Murder on Memory Lake

by J. D. Griffo

  “Where do you think I’ve lived my entire life?” Shortly thereafter, Jinx found herself reluctantly moving with her parents and younger brother, Sergio, to Florida. And not the fun part of Florida near the ocean or Disney World, but a town named Eufala in the landlocked portion of the state that’s geographically closer to Alabama than to real Florida. She hated everything about it except its name, which she thought sounded ironically and appropriately like an Italian curse word. But it was nothing like New Jersey and nothing like where Jinx dreamed she would grow up. She felt as if her life was finally living up to her nickname.

  Distance helped her mother stay true to her conviction, and soon it was as if Grandma Alberta never existed. She wasn’t mentioned in conversation and her photos were mysteriously absent from the rest of the family pictures that were scattered around their new home. Eeriest of all, her mother grew quieter. Without Alberta to battle, Lisa Marie no longer had a reason to shout. Jinx was certain her mother would miss their squabbling, not to mention the volume of her own voice, and cart the family back to Jersey, but that never happened.

  When Jinx was applying to college she specifically chose a few Northeastern schools hoping to get back to the life and grandmother that she missed, but her mother, sensing her daughter’s true motives, put the kibosh on that possibility and told her that they couldn’t afford anything more than a local community college. Not wanting to wind up with a relationship that mirrored the fractured connection between her mother and grandmother, Jinx didn’t fight what she knew was a lie. She agreed to attend nearby Chipola College, and four years later graduated summa cum laude with a journalism degree.

  But the moment she had her diploma, she knew her time as a Floridian and a dutiful daughter had come to an end. Yearlong sunshine was nice, but so was home, and that’s where Jinx wanted to return.

  “In bocca al lupo.”

  Jinx was surprised to hear her mother use that phrase when she told her she was moving back to New Jersey, but Lisa Marie simply said, “That’s where you’re going, isn’t it? Right into the mouth of the wolf?”

  Ignoring her mother largely because she knew she was never going to change her mind where her grandmother was concerned, Jinx just hugged her tightly and told her that it would be wonderful if she came up for a visit. She expected her mother to scream at her for daring to make such a comment, but she was pleasantly surprised when all she received was silence and a raised eyebrow. Maybe her luck was changing after all.

  And it did begin to change and all for the better.

  In short order, Jinx found an apartment, a roommate, and a job as a reporter for The Upper Sussex Herald, the paper that covered the news for all the towns in Sussex County. She knew it was fate when she found out that her grandmother was living in one of those towns—Tranquility—the same lakeside community where she vacationed as a young girl and still had such wonderful memories. She hadn’t embarked on a foolish journey. She was meant to reestablish a relationship with her grandmother, one of the people who had witnessed her auspicious entrance into this world. Nothing could possibly go wrong now.

  When she saw two police cars parked in her grandmother’s driveway, she feared something had, in fact, gone horribly wrong. When she saw her grandmother was fine and standing next to a cop, she was greatly relieved. But when she saw the wet dead body of the woman on the ground at their feet, she knew that her luck had given out. The wolf had followed her back home.

  CHAPTER 3 – Alberta & Jinx

  Loda il mare e tienti alla terra.

  “Oh my God! Everybody was right!” Jinx screamed. “I really am a jinx!”

  Startled by the outburst, Alberta and the young cop both turned around and were surprised to see Alberta’s granddaughter staring back at them. They were both not only startled, but unhappy. Alberta because she didn’t want Jinx to be so close to death, and the cop because he knew he was going to get into trouble for allowing someone to stumble onto the crime scene.

  “Jinx!” Alberta shouted. “Oh honey, no, don’t look!”

  Too late. The image of the dead woman’s soaking wet body had already seared itself into Jinx’s brain. Lying on the grass without one of those police-issued body bags covering her up, the dead woman was fully exposed, and Jinx’s impulse to look away was thwarted by curiosity.

  The only dead bodies she’d ever seen before were in caskets, and thanks to embalming fluid and strategic posing they always looked artificial and often bore little resemblance to how they looked when they were alive. This body was an example of death untouched, and Jinx couldn’t help but think it was beautiful, that she was bearing witness to the true essence of Nature without human interference.

  The woman’s hands weren’t unnaturally crossed in front of her chest clutching a rosary, her eyelids weren’t glued shut, her face wasn’t spread wide making the skin look as if it was being pulled down by some carefully hidden industrial-strength tape. This woman, despite being dead, looked more alive than any coffin-confined corpse Jinx had ever seen.

  Her eyes were open and staring directly into the morning sunshine, her hair splayed out around her head like a tangled mass of black and gray as if she just stepped out of the shower. Her skin, lined and creased with age, didn’t resemble a solid rock carved with facial features, and hung loose around her neck. Most interesting, however, were her arms and hands.

  Instead of being forced into the prayer position in an attempt to convince Saint Peter that she was willing to accept her fate, her arms fell at her side and her fingers curved slightly downward so it looked like her hands were digging into the grass. It was probably rigor mortis settling in, but she seemed to be clutching the earth, and Jinx got the distinct impression that this woman did not want to leave the world of the living just yet. Jinx had never considered herself to be morbid, but staring into the face of uncensored death for the first time, she couldn’t help but find the unexpected turn of events fascinating. The cop, playing bodyguard to the dead woman, merely found Jinx’s presence to be a nuisance.

