by Harper Lin
“Lila is going to love this!” Meg boasted, licking her fingers.
“And I love you. Thanks for the help.” Amelia kissed her daughter’s head.
“Save one for Adam,” Meg insisted, which Amelia obliged, putting one away in a special plastic bag separate from the rest she’d take to work tomorrow.
Her children were so good. What she had ever done to deserve the two greatest blessings of her life, Amelia didn’t know. But she thanked God for it every day.
Chapter Two
Food Truck Alley, as it was affectionately known in the city of Gary, had become Amelia’s home away from home. Over the past several months, her list of friends had grown as much as her business.
Len from Charming Wok, who made incredible egg rolls, knew exactly what Amelia meant when she praised the customers who paid in change.
Henrietta from Heavenly Soul Food treated both Amelia and Lila to a heaping helping of her red beans and rice and, like Amelia, had also put in several calls to the city to get them to manage the grass and trim the trees and shrubs where the trucks were parked.
Connie from That’s Amore Pizza collected the leftovers from several of the trucks every Thursday and took them to her church to donate to their soup kitchen.
Then there was Gavin, the Philly Cheese Steak guy and Amelia’s neighbor to the left, who encouraged building businesses together by sending his customers to The Pink Cupcake for dessert.
After having lunch with Gavin a couple months ago, Amelia felt a little awkward when he came around.
It was like a high school football star suddenly noticing the bookworm girl in study hall. Why? What was the angle? Amelia knew it was wrong to assume Gavin had an angle, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t see herself the way he saw her. Plus, this was her job. She had paid for this space on Food Truck Alley with her own hard-earned cash. She wasn’t going to jeopardize it for a pretty face.
Lila, on the other hand, had no problem gossiping with the handsome Philadelphia native. Today was no different. But the news he shared sure was.
“Did you guys hear about the murder yesterday?” He stood outside the order window, leaning casually against the truck while sipping his coffee. Every day after the morning mayhem, but before the lunchtime lunacy, Gavin would stop by.
“Murder?” Lila asked, looking over her shoulder at Amelia, who was busy prepping the area for the next round of cupcakes to keep the lunchtime crowd happy.
“Yeah. At the No-Tell Motel over on Wolf Road.”
“Murder?” Amelia looked up. “I thought it was a suicide!”
Both Lila and Gavin looked at Amelia with their eyebrows pinched together in the middle.
“Dan was supposed to come by last night, but he couldn’t because he was stuck at the No-Tell Motel.” She looked toward Gavin as she spoke. “He said it looked like a suicide. But he did sound unsure.”
Amelia stepped closer to the window.
Gavin pulled out the Gary local newspaper. There it was as front-page news: “Prominent Los Angeles reporter found dead in motel. Police suspect foul play.”
“They said the guy was in town looking into a cold case from about ten years ago.” Gavin scratched his perfectly square jaw. “Some kid was murdered.”
Lila gasped. “I remember it. That little boy who was found dead at Rochester Playground? He’d been beaten and strangled and dumped there. That was a heartbreaking story.”
Amelia took the paper and began to read the details. David Scranton was the reporter’s name. He had a long list of credentials, including bylines in The New York Times, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, The Economist, and a handful of other journals.
“Weird,” she mumbled.
“What’s weird?” Lila turned.
“That little boy—Dwight was his last name, if I remember right.” Amelia looked up at Lila. “He was beaten but died from strangulation. This says David Scranton was strangled, too. But he had cuts on his wrists.”
“Yikes,” Lila whispered. “That is weird. I wonder what Dan’s opinion is.”
“Who is Dan?” Gavin asked.
Amelia snapped out of her daze and shook her head.
“Detective Dan Walishovsky. Close friend of mine.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say boyfriend. She was in her forties, after all. Man-friend sounded like some kind of prehistoric animal or a creature from a horror movie. She looked at Gavin, who she suspected caught her meaning but didn’t seem to be bothered by it. That bothered Amelia.
“Well, I’ve got to get back to work.” Gavin smiled up at Lila.
“Don’t work too hard, Gavin.” She waved and turned her back.
“I promise,” he replied. “See you later, Amelia.”
Amelia nodded and waved.
“What is the matter with you? Why are you so rude to him?” Lila teased her.
“Was I rude? I don’t know, Lila. He’s nice and good-looking, but there just isn’t that spark.”
“Not like there is with Dan?”
Amelia couldn’t control the smile that crept over her face.
“Never mind, Amelia. No need to answer. Your red cheeks say everything.”
The women continued to prepare for the midday rush even though a blanket of dark clouds started to roll in. It would probably put a dent in the number of patrons visiting Food Truck Alley that afternoon.
Amelia was thankful for that. She was distracted.
She recalled the sad story of the case David Scranton was researching. The details were hazy, but in a nutshell, that little boy was only six and had been strangled and left in the dirt at the playground. Thankfully, he was discovered in the early hours by the city garbagemen long before anyone showed up at the park to play. Many people blamed the mother, but no one was ever caught.
