She pointed to the massive, jagged peninsula of rock overlooking the beach, which coincidentally gives our quaint little village its name. Looking up at it, we always get a feeling of awe. It’s quite a feat just climbing the thing. Little wonder Harry, Babs and I stared up at the Bluff and whistled.
“Quite a drop,” I said.
“Yes,” Joyce continued. “So I manufactured that dummy, went up the Bluff and threw it off. Then I waited for it to come floating down towards the beach. That happened about an hour ago, just as Babs and Harry arrived. Its current position is only a short distance away from that since you arrived here tardily, Sheldon!”
“Didn’t I apologize?” I said, with some indignation.
Joyce ignored me and continued.
“As a consequence, it could only have been within an hour or so before Francy got dropped in the ocean that she got killed. The body had to have sustained injury falling off the cliff, regardless of whether or not she was conscious at the time. It’s more likely that she was unconscious at the time, due to being roughed up in some way or another prior to the drop. And therefore, it could have only been done by one person—or two. One person to beat up Francy and turn her unconscious, and another to make the drop down the cliff. Or, maybe even one person to do both jobs!”
“What do you mean, Joyce?” Babs asked.
“Just this,” said Joyce. “There could only have been two motivations for the murder, and both of them are connected to the custody battle between Francy’s parents. Both of them wanted to have possession of her full time, and they were frustrated at not having her around when they wanted. So it had to be one—or both—of them that did it.”
“Why would they possibly collaborate?” I said, being the Devil’s advocate. “They hated each other’s guts!”
“That could have been a front, for keeping up appearances,” Joyce countered. “The Goldensons could have pretended that they were getting a divorce and acting out just so nobody would suspect them of being criminal collaborators. Or Francy could have killed herself —you know how stressed she was about the whole thing. But I’m tucking that into the “maybe” file. My guess is that Mr. and/or Mrs. Goldenson killed Francy and dumped the body off the Bluff, and then Mrs. Goldenson found out about the recovery of the body from us.”
“So that’s it?” Harry said, without believing Joyce. “We’re just gonna accuse the Goldensons of killing their own daughter? Like we don’t have enough problems!”
Joyce’s jaw dropped.
“Don’t tell me you’re backing out, Harry!” she said. “We’re in this together! We found that body, we told Mrs. Goldenson about it, and we swore to her we’d do our best to find out how things really happened. Well, we did! And I don’t care if she was the one who did it. Just because she’s been a friend to us all of our lives doesn’t mean that she’s incapable of committing murder!”
We paused for a minute to consider what Joyce had just said. Sure, Mrs. Goldenson was an old friend of our families and one of the best-known citizens in town. But was she capable of murdering her own daughter to hurt her husband? Or was it him who was doing it to her?
“What’s your view on it, Sheldon?” Babs said to me. “I mean, Harry and I could go either way if we had to. So what do you think? We trust you, man!”
I paused for a moment, and then said, with unusual seriousness:
“I just want this over!”
They understood.
5.
Unfortunately, our investigation was temporarily derailed by a couple of parallel events. The cops and media disappeared, and with them, interest in the case. It was placed in the “cold” files, which supposedly meant we were never to speak of that ugly thing again. Naturally, everyone stopped talking about it—and to us—which dried up any chance of getting evidence from them to back up Joyce’s theory about Francy’s death. And then there was my encounter with a runaway lumber truck.
It started out innocently enough, with us hanging out as usual trying to solve the case. We had mounted Rock Cove Bluff and had been trying—and failing—to find some clues there. Nothing. Joyce’s logic was flawless, as she never failed to remind us. So obviously, we figured, whoever had killed Francy had gone a long way to cover their tracks in case some certain enterprising young sleuths ever thought to try to uncover the truth. And because there were only so many people in Rock Cove, and even fewer whom we could openly accuse of committing murder, the facts became increasingly clear to us. What had happened to Francy was clearly murder. All the evidence—that is, all the evidence we could actually find—pointed to her being the victim of a mysterious stranger, or two, who knocked her out and threw her off Rock Cove Bluff—a steep descent that no one in their right mind could possibly survive. Since Joyce was being her usual demanding, yakety-yak self, I ultimately decided that my assistance would no longer be required and I made my way down the bluff earlier than the others.
