When she handed him back the ring, he thought his heart might stop.
Sad hearts still keep pumping, he learned. A broken heart didn’t even get him a few days off work—he had to keep moving, working, building—and it was then that he realized how easy it was to use the pain of others to mask his own.
He’d worked hard, he bought the land, and he had a plan.
Nothing was going to deter him from the specificity of his needs. Not anymore.
“Well,” his dad started, rocking back on his heels. “Nice seeing you then.”
Derek wondered if his dad was even aware of how little they ever really said to each other. Pound for pound, how much did they know about each other now? They were strangers who shared DNA. They talked more about the weather than their feelings.
“You can call next time. Set up a time.” Derek scratched at his chin. “No need to be my alarm clock, even though I’ll always have eggs and coffee for you.” He meant it; it was true and honest. He loved his dad and wanted him to know him, wanted that relationship, wanted to be seen. The biggest pain knew that Timothy Shelton wasn’t going to change.
“Thought you’d avoid or duck,” Timothy admitted, a glimpse of honesty and Derek was sufficiently shamed by assuming he didn’t have it in him.
“I haven’t been good about keeping in contact. I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll be better.”
Timothy grunted a vague acceptance and wandered back to his car with a wave behind his back. At least they both shared a genetic predisposition for running away from hard conversations. Derek waited until the car was out of sight before he took in another long view of the mountain in the distance and walked back to his trailer, already pushing the idea of the Love is Murder Social Club out of his memory entirely.
He was at work when the call came in on his cellphone. His phone was on the floor by accident, but he’d kept it close regardless, and while he was at the nurse’s station, typing up instructions for a patient, the incoming call said: Timothy. It was late and Derek was confused. He lowered his voice and ducked into an empty room.
His dad was calling him now?
“Hello?” he asked, worried that his dad was drunk or angry, or both.
But it wasn’t his dad’s voice on the other end of the receiver. It was a woman. She was timid and mumbling at first, “Hello. Hi, um…I’m sorry. I’m calling about your dad.”
“Wait, um…” Derek moved the phone away to check his caller-ID again and then he crossed his arms and waited for the inevitable news. Passed out, belligerent, spewing lies. “Is my dad there?” he asked. “Who are you?”
“I’m Maeve and I’m here at The Alibi where your dad was speaking…and he’s appeared to have had a heart attack. I was performing CPR. We called 911.”
“Is he responsive?” Derek asked and he moved back out to the nurse’s station and scribbled on a sheet of paper: my dad had a heart attack in pdx. “Is he currently awake and breathing? I’m a nurse.” He didn’t know why he’d said it—he wasn’t there and his occupation didn’t matter. The head nurse’s eyes widened and she motioned for him to head out. Quickly. Oh, how everyone in there knew how to handle every emergency but their own. Derek didn’t know where to go. The rest of the nurses on the floor pushed him toward the exit and handed him his keys and coat. They’d all been through something together that required more teamwork than most jobs required. He’d been hurried out of that Emergency Room without a word uttered, and Derek rushed out through the lobby of the ER toward the nurse’s parking lot. Once out of earshot, finally, he asked, “You’re where? Is that a bar? I’m on my way. Are the paramedics there? Put me on with them, please,” he said.
He sat in his car and waited. The girl’s voice trailed off and Derek leaned his head against the steering wheel. He thought of a poor bar patron’s night ending with giving a stranger CPR, and he hoped the moment wouldn’t traumatize her for long. Sometimes strangers showed up at the ER, accompanying a person they’ve helped—Derek hated turning the Good Samaritans away from continuing their journey, but laws prohibited strangers from learning intimate details of your medical histories for a reason.
Maeve, he committed to memory, as he waited for the paramedics to tell him where to go next. He made a mental note to try and find a way to tell her thank you—he knew the type and they needed and deserved thank yous—then he started his car and started to head north to Providence Hospital.
While his father laid unbreathing in the back of an ambulance.
Chapter Four
It was important to Maeve and her anxiety that she only have one drink before arriving at the Alibi Bar for the Love is Murder Social Club meet-up. Millie, however, had no such rule. She was bordering on full-on drunk by the time they wandered to the back of the little Tiki lounge and noticed the mixed-age group of women sitting in a semi-circle, holding glasses of wine and cocktails with fruit, talking in hushed voices with intense expressions.
There were a few men hovering at the periphery, but most of them seemed like put out husbands and boyfriends.
“You think that’s them?” Millie asked, pulling her purse up higher on her shoulder.
“I think that’s a decent guess,” Maeve responded, and moved toward the group with slow tentative steps, half-hoping someone would beckon them and welcome them to the evening and invite them to sit down. But the attendees paid no attention to the newcomers, and so Millie and Maeve settled for a table to the side—within hearing distance, but not within the circle itself, which seemed too difficult to penetrate.
The group was eclectic and, from their vantage point, the sisters people-watched with intention. A college-aged girl with a shaved head sat on the ground next to a group of younger looking co-eds. One was wearing a large pink hoodie from Lewis and Clark College, which Maeve only knew of for its famous alumn, Monica Lewinski. A few others sported short floral dresses and rose tattoos. Across from them was a group of thirty-somethings and older women, all fashionable, professional, and put together in a way Maeve felt was elusive in her own life.
