Who’s Who on River Road

Meet the Locals (not in order of appearance …)

Bernie Rossie (63) – News Editor, Chickotee River Dispatch … To say that Bernie Rossie’s life has not turned out as he had planned would be the world’s biggest understatement. It was said that Bernie entered the world with ink stains on his hands. He had one ambition as a young Middle Valley High graduate – to be a journalist. The ambition instilled into him as an undergrad at Northeastern in Boston led to a stellar internship at The New York Times. But a chance meeting and a random picture snapped at a fateful five-year reunion led to accepting a job at the Dispatch – and blew up into exactly the life he never wanted. Forced to take the “desk job” under suspicious circumstances, his days now consist of corporate budget cuts, a never-ending rotation of ambitious reporters that look beyond the Dispatch the day they walk in the door, and avoiding alimony payments to a woman he once loved deeply.

John McHenry (24) – Reporter, Chickotee River Dispatch … Raised in wealth and privilege on the Upper West Side of New York City, John has known a life of luxury. On the advice of a trusted family friend, he decides to study journalism. “Learn the world, get some skills … and get some perspective off this little island we call Manhattan,” the friend had said. “You can always come back!” While at Columbia, he applies and is accepted to a non-profit pilot program that places reporters in what have come to be known as “news deserts,” where newspapers and local news outlets are either non-competitive or non-existent. “Think of it as a form community service,” his advisor says, much like Teach for America, which places teachers in communities lacking educators. John finds himself shuttled off to Middle Valley, a place he’d heard about only in passing when a friend, en route to his freshman year on scholarship at Cornell, tagged a selfie “#RiversideBar #upstatenightmare” alongside a jarring review of the bar’s food. Lacking any common sense, it’s Bernie who’s charged with creating what his advisor used to call a “wide-angle lens.” Too bad the lens is more than a little blurry …

Cassie Cunningham (40) – Owner / Bartender, The Riverside … Cassie grew up behind a bar – her father’s, The Printing Press, on the Lower East Side of New York. Its blended clientele fascinated her. The regulars had always been super-regular – locals from the neighborhood, most of them famous actors and musicians. When not traveling or on location, they’d walk their dogs and amble in, animals in tow, for a cold beer and conversation, then make way for the post-dinner power crowd, a group that was a bit more intense. Politicians, journalists, city workers – influencers all, holding court for hours at a time, running tabs on credit cards as if descendants of Rockefeller himself. It had always been her dream to have a similar place, but minus the “players.” Friendly, kind. Those were her father’s people, and he played them to the hilt. Now on the other side of an ugly but (mercifully) private divorce from one of those super-regulars (a musician of whom her father once approved), she had the money to start a new life – as far away from the old one as she could possibly get.

Marjorie Hughes (54) – Gossip Columnist / “Miss Comportment”, Middle Valley Tribune … As an English major at Ithaca College, Marjorie had no idea what she wanted to accomplish in life – just that reading the greats like Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner and Hemingway fed her soul in ways unimaginable. Afternoons with a book alongside Cayuga Lake – how romantic! But when her sorority sisters voted her “most likely to become a poet,” something less than romantic stirred within her. They don’t know me! she thought. So, in the great tradition of Mark Twain (or rather Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as he was known to his family), she created a weekly gossip column in the campus newspaper under the moniker “Miss Comportment.” Wardrobe, make-up, untoward behavior in public … nothing was off limits. But it wasn’t until she received a tip from one of the students that things truly blew up: A trustee had been engaging in a five-year affair with one of the married professors, then funneling money to her department for no apparent reason. The story broke wide – even made national press. Though keeping her cover had been a challenge, she managed to do so and even to this day – 30 years and five books later – remained anonymous. She had made it, and now wanted the peace and quiet that a Victorian mansion along the banks of the Chickotee River would provide – a quiet, anonymous part of River Road where she planned to sit, read Chaucer and Shakespeare, feed Chuckles the cat and sip wine. A place where no one would find her … right?

