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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

 

 

According to Alicia Soares, when Davin first talked to her about providing consulting services regarding an online newspaper, the unusual problem with getting local news in the Berkshires wasn’t that there were no local papers, but rather, there were far too many.

Her argument, some three-plus years before, was that too many papers meant they not only cannibalized each other’s potential ad revenue but also offered different target audiences, so there wasn’t one place to go to for a full pitch and perspective on the local goings on. Davin has been an intermittent subscriber to the digital edition of the one “big” paper, The Berkshire Eagle, a daily that tried to handle all of Berkshire County from North Adams and Williamstown on the northern border all the way to Great Barrington and Sheffield to the south, but which acted like only Pittsfield, the main metropolis and county seat stuck pretty much dead center of the county, generated news. The Eagle only rarely carried news of the far reaches of Berkshire County, which is one reason why he’s currently a nonsubscriber. Another reason is because even the Pittsfield news is typically overwhelmed by the rash of AP stories that populate this daily, and he still reads The New York Times for national and international news. The Eagle is also chronically rumored to be on its way out, changing ownership several times in the past decade.

He’s sitting at his desk, letting himself reminisce about South County Interactive and how he got himself involved. He’s letting his mind wander mainly because there’s a work order and project definition he’s supposed to be putting together for his subcontractor who does the API and software coding tweaks on the SCI platform. The current requirement involves changes to the metrics engine, so there’s likely to be fussy PHP backend integration with the SQL database he’s argued needs updating.

Be careful what you wish for, he reproaches himself. He knows he has something of a knack for pushing for improvements on any project he gets involved with, just like he knows he also has the unfortunate knack for underestimating the time he’ll be required to spend pursuing any such improvements.

He thinks of his present situation as a good case in point. At least SCI is a pretty good service, he feels, and his strategy of the self-erecting site means this online service delivers a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in South County.

In his early years in Housatonic, if he wanted to know about Great Barrington or Lenox or Stockbridge, Lee, or Sheffield, or any of these towns’ select board or planning board meetings, or traffic problems, or if he desired a thorough bead on obituaries, real estate transactions, district court cases, and school sports, the old south county weekly, The Berkshire Record, was his best bet but hardly all that helpful considering its light content listings. Even the news—except for the local school sports—was hit-or-miss, not that SCI itself doesn’t have a long way to go in comprehensive news reporting.

And Alicia keeps hinting I should write a lot of it.

But before SCI, the publication that was the place to see what was going on around town for dining or entertainment or tag sales or cars for sale, was the free shopper, Shoppers’ Guide, but it comes, of course, with a complete and intentional absence of any news reporting. There were also several periodicals focused on art and culture, ranging from the local to the wider region that included northwest Connecticut, upper Hudson Valley, and even southern Vermont. There were magazines covering health, yoga, and metaphysics, and one with a slant toward women’s issues, and others yet that covered real estate or home interior design, and of course, the stream of glossy and pulp realty porn publications. There was even a commerce weekly covering Berkshire businesses, and he finds this publication to be okay, just not that widely read, including by him. And then there were a bunch of online efforts from both the print publications and some digital standalones, all rather different one from the other, and most now a matter of historical interest because they all pretty much shared the characteristic thinness endemic to such efforts, and thus little income generation potential and therefore little in the way of actual content staff or longevity.

He brings up the bookmarked tabs he’s been referencing in his effort to more clearly understand the issues of using PHP with SQL, but it’s another nice day, and he really wants to be in the garden or in the studio.

He sighs.

No such luck, he tells himself.

Davin had made his original pitch to Alicia when she’d been—for what proved a very brief tenure—the editorial side of The Berkshire Record. It hadn’t amounted to anything, despite her interest and her telling him she had great hopes for the Record, including the online component she was trying to push the publisher to fund. She didn’t need to be convinced of the opportunity in the marketplace for publishing something that carried online news more people would want to read and therefore generate more ad revenue. She’d been quite positive in her attitude and knew it would take time and investment to pull off the Record remake. Her optimism was largely based on the new publisher’s oft-stated commitment to back her, and the publisher was putting up real money for building a bigger reporting staff.

He’d gotten excited about the prospect for The Berkshire Record online work back then, but he didn’t get any go-ahead for writing any specifications, and then Covid hit, and his occasional email reminders to Alicia got replies that took more and more time and increasingly cryptic responses, and then none, and then he learned about the Record being sold.

