Chapter 10

For many years longer than Susan had been alive, Wednesday morning was paper day around the Spearfish Lake Record-Herald. Since the paper was a weekly, it had no regular circulation staff, so it was traditional for members of all the departments to gather around to address and bundle the thousands of papers that had to go out in the mail. This wasn't an unfamiliar chore to Susan; she'd helped with it from time to time since she'd been just a very small girl, and her joining the staff for the chore just underlined the fact that she was really back home.

The papers were printed at a central plant down in Camden, like they had been for many years, and someone always had to head down there way early to pick them up. Since they wanted to have the papers over at the post office before the carriers came in and began to set up their next day's deliveries, it was always necessary to get the addressing done early. This morning was the earliest that Susan had gotten up since she'd been back home, but she figured that she could get the addressing done and still have time to go home, change clothes, and head down to Riverside to do her actual registration for classes.

Although the job could get a little boring, it wasn't drudgery. Mostly the staff members gathered around a couple of big tables in the back room and gossiped as they worked. There had been some changes since Susan had last done the job; the old advertising manager, Sally Szczerowski, had taken early retirement, and her long-time assistant, Debbie Evachevski, had replaced her. Due to the lack of a junior reporter, this morning even Anissa Hodges had come in to help out with the chore.

If the Record-Herald had such a thing as a "senior reporter," Anissa was it. She was actually the sportswriter, but occasionally helped fill in with other things, especially when the paper was short a junior reporter. She'd never been more than part-time, and mostly concentrated her attention on the school sports, mostly the Spearfish Lake Marlins, but she also provided some limited coverage to the Warsaw Warriors and the Albany River Panthers. She really wasn't a full-fledged reporter, anyway. She'd never attended a day of college, and had only been pressed into service as the sportswriter years before when Mike, short a junior reporter, had noticed that Anissa was at every game he went to, usually with a small child or two in tow. She was knowledgeable about the sports and the kids playing them, and he figured that she could at least give him raw information that he could convert into a legible story, giving Mike the occasional chance to go home and get away from all that. Over the years, under his tutelage, she'd become a pretty good reporter, especially on school events, but only if no digging was involved beyond the school gym.

The group in the back room, which included her father and mother, spent some time talking about Susan's experiences in Germany. Everyone there already knew the basic details, and Susan suspected that most Wednesday mornings had featured some discussion of what she'd been up to. Thank God, she hadn't told her parents everything she was doing, she thought. Not only would they know it, who could say how many other people would know it after the gossip got aired out around here! Even an ocean's separation wouldn't have mattered much if she hadn't kept her mouth firmly shut about some of the things she'd done with Hans, Elke, Lothar, and Freya. She knew she was going to have to continue to be careful with what she said, too.

Susan also knew that having Anissa around meant that there was going to be some sports talk sooner or later, so she figured that she might as well accept it. "So, Anissa," she said when she'd got tired of talking about the things in Germany that had been rehashed many times before, "I never heard much of anything about how the football team did last year. Lousy as usual, I suppose?"

"Lousy is hardly the word for it," Anissa sneered. "Let's see, you were still here when Jerome Weilfahrt was named coach, weren't you? Oh, yes, you must have been, it was two years ago."

"They didn't do very well then," Susan commented. "I mean, not that I cared very much. I had other things to worry about, including getting an extra year's worth of requirements out of the way." She would have liked to have added, "Not that it meant anything," but over breakfast the McMahons had agreed that there was no point in letting the cat out of the bag about the Gingrich situation around the addressing table just yet. It couldn't wait for long, perhaps another week, if that, but there was no point in stirring things up any earlier than they needed to be.

"If you thought they did lousy two years ago, then you sure didn't hear about last year," Anissa said. "I used to think Johansen was a lousy coach but he seems pretty good now. There's no preparation before practice starts, and not much discipline. He mostly lets the kids do what they want to do, and mostly what they want to do is think they're the kings of the hill without doing anything to deserve it. And Weilfahrt lets them get away with it, so don't be expecting any championships this year, or even much winning."

"That's not quite what you said in your story," Mike pointed out.

"Well, I had to make it look positive," Anissa protested. "I said they had a chance of having a better record than last year. There is that chance if they get a little lucky, but in football you sometimes have to make your own luck, and they haven't been working very hard at trying to develop it."

