We weren’t done recording yet, but Mike arrived, looking panicked. He was covered with suds and carrying a towel-wrapped Willow. Bath time in the Mueller house was not a job for one person, and especially if that person was a guy wearing an aluminum foil crown.
“I kept my fort up the longest, so I won the kingdom,” he said in all seriousness, pointing at the crown with a sudsy finger. “But Spencer’s a sore loser, so I expect an assassination attempt within the week.”
“As one would,” I said. My stomach hurt. I’d eaten four lemon bars while Daisy went on about how to get the perfect crisp-yet-gooey shortbread crust. Still, I felt good. Like maybe this was exactly what I had needed to finally put everything behind me and start over anew.
“So we get into the poisonings tomorrow?” I asked as Daisy hefted Willow onto her hip. The little girl struggled to get down, but Daisy had an amazing grip when it came to those kids. “And then I’ll try to figure out how to edit and post.”
“I just don’t know how poisonings reflect on my lemon bars,” she said. “But I suppose we’ll make it work.”
“It’s a true crime podcast,” I reminded her for the hundredth time. “Arsenic is going to become your jam. Get it? Jam? Because you’re a baker?” I nudged her until she smiled and slapped at my shoulder playfully.
“I hope not,” Mike mumbled, following Daisy down the front walk and across the lawn. “The husband’s always first to go.”
“You have nothing to worry about,” Daisy said, stopping to kiss his cheek. “I need you to rule the kingdom when I’m gone. See you tomorrow, Hollis. I’m thinking lemon tarts. A whole lemon theme. I’ve got loads of recipes.”
She had loads of recipes and I had a whole folder of poisonings. Women who’d poisoned for insurance money, women who’d poisoned for revenge after an affair, and a slew of very disturbing stories from the 1800s, when it seemed like women were just poisoning everyone, willy-nilly-style.
Women who poisoned. It was a great start to the season and I was pumped.
Daisy and Mike had no sooner left when my phone rang. I checked the caller ID while I headed over to spruce up the podcast corner. Daisy and I had disagreed over the appropriate name for our recording space. I wanted to call it the control center, or perhaps the anchor desk. She wanted to call it a warm and welcoming nook, but was willing to settle for podcast pad, because of the retro-sounding alliteration, of course. In the end, we called it a corner, which was neither creative nor authoritative, and now I had another whole fifty-fifty-partners discussion to edit out of our episode.
I answered the phone on the third ring. “Hey, Mom. Hey, Aunt Ruta.”
They were too busy carrying on their own conversation with each other to hear me. As always.
“Hey, Mom. Hey, Aunt Ruta,” I repeated.
One of them said something about outdoor chair cushions. One aggressively stirred sugar into iced tea. One complained that tea had splashed onto the clean tablecloth and there was no need to get so snippy about cushions. One countered that there was no need to get so snippy about tablecloths. I was convinced that Mom and Aunt Ruta had come into this world arguing—but we could never know who started it, because they couldn’t even agree on who was born first. And my grandma never told, because she was afraid of one of them getting a superiority complex over the other.
“Ma! Aunt Ruta!” I shouted.
“Oh, mercy, no need to shout,” Mom said. “Guess someone’s having a bad day, Rut.”
“Eh, she was born having a bad day. A bad hair day.” They both cracked up with their signature twin cackle.
“Very nice,” I said. “Did you call specifically to insult me, or…”
“Oh, now, don’t get your Tootsie Rolls in a twist,” Aunt Ruta said. “We were just teasing you.”
“She doesn’t care for teasing, Rut. Never has. Serious all the time. Good thing she was an only.”
“What are you talking about? I am not serious all the time. And I’m not an only,” I said. “What did Betsy and Harlowe do now?”
