by Jill Orr
I walked out of his office before he could finish the rest of that sentence. I had a feeling I’d hear quite enough about “colloquialisms of the Jazz Age” before the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve.
CHAPTER 10
I texted Lindsey and told her Holman was in for the party, and that I hadn’t mentioned to him that I’d invited her also. Since she seemed so opposed to the idea of a setup, I thought I’d space out those conversations. Then I texted Ash and told him. His cousin had said it was cool to invite whoever. The party was still four days away, but I was starting to get excited. It’d been a long time since I’d gone to a party like this, longer than I cared to admit. And the past few weeks had been so bleak, so depressing, it felt good to have something to look forward to. I’d call my mom later that night to help me decide what to wear. Jeannie would love this sort of a project.
I was all caught up on my assignments for the paper, so I dedicated some time to trying to get more information about Shannon Miller and the plane crash that killed her and her family. There wasn’t a whole lot of information beyond the details of the accident in the few articles I’d found online, but since the ones I had found were from the Chincoteague Historical Society, I wondered if maybe they could point me to more resources.
“I’m sorry, Miss Ellison. I don’t have much on that particular accident. It was before the NTSB was formed, and I’m afraid they just didn’t keep good records back then,” a docent named Roberta told me when I called. I was about to thank her for her time when she added, “Did you try the local historical society in Hudson Falls, Texas?”
“Hudson Falls?”
“Yes. That’s where the family who perished was from.”
“They were from Texas?”
“Yes,” Roberta said. “It says right here in our ledger. Daniel Miller’s pilot license has a home address in Hudson Falls, Texas.”
“Can you email me a copy of that?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll see what else I can dig up and will send along whatever I find.”
“Thanks, Roberta,” I said. “You’ve been super helpful.”
“I’m happy to have a project. You’d be surprised—it can be fairly slow around here.”
I was not at all surprised; I would not have imagined the Chincoteague Historical Society being anything other than slow. But I didn’t say anything. We hung up and I immediately looked up Hudson Falls, Texas. It was a tiny town, population 2,347 at the last census. Tuttle Corner was bigger than that, but I knew from experience that small towns often had less red tape when it came to information sharing. I called their county records office and spoke to a nice woman named Elaine. I explained that I was doing a story on a family who had lived in Hudson Falls in the 1950s but had died while on vacation in Virginia. Elaine surprised me by asking, “The Miller family?”
I almost swallowed my tongue. “How did you know that?”
“You’re the second person to call today about the Millers,” she said. “Is it some sort of anniversary of their death or something?”
“Something like that,” I mumbled. I wondered if the first person to call had been someone from Brunswick County. I decided to see if I could find out. “Um, oh gosh, I hope I’m not duplicating efforts. Was it Sheriff Clark who called?”
“No,” Elaine said. I heard the sound of shuffling papers. “Says here it was a woman named Jane Smith. We faxed her some information on the Millers first thing this morning.”
Jane Smith. I’d never heard such a fake name in all my life. Sounded like someone else was also doing some digging into the Miller family.
“Oh yes, Jane,” I said, hatching a plan on the fly. “We used to work together when I was at a different paper.” I laughed again, then lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Hey listen, Elaine, is there any way you could help me out and send me what you sent Jane?”
“Um, well…” She had the sweetest lilting accent. “I suppose so…they’re just some records from our archives, free and open to the public. All we need is your name, phone number, and email address. There’s a real handy form I can send you to fill out.”
“You’re the best. Thank you!” I paused. “Um, one more thing…do you think you could give me Jane’s phone number? I’d love to reach out and see if we can share sources and that sort of thing.”
“But I thought you said you two know each other?”
I could tell I was making poor Elaine feel uncomfortable. I felt my conscience squirming from somewhere deep within my internal ethics department. Journalism 101 teaches you it is not okay to lie to get information from a source. But I wasn’t exactly researching a story here, was I? I was a private citizen looking for information to help solve the murders of two innocent men.
“We do!”
“Then, uh, shouldn’t you already have her number?”
Good point, Lainey. I quickly rerouted. “Of course I do—I mean, I did. This is kind of embarrassing, but I actually just dropped my phone in the toilet and lost all my contacts.”
Elaine gasped.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “And I haven’t been able to afford a new phone—you don’t exactly get rich working at a small-town newspaper, am I right?”
“Or working at the records department in one,” she said with a laugh, and I knew I almost had her. I just needed to press on the gas a little bit harder.
“Jane is such a good reporter. She was like a mentor to me at one point, and I’d bet she’d help me out if I could just reach her.” I paused for dramatic effect. “If I’m being honest, Elaine, I think my boss is like two seconds away from firing me. If he’s not happy with my work on this story, Nibbles and I could be out on the streets.”
“Nibbles?”
“My cat.” Then in a last-minute spark of inspiration I added, “She’s diabetic.”
“Oh, my word,” Elaine said. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be a big deal. I mean, you two being friends and all. And you used to have her number and all before you, uh, had the mishap with the, uh…”
I lowered my voice. “They say toilet water is just like the rest of the water in your house, but I don’t believe it.”