"So what do you actually think?" Mike asked.

"They might have a chance to go three and six, but two and seven seems more likely, if they even do that well. At least this year they switched the schedule around so they don't open with Coldwater. That would be a sure loss. Since they're playing Warsaw for the season opener Friday night, there's at least a chance they could open with a win at home. They haven't done that for years. If you want to go to a football game and see the best chance at a win, then that's the one."

"I don't really know if I care," Susan shrugged. "We didn't have school sports in Germany the way they have here, so I guess I got out of the habit of caring." It wasn't all that appealing to her; she really didn't care much about sports in the first place, and the arrogant superiority complex that some of the football players had even back when they were in tenth grade had really irritated her. On the other hand, if things worked out the way she hoped, it would it might be a rare opportunity to see some of the kids she'd gone to school with for years but probably wouldn't be seeing much more, at least in school. It might be her last opportunity before the word got out that she was going to be attending college rather than high school. "But going might be something to think about," she added.

"Nothing like a little American football to remind you that you're really an American," Mike grinned as he set another bundle of papers up on the table. "I'll bet you're still thinking like a German and that a football is round and white with black spots."

"No, I retain that much of my heritage," Susan smiled. "Lothar was kind of a football nut, and by that I mean what we call soccer here. He took me to a couple games, and well, it probably was a little more interesting than watching grass grow, if you know what I mean."

"Well, I guess that's OK if it's what you like," Anissa shrugged. "But soccer seems pretty dull to me, too. Any game that can have what I've heard called 'an unassailable one-point lead' seems pretty pointless to me, but I know there are those who like it."

"So," Mike said, obviously looking to change the subject, "what do you hear about the new superintendent?"

"You mean besides the fact that he's a dork?" Anissa sneered. "From what I hear, it seems like he's real interested in putting his finger into every pie at the school and making sure the pie tastes like it. I have yet to meet anyone who likes him after the first time they've met him, and that includes me. I have no idea what Glenn Aho was thinking when he pushed so hard for hiring him."

"Lindeman didn't give me much information on all that," Mike shrugged. "Well, there were a lot of things that he didn't handle very well and that was one of them. I heard elsewhere that Glenn pushed pretty hard, though."

"That he did," Anissa agreed. "I mean, I thought Glenn was smarter than that, but I guess not." From what I hear he pulled every string he could to get board votes enough to hire him, and I guess there was a lot of trading of favors going on. The story I heard was that there were several people on the school board who would have liked to have seen Weilfahrt gone from coaching before he can cause much more damage. George Battle is the only one who really likes the guy, for whatever reason. It doesn't make much sense to me."

"I hadn't heard that story, either," Mike shook his head. To Susan it looked like he was probing Anissa for information without letting on to her what he was doing. "I heard that Aho stalled the vote on hiring Gingrich until after the new board members came on so there would be Don Friedenbach's vote for him."

"Yeah, and I thought that was a little underhanded," Anissa shook her head. "I mean, he was making out like it was for something else, but it's the only reason he would have done something like that."

"Something smells fishy to me," Mike wrinkled his nose. "In fact, it's smelled fishy for quite a while, but the more I hear the worse it gets. I sure would like to see Gingrich's resumé and any investigation the school board did on him, but I don't think I want to stir things up by dropping a Freedom of Information Act request on them. Hell, that's supposed to be public information anyway."

"I don't know what good that would do," Anissa shrugged. "I mean, it sort of strikes me as closing the gate after the horse is gone."

"You never know," Mike shrugged. "It still strikes me as something that we ought to know, and maybe the public ought to know it, too. There has to be some reason Aho was pushing so damn hard."

"If so, I have no idea what it could be," the sportswriter shrugged. "Maybe Gingrich had something on him and was looking for a payoff."

"I could believe it," Mike said. "And I could believe it if that wasn't what was going on, too. That sort of thing looks good on TV, but it's not the kind of thing that happens in real life very often. Still, I think it's something we need to look into. Anissa, keep your ear to the ground on this and let me know if you hear something. And if you can find a way to get your hands on his resumé and the background investigation without anyone knowing that the request came from me, I'd appreciate it."