He knows he’d been half-relieved, thinking he’d be able to finish a series of pieces in the studio and restart his conversations with two different area galleries about scheduling shows. Not that either were then open, but the Covid shutdown couldn’t last all that long, he’d assumed.

Gwen had been kept on salary, but money was tight, and he doesn’t like to think about his income during this period. There had been a report or white paper here or there, but he’s sure that time of low billings hadn’t helped the marriage.

But, hey, I’m working now, he tells himself, shuffling through his notes.

Davin looks at the sites he’s pulled up on his monitor and groans. It seems like he needs to catch up on the details of any and all new developments in the technical process of what he’s trying to update, and he knows he’s never been all that adept at application program interfaces.

He’s interested enough in the SCI work, and he remains impressed Alicia hadn’t let a little thing like losing her editorial position put too much of a damper on her goals. They’d reconnected well over a year ago now, a date easy enough for him to keep track of, coming shortly after the legal end of his marriage and the stint of self-imposed isolation he had fallen into afterward.

Alicia had called him and restarted their discussions. She’d made it clear she felt she’d had to do something because the way her career was going was a problem. Not a problem financially though, she’d pointed out, talking about Walter, her husband, who worked as a trader and was good at it, even better than good. No, money hadn’t ever been a problem, and there always seemed to be more than enough money, mostly from his family. The house in Sheffield had been bought outright and the renovations expensive, but fully paid off, and there was the life insurance payout too after her husband died.

He’d been on game and could see her interest in his expertise, but the conversation turned stranger yet, their having adjourned the meeting to one of the small restaurants in town. Sitting at the bar with her, he’d been surprised to learn the husband had died in a car crash, and Alicia talked about having to figure out the financial situation in detail. That had come with a few surprises too, including her discovery that her late husband had bought the girlfriend Alicia had had no idea he had a place of her own, except the Manhattan co-op was still in Walter’s name. There wasn’t any question of his girlfriend getting the co-op anyway, considering she died along with Walter in the crash, Alicia had noted, seemingly matter-of-fact.

The estate was worth almost five million, all told, she mentioned, which had surprised him, not because of the sum, but because of her openness about her financial resources. She did make it clear that much of it was in the real estate, but with liquid assets too, especially after selling off the co-op.

He had certainly paid attention.

She seemed intent on telling her story, which was that the move to the Berkshires had been her choice because of The Berkshire Record job offer and because her husband had gone independent, a day trader, and could live anywhere. The job offer had been compelling, but she had told him she wasn’t entirely surprised that in the months of increasing ad revenues the publisher took a buyout offer, and the new owner looked at the editorial costs and decided to trim staff, starting with Alicia. She talked about how she had wanted to be a newspaper person going all the way back to high school, and she had never considered any other major than journalism and had spent the first few years post-college on the staff of a mid-market newspaper. After that, she had found work as a freelancer because she’d gotten married and they were moving a lot as Walter jumped from one opportunity to another as he worked his way through better and better investment companies.

It had been a strange afternoon, and Davin still wonders how much that may have been due to their finishing off a second round of martinis as she talked. He had considered going for a third round but found himself noticing she was quite attractive, in her forties, probably, but in good shape, and with the short, cropped brown-blond hair that seemed right for a successful and fit woman of the world.

He had abandoned the idea of another drink, half-amused and half-confused by his turn of attention. But he’d felt there was grief still forAlicia, but mixed with anger, and maybe some feelings of relief too. But she still doesn’tstrikehimasdwellingonfeelingsalltoomuch.

Instead, she dwells on the business as best he can tell.

The two of them have never again had any conversation like that.

The bet with her online newspaper seems likely to pay off, he thinks, although he’s sure Alicia still keeps her fingers crossed. And the competition has been withering away, and the pandemic certainly hadn’t helped those publications. Most of the print efforts have collapsed due to a combination of pulp price hikes, ever- increasing energy costs, and the die-off of those customers who still retain the habit of reading print, a demographic increasingly small and increasingly economically irrelevant.

Still, that could be one big challenge, and Davin fears the demographics of Berkshire County aren’t particularly encouraging for an online newspaper. Out of all Massachusetts counties, Berkshire remains at the top of the list for average age, leading the state in older population, and it’s been getting worse that way for a long time. Not that there’s any mystery about this trend, he knows, considering the county also remains the most economically depressed, which means most of those young people who could seek work elsewhere did seek work elsewhere.