Wanda Moreno (mid60s) – President, Middle Valley Chamber of Commerce … Garish and sweet, everyone knows Wanda Moreno – and that’s just fine with her. A high school classmate of Bernie’s, Wanda ran away at age 18 and eloped with Stu Jergonson, an eccentric 52-year-old with family money and two young children not much older than Wanda had been at the time. The return to Middle Valley had been met with hoots and clicks and the gossip mills ran out of control, chewing on the notion of just how something like this could have ever happened to a “nice girl” like Wanda. But, in true Middle Valley fashion, the town rallied around her when her beloved Stu was found dead in the VFW basement, the victim a self-inflicted bullet to the head. (No one in Middle Valley missed a good piece of gossip!) Stu had been known as a bit of gambler, empowered by his close ties with Veterans from around the area, so there’d been some question as to whether his debts led to his untimely passing – whether it really was self-imposed, or whether an unsuspecting benefactor had been stretched too thin and decided to teach him a lesson. Wanda lives every day knowing that half the town thinks he brought his death on himself, but it’s her belief in her Stu – the Stu that she knew – that keeps her going. After raising his children, she went back to school, earned an Associate’s Degree and took over as President of the Chamber, a position of influence with a power and scope that even she never could have imagined … though she’s come to find that she enjoys it …

Elyse Hughes Rossie (61) – Social Worker, Middle Valley Human Services. No one believes Elyse when she says she was married to Bernie. Elyse grew up in Middle Valley, along River Road and two doors down from Paul. Like him, she had wanted for nothing. It had been Bernie’s dream to leave Middle Valley for New York City, but secretly she never shared in it. In fact, she figured, if he was marrying her, he must have accepted that to be little more than pipe dream, though she never asked. Their lives had shaped up as God intended, she believed. This is where she was meant to raise her children, and this is where she was meant to live – but Bernie had never believed it. After refusing yet again to see a therapist, Elyse had had enough of him. Balancing her case load with a surly husband and three demanding teenage girls became impossible, so, three days before Christmas, she packed up her daughters and drove them the three blocks across town to River Road where they lived with her folks for a year. Now single and seeing Middle Valley through the wide-open eyes of life experience, not just the eyes of a rich girl, she wonders how the drug-addled teens and victims of abuse that come in and out of her office each day can be part of God’s greater plan – and what the plan is for her own life, or those of her daughters.

Carson Sigmund (mid-40s) – Broken-hearted and loaded with “new” money, Internet entrepreneur Carson arrives in Middle Valley on the random advice of a former secretary in search of solitude and spirituality far, far away from that other Valley – Silicon – where he’d been steeped for his entire adult life. The sudden death of his business partner and sale of his video game company drew his Pacific time to a sad and dramatic close. Seeing the Chickotee River for the first time brought him immediate peace – a peace that deepens every day as he wakes up, looks through his bedroom window at the sloping banks that now comprise his backyard and winds his way down the mansion’s wooden staircase for his morning espresso. There’s something about not knowing everything or everyone around you – being the anonymous stranger is bringing him great joy! That is until his charitable instincts lead him to meeting one of the most eligible “daughters of the Chickotee” – nearly 20 years his senior.

Pete “Judge Pete” Nutwell (63) – Judge, Middle Valley County Court … A native and contemporary of Bernie’s, Pete had returned to Middle Valley with his wife, Jessica, for a variety of reasons – burnout chief among them. Years of navigating the New York City courts his work as a DA had taken a toll. It had always been his intent to come back – an intent that became a plan after the death of his mother. It was at the wake that Judge Bailey had taken him aside and told him in confidence of his own pending retirement and suggested he run for the County Judge seat, which he won. Now renovating the very home he’d grown up in on River Road, he relishes the idea of sipping wine along the shores of the river, of having room in the house for visits from his grandchildren and the simple acts of picking color swatches that would have earned his mother’s approval. That was before all of this business with the hand …

Paul “Sheriff Paul” Wilson (43) – Sheriff, Middle Valley … divorced father of a teenage daughter; a native son of Middle Valley. His aimless youth growing up on the North side of town parlayed itself into an even more aimless adulthood. Police work sounded good, so, after passing the exam and with a baby on the way, Paul became a stand-up member of the county’s social fabric. The only pride he has in life is his daughter, and even that’s a stretch. When they do converse, it’s about her curfew or grades – or she’s simply asking for money. There would seem to be no joy in this man’s life.

Susan Cotton (38) – network TV news reporter … Six months into the investigation and dripping with ambition, Susan Cotton arrives in Middle Valley from New York City, microphone in hand, ready to blow the lid off this small town. She is certain that this will be her last high-profile road trip before landing the coveted anchor slot set to be vacated by the retiring Henry Stoller at the end of the month. No more traipsing the countryside through blizzards and floods. No more relying on local journalists for diner recommendations and directions to the nearest grocery store. If any of them had any gumption, she thought, they’d have gotten out of their backwater towns and been more like her. The daughter of a small town, she thinks she knows how they work. But, then again, she’s never been to Middle Valley …

Shirley Scott (45) – realtor to the wealthy … Shirley’s set up many a well-to-do citizen with investment properties in Middle Valley. Her motto: Deny, deny, deny. Her other motto: Say nothing. And her final motto: Currency lies in what you know, not what you share.