by Elise Sax
“Is she still here?”
“The lady? Margaret Marshall. The meanest bitch in Goodnight. Although, she was always nice to me. Yes, she took a tumble, too, but she’s much worse for wear.”
“No. Not her. The girl. Oh my God, the girl.” I sat up too quickly, and I got dizzy. The coroner was going over the older woman, and the paramedics were getting ready to examine me, but there was no sign of the girl.
“What girl? The dead girl?” Amos asked, cocking his head to the side, as if I had lost all of my marbles during the fall. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was seeing things. I really didn’t want to be known as the crazy girl forever. Ditto the girl that spoke to dead people.
“No. Nobody. Nothing,” I murmured and lay back down.
It took them over two hours to tell me that I was fine and that Margaret Marshall had fallen to her death. They put Margaret in the back of the coroner’s vehicle, and Amos helped me into his SUV when I refused to go to the hospital.
“Holy crap, I have to get to a story,” I said, as he clicked my seat belt on for me.
“Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.”
“I’m fine.” I looked at my naked wrist. “Look at the time. I’m going to be late.”
“Where do you need to go? I’ll take you.”
“My car is back at the witches’ castle,” I said and slumped exhausted against the window. Amos started the car and drove it ever so slowly through the canyon.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? Just to get checked out? You might have a concussion.”
“Nah, I’ve had much worse falls than this.” That was a total lie. I just fell down the Grand Canyon and lived to tell. I should have been dead, and that had me freaked out. Amos stopped the car and took a blanket from the backseat and draped it over me.
“You’re in shock. Open the glove compartment.”
I did. Inside were two handguns and a flask. “You either want me to put myself out of my misery or take a nip.”
“I want you to take a big nip. It’ll help right your system.”
“Right my system,” I mumbled and took a big nip. Then, I took a bigger one. He was right about righting my system. The warmth of the booze ran through my body, fixing me up until I was almost back in my right mind and okay with the fact that I had almost died like poor Margaret.
And then there was the dead girl who had talked to me. Dead girl number two. That freaked me out, too.
I took another big nip.
“There you go,” Amos said. “You got some color back in your face, and your eyes aren’t doing that thing anymore.”
“They were doing a thing?”
“A little bit.”
“You know, I’ve seen the coroner twice in twenty-four hours. Old people are dropping like flies.”
“Welcome to my world,” Amos said, maneuvering around a large rock. The floor of the canyon was beautiful. Wild and lush with a river running through it.
“One heart attack, one flu, and one fell off a cliff. Three dead in two days,” I said.
“Stella died before that. About five days ago, I think.”
“Did the three have anything in common?”
“Yes. They lived in Goodnight. Here we are.”
We had finally arrived at the paved road. Amos took a sharp left and drove like a maniac back to Jenny and Joyce’s house. When we got there, I opened my door. “Don’t forget tonight at five. My place,” he said.
“That’s right. It’s Tuesday.”
“I have something I need to ask you.”
I got out of the car and closed the door. Nora burst out of the mansion with two toddlers in her arms and ran to me. Jenny, Joyce, and Faye were behind her. When she got to me, she put her kids down and wrapped me in a bear hug.
“I thought you were dead for sure,” she said.
“Amos has something he needs to ask me at his house,” I told her.
“No way,” Nora breathed. She pulled Faye into our hug, and she handed me my purse. “Faye, Amos wants to ask Matilda something.”
“Oh my God,” Faye exclaimed. “You bagged the most eligible man in New Mexico. It’s a good thing you didn’t die when you fell.”
I arrived early at Mabel’s tea party rave. I had decided to take a lunch break first at the diner, but the line was out the door, and I could hear Adele screaming at people to stop eating. So, I skipped lunch and drove to the Goodnight Senior Home and waited around in my car in the parking lot. I played a word search game on my phone for a while and then went into the Senior Home a half hour early.
Mabel was in the lobby, ordering employees around. She spotted me and waved me over. “Good. You’re here. This is a front-page story. You hear me?”
“Of course. But I’m not in charge of that. Klee decides, along with Silas.”
Mabel grunted. “You own the paper, don’t you?” She looked me up and down. “What happened to you? Is this the new fashion?”
I looked down at my jeans, which were intact but stained with dirt. “I was communing with nature.”
“Is that what’s on your face? Nature? Never mind. Get in there. This is a big story. These tea party raves are going to transform this town. You know there’s big business in senior living. Big! Where’s your reporter’s notebook? Don’t you take notes? Maybe I should call Silas to do this story. Don’t you people know a good story when you see it? Is that a worm crawling out of your ear?”
I slapped at my ear and took my notebook out of my purse and jotted down “senior living” and showed it to Mabel. She didn’t look convinced about my competence.
She opened the door to the dining room. There were about fifteen large round tables set up, each with a white tablecloth and tea service on them. “Nobody else has this,” Mabel bragged. “Nobody. Goodnight will bring in geezers by the hundreds to live here because of this. It’ll revitalize the town. And they won’t run scared into the wilds and have to be tracked down for two thousand a head. I can tell you that.”