  “I’m sorry, Miss, but I have to ask you to leave,” Detective Miyahara commanded in a voice too high-pitched to be commanding. “This is an active police investigation and you’re trespassing.”

  As if working in tandem, Alberta, holding an unfazed Lola in her arms, and the detective shifted their positions to stand in front of the dead body to block Jinx’s view. How cute, Jinx thought, they feel as if they need to protect me, but how wrong.

  “I’m not trespassing,” she stated. “This is my grandmother, and we have a standing date for breakfast every Wednesday morning.” To illustrate her point, she held up the paper bag she was carrying. “In here is her favorite breakfast treat. Tell ’em, Gram, tell ’em what’s in here.”

  Alberta’s eyes lit up with anticipation. “You got one?”

  “Of course I did,” Jinx replied. “I made sure I got to Vitalano’s early because they always sell out.”

  “Oh, you’re such a good girl,” Alberta gushed.

  “I keep telling Joey that he has to make more, meet demand with supply, but he keeps saying that if he makes more they’ll no longer be special,” Jinx said. “Which makes sense from a purely creative standpoint, though not a financial one.”

  “Such a good girl,” Alberta repeated, then turned to Detective Miyahara and asked rhetorically, “Isn’t she such a good girl?”

  Clinging to the last ounce of his patience, the detective answered, “Honestly, I have no idea if she’s good or not, all I know is that she’s trespassing.”

  “I already told you I’m not trespassing. Are you deaf?” Jinx asked. “She’s my grandmother, and I practically live here, so if anybody’s trespassing it’s you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” Jinx answered. “I only have two Nutella-filled croissants . . .”

  “My favorite! It reminds me of my childhood,” Alberta interrupted, reveling in the memory. “I used to watch my Grandma Marie make them fresh. I’ve tried, but I
just can’t make them like her. I’m good in the kitchen, but . . .”

  “She’s very good in the kitchen,” Jinx corrected.

  “Thank you, lovey,” Alberta said. “With regular food I’m good . . . lasagna, ravioli, giambotta, even a meatloaf . . . but baking and desserts, no, I could never master that like my grandmother, she was the best.”

  “Oh come on, Gram, you’re being modest, your anisette cookies with the rainbow sprinkles are delicious.”

  “Because you never tasted Grandma Marie’s!”

  “True, but I can’t imagine they’re any better than Grandma Alberta’s.”

  Alberta beamed. She didn’t care about the compliment, she only cared that she was sharing the morning with her granddaughter after so many years of separation. Even if their weekly morning ritual was being interrupted by a detective and a dead woman. The detective, on the other hand, wanted his crime scene to have one less intruder.

  “Now look, I’m not going to ask you again,” he started, his voice reaching an even higher pitch. “You need to leave.”

  “And I’m not going to tell you again that I have more right to be on this property than you,” Jinx replied. “I only have two croissants, one for me and one for my grandma, which leaves none for you, so there’s no need for you to stay.”

  The detective looked at Alberta for help, but she just smiled and readjusted Lola in her arms, cradling her like a newborn. It wasn’t a ladylike position, but Lola hardly had the temperament of a lady. The detective realized it was two against one. He tried to remember his training, which was to remain calm and in control no matter how uncooperative civilians might get during an investigation. But the problem with Detective Kichiro Miyahara was that despite all the sensitivity training he’d had to endure throughout the course of his career, one simple fact always got in the way: He much preferred dead people than the living.

  “If you don’t leave now, I’m going to have you arrested!”

  In his frustrated fury, Kichiro’s voice reached such a high pitch that he sounded like a soprano at the end of a particularly trying aria. It was a sound that Lola found so delightful she tried to mimic it with her own high-pitched meow. Jinx thought the whole situation was so funny she almost laughed in Kichiro’s face until she remembered she really did have the right to stay.

  “Wait a second, you can’t arrest me!” Jinx shouted, then proudly declared, “I’m a journalist.”

  “That’s right, you are,” Alberta confirmed. “I keep forgetting that.”

  Kichiro examined Jinx thoroughly and thought the reason Alberta kept forgetting her granddaughter was a journalist was because her granddaughter looked nothing like a journalist, at least none that he had ever met. Her long, jet-black hair fell in waves around her face and extended well below her shoulders. There was no way it looked like that first thing in the morning after a night’s sleep. She must’ve spent hours blow-drying it to get it to look so perfect. Her makeup was soft and minimal, but he knew from watching his own girlfriend get ready for a date that it took longer to achieve the I’m-hardly-wearing-any-makeup-look than it did to pile on the cosmetics.

  And while her clothes were appropriate for mid-July, they were all wrong for a reporter. She wore a green sleeveless cotton top, trimmed in eyelet lace that skimmed the top of her formfitting jeans, which were cuffed up to show her ankle and make her three-inch-heel brown leather sandals stand out even more. The detective was convinced she was lying because there was no way a journalist would wear such high heels. What if she had to run somewhere to catch a scoop? No, this woman was far too pretty and far too preoccupied with how she looked to be a real journalist.

