HELL'S HALF ACRE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 2)

by JACKIE ELLIOTT

  Reluctantly, Jim had agreed.

  Andi rubbed at the scar on her thigh. A little over a year ago, a very dangerous man had shot her. She had been pursuing a story. It was her job, and she was bloody good at it, she knew that. But she was also impulsive (undisciplined, Jim called it) and inclined to cut corners. These bad habits, combined with terrible judgment when it came to men, had contributed to the loss of a glittering career at a national news outlet the year before. Andi had taken the job at the Coffin Cove Gazette — the only opportunity offered to her — and expected to be filing dull reports about city council meetings and garage sales for the struggling local paper. Coffin Cove was an isolated fishing town with a dwindling population on the east side of Vancouver Island and barely attracted enough tourists to keep the only motel booked through summer. The rest of the island, though, was a Mecca for surfers, fishermen and outdoor enthusiasts.

  The run-down town sullenly refused to go bankrupt and be swallowed up into the suburbs of Nanaimo, the nearest big city. Every year, the pulp mill located at one end of the Cove, combined with a handful of just-viable businesses and a crumbling residential infrastructure, scraped together enough tax dollars for another year.

  When Andi first arrived, she couldn’t understand why Coffin Cove wasn’t overrun by developers, with all the cheap real estate available in the coastal town. But there was only one road in and out. There were few amenities, and frankly, the locals weren’t that friendly. They had regarded Andi with suspicion and sometimes downright hostility. She could attribute some of that reaction to her chosen career. People these days didn’t trust the media. But it was more than that. In some ways, Coffin Cove had closed itself off from the world. The inhabitants complained about the lack of stores, cell phone coverage, not enough work, and decreasing numbers of children keeping the elementary school open. But should an outsider point out deficiencies, the locals would bridle with indignation and mutter about the “good ol’ days” and “damn blow-ins”.

  People reluctantly began to accept Andi after she had helped uncover the truth behind the death of a local teenager. Years ago, the drowned body of Sarah McIntosh, the daughter of a local businessman, had washed up on the beach. Andi had made it her business to solve the mystery, even going against the advice of her boss.

  Andi’s story had started out as a clash between local fishermen and environmentalists and had ended up as a murder investigation. She had rediscovered her old tenacity as a journalist after being fired, and her relentless digging uncovered a link between this murder and a twenty-five-year-old missing persons mystery. Andi’s persistence had been rewarded by getting shot by the prime suspect.

  “Your own goddam fault!” Jim had shouted at her, while she was lying in the hospital. “All this haywire bullshit got you fired once, and this time you nearly died!”

  He had calmed down, and Andi knew that this man who had given her a chance and was now her friend was shaken by the events.

  But his words hit home, and for months her confidence had been in pieces. Jim had only allowed her to cover local events when she first started back at work, and now she was beginning to think her old instinct for a good story might never return. As the nightmares lessened, worries about her future surfaced, and she often lay awake obsessing over the same questions. Was she still a good journalist? Had she ever been? And what was next? Just growing old and lonely in a tiny rented apartment writing fluff pieces?

  Andi touched her scar again, remembering how difficult the last months had been.

  “ANDI!” Someone thumped at the door.

  She jumped and winced.

  “Andi? Are you in there? Your rent is late again!”

  Andi lay still with her eyes closed, hoping that Walter would go away. As she listened for his retreating footsteps, her cell phone trilled from somewhere under the heap of clothes. She dug around, forgetting her hangover for a moment.

  Work.

  “Shit.” Andi turned off the cell phone and slumped back on the bed.

  “Andi, I know you’re in there.”

  “Walter, I’m really sorry, I’m sick,” Andi called out. Well, she felt like crap, so it wasn’t a lie. “I promise I’ll bring you the rent later today.”

  Silence.

  She heard Walter’s steps echoing away.

