A Hopeless Murder, page 3
part #1 of Hope Walker Series
“Today? Whiskey.”
He made a face. “That bad?”
“Better make it a double.”
“Bess, we need a double Jack as well,” he said. He turned back to me. “So you’re the famous Hope Walker I’ve heard so much about.”
“And you have me at a loss. I thought I knew everyone in Hopeless.”
He held out his hand. “Patrick Crofton.”
I took his hand and squeezed. “Hope. But you knew that.”
Bess set a new beer in front of Patrick and a double whiskey in front of me with a crooked, knowing grin. She wasn’t about to say anything because Bess never said anything to anybody. Bess was Granny’s oldest friend in the world and she helped raise me. Granny said Bess talked all the time when they were kids and then one day in high school, she just stopped. Nobody knew why.
“You look different than you do over facetime,” I said to her.
At that, Bess grinned wider. Then she leaned over the bar and gave me a kiss on the forehead. She went back to slinging drinks without a word. Good ol’ Bess.
I grabbed the whiskey, held it up in a silent toast and downed the entire thing. The back of my throat burned and my entire body shook. I slammed it back on the bar and wiped the back of my hand across my lips.
“Wow,” said Patrick. “Just like they do in the movies. Now I’m a little afraid. Being back home is that bad?”
I got Bess’s attention and pointed at my now empty glass. “Being home is weird. Running into Sheriff Kline? That’s bad.”
Patrick’s expression changed. His cute smile was gone, his jaw tense. “Not the friendliest guy in the world, is he?”
“You’ve had the pleasure of meeting Sheriff Kline?”
He shook his head. “Just had a conversation with him yesterday.”
Sharing Sheriff Kline hate stories was a favorite extracurricular activity back in high school. Patrick Crofton had me intrigued.
“Let me guess, you jaywalked?”
He shook his head.
“You looked at him wrong? Breathed his exquisite air without permission.”
That made him laugh. “You’re warm.”
“You’re not going to tell me about your horrible crime?”
“You’d have to go out with me for that kind of information.”
I froze and my neck got warm. That Christmas sweater was back and I felt like I was drowning. Bess was coming my way with another whiskey and before she could set it down I snatched it out of her hand. It hit the back of my mouth like a blast of gasoline this time and it registered that I’d just taken four shots of whiskey in less than five minutes.
Granny could handle that kind of pace.
Her granddaughter could not.
“I was just joking about going out with me.”
I took a deep breath. “I know. It’s just…”
“It’s all right. I didn’t mean to make you nervous.”
This stupid Christmas sweater. “Not nervous. Okay, a little nervous. When it comes to me and guys, it’s complicated.”
He smiled again, that crooked front tooth now blending into what was quickly becoming my favorite face.
“Fair enough. So, you and Sheriff Kline. Complicated. You and guys. Complicated. You and your home town of Hopeless. Complicated. You got any relationships that aren’t complicated?”
“My relationship with chocolate chip cookies? Not complicated at all. We’re soulmates. Have been since birth.”
Patrick laughed and took another sip of his beer. “I’ll remember that. Anything else uncomplicated?”
The whiskey was in the early stages of loosening me up. I turned from the bar and looked out at the sea of black. At all the people that had been part of my youth. And that’s when I spotted her. She wore a tight-fitting dress, the kind of dress that a good many people would probably consider inappropriate at a funeral. Even a fake funeral. Her hair was curly and gorgeous, her makeup perfect. She walked the way people walk when they know they’re the best-looking person in every room and the walk showcased a body that had gotten even better since we were eighteen years old. I poked Patrick in the ribs.
“See that girl?”
“Sure.”
“My relationship with her is uncomplicated.”
“How so?”
“Her name is Gemima Clark. She’s hated me from the day she was born. I’ve hated her. It’s the way it’s always been and it will never, ever change.”
She was walking right towards us now and I had to prepare for whatever battle was about to ensue.
