Let Me Whisper in Your Ear Read Free Page A

she promised herself. While most people are making out their Christmas lists, I’m making my list and checking it twice, all right. A list of the dead.
    Laura swept her blond bangs back from her forehead, instinctively rubbing the thin scar above her browline, and sighed. This was the last thing she wanted to be doing. Not because it was a ghoulish task in the otherwise cheery holiday season. In fact, she found it rather interesting, reading upon who had died over the previous twelve months. Even though she followed the news very closely, there were always some people she’d forgotten or missed—the ones who were not household names, who did not get a full television obit when they died, but who were noteworthy enough to get a write-up in the national newspaper of record.
    No, it wasn’t the work that bothered her. It was the timing. There was just so much to do at this time of the year. The socializing, the shopping, the rushing, the wrapping. It was stressful enough to get all that done. Who needed to be worried about choosing the top-sixty croakers?
    Come on, Laura, she chided herself. Don’t be cynical. You know you want it to be good. Every KEY television station will use it.
    The Yearender piece would run on New Year’s Eve. Two minutes and thirty seconds of flashes of the faces of those who had gone on to their rewards, set against some appropriate music. This year, Laura had selected the signature song of a legendary singer who had died a few months earlier.
    She knew it would come out well. It always did. She’d done several of these Yearenders now and, each time, when they played out to the network, her newsroom co-workers watched, fascinated. They were a tough crowd, most of them not given to compliments. But even some of the most jaded could be moved by the combination of visual images, wonderful music and thoughts of people who had all made impressive marks on this world, passing on to whatever comes next.
    Laura always felt satisfied after the Yearender was done. But mostly she felt relieved. Relieved that she’d made another deadline and that she could then pay a little attention to her personal life, such as it was.
    Being a producer assigned to the KEY News Bulletin Center meant that Laura’s life was not her own. When she accepted the position, she knew it meant that she would be constantly on call. Weekends, holidays and vacations were only fully her own as long as no major news story broke. If something big happened, the beeper, her constant companion, would sound and she was expected to call in to KEY News headquarters immediately and, most often, report in person quickly thereafter. In the year she’d worked in the Bulletin Center, she’d left dozens of dinners uneaten, and days off interrupted.
    Whenever she felt a bit sorry for herself, when the rest of the world seemed to work a normal schedule, without fear of having a random act of violence or a whim of Mother Nature cut one’s plans short, Laura reminded herself that there were lots of people who lived this way. Police and firefighters staffed their departments around the clock. Hospital doctors and nurses had to make sure their institutions were covered twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.
    In fact, when reflecting on it, Laura thought that KEY News was a lot like a hospital. The fine surgery was performed on KEY Evening Headlines and on the magazine shows like Hourglass, where untold hours of excruciating exactitude were spent perfecting every aspect of each broadcast. The Bulletin Center was more like the hospital emergency room. The correspondents, producers and editors assigned to Bulletin duty dealt with whatever the news gods blew their way, and they dealt with it immediately. Seconds counted in being first on the air with the news and beating the competition.
    Laura was so engrossed in going over her obituary list, she jumped when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
    â€œHey, Laura,