Advertisement for Murder

by Nadine Doolittle

  “Just like Sarah of the Bible,” she told Thomas after their doctor had broken the news. Cracking jokes was how she kept from crying. She felt bad for Thomas who wanted children almost as much as she did. He adapted, filling their lives with an assortment of animals.

  When the infant Dylan came along, Avery gently, persistently, claimed space in her nephew’s life—to their mutual relief when Addison decided she’d had enough of parenting the day Dylan turned sixteen.

  “I don’t think you should go,” he said. “What if the guy’s a kook? What if he takes you hostage in his basement? It happens, you know. What’s the ad say—a murder club? Seriously, Aunt Avery, it sounds like a snuff film.”

  “Well, I have to do something!” Avery protested. “I can’t keep trying to meet people in the grocery store, coming at them like a deranged cat lady, starting conversations in the Produce section. You know how I get when I’m nervous.”

  “If I were you, I’d check it out first. Vet this dude before you go there alone.”

  “Why do you assume it was a man who placed the ad?”

  “Because the psychos are always guys. If I were you, I’d make sure first. If you get there and he’s some kind of weirdo, no one can get you out of it. It’s what you’d tell me to do.”

  He was right, Avery thought, hanging up the phone. She should definitely do her due diligence. Stop in at the newspaper office, buy a subscription and ask a couple of questions. The Herald was on King Street, on the way to grocery store. She could pick up something interesting for dinner while she was there. Thomas had been a meat and potatoes man. Dinners now could be anything she wanted them to be, which is why she wound up eating beans on toast so often.

  Avery slung her purse over her shoulder and plucked up the car keys from the bowl. And then, on impulse, she turned back to gaze at her peaceful, sun-filled house and sighed. One day she would learn how to relax and enjoy it.

  ✽✽✽

  SOLOMON BRICE flung his dark head back and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. His boss was in the next room—he didn’t dare give into temptation and fire his sharpened pencil into the brown splotch to see if it would stick.

  His eyes slew from the ceiling to the clock. Twenty minutes to lunchtime. Thank God. Another day at the Haldimand Herald saved by the fetching of lunch, an hour both he and his boss, Gary Briggs looked forward to with ridiculous anticipation.

  The door opened and a customer entered, presaged by the loud jangling of the overhead bell. Solomon hated that bell but the owner of the paper, Mrs Lucinda Pye, insisted it gave the paper an old-timey atmosphere that customers loved. What customers, he wanted to ask but didn’t because Lucinda Pye scared the hell out of him.

  He sat up and pretended to look busy. “Hey, what’s up,” he said automatically without taking his eyes off the computer screen.

  “What’s up? Is that how you greet customers?”

  He turned to the voice. A girl was standing in the doorway holding this week’s edition of the Herald, folded to the classified ads.

  “Are you a customer?” he asked coolly.

  “I could be. But I’m not. I’m here to interview for the intern position.”

  She was cute—not his type—but not bad looking. She sort of reminded him of a cat he used to own. Staring grey eyes, short black hair, bossy as all hell.

  “Is Mr Briggs available? He’s the one I should speak to. My father said if I was going to do this, I shouldn’t waste my time being screened by a lower level employee. Go right to the top.” She pointed up with her finger.

  “Sure, no problem.” Solomon came around the desk. “Mr Briggs is available. I’ll be sure to tell him what a great addition to the team you’d make. As a low level employee, I’m the sort of scum you’ll be associating with—if you got the job. Briggs will love to hear how it’s better to waste his time screening candidates than mine. I’m Solomon Brice, reporter-at-large. My friends call me Solly. You may call me Solomon Brice.”

  Her chin wobbled. Tears were imminent, a swift disqualification for an internship at the Herald. Solomon Brice for the win. “And you are?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Pearl Hansen. My father is Ivor Hansen. He owns the hardware store on King Street. He’s one of your major advertisers.”

  Solomon felt the blood drain from his face but he held her gaze as though the possibility of getting fired for insulting the daughter of a major advertiser did not concern him in the least. “How nice for him. I’ll let Mr Briggs know you’re here.”

