material that’s submitted; that’s what an editor is supposed to do. That’s what I’ve been trained to do.”

“Josh.” Lexington’s voice returned to a more normal level. “This is not an old-time newspaper. This is a new approach, a new idea, the future. You can’t use yesterday’s tools on tomorrow’s products.”

“Good editing is good editing. Readable and accurate writing ought to be our goal, no matter whether the material is on paper or on a screen,” Josh said quietly but firmly.

“Josh, Josh, Josh . . . You are not listening to me. When a customer sends us a story along with the money to publish it, we publish it. The only editing we should do is to make sure there is no profanity and the customer hasn’t said something over which they or we might get sued. Other than that, everything goes—as long as they pay their money. Understood?”

“I hear you, but the reputation of
Farm Country News
depends on the quality of the material we publish.”

“Reputation be damned. I’m interested in the paper making a profit. Period,” said Lexington. “Now I’ve got to write to Nathan West and offer to republish what they originally sent us for free—and we’ll lose money on the deal.”

“Is that all?” said Josh quietly.

“One more thing. Don’t you ever send money back to a customer. What in hell were you thinking? Once we have the money, it’s ours. You got that?”

“I’ve got it,” Josh said, trying not to allow his disgust to show in his voice.

The remaining summer months flew by. Submissions continued to flow into the offices of
Farm Country News
. Articles from John Deere and Case IH, material from Archer Daniels Midland, a long piece from Monsanto, a story from Tyson Foods, another from Cargill, and a two-thousand-word piece from Land O’Lakes. Nothing from Nathan West headquarters in Dubuque—the folks there were obviously still angry about the editing Josh had done to their long article.

For days on end, Josh sat at his computer, reviewing the stories that came in and doing some minor, usually very minor, editing. He bit his tongue when he allowed some of the material to appear on the paper’s website—in his mind too much of it was poorly written or at best sounded like an info-ad, which, indeed, most of the material was. As long as the money followed the stories, he had no reason to turn them down; his boss had made that abundantly clear.

Josh stopped out at the Nathan West building site in late July and again in late August and after each visit wrote a brief piece, including photos. His boss reminded him that he should allow Nathan West to write the stories and take the photos—that the paper would benefit in at least two ways. Josh wouldn’t waste his time traveling, writing stories, and taking photos; and, of course, Nathan West would pay for everything that it submitted.

After each of Josh’s stories appeared, the usual set of letters to the editor came flying in—some actual letters and most of them e-mails. Almost none included the required payment, so they were never published.

The last letter came in an envelope with no return address; the postmark was Plainfield. Josh stared at the signature. He had printed several items that M.D. had written, all of them quite critical of the Nathan West project, but none sounded the least bit threatening. Was M.D. going off in a new, more violent direction? He stared at the letter again; it was handwritten. All of the other M.D. pieces had arrived neatly typed. Could this be a different M.D.? Perhaps some kind of prank? Josh didn’t know what to make of the letter, except that it clearly sounded like a threat. He called Natalie. As a trained law-enforcement officer, she would have had experience with these kinds of threats, if indeed it was a threat.

“Natalie, Josh. Got a question for you. What does it take for a threatening letter to become a threatening letter?”

“What?”

“What does it take for a threatening letter to become a threatening letter?”

“I heard you the first time. What’s going on?”

Josh read the letter aloud.

“Who signed it?”

“This is the part that troubles me. It’s signed “M.D.” As you know from reading the paper, we get the occasional submission from an M.D., but we have never gotten a letter to the editor. I can’t believe this is the same person, but you never know.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“Are you still there?” Josh asked.

“I’m still here. I don’t think the letter reaches the threat level. The person didn’t say he was going to harm the Nathan West buildings but merely said something might happen to them.”

“True, but aren’t you splitting hairs?”

“Maybe, but it sounds like a spoof, with the writer using ‘M.D.’ to stand for Mortimer Dunn, that old drowned lumberjack.”

“I was thinking the same thing. Hey, Dunn may be dead, but his ghost is still around. People swear that his ghost is out there, searching for his grave on dark nights and trying to protect the valley.“

Natalie laughed. “You don’t believe in all that ghost stuff, do you?”

“Well, I’ve been getting this poetry from somebody who uses the initials ‘M.D.’ I’m beginning to wonder if the old ghost isn’t writing the stuff and sending it to me.”

“Oh, Josh, what’s happening to you? Where’s that trained journalist who wants only to deal with the facts? Whatever happened to him?”

Now Josh laughed. “Just pulling your chain a little, Natalie. But I really do wonder who M.D. is. I also think I better give the folks over at Nathan West a call, just in case the threat is real and someone is planning to do something stupid.”

“Sounds like a good idea. How about coming to my cabin for dinner on Saturday? I’ll bake a chocolate cake.”

“I’ll be there with bells on,” Josh said.

“You can leave the bells home—I don’t think you’ll need them.” Natalie chuckled as she hung up the phone.

Immediately, Josh called Ed Clark at Nathan West’s building site.

“Ed, it’s Josh Wittmore at
Farm Country News
.”

“How you doing?” answered Clark, who, unlike his superiors at Nathan Clark headquarters in Dubuque, had come to like Josh and his interest in and writings about their new hog operation.

