by Elise Sax
“He’s been quiet. Mom says he’s down in the dumps about Amy,” Jack said.
“I guess he was really in love with her.”
“They used to kiss all the time,” Jack explained.
“They never used to fight?”
“I don’t know. My mom says they were soulmates. She said Uncle Boone was interested in her first in high school, but she went with Uncle Amos instead.”
Oh, no. If Boone was jealous and in love with Amy, that would give him another motive to kill her.
“Did Boone get along with Amy after she married Amos?” I asked.
“Sure. Amy was awesome. Everyone liked her.”
“Do you have any idea what happened to her? How she died?”
Jack turned toward me as we reached the Plaza. “Why are you asking so much about Amy? Are you working on another case?”
“What do you mean, another case?”
“A Jessica Fletcher case. You’re sort of famous in town for solving mysteries.”
“Yes,” I said, honestly. “I’m trying to solve her murder.”
Jack’s eyes widened, and he grew excited, waving his hands. “I think she was murdered, too. I mean, why was she on the mountain in the forest? Only Boone could find her. Amos looked but couldn’t track her down. What was she doing there? Obviously, the killer lured her there.”
I made a mental note to find out where Amy’s body was found and investigate it.
“What killer lured her out there? Why did she go?” I asked Jack.
“I don’t know, but…oh, wow. Look at that.”
Jack pointed ahead of us. The reality show crew was hounding a man as he walked by. “Who is that?” I asked.
“That’s Nigel Ridder, who’s going for the world record of walking around Goodnight.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot about him.”
“I saw him peeing on the Goodnight UFOs building yesterday,” Jack informed me, excitedly. “Norton yelled at him, but the guy explained that he couldn’t stop walking or he would forfeit the award. He peed a long straight line along the building as he walked. I saw him do it, but I forgot to take a picture.”
Ahead of us, Nigel was regaling the reality show crew about his record attempt as he walked. Jack and I fell behind them. Jack was a natural-born reporter, always smelling out a story. I was just curious.
“I’m putting this town on the map,” Nigel was telling the director. “I’m going to do this record and get my own book deal and television show.”
“You’re on television now,” the director told him. “You’re being recorded for a television show.”
“I have ideas for the title. How about the Nigel Ridder Show?” Nigel asked.
Across the Plaza, Rocco and Mabel were speed-walking toward their reality show crew. Mabel was huffing and puffing like a gorilla, ready to attack. Her focus was set on Nigel and the director, and I sent a prayer to the universe that she wasn’t armed.
I was surprised that Rocco was the first one to speak when they reached the film crew. “What do you think you’re doing? We’re the reality show. Our marriage. Nigel Ridder is a conman. Who cares if he’s walking? Nobody’s counting his steps. He’s probably cheating.”
“Shut up, Rocco. I’m not cheating. I’ll show you my blisters to prove it,” Nigel spat at him, never pausing in his walk.
“Your blisters mean nothing!” Mabel yelled at him. She was completely out of breath, and her face was red as she tried to keep up with the pace.
“Yeah, nothing!” Rocco yelled.
Nigel stuck his tongue out at Rocco, and then Rocco flipped his lid. I could see it happen, but I still didn’t believe it when it did. Rocco’s mouth dropped open, his eyes widened showing his purple contacts, his nostrils flared, and his ears turned red. Even though he was an older man in limited shape, he leapt into the air like a leopard attacking its prey. For Rocco, his prey turned out to be a middle-aged man who was walking around town to get into the book of world records. He landed on Nigel with a thud. The cameraman pushed in closer, and the guy with the microphone on a pole waved it over the fighting men, trying to pick up every grunt, moan, and scream from them.
“This will put Goodnight on the map for sure,” Jack noted.
Rocco and Nigel rolled around on the sidewalk, and the camera kept filming. Mabel held her fist up, urging Rocco to break Nigel’s legs. Jack was giggling, and I had no idea what to do. That’s when the shot rang out.