“That’s really, really unfortunate,” said Patrick, his smile gone and his face suddenly sad.
“Why? Do you know Gemima?”
His face changed again. Not cute. Not sad but, somehow, pained.
“I don’t just know Gemima. Hope, I’m engaged to her.”
I practically choked on my tongue. “You? Engaged to… her?” I pointed at Gemima waltzing up to me. She gave me the quick stink eye before she leaned into Patrick, cupped one hand around the back of his head, pulled him close and gave him the kind of kiss that was probably once illegal in most of America. Like I always said about Gemima, you can’t spell class without—
“Hello, Hope,” Gemima said and released her victim to focus her dark powers on me. Just two words from her made me feel like I was in high school again. Gemima Clark’s voice had that effect. Her words had texture. Slippery smooth and gritty all at the same time. Butter and sand.
“Hello, Gemima,” I said.
That’s where our first conversation in twelve years stalled. Like a pair of rams sizing each other up before the big fight. But I didn’t want to fight today. So I said the only nice and honest thing I could say.
“You look great.” Impossibly and nauseatingly great.
That made her laugh. “And you…” she gestured at my hair. “You look… interesting.” There it was again. Butter. Sand.
“So, my design business is going well,” she told me.
I didn’t remember asking. As ever, anyone’s interest was not a prerequisite for Gemima to talk about herself.
“I do lots of work for the well-to-do in Sun Valley and Ketchum. Did you hear I designed a mud room for Ashton Kutcher?”
“I remember seeing that on CNN.” I flashed the biggest and fakest smile I could muster.
She seemed genuinely astonished… and then suddenly got the joke and gave me a slight tilt of her head before she batted her eyes at Patrick. “I see you’ve gotten acquainted with my man.”
Only Gemima Clark would refer to a gorgeous nice guy who was dumb enough to marry her as her man. I wondered what kind of dirt Gemima had on him. In my brief five-minute history of drinking Jack Daniels next to him, he seemed like the kind of guy—
“Patrick’s a businessman. Moved back here two years ago. He does quite well for himself. We both do. We’re moving into a big house on Bufton, across from the Parkers’. You know the house. Everybody does. I hear you’re some kind of reporter.”
And it was at that moment when Granny and her bright blue Boise State Football sweatshirt collided into Patrick and our conversation.
“No, Gemima, she’s not just a reporter. She’s an investigative reporter for the Portland News Gazette.”
I shook my head furiously at Granny, but she didn’t get the message.
“The time for modesty has passed, granddaughter.” Granny looked down the bar and waved at Bess. Bess dropped a bottle of Jack, stuck two fingers into her mouth and whistled so loudly I thought the windows might shatter. The woman didn’t talk, but she sure could whistle. The Library settled down to a quiet murmur.
“Attention, attention,” Granny bellowed. “My Hope has come back home for my funeral, but the time for celebrating me is over. Because it just so happens that today—”
“No, Granny, don’t.”
“Nonsense, if Gemima Clark gets to flaunt her hoof-sized diamond around, then I get to brag about my granddaughter. As any of you with a brain know, my Hope is the best investigative journalist in Portland and today, the biggest story of her career is in the paper. It’s about Tommy Med—”
“Stop!” I yelled.
“Stop being modest, Hope, it’ll make people think we’re not related.”
“I’m not being modest,” I shot back. And then without even thinking, I said it.
“I got fired.”
Granny’s eyes got big as dinner plates and a hush fell over the crowd. And five feet in front of me, Gemima Clark drank in the deliciousness of it all. And then with elation in her eyes, she smiled a sickeningly sweet smile. And patted me on the arm.
“Now that’s the Hope Walker I know.”
Like I said. Butter and sand.
CHAPTER SIX
As I looked into that crowd, one of the reasons I’d been gone so long came flooding back. I could see it on their faces. A mixture of pity and disappointment. When everybody in town knew who you were, there was no escaping those looks. You could feel them on you. And Gemima Clark chose it as the perfect time to make her grand exit, her giant diamond ring leading the way and her gorgeous man in tow.