Betsy and Harlowe. My sisters. One thinks she’s still in college and the other thinks she’s the First Lady. They both live walking distance from Mom and Aunt Ruta but neither of them ever walks over, unless they need money (Betsy) or a sitter for their herd of nervous Pomeranians (Harlowe) or a chocolate stash to raid when their significant other is being annoying (both). And they were constantly getting themselves “disowned” by Mom and Aunt Ruta for various and sundry real and imagined offenses. And to Mom and Ruta, “disowned” was a very transient state of being. You could be “disowned” on a Thursday and invited over for sandwiches on Saturday. And then disowned again on Sunday for having previous plans that prevented you from showing up for said Saturday sandwiches.
“Oh, nothing important,” Mom said. “We weren’t calling about them. Even if we haven’t seen hide nor hair of either of them in two full months, so they obviously don’t care about two little old ladies. We could have fallen and been lying here waiting for sweet death to take us out of our misery and into the light of the Great Beyond, and would either of those girls have even known?”
Another favorite in the Mom and Ruta conversation repertoire: mortal injury.
“I mean, the chances that you would both fall at the same time are pretty low…”
“It’s bad enough that you moved seven hours and thirty-six minutes away, but you would think after a lifetime of sacrifice, someone would stop in and call 9-1-1.”
“But you’re not—”
“You would think someone would care enough to pick poor old Ruta here up off the floor, especially since I’m dead and gone. Save one of us, you know. If not your sisters, then your ungrateful cousin, Bart. Now, there’s a conversation.”
I massaged the bridge of my nose. Ungrateful Cousin Bart was a subject that would last for hours, and I had zero ice cream in the house to distract me from it.
“That would be a long conversation,” Ruta yelled, confirming my need for ice cream, and causing my ear to ring from the volume of her voice. I winced, pulling the phone away from my ear.
“Aunt Ruta, you’re on speaker phone, you don’t have to yell. I can hear you just fine. Well, could. Now I kind of only hear ringing.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Hollis,” she replied. “Your ears are fine.”
“She always did have sensitive ears,” Mom said. “You did. You always had sensitive ears. This is why you never got them pierced.”
“I got them pierced in eighth grade, Mom.”
“How long are we going to talk about your ears?” Aunt Ruta shouted.
“You’re right, Rut. We didn’t call about ears,” Mom said. “Even though you clearly got them pierced without my knowing. You never did mind breaking your mother’s heart.”
“What did you call about?” I asked, trying my hardest not to get frustrated. And also wondering if she was right about my ears being too sensitive.
“We called to tell you that we saw Trace,” Aunt Ruta yelled.
I forced nonchalance, or at least my best version of it, although my voice sounded a little strangled. “Oh? That’s nice.”
“We agreed we were going to break the news to her gently,” Mom said.
“What wasn’t gentle about that? We saw Trace. It’s not like I told her that you invited him for Thanksgiving.”
“You what?” I yelped, nonchalance completely out the window. My stomach had fallen to my feet.
“Christmas, too,” Aunt Ruta chirped. “Not for the whole day, of course. Just a stop by kind of thing.”
“You were supposed to leave it to me to tell her,” Mom said, and they launched into another of their squabbles.
“Mom—” I tried. “Aunt Ru—you guys—hello, I’m still here—Mother!”
“Yes?” Mom asked, her innocence as fake as my nonchalance had been.
“Please tell me I heard Aunt Ruta wrong.”
“What did you hear?”
“I heard that you invited my ex-boyfriend—emphasis on the ex—to celebrate the holidays with us.”
“Oh, well, yes, then, you heard that correctly.”
It had broken my heart to leave Trace, and I wasn’t over it yet. Part of me thought I would never be over it. My best hope and strategy had been to never lay eyes on him again. And here I would be, eating, drinking, and making merry with him in just over a month.
I lightly pounded my forehead on the desk and groaned.
By the time I got to work Monday morning, I was in no mood for…pretty much anything. I’d spent the greater portion of the night stress-dreaming about Ungrateful Cousin Bart and Trace pelting me with cold, half-eaten dinner rolls with Betsy and Harlowe noshing on chocolate while I tried to save a very-loudly-fallen-and-waiting-for-death-under-the-Christmas-tree Mom and Aunt Ruta. As I was having an extremely bad hair day. And Officer Hopkins was jogging, a half-excited gleam in his eye while I tried to question him about what had happened to Mom and Aunt Ruta. I woke up exhausted and sweaty and hoping it was April and I’d somehow slept through “the festivities.” Was it possible to schedule a stomach flu?
