A Hopeless Discovery

by Daniel Carson

  “Figure anything out?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I see that gleam in your eye. You’ve got an idea.”

  “The possibility of an idea.”

  “Care to share?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “You about ready to go?”

  “Yeah, I actually am. My feet are killing me and I’m tired,” I said.

  “Me too. But there’s one thing we have to do first.”

  “Please don’t say the corn maze.”

  “Good guess. Nope, something much more important.”

  “What?”

  Katie smiled. “We need to grab more donuts.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I was in the bathroom the next morning—and watching videos of goats stumbling down playground slides—when my phone buzzed with a text message.

  Hot chick is here

  My brain and belly were both suffering from a not-insignificant apple donut hangover, so it took me a second for the message to register.

  Is this Nick?

  OC

  What does OC mean?

  Of course… old lady

  Are you sure it’s her?

  She’s the only hot chick in this town

  He had insulted me twice, but I didn’t care. I was on a mission.

  Can you keep her there long enough for me to get there?

  Easy

  You sure?

  Yep. Hot chick wants to meet you.

  When I walked into A Hopeless Cup ten minutes later, Nick and Madeline were busy behind the counter, and there was only one customer in the coffee shop.

  The woman from the picture.

  Ms. Jones.

  She had on gray tights and a pink jogging quarter-zip, and she sat at a table, one leg crossed over the other, her back straight and perfect, sipping her coffee.

  There was another coffee across from her.

  She did not look my way.

  I walked to the table and looked at the untouched cup of coffee. “White Mocha Latte” was written in Sharpie on the side.

  I gestured to the empty chair.

  Finally, Ms. Jones looked up at me. And she was indeed beautiful. She had the high cheekbones of a model and almost flawless skin. Her hair was a brilliant blonde, with just a few light brown highlights. But her lips were thin and cruel. And her eyes… I now understood what Mr. Clowder had meant. They were a cold, soulless gray.

  She took another sip of her coffee. “The barista said you drink white mocha latte.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I grabbed my coffee and sat.

  She smelled of coconut oil. And some other aroma I couldn’t quite place.

  “So, Ms. Walker,” she said.

  I took a sip of my coffee. Perfect as usual. “Ms. Jones, I presume.”

  She nodded.

  “I understand you wanted to meet,” I said.

  “I understand you’ve been showing my picture around town.”

  “You came up in an investigation of mine.”

  She squinted. “I heard something about a goat being shot?”

  “Murdered is more like it.”

  “Didn’t know goats could be murdered.”

  “They can. So can cows.”

  “This is thrilling. But what does any of it have to do with me?”

  “I heard you’ve been visiting the people on Moose Mountain, trying to convince them to sell their cabins.”

  “Yes. I’m an independent real estate broker and I have an investor who’s interested in the properties.”

  “Who is this investor?”

  “The kind of person who prefers to remain anonymous in the early part of a project.”

  “What kind of ‘project’?”

  “The kind of project that I don’t talk about, so I can do a good job getting the best value for my client.”

  “And have you?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Done a good job?”

  She blinked several times. “Sadly, I have not. Try as I might, the people of Hopeless have not responded to my charms.”

  “I hear Wilma Jenkins is having some luck.”

  “I wouldn’t know. But it’s always nice to see a strong woman do well for herself.”

  “Do you own a gun?” I asked.

  She tapped her fingernails against the table. “I own several.”

  “And did you fire one of these guns at Percy?”

  “Who’s Percy?”

  “The goat. The goat you killed.”

  “That’s quite an accusation.”

  “You didn’t deny it.”

  Her tongue danced across her thin, cruel lips. Then she cocked her head. “I deny it now. Categorically. I am a law-abiding citizen of the United States of America. I don’t shoot animals. I don’t speed. I don’t jaywalk. I don’t even litter. I am a businesswoman, Ms. Walker. That’s why I wanted to meet you. To make that clear to you.”

  “So the rest is just some big coincidence?”

  “The rest? You mean the goat? You want to know if it is a coincidence that a goat got shot in the same town where I happen to be working as a real estate broker? The very question is bizarre, Ms. Walker. But you’re an investigator, so I want you to have the facts. And the facts here are clear.

  “First, whoever this alleged ‘goat murderer’ is, it’s not me. And second, I don’t like it when people accuse me of things I didn’t do. And… hypothetically… if someone were to ever do that—you know, accuse me of something? I would take that kind of thing personally.” She stood. “Very personally.”

  She looked at me with those cold, soulless eyes, and then she tipped her head forward just a bit. “Ms. Walker.” And she walked away, tossed her empty cup in the trash, and left.

  A shiver ran down my spine. Ms. Jones was serious, grade-A villain, straight out of central casting for a Bond movie.

  I suddenly wondered what kind of car she drove. I ran outside to see a car reversing out of its parking place, with Ms. Jones in the driver’s seat. But it wasn’t red, and it wasn’t a sedan. It was a black SUV. Not that this surprised me. If she was behind the animal shootings, she wouldn’t have used her own car. She was too smart for that.

  But then I thought of something.

  Maybe she wasn’t always smart.

