Page 35 of Head Room

Not because I was looking for her there, but because I was in search of a backup stash of Pepperidge Farm Double Dark Chocolate Milano cookies I kept here.So, maybe it hadn’t been all self-restraint leaving the historical research behind.

My stash was not in the fridge, where my coworkers who would never consider poaching a story would gobble them without hesitation.At the moment, Nola was rooting inside it in a way that would have revealed anything hidden.

No, I kept this stash of cookies inside an innocuous box and tucked behind a dozen similar boxes of napkins.

Wasn’t giving that hiding spot away by digging them out in front of a witness.

“Nola, okay with you if I look at all your footage from the cabin fire scene?”

She straightened enough to look at me over the open refrigerator door.

“Sure.I’ll set it up in the editing bay.”

I could easily do that myself.“No reason for you to—”

She closed the fridge and started out, then stopped at the doorway.“You coming?”

Yes, darn it.Without the cookies.

Didn’t take long for her to set it up.Rather than leaving the editing bay when she finished, she sat next to me, not asking permission, but assuming I’d let her stay.I admired that.

Didn’t stop me from side-eyeing her.

She answered my unspoken invitation to leave with, “No way.”

I rolled the video.

After a minute or two, she added, “What are you looking for?”

“Don’t know.Just looking.Your framing’s good.Especially with the standup with Ned Irvin.”

Distract with a compliment?Me?

“Thanks.Diana gave me a trick to keep the head room even.”

After a while, she switched to the second day.We watched several more minutes of burnt ruins, with drifts of smoke, some still rising, but also shifting sideways.

I leaned forward.“There.Is that when they found the body?”

“Yeah.”She stopped the replay with bulky bodies leaving only glimpses between them as they clustered around something.“I couldn’t see much.Before the firefighters reacted, I had no idea.Then they blocked the view.There’s a better angle later on.Audrey said not to use it on air, even though you have to mostly use your imagination to make out that it’s a body.”

She restarted the video, which showed more legs shifting around.After another three minutes, she stopped it again.

“There.That’s the clearest frame.”

“Not very clear.”

“No.Camera didn’t do much better, either.I tried that, too, along with the video.Still, I was pretty sure I saw something and one firefighter confirmed it, though he insisted on off-the-record.”She grimaced.“Couldn’t have used it at that point with just him and my maybe-I-saw-it, but—”

“What was it?”

“The dead man had been shot in the head.”

“Well, we knew that from the sheriff’s department’s statements later.”

“Uh-huh.How I knew it was I could see the hole in what was mostly a skull.”

That spiked my eyebrows.“The head was a skull...?But the boots survived?”