The whole situation reminded her of the panic California residents experienced in the 1970s when Richard Ramirez—The Night Stalker—was on the loose. Girls with long hair cut their hair short because some of his victims had long hair. Two homes he had broken into were beige, so anyone who had a beige or brown or off-white house gave their homes a new face just to deter him from singling them out. People were reporting anything that appeared out of the ordinary, and any stranger driving or walking down the street soon had a squad car or two pulling up behind them and officers stepping out of their cars, hands on their pistols just in case.
The town of Gary had experienced that fear, too. But it was like a desperate whisper, not the scream of the California residents in the ’70s. Since only one child had died and there were no other missing children one week, two weeks, a month, three months later, it was decided the mother had something to do with it. The story went from a headline to a tiny paragraph buried on the blotter page with Travis Foggarty being fined for shooting a BB gun at a stop sign and an unseen vandal throwing a rock through a window at the high school.
Nothing ever came of the case. That little boy was buried, and with him went his story. Now, a decade later, a reporter with a long line of credentials had decided to look into it, and he turned up dead, too.
Lila was right. Amelia did want to talk to Dan about the story and see what she could find out. But she knew he wouldn’t say too much. He couldn’t. It would go against his nature of doing things by the books. But if she collected her own arsenal of facts and asked him what he thought, she might be able to piece something together.
As predicted, a steady downpour of rain that decided it wanted to remain all afternoon hampered the flow of customers. However, even with this setback, The Pink Cupcake managed to end the day over two hundred dollars in the black.
While driving home, she decided to stop at the grocery store to pick up the ingredients she thought would make a good chili for the Tex-Mex muffins.
However, she couldn’t get out of her mind the story of the reporter and that little boy from ten years ago.
As she got back in the car and headed home, she let herself mull over the tragedy and why it bothered her.
> It was simple: Adam and Meg. They were six and four years old when it happened. Adam had been the same age as that boy. Her children had grown into such beautiful individuals. But that boy’s mother would never get to experience that.
It was a pain Amelia didn’t want to imagine. She couldn’t imagine it, not really, since her children were at home, safe and sound, young adults who were smart enough not to take candy from a stranger or open the door for someone they didn’t know. Still, the sad story made her push the accelerator down further on The Pink Cupcake truck just to get home a few minutes faster.
When she walked in the door at 6:30 as she did almost every day, she felt a wave of relief when the first sound she heard was her little angels arguing like an elderly couple.
“I told you to set it over there!” Adam scolded Meg.
“What difference does it make if it’s here or there?”
“It makes all the difference in the world. But you are just too much of a simpleton to know that.”
“Aren’t you a big shot. A simpleton. How long you been waiting to slip that funny word into a conversation?” Meg’s sarcasm was a trait she inherited from her mother.
“Hello? Is this the most happy and joyful home of Adam and Meg O’Malley?”
“Hi, Mom,” the kids replied in unison.
“What’s going on?” she asked while carefully tiptoeing into the kitchen.
“Meg’s just screwing everything up,” Adam said matter-of-factly as he scooped up his schoolbooks and headed toward his room in the basement.
“He’s griping because I set the phone over on the counter instead of on the table, and he wanted to snatch it up in case Amy called. As if I don’t know they’ve got the hots for each other already.”
“Okay, okay,” Amelia said, setting her purse and a few leftover cupcakes on the table. “That’s enough.”
She shook her head then walked up to Adam and mussed his hair.
“Did you do your homework?”
“Yeah.” He rolled his eyes.
“Did you guys make sandwiches for yourselves? I promise to go to the store and get real groceries this weekend.”
“Yes, and Adam ate all the dill pickles, as usual.” Meg snitched as she turned and headed upstairs to her room.
“You say that like it’s a surprise.” Amelia unpacked the grocery bag with ingredients to make chili.
“I really need to get my own apartment.” Adam sighed as he headed down into the basement.
“You said it, not me,” Amelia teased him as she went about getting her giant soup pot from underneath the counter.
As the ground beef browned in a pan and the garlic and onions simmered in the bottom of the soup pot, Amelia set up her laptop on the kitchen table and typed in the name Dwight, the word murder, and the city of Gary.
There it was. The same article she had read ten years ago along with the picture of the victim. Preston Dwight. He was six years old, smiling at the camera while holding what looked like a teddy bear in one hand and a little train engine in the other. His hair was going in several directions as if he’d just woken from a nap.
Amelia remembered when Adam would wake up from his naps, his eyes fresh and his hair wild, as if bats had nested in it while he slept. He’d run back to whatever project he’d been working on before he had been forced to lie down, and the adventures would begin. His little hands would push cars and airplanes to their imaginary destinations. Brilliant battles would be fought between plastic army soldiers. The good guys always won. The bad guys always went to jail.
The sad story of Preston Dwight gripped her heart, and she couldn’t help the tears that surfaced in her eyes.
“What a shame,” she muttered. Swallowing hard, she shook off the hat of mother and slipped into the cap of sleuth.
She scrolled through the rest of the article, noting three valuable bits of information. The mother, Starla-Ann Dwight, the baby’s father, Kyle Spoon, and the boyfriend, Timothy Casey. All were considered persons of interest, but no arrests were ever made. She quickly wrote the names down in a notebook.