I wrote, “geezers” and “revitalize the town” in my notebook.
“Tea Party Rave. Is that what you’re calling it?” I asked.
“Yes. The seniors here love it. They really party down. Work out a lot of energy. I had to expand the time because once they start partying, they don’t want to stop.”
“Cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tea?”
“And little cakes. Don’t forget the little cakes.”
I wrote “little cakes” in my notebook. The lights dimmed, and Frank Sinatra started crooning through the sound system. Seniors began filing into the dining room. Most walked, but about a third used walkers or wheelchairs. Sure enough, there was a general air of excitement.
“Come with me. I want to show you something,” Mabel said. She took me to a control panel by the wall. “Don’t forget to write about this. John Travolta would pee his pants to have this.” She flipped several switches, and the room was transformed with swirling, colored lights and effects. Two people dropped to the ground in a dead faint. “Oh, damn. They forgot to take their anticonvulsants before they got here. Some of the patrons react badly to the special effects, but screw ‘em. This here is Star Trek-level greatness. Don’t write about the patrons and the convulsions.”
“No problem.”
The lighting effects changed again, and the two unconscious seniors came back to life, getting up from the floor and launching right into the Twist.
“What are you still doing here?” Mabel demanded. “Go and interview the happy seniors. Don’t worry about photos. I emailed a bunch of them to Klee already.”
I saluted her and walked to the nearest table. Two women were sitting, eating finger sandwiches, and a few others were swaying their hips nearby. “Take a sandwich. They’re not bad,” one of the women told me.
“Better than the slop they serve here, normally,” the other said.
“How do you like the raves?” I asked.
“Great! Food and music. It s
ure beats bingo and petting those puppies they like to bring in to raise our happiness quotient.”
“Happiness quotient,” a man behind me sneered, and he spit on the ground.
One of the women leaned in close to me. “The lights horny the men up. The music moves the women, but the men get randy dandy from those lights.”
The effects changed again, and a woman dropped to the floor.
“And I got a new room after old lady Phyllis dropped dead from the disco strobe,” another woman told me. “An upgrade.”
I wasn’t sure what notes I should be taking. They were saying they loved the raves, but it sounded more like Abu Ghraib. I asked more questions, getting all the facts. The raves started after lunch in order to finish up before the early bird special. I hadn’t eaten lunch, so I chowed down on the sandwiches, eating while I went from table to table. Most of the people were up dancing and flirting, especially when the music changed from Frank Sinatra to AC/DC.
“I don’t dance,” a woman told me, as I took a bite of one of the mini-cakes. “Bum hip. Bum knee. Bum other knee. And I don’t have toes. You gotta have toes to really dance right. You know what I mean?”
She opened her purse on the table and dug through it, pulling out her belongings and placing them on the table next to it. Finally finding a Kleenex, she blew her nose loudly. In the middle of her belongings, I spotted a gold piece of paper. I recognized it immediately. It was a VIP Ticket to Heaven.
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“That’s my guarantee to get into heaven, that is. I’m going to sit at the right hand of God, and behind me will be a young guy named Paolo who will give me full body massages every day. Full body. You know what I mean?”
“Where did you get the ticket?”
“I paid a thousand dollars for it. I’m one of the lucky few. They’re a limited issue, you know. There’s not that many VIPs in heaven. There’s me and Jesus and not too many more. Oh, and Paolo. He’ll be there. That’s guaranteed or my money back.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “Who did you buy it from?”
“A guy. I can’t remember his name. Not bad looking.”
My brain whirred into action, like all of my neurons were firing at the same time. I slapped the table hard and jumped up. “Margaret Marshall!” I yelled.
“I know Margaret,” the woman said. “The meanest bitch in Goodnight. Although, she was always nice to me.”
“Margaret Marshall! MM! The second set of initials.” It was all tying in together. Leonard Shetland’s letter was real. There were now three deaths, and I was sure they were connected. Somehow, I would have to save the person with the last set of initials.
Part II: A Hottie Cooks for Matilda, and Another Hottie Comes Back to Town
Falling Feces Stalk Townspeople
by Silas Miller
Nearly thirty people have reported that black goo has fallen from the sky, showering them in the substance. Local lab tests have revealed that the black goo is actually human poop.
“I don’t know how, but someone up there is taking a dump, and it’s landing all over our town,” Goodnight Clinic lab technician Shemp Jones said.
Theories about the poop have abounded among locals. The most common theory is that the stool is coming from airplane toilets. “They’re opening up those toilets and dumping it all over our town,” local businessman Rocco Humphrey explained. “It’s a cost-saving measure. That way, they don’t have to clean up their own sh**. They just open the trap doors and whoosh! it falls on our heads.”
But NTSB and FAA officials refute that claim. “Any plane over Goodnight, New Mexico, is flying at over thirty-thousand feet,” John Thayer from the FAA said. “Even if the airlines could figure out a way to crap over America, the crap would diffuse out into the air. There wouldn’t be any splat going on.”
The poop incidents have happened all over town at different times of the day. Local officials have asked people to carry umbrellas and not to look up with their mouths open.
