by Elise Sax
“No.”
“Stupid,” Jenny said. “You could probably work out a monthly retainer that’ll pay your bills.”
Yep. They were con artists.
“Leonard Shetland, Margaret Marshall, Stella Hernandez, Tony Eddy,” I said. “What did you do to them? I know you cursed them.”
“No, we didn’t,” Jenny said.
Joyce shushed her.
I put my hands on my hips and gave them my best scowl. “I know you cursed them.”
“You better be quiet or we’ll curse you,” Joyce warned.
“So you did curse them,” I said, proud of myself.
“We didn’t,” Jenny said. “We were going to, but then something happened, and we couldn’t do it.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“We were interrupted,” Joyce said. “And that’s all we’re going to say.”
“What do you mean you were interrupted? Who interrupted you?”
“Sorry to interrupt you, but I really need to get home,” Boone said, walking into the room. I shot him a death stare.
“You’re not interrupting,” Joyce gushed at him, and Jenny nodded in agreement.
“You’re interrupting,” I growled. “You’re interrupting a lot. Go away and come back later when you’re not interrupting.”
“I need to get home, Matilda. I need to get home,” Boone said.
I stomped my foot. “You haven’t been home for weeks, and now all of a sudden you have to go home?”
He put his hand on my back and pushed me out of the room. “Look, something is crawling in my pants. Something I don’t want crawling in my pants. I want to go home, strip down, and scrub myself down. Got it?”
“You can do that here,” I said.
“With the poisonous vaginal soap? I don’t think so.”
He picked me up and marched me through the front door. Faye and Nora ran out after us. Boone opened the passenger door of his truck and tossed me in. “Should we keep spying?” Nora asked me through the open window.
“They’re still suspects,” I told them, as Boone started the engine. “But be careful. They might be dangerous.”
“I’ve got Nora covered,” Faye announced, punctuating each word with her hammer, like she was conducting a symphony for HGTV.
Part III: Matilda Finds Another Victim, and Boone Dresses Up
Cheating Couple Found Asphyxiated in Car, Chile Pepper Cook-off Threatened
by Jack Remington
Late last night, George Henry and Lisa Alcott were discovered dead in the latter’s car. The couple is believed to have died from carbon monoxide, due to the running car in the closed garage.
“The deaths appear to be accidental,” Patrolman Wendy Ackerman explained. “The couple was found naked and let’s say, connected.”
It’s unclear why Henry and Alcott kept the car on, except maybe to keep the radio playing while they were together in the car. According to sources, the radio was tuned to the Arizona Diamondbacks game.
“If you didn’t think the bastard was dumb before, you sure do now,” Mr. Henry’s wife, Julie Henry said. “And why would he have an affair with Lisa Alcott? The woman wasn’t exactly Farrah Fawcett, you know.”
Henry and Alcott were the organization and publicity chairs for the Goodnight Chile Pepper Cook-off, and their tragic and untimely deaths have threatened the event.
According to Mabel Kessler, the president of the Cook-off, the two left many details of the event’s organization unknown and disappeared with them.
“It’s a complete disaster,” Kessler said. “We don’t know which way is up. The posters? We don’t know where they are. And where the hell are the chafing dishes?”
The mayor has called an emergency meeting to discuss the future of Saturday’s Cook-off. “Giraffes, poop from the sky, a crazy potato burglar, and now no Chile Pepper Cook-off? Is this Goodnight, New Mexico or Florida?” the mayor asked.
The question is yet to be answered.
Chapter 9
I spent the first few hours of my sleepless night staring up at my ceiling and thinking about the epidemic of deaths among the older population of Goodnight. There were a handful of suspects, and it wasn’t certain that the deaths were connected, even with the list of curses. What did Jenny and Joyce mean that they had been interrupted before they could carry out the curses, and should I believe them?
