The Spy on the Tennessee Walker Read Online Free Page A

and collapsed in his chair, wiped out by disappointment. Apparently I’d forgotten just how exhausting young love can be. To make matters worse, I was in horrible, unfeeling mother mode — squelching Josh’s attempt to reopen the discussion of climbing Half Dome with Lexie and reminding Zach not to feed Raider, our aging German shepherd, under the table for approximately the ten thousandth time. Mom, the perennial spoilsport.
    â€œHey,” I said. “Delicious paella, Michael. And we got an interesting package in the mail today. Josh, would you go get it?” Josh had regained some small measure of energy simply by shoveling in three generous servings of paella. Marginally restored, he went over to the sideboard and brought the double-framed pictures Phoebe had sent and put them in front of Michael.
    â€œWho do you see, Dad?” he asked.
    â€œGrandma Alma,” he said without hesitation. “But…who’s this?”
    â€œWho does it look like?”
    Michael looked at the photo of Victoria and lookedacross the table at me. “It’s Mom,” he said. He put the frame down and picked up his glass of wine. “Pretty slick Photoshopping. You look like somebody out of the nineteenth century.”
    â€œWrong, as usual,” snapped Josh, rejuvenated by the opportunity to correct a grown-up.
    Michael looked at the photo and back at me. “Well, Annie Oakley — if it’s not some touched-up version of you on the horse, who is it?”
    â€œThat,” I said, “is exactly what I’d like to know. And,” I said, swirling the last of the light Spanish red around in my glass, “that’s why I want us to go to Oxford to visit the Cardworthy Henhouse Museum.”
    Michael did his eyebrow-raising trick. “Oh, tell me more. Just don’t tell me I have to show up at one of those football games in a blue blazer and rep tie.”
    â€œYou do, and you will,” I said. “And just FYI, since both you and Josh keep throwing Annie Oakley into the discussion, I’d like to point out that she came from a different generation than my great-great-great-grandmother. Victoria was born in 1841, Annie Oakley was born nearly twenty years later — 1860, I believe.”
    Silence fell around the table. “Mom,” said Zach in a stage whisper. “I think you’re being a know-it-all again.”

CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 6
    MAGGIE MAGGIE
    SMALL TOWN OFFICE, SAN FRANCISCO
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “It [California] is the land where the fabled Aladdin’s Lamp lies buried and she [San Francisco] is the new Aladdin who shall seize it from its obscurity and summon the genie and command him to crown her with power and greatness and bring to her feet the hoarded treasures of the earth.”
    â€” Mark Twain
    Hoyt runs a damn fine story meeting at Small Town. For a man who’s soft-spoken, who still rises when a woman enters the room, and who reminds me of my mother’s family, with that leisurely Mississippi (pronounced “Mi’-sip-ee” by the natives) drawl that sounds like a gentle waltz around colloquial Southern English, there is no nonsense at Hoyt’s core. The trains run on time, and so do the writers, designers, copyeditors, and a small, rotating army of freelance photographers and illustrators. All thanks to Hoyt, who is unshakably polite and indisputably no-nonsense. I’m the editor-in-chief, but without Hoyt’s shepherding, nagging, and constantsurveillance, nothing substantive would get done.
    It was the usual suspects around the table: Andrea “Starchy” Storch, New England’s preppy gift to journalism, who did features and covered film and theater; designer Linda Quoc, dressed, as always, head to toe in black; Puck Morris, scourge of the music beat; and a couple of eager-beaver young writers who represented the sensibility of youth. They managed the online content of Small Town and