Chapter 5
I rushed home to write my story quickly and change my clothes in order to get to Amos’s house in time. My brain swam with thoughts of the recent deaths, another dead girl talking to me, and the fact that Amos needed to ask me something.
What did he want to ask me? And did I need to shave my legs for it?
I flopped down at my desk and opened a new file for the Tea Party Raves’ story. “What happened to your head?” Silas asked me.
“Is there another worm crawling out of my ear?” I asked, swatting at my ear.
“Another worm? How’d the rave go?”
“It ended early because one of the men had to go to the hospital. He forgot to take his medication before the rave. It was the first rave in history where someone was hospitalized for not taking drugs.”
Silas laughed. “That’s a good one, boss. Put that in the article. The readers will eat it up.”
“I’m not sure Mabel will be happy about that.”
“Who cares? We stir things up. We’re watchdog journalism. W’re the thin line between democracy and tyranny.”
“So, I should put in the part about the seizures?”
I wrote the story in record time, and Silas ripped through it with his red pen and basically rewrote the whole thing. “You’re doing much better, boss. You’re going to be a great reporter.”
Klee guffawed and said something under her breath that I couldn’t make out. I told Silas about Margaret and the initials.
“I already wrote the story about Margaret,” he said. “MM. That’s right. You’ve got the nose, boss. Okay. We might have some kind of wacko, knocking off older folks. Keep on the story.”
I was tempted to tell him about the dead girl and what she said, but again, I was worried about how he would react. And there was no way I was going to say anything in front of Klee. But the girl had given me a clue, and I needed to check up on it pronto. She said she shouldn’t have run away.
“Silas, is there some way I can look up a list of runaways? Maybe missing children?”
“Sure. Is there something I should know?”
“Not yet.”
I jotted down the information and left the office to get dressed. I would have to research the runaway angle when I got home, on my own time. I fed the dogs early and let them run wild in the forest for fifteen minutes. Then, I stood in front of my closet and tried to figure out what was proper attire to wear when a gorgeous man had something to ask.
I took out a long skirt and a sweater and went to the bathroom. “Oh my God!” I yelled when I finally saw myself in the mirror. My face looked like it had been dragged by wild horses. The tip of my nose was scabbed over, and there were twigs and dirt in my hair.
I looked like I had fallen off a cliff.
Quickly, I turned on the tap and dunked my head under it. I washed off as best as I could, but I still had skid marks on my cheek, and my nose looked like Rudolph the Flying Reindeer’s. I put on a double-dose of makeup and slipped on the clothes as fast as I could. Whatever Amos had to ask me, I hoped he wouldn’t be put off by my face.
Not that I cared about what he had to ask me. I was totally off men. And Amos was still in love with his wife. And there was Boone… who I didn’t even like! But. Oh, who was I kidding? There was a hormonal soup bubbling up inside me, ready to boil over.
It was a beautiful drive to Amos’s house. He lived south of town and had enough land to satisfy a militia in Montana. He was more or less J.R. Ewing, except he was way nicer and much better looking. His wife had decorated the inside of their house, and she did a beautiful job.
I crossed a bridge over the Snake River, and his ranch came into view. Horses were frolicking in a ring, and the house was already lit up inside. I parked in front, and Amos came out to greet me. He was out of his sheriff shirt and was wearing a tight white undershirt that showed off every bit of his torso. Holy cow, he was like a mutant of sexiness. I wondered if his mother had gotten bitt
en by some kind of radioactive spider when she was pregnant that made him look that good.
His brother Boone looked equally as good, although he was dusty and unkempt. Maybe their mother got bit by two radioactive spiders.
“You look a lot better than you did,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”
“I’m fine, and I wouldn’t leave you in the lurch when you have something important to ask me.” My voice came out calm, like I wasn’t dying of curiosity and half-hoping for a ring. Oh, geez. I was still married! Why was I hoping for a ring from Amos? We barely knew each other.
But he did have a giant ranch.
And a six-pack.
But what about his brother?
Well, Boone wasn’t there. He had left without a word about where he was going.
But he had left me a nice note.
My brain needed a break. “Do you have a drink?”
“Gin and tonic?”
“That sounds good.”
Inside, there was a crackling fire in the large fireplace, and candles lit up the great room. Holy cow. He was going to ask me something big.
He locked eyes with me. “I hope you’re ready for something hot.”
“Uh…” I said.
“Cause we’re going to get hot right now.”
He took my hand, and I followed him to his gourmet kitchen. The smell was out of this world delicious. My stomach growled. “Did you cook?” I asked. Amos was known for his cooking, and he had cooked for me once before. Then, dessert was his lips, and they were the highlight of the meal.
“I haven’t stopped cooking for a week. It’s too important now. This is going to be my year. Blue Ribbon,” he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about. “Are you changing careers?”
“No, I’m a sheriff for life. The Chile Pepper Cook-off is this weekend. It’s the event of the year in Goodnight. The Gazette does a huge thing for it. Haven’t you guys been talking about the Chile Pepper Cook-off at the paper?”
