Beaches, Blogging, and Bodies

by Stacey Alabaster

  I nodded, still feeling defeated. “I suppose not.”

  “So, you didn’t find any trace of Agatha at all? No clues to where she had gone?” He must have spotted the look on my face, because he smiled softly and laughed before offering me an apology. “I’m sorry. That’s just the newspaper editor in me, rearing his ugly head.”

  “I don’t mind your question. I understand the curiosity.” I shook my head. “And to answer it—no, unfortunately, I did not.”

  Matthew was silent for a minute as we sat at the intersection. “So, you’re really staying at her house when she’s not there? You don’t think she’d mind?”

  I sat in silence. I hadn’t really thought about it like that. It wasn’t weird, was it, to still stay there? I mean, I still had her permission, didn’t I?

  I decided to act confident. “Of course,” I said, like it was no big deal. I couldn’t really see why it would be. After all, when and if Agatha returned, she’d expect to find me there, not to have me run off and abandon her. “So if you drop me off there, that would be fine.”

  He nodded and turned right, and we drove down the hill toward the beach. I was starting to feel a little uneasy. I supposed it WAS a little strange that I was still staying at Agatha’s cottage when she was nowhere to be seen. The residents of Sandy Point were probably all talking about the strange woman who had taken over the abandoned cottage and refused to go back to her home. Why doesn’t she just leave?

  Matthew pulled my bags out of his truck and then offered to take my own truck up to the repair shop. I thanked him profusely while he helped me unload.

  “It’s just a shame your trip was for nothing,” Mathew said.

  Tell me about it. It had ended up costing me six hundred dollars and almost wound up with a poor young woman losing her job. It could have ended with me stranded in the middle of nowhere, indefinitely.

  The cottage was cold and emptier than ever when I entered it. I realized I’d been holding out hope of finding that Agatha had returned while I’d been gone. But not only had she not returned, she seemed to have gotten further and further away. I tried to fight down the anger I was feeling toward her. Could she not even have bothered to text me to let me know that she was all right?

  I sat down at the kitchen table with my chin on my hands. The only reason I even came to Sandy Point in the first place was because she had suddenly gone radio silent. She hadn’t bothered to email me or message me to let me know she was okay then, either. She never even cared that I was worried. Perhaps our friendship really was one-sided. She didn’t seem to care what I felt, or how worried I was, at all.

  Jasper sat by my chair and whimpered, a sure sign that he was hungry and expected to be fed. I stood up and fetched the bag of dog food from the pantry. “Maybe it is time we left,” I said to Jasper as he devoured the entire bowl in about three seconds flat. “If Agatha doesn’t care, then why should we?”

  But I was still troubled by what I had read on her blog. Had Agatha really been trying to out her friend as a bad journalist? I told myself I shouldn’t obsess about it, but I walked over to my bag, got out my laptop, opened it again, and re-read the post. Read it over and over, trying to make sense of it all. I knew M was Matilda. But who was Z and why was Agatha so worried about him or her? Not just worried. She sounded scared.

  Things always look a little brighter in the morning, don’t they? That is doubly true when you wake up to bright sunshine and an endless view of blue water in front of you.

  I made a vow. That when I retired—whenever that might eventually be—that I would buy a house by the ocean. That would be where I would truly settle. I might even get myself a little sailboat. Might even take up fishing. Okay, I was being silly. I’d never fished in my life and I didn’t think retirement was going to change that.

  I walked down to the ocean with my camera in hand, intending to take some photos for a new blog post I was thinking about—a crafting project that involved star fish. But I couldn’t find a single washed-up starfish shell that morning, and the day was becoming overcast. Or, at least, the cliffs above were casting a long shadow over the beach. I glanced up. That was where I needed to be that day.

  Jasper followed along dutifully as we climbed the walkway.

  I knew what I needed to do. I was intent on finding out more about Z. That seemed like it would be the key to the entire thing. Clearly, there were no people in the town with that letter for their first name—or, at least, none that I had met or heard of—so it must have stood for something else entirely. I didn’t think the Z itself really meant anything. It was only important to discover who it was referring to.

  We wandered up to the news agency. There was the smell of freshly battered and fried fish in the air from the shop next door and my stomach started rumbling. I decided that would be my next stop.

  I walked inside and called out a big hello to Bill. It seemed like years had passed since we’d last been inside the shop.

  “Hello there!” he called out, more to Jasper than to me. “Where has my favorite doggy been?” he asked as Jasper ran over to him.

  I laughed. “We decided to take an impromptu trip up to the town of Rosebud,” I said. “You hear of it?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, of course. That’s a common destination for a lot of the creative types in this town. A lot of the writers go up there too, to get away. They all take turns at sharing a cabin. People who work at the Sandy Point Weekly, that is.”

  Hmm.

  “Bill?” I asked him. “Does anyone in this town have a name—first name or surname—that starts with a Z?”

  He mulled it over for a second, his brow heavily creased. Finally, he shook his head. “I really can’t think of anyone,” he said.

  Darn. Bill knew everyone in town. “Oh well, it was worth a shot anyway.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I shook my head. “It really doesn’t matter. I’ll just grab the paper.”