I sat up in bed with a jolt. “Tony Eddy needs to be warned,” I said out loud. But my phone said it was two o’clock. The middle of the night. I would have to wait until morning to warn him. Abbott and Costello’s heads perked up, and I took them for a long walk in the forest to use up some more time. Insomnia can be lonely. I do have to admit that I paused at Boone’s door on the way out because I knew of something that could pass the time better than walking the dogs. But his lights were off. And I was totally off men.
The next morning, I was the second person in the Gazette office after Klee. I called Tony Eddy and warned him that he was on a cursed list.
“I’m not buying what you’re selling, lady,” he yelled into the phone and hung up on me. It wasn’t easy being a Girl Scout. I needed to see him in person before he wound up dead like the rest of them. Somehow, my car was returned home, but I couldn’t drive it without a key. According to Goodnight Garage, a new car fob cost two hundred dollars, which was approximately one thousand peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
“Klee, may I borrow your car?” I asked her.
She laughed. “Good one, Matilda. Great sense of humor.”
Silas walked in and plopped down in his chair. He jiggled his mouse and started typing furiously on his keyboard. “That poor bastard Adam Beatman’s in real hot water, boss,” Silas said. “Doesn’t he know not to talk to journalists?”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“All about how much he hated his stepmother and about her spending his retirement. Idiot. Now I have to write it all up, and he’s going to go to jail because of it. Adam’s on my bowling team. We’ll never get to the championships now.”
“You bowl?”
I couldn’t imagine Silas moving his body that much. His cholesterol level must have been sky high, and I worried that any movement at all would shift the cholesterol in his arteries and give him a heart attack.
“I’m the official scorekeeper. Reporters don’t bowl.”
“Do you think Adam killed his stepmother?” I asked.
“I think he could have killed her, but not with vaginal soap.”
It was the same thing that Boone had told me.
Silas leaned forward. “You still working on that list?” he asked me, softly. I nodded. “That Tony Eddy guy? The retired washer dryer repairman? He worked on all of the other dead folks’ washers. Leonard, Stella, and Margaret. Might be an avenue to go down, boss.”
“How did you find out?”
“As long as there’s shoe leather left on my Hush Puppies, I never stop. Just like the free press. We never stop. You can imprison us, but we never stop. You can censor us, but we never stop. You can pay us next to nothing, but we never stop.”
Silas really loved the free press.
“May I borrow your car?” I asked him.
“No. I’ve got back-to-back stories today. Quint gave Fifi a nervous breakdown, and she locked herself in the Giraffe Museum. She won’t stop hugging the stuffed version of Daisy the Giraffe in the display.”
While he wrote his story, I searched through the database of runaway girls again. There were thousands of them. I figured it was going to take me weeks to find her, if I found her at all.
And then I found her about five minutes into my search.
Devyn Jones. Eighteen years old. From West Texas. She barely looked like her picture. She was thinner now, and the smiling, bright-eyed girl staring back at me from the monitor was little like the scarily thin girl who appeared to me in the canyon and at the river. But it was her, all right.
I called Amos and told him that I found
another girl. “I’ll be right there,” he said and hung up.
Amos arrived a couple of minutes later, at about the same time that Boone walked in and almost made me swallow my tongue. “What’re you wearing?” I asked him.
“A suit. All of my regular clothes are dirty, so I’m stuck with this.”
He was a GQ model in a suit. George Clooney wished he looked like Boone in a suit.
“What an asshole,” Amos said under his breath. “Did you have to wear a tie, too?”
“It’s part of the suit, asshole,” Boone told him, running a hand down his tie, smoothing it. Holy cow, he was hot. Even hotter than when he was wet and mostly naked.
“Like you put on a suit because it’s laundry day,” Amos growled, looking from Boone to me and back again. “You know, the Cook-off might not happen this year after what happened,” he said, as if to tell the world to lay off him because he was having a bad time.
“What the hell is going on?” Klee demanded. “This is a place of business. I’m trying to format the story on the shit falling from the sky. So, stay professional, people, or leave.”