I was going to have to call Trace and uninvite him. Nicely. Which meant talking to him. Ugh. I’d put that one off as long as I possibly could.
Ernie was sitting at Mary Jean’s desk, an open box of doughnuts between them while she bent over his article with red pen in hand. I tried not to notice she was making very few marks on his article. Ernie must have already read his work aloud.
“Oh, hey, Hollis,” Joyce said when I walked in. “Gosh, you look exhausted.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Long weekend.”
“I heard,” she said. “Ernie’s writing a whole story about it.”
“A whole story about what?”
“About how that coach dropped dead right in the high school stadium’s parking lot Friday night.”
I blinked. “Dropped dead?”
She nodded. “Chief Henderson stopped by this morning and told us all about it. Sad situation, really, when you think about it. Dying on enemy turf like that. Would have been much better to die in his own stadium. More apropos or something. Anyway, did you try the hot dogs?”
“He didn’t just—it was a hit and—they’re not investigating—” Once again, I was reduced to partial sentencing. I took a breath, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. Maybe Joyce had it wrong. I about-faced and gave her a smile. “The hot dogs were great. I should get to writing about them now while the taste is still fresh in my mind.”
Ernie had finished up and was headed to his cubicle with his article in one hand, and three doughnuts balanced in a stack in his other hand. He was so worried about dropping the doughnuts, he nearly crashed into me as I headed to Mary Jean’s desk.
“Oh, it’s you!” I was ninety-nine percent sure Ernie called me It’s you because he couldn’t remember my actual name. “Mary Jean’s got breakfast.”
“Great,” I said. I pointed at the paper he was carrying. “Your piece about the homecoming game?”
He studied the paper as if he didn’t realize what it was or why it was in his hand. “Yep.”
“It was quite a loss.”
He nodded sagely. “Nothing too exciting to publish about a game like that.”
A mid-field fight with an open death threat, followed by the recipient of that threat actually ending up dead an hour later with the sole witness giving a description of headlights that just happened to match the headlights on the vehicle of the person who issued the threat? Nope. I couldn’t see any story potential there.
“I hear you’re writing about Coach Farley,” I said. “The coach who…dropped dead?” A corner of my mouth twitched as it tried to dip down. Smile, Hollis, just smile.
“Yeah, I’ll get to that later.”
He took a giant bite of a doughnut, mumbled something that vaguely resembled a farewell, and shuffled toward his desk, happily chewing. I watched in shock.
He would get to that later? Later?
Well, maybe he could put it off until later, but I couldn’t.
I dropped my bag on my chair and marched straight to Mary Jean’s office. I was trained to chase down big stories. To not let anything get in the way of reporting crucial news. To use my reporter’s notebook as a shield and my pen as a dagger. A weapon of truth and justice!
Okay…maybe I was taking that last bit a little far. But I wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to Coach Farley. Because if the police chief was calling it natural causes, he was wrong. And I wanted to set it right. The people deserved to know what really happened. Coach Farley’s widow deserved to know what really happened. The River Fork Otters deserved to know what really happened.
“Hollis! Good morning! How were the hot dogs?”
I planted my hands on my hips to channel the fearlessness I was trying to convince myself I had. “I want the Farley hit-and-run story.”
“Hit-and-run?” She never lost her pleasant expression. “There was no hit-and-run. He just died in an unfortunate location.”
“That’s not true. There was a witness. She said he thump-thumped.”
She took off her cheaters and dropped them onto the desk. “That witness was Agnes Tellerman. She’s one of those professional witnesses. Always the one to see something strange or scary or illegal. A bit of a fibber, just trying to get attention. Loves to see her name in the paper, I would suspect. She’s forever calling the police for one thing or another. You can’t go off of what she said.”