  He walked to the back office on wobbly legs and knocked on the door of the managing editor’s office. “Pearl Hansen is here to talk about the internship.”

  His boss grunted to send her in. Solomon returned to his desk, sat down and waited to be asked to pack up his desk. Ten minutes later, Pearl emerged ahead of Gary Briggs. He met her eyes briefly.

  “Get Miss Hansen set up, Brice,” Gary boomed jovially. “She’s joining the staff as our new intern and cub reporter. Show her the ropes. And when you’re done that, someone go get my lunch. Nothing spicy. I have a meeting with Lucinda Pye in half an hour.”

  The managing editor was in a continual battle with indigestion. He disappeared into his office and Solly turned to her. “Welcome aboard, Pearl.”

  “My friends call me Pearl. You may call me Miss Hansen.”

  She smiled. When she smiled, she wasn’t half-bad looking.

  It took some doing but he managed to get her set up on the desk across from his. The office was overcrowded with obsolete filing cabinets and too many chairs, but trying telling Briggs that. Come to think about it, reorganizing the office was a job he could dump on Hansen.

  “You really don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.

  Solly was on his way out the door to get Briggs’ lunch. “No.” He frowned. “Have we met?”

  “It was Christmas three years ago.” Her face went bright red. “At the skating party the students organized? We made a skating rink in the park near the band shell and hung white lights on the trees. You came with some of the other alumni. Do you remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “You asked me to skate and I had to say no because my father wouldn’t approve and I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t personal.”

  “Your father wouldn’t approve of you skating—or you skating with me?”

  “Both. He’s kind of a maniac.” Her cheeks glowed pink.

  “Okay. Well.” Solomon shrugged. “Thanks for letting me know. I better get going. Briggs is a maniac about his lunch. If any calls come in, take a message. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  Solomon Brice left the office and Pearl sat in the quiet aftermath, waiting for her heart to leave her throat and for her stomach to settle down. He didn’t remember her. She’d been thinking about that moment for three years, convinced that it had meant something to him. The look on his face when she turned him down seemed to hint that it had meant something—and it didn’t!

  Solomon Brice didn’t remember any of it! He was five years older than she was; of course it meant nothing to him that a fifteen-year-old had turned him down to go ice-skating!

  “God, I’m so dumb,” she moaned, dropping her head to the desk.

  The bell over the door jangled loudly. Pearl’s head snapped up.

  “May I help you?”

  An older woman wearing jeans, a white and brown sweater and brown leather boots stepped up to the desk. “I hope so. I have a question about an ad your paper ran this week?”

  “Which ad would that be?” Pearl assumed a professional manner. She tapped a key on computer to wake up the screen. The Haldimand Herald logo appeared.

  The lady opened the paper and pointed to the ad. “An advertisement for murder,” she said. “I’m interested in joining this book club, it actually sounds pretty fun, but I’d like to know more about the person who placed the ad if that’s possible. Do you know his or her name?”

  Pearl bent over the copy. “Weird. No p
hone number or email given. Humph. I don’t know who placed it but I know that address. No one’s lived there for years.”

  “Really? Well that’s worrying. I’m glad I checked here first. I just moved to St. Ives. Where is this place? Maybe I’ll stroll by and take a look.”

  In that providential moment, Solomon Brice returned, grumbling that he’d forgotten the petty cash and the owner of the diner wouldn’t let Briggs run a tab.

  “What’s up?” he asked Pearl.

  “This lady wants to know who placed the murder ad.”

  His heavy eyebrows shot up. “Is that what you’re calling it? I don’t know who placed it. It came through the mail slot with the money to pay for it inside the envelope.”

  Briggs came out of his office, looking for his lunch. “Are you still here, Brice? I’m starving.”

  “Do you know who placed the book club ad in the Classifieds?”

