Today's Reading
He put down his spent pipe, leaned back in his chair, and linked his fingers together, resting them in a tangle in his lap. "Since Miss Jones returns from her holiday next Monday, I've been wondering what to do with you now your temporary assignment with me is over." He smiled. "I thought perhaps working with this Quinn fellow could be your next position. You've done a marvelous job looking after me while Miss Jones has been away, Miss Berry." He paused to search his memory. "Tasmania, I believe."
"Tasmania?"
"That's where Miss Jones has been. With a group of her girlfriends. On a bus trip."
"I see."
"Have you ever been?"
"On a bus trip?" Martha asked by way of clarification.
"To Tasmania."
"No, I haven't, Mr. Hayes. I hear Mount Wellington is a sight to behold. Especially when the peaks are kissed by snow as winter beckons."
Mr. Hayes gave Martha a curious look and held it for a long moment, then shook his head. "Yes, quite. Anyway, this Quinn fellow. He's very bright indeed. A wonderful writer, so I'm told. He's young, but aren't they all these days?"
Martha chuckled at the acknowledgment of their vintage. It had been no trouble at all working for the kind, gray-haired man. More than a decade older than she was, judging by the wrinkles around his eyes and his sagging jowls, he was an old-fashioned gentleman in the best of ways. He had a mature sensibility that she liked and a gravitas she both understood and appreciated.
"They are indeed, Mr. Hayes. But as they say, youth is often wasted on the young."
"Ah, Oscar Wilde," he replied with a knowing smile.
Martha was far too polite to point out that it wasn't Oscar Wilde. Or George Bernard Shaw either, as many thought.
"We want this young chap, Quinn, to come up with another Blue Hills."
Martha startled in her chair and gripped the armrests. "What's happening to Blue Hills?"
"Goodness, nothing at all, Miss Berry. That marvel Gwen Meredith has turned Blue Hills into such a success story that the powers that be"—Mr. Hayes pointed to the ceiling—"want something else just like it. But not exactly like it." He sighed. "The truth is, we had something else in mind to fill the fifteen-minute time slot after Blue Hills, but it's fallen in a rather deep hole, I'm afraid. We had such high hopes for Detective Reeves Investigates. Imagine—a real detective on the radio hosting his own program. But, unfortunately for all concerned, the detective"—Mr. Hayes cleared his throat—"has been assigned to a very important police matter and is now unable to host the program and share his true-life detective stories."
That wasn't exactly true, but Martha was far too polite to tell Mr. Hayes what she'd heard through the unofficial grapevine: Detective Reeves (Detective Smith in real life), a respected officer with a long career in the force, had been exposed as a bigamist. He'd apparently left a wife—and, shockingly, three young children—behind in Adelaide twenty years earlier and had never bothered to get divorced, or even tell his new wife, Faith, the very-much-younger-than-him shopgirl he'd met while buying socks. When the first Mrs. Smith read about the brand-new program featuring a real-life detective in ABC Weekly magazine, she was astonished to see a photograph of her missing husband. She had quickly turned up in Sydney with a long-overdue account in one hand for all she believed she was owed for raising their children on her own and a sturdy umbrella in her other hand. The new Mrs. Smith had been so horrified by the realization her marriage wasn't legal that she'd hopped on a train to Thirroul to her parents to await the arrival of her child.
Interestingly, the scandal had never made the papers. The police swept it under the carpet because Detective Smith was one of their own, and the broadcaster announced that radio's Detective Reeves had been called away on an important assignment fighting crime, and the whole thing had been shelved. Everyone in management and in the police force was confident the embarrassing episode would just go away. And funnily enough, it did. At her age, Martha couldn't be shocked that men's scandals remained secrets. It was the way of the world, after all.
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