There was a listing for an S. Dwight. The other two names were not listed, but that didn’t mean anything. Lots of people were unlisted. Amelia herself was unlisted.
“Well, it’s as good a place to start as any.”
Amelia went back to the beef sizzling in the pan, lifted it, and drained off the excess fat. She’d have three dozen Tex-Mex muffins to unleash on her customers tomorrow. And then a quick trip to the home of Starla-Ann Dwight.
Chapter Three
Brookhaven was a neighborhood in the periphery of downtown Gary. It was like the corner of a yard where the trash cans were kept. There was very little grass. Passersby would mostly see broken glass, filthy newspapers, or plastic bags lying around that had escaped the trash man’s compactor. The place was dirty and secluded, and most people avoided it if they could help it.
Amelia looked at the map on her phone, which was attached to the dashboard. If she went up two more blocks, she should see Combs Street, where she needed to take a left. It was marked with several pairs of shoes hanging from the telephone wires.
As she made the turn, she found it difficult to tell which houses were actually being lived in and which ones might be abandoned. Metal bars were on most of the windows. Others were covered with plywood. There was a scattering of homes that displayed their owner’s care with flowers and wind socks and colorful flags that read “Welcome” or “God Bless America.”
The majority of homes were sad, run-down structures that still held the ghosts of their majesty and beauty, like the architectural details of a round attic window or a brick chimney.
Even if they wanted to be lovely homes again, the effort would be null as long as the owners left hundreds of neon-colored children’s toys dumped carelessly around the sparse patches of grass, or worn-out sofas positioned on the front porches as they did now.
A few characters who dared venture from their homes watched Amelia as she slowly drove past. While she’d left the pink truck at home, the sedan she drove was an unfamiliar car to them, so she was on their radar now.
One man in a sleeveless flannel shirt, baggy sweatpants, and no shoes stood on the edge of his porch steps, a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other, studying her with a cold stare.
Amelia could feel herself sweating. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come here alone. She had followed her heart, but what if this was dangerous? Nobody even knew she was here.
Finally, she rolled up to the address she had been trying to find and let out a sigh of relief. It was just a plain bungalow. There were black bars on the windows, but Amelia was still able to see curtains being parted then quickly falling back into place.
She climbed out of the car, slinging her purse onto one arm, trying to act as if she were just visiting an old friend, but she felt she looked more like a nervous ten-year-old stepping onto a stage to recite five words for the school Christmas pageant.
Before she could knock on the screen door, the heavy inside door was yanked open, and a scratchy female voice spat, “Can I help you?”
Amelia widened her eyes innocently as she carefully approached the screen door. Calling it a screen door was really open to interpretation since the screen hung lazily from the corner, easily letting in any winged devils it was designed to keep out. The bottom of the metal frame was bent outward as if it had been kicked.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m looking for Starla-Ann Dwight?”
“What for?”
Clearing her throat, Amelia wasn’t sure what to say next. What did she want to speak to this woman for? What business was it of hers to ask her about what was probably the most horrific experience of her life?
“I don’t know,” Amelia confessed. “My name is Amelia Harley. I heard about your son’s death being looked into, and I thought I might be able to help. I think I made a mistake,” Amelia grumbled. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
Q
uickly, she turned and took a step toward her car.
The broken screen door scratched open.
“Hold on,” the woman said, leaning out the opened door.
She looked exactly like her voice sounded: a bleached blonde with jet-black roots and deeply wrinkled skin from too many tanning sessions. She looked out the door at Amelia. Her brown eyes were devoid of eyelashes, and her eyebrows had been plucked into near nonexistence. She wore a baggy men’s T-shirt and, despite the cooler temperature, spandex shorts that exposed her wrinkly knees. “Did that reporter send you? He said he was going to come by.”
Amelia blinked in surprise.
“You mean David Scranton?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He stopped by here last week and said he was coming back. That he saw a lot of flaws with Preston’s investigation.”
“No. I’m not with him,” Amelia sputtered. “I guess you hadn’t heard, but he was found dead in his motel room.”
The news barely caused the woman to blink.
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Licking her lips, she surveyed her estate then held the screen door open wider for Amelia to enter.
“Why not?” Amelia asked.
“Because I know someone who wouldn’t want the case to be reopened. Come in.”
Amelia gave an awkward grin and stepped into the house. It smelled of many years of cigarette smoke, as did the woman who held the door for her.
“Starla-Ann died about three years ago.” The woman walked past Amelia to a worn-out sofa and grabbed a pack of Marlboros and a hot-pink lighter. “I’m her sister, Sandra.”
“I’m sorry.” Amelia stepped to the sofa and took a seat on the edge. Sandra sat in a swiveling La-Z-Boy, kicked back, and crossed her legs. She shrugged at Amelia’s condolences.
“It doesn’t matter.” She spoke with the cigarette between her lips. “She died the day they found Preston. It just took a little longer.”
“Sandra, do you have an opinion on what happened? I know what the newspapers said. I watched the reports on the news. But what do you think?”