  “Sure I do. That was Elliot Marks. He bought the Abercrombie place a couple of weeks ago for back taxes. I ran the story—does nobody in this office read the paper? He’s retired, keeps to himself. Well-travelled, well-educated. Bought a subscription. He seems sane enough but you never know these days.”

  “I think I should go, Mr Briggs,” Pearl put in quickly. “There could be a story in it.”

  “Hold on,” Solomon said. “If she’s going to a murder club, then I’m going too. I’m the senior reporter here.”

  Briggs rolled his eyes. “It’s a murder mystery book club—not a murder club and it’s not a story. I don’t care what you do on your own time, go if you want to, but I’m not paying for it.” He cast a bleary eye at the woman who was the catalyst for this unwelcome development. “Is there anything else we can help you with?”

  The woman’s name was Avery Holmes and she bought a subscription, probably out of pity for Pearl who felt like she’d done something wrong. She wrote up the order, mentally rehearsing the excuse she was going to give her father for going to a book club on Thursday night. Ivor Hansen had objected loudly and at length to her applying for the internship at the newspaper. He declared journalism a muck-raking profession, another one of her romantic fancies that would come to nothing. Pearl would soon discover that she was not emotionally equipped to dig through other peoples’ dirt to get a story.

  “I’d like to find out for myself,” she’d said defiantly.

  Her father’s disapproval had intimidated her all through high school, causing her to back out of every extra-curricular activity that interested her. Not this time. It was the internship or the housekeeping job at St. Ives Day Spa, she told him.

  Ivor relented.

  His preference for his only child was to get a degree in business administration so she could take over the hardware store when he was ready to retire. The thought of spending the rest of her life in a hardware store sunk Pearl into the depths of despair.

  But the guilt of an only child was a terrible burden. Her father was going to win because she couldn’t take the guilt. This internship was her last chance at making a life for herself and the murder club was a story, despite what Mr Briggs had to say about it. Pearl had a penchant for spy novels and romances and this had the potential to be a mystery within a mystery.

  Maybe her father was right and she romanticized real life too much. If so, Pearl wanted to find that out for herself. She was only eighteen. If she didn’t take chances now, she never would and she would die in the Hansen Hardware Store, never knowing what might’ve been.

  Chapter Three

  THE ABERCROMBIE place was the perfect setting for a murder mystery book club, Josephine Gaskell acknowledged with satisfaction. She pulled up in front of the mansion at ten minutes past eight, and was thrilled by the atmospheric mystery in its derelict façade.

  She rarely read anything outside of cookery books, but there was no question of her not joining a new club in St. Ives. Josie Gaskell made it a policy to sign up for anything going. ‘Seize the day’ was her motto. It got on some people’s nerves. Everyone told her she should slow down and put her feet up. They all said it. Slow down for what? Her husband died four years ago. Her children and grandchildren were an ocean away and her nurses’ pension wasn’t big enough to cover travel. She had too much energy to sit at home.

  As she lifted the baklava she’d made and her bag of knitting, a shadow crossed her mind that maybe it wasn’t energy that drove her from her comfortable home to seek the company of others. Maybe it was loneliness. She had no purpose and filling her days with groups and clubs and activities wasn’t going to change that.

  Mrs Gaskell was too much of an optimist to allow that sort of thinking to take root. She shook it off and rang the door bell with some force. Within seconds, the door was flung open as though Elliot Marks had been waiting in the hall. The new owner of the Abercrombie house was a tall, narrow, solemn-faced man about ten years younger than herself—mid-fifties, she reckoned. He exuded a peculiar intensity that some people would find off-putting. Probably an eccentric, but who was she to judge? ‘Judge not’ was Josie’s motto. She bustled in, handed the pan of baklava to Elliot to hold while she shrugged out of her coat.

  “Hello, hello! I hope I’m not late!” she cried as she entered the library.

  It was as she expected. A quiet, tense group sat in chairs as far apart from one another as possible. No wine. No tea. No nibbles of any kind. From the look of things, Marks expected a better turn-out. There were four people in all and ten chairs. It was a good thing she came. Elliot was clearly out of his depth.

