Red Ink is No Picnic

by Arline Chase

A newspaper's company picnic leads to murder, while an aging "girl-reporter" works with her younger male counterpart to solve the crime.

ISBN 978-1-59431-888-7 Mystery/ Suspense / Romance

Also available in RTF and HTML formats.

CHAPTER 1

Murder was the last thing on my mind the Saturday they held our company picnic at Assateague Island. Yes, I suffered from Toxic Boss Syndrome. Yes, I had wished our newspaper’s editor, Scrod Hitchins, dead, once.

Okay, more than once. But I hadn’t killed him. Yet.

Scrod may have had a toothpaste-ad smile, and looks that could pass on the cover of GQ, but I certainly didn’t hold the record for death threats when it came to our peerless editor. He was peerless because nobody else would sink that low. And he had a bad habit of hanging his reporters out to dry.

We’re an evening newspaper. We go to press at 9 a.m. and hit the streets before noon, so I made it a point to file my stories mostly at night. I left them on the mainframe for Scrod to find when he laid out the front page in the morning. If he didn’t like what I wrote, or if he had questions, he was free to call me on my cell.

Caller ID is one of the blessings of the universe.

I knew he’d change the facts to suit himself, anyway. And leave my byline on the story so I’d be the one to take the heat when it was inaccurate.

I figured staying out of Scrod’s way at deadline removed us both from temptation. It kept him alive and me from being fired. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have selected his company anywhere, especially on an empty beach in the middle of a hurricane. So it was with no little shock that I found myself that afternoon picnicking with the Scrod and the rest of our staff.

Let me explain a bit. Our paper, The Daily Blade, had recently been sold. Having this picnic was the new owner, Humphrey Peterson’s, idea of an “initial bonding experience.” The sale had been mandatory—it was that or close forever, given that our advertising sales had fallen by 40% in the last year (partly thanks to Scrod’s pissing off every business-owner in town by putting unsaid and insulting words in their mouths), and that was already down from the year before.