That was when it happened.
I had just said goodbye to the others, and was slowly making my way down the steep embankments of Rock Cove Bluff, when I heard a gunshot off in the distance. Then I noticed that a lumber truck that was up on a road on the side of the Bluff I was walking on was now coming towards me. Nothing unusual about that, you say? Well, it was coming backwards, with no one at the wheel and absolutely no brakes. All I could do was run, and that was what I did. Still, if you’ve ever tried to run down Rock Cove Bluff with a lumber truck with no brakes chasing you, you know that it’s a rather impossible task. And so, as soon as I got to the bottom of the Bluff, I felt a sharp pain in my side as a hard metal object hit my back. And then it all went dark….
6.
I didn’t come out of my little coma for a couple of days, and then it took several weeks for me to complete the process of recovery. By that time, I’d completely forgotten about the case and investigating it. But some of my friends had not, and they were convinced that something was up that connected my accident to Francy’s murder.
Okay, by “some of my friends,” I mean Joyce, but she has a tenacious, bulldog-like obsession with these things, and I wasn’t surprised that she’d continued investigating the case with Harry and Babs in my absence. My being knocked out and near death’s door had almost seemed, oddly enough, to make things a lot more personal for them. And so, as soon as I could take enough steps without crutches to demonstrate to my mother that I was, in fact, healed, I rejoined our little P.I. group and was briefed on what I had missed.
Babs and Harry had tracked down the origination point of the lumber truck and had found out that the last place it had been was in the garage owned by Jay Goldenson, the deadbeat dad of the late Francy, on the outskirts of Rock Cove. That solved one side of the problem: he could have contrived to have the truck hit me as a warning to the others. But why?
Joyce supplied an alternate, yet parallel, argument with her further examination of the crime scene. Having already calculated how long it would have taken Francy’s body to resurface following its mysterious drop, she next had to figure out who were the last people to have been seen with Francy before she died. And based on the evidence that she, Harry and Babs had collected so far, there could only be one conclusion. I gasped in shock when they told me.
“No!” I said with a certain amount of belief. “That can’t be possible!”
“Look, Sheldon,” Joyce said, firmly, “I know you’ve been out of commission for a bit, and you’re probably still fuzzy on a few things, but we are perfectly in the right here! We’ve got to confront the person responsible for the murder of our friend!”
“You don’t have to be the accuser, Shel, if you don’t want,” Harry added. “You could just be the ‘good cop.’ Set things up nicely for us. You’re good at that!”
“Yes!” I said. “And I’m also good at feeling guilty about ratting out one of the few people who live in this place full time! Especially if I have some evidence that might be responsible for convicting them!” I pulled out the pearl I
found on the beach the day we found Francy’s body, which I had kept in my room all this time. I held it up for their inspection briefly, but indignantly snapped the hand with the pearl back from their grasp when they tried coming in close.
“Don’t be obstinate, Sheldon!” snapped Joyce. “This has to be done! Otherwise, we’ll be letting a murderer go free. Do you want that?”
“No, but,” I began.
Babs grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back, with the expected painful results.
“You just came out of a coma!” she said. “You want to go back into one?”
“All right!” I said. “Just let me go!”
She did.
7.
We agreed to set up the meeting between Mrs. Goldenson and myself in the back yard of her house, so that it would be easier for my friends to emerge and confront her when the time came. I insisted that they wait until I had broken the ice far enough so that Mrs. Goldenson would be comfortable enough to confess, if she was willing to confess. Joyce was confident enough to believe that it was an eventuality, but I was not as sure.
While my friends made haste to hide out in the little woods area near the Goldenson house, I ambled to the front, put on my best crippled poor-boy with a walking stick act, and was greeted by Mrs. Goldenson, who let me in immediately.