After a few minutes of strained silence, Millie leaned in and loudly asked, “I want murder talk and I want it now, Maeve. I’m bored.”
A few people turned their heads and Millie waved half-heartedly, flashing a smile that assumed the entire world thought she was cute.
Someone said, not hearing what Millie called, in a friendly tone, “Oh, darlings. We’re having a meet-up over here, topics can get kind of not-safe-for-public—”
“She means,” another butted in without even looking over at the sisters, “that you might want to move a few tables away or you might get some blood and bondage with your booze.” That was Kristy, she learned.
“Blood and bondage with your booze,” Millie laughed inappropriately and tilted her head toward the table, slapping it loudly for effect. “That’s awesome.”
“And we say fuck a lot,” Kristy added with a shrug and stirred the ice around in her drink.
Maeve reached across the table and grabbed at her sister’s forearm, quieting the giggles as the ladies shifted to stare at them.
“Actually,” Maeve started, aware of how she felt catapulted right back into the eighth grade when the girls in math class started a rumor by passing notes that she stuffed her bra, snickering, staring and whispering; every junior high cliché ran true—it was hell, feeling out of place was hell, and she was now in hell.
Except she wasn’t.
These were her people.
She took a deep breath.
Maeve threw eye daggers at Millie as she came up for air and tried to speak again with confidence.
“Is this the Love is Murder Social Club?” she asked. “I’d read about it online—”
“I read about it online,” Millie said with a laugh on her voice. The joke lingered and a few of the attendees turned back to their side conversations, no longer interested.
“Can you go somewhere else?” Maeve replied and tilted her chin to the side to give her
sister a pointed glare. “Please?”
“You’re here for the meeting then?” a curvaceous redhead asked. She turned and shifted her body to look back and see the sisters fully. She extended her hand and smiled. “I’m Holly. Welcome. You can pull up a chair, here or here.” She motioned to the people around her and together the women parted their group and rearranged the chairs and enveloped Millie and Maeve, all elbows and drinks and sorrys and hellos.
“Your names?” a different woman asked.
Maeve recognized the woman immediately from the website. Gloria Hernandez was prettier in person, her dark hair down to her waist and parted in the middle, her bright blue eyes searching the sisters, mouth full and pinched. She assessed their motives with a cursory glance and pulled out her tablet, scrolling and scrolling.
“Did you RSVP?” Gloria said.
The hum of conversation paused and Maeve went red as she realized they’d just intruded upon something that required an actual RSVP. Like, they couldn’t just show up already drunk. Perfect.
“Oh, we thought—”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. You normally don’t,” Holly offered with a pat on Millie’s knee. Millie glanced at the hand, then the lady, and then back at Maeve with a clear-cut message: get that lady to cut that shit out and stop touching me.
Maeve rolled her eyes so only Millie could see and leaned around her sister to address the woman directly, “Thank you. We just found this on the internet.”
“That’s how most of us got started. A few people had a group on one message board then we combined with a true crime book club from Powell’s. Tonight is different because there’s a guest speaker. Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand and Millie and Maeve shook her hand in turn, nodding and saying, nice to meet you, too, in a small whisper.
“I’m Maeve. This is my drunk sister, Millie.”
Millie shrugged and chugged her mai tai.
“So, who is the guest speaker?” Millie asked.
Gloria smiled for the first time. She, too, shook Millie and Maeve’s hands, taking each hand with both of hers and bowing slightly. “Welcome. Welcome to our Social Club. How did you hear of us again?”
“My sister found your website. And someone put a flyer on Rosa Parks Avenue and, so, here we are.”
“Great. Well, here. Can you fill out this little card for us? It will help us keep track of your attendance and, well, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.”
Maeve glanced at the contact card. She read through the basics: How did you hear about us? How can we contact you? Are there any topics you’d like to discuss? And then, her favorite: What’s your favorite true crime moment/story/murder?
With a smile and a gleeful little jig, Maeve scrawled in her busy script, “Sodder Fire.” Her sister asked for suggestions. Then she waited, the nervousness in her belly giving way to something calm and unexpected.
Sometimes things just felt right.
Timothy Shelton.
Timothy Fucking Shelton.
There he was—in the flesh—in the room, with her, right now. At the bar, ten feet away. Timothy Shelton. The fangirling was a little out of control, but Maeve couldn’t help herself.
Millie looked bored and confused and she got up three times to get drinks—twice for herself, once for Maeve—but Maeve could not believe her luck and she was thrilled to have stumbled upon the little group, and be rewarded with the man who stopped the Woodstock Killer. The man who lost his daughter but saved his son from a grisly serial killer who terrorized Portland fifteen years ago. He was the biggest murder celebrity her city had to offer.
And he came bearing presents.
“We have two more that I hadn’t accounted for,” Gloria said as Timothy started to hand out signed paperback copies of his memoir, The End of a Killer.
