by Elise Sax
My car was definitely good news. I hoped it was also a good omen for the rest of the day. I walked through the gate with the dogs on my heels and went into the Gazette’s office. It was empty, except for Klee, who was busy making the newspaper run. She was incredibly organized and competent. It was clear that the newspaper couldn’t survive without her.
“Oh, good,” she said, noticing me. “Jack’s on assignment. Thank goodness that Goodnight High is giving him work study credits to help out on the Gazette while Silas is out, or we would be screwed.” She handed me a piece of paper with a name and address on it. “I need five hundred words for this one, but if you can only do three hundred, that’ll be fine.”
“What’s the story?”
“I’m going to leave that as a surprise for you. You know, to brighten your day.”
“Do you know how my car got here? Who brought it?”
“I didn’t know your car was here. It wasn’t here when I arrived. I fed the dogs, let them out for a run, and I’ve been at work ever since. I hope Gloria gets here soon. I’m starving. I could eat three burritos.”
I sat down at Silas’s computer and Googled New Sun Petroleum in New Mexico. My new assignment was located on the way to New Sun’s headquarters. Perfect. It was time for the mountain to come to Mohammed.
Before I headed out, I needed to change and get cleaned up. The dogs and I left the office. In the courtyard, I stopped a moment and glanced over at Boone’s section of the house. It was completely quiet with no sign of him. I was tempted to break in and find out what his story was, but I was too busy.
I walked into my section of the house through the door to the living room and went back to the kitchen pantry, where I refilled the dogs’ water bowls and gave them two bones. Remembering to hydrate, I filled a glass under the tap and drank it all. My altitude sickness was a lot better, but I still gasped for air if I walked too quickly.
I stripped down, as I walked through the house to my bedroom. The house needed a lot of work, as Faye had pointed out, but it was starting to feel like home. My belongings were in place, I had a job, and I was making friends. I was settling in. There was still the pesky problem about income and how to make the Gazette bring in more money, but I had time to work that out.
I dumped my dirty clothes in the hamper and took a quick shower. After, I went to my bedroom and stopped dead when I saw my purse, cellphone, and keys on my bed. There was a little note on the purse.
No need to thank me.
The short note was written in perfect, deliberate handwriting. It was the handwriting I imagined belonged to Sheriff Amos Goodnight. He was that kind of man. Perfect. Deliberate. It also turned out that he was chivalrous, returning my belongings without asking for payment or even thanks.
I picked a terrible moment to give up men.
After I gave the dogs a short walk, I grabbed my purse and at the last moment, decided to take the crowbar with me. If I was going to snoop around suspected killers, I wanted some semblance of protection.
It took fifteen minutes of searching the car before I actually sat in it. Just as I finally took my seat, Gloria the tamale lady drove up. I opened my window and asked for a burrito to go.
Driving away, I unwrapped the burrito and took a bite. It was the best Mexican food I had ever tasted, and it came to my door every day. It was my second good news of the day. I drove with the air-conditioning cranked up and the Bee Gees playing on the radio. I was wearing cotton shorts and a Disneyland t-shirt that I had bought during my California days. I was amazed that the car could run after the accident, but I guess a hood isn’t important.
It took nearly a half hour to reach the address for my new assignment. It was a small rundown house out in the middle of nowhere. I checked the name. Simon Whitehead. I parked in front next to a sheriff SUV, and my heart danced around in my chest, just looking at the words “sheriff” on the side of the car.
Darn it. I forgot to wear the floral miniskirt.
I knocked on the door and dug my reporter’s notebook and pen out of my purse in order to take notes. A middle-aged man answered. He was meticulously dressed in slacks, a short-sleeved button-down, and a red bow tie.
“Are you more cops?” he asked.
“No, I’m Matilda Dare from the Goodnight Gazette.”
“The new one? The crazy girl who sang the National Anthem backward at the World Cup?”
“No. That was someone else. I’ve lived here for thirty years.” I had grown tired of defending my sanity. It was a lot easier just to lie and say I wasn’t me.