In the corner, Sheriff Kline gave me a slight disappointed head shake and returned to a conversation with Wilma Jenkins, the woman who’d sold Granny a rental property years ago and was now the town’s mayor. On my right Zeke Roberson gave me his easy smile and a shrug. A noncommittal gesture at best. So as not to offend. Zeke at his best. And then there was Granny. Her face was all different shades of red and she was not happy. She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me in close.
“What do you mean you got fired?”
“Fired, Granny. A concept that describes the state of being no longer employed.”
“Don’t you dare sass me on the day of my funeral. I don’t understand. You told me yourself this was your big break. You said that idiot boss of yours said it could earn you The Wurlitzer Prize.”
“The Pulitzer Prize, Granny.”
“Yeah, that too. What happened?”
The truth was, I had no idea what happened. I’d never seen Henry Novak cave on a story before. I’d also never seen Dennis Brinkley get one ounce involved in what stories the paper ran or did not run.
“I’m not even sure I know. But something just doesn’t add up.”
Granny reached over the bar, grabbed a bottle of whiskey and poured us each a glass.
“Then how about you start at the beginning.”
And so I told her what I knew and Granny and I drank whiskey at the bar during her funeral at the Library. We drank. I explained what I thought happened. Granny yelled a lot. Mostly curse words. Then we drank more. As the afternoon turned to evening, all that drinking was catching up to me. Granny was so frustrated that she went over and started playing pool with some young guys. Well, she hustled some pool. She beat the whole lot of them. Several people gave eulogies in Granny’s honor and Granny only booed three of them. And people from my former life straggled by to chat me up. Old classmates, old teachers, old everything. Nothing new and fresh and exciting like Patrick Crofton. And something else was wrong. Someone was missing.
Granny was counting the cash she’d just won one off of Zeke’s grandsons and was smoking a cigar. Thankfully, her concern over my joblessness was short-lived.
“Where’s Katie?” I asked.
She stopped counting and chomped down on her cigar.
“She was definitely invited.”
“You’re saying if she didn’t show up it was because of me?”
Granny stuck the cigar in one of those young men’s beer glasses and patted me on the shoulder.
“You’ve been gone a long time, Hope. Now, I’m an old broad and I’ve lived a long life. I get why you stayed away. I don’t like it. But I get it.”
“And you’re saying Katie doesn’t get it.”
Granny pulled a key out of her back pocket and handed it to me. “Stay in the apartment above the bar as long as you need.”
“Granny, I’ll get another job.”
“Just the same. Stay as long as you need. You could even help Bess out at the bar. A place to stay, a job even. Those are things I can help you with. But Katie? That’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own.”
Granny made Zeke take her home and I suddenly became very aware of the effects of having spent most of the day drinking whiskey. I stumbled to the back of the bar and up the staircase to the room that Granny had always kept “just in case”. I barely got the key in the door before everything started spinning. I pushed the door open, stumbled in, and was lucky to hit the bed before everything went black.
It was the same dream I’d had a hundred times in the last twelve years. I was smiling. Happy. Like a cloud. He was right next to me. Smiling. Not a care in the world. And like always, I thought it meant nothing happened. That he was still with me. Then I saw his face. Not happy. We were yelling at each other. Then lights, the crack of glass, the screeching of steel, and we tumbled over and over and over. And then water. Cold, suffocating water. And then nothing but black. Except I knew he was gone. And he was never ever coming back.
I woke up from the dream, panicked like always. It took me a minute to catch my breath. To calm down. I tried to get up, but my head felt like a fifty-pound bag of sand. I grabbed my temples and slowly got up from the bed. When I accomplished that, I shuffled to the bathroom mumbling, “Hope, whiskey is not your friend. Whiskey is not your friend.”