*
Mrs. Goldenson seemed genuinely sorry about my accident when she and I went out into the yard to chat. She explained that her husband had been severely wounded as a consequence of a vicious labor dispute between his garage and an out-of-town rival, and that, in all likelihood, the release of the lumber truck on the night of my accident was intended to be simply a “friendly warning” to him of what could happen were the demands of the employees not met. He was in the hospital at that moment, in fact, struggling to recover from his injuries, and she had just returned from visiting him there.
Mrs. Goldenson’s explanation and her apologies sounded honest, and I felt guilty for being the front man for a disingenuous “sting” set up by my friends. But it was out of my hands. I had to go through with it; otherwise, I might lose the friendship of those who had been the closest friends I had ever had and would likely ever have. And besides which, even I was beginning to suspect her now. This great outpouring of emotion on her part was extremely atypical. Until Francy’s death, she’d generally been known around town for being fairly tight-lipped about anything and everything. But something about losing her daughter must have made her snap mentally. Or had it?
I decided that, before things got unexpectedly strange, I’d better start asking Mrs. Goldenson about the facts of Francy’s death. After all, she wasn’t just going to break down and confess, was she?
“Uh…Mrs. Goldenson…” I said, with little confidence or articulation in my voice, “is it okay if I ask you a…couple of things about…Francy…and all? See, I’m writing a paper for school about it and all, and…”
“No, no, no, you idiot! You’re doing it all wrong!”
That came from Joyce, as she, Babs and Harry came out of the bushes, all employing a “don’t mess with us” gaze that they pointed at Mrs. Goldenson with their eyes. She in turn shot a “were you in on this?” gaze at me, which I responded to with a “Sorry. I didn’t want to, but they forced me!” one of my own.
“Don’t you know the first thing about confronting a suspect, moron?” Joyce said to me. “That is not the way you’re supposed to do it!”
“And how would you know about it, Joyce?” I answered. “How many cons have you busted?”
“I have read a lot more about this subject than you, my friend!” she replied.
“Then why don’t you show me how to do it properly?” I said.
While this was going on, Mrs. Goldenson, sensing that the jig was up for her because we had put the pieces together, tried to get back to the house for safety. But Babs, our sharp-eyed athlete, reached out and grabbed her with her strong hands.
“You get back here, you witch!” she exclaimed. “We know what you did!” Then, to me and Joyce, she said: “I don’t give a damn about which one of you does it, so long as we do it! So give it up with the blame game!”
“Sure,” said Joyce. “Sorry, Sheldon.”
“Not a problem, friend,” I answered. “This is more of a tag team job, anyway. We can all do this together, one at a time. You start, Harry.”
Harry took my cue right away and leaned on the chair in front of Mrs. Goldenson, blocking her from making any sudden movements. Babs, Joyce and I circled around it beside him, creating a semicircle of confrontation.
“Francy didn’t display any outward signs that there was any trouble,” Harry began, “because you and her father pressed her not to mention the divorce in public. You didn’t like that she was talking to people like us about it, so you decided to discipline her. You chose to take her for a car ride up the Bluff. Easy, huh? But you got too rough with her when you broke the news. You went and got your big meat hook hands all over her neck and choked the life out of her!”
“Once you realized what you’d done,” I took over, “you knew it would tip the scales of the divorce in favor of Mr. Goldenson. You’d lose the house, the car and everything else that you had, including your self-respect, your freedom, and, possibly, your life, once word of what you’d done broke out. So you fixed it so that it looked like someone else did it, to absolve yourself from the knowledge that you killed your only child. You found her belt, undid it, let her pants fall to the ground, and messed her face and body up a bit, until it looked like a perv had done unmentionable things to her. Then you threw her, with great sensitivity, as always, off the Bluff, and we found her a couple of days after the fact. That was something you never thought of held up that somebody like us would find the damn body and connect all the dots to you!” And, in a rage, I moved away from her in disgust.