“Oh. In that case, come in.”
Even if the outside of the house was rundown, the inside was tidy and decorated like a doll house with handcrafted doilies and afghans everywhere. I looked around for Amos, but he wasn’t there.
“The patrolman lady is in the kitchen, taking notes,” Mr. Whitehead said.
I followed him into the kitchen. I said hello to Wendy Ackerman, the deputy I had met the night I saw the vanished girl. She was taking notes in a reporter’s notebook at the kitchen table, and she was eating cookies from a small plate.
I sat next to her and Mr. Whitehead offered me a cookie, which I accepted.
“Where was the stolen good when it went missing?” Wendy asked him.
I jotted down where in my notebook. Mr. Whitehead showed Wendy a small plate, the kind that doesn’t break when it’s dropped on the floor.
“It was on this plate, and wrapped with this plastic wrap,” he said.
He showed her the piece of crinkled plastic wrap, which was striped with grease.
I wrote down plate and plastic wrap in my notebook. Wendy wrote some notes, too.
“Have you noticed any suspicious characters hanging around, sir?” she asked. “Anybody. Think hard. Perhaps a deliveryman that shouldn’t have been here. Even a kid selling lemonade would be suspicious in a case like this one.”
I jotted down lemonade kid.
“So?” Wendy asked. “Have you seen anyone suspicious?”
Mr. Whitehead gave me a pointed look, like I was suspicious. “I just got here,” I said. “I’ve never been here before. I don’t even know what was stolen.”
“My retirement, that’s all,” he said, angry. “My entire retirement was stolen!”
Grand larceny, I wrote down. Wow, Goodnight seemed like a sleepy town, but it was bursting with crime. No wonder Klee wanted five hundred words. This was a big story. It might even need a thousand words.
“You kept your retirement on a plate covered with plastic wrap?” I asked.
“In the refrigerator. Where else would I keep it?”
I wrote that down. “How much was in your retirement fund?”
Wendy shot me a nasty look. I was stepping on her toes, since she had been the one asking questions, but I knew that Silas would want me to ask all the pertinent questions, and he would never have allowed law enforcement to stop him.
I shrugged at her and gave her an I’m sorry smile. Mr. Whitehead sat down at the table. “That’s the thing,” he started, his voice lowering with the seriousness of his story. “There was one that looked like Dolly Parton sold on eBay six months ago for ten large. So, I figure that one that looked like Abraham Lincoln would be worth at least ten times that much.”
“So, one hundred thousand,” Wendy said, writing it down.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What are we talking about? Dolly Parton? Abraham Lincoln?”
“Keep up,” he complained.
“Mr. Whitehead purchased a ten-piece McNugget box at McDonalds two days ago, and one of the nuggets looked like Lincoln,” Wendy explained to me.
“A chicken McNugget,” I repeated.
“Looked like Abraham Lincoln,” she repeated. “Kind of like seeing a girl who isn’t there.”
Ouch. Burn. Wendy wasn’t nice, but she had a gun and a Taser, so I just smiled and took more notes.
“When did it go missing?” Wendy asked, and I wrote when in my notebook.
I was having a bad feeling about the Lincoln nugget’s chances for survival. “Any idea who would have stolen it?” Wendy asked.
“Yes. My nephew, Jamie. He’s like a lawnmower around food, and he’s out of work. I was keeping the nugget secret, but he probably took one look at it, recognized it as a goldmine, and made off with it. You have to find him!”
I wrote furiously while Wendy radioed for an alert on Mr. Whitehead’s nephew. “Suspect might be in possession of a valuable chicken McNugget,” she said on the radio hooked to her shoulder.
“What?” a voice demanded in the radio. “Are you playing with me, Wendy?”
“The McNugget looks like Lincoln,” she continued, ignoring the question.
“For the love of Pete. If my loser kids had gotten jobs, I could be retired by now,” the voice complained.
