A Hopeless Discovery

by Daniel Carson

  As Bubba and Mary walked back to their employees, Alex turned to me. “I’m starting to get nervous around you.”

  I smiled. “I make you nervous, Alex Kramer?”

  “Not like that.”

  “Oh, I don’t make you nervous?”

  “Hope, can you be serious for a second? How exactly do you keep stumbling upon dead bodies all the time?”

  “It’s a gift. I was voted Most Likely to Stumble Upon Dead Bodies in my senior yearbook.”

  “You really think this is funny, don’t you?”

  “For the record, I don’t think anything having to do with finding dead bodies is funny.”

  “There’s something we can agree on. Now, I have an important job for you to do.”

  “You’re taking me off the goat murder case and making me your lead investigator on this one.”

  “No. I’ve got a phone number. And you need to call it.”

  Alex turned his phone around, and I looked at the number on the screen.

  “Hey, I know that number. That’s…” I started to panic. “That’s Katie’s number!”

  “I know, Hope. And you have to tell her.”

  “Tell her that her son found a dead body while I was watching him?”

  He gave me a sympathetic look. “Something like that.”

  “Not gonna happen. This is Katie’s weekend to get away and have a little romance, and then when she’s tired of romance, to wear nothing but granny underwear and watch Lifetime movies and drink margaritas. It is not her weekend to worry about things like taking care of kids.”

  “And finding dead bodies.”

  “Exactly!”

  “So you’re going to call her?”

  “Not in a million years.”

  “Hope!”

  I pointed to the kids. Dominic had a donut hanging out of his mouth and was making disgusting snorting noises, and Lucy was giggling like crazy. “Do they look traumatized to you?”

  Alex shook his head at me in disappointment, but before he could chastise me further, his phone rang, and he stepped away.

  And I took a deep breath… and called Katie.

  She picked up on the second ring. “Hope Walker, my new old friend, how is life with three children?”

  “You’re never going to believe what happened today.”

  “What?”

  “Dominic… he…”

  “He what, Hope? Dominic what?”

  She sounded upset. Of course she sounded upset. I’d just interrupted her time away.

  I just couldn’t tell her the truth.

  “He, um… couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Freddy Krueger or a flesh-eating zombie… so he’s both.”

  “That’s what you called to tell me?”

  “It was really dramatic—not many people could pull it off. But he, um… he really did.”

  Katie giggled. “That’s my adorable little psychopath. Other than that, everything going okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, big-time okay. Uneventful. And you?”

  “I have not moved from this bed in six hours.”

  “That’s terrible. You should get out and do something fun.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s been the greatest six hours of my life. I don’t think I’m ever coming back.”

  “Katie, you have to come back.”

  “Not really, Chris and I changed our will, and you now get sole custody of the children. So if a meteor hits our hotel room tonight, you’re in charge.”

  “That’s not a funny thing to joke about,” I said.

  “When you’re lying in bed for six hours not taking care of your three children, it sort of is.”

  Chapter Eight

  Celia fell asleep within five minutes of leaving Bubba’s. And Lucy informed me that the only way to keep her asleep was to drive her around.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “For as long as you want her asleep.”

  I gave Lucy and Dominic suckers out of the bag Katie had labeled “Emergency Suckers,” told them to look for flying squirrels and unicorns, and put on some good music. And then I just drove.

  Once upon a time, before jobs and responsibilities and heartache… just driving was my favorite pastime.

  When I was little, and the days were turning from cold to tolerable, Granny would roll the windows down and just drive through the forest and the mountains with no particular destination in mind. When I was sixteen, Katie and I would turn the music way up, scream and laugh like idiots, and drive around for hours just being young. And when I was eighteen and in love with a boy, I’d scoot over in his pickup, lean my head against his shoulder, and get lost in a dream world while he ran his fingers through my hair and the two of us just drove.