I splashed cold water on my face and ran my fingers through my hair. Cold water was not going to do much to what was shaping up to be a very big hangover. “Remember, coffee is your friend. Coffee is your friend.”
I made my way out of the apartment down the stairs to the bar. The place was dark, except for the little bit of light that leaked from the front window. It was morning.
I made my way to the back of the bar and started to brew a pot of coffee. My phone buzzed in my back pocket. It wasn’t a contact, but it was a vaguely familiar number. It was a 509 area code which was Eastern Washington.
“Hello,” I said, my own voice drilling intense pain in the front of my head.
“Hope Walker?” An older woman’s voice asked.
“This is Hope.”
“I’m Doris Mahoney, Senior Editor at the Spokane Times and I understand you’re looking for a job?”
“I just talked to your news editor yesterday.”
“And he told you thank you, but no.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what he said.”
“Well, he can be a bit of ninny. When he told me about the call, I told him to give me your number.”
“You mean you’re interested in me?”
“Slow down. What I’m interested in is sticking it to Henry Novak. Let’s just say he and I’ve had a bit of a rivalry over the years, and I take every opportunity to make him look bad. When I heard that he wasn’t man enough to run your story, I thought it was at least worth a conversation.”
“Thank you, Ms. Mahoney.”
“Don’t thank me yet. First the facts. One, I need an investigative reporter. And Two, I’ve already got one lined up. He’s coming in on Friday afternoon to finalize the deal.”
Of course.
“But, if you can be in my office at 3pm on Friday, I’ll give you thirty minutes to talk me into it.”
“Talk you into what?”
“You got rocks in your head, young lady? You convince me that you’re the right person for the job and not this hotshot from Omaha. Think you can do that?”
I felt like I’d been saved. I not only could do that, I was going to blow her away.
“Ms. Mahoney, thank you so much. I can’t tell you what this means.”
“It doesn’t mean anything yet, darling. It could—if you’re good enough. But you better be prepared. Friday at three. One shot. I suggest you make the most of it. Got it?”
“See you then.”
The call ended and I lifted my hands in the air in triumph. Doris Mahoney had thrown me a lifeline, an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Spokane wasn’t Portland, but it wasn’t bad either. It was a real city, and most importantly, it wasn’t Hopeless.
Maybe good news was the prescription I needed to cure this hangover. The thought sent another skull-rattling spike through my forehead and I had to steady myself against the bar. So on second thought, I decided to let coffee give a little assist. I poured myself a cup and took a long slow glorious sip. It wasn’t Starbucks, but it was hot and caffeinated. I walked from behind the bar to turn on the main light switch across the room. I was just thinking the previous night might have had its share of humiliations but overall, my return to Hopeless hadn’t been so bad.
That’s when I tripped over something large in the middle of the floor. I went down like a sack of mud and the coffee went flying. The mug crashed and exploded into a million pieces.
I climbed to my feet and hit the light switch near the door, then I turned around to see what I’d tripped on.
I screamed.
It was large, dressed in rumpled brown clothing, and it wasn’t moving. It was a body.
I’d tripped on a body.
It was lying flat on its back, blood pooled around its head. A bottle of whiskey in pieces right next to it. The body belonged to the Sheriff of Hopeless, Idaho.
Ed Kline, the man I’d hated from my youth, was dead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ten minutes later, Granny and Bess were in the Library with me standing over Ed Kline’s corpse.
“Well, Hope, how do you want to do this?” asked Granny.
“Do what?”
“Dispose of the body. You thinking the dumpster out back so he makes it to the city dump or you think we should take him into the foothills where the coyotes can get him?”
“Jesus, Granny. I didn’t kill him.”
Granny winked at me. “That’s my girl. Very convincing.”
“You really think I could kill Sheriff Kline?”
“I think just about anybody could kill Sheriff Kline. He was a miserable old coot everyone hated. And if I recall correctly, you especially hated the man.”