Yes, I thought. Yes, I actually can. She was the only witness. She saw a hit-and-run. She was sure of it. “She was crying really hard.”
Mary Jean waved her hand at me, then slipped her cheaters back on and turned to her computer, dismissing me. “She cries all the time. She likes the drama. It’s a ruse.”
“Not this time. This was no accident and no natural death. This was a manslaughter at the very least. Maybe a murder. There was a car involved, and a witness saw it. And we owe it to the public to report on what actually happened.”
Her mouth turned down in pitiful concern, as if she were feeling sorry for me. She took off her glasses and carefully placed them on the desk. “Did you see it happen?”
“No.”
“Did you hit the man yourself?”
“Of course not. But I was on the scene immediately afterwards.”
“But you weren’t there to see him actually die.”
“No.”
“And did you talk to the witness yourself?”
I paused, realizing that she had me. “No.”
“Charlie, however, did talk to that witness, and he did look over the body, and he’s reporting it as a plain, old, natural death.”
“Charlie?”
“Chief Henderson,” Joyce called from her desk. “He and Mary Jean go way back.”
Well. That was concerning. The police chief, whose delinquent son was always skating out of trouble, and the newspaper editor, whose job was to report on delinquency, were old pals.
Mary Jean flicked a glance at Joyce, then leveled her eyes at me. “My friendship with Charlie has nothing to do with this. We can only go on what the chief has reported to us.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “That’s precisely what we can’t do. We can’t mislead the public, or give them partial facts. It’s our job to seek out the whole story.”
“But if you didn’t witness it, didn’t talk to any witnesses, and didn’t even investigate the body up close, you’re making assumptions, and that is precisely what we can’t do. We’re not medical examiners. We report on facts, not on suspicions. You know this, Hollis.”
“But if I talked to Agnes—”
“You would be wasting your time. She’s an unreliable source, and nobody in this town would take us seriously if we were to quote her in our paper. Again.”
“So I can’t even just interview her? Find out what she saw?”
“No. I’m ordering you to stay away from her and focus on your assigned stories.”
My mouth dropped open, incredulous. “Ordering me to—”
“We have to report reality, and the reality is I know Charlie very well and I trust him.”
The reality was I might have an actual heart attack if she kept talking like that. I was stumped. I had no rebuttal for such an unbalanced system. The sad part was, I was pretty sure Mary Jean truly believed in her system. She had no idea it was all kinds of wrong. It was our job to dig for the truth. To talk to every witness. To view the story from every angle.
But wasn’t that the chief’s job, too? Yet he was shutting down the case before even opening it. Why? Surely Paulie’s privileges didn’t extend this far. Mary Jean was trustworthy, and I didn’t believe she would ever be part of something unethical on purpose. But she was also very trusting, and I couldn’t say for sure that the chief wouldn’t do something unethical—not when it came to protecting his son.
Mary Jean patted my hand and gave me a soft, motherly smile. “I know it’s hard for you, coming from your old newspaper to this one, but we do things a little differently here. It’s what our cu—”
“I know,” I said, resigning. “It’s what our customers expect.”
“You’ll get used to it,” she said. “Give it time. So tell me about the new roller.”
“We got interrupted during my interview, so I don’t have much.” I shrugged. “It’s a hot dog roller. Not sure what else there is to say.” You can find one at any gas station on I-70, I didn’t add.
“That’s okay. There’s a youth football game going on out there this afternoon,” she said. “You can go back and get a quote or two. That way Evangeline’s mom can see her daughter’s name in the paper. She’ll love that.”
“With all due respect, Mary Jean, I just don’t think this is the best use of my time. Surely there are other stories…”
“Evangeline’s family will be expecting it, so we can’t back out now. Her mother is ninety-eight years old. She doesn’t have many more years to wait for her daughter to end up in the paper. We’ll keep it short. Consider it a human interest piece.”
Except I couldn’t think of a human who would be interested.
“Okay.”