I gave Amos the rundown on the second dead girl and showed him the picture. It was obvious he didn’t want to believe me, but he took down the information anyway and promised to contact her family.
“Can you give me a ride?” I asked him. “My car key went down the rapids.”
“I’ll take you,” Boone announced, standing up. “I got nothing else to do but wait for my clothes. You know, unless you want to take her, asshole.”
I sighed. They had a strange relationship. They hated each other, yet they were worried to step on the other’s toes when it came to me. I wasn’t sure if either of them were truly interested in me. Amos had seemed to be, but I couldn’t compete with his lost love. And as for Boone, he was a mystery.
“No, you take her,” Amos said softly and walked out of the office, his cowboy boots making a racket on the wood floor.
Silas looked up from his computer. “What’s going on? Is something going on?”
“I’m giving Matilda a ride,” Boone explained.
Klee snorted, and that just about said it all.
“Did you bring my car back?” I asked Boone as we drove away.
“It wasn’t hard.”
It was the second time that he had retrieved my car for me from the wilds outside of Goodnight. I tried not to focus on his chivalry too much because it was distracting me from what was important. I had found the second girl, and now I had her name. I was one step closer to finding the monster who was abducting and murdering blond girls in Goodnight. I felt like Wonder Woman, like Superman.
“Tony’s a good guy,” he continued, moving on from talking about my car. “But there’s something off about him. Loner. Quiet. Something not all there about him.”
That description could have fit half of the town. We arrived at Tony’s house a few minutes later. It was a two-story adobe, and Boone parked on the street. I rang the doorbell and eyed Boone from the corner of my eye. In my jeans and sweater, I was definitely underdressed next to him. I could tell that he knew how good he looked in his suit because he had a perpetual smile on his face, like he felt proud of himself.
Nobody answered the door, so I rang the bell again and knocked. “Maybe he’s out repairing a dryer,” I suggested.
“He’s retired.”
“Do you know how to pick locks?” I asked.
“How about we come back later? We could go out to lunch.”
“Huh?” Was he asking me out on a date? He was dressed like a man ready to go on a date. I felt myself blush, and I fell against the door, and it opened with a creak.
“Oh, no,” Boone moaned. “This isn’t good. A creaking open door. You opened the portal to hell again.”
“Maybe he forgot to lock up.”
I took a step, but Boone put his arm out and blocked me. “Nuh-uh. I’ll go in first.”
He went inside, and I quickly followed. It turned out that Tony was a hoarder, and there had to be cats around, because it smelled like cat pee. I covered my nose and mouth with my sweater. Boone and I carefully made our way through old newspapers, clothes, appliances, and trash.
“I don’t understand this,” I said. “I get not wanting to wash the dishes for one night, but this? I don’t get it.”
“I’ve never been here before, and I never want to be here again.”
The kitchen was even worse. The cats had used it as one giant litter box, and there was cat feces all over the place. “I’m going to throw up,” I said. “I don’t care if Tony was cursed by the sisters. He’s already cursed, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Matilda, look over there,” Boone said.
“Where?”
“The floor by the sink.”
“Is that?”
“Tony Eddy. Yes.”
He was lying on the floor by the sink, a spilled glass of water by his head. He was dead. We could tell he was dead without checking.
“I can’t believe I’m seeing another dead body,” I said. “It’s like I’m going for a world record or something.”
“Portal to hell.”
“He hung up on me an hour ago,” I said.
“It looks like he was sick. Check out his skin. His hair.”
“Like he was poisoned?” I asked.
Boone shrugged. “Murder’s your expertise, not mine.”
We waited around for Amos and the coroner, who crossed himself when he saw me. I was getting a reputation as the angel of death. Once they arrived and had the situation under control, Boone and I got in his truck and headed back to my house.
“Are you going to the funeral?” Boone asked.