“Say, I want to give you a heads-up. There may be nothing to it, but after the last piece I wrote about the progress you guys are making with your buildings, I got a rather nasty letter in the mail. I’ll read it to you.” Josh read him the letter.

“Who is this M.D.?” asked Clark.

“Probably stands for Mortimer Dunn, the Tamarack River Ghost.”

“Him again?”

“Yup, lots of ghost believers around. This may be simply a prank. I wanted to let you know, though, just in case there is something to it.”

“We’ve gotten this kind of stuff more times than I can count. We don’t put much stock in these tirades. They come at us from all directions. But thanks for letting me know,” said Clark.

For weeks on end, Josh and his boss scarcely talked. They had obviously reached some kind of truce. Josh came to work each morning, put in his eight hours, and returned to his apartment. His heart was just not in his work anymore. He felt like a phony; he wanted to be a journalist, dig out important stories, interview people, find different points of view on a controversial topic, but now his hands were tied. He believed a high school dropout could do the work he was doing; his position certainly didn’t require a trained journalist.

The electronic
Farm Country News
was making a profit.
It should
, thought Josh. The paper’s fixed costs were minimal. It had a tiny full-time staff and almost no newsprint and press charges, as it printed only a thin broadsheet once a month. Posting material on the paper’s website cost the paper little.

Josh had hoped people would begin to see that the printed articles, especially those that were supposed to be news, were not news at all but advertising pieces for the companies submitting them. A few people figured it out and let the paper know in no uncertain terms that they were opposed to what it was doing. A recent e-mail Josh received made the point:

Josh forwarded the e-mail to his boss, hoping that one day soon Lexington might see his idea was failing and that if the paper was to continue it must develop a new strategy. But he heard not a whisper from his boss. Not one word.

Some things never change
, thought Natalie as she sat in her Ford F-150, parked on a little knoll that overlooked a considerable portion of the Tamarack River Valley. It was late September, and she was on poacher duty. As surely as the first frost arrives in the fall, the calls come in complaining about game poaching and wondering why she wasn’t stopping all the illegal hunting. She wanted to tell these callers that rounding up game poachers wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded, especially those who poached deer at night—which was when most of them operated.

She remembered so well the previous fall when she had been certain that she had the goods on Dan Burman but then had been embarrassed when she and the sheriff trekked out to his farm only to find a pair of dressed goats hanging in his barn. Natalie was convinced at the time that Burman was guilty and that he had cleverly replaced the deer carcasses with goat carcasses. If he chose to do some poaching this year, she would nail his skin to the wall.

With the driver’s-side window of her pickup open, she was listening to the early evening sounds and smelling the pungent aroma of fall. Even though she lost a lot of sleep on these watches, she also enjoyed the quiet. From time to time, she flicked on her Mag-Lite and scratched a few things in her ever-present journal. Writing helped to pass the time as she waited for the sound of a gunshot or the sight of a bright light sweeping across one of the open fields in the distance.

She allowed her mind to wander. Thoughts of Josh Wittmore and the good times they’d had together this past year quickly crowded out anything else. Was he the one? Should she say “yes” if he proposed marriage? A year ago marriage was the farthest thing from her mind as she worked
hard to establish herself as a female warden in a county that believed only men should hold such positions. She believed, with substantial evidence, that she had garnered considerable respect in the county, especially from other law-enforcement people, environmental groups, and fish and wild-life organizations interested in sensible management of the county’s fish and game resources. Even those she arrested begrudgingly admitted that she was tough but fair—she treated everyone the same. She chuckled when she recalled the time she cited the mayor of Link Lake for having in his boat a largemouth bass one inch short of the lawful length. At the time, she didn’t know who he was, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She would have cited anyone—the law was the law. The incident was a considerable embarrassment to the mayor when his name appeared in the
Ames County Argus
’s citation list. Most of the people in Link Lake found the incident hilarious and never ceased kidding their mayor. Several even mailed him rulers with instructions on how to use them.

Would a marriage work? A law enforcement officer married to a journalist? She knew Josh was a good journalist, but he had a job that he hated. She had lately become his sounding board. When they got together, whether over a cup of coffee or for a night at her cabin, he always got around to sharing his unhappiness over what had become of
Farm Country News
. “It’s just not right what our paper is doing,” he often said.

A near full moon, orange and bright, hung low in the night sky as Natalie continued to look and listen. She inhaled deeply. The cool night air was refreshing, and it helped keep her alert, but soon she smelled something different. Just a hint of wood smoke. She wondered if the evening breeze had pushed the smoke from a neighbor’s chimney her way. She knew that many people in the valley continued to warm their homes, at least some of the time, with woodstoves. Heating a home this way was considerably less expensive than using propane, especially when most folks had their own woodlots.

She sat back and relaxed, pushing the new smell aside. She watched and listened, scanning the fields to the south, listening for a pickup, for the report of a rifle, for voices that carried some distance on quiet nights. Her eyes fixed on a faint red glow in the sky she hadn’t noticed before. She picked up her binoculars. It was brighter, but she still couldn’t make out
what it was. Then she caught an even stronger whiff of wood smoke. She decided to check it out—could this be a forest fire? She fired up her pickup, drove out on the road, and headed toward the red glow.