  I traveled many of those same roads on this particular day. A snoozing and slobbering Celia made the most of it, and even Dominic closed his eyes and drifted off for a bit. Lucy just smiled and looked out the window, no doubt dreaming the kinds of dreams that six-year-old girls dream.

  An hour into our drive, I had passed the site where Jimmy and I had our accident so many years ago. I passed the cabin that I’d once upon a time dreamed of living in. And before I knew it, I was driving up the twisty roads and found myself at Mr. Clowder’s place.

  I looked into his pasture. The tarp was gone. Percy was gone.

  I hadn’t even thought about Percy today. Hadn’t had time. Looking after children was a fairly all-consuming enterprise—and one that I had little experience with. Living on my own in Seattle as an investigative reporter hadn’t prepared me for the domestic life. It was only afternoon, and I already wanted only to jump into bed and sleep for days.

  But I knew that my day was only at intermission. And with no bed or glass of wine in sight, I instead decided to make the most of my driving time to think about the case.

  The case of goat murder.

  Percy was hit with a single shot just above the shoulder. The kind of shot a hunter makes. A shot meant to kill. The killer stood at the tree line, where he left a note. Bang Bang. Super creepy. Like in the movies.

  So who could it have been?

  Mr. Clowder had no ideas. Said he didn’t have any enemies. But I knew from experience that people were often terrible judges of other people’s opinions of them. Mr. Clowder had run a business for decades. Stuff happens in business all the time. And when money’s at stake, people get mad. Sometimes mad enough to kill.

  But kill a goat?

  That seemed more like the type of thing a dumb teenage boy might do. But this didn’t feel like the work of a teenage boy. Teenage boys are reckless and stupid, and that note wasn’t reckless. It was calculated. Left there to send a message.

  Besides, I would expect a teenage boy to fire five shots into the goat’s body. Not one perfectly placed kill shot.

  Nope. This definitely felt like the work of a man.

  I meandered on up the tree side of Moose Mountain, past the old cabins that seemed like they had existed there since the beginning of time, then finally took a turn to come back down by a different route.

  I was just coming up on Old Mrs. Greeley’s place when I saw it. Tucked behind the mossy stone wall that bordered her place was a large rectangular sign reading “Jenkins Real Estate.” And at the top, a smaller sign read “Sold.”

  I knew the mayor had been trying to buy up the properties on this side of the mountain for her big new development—Sawtooth National Ski Resort—and that she’d been offering good money. But people like Mrs. Greeley had been on the mountain so long, I’d assumed that money wouldn’t be enough to move most of them.

  When I was little, Granny called Mrs. Greeley “the bird lady.” She had probably a hundred bird feeders in her front yard, and spent most of her life tending to her flowers and watching her birds. She ran the local Audubon Society, and she even tagged and tracked some of the birds that migrated through her property.

  Now the bird feeders were gone. The birds would have to fend for themselves.
/>   And I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of offers had been made on Mr. Clowder’s place.

  I called his number as I drove, and when he answered, he was sniffling.

  “You okay, Mr. Clowder?”

  “How okay can a man be when he buries his best friend?”

  “We’re talking about Percy, right?”

  “Yes, we had a nice little service for him. John Riley, our mail carrier, came out to perform the ceremony.”

  “I didn’t know postal workers did funerals.”

  “Well, I don’t know if they do. But I wasn’t rightly sure who else to ask to do the honors. I’m a Methodist myself, but Percy… well, there were times he seemed like a good Methodist goat, but other times he acted downright Catholic. And every once in a while the Baptist in him would come out. Confusing, to say the least. But he absolutely loved John. You’da thought he was a beagle the way he’d go on and on whenever the mailman showed up. In fact, in the hot summer months, Percy was rather fond of licking John’s sweaty shins… so it seemed a natural fit for John to perform the ceremony.”

  “I suppose every goat deserves a proper sendoff,” I said.

  “There are one or two goats I’ve crossed paths with that I hope are burning in hell, but you’re mostly right. Goats generally deserve better than people, and Percy more than most. John did a wonderful job, and we laid a nice wreath down. And Percy would have loved the music. Warden Bristow from the county correctional facility is an old friend of mine. He let the Cook County players come by.”