  Andi heaved herself into an upright position. She needed money, she needed to get out of this apartment, and the only way to do either of those things was to get back to work. Real work. And in the last few weeks, she’d finally got the whiff of a story. Well, it might develop into a story, Andi wasn’t sure yet, but it looked intriguing. She’d made a promise to help someone. Ricky Havers, the mayor’s forty-two-year-old son, had gone missing. The mystery had fuelled the Coffin Cove gossip factory, not least because Ricky owned the town’s first and only weed emporium, but so far there were no clues at all. Andi was investigating every angle possible, but the fact was, one day Ricky was at work and the next he was gone. There was no sign of a struggle and nothing missing from the store, not even cash. The local RCMP had conducted a few half-hearted searches, not willing to invest resources because Ricky was a grown man and free to vanish if he wanted to.

  It wasn’t until Dennis and Sandra Havers, his parents, exerted some family influence over a senior member of the RCMP, that they dispatched Andi’s old friend, Inspector Andrew Vega, to Coffin Cove to “oversee” a thorough investigation. He too found nothing. Ricky Havers was gone, and the only thing to do was wait until he turned up.

  Dead or alive.

  Andi was now convinced of two things. First, Ricky’s plight involved foul play. Second, the new mayor, Jade Thompson, who’d unseated Dennis Havers a few months after his son’s disappearance, knew more about Ricky than she was letting on.

  Andi had no proof of this. She was relying on a few small clues and her gut instinct. Andrew Vega and Jim Peters had been quick to point this out. Usually that wouldn’t have stopped her. But the problem was, she was worried her gut instinct was not reliable. Not at the moment, anyway.

  There was one person who thought Andi could solve the mystery, though, and that was Sandra Havers, Ricky’s distraught mother. Andi had given her word she’d continue investigating Ricky’s disappearance, especially when Sandra handed her some intriguing information. So now, despite her horrible night, Andi had made a promise and now she needed to get out of bed and get on with her job.

  * * *

  The Coffin Cove Gazette had moved from a tiny run-down office on the outskirts of town to a “suite of spacious modern work spaces overlooking the ocean”. At least, that’s how the landlord had advertised it, and although Jim Peters had discovered that the roof leaked when it rained hard, and only one wall heater worked properly, at least he had his own space now. And the new office, updated computer equipment and stylish office furniture signified an upturn in business.

  Jim Peters had inherited the Gazette from his father. An anomaly in Coffin Cove back in the seventies, he’d always had wanted to be in the newspaper business. Instead of heading to the mill or a fishing boat when he left school, he went to university and got a degree in journalism. He came back to Coffin Cove to work with his father, but his new wife disliked Coffin Cove and left Jim alone to raise their young son. Paul went off the rails when he was a teenager, and when he left home, Jim left too. For a couple of decades he worked for national and international media organizations, reporting the news from around the globe. He returned to Coffin Cove when it was apparent that both the Gazette and his father were in ailing health.

  Jim, a small, slender man, leaned back in his office chair, clasping and unclasping his fingers, as he always did when he was thinking.

  The Gazette had undoubtedly profited from last summer’s tragedy. The murder of a prominent activist, the uncovering of a decades-old murder of a local young woman, all against the backdrop of a conflict between the working men of Coffin Cove’s traditional resource industry and environmental protestors . . . Well, if that
wasn’t a great story, Jim didn’t know what was.

  Andi had investigated and written a series of captivating articles that put the independent Gazette on the map and earned both Jim and the paper a good payday. Since then, Jim had shaken off numerous offers to buy the business from regional media organizations. He had launched an online version of the paper and even had a social media strategy.

  All was good from that point of view, but great stories came at a cost — and in this case, two people were dead. The inhabitants of Coffin Cove had been shaken by the events, and Jim knew that Andi had suffered over the last year. He had to push her to turn in an article a week.

  He sighed. Andi was talented. But she’d become obsessed by the disappearance of a local man a few months before.