“You didn’t count on us finding the body and reporting it, did you?” Babs took over. “You just thought it would naturally decompose in the ocean and it wouldn’t be able to be identified. But we found it, and then the cops and media came down. You were trapped. Eventually, they were gonna find things out if you didn’t do something. So you just repeated the thing about the perv we thought it might have been, and they spent a couple of weeks beating around the bush based on that far-fetched hypothesis. That, while our life became a living hell just ’cause we happened to find that body! You stupid jerk…”
Babs lunged at Mrs. Goldenson, aiming to kill her in a fury over what she had done to Francy. Harry and I grabbed her and pulled her back before she could do such a thing, while Joyce posed over Mrs. Goldenson for the metaphorical kill.
“My calculations, as always, indicated precisely that Francy was thrown off the Bluff in such a condition that it would indicate somebody other than you killed her!” Joyce said with calculated precision. “You could be safe in knowing that your secret would never be discovered. But, as my good friend Babs already noted, we ended up coming across the body, and, in memory of a dear friend we loved and respected but you obviously did not, we sought out the solution. You could see that we were on your trail when we came to tell you about Francy, and you knew that you had to get us off it by any means necessary. So you told your former husband and current co-conspirator to off us. He was going to release that lumber truck down Rock Cove Bluff and have it run into and kill all of us. Fortunately, three of us were already out of the way when he tried that little stunt, but unfortunately, Sheldon was not, and, thus, you were nearly responsible for his death! That derailed him, but not the rest of us. We were dead certain to bring you to justice, if only to avenge the damage brought upon our friend. We young adults are like that. So, you have only two options here, Mrs. Goldenson. You can either call the State Police and confess, or we will.”
Mrs. Goldenson hesitated, trying to avoid Joyce’s penetrating gaze. She was going to move towards the telephone when it happened.
BLAM!
Out of nowhere, a gunshot rang out.
The shot hit Mrs. Goldenson in the back of the head and, with blood spurting in all directions, she fell to the ground, dead! We could do nothing except gape in stunned shock—until we got a glimpse of the shadowy figure who had done it.
It looked like a girl about our age, fairly tough looking, it seemed. It was quite evident to us that she was responsible for killing Mrs. Goldenson. Hell, she was holding the gun, with the smoke coming out of it and everything!
The girl started running out of the house, so naturally we chased her. Most of us, anyway—I’ve never been one for that athletic stuff. But, as I watched, panting, from a distance, Harry, Joyce and Babs caught up with her, and Babs knocked her down with a flying tackle that would be the envy of any football player. Then, under duress, they brought her back, and, boy oh boy, was I surprised to see who it was!
*
Now, it should be said here that when you go to all the trouble of trying to investigate your friend’s death, a mighty big monkey wrench is thrown into your plans when said friend emerges from the dead after several months of hiding! Yes, Francy was alive, and, what’s more, she was unrepentant when we confronted her, tied her to a tree to make sure she wouldn’t escape, and politely but firmly demanded an explanation of why she had faked her own death—with, we discovered later on—a very realistic looking dummy, not unlike the one Joyce had used during the investigation, painted and clothed to looked exactly like her so we would naturally assume it was her…and offed her own mother. Granted, she wasn’t too cooperative at first, but after Babs punched her in the face a few times, we got a confession out of her. Francy began talking and didn’t stop until we’d heard the whole story.
“I wasn’t purposely trying to hurt anyone—you guys know that. But I couldn’t stand how things were going with Mom and my stepdad. Yeah, that’s right—my stepdad. My real dad split a long time ago and my Mom married Mr. Goldenson right after that to keep her social position ‘safe.’ That’s all she cared about, her ‘position.’ Nothing at all about me! I was starving for some love and attention, but they wouldn’t give me nothing! Besides which, this town was suffocating me. I had a plan to get out of here and make a real life for myself out in Seattle! But then you bozos had to show up and interfere with that!
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