“Which one?”
“Margaret’s. It starts in thirty minutes. Bernard called and invited me this morning. It might be a good place to pick up clues. There’s going to be a big turnout. I think most folks want to see the meanest bitch in Goodnight dead and buried.”
We went home, and I changed into a black skirt and white top after eating another sandwich. Then, Boone drove me to the funeral. Sure enough, there was a big turnout. In fact, all of the suspects showed up. The crowd circled the casket, which was perched above the hole in the ground. It was a gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky, and a perfect sixty-eight degrees. The cemetery was a large patch of green in an otherwise brown area.
Everyone said hello to Boone, but there was a lot of ignoring going on where I was concerned. I didn’t blame them. I was a death magnet.
Adam Beatman was standing with his father and wife. His eyes darted around, as if he was waiting to be carted off to jail at any moment. He had bought his stepmother vaginal soap and hated her guts. Made sense. Vaginal soap wasn’t exactly the gift one gave to a loved one.
Jenny and Joyce showed up with Nora. Nora caught my eye. My normally unshakable friend looked pretty freaked out, and I wondered how long she would stay in her job. Jenny and Joyce ignored me. They were too busy waving crystals around and making woo-woo noises. They were all kinds of shady, and I still wasn’t counting out my theory that they used the curse list as a hit list to up their street cred in the psychic department. But they did seem to be telling the truth when they said their curses got interrupted.
And then there were the VIP Tickets to Heaven. There was a good chance that the scam artist for that one was among the mourners. Perhaps he had been found out and had to silence his victims.
“Bernard’s brother Ted showed up,” Boone whispered to me. “He’s the golden boy. He could do no wrong in Margaret’s eyes.”
“He didn’t have to stay in a box under her bed?”
“Not the favorite son. Now he’s some kind of business guy in Albuquerque.”
Bernard waved at Boone. “Come on. I’ll introduce you,” Boone told me. He put his hand on my lower back as we walked.
“Hello there,” Ted said like he hadn’t eaten for weeks, and I was a Big Mac. He took my hand and brought it to his lips. Ewww. Ted wa
s creepy and greasy, and I got a big rapey vibe off of him. “You’re new. We don’t normally get beautiful women in Goodnight except for Faye. You with Boone? You busy later? You want to go to dinner?”
Boone put his arm around my waist. “She’s busy tonight, Ted.”
“No problem. I’m busy, too. I have to help Bernard with the paperwork.”
“Ted is letting me live in his house,” Bernard said, excitedly.
“Mother left me the house, of course,” Ted said. My ears pricked up, and the hair on my arms stood on end. “But Bernard will keep living there. I mean where else is he going to go?” He barked laughter until he was interrupted by the reverend, who wanted to start the ceremony.
“The plot thickens,” Boone whispered in my ear. “Ted made a pretty penny off his mother’s death.”
The reverend completed the short service, and Nora grabbed me on her way out. “I thought the mourners were going to applaud when they put her in the ground,” she said. “Everyone here hated that woman, and they had good reason. Meanest bitch in Goodnight, even though she was always nice to me. But she probably hated me anyway. She hated everybody.”
Nora skipped away to catch up to her bosses, and I was left standing with Boone, thinking about Margaret and all of the deaths that had happened this week. Taken together, there didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason behind them. It was like I was trying to put together a puzzle, but either some pieces were missing, or I was actually working on more than one puzzle at a time.
“So, you and me, then?” Boone asked, waking me up from my thoughts.
“Excuse me?”
“Dinner. You want to go with me, or should I call Ted back for you?”
“I don’t think I could eat anywhere near Ted, but if you’re paying, I wouldn’t mind eating with you.”
“Then, it’s a date.”
Chapter 10
There was a handwritten sign on the door to Goodnight Diner. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone with poop on their head. Boone opened the door for me, and I walked in. The diner was busy, but it wasn’t anything close to lunch traffic.