  I picked up a copy of the local newspaper and paid for it. Once I had my battered fish and a healthy—or perhaps not so healthy, as it goes—serving of fries as well, I headed back toward the edge of the cliff that looked over the beach and sat down on a bench, with the newspaper spread out in front of me to read. The front page article was about the Literary Festival.

  Huh.

  Wasn’t that a little strange, considering what else had taken place since the last issue went to print?

  I figured that maybe they just wanted to keep the murder of Matilda off the front page. Maybe in a town like this, sensationalistic stories didn’t actually sell the paper when they were plastered over the front cover. I was sure the story would be covered on the second, third, or fourth page.

  But there was only one tiny mention of it, on page five.

  I flipped through again, certain I must have been mistaken, that there must have been a bigger story that I’d just missed the first time.

  I stopped. Jason had already taken over Matilda’s column. This was his first edition. I smoothed the paper down and started to read it carefully. “Thanks for having me, dear readers of the Sandy Point Weekly,” he started off. Beside his words, there was a smug looking—full color—photograph of him smiling with his arms crossed and his thick glasses framing his face.

  I was almost glad Agatha wasn’t around to see this. She would have been livid to see the way that Matilda’s column had been taken apart and replaced by something barely recognizable. They had already renamed the column from ‘Sandy Talking Points’ to…’The Z Spot’. I gasped. How had I not noticed that when I’d first spotted the column? I had been so distracted by Jason’s smug face that I hadn’t even seen the title change.

  I blinked a few times and almost dropped the paper. But Bill was watching me intently through the window, so I kept my cool and read over the column, trying to get my eyes to focus again, when there were stars dancing in front of them.

  I did think, for a moment, just how close Bill’s news agency was to the edge of the
cliff.

  But I had to focus on the column. I started reading again. He was talking about a new art exhibit that was coming to town the following month, of modernist painters from the 1920s. He wrote that it was important for the people of Sandy Point to know about these events, and Jason was going to make it his mission to make sure everyone was informed of such events. And it seemed, from the look of the maiden column, like it was going to be tackling more ‘serious’ topics than just homemade crafts from this point forward.

  Bill was still staring at me through the window. My heart was racing. The Z Spot.

  Was Jason Z? Was this what Agatha had been alluding to in her blog posts?

  Chapter 10

  “I’ll take a battered fish and a serving of fries, thanks,” I said to the woman behind the counter in the fish shop.

  She just stared at me. “Didn’t…didn’t you make this same order half an hour ago?” She went as white as a ghost.

  I bit my lip. I had been hoping she wouldn’t remember that. But I also didn’t want her to think she was going crazy. “I accidentally spilled the entire package onto the pavement,” I had to admit. “So I’d like another serving of the same, please.” My entire lunch had been the victim of my shock. At least Jasper had gotten an unexpected meal.

  Hugging the hot packet to my chest, I walked back down to the same bench and took a seat near the edge of the cliff on a park bench, with Jasper at my feet, trying to figure out whether he was going to get to eat any of my food this time. “I’ll be hanging on to this one, Jasper,” I said. He looked disappointed.

  I googled “Jason Spears Journalist” while I ate. Luckily, he came up in the first page of results. And there was a good reason why. At his last post, the daily paper in the city, he’d come under controversy for harassing the victim of a vicious attack by arriving at the hospital where the victim was recovering, pretending to be a family member. As I read the articles about it, I couldn’t help but wonder if this thing was actually that uncommon. But the woman’s family had sued Jason and the newspaper, and the matter had been settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Jason was fired from the paper. He would have had a hard time getting work at any big publication after that.

  I shook my head and placed the phone back in my pocket. “We got him, Jasper.” I threw him the last one of my fries and stood up with only one destination in mind.

  The Sandy Point Weekly offices were very quiet that afternoon. The reception desk was unattended, and I could have walked right in and stolen one of the expensive looking computers, if I’d been that way inclined. Someone had even left their wallet on one of the desks. They were way too trusting, considering who they were working alongside.

  A little bit of envy tugged at my stomach as I walked in. I’d only seen the place at night last time; during the day, it was spectacular. It was right on the edge of the cliff, with the ocean right below. Hmm. Right below. Jason would have had the perfect opportunity to push Matilda over the edge. Especially if he was working alone, like he was right now. An ambitious guy like he was would often find himself alone in the office. All the walls were glass, so the whole entire office was just views of the sky and the ocean below.

  Jason had his back turned, facing what looked to be a photocopier. He hadn’t heard me walk in.

  “Hello there, Jason,” I said, giving him a fright. He jumped and then tried to act composed, like nothing had happened. I had tied Jasper up outside so that he wouldn’t bark and give me away. I’d learned my lesson there.

  “What, um, what can I do for you?” he asked me, looking nervous as he shuffled the pile of papers he was holding.

  I pursed my lips for a moment. “I was just wondering. Do you read the website Sew Anyway?”

  “What is that?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in a condescending manner.

  “Its Agatha’s craft blog,” I said. “It’s very popular.”