  Jim trusted Andi’s nose for a story when she was functioning at full capacity. But he was worried about her recent investigations. Jim hadn’t intended to snoop — at least that’s what he told himself when he was picking the lock on Andi’s desk drawer. Careful not to disturb the contents, he flicked through the hanging files until he came to one marked “Havers” and another labelled “Thompson”. He pulled them both out and found Andi’s usual thorough work. The Havers file contained archived articles, yearbook photographs and scribbled notes about the Havers family and Dennis’s tenure as mayor. All as Jim expected. Andi wrote several articles about Dennis during his recent re-election bid, and he expected her to do her homework. The Thompson file was considerably thinner. Andi was right about one thing, Jim thought: Jade Thompson was a bit of an enigma.

  Jim leaned back in the chair again.

  There was nothing here to link Ricky Havers with Jade Thompson. They’d attended the same school in Coffin Cove, but Ricky was a few years older than Jade. She’d been a serious-looking, plain little thing with big round glasses. In his day, Jim thought, they’d have called her a swot. After graduation, she’d left Coffin Cove and gone to university on the mainland. After that, she’d worked her way up the corporate ladder in a big property development company. Ricky, on the other hand, was a jock. He’d played football and excelled at baseball. There was even one article about a national team scout inviting Ricky to a summer baseball camp for rising stars. It hadn’t come to anything. Ricky never left Coffin Cove, and to all accounts, he’d only left his parents’ basement a few months before he disappeared. Ricky hadn’t held down a job since he’d left school. Dennis Havers had been exasperated by his only son and didn’t make a secret of it, Jim recalled. Ricky was lazy, entitled and did little except smoke dope all day long. The contrast between smart, hard-working Jade Thompson and Ricky Havers couldn’t have been starker.

  So why was Andi so convinced?

  When Ricky went missing, he was the proprietor of the Smoke Room, the first and only legal marijuana store in Coffin Cove. Dennis had bankrolled the whole venture, realizing maybe the only chance he had of ejecting his adult son from the basement was to hand him ready-made financial independence. And what better business for Ricky Havers than a store selling his beloved marijuana?

  Dennis’s decision attracted controversy. The Smoke Room was located in the run-down, deserted strip mall near the Coffin Cove trailer park. Dennis owned the strip mall, and while everyone agreed the property was an eyesore and badly in need of upgrading, there were rumblings of dissent in the community when Dennis proposed opening a legal weed store.

  Dennis pushed it through the planning committee, despite a lengthy petition from disgruntled nearby residents. One name that caught Jim’s eye in Andi’s notes was Summer Thompson. Andi had underlined it, and in the margins, written a date. Jim thumbed through the file. He saw the date referenced and an interview between Andi, Summer and Jade Thompson.

  Jim vaguely remembered Andi wanting to interview Summer. He checked the date again. It was a few days before Ricky went missing. He shrugged. Probably Andi wanted to get a few comments on record about the Smoke Room. Summer Thompson was the organizer of the petition opposing the store. The trailer park tenants were worried the store would attract customers looking for more than weed. Drug dealers on the island had switched to opioids almost immediately after recreational marijuana became legal.

  Jim smiled ruefully. The petitioners were probably right. It was likely Ricky Havers would dabble in a more lucrative, illegal inventory, along with the government-sanctioned weed, oil and edibles. When Ricky went missing, the most popular theory was that he’d encroached on someone’s territory. Someone who didn’t resolve their business differences around a conference table.

  Andi hadn’t found a shred of evidence to connect Jade Thompson with Ricky Havers, let alone his disappearance. Jim read through her interview notes. All she had were a series of coincidences. Jade had apparently reacted “in fear” when she heard Ricky’s name. She had been evasive when Andi questioned her about Ricky and the Smoke Room. Summer Thompson clearly disliked Dennis Havers, and not just because of the Smoke Room. She had hinted at Dennis’s nefarious past. All Andi had was her intuition, but was it sheer coincidence that Ricky disappeared a few days after Jade appeared in town?

  Jim wondered if Andi was still traumatized. A gut feeling for a story was one thing, but Andi was imagining bogeymen and conspiracies. It wasn’t like her. One sentence in her notes stood out to Jim: “Summer Thompson is not what she seems.” Andi sounded like one of those crazy bloggers, not a serious investigative journalist.