  I went back in, grabbed a napkin, and carefully used it to remove her paper coffee cup from the trash can. Then I took out my phone and called Darwin.

  Darwin worked in IT for my old paper, the Portland News Gazette. But on the side, he was the best researcher I’d ever met. And a pretty fair hacker. And I had leverage.

  He’d had a crush on me for as long as I’d known him.

  “Hope, I’m in the middle of something right now.”

  “What?”

  “Sleep. It’s six forty-five in the morning. I’m in the middle of sleep.”

  “You do realize that one day, when we share a house together, I’m not going to cotton to that attitude of yours, mister.”

  “Did you just say cotton to?”

  “It’s an old person’s saying. And since we’re going to be growing old together…”

  “Can we go back to the times when you just joked about us going on a date sometime?”

  “Darwin, you know that I only have eyes for you.”

  “I categorically do not know that.”

  “Well, you should… after all we’ve been through the last few months.”

  “I haven’t even seen you in a few months.”

  “But this thing you and I’ve got.”

  “Which is only over the phone.”

  “Exactly! This thing we have over the phone is so perfect, I don’t know how you could have any doubts about us anymore.”

  “Can you just ask me for the favor? I really am tired.”

  “I’m sending you a package. In that package is a coffee cup. I need you to find fingerprints, DNA, the works. Tell me whatever you can about the person who used that cup.”

  �
��Hope, I’m not a forensic scientist.”

  I laughed. “Come on, my snuggle bunny. I know you’re not a forensic scientist. I also know you can do almost anything.”

  “That is technically true.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Hope?”

  “Yes, Darwin.”

  “I thought we talked about ‘snuggle bunny.’”

  My next stop was the Hopeless News, where my boss, Earl Denton, was busy whacking away at the antique printing press with a Louisville slugger.

  “Doing some fine-tuning, Earl?”

  Earl let loose a torrent of near-obscenities, a language almost entirely his own, made up of words that weren’t obscene but sounded like maybe they should be. Then he smashed the printing press one last time and stepped back, looking at the machine as if maybe he’d just dealt the death blow.

  Miraculously, the printing press roared to life. Earl raised both arms in triumph and walked right past me like some conquering hero. He reached under his desk, pulled out a bottle of Jim Beam, and took a swig.

  “Earl, isn’t it seven in the morning a little early even for you?”

  “You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen.”

  “We’re talking about an old printing press, not a firefight in the Mekong Delta.”

  Earl sat down and kicked his feet up on his desk. “Update me on this murder investigation.”

  “Which one?”

  Earl arched an eyebrow. “There’s more than one?”

  “You haven’t heard about Mr. Clowder’s goat, Percy?”

  “Percy’s dead?”

  “Shot in broad daylight.”

  Earl raised his glass in solemn fashion. “To one of the best wethers I’ve ever seen.”

  “You know what a wether is?” I asked.

  “Who doesn’t? And why didn’t you tell me about Percy?”

  “I’ve been busy with the other murder investigation.”

  He raised a finger off of his glass. “That one I did hear about. And we’ll get to that. But what happened to Percy?”

  I told him everything—about Percy, the note, the Rutledges’ cow. And I told him what I thought was going on with Mayor Jenkins and the cabins, using Ms. Jones to scaring people into selling their land. And I finished up with the strange Bond-villain coffee shop meeting.

  “So,” he said, “a little mano a mano?”

  “Like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro finally facing off in the movie Heat.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “I think I’m Al Pacino.”

  Earl poured himself another glass of whiskey and took a nice long sip. Then he shook his head. “That is one whale of a story.” He leaned over his desk and stabbed his long bony finger at me. “But Hope, we’ve got to be right about this one. You’ve got to do the work. Really do the work. This Ms. Jones? She’s a brazen one. And that probably means she’s smart.”

  “You’re thinking it’s going to be difficult to prove a connection between her and Wilma?”

  “I’m thinking it’s going to be difficult to prove a lot of things. In my experience, when a great deal of money is at stake, people, bad people, work really hard to get that money. And they don’t’ much care for nosy reporters who get in their way. Work the problem, Hope. Work the story. And then, when you’ve got it… when you’ve really got it…” He trailed off, his fingers tap-tap-tapping away at this desk.

  “What?” I asked.

  He leaned over the desk again, his eyes full of intensity. “We nail Wilma Jenkins to the wall.” He took another sip of his whiskey. “Now, tell me about Wanda Wegman.”

  And so I did. I told him about Dominic finding the skeleton arm. He howled at that. I told him about finding out it was Wanda. About Dr. Bridges finding the murder weapon. About Alex withholding that piece of evidence from me. And about all the conversations I’d had with the employees at Bubba’s Pumpkin Patch.

  “So, any ideas?” I asked when I had finished.

  “Three-year-old body, practically no physical evidence. That’s a mess. The theory about the random person, the drifter, that’s as good as any.”

  “But if it’s not? If it really was one of the employees at Bubba’s?”