I knew what the sound was immediately. A gunshot. I covered Jack with my body. The movement around us stopped. “The shot didn’t come from here,” Jack told me, moving me off him. Jack was right. The shot came from somewhere else. Rocco and Nigel had stopped fighting and were checking their bodies for extra holes. One of Rocco’s contacts had fallen out, and now he had two different color eyes.
When the shot had rung out, Mabel hit the deck, taking out the sound guy, which sent the microphone into the director’s belly, making her double over. Now, everyone was on the ground, except for the cameraman, Jack, and me.
“I bet it came from the butt guy!” Jack told me with glee. “They must have finally shot him.”
Jack took off like a jackrabbit across the Plaza, and I was fast on his heels. His youthful exuberance to get a story was infectious. The cameraman ran after us, eager, I assumed, to get the footage.
I could hear what happened next before I saw the scene.
“Please let me shoot him. Please!” I heard Wendy plead.
“We can’t shoot him. Not yet,” Adam said, although he didn’t sound totally convinced. “I wish I could get hold of Amos.”
When we got close, I saw Adam holding Wendy’s gun. She looked worn out. Her hair had escaped its neat bun in long straggles. “Have you been in a standoff all night?” I asked Adam. He didn’t look any better than Wendy. “Can’t you go up and get him?”
“He’s threatening to burn down the building,” Adam said, whining.
“You need to get some sleep and a good meal,” I said. “Maybe you can let him be.”
We looked up. The man was still mooning the town, but he didn’t seem quite as enthusiastic as before. “Why are you naked?” Jack shouted up at the mooner.
“White Castle hamburgers! Losers!” the mooner yelled back, but his voice wasn’t as strong as it was yesterday, and his front half looked like it had suffered under the elements and was trying to take shelter.
“What does that mean?” Jack asked me.
“It means he’s crazy,” Adam said.
“At the very least, he has poor impulse control,” I said.
“This is great. I’m going to sell this to TMZ,” the cameraman said.
“What does Amos say about it?” I asked Adam.
“Can’t reach him.”
“Maybe he’s taking time off to investigate his wife’s death,” I said, looking at my fingernails.
“What?” Adam asked, jolted. “Why would he be doing that? That was my case because he was involved. That’s department protocol. Why? Did something new happen? A new clue?”
Wendy leaned in close to me, and so did Adam, both waiting for me to announce some new clue, I guessed. Jack was looking at me questioningly.
Everyone called me Jessica Fletcher, but she was leaving me in the dust. I was a terrible interrogator.
“No, I just assumed he did that in his spare time. You know, trying to get to the truth,” I said.
“He won’t even go near the file,” Adam said, surprised. “He’s never looked at the crime photos.”
“He never asked you about the case?” I asked.
Adam shook his head, but Wendy stepped forward. “He asked me,” she said. “I told him that Adam was looking under every rock, but we had no leads. The body was too decomposed to get a cause of death anyway. I didn’t mention that to Amos.”
That didn’t get me anywhere. Was Amos worried that Adam was closing in on him, or was he worried that Adam wasn’t investigating hard enough? I was at anot
her dead end.
“Chicken fried steak!” the naked man above us yelled down.
“Chicken fried steak? That’s a new one,” Wendy said. “Maybe he’s changing gears.”
“Chicken fried steak!” he yelled, again.
“I’ll buy you chicken fried steak at the diner if you come down now,” Wendy yelled.
“I’m not sure that’s department protocol,” Adam said. “But I don’t care. I’m tired of looking at this man’s ass.”
“Promise?” the man yelled back at Wendy.
She crossed her heart, and that seemed to be enough for the mooner. A couple minutes later, he appeared outside. He had put a shirt on, but his lower half was still naked.
“Oh, lord,” Adam moaned.
“Seriously, do you think his ass is real, or did he have plastic surgery?” Wendy asked me out of the corner of her mouth.
“Holy crap,” Jack said, euphoric. “All I need to do is steal a car, and I would be breaking every one of my mother’s rules.”