  “Wait—the warden let inmates out for a goat funeral?”

  “How else would I get the best polka players in central Idaho to play for my Percy?”

  Ask a stupid question.

  “Um, Mr. Clowder, I know this is a difficult time, but I do have a question for you. I just saw that Mrs. Greeley is selling her place. Sold it, actually. Did you know about that?”

  “Found out last week.”

  “And has the mayor approached you about selling your cabin?”

  “Oh, sure. She’s approached all of us. Then last week, a different woman showed up.”

  “She works for Mayor Jenkins?”

  “I don’t rightly know. She called herself an independent real estate consultant, whatever that is.”

  “What did she want?”

  “The same—to buy my property. Told her the same thing I’ve told the mayor. Not interested. Not for twice market rate. Not for any amount of money. That woman was insistent. She said with the amount of money she was offering, I could build a home anywhere I wanted. I laughed right in her face. I told her I already lived where I wanted. The mountain’s my home.”

  “And how did she take that?”

  “She was angry. I got the sense she’s not a woman who hears no very much.”

  “Mr. Clowder, why didn’t you tell me about her when I asked you about enemies?”

  “Enemies? She’s just a woman I said no to. I don’t even know her. That doesn’t count as an enemy in my book.”

  “What was this woman’s name?”

  “Jones.”

  “Does she have a first name?”

  “I presume she does, but I don’t know it. She shook my hand like she was wielding a bayonet and told me her name was Ms. Jones. Hope… you don’t think this Ms. Jones had something to do with my Percy, do you?”

  “I’m just trying to consider anything that might provide a motive for someone to murder a goat. What did this Ms. Jones look like?”

  “Tall. Blonde. Pretty… I guess. Wore nice clothes.”

  “Nice how?”

  “Like she was going to a business meeting.”

  “Could you pick her out if you saw her?”

  “Probably. Especially if I saw her eyes. They were strange.”

  “Was there something special about her eyes?”

  “Just that they never blinked. And they were gray.”

  “Gray isn’t exactly what I’d call strange. I’ve seen gray eyes before.”

  “Not like these, Hope. They were a gray like you’ve never seen in your life. A cold gray. And they were lifeless.”

  Chapter Nine

  We had frozen pizzas and juice boxes for dinner. It was glorious. Except for the part where Dominic handcuffed my ankle to the kitchen chair. And the part where me and my kitchen chair chased him around the house while he laughed hysterically. And the part where I finally caught him, and he laughed so hard he started to pee.

  Other than that though… glorious.

  When I got the handcuff key from him—and I only barely stopped him from swallowing it—I not only unlocked the handcuff from my ankle, I also handcuffed Dominic’s hand to his foot. That made Lucy laugh so hard she started to pee. It was worth it.

  Eventually I unlocked Dominic and got everyone clean clothes, and then the four of us sat on the couch with some popcorn and binge-watched SpongeBob SquarePants. Dominic kept wanting to switch it to The Walking Dead, but Lucy and I threatened to watch Downton Abbey and he quickly agreed that SpongeBob was a pretty good compromise.

  I rocked Celia to sleep, then tried to tiptoe past Lucy and Dominic’s room so I could go downstairs and pour myself a glass of wine. But these kids were on the lookout. Before I even reached their doorway, they yelled “We want a story!” in unison.

  And not just any story. They wanted a genuine made-up bedtime story.

  I tried to pretend I was making up, on the spot, a story about this kid named Peter Parker who was bitten by a radioactive spider. They didn’t fall for it. I’d forgotten we’d just read three Spider-Man books the night before.

  “Fine. What kind of story do you want me to make up?” I asked.

  Dominic smiled. “How about one where that old dead arm I found comes back to life and terrorizes an entire village!”