“No, no, definitely not,” she whispered. I heard the sound of shuffling papers again. “Okay, it says here Jane’s phone number is 252-555-4378.”
“You’re amazing,” I said. Guilt aside, I felt like I was writing down the winning Powerball numbers. Elaine emailed me the form I needed to fill out to request the documents. I didn’t exactly know what I was asking for, so in the Materials Requested box, I just wrote: copy of materials sent to Jane Smith. Elaine said she was the only one in the records office, so she’d know what that meant. I thanked her profusely again.
“Best of luck with the story,” she said before hanging up. “And with Nibbles!”
CHAPTER 11
The records that “Jane Smith” requested (and I so deftly cribbed) were a little underwhelming. They painted a picture of the Millers as a normal American family. Between 1948 and 1959 the Miller family had lived a pretty typical life in Hudson Falls, at least according to their paper trail. Daniel and Robin had gotten married, bought a house, and paid their taxes. Since I was neither family nor law enforcement, I couldn’t access any of their birth certificates, but I could tell from Department of Health immunization schedules that the Millers’ three children, Eric, Joseph, and Shannon, definitely existed, because the records show they’d been vaccinated on a regular age-based schedule.
There was not a single record filed after May 1959, when the plane crash occurred, not even death certificates. I learned that death certificates are filed in the place you die—not where you were born or even where you lived. So, because they died in Virginia and not Texas, their story had never been given an ending, at least not in Hudson Falls. Birth and death records weren’t cross-referenced across state lines back then, so technically as far as the state of Texas knew, the Millers could still be alive. It was sad and actually sort of poeti
c. They’d have to be living off the grid and would be in serious violation of about 700 tax laws, but still. It was strange to think that an entire family could vanish from the face of the Earth, and because of a failure in data management procedures, it could look like the whole thing never happened.
As I integrated this new information, I did a quick mental assessment of what I knew: Granddad was writing a book about people who had died alone. Flick said something Granddad was working on got him killed. Flick told me to remember the name Shannon Miller. Within forty-eight hours of telling me that, Flick was killed too.
As a general rule, I tried not to jump to conclusions, but when you have no place else to start, sometimes you have to start from a hypothesis and work backward. I knew from reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (and binge-watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of the same on Netflix) that he relied on the method of deductive reasoning. Granted, he was a fictional character with a serious drug habit, but with no better plan in place, I decided if it was good enough for Sherlock Holmes, then surely it was good enough for Riley Ellison! I would start from the hypothesis that Granddad was planning to include the Miller family in his book. If that premise was true, then under the rules of deductive reasoning, the next most logical question would be, Why had the Millers died alone? The whole family was wiped out by one cruel swipe of fate’s paw, so where were the grieving grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and friends?
Another central question was, Why did Flick tell me to remember the name Shannon Miller? There had been five Millers who perished. What was special about Shannon? She was only four years old when she died. Had she been extraordinary in some way? My Google search quickly revealed that looking up Shannon Miller was about as productive as looking up someone named Jane Smith. Of the approximately one zillion Shannon Millers who came up in my search, one was a famous Australian performance artist, one was the CEO of a large multinational corporation based in California, one was a nail technician in Boca Raton, and on and on. There was nothing written about a four-year-old who had died five decades ago. And in fact, there was nothing I could even think of that a four-year-old could do that would bring them notoriety, other than being a famous child actor (negative) or becoming the poster child for a tragic disease (unlikely). But I made a note to contact the hospital in Hudson Falls to see if anyone there remembered a Shannon Miller being associated with any sort of fundraising drives or the like.
After I hit a dead end with the Shannon Millers of the world, I decided to grab a late afternoon pick-me-up (in the form of something caffeinated and possibly something chocolate) at Mysa. I bundled up in my yellow wool peacoat and braved the five-minute trek. Tuttle winters weren’t typically too bad, usually bottoming out in the forties during the day, but this year we were having an unseasonably cold winter. Chase Brommer on Channel Eight news this morning said we were on our sixth consecutive day of subfreezing temperatures. It was a bad time of year to be without a car.
About a month ago, my sweet little Nissan Cube (Oscar, may he rest in peace) went to the great scrap heap in the sky. Oscar needed some repairs that were going to cost almost as much as I had paid for the car. My mechanic Ivan convinced me it was probably best to just sell it and get something else. “This cube car is not reliable transportation. You are young woman, you need better. Ivan will find good car for you. You wait and see.”
Ivan had actually been able to sell Oscar to a guy he knows who resells parts and got me way more than I could have gotten on my own. He’d also been in touch to let me know about a couple of cars he’d found at auctions, but I’d been so consumed with everything going on with Flick and the funeral that I just hadn’t gotten back to him yet. The truth was that most places I needed to go to in Tuttle Corner were walkable, and on the rare occasion I needed a car during the past month, I asked my parents or Holman. But as the cold wind blew hard against my cheeks, I realized it was probably time to let Ivan know I was ready to buy something.