The rest of the reality show crew showed up. Rocco and Mabel were with them. Nigel was back on his walk, and as he walked by, he stuck his middle finger up at Rocco. But Rocco wasn’t paying attention to him. He was too preoccupied with the mooner getting the reality show’s attention away from him and Mabel.
“Cut! Cut!” Mabel yelled. “This isn’t an accurate depiction of Goodnight!”
Jack snickered next to me, probably because this was a perfect depiction of Goodnight.
“You promised me chicken fried steak,” the mooner said, staring at Adam, who had taken handcuffs off his belt. I noticed he was holding that at a safe distance from the mooner’s private parts. Private parts which weren’t so private.
“Fine. Let’s go. But first, put something on,” Adam said.
“After I get my chicken fried steak. That’s the deal,” the mooner said.
Wendy and Adam started to walk toward the diner. The reality show crew were right behind them, and Rocco and Mabel were behind them, trying to convince them to stop filming.
“I’m trying to figure out the lead for this story,” Jack said to me, jotting down notes in his reporter’s notebook. “I’m thinking of using ‘Butt man standoff ended today with the chicken fried steak special.’ What do you think?”
“Sounds dead on to me,” I said.
Jack had to go to the town meeting, and I decided to go with him, in case I could dredge up more memories about Amy’s death among the townspeople. We only made it a couple steps, however, when there was a loud screech of tires and another few screams.
“Wow, it’s sure busy in the Plaza this morning,” I said to Jack.
Across the way, in front of the diner, a pickup truck almost ran down the reality show crew. The driver slammed on his brakes just in time, but drove up on the curb. Morris, the diner cook, stepped out of the truck.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “That man is naked!”
“You dinged your truck there. You want me to take a look at it?” Adam offered.
“No, I want you to get the naked man off the street. He’s a danger to drivers.”
The cameraman turned his camera on Morris. The attention startled Morris, and he knocked the camera aside. It almost dropped to the ground, but the cameraman caught it in time.
“This is not a good representation of Goodnight!” Mabel yelled, again. I was feeling sorry for Mabel and Rocco. Once again, their big ideas were failing miserably. The reality show would be little about them and a lot about the freakazoids of our town.
“Fine. Fine. You can see the giraffes,” Rocco said, defeated. “I’ll tell you all about the damned giraffes. Will that get you off the naked guy?”
The director nodded. “Sure. We got enough footage of the butt.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to check your truck, Morris?” Adam asked.
“Leave my truck the hell alone,” Morris grunted and got back into to his truck and started it up.
The mooner, Adam, and Wendy continued on their way to the diner. “This is going to be bad,” Jack said. “They pissed off Morris. There’s no chance he’s going to make them chicken fried steak, now.”
It was odd to be at a town meeting that wasn’t run by Mabel or Rocco. They were the backbone of the town, or at least they were the bossiest residents of the town. But today’s meeting went on without them. The meeting was taking place in a large room at the rec center. There were about fifty folding chairs set out. Jack sat up front, and I sat by Faye, Adele, and Nora, who had all saved me a seat right in the middle. We were pretty much the only ones who were not wearing garlic necklaces.
Faye showed me her large backpack, lifting it up. When she put it back down on the floor, it made a clanging sound. “I brought the equipment we need to scope out you-know-who’s property after the meeting,” she said.
“What equipment?” I asked. “We need equipment?”
“To grapple down the cliff to his property,” Nora explained.
“I’m not going to grapple. I’m going to stay up top and tell you what to do,” Adele said.
“I’m not going to grapple, either,” Nora said. “I’ve got thirteen children.”
“I’ll grapple with you,” Faye told me and squeezed my hand.
“I’m going to grapple?” I asked. I didn’t even know what grappling was, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.
The meeting started, and it was chaos from the beginning. There wasn’t a leader. Instead, there was a steady stream of complainants. One after the other, Goodnight townsfolk described the egregious things that the ghosts had done to them.
“A whole bag of potatoes,” one man complained. “A whole bag!”
