Cold Tea on a Hot Day Read Free

day.”
    The new publisher and editor in chief of The Valentine Voice, Tate Holloway, will be arriving this weekend to officially take over the paper. Mr. Holloway is Ms. Porter-Abercrombie’s cousin and a veteran newspaper journalist with thirty years experience on a number of the nation’s leading newspapers.
    An open house will be held in honor of Mr. Holloway on Monday at the Voice offices. Cake and coffee will be served courtesy of Sweetie Cakes of Main Street. Come by and welcome Mr. Holloway, or address to him your complaints.
    Until Monday, I will continue as managing editor. All news stories should be reported to me, and you can call me at my home number, 555-4743, afternoons and until 8:00 p.m. Please save all complaints for Mr. Holloway on Monday.
    Other important bits of note:
    The first meeting of the Valentine Rose Club will be held tonight, 7:00 p.m., at the Methodist Church Fellowship Hall. Vella Blaine will head the meeting and wants it stressed that all denominations are welcome and there will be no passing of a collection plate.
    Jaydee Mayhall has formally declared his candidacy for city council. Thus far he is the first candidate to declare intentions of running for the seat being vacated by long-time member Wesley Fitz-water, who says he is tired of the thankless job.Mayhall invites anyone who would like to talk to him about the town’s needs to stop by to visit with him at his office on Main Street.
    Mayor Upchurch has ten Valentine town flags left at city hall, for anyone who wants to fly one outside their home or shop. The flags are free; the only requirement is a proper pole high enough that the flag does not brush the ground.

Two
    Looking in the Wrong Direction
    “H ow long has he been missing?” Principal Blankenship demanded of the teacher standing before her.
    “Since lunch recess,” Imogene Reeves answered, wringing her hands. “I don’t care if he is retarded and looks like an angel. He knows how to slip away. He is not just wanderin’ off.”
    The principal winced at the word retarded spoken out loud. There were so many unacceptable words and phrases these days that she couldn’t keep up, but she was fairly certain the term retarded fell in the unacceptable category. She checked her watch and saw it was going on one o’clock.
    She headed at a good clip out of her office, asking as she went, “Has anyone spoken to Mr. Starr…checked the storerooms?”
    It could very well be a repeat of that first time, she thought, calming herself. It had been Mr. Starr, the custodian, who had found Willie Lee the first time. That time the boy had been all along playing with a mouse in the janitor’s storeroom. This had been upsetting—a little fright that the mouse might bite and the boy get an infection—but it was better than the second time, when the boy had gotten off the school grounds and all the way down to the veterinarian’s place a half-mile away. That time Principal Blankenship had been forced to call the boy’s mother, because the veterinarian was a friend of the boy’s mother.
    Oh, she did not want to have to tell the mother again. Marilee James wrote for the newspaper. This would get everywhere.
    Imagining what her father, a principal before her, would have said, would have yelled, Principal Blankenship just about wet her pants.
    The storeroom had been searched and the custodian Mr. Starr consulted; involved with changing out hot water heaters, he had not seen Willie Lee since the beginning of the school day. The closets were searched, and the storerooms a second time, and the boys’ bathrooms.
    At last the principal resorted to telephoning down to the veterinarian’s office.
    “I haven’t seen Willie Lee,” the young receptionist at the veterinarian’s told her. “And Doc Lindsey has been out inoculatin’ cattle since before noon.”
    The principal, with a sinking feeling, went along the corridors of her small school, peeking into each classroom, searching faces,