But then, there are the second-home owners and the tourists, and there’s also the newly-resurrected passenger train services from New York and Boston. House sale prices are among the lowest in the state and more and more people taking notice of this for some time, even if mostly out-of-towners, as the house prices seem quite high enough to most long-time residents. Prices went even higher during Covid with city-folk buying up property in their escape from cities as work-at-home practices took hold across many businesses.

Many of these city-folk stayed.

Berkshire County is close to New York—but not too close—which means a lot of affluent city people seek vacation homes, or at least vacations, among the green and relatively cool hills of the county. It’s beyond dispute that Berkshire County is beautiful with its rolling lands, small farms, river valleys, and worn, gentle mountains, and a good number of big state parks and forests help keep it that way. The Berkshires is also home to cultural institutions of surprising quality, the poster child being Tanglewood, summer home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and still going strong, but there’s plenty of art, theatre, summer camps, luxury health spas, yoga retreats, and outdoor hiking, biking, and camping activities as other big draws. When such folk are here, they want to know what there is to do, where to eat, where to spend money.

He tells himself to get to work, and for the next few minutes actually makes a dent in the project definition, but he realizes that he needs to confirm the likely scale of API work. Before he goes back to his open tabs, he checks his email.

He still has at least one room to let, so he checks frequently to look at inquiries. There were two in his mailbox earlier this morning, both getting the form response of polite “No Thanks.” There are now three new ones, and it takes him just a couple of minutes to reject two of them, but the third is well-written and answers the questions he’s asked of the applicants, an action far rarer than he would ever have supposed.

The woman, probably young, he guesses, works a full-time job and is a part-time server at one of his favorite restaurants, Farm Table.

Deidre is an unusual name these days, he thinks.

He wonders if she’s served him, but he knows the chances are slim since he eats out infrequently.

Employed, can pay rent, works at least some evenings, so less intrusive maybe, he wonders.

He replies with a request to speak on the phone, providing several time windows.

He’s been amazed at the number of responses, although he’s not entirely surprised since housing is tight in the area. What does shock him is how poorly so many people present themselves in their queries. There have been a few exceptions, including Chaplin, his first house share, but he is worried if Chaplin will work out, especially since the safety deposit payment remains partly unpaid. But Chaplin likes the idea of substituting in-kind work, both with garden and carpentry labor, and he’s already made up the shortfall. Davin’s already growing concerned he’ll end up paying Chaplin, considering all the projects there are to do.

And now a restaurant worker with a day job could work out, and the extra rent income will certainly help him. She seems more financially steady than Chaplin, and there should be plenty of additional restaurant shifts come high season.

In the high season, Davin knows, New Yorkers rent cars by the thousands to make the quite pleasant ride to the Berkshires—pleasant, at least, once that ride gets out of Metro New York. Increasingly, tourists and second homeowners are taking the reestablished passenger service that connects with the Metro North commuter rails out of Grand Central Station, then transferring at Southeast Junction, passing through upper northwest Connecticut to run into Massachusetts with stations through Sheffield, Great Barrington, and Lee, all the way to Pittsfield where other new connections will eventually head farther northward to North Adams and into Vermont. The Berkshires draw visitors from Metro Boston too via the straight shot west down the Mass Pike and the east/west rail that’s been reestablished through Pittsfield. The Berkshires also sees its share of overseas travelers and west- coasters, and even with the economy down and energy prices back up, the Berkshires is a lovely and easy place to go for a lot of people, and people with money, at that. That had been Alicia’s argument, at any rate, and nearly a year into the venture, the online publication is making money. Not all that much money yet but heading in the right direction, and this makes Davin happy because she’s had to start paying out some of the revenue to him. He had contracted out as content management consultant, and he’d put together the RFP and vendor options for the South County Interactive platform, and he’d vetted the various proposals for her until they had a plan in place, but he’d deferred part of his payment until certain revenue marks were hit.

After last month’s tally, the revenue has reached the first trigger amount.

Davin pulls a copy of the latest revenue report from a pile of papers on the surface of Gwen’s old desk, and he finds himself wondering if the day may come when Alicia finds herself a bit envious of the way Davin made his deal.

And then he looks out his window and sees the light will fade soon, and he groans.

Time to figure out the PHP SQL parameters.