  I knew doing that would land me in the Most Irresponsible Babysitters Hall of Fame. But then again, I’ve always wanted to be in a Hall of Fame, and when Lucy said she was okay with that story, I figured… what the hell.

  I called the story: “Godzilla Versus Dominic’s Old Dead Arm.” It was set in the city of Tokyo, 1975. And despite Godzilla’s ability to breathe fire and his fifty-foot stature, in the end, Dominic’s old dead arm was able to stop him… and save the people of Tokyo.

  When I finished, Lucy clapped. But Dominic had tears in his eyes.

  Uh-oh.

  “Was it too scary?” I asked.

  Dominic shook his head. “That’s the best story I’ve ever heard!” He flung his arms around my neck and squeezed. “Thanks, Aunt Hope. I promise not to handcuff you to anything tomorrow.”

  I said prayers with the kids, then went downstairs. Finally, I was alone. I’d never before realized just how great being alone could be.

  I checked the DVR for something brainless and a little trashy. Katie did not disappoint. They’d taped one of her favorite shows, Bachelor in Buffalo. That would do nicely.

  I was headed to the kitchen for a bottle of red wine when the doorbell rang.

  “Who on earth?”

  I jogged to the door with my hairs standing on end. I’d lived by myself for years and had never been frightened by a doorbell, but now that I was the protector of these little animals, it made me nervous. I looked through the peephole, and what I saw made me nervous in a whole different way.

  Cowboy boots, blue jeans, long brown coat, gold star, cowboy hat, and piercing green eyes.

  I opened the door. “Alex? What are you doing here?”

  He gave me a nervous smile. “I knew you were alone watching Katie’s kids.”

  And…? I wanted to ask. But I said nothing. I matched his awkward silence with an awkward silence of my own.

  Finally he raised a brown paper bag and shrugged. “So I grabbed some chocolate cake. I thought maybe after finding another dead body, you might want some company?”

  “I’ll have you know that I just told a bedtime story called ‘Godzilla Versus Dominic’s Old Dead Arm,’ so I thi
nk I’ll be all right.”

  His face fell. “Oh. Yeah, no, I didn’t mean…”

  I grabbed the paper bag. “But I would love some chocolate cake. Come on in.”

  Alex stepped inside, took off his hat, and looked around. His smile was back, but not a big toothy grin. This one was relaxed and subtle and it called attention to the little dimple at the corner of his mouth. Sheriff Pain-in-the-Butt Kramer was off-duty. The guy who gave me butterflies was on the clock.

  “I hope you don’t mind me dropping by unannounced.”

  “Mind?” I said, my voice cracking and the breath catching in my chest. “Not at all. I was just pouring myself a glass of wine and saying to myself, ‘I sure wish someone would drop by unannounced with a piece of chocolate cake.’ And here you are.”

  “And here I am.”

  “Well, uh… the living room’s right there. I’ll, uh… be right back.”

  I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. Taking a deep breath. I looked in the mirror. What I saw looking back at me was a character straight out of “Godzilla Versus Dominic’s Old Dead Arm.” I smelled my pits. They, too, were straight out of the story. The dead arm part.

  I worked as quickly as I could. Splashed water on my face. Put deodorant on over my shirt. Brushed my teeth… then regretted brushing my teeth, knowing that I was about to have wine and chocolate. Arggh! Maybe I didn’t like it when hot guys dropped by unannounced.

  I hustled into the kitchen, poured two glasses of red wine, drank one of them quickly, then poured another glass.

  That’s when I heard a very strange sound.

  Is that… a vacuum?

  I grabbed both glasses and went to the living room, where Alex had cleaned up all the toys, picked up the plates from dinner, and was now vacuuming the carpet. He turned it off just as I entered.

  “I’m not sure how to feel about this,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of neat freak.”

  He shook his head. “Not a neat freak. Not a slob either… but definitely not a neat freak.”

  “Then what’s with the Felix treatment?”

  His eyes widened. “From The Odd Couple. Nice reference. Listen, I can’t imagine watching Katie’s kids for two days.”