The Note

By Ian W. Cooper

Deeply in love with Madeline, his girlfriend back in Orillia, Devlin’s a long way from home. He’s starting off as a cub reporter for a publisher of small newspapers and agricultural magazines in Carlton Falls, population fourteen hundred. Wearing a suit and tie, reporting on ball games and township council, with a camera around his neck and cruising in his little sports car, he’s the best thing to hit town in ages. When he responds to an anonymous note on sheer impulse, life gets very complicated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian W. Cooper
• Release date: May 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780991671687

Ian W. Cooper

Ian Cooper has written fiction, non-fiction and worked for newspapers and magazines. He likes to make people laugh as well as think. His writing has a strong sense of the dramatic. Out of work and recovering from a life-threatening illness, someone suggested writing his sexual memoirs, which he initially rejected for the amount of research involved. He didn’t want to have to make it all up from scratch. A single dad and semi-retired from his most recent experience in the construction industry, Ian squeezes a little writing time in between raising a daughter and building a home-based business.

Book preview

The Note

Ian Cooper

This Smashwords edition copyright Ian Cooper and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-0-9916716-8-7

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The author’s moral right has been asserted.

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Table of Contents

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

About Ian Cooper

The Note

Ian Cooper

Act One

Devlin returned to the newsroom after interviewing a potato farmer about his new irrigation system. The questions were all the usual ones. He’d filled up ten or twelve pages in his steno-pad, and the story was easy enough once you had done a couple. Lanark Agricultural Publications had a number of specialty magazines, and Potato Monthly was one of several he wrote for.

He had to do one potato story a month.

Hanging up his jacket just inside the door, he took the camera bag to his desk and plopped it down.

What’s this?

Marjorie looked up from her desk in a bored manner.

What’s what?

Dev held up the envelope. It was in the keys of his computer keyboard, sticking straight up and with the name Devlin written on it in a slanting, eccentric, yet clearly feminine hand.

Park Davis, facing them from his desk at the other end of the room, shook his head in the negative.

Devlin poked a fingernail under the flap and tore it open. Taking out the small sheet of closely-written paper, he sat down, and began to read.

***

At first he took it for a joke. The bunch of them, five reporters working three weekly papers plus the agricultural magazines, had been kidding around just the other day. It was such a small place, one or two were away from families and they all agreed the love life tended to suffer.

It was what looked like a love letter, although he thought they were usually longer. He and Madeline had written the steamiest love letters back and forth while they were in college, a hundred and fifty miles apart. They tended to be three or four pages long. He’d saved all of hers. They were bundled up with an elastic band in his top dresser drawer back home, and still in their original envelopes.

Madeline was in Orillia, their home town. Getting into the spirit of the thing, he had remarked on the local nightlife or rather the lack of it in the little town of Carlton Falls. In a word, there wasn’t any. The town had two bars and a pizza place that had a few tables, a dance floor and a liquor license. The better bar was more of a dining room, with no music and no dance floor. The other one was pretty lame, a long storefront with booths on one wall and pin-ball games at the back, the antique machines its only major draw. There was a variety store-cum grocer that had a diner along one side, where all the high-school kids went for lunch. That’s where Devlin had eaten for the first week or two in town. They closed at nine p.m. so it wasn’t exactly a night spot.

Once you’d been to the local watering holes a few times, you started seeing the same tired faces over and over again. The town had a population of about fourteen hundred, which made the larger towns fifteen or twenty kilometres up the road a pretty good draw for the younger crowd.

Why he ever took this job, for reporting sports wasn’t his first choice, was a bit of a mystery, but Madeline had a good-paying job while Devlin lived in a back bedroom at his folk’s house. He’d been there all through college, on weekends and in summers. He didn’t realize he was such a burden. His step-father was on him to find work, and it was like he didn’t have much choice but to take almost anything offered.

He got home two or three times a month, arriving around ten on a Friday night and having to leave before dinnertime on Sundays. While the sex was good, he and Madeline sometimes found it difficult to find anything to talk about, now that he was so far away. They picked up where they left off, but it seemed there was nothing new. She couldn’t relate to his job, as she knew so little about it or the town he worked in. She knew nothing of the people or the area he found so fascinating.

They were deeply in love, and had been together for seven years. Plans of marriage were comfortably vague, although there had been hints lately that the situation wouldn’t last forever. The disturbing thing was that the information came from his buddy Dave, whose girlfriend Beth was Madeline’s best friend. The path of travel was easy to read, although Madeline had never mentioned it. The real underlying problem was that neither had Devlin.

Devlin wasn’t a stupid or insensitive man, but he really didn’t want to get married right now. A man needed a good steady job and he wasn’t sure that was the case just yet. Madeline’s success outstripped his own rather lackluster performance and maybe that had something to do with it.

The job in Carlton Falls represented a start. Everyone had to start somewhere.

So who is this person? No ideas?

Park shrugged elaborately.

It’s like Marjorie and Park were trying not to smile.

Not a clue. Parked looked up as Pinton came in, like Dev he slung his jacket up carelessly and was lugging the usual bag with camera, lenses, and flash units over his shoulder.

It doesn’t ring any bells. Marj laughed at her own joke and winked at Park. Get it? Ring my bell?

What’s up, doc? Predictable, but Doug Pinton was all right, despite his thug looks and shoulders that scraped the door frames coming in.

He was their token black guy, or so the saying went around there.

Dev got an anonymous letter. Marjorie’s face puckered up in what passed for humour.

Her wizened old face had blessed these