Wendy stood and nodded to Mr. Whitehead. “We’ll be on the case. Don’t worry.”
“I’m worried!” he yelled. “A hundred thousand dollars! Stolen! Or eaten. And if it was eaten, we can’t retrieve it. I mean, we could, but it wouldn’t look anything like Lincoln anymore.”
Mr. Whitehead walked Wendy to the front door. When he returned, I asked if he had a photo of the stolen meat. He did and showed it to me on his phone. It didn’t look anything like Lincoln. It looked like a chicken McNugget with maybe a hint of Elton John.
He texted me the picture so I could publish it in the Gazette. I had gotten the who, what, where, when, why, and how. Journalism wasn’t hard at all. Carl Bernstein wasn’t such hot stuff after all.
I thanked Mr. Whitehead and left. Outside, Wendy was pushing buttons on her car’s computer. I knocked on her window, and she opened it.
“You were great in there,” I said, trying to butter her up. She wasn’t easily buttered, however. She pursed her lips, as if she was impatient. I skipped ahead to the point. “Have you discovered anything in Silas’s case?”
“Yep. He fell off a roof, and a flying saucer landed on him.”
“He says he was pushed.”
“If he was, we don’t know who did it.”
“How about Jimmy?”
Her pupils dilated, and she looked up and to the right. I knew what that meant. She was figuring out a lie to tell me. “Sheriff Goodnight is handling that case, personally. I don’t think he has any leads, but he’s not keeping me informed.”
I nodded. “Well, thank you, anyway.”
I got in my car and drove off. My mind was racing a mile a minute. Why would the patrolwoman lie to me? What was happening with Jimmy’s murder case that would warrant deception by law enforcement? And why would she act differently about Jimmy’s case than Silas’s case? I had been under the impression that they were the same case. That Jimmy’s murder was actually a failed attempt to kill Silas.
Was I wrong?
Did the killer mean to kill Jimmy? Were there actually two different killers? Were the two murders not related?
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. Maybe I wasn’t so good at the detective thing as I thought. Still, my best theory so far was that Wade from New Sun Petroleum tried to kill Silas twice and murdered Jimmy by accident. At least, that’s what Silas believed. And he was a real journalist.
I couldn’t get anywhere near New Sun Petroleum. There was a long fence topped with razor wire that bordered the miles of property. The entrance gate was manned by an armed guard, and I couldn’t see any buildings in the distance, so I knew that I was far out.
I pulled over to the side of the road and debated whether I should tell the truth to the guard and hope that Wade would let me in or if I should lie to the guard, so that I could sneak in and spy.
For some stupid reason, I decided on the truth. I pulled up to the guard’s gate and told him that the Gazette wanted to speak to either Wade Georgia or Steve Wright. The guard was nice enough, even flirting with me. But his calls to Wade and Steve were rejected. They didn’t want any part of the Gazette, and if I didn’t leave immediately, the flirty guard would have to get mean with me.
He shrugged. “I can’t shoot you, but I can pepper spray you,” he explained. “I’ve had to do it four times already.”
“No problem. I’ll get out of here,” I said.
He took his phone out. “Can I get your number first?”
“I’m married,” I said, which was technically true.
“Shoot. Can I get your picture, at least? I can lie to my buds, tell ‘em you’re my girl.”
I let him take my picture, and then I made a big show of turning my car around. But I wasn’t going to give up. It served me right to be honest. But now I had a different plan. When I got out of eyesight of the guard’s gate, I turned off the road and followed the fence.
My plan was basically to break in and somehow get the proof that New Sun Petroleum had killed Jimmy and had thrown Silas off a roof. I drove for a while before I found a patch of fence without razor wire. I dug a blanket out of my trunk and tossed it over the fence.
“Here we go, eighth grade P.E. class,” I said, pushing my tennis shoe through a hole in the fence and pulled myself up. It was easier than I thought it would be to scale a ten-foot fence. Thankfully, I had narrow feet, and my toes fit easily into the holes in the fence. It was dicey when I got to the top and had to climb over, and I almost fell once, but finally I got over to the other side.
