“Perhaps you could write a letter to the editor?” the unhelpful receptionist said to Shelly Lockes the day she actually went down to the offices.
“This isn’t my opinion,” Shelly told her. “These are facts. Doesn’t your paper want to publish facts?”
The receptionist looked at her blankly, almost as if she were blind.
“Can I see someone? An editor?” Shelly asked.
The receptionist moved her fingers around on a phone, holding the receiver to her ear, before she looked back up at Shelly and told her that there were no editors in the building (“Big convention in Chicago”), but that she would call for a reporter. The reporter who finally met with Shelly, a girl who appeared all of twenty years old, took copious notes on a yellow legal pad and nodded meaningfully at every detail—but the next article repeated the same false information:
No one knew how long Craig Clements-Rabbitt and his girlfriend, Nicole Werner, lay there in the lake of Nicole Werner’s blood, or how soon afterward the young man had fled the scene.
The middle-aged woman who made the cell phone call did not give adequate information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to find it until it was too late to assist the victim.
After that, Shelly Lockes quit reading articles about the accident, and not long after that, she quit buying the newspaper altogether.
Still, she imagined there would be a trial, or some sort of investigation having to do with Craig Clements-Rabbitt, and that she might have a chance then to deliver the facts.
But by the end of the summer, she’d quit expecting that as well.