“See if you can get it to me by tomorrow morning. And there’s a soft opening today of the new housewares store. I’d like you to get that. And grab some obits and ads from Joyce. You can do those and this week’s events calendar from home again. Just email it when you’re done.” She checked her watch, grabbed the doughnut box and shook it at me. “Feel free.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
She dropped the box on her desk and resumed working, dismissing me. Defeated, I started back toward my desk. “And Hollis?” She didn’t look up from the paper she was writing on.
“Yes?”
“I’d better not find out that you went anywhere near Agnes Tellerman.”
And in a town like Parkwood, I had no doubt that if I tried, she would find out. I gritted my teeth. “Understood.” She didn’t seem to have any more to say, so I continued my trudge toward my work station.
Back to the hot dog roller, and now a housewares store, a handful of ads and obits, an events calendar, and the big old kibosh on the only exciting story Parkwood had seen since I arrived.
There weren’t enough doughnuts in the world to make swallowing all of that any easier.
By “soft opening,” they must have meant “whenever the owner decides to show up,” because there was nobody to be found when I arrived at Vacuumulate, even though the rest of the stores in the strip mall it was anchoring had been open for at least an hour. I jotted down the name of the store with about a hundred question marks. I didn’t get it. Was the name to suggest people want to collect vacuum cleaners? Or that their vacuum cleaners were the collectors, specifically of the dust and dirt in their homes? I suspected it was just the only cute way they could make vacuum cleaners not sound like…well, like vacuum cleaners, and housewares not sound like housewares. And I supposed if their goal was to get people thinking while waiting for them to open, it was effective.
The weather was nice, with a mild breeze knocking the last leaves off their branches, so I decided to wait outside the store. I found a bench and sat, waiting, people watching, trying to scribble out enough hot dog story to warrant my not having to go back to the stadium.
Suit up, Parkwood football fans, there’s a new player on the roster. His name is Frank and he is delicious.
His name is Frank and he is the current MVP. Most Valuable Protein, that is.
A new player has rolled into town, and frankly, we couldn’t be happier.
I wasn’t having much success.
A shadow fell over me, darkening my pad, and I began to gather my belongings. Finally, I could get some housewares action and get on with my day. If I managed my time wisely, I could maybe even get out to River Fork and do some light investigating and just work on the obits in the evening.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I said, stuffing my pad into my bag and tucking my pencil behind my ear. “I’m from the Parkwood Chronicle Weekly and I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes about—”
I stood up to find myself face to face with Officer Hopkins.
“You’re not the owner of Vacuumulate,” I said, with a little hope that maybe he was, as a side job, since he wasn’t in his uniform. He was casual, in a pair of jeans and flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to show muscular forearms.
“Nope,” Officer Hopkins said. “I just happen to be…” He trailed off, his eyes darting around the strip mall, as he seemed to be at a loss for exactly what he happened to be.
“Shopping?” I supplied.
He looked sheepish. “Guilty.”
“Unsuccessfully, huh?”
“Huh?”
I pointed at his empty hands. “You’re not carrying any bags, so I’m guessing your shopping hasn’t been successful.”
“Oh,” he said, staring at his hands as if he hadn’t ever seen them before. “Right. No, I haven’t been—I need a toaster.” He gestured toward Vacuumulate, and then tucked his thumbs into his pockets, a little too nonchalantly to actually be nonchalant.
I raised my eyebrows. Was he blushing? About a toaster? Was he embarrassed for me to know he liked toast? “Well, I would say you came to the right place, but…” We both looked at the CLOSED sign on the Vacuumulate door. I plopped back down on the bench.
“I guess I could just sit with you while we wait,” he said, then proceeded to perch as far away from me as he could, barely touching the bench with his backside. I stifled a giggle. Perhaps he felt that weird electricity bouncing around between us, just like I had.
“You need a toaster, too?” he asked, grinning. “Or are you more in the market for a spaghetti strainer?”
I held up my hands like I was posting a headline. “Breaking news story. New housewares store in Parkwood.”
“Ah. I see.”
“But now that you mention it, I could use a spaghetti strainer.”
“Do you make a lot of spaghetti?”