  “You don’t look like a journalist,” the detective announced.

  “You don’t sound like a detective,” the journalist replied.

  “Well, I am.”

  “I am too. So there.”

  Alberta shook her head, a little amused but also a little disgusted. All three of them had been ignoring what was right in front of them. Or in this case, what was right at their feet.

  “Now that that’s settled,” Alberta said. “Could we please deal with Lucy?”

  “Who’s Lucy?” the detective and the journalist jointly asked.

  “Lucy Agostino!” Alberta told them. “The dead lady on my lawn!”

  Jinx and Kichiro were both stunned to find out that the corpse had a name, and one that Alberta knew.

  “You know her?” the detective and Jinx asked, again in unison.

  “Of course I know her,” Alberta replied. “I never liked her, but I knew her all the same.”

  There was no reason that Jinx should be surprised by this revelation since there were decades of her grandmother’s life that were a mystery to her. She hardly knew anything about her childhood, her early married life, and nothing at all during the years she was involuntarily sequestered in Florida. Still, this announcement that her grandmother and the dead woman were somehow linked was spooky. Journalistic instinct faded and Jinx was overwhelmed with the feeling that she would rather be sitting at the kitchen table with her grandmother eating Nutella-filled croissants, petting Lola, and gossiping rather than standing outside in the morning sunshine discussing her grandmother’s relationship with the recently deceased Lucy Agostino. Contrary to her pronouncement, Jinx was still more granddaughter than reporter.

  “Seriously, Gram,” Jinx began. “You know . . . I mean, you knew this woman?”

  * * *

  Glancing at Lucy’s inanimate body, Alberta was overcome with a flood of memories. And even though she was deeply saddened to see someone she once knew dead, none of the memories were pleasant.

  There was a memory of Lucy pushing seven-year-old Alberta off the seesaw on the playground at St. Ann’s elementary school and Alberta screaming when she broke her arm. Then Lucy pointing her finger at Alberta, laughing wildly and encouraging a group of girls to do the same because Alberta had been unlucky enough to wake up with a cluster of ugly pimples on her nose the day of the Immaculate Conception High School Junior Prom. And the flashbacks concluded with a final picture of Lucy standing in front of Alberta and her husband, Sammy, telling them both that she was sorry their picture in the local paper announcing their wedding made Alberta look so fat. No one would argue that Lucy Agostino had been a thorn in Alberta’s side her entire life, especially not Alberta. And no one, especially Alberta, would also argue that after all the years of being her nemesis it wasn’t ironic she should wind up dead on Alberta’s property. Karma, like Lucy, really was a bitch.

  “I knew Lucy almost my whole life,” Alberta confirmed. Then she pointed at the man walking toward them and said, “And Dio mio! So did he.”

  “Chief!” Kichiro cried. “Thank God.”

  “Looks like we got ourselves a little reunion,” Vinny announced.

  “Vinny D’Angelo?” Alberta said, dumbfounded. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  “Alberta Scaglione, I’m disappointed in you,” he said. “Don’t you recognize your own chief of police?”

  “Chief of police?” Alberta questioned. “You?”

  “Don’t act so surprised,” he said. “People change.”

  Still confused, Alberta replied, “True, but I never imagined you would follow in your father’s footsteps.”

  Smiling wistfully, Vinny said, “Sometimes a kid doesn’t have a choice.”

  Although Vinny D’Angelo came from a long line of blue bloods and was Tranquility’s chief of police, whose jurisdiction included several of the neighboring small towns in the county, it was not his first career choice. It unfortunately was the only realistic one.

  At six feet four and built like a linebacker, Vinny looked like someone who would be a natural-born protector, but he was actually a natural-born voyeur and preferred to hang out in the shadows. He was more adept at watching events unfold than participating in them, and as a young man had wanted to become a writer. Unable to afford the college tuition needed to fulfill his d
ream, Vinny reluctantly accepted the path his father, his grandfather, two of his uncles, and even a female cousin had taken before him, and became a cop. Surprisingly, it was a decent fit.

  As a cop in a small town, most of the time he and his small ten-person police force simply watched what was going on around them or listened to eyewitness accounts of petty wrongdoings and misdemeanors. Rarely did Vinny have to participate in the action, and that suited him just fine. Less real police interaction gave him more time to reflect.

  Early on as a rookie cop he started to keep a journal, which he still maintained on a daily basis. Some entries were a mere cataloging of events, others were his personal reflections on crimes and criminals, both the interesting and the mundane, that went well beyond the department-sanctioned accounts he’d been required to submit. It had always been his hope that he would turn the long-running record of what he’d witnessed over the course of nearly four decades on the force into a novel when he retired. Until then he would continue to deal with the current police matters, and the first on the list involved Tranquility’s newest resident.

  “I heard you moved into Carmela’s old place,” Vinny stated. “Such a beautiful house.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you knew my aunt owned all this, being the man in charge and all,” Alberta said. “But I’m still in a bit of shock that it’s mine now. Or that you’re standing in my backyard.”