  “Then you’ve got yourself a puzzle. And when you’ve got a puzzle, what do you do? You don’t try to solve it all at once. You start on the edges, or wherever’s easiest, and you get something to fit. One piece, that’s all you need. One piece. And then… one more. You go out there and you find that piece, Hope. Put it in place. The picture will take care of itself. If anyone can do it, Hope, it’s you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I spent the next two days following Earl’s advice. Working the problem. Not trying to solve the whole case at once. Just trying to get one piece of the puzzle to fit.

  I chatted with every part-time employee at Bubba’s, and found that a lot of them had been there back in Wanda’s day. I touched base with all the full-time employees again. I wracked my brain trying to make connections, trying to unearth motives, trying to fit something, anything together.

  But come Thursday, I still was no closer to solving my puzzle. Not only had I failed to put any pieces together, I felt like I hadn’t even gotten the pieces out of the box.

  I needed help.

  I needed the whiteboard.

  Granny and Bess were arguing about bar peanuts when I dragged the whiteboard down from my apartment and set it up in the middle of the bar.

  “Oh, Lordy. Do we have to help you solve another murder?” grumbled Granny.

  “You’d rather argue about peanuts?”

  “For your information, Bess and I have been arguing about peanuts for thirty years.”

  Bess confirmed this with a simple nod of the head.

  I shrugged. “I know you want me to ask you what the argument’s about, but there’s nothing I’m less interested in in the entire world.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” said Granny. “You’re trying to trick us into being interested in your thing by showing absolutely no interest in our thing.”

  That was precisely what I was doing. I doubled down. “Honestly, if you paid me to sit around for a week and think of the least interesting topic on earth, I would probably come up with ‘Granny and Bess’s argument about bar peanuts.’”

  “Fine!” said Granny, throwing up her hands. “We’ll help you.”

  The door burst open, and Katie came flying through. “I’ll help you too!”

  “You look like you’re fleeing the authorities.”

  “Worse. Chris’s mother stopped by this morning.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I told her I had to run an errand.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “She’s terrible. That woman is blowing up my phone with her texts. Someone should tell her all caps is not a thing anymore.”

  “Do you really think it’s a good idea to make your mother-in-law angry?”

  “Are you kidding me? This is the good swift kick in the butt that woman needs to finally become the grandmother I know she can become.”

  “You mean the kind of grandmother who comes by and watches your children for you?”

  “Exactly!” Katie rubbed her hands together. “Okay, let’s solve a murder!”

  I started by writing Wanda’s name in the middle of the whiteboard and then drawing a circle around it.

  “For starters,” said Granny, “that picture doesn’t look anything like Wanda. She wasn’t round at all.”

  Katie agreed. “More like a lumpy rectangle.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Granny said.

  I sighed. “I knew it was a mistake to bring the two of you together.”

  They snickered like they were twelve.

  Around the sides of the board, I wrote the names of my suspects, if you could call them that. Kip Granger. Lucinda Meadows. Johnny Driscoll. Mary Riley. Bubba Riley. And then I wrote the word “Other.” I drew lines from Wanda t
o each one of the names. Then I turned around.

  “The problem with this murder is simple,” I said. “It took place three years ago. We will never know when exactly. We don’t know who might or might not have an alibi. And after three years in the pumpkin patch, all that’s left of Wanda is a skeleton.”

  Katie raised her hand. “You think I could get a bumper sticker that says, ‘I don’t care if your child’s an honor student because my kid found some dead lady’s arm in a pumpkin patch’?”

  “It’s a little wordy,” said Granny. “But I like the direction you’re going with this.”

  I ignored them and continued. “The one piece of physical evidence we have is the murder weapon. Wanda was stabbed between the ribs, and the end of the weapon broke off. Unfortunately, not all of it is there, and after this much time, we don’t expect there to be fingerprints or DNA evidence.”

  “What kind of knife was it?” Granny asked.

  “That’s the interesting part. Initially, Sheriff Kramer told me Wanda was stabbed with a knife. But Dr. Bridges told me that isn’t correct. Wanda was stabbed with a flathead screwdriver.”

  “Then why’d Alex tell you it was a knife?” said Granny.

  “Because he doesn’t trust me.”

  “That can’t be it,” said Katie.

  “It is. He knows that’s the one detail of the death that only us and the killer know. That secret is leverage against the killer—a way of proving he or she really did do it. Maybe someone slips up and mentions it, and we’ve got ’em. And Alex thought I’d accidentally leak the information.”

  “Like you’re doing right now,” said Granny.

  “This is no accident. I’m telling you on purpose.”

  “Which is totally different,” Katie said in her most smart-alecky voice.

  I ignored her and pointed at the names on the board. “These names represent our prime suspects—the full-time employees at Bubba’s. It could well have been some other person, but Wanda’s life was all about the pumpkin patch—that’s where she worked, that’s where she lived, and she barely came into town. So I’ve been focusing on the people she knew best: these five people.

  “Unfortunately, although I’ve spoken with them all, and I at least feel like I now know Wanda, I don’t feel any closer than when I started to finding the murderer. I don’t even have a motive. It’s still one big puzzle. And Earl Denton gave me some advice. Don’t worry about putting together the whole puzzle, he said. Just start by getting one piece to fit. And that’s what I need your help with today.”