“I heard about this already,” I whispered to Faye.
“I was cooling a cherry pie on the windowsill and then poof! it was gone!” a woman announced with fury.
“This is like a scene out of Tom Sawyer,” Adele whispered.
“I lost my iPhone,” a young man said. “One minute it was in my pocket, and the next minute it wasn’t. I never believed in ghosts until now.”
“There was a ring around my tub,” another woman said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I had just washed it. I went to the store to pick up a box of saltines. They were on sale for twenty percent off. When I came back, there was a ring around my tub. Explain that!”
Nora leaned forward and turned her head toward me. “That’s Charlene. Amy’s best friend. They were thick as thieves,” she told me.
My skin erupted in goosebumps. Amy’s best friend. She probably knew every detail of Amy’s life and her last days. Finally, I had someone to talk to about Amy’s death. And her marriage.
Chapter 8
After the meeting, we cornered Charlene in a back room.
“So sorry about the ghost in your tub,” Nora told her. She took a tamale out of her purse and handed it to Charlene.
“Thanks,” Charlene said.
“Matilda wants to talk to you about Amy,” Adele said, always cutting to the chase.
Charlene blinked and focused on me. “Did you know her?”
“No, but I’m friends with Amos and Boone.”
“She’s going to marry Boone,” Nora interrupted.
“Wow, I can’t believe Boone is finally settling down. I never thought he would get serious with another woman after Amy. They were sweethearts before she fell for Amos,” Charlene said.
I knew this bit of information, but it was obviously a surprise to my friends.
Adele stomped her foot on the floor. “Get out of town. I never knew that. It used to be that I knew everything that went on in Goodnight. What’s the matter with people?”
“I knew,” Nora said. “But I went to high school with them. Amy and Boone were junior prom king and queen. But I didn’t know it lasted very long.”
Faye took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. I knew that she was trying to comfort me because there was no greater motivation for mur
der than that of a scorned lover. And after the first murder, did Boone continue killing? Did it spark some kind of psychosis in him?
“Boone was Amos’s best man at the wedding. I was Amy’s maid of honor. It was a lovely wedding, outside by the river. Boone carved them a bed for their wedding present. I made the quilt for the bed,” Charlene said, dreamily. “Boone and his friends decorated the car, and away Amos and Amy went on their honeymoon. It was the most romantic day I’ve ever seen. We were all so happy for them. It was like proof that fairy tales come true, that there really are happily ever afters.” She sniffed, and Nora patted her back to comfort her.
“So Boone was happy about their marriage?” Faye asked, looking at me.
“Oh, yes,” Charlene said. “The bad blood between the brothers happened after Amy’s passing. Boone blamed Amos about that, you know.”
I leaned forward to make sure I heard her correctly. “What do you mean that Boone blamed Amos?”
“Oh, you know men,” she said, and we all nodded.
“She means they’re full of testosterone, and that blocks off most of their brain cells,” Adele explained.
Charlene nodded. “So, what did you want to know about Amy?”
“Where was she going the day she disappeared?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a mystery,” Charlene said. “She did her errands on the ranch during the morning. She went to the grocery store and then she was never seen again.”
After the meeting, we piled into Adele’s car, and she drove us to Boone’s property line. “Be on the lookout for dungeons, whips, and chains,” Nora said. She took a canister of pepper spray out of her purse and lifted it high so we could see it. “I wanted to bring a grenade, but I couldn’t find one.”
“Don’t worry. I brought one,” Adele said and parked the car on a patch of grass overlooking a deep ravine.
“I don’t think we’ll need a grenade,” I said, and prayed I was right.
“I almost brought a baseball bat, but it wouldn’t fit in my bag with the grappling equipment. But I did bring my heaviest hammer,” Faye said.
I was the only one without a weapon. I also didn’t have a clue. The information I had was contradictory. Boone was jealous of Amos. Boone was happy for Amos and built him a bed for him and his wife. Amos was devastated by his wife’s death. Amos didn’t investigate his wife’s death.