“Not unless you count the kind that comes in a can.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to strain that.”
“So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong.” I smacked my forehead lightly.
We chuckled, then sat awkwardly for a few minutes in silence, during which I caught myself assessing the ringless nature of his left hand. Was he new to Parkwood and single, just like me?
The question that followed that thought popped out without consulting my brain at all, and in the dorkiest way possible. “So do you do all the toasting at your house or is your girlfriend into crispy bread, too?” Seriously, Hollis? Crispy bread? I wanted Vacuumulate to open its doors and swallow me whole.
His brow furrowed while he put together the puzzle of my ridiculous question. “Toast for one, I’m afraid,” he said, and my mortification was temporarily assuaged by relief that there was no toast-eating girlfriend in the picture, even though I wasn’t sure why exactly I was so happy about that. “What about you?”
“Oh,” I said. “Single toaster at my house, too. But I like that I get to use both slots.”
I dug out my notebook and pencil. “So, since we have some time, I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
He looked wary. “About what?”
“I’m told Coach Farley had a natural death.”
“Ah. About that.” He nodded. “Chief Henderson did say there was no evidence of foul play.”
“And the witness—”
“Unreliable, trust me,” he said.
“So she was just making up the thing about the car with the round headlights and the thump-thump and the pancake?”
“Agnes? Most definitely.”
“But why would she do that? What does she have to gain? It doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does if you know Agnes Tellerman. She’s had us out to her house four times this month for suspicious noises or shadows or some such. She’s a crier. My neighbor went to school with her older brother, Tommy, and says he’s a crier, too. Well, I mean, maybe not anymore. He’s some big deal up on Wall Street now. Not sure they’d put up with a lot of crying on Wall Street.”
“He probably just chugs antacids now,” I said. “That’s crying in adult form.”
“It’s your stomach crying,” he said, and we both chuckled.
I liked that Officer Hopkins shared my sense of humor, and there was something so easy about the way we laughed together, but I didn’t want to be lured away from the subject at hand. I steered the conversation back on track.
“No, but seriously. You saw the scene. That was no natural death. What am I missing here?”
He scooted a little closer, tented his hands between his knees, and thought it over. “Are we off the record?”
I didn’t want to be, but… “Sure.”
“You have to understand Parkwood.”
I waited for more, but he only sat there nodding at his own statement, as if it had been some sort of wise advice. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
I sensed my temperature rise, making my ears hot. He was toying with me. This was a joke to him. My job was a joke. It felt like I was being mocked, and my mouth did the thing it always did when I was embarrassed or irritated—started moving ninety miles a minute. “You’re saying I don’t know what a murder looks like because I’m from somewhere else?”
“No, I’m just saying—”
“But aren’t you new to Parkwood, too? Newer than I am, actually?”
“It doesn’t matter how new you—”
“Which actually makes you less qualified to say you know Parkwood, right? It would stand to reason that someone who’s been here a year would know the town better than someone who’s been here a month.”
“You’re getting upset,” he said.
“No, I’m not.” But I was definitely getting frustrated. Especially after I’d pointed out—aloud—that I’d been here a year. I’d always sort of considered this a temporary assignment, and that I would be back in Chicago before I knew it. But I would be re-signing my lease soon, and that meant I would be locked in for another year. And I wasn’t even conflicted about it. I had obviously become used to the idea, and when the heck did that happen? I’d never felt more homesick in my life than I did right then and there, sitting outside Vacuumulate with an adorable, single police officer who got my jokes and smelled amazing, but was not Trace. “But you’re being condescending about what I do and don’t know about this town.”
He separated his hands and lifted them, palms up. “Parkwood isn’t Chicago.” He knew where I was from. Weird. What else did he know?
“I know that Parkwood isn’t Chicago.” I stood. “But surprisingly enough, murder looks the same no matter what state you’re living in. Unless, of course, the state you’re living in is denial. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other interviews to do.”
I hurried back to my car.
I would get the housewares story later.
Right now, River Fork seemed like the best place to find the truth. The truth I was willing to find, anyway.