  The thing was, Coffin Cove did have a questionable history. It was an isolated town, accessible only by one potholed road or by boat. The location was perfect for anyone wanting to drop off the grid. From the coal mining days to the boom years of fishing, Coffin Cove had always attracted the shadiest characters. Nobody asked questions, and they got paid in cash. Draft-dodgers assimilated into the population in the sixties, and as far back as Prohibition, Coffin Cove had been a favourite with smugglers and drug dealers.

  Newcomers were viewed with suspicion. Despite having a very healthy gossip network, residents clammed up around people they didn’t know. There was a mistrust of any kind of authority — police, the Canada Revenue Agency, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

  Jim could see how Andi had got caught up in Coffin Cove’s outlaw mythology. Andi was getting carried away with the thought of criminal masterminds around every corner. The reality was that most people in Coffin Cove were trying to scrape a living and were working for cash under the table. The worst crimes committed here were undeclared income and unpaid payroll tax, Jim thought.

  That was why the new mayor was making so many waves. Her plans to revitalize Coffin Cove’s economy were not being met with enthusiasm from everyone. With new businesses, provincial grants and municipal improvements came increased regulations, property taxes and closer scrutiny of those operating in the grey area of legality.

  Jade Thompson was a disrupter. And disruption, in this small community, was not popular.

  Jim gathered up all Andi’s paperwork and replaced the files in her desk drawer. As he ran his fingers over the file hangers in Andi’s drawers, he noticed an oversized manila envelope jammed at the back. He pulled it out. It had been hand-delivered to Andi and had her apartment address at the Fat Chicken scrawled on the front. Jim frowned. That was strange. Andi usually had her mail delivered to the office. Knowing he was now really invading Andi’s privacy, Jim shook out the papers from the envelope. Then he wished he hadn’t.

  “Damn it, Andi,” he said out loud. Sometimes Andi operated in the grey area too. This was one of those times. The papers were from the British Columbia Business and Incorporation Registry. It took Jim less than a few seconds to see Andi had got a search from the Transparency Registry of Private Companies.

  The provincial government required private companies to register, among other things, the names of individuals who had significant interest in their businesses. Someone had sent Andi the results of a search on Dennis Havers.

  Jim groaned. There was no way Andi had obtained this legally. Only authorized
representatives of certain agencies could get this information.

  He stuffed the documents back in the envelope, resisting his journalistic curiosity to examine them. He couldn’t help noticing one company name because Andi had marked it with a bold question mark. Abandoning his misgivings, Jim had a quick peek. He didn’t recognize the business, “Knights Development Ltd”, but the listed shareholders were familiar. Apart from Dennis Havers, there were three names: Daniel Ellis, Wayne Dagg and Art Whilley. Jim had never heard of Daniel Ellis, although there was an Ellis family in Coffin Cove. Wayne Dagg was Lee’s older brother. Lee Dagg was a local electrician, but Wayne had left Coffin Cove long ago. Jim stared at the last name. He should know it, he thought. Was it an old story his father had worked on? He couldn’t think. He shoved the envelope back into the desk and locked it.

  Jim could see no connection with the Ricky Havers case. But Andi was digging deep and taking risks.

  Jim was angry. Andi knew better than to break the law for a story. She’d pushed boundaries before, and it had cost her dearly, but she hadn’t crossed the line at the Gazette until now.

  His first impulse was to confront her and demand an explanation. Fortunately, his anger dissipated as quickly as it had come. He cared about Andi and admired her talent. He was also touched that she had turned down other opportunities to stay with the Gazette after her articles garnered so much attention. He knew Andi was struggling, but maybe he hadn’t realized how bad it was. Andi’s confidence had taken a beating before she came to Coffin Cove. She’d pushed herself to get to the truth of an old murder, and in the process had been shot. Now she was trying to deal with the aftermath by throwing herself into another investigation — even if there was nothing to uncover.

  Andi’s preoccupation with Ricky Havers and the Thompsons wasn’t healthy, Jim concluded. It needed to stop for her own benefit.