The altitude sickness hit me hard then, and I sat down on the scrub to try and catch my breath. Stupidly, I hadn’t brought any water, and I thought back to the story of Boone finding Silas after he drank his pee for five days. Would Boone search for me? Would I have to drink my pee? Finally, after a long moment, I felt well enough to walk.
“Now what?” I asked myself. I started walking in the direction of what I hoped was the New Sun Petroleum building. Luckily, it only took about fifteen minutes before I saw a series of buildings, standard industrial park construction. After another fifteen minutes, I was standing on the pavement, a few feet from the entrance to the main building.
No way was I going to try and enter that way. It was time to be sneaky. I walked around the building until I got to a side door. I said a little prayer and tugged at the door handle. Miraculously, it opened. I took a deep breath and walked inside.
It was a sterile, no frills office building. People came and went through the hallway. Some were dressed in suits, and others wore work clothes. Apparently, I didn’t stand out, even in my shorts, and nobody asked me who I was or what I was doing there.
The building was only three stories, so I didn’t think it would be that difficult to find where Wade was hiding. I took the elevator to the top floor, assuming that he would want to be above everyone else. I was right. As I left the elevator on the top floor, I spotted Wade at the other end of the hallway before he turned into an office.
My pulse raced. I couldn’t believe I had managed to break in and find him. I was so cool. I was Lara Croft. I was Wonder Woman.
I was caught.
Two security guards came up behind me, each taking one of my arms. I struggled against them, but it was no use. “Let me go!” I yelled, drawing the attention of the workers. But nobody came to my rescue. I was dragged back into the elevator, and one of the security guards hit the button to the ground floor. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” I insisted. “I was visiting a friend.”
I offered them half a dozen excuses for why I as there. No matter what I said, they didn’t react. They held onto my arms, and after the elevator doors opened again, they took me to a small room and forcibly sat me down in a chair.
And they zip-tied my hands together in front of me.
This is so much worse than drinking my own pee.
I sat in the small room for a long time with the two guards never letting me out of their sight. My imagination didn’t let up. It came up with a never-ending supply of scenarios where I ended up murdered in horrible ways and in
sixty-seven percent of the scenarios, my dead body wound up cut into bite-sized pieces and fed to Rocco’s parade of giraffes.
Did giraffes even eat meat?
Finally, the door opened, and Wade entered. I stood up with my hands zip-tied in front of me, but one of the guards pushed me back down onto the chair. This was bad, I thought. Real bad.
And stupid. How did I get so stupid?
“Klee knows where I am,” I told Wade. “So, if anything happens to me, you’ll have a world of hurt come down on you. There’ll be nowhere you can hide. Your ass will be grass. Your hide will be tanned. You won’t be able to breathe. You won’t be able to live. You won’t be able to say boo.”
“She’s in here, Sheriff,” Wade said. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. That only happened when I ate hot fudge and when Amos Goodnight was near. Sure enough, Amos walked around to face me and took stock of the situation.
His face was impassable. He had no visible expression. As usual, I didn’t know if he was angry or not. Actually, I was pretty sure he was angry. His cowboy hat was dipped low, practically covering his eyes. He had a gun in a holster on his hip, and his shiny badge on his chest.
“Breaking and entering. Our cameras caught her climbing over a fence. If she damaged it, I expect payment, of course,” Wade said.
As Wade spoke, Amos continued to look at me, his eyes boring through me. I could imagine what he was thinking. Trouble. I was lots of trouble, and now I had crossed a line, literally. I had climbed a fence and trespassed, and now I was zip-tied in a small room and about to go to jail.
“Am I going to jail?” I asked. My voice cracked with fear. I willed myself not to cry, but my body wasn’t cooperating. My nose filled up, and my eyes burned. It was the typical pre-crying position.
“Damn right, you’re going to jail,” Wade spat. “Read her her rights, Sheriff.”