I pulled open the door to Mysa, thankful for the blast of warm air that came at me. Taking off my hat and gloves, I looked around—or rather gaped—at all the changes Ridley and Ryan had made over the past month during their rebranding campaign. The café looked like a completely different space! They’d painted over Rosalee’s signature yellow walls with a soft white, making the space appear much larger and more modern than before. Gone were the red café curtains with the small fleur-de-lis pattern that had hung in the windows for as far back as I could remember. The front window now stood uncovered, and they’d painted the casement black for a chic, updated look. They’d replaced the old wooden chairs with molded plastic white ones with stainless steel legs. And although they were still using the marble-top tables, they replaced the bud vase and single faux red rose with a low rectangular white ceramic candle in the center of each table.
Along the back of the café, the pastry case was still there, as it had always been, but the wire racks had been switched out for glass ones and an entire wall of floating shelves on the wall behind the case had been added. The shelves were arranged with an artful display of white ceramic dishes, dried goods in glass jars, and some new products they were now selling for at-home consumption, like imported Swedish biscuits, green tea, specialty hot cocoa, and of course everyone’s favorite, Swedish fish.
I stood at the front door admiring the new look, my eyes swiveling from one new thing to the next. It wasn’t every day that familiar institutions got a facelift in Tuttle Corner.
“What do you think?” Ridley floated out from behind the pastry case, leaning down to give me a kiss on each cheek.
“It’s amazing. I can’t believe how much you’ve done,” I said as I mentally added interior decorating to the long list of things Ridley Nilsson was good at.
“We’ve basically been living here.” She smiled, giving me a shot of her perfect white teeth. “But it’s good, right? It looks cozy?”
“It’s incredible,” I said, and I meant it. I would have complimented it whether or not I liked it (I was a good Southern girl), but in this case I didn’t have to fake it. “I’m so impressed.”
“Come in the back,” she said, leading me through the swinging door that connected the front and back of the house. “Let me show you what else we’ve done.”
Just as they’d done in the dining room, they’d completely streamlined and cleaned up the kitchen. What used to be a small cramped space overflowing with equipment was now an efficient, organized workspace. And Rosalee’s old office, which was basically a glorified broom closet, had been reconfigured, repainted, and repurposed as a tiny little nursery for Lizzie. Ridley pulled back the heavy hanging curtain to reveal a beautiful modern bassinet on large wooden rockers. Lizzie slept peacefully inside, swaddled within an inch of her life. She looked like a beautiful pink cotton candy burrito.
“Amazing,” I whispered, staring at the baby.
Lizzie’s plump cheek twitched, and her eyelashes fluttered. Ridley pulled the curtain closed. “She loves it in there.”
She led me back out front and to a table near the window. I ordered a mocha latte and a croissant, and when she brought it out, she sat down.
“So how are you doing? You’re back to work?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Feels good to be busy.”
“Have you found out anything more about who—” she stopped herself from actually saying the words.
“Killed Flick?” I filled in the blank. “No, not yet. I’m working on a few things.”
Ridley tucked a strand of her long blond hair behind one ear and leaned forward. “Ryan said there might have been someone following you last night?”
I shook my head. “Coltrane probably just saw a squirrel or something. Everything’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I could have kissed her for not telling me to be careful.
“By the way, are you going to Toad’s New Year’
s Eve party?” she asked.
“How do you know Toad?” Ridley had lived in Tuttle Corner for only a few months, and I swear she already had more friends than I did.
“He sold us the insurance on this place.”
“He did?” I didn’t even know he was an insurance salesman.
She nodded.
“How’d you know I’d be going?”
“Aren’t you dating his cousin Ash?”
“Um, I…I mean…it’s—we’re—”
Ridley waited patiently as I stammered through my nonanswer. When I finally stopped making sounds, she said, “You like him but aren’t sure you want to get into a relationship.”
I stared at her openmouthed. I had never confided any such thing to her. “How did you know that?”
“You know I have a heightened sense of intuition,” she said with accountant-level seriousness, then flashed me a wicked smile. “So, what’s the hesitation? He’s very cute…”
“Yeah, he’s cute for sure.” I felt a blush begin. “What kind of coffee is this? It’s delicious.”
“No changing the subject.”
“There’s nothing to say,” I said, looking down. “It’s like you said: I like him, he’s cute, we’re just going slow, that’s all.”
“But you are going to the party as his date?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I hadn’t exactly thought about it in those terms, but I supposed she was right. It was a date. “Speaking of dates, whatever happened between you and David Davenport? You guys still seeing each other?”
It was Ridley’s turn to blush, something I’d actually never seen her do in the whole time I’d known her. Ridley was perhaps the most confident person I’d ever met; she was not prone to self-conscious blushing. “David is a great guy, but with the baby and all…it just didn’t work out. We’re in two completely different places in our lives.” She paused, then looked up at me, her crystal blue eyes boring into mine. “Ryan and I have been spending a lot of time together, obviously, and we’ve sort of reconnected—romantically.”
