Donald Harry Roberts
Coffee. In this business you need lots of it because it keeps you going when you are burning the candle at both ends, which is just about all the time and you gotta have a callused heart and an iron soul, because if you don’t have these sometimes the stories you write for a small town newspaper like The Twin Buffs Harbour Mirror will shred you like so much unwanted documents and spit you out like a mouth full of bad meat. But no matter how tough you get there is always one that comes along, grabs you by whatever part of your mind turns you inside out with awe and grief and dumps what’s left in the psycho trash. Sometimes you don’t figure out where a mystery actually begins until its solved, or nearly solved and when you do, it all seems so simple, but until that moment of eureka it ties the neurons in your brain into a massive Gordian knot and if you’re like this reporter you can’t let it go until you find that elusive loose end that unravels the whole ugly mess. When the first shard of the mystery surfaces, like an iceberg all you see is the surface. When that shard rises out of the twisted fibres of intrigue in the form of a body in the cold dark water of Twin Bluffs Harbour the veil of innocents suddenly flares in a fire ball of suspicion. It was that grandeur occasion of New-Year’s Eve.
Read this work at the World Public Library (library card needed).