  “I’m Josephine Gaskell, but everyone calls me Josie. There are some familiar faces here. Pardon me if we’ve met before and I’ve forgotten your name. I’m over sixty; my faculties are sharp but nothing else,” she said with a boisterous laugh. Bombard them with good cheer was Josephine’s motto. “Now, what did I miss? Who are we planning to kill?”

  She laughed at their stricken faces. “I mean in novels, of course! That was some advertisement, wasn’t it? It certainly got my attention. A murder club—count me in! I can think of a couple of people I’d like to murder. Mr Marks, may I trouble you for some plates and napkins? And if you have a kettle, I’ll make a pot of tea. Would everyone care for a cup of tea with their baklava?”

  There were nods and shrugs of agreement. Hector Mandela, a tall black distinguished man stared at a spot on the wall, as though he’d wandered into the wrong house. Elliot, luckily, was responsive and did as Josie instructed. After a few minutes, he returned with a tray of cheese and crackers, two bottles of wine and glasses.

  She signalled her approval with a small nod and then sandwiched her girth between Solomon Brice and a middle-aged lady with lovely brown hair that was fading to grey. A new arrival to St. Ives, Josephine thought. She introduced herself as Avery Holmes. Solomon, she knew, though she hadn’t seen him for a few years. He’d grown up a good-looking fellow. Josie had a nodding acquaintance with his mother, Veronica Wakefield-Brice, a dreadful woman everyone avoided.

  Her gaze travelled over the group. They had loosened up and were beginning to introduce themselves to one another. Helen and Dennis Potter particularly intrigued her. They’d been seen separately in St. Ives for so long that Josie thought they’d split up. So many couples did nowadays after their offspring left the nest.

  The extra chairs were disposed of and their host stood before the hearth, wine glass in hand. “Welcome to the St. Ives Book Club. Thank you for coming. My name is Elliot Marks. I’ve always had a keen interest in solving mysteries.” There was a pause. “And I thought what better way to indulge my hobby than to form a book club.”

  Josie listened politely but felt that Mr Marks was not being wholly honest. If there was one thing she prided herself upon, it was her ability to read people and Elliot Marks was hiding something. His was an introverted, socially awkward personality. Not the sort who joins clubs much less start them. She was certain there was another reason, one he wasn’t sharing, for why he started this one.

  ✽�
��✽

  AVERY ASSUMED the role of secretary, recording their picks of books to read that year and offering to send out reminders of meetings. She was daunted at first by Elliot’s attention to detail—his near fanatical attention. He requested that she take notes in the form of minutes on the meetings to keep them on track and she immediately began to worry she would miss something and screw it up.

  Their host was restless, pacing in front of the hearth, hand to his mouth, frowning in thought as though they were planning D-Day and not choosing their first mystery to read. He was definitely odd. There was a slight halt to his speech as though he was weighing the next word before speaking, and his fashion sense was wildly out of date.

  “Will the library will have enough copies or will we have to buy the books?” Helen Potter asked.

  She hadn’t thought about that. Buying books was an expense Avery hadn’t calculated on. Money was too tight to purchase books week in and week out.

  “The local bookstore will order whatever we need,” said Josie helpfully. “I’m not in a position to afford new books so if we could choose titles that have been out for awhile, that would help.”

  “I think most of us have read the older titles. If we’re just going to circle back over books I’ve already read, I’ll have to bow out,” Hector said stiffly.

  The retired naval officer seemed to have trouble relaxing. It was as though his knees wouldn’t bend to allow him to sit down. His military stance in the corner was ‘at ease.’

  The meeting was held in the Abercrombie library; an oppressive room lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves of leather-bound books. Apparently the library was quite famous in its day. It looked positively Victorian. But the furnishings were comfortable, there was a cheerful fire on the grate, and the food and drink were excellent. The other murder mystery devotees seemed pleasant enough but everyone was on their best behaviour. A fight could break out over the Oxford comma and that would be the end of civility.