  He shook his head and rolled his eyes a little. “Why would I read blogs about crafting?” he said. “That kind of thing doesn’t interest me.”

  “That kind of thing?” I frowned. “You’re writing an arts column, aren’t you?”

  He spun around and gave me a patronizing look. “I am writing about topics that are a little more cultural and important to people than handcrafts. Actual art. You know, the kind that they actually hang in museums? Not that nonsense that Agatha writes about.”

  Hmm. So, he was familiar with it then.

  “I see,” I said. “It’s just funny, because on her blog, Agatha mentions that you…mentions some of your journalistic practices. The blog even mentions some of the stuff you did during your time in the city.”

  His face turned red and he slowly put his papers down.

  “It does not,” he said. “It doesn’t mention me by name.”

  Ah-ha.

  “People will be able to figure it out, Jason, so you may as well come clean.”

  “So is this the only cafe in Sandy Point or what?” I asked as I walked into the same cafe for the third time that week.

  Jason added another sugar to his coffee and stirred it. That made three. I was counting. He nodded and took a sip. “Pretty much.”

  “Why did you really come back to Sandy Point, Jason?”

  “What is it that you want, George?” he asked, shaking his head. “Matilda is already dead, and revealing my secret is not going to bring her back.”

  I was silent for a few moments.

  I’d uncovered Jason Spears’s dirty little secret after just a few minutes of searching online, so it wouldn’t have been hard for Agatha to do the same. It was all public knowledge that he had been fired from that job in disgrace.

  “What does the Z stand for?” I asked Jason.

  He stared into his coffee. “It was a nickname I went by as a kid. The twenty-sixth letter of the alphabet. I was always reciting my ABCs and I was always wanting to recite them to any adult who would listen. Matilda was my babysitter growing up. She knew that.”

  “I want you to admit what you did,” I said, leaning forward. “Agatha is in hiding because of you. You need to come clean.”

  He looked confused. “People already know what I did. It’s in the papers.”

  “Not that,” I said quickly. “I want you to admit what you did to Matilda. She knew about your secret so you had her killed.”

  He blinked a few times. He actually laughed a little. “Why would I kill Matilda to keep my secret? It’s already out there in public for anyone to discover.” He said it like I was a complete idiot.

  But I kept my cool. “I don’t think you killed her for that. I think you killed her so that you could take over her column.” With a ruined reputation, it might have been his only way to claw his way back up the journalism ladder again. How could he deny this?

  “You still really think I had something to do with Matilda’s death?” He shook his head and leaned back. “That is crazy. I wouldn’t kill someone just because I wanted their newspaper column.” He scoffed and ran his fingers through his hair. “You’re looking at the wrong person, George. Maybe Agatha didn’t like me. Yeah, maybe I wanted to take over Matilda’s column, but I didn’t kill her.”

  “You don’t exactly have a good reputation, Jason,” I said, trying to keep my voice low. We were attracting onlookers. “You left your last job in disgrace. It was going to be pretty hard for you to find another full-time job in journalism. Seems like things worked out pretty well for you in the end.”

  “Well?” he scoffed. “You’ve got a funny definition of the word. What is good about being back here, trapped in this dump?”

  Was he talking about Sandy Point? The same spot that was the most beautiful, delightful little town that I had ever come across?

  “I think you’re extremely lucky that you had a place like this to come back to, young man.”

  I could feel the eyes on my back, someone was staring at us. “It’s only the boss,” Jason said dismissively. Then he took a second look. “Actually, he
doesn’t seem super happy to see me here with you. Why is that?”

  I groaned and looked around, but Mathew averted his eyes. Great. I knew what this looked like. He thought he had been proven right—all I’d wanted all along was to go on a date with Jason. And now I had gotten lucky.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, picking up my purse. “I hope you’ll be all right to pick up the bill?”

  Mathew had already taken off by the time I dashed out of the cafe and untied Jasper from the shady spot where he’d been sitting with a dish of water. He’d been adopted by a young family with two children who were fussing over him and giving him plenty of pets, which he was lapping up.

  “We gotta go, Jasper, come on.”

  I followed Mathew back to the newspaper office, hoping to explain things. If he really pushed the point, maybe I would have to tell him what I knew about Jason. Surely Mathew couldn’t have known about that when he’d hired him? Was it even right of me to keep this info from him? Even with it being public, it somehow seemed wrong of me to hide it.

  I came to a complete stop outside the door when I noticed a familiar car parked in the parking lot.

  Detective Anthony Nicholas was inside the office. And he was talking to Mathew.

  The rest of the office was deserted for the rest of the afternoon. Jason had still not come back from the cafe and neither had the few other employees of the office. Their desks, and wallets, were still abandoned, even an hour later. Strange that this small town could still be so very trusting after what had happened.

  I was staring through the window, trying to stay hidden while trying to figure out what to do. Mathew and Detective Nicholas were talking in the editor’s office. I had to get inside; I had to hear their conversation.

  “Jasper,” I said, “I know we haven’t had much luck with this so far, but I really, really need you to sit here and be quiet, okay?” I whispered. I pulled a treat out of my pocket and slowly crept away, pushing the door open as slowly as possible so as not to make a sound.