“Well, I brought extras,” Timothy said with a charming and self-deprecating smile as Maeve greedily grabbed both hers and Millie’s copy and hugged them to her chest. Two signed copies of his book—a book she loathed to admit she already had dog-eared and shoved between other true crime books on her bookshelf. It was hard to read the mood of the room, Maeve thought, as she looked around at the women she barely knew, all as eager as she was to hear the story of the Woodstock Killer.
Millie was not firmly grasping the importance of meeting Mr. Shelton. In lore, his story was what first drew Maeve into a strange and tantalizing relationship with murder.
She was ten when the murders first happened.
That summer, a killer tormented SE Portland’s Woodstock neighborhood. The body count was up to seven. He targeted homes with babysitters and seemed uncatchable and haunting. The public pleaded for clues.
Then one night the Woodstock Killer attacked the Shelton family, killed a young girl, their babysitter, and was attacking the young boy when the father and mother arrived back home. It was an escalation of the murders from before where only the babysitter died, but he spared the kids.
But that night, Timothy and his wife came home early.
Shelton fought off the killer, stabbing him ferociously with a pair of gardening shears he had picked up in the basement—a weapon of opportunity for the frantic father whose life went from blissfully post-date with his lovely wife, to fending off a deranged madman in his own home.
As with all stories of murder, there were things that did not make sense or did not ring true to the public’s expectations, and so, with the ever-growing saga of the story, the murders stayed in the media for a long time.
Opinions—on message boards, in books, on talk shows, in podcasts, and commentary on tv reenactments—were all mixed. The conspiracies ranged from the parents hiring a fake Woodstock Killer to attack their children to weird connections to the occult.
The mom died of cancer a few years later and the dad wrote a memoir about his pain. It was an instant bestseller.
Maeve had, through the bulk of her childhood and teenage years, an inappropriate crush on the son who survived. He was older than she was by three years and spent the next few years of his life visible on every major media network. He was a pudgy little kid with a round face whose testimony was displayed via intricate sketches on the evening news since TV crews weren’t permitted inside the courtroom.
She wasn’t able to whisper all of this to Millie in the middle of The Alibi, however, and her sister kept rudely pulling out her phone to send a few texts to her friends while Timothy introduced himself to the group.
“Well, I’m surprised there’s still interest in this little story,” Timothy said to the group, as he dipped his head in admiration. Little story her ass. Timothy knew he was a true crime celebrity to those into that sort of thing, and clearly, they were all into that sort of thing. “My little girl, and of course, my late wife, would have been so proud to see how many lives they have touched since their passing.”
“I’m sure they would’ve picked staying alive,” Millie grumbled, and slumped back in her chair, out of drinks and patience for the topic that didn’t interest her. She had her story and now she wanted to go hit up a north east dive bar and make-out with an engineering student from the University of Portland.
Maeve wanted to hang on to Timothy Shelton’s every word and then possibly work up the nerve to ask him about his son. He was all she could think about. Where was he now? No one knew. And maybe no one was supposed to know, but if it wasn’t a secret then Maeve felt powerful being one of the few people who knew what the Woodstock Killer survivor was up to.
She was jittery with excitement, but she didn’t want to come across as too needy. It was her first night visiting the group and Gloria seemed focused on appearances, and she definitely wanted to be invited back.
Instead, she listened as Timothy told his version of the evening.
Everyone in the room knew he was skipping details.
“We came home from our date—”
He left out the details of his sex romp. Their date, the courts outed, was to a sex club. They hadn’t wanted anyone to
know that, at times, to spice up their sex life, they’d visited a nondescript house in Portland that hosted evenings of safe, consensual, exhibitionist style sex. No one at the Love is Murder Social Club believed his sanitized version—these were experts.
They’d read the case files.
Holly leaned forward and put a finger up, her ample cleavage the focal point in her low-cut blouse. Maeve thought the woman was beautiful in a non-traditional way; she was all curves and breasts and long red hair, and when she raised her hand to interject, everyone turned to look at her.
“Wait. Wait, Mr. Shelton,” Holly said. “We appreciate that you think we can skim over the tabloid fodder. And we don’t need details. Our question always leans to…who leaked it? That’s what we’ve always talked about,” she said, and the ladies nodded and hummed and clapped in agreement. “So, you went to a sex club. But no one knows who was the first to leak that to the press. And was it to discredit you? Why?”
Maeve was shocked.
Who were these people who could ask a man with a high profile such an intimate question? But Maeve understood instantly.
These women knew their murders.
They weren’t groupies, they were masters of the crime—they studied clues and poured over crime scene notes and talked to witnesses themselves, if possible. Maeve pieced together what they knew and what they wanted, and she was on the edge of her seat, humbled into silence by the steady barrage of questions that they tactfully, kindly, and with great charm, lobbed to Timothy.
How did you hire Ginny? What did you know about her boyfriend at the time? What made you come home early from your date?
With the signed copies of his book still on her lap, Maeve’s knee bounced with nervous anticipation as the women got under his skin and rattled his story. It was glorious to watch, if not a tad embarrassing. He’d been unprepared for their knowledge—unprepared for their mastery. He was an aging man with a story he’d protected for a decade and a half, and they were armchair detectives
Forgotten Obsessions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 1) Page 3
