Coastal Corpse Read online

  Time to get to work. I had a newspaper edition to get out in only two days and didn’t have time for all of this second-guessing about my love life.

  I opened my door, faced another blast of cold air, and ran for the building. Once inside, instead of the deserted, lonesome office that had greeted me yesterday, I was treated to the smell of a lovely pot of coffee (good), a pleasantly heated environment (better), and the sound of computer keys clicking—by Joe Earl (best).

  My eyes widened in amazement. Had I wandered into bizzaro newspaper world?

  He looked up from Sandy’s desk. “I had to take a hammer to that thermostat to get it to work, and it still took almost an hour to warm up this place.” Turning his attention back to the computer, he added, “I made coffee and picked you up a snack.”

  “Um . . . are you working here now?” I asked casually as I strolled over to the coffee pot and found a package of Island Blend java and a Krispy Kreme donut positioned on top of a napkin in all of its high-sugar glazed glory. Nirvana. My head swiveled back to Joe Earl in dazed disbelief. Was he for real?

  “How did you know about my sugar addiction?” I leveled a severe glance in his direction. “And don’t tell me it was the Abe Lincoln violin.”

  “Madame Geri told me.”

  Whew. I was worried that the violin had done a Ouija board rat-out on me.

  “But I did come in to sketch out some historical details for Madame Geri’s story about my violin. She’s got a morning Tai Chi class.” He started clicking the keyboard with rapid-fire, staccato taps. “I thought you might want a boost after the Bucky thing yesterday. The dude’s comb-over was bad business, but he didn’t deserve to die like that.”

  “True.” I poured a cup of the Island Blend’s finest and savored its strong, deep aroma. Then, when I took a deep swig, a grin spread over my face. Dark-roasted and full-bodied. Oh, baby. Joe Earl and I were office soul mates.

  “You are on the payroll as of today,” I said, gliding over to my desk as I took a bite out of my Krispy Kreme. The glaze just melted in my mouth, leaving a lovely aftertaste of cakey sweetness.

  More Nirvana.

  Joe Earl hit the print button. “I’m actually getting bored with my eBay business, so I thought I’d give this journalism thing a try and help out.”

  “That’s how I got started; I guess we have something else in common: we don’t believe in career planning.” I flipped on my own computer as I finished off the donut.

  “What’s the point of trying to plan? You end up where you’re supposed to be anyway.”

  “So true.” I checked my e-mail and found ten messages from Liz Ellis. I hit the delete button without even opening them. The rest of my mailbox content comprised unsolicited bulk e-mail, unsolicited commercial spam, and a couple of cute notes from Sandy (also unsolicited) with honeymoon pictures of her and Jimmy in St. Augustine. I flipped through the photos of their radiant faces and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “It’s all karma,” Joe Earl added.

  “You’ve been around Madame Geri too long,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

  “She knows her stuff.” He leaned back in Sandy’s chair and folded his arms behind his head.

  “Watch those loose wheels.”

  “I fixed all the rolling chairs this morning. The screws just needed tightening.”

  My mouth dropped open. Then I scooted around in my chair and tilted it back and forth. It creaked, but didn’t tip over. This was beyond Nirvana; I’d died and gone to office heaven with fresh coffee, a Krispy Kreme donut, and working furniture. What a change twenty-four hours can make.

  Doldrums to delight.

  Feeling buoyant, I thought maybe my wave of good luck would keep on rolling, so I whipped open my desk drawer, thinking maybe the diamond engagement ring might materialize, too.

  The joy bulb dimmed. Still missing.

  I shut the drawer with a sigh.

  “Madame Geri has me researching everyone who’s ever owned the Abe Lincoln violin. Just think, all of the people who touched the wood on the violin touched the soul of a dead president. Awesome.”

  “You bet.” I checked the desk drawer just one more time. Nada. “Just curious . . . um . . . while you were doing your Mr. Fixit thing around here, did you happen to find . . . a piece of jewelry?”

  “Did you lose something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No jewelry. But I did find a few Snickers bar wrappers and empty Reese’s cups under the chair cushions.”

  “They’re probably leftovers from when Sandy was on her all-chocolate diet. She gained five pounds.” I brushed a stray donut crumb off my jeans. “That was it?”

  “ ’Fraid so, but I’ve got a metal detector at home,” he suggested. “I can go get it after lunch and hunt around the office.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. It’ll turn up.” I hoped so, but doubts stirred inside—along with the thought that losing it was a sign. “Keep working on Madame Geri’s story, but I think Bucky McGuire’s death is our lead, especially if it turns out to be foul play. And I definitely want to interview Destiny Ransford today. Her name keeps coming up.”

  “I already pulled some info from his website, ‘Bucky’s Landscaping: I Take Care of Weeds and Dirty Deeds’.” He reached over and handed me a hard copy of the home page. The company logo appeared to be a green-faced lizard man pushing an old-fashioned lawnmower.

  “Catchy.” The up-front close and personal pictures of Bucky were even worse: full-length shots of him wearing a dirt-encrusted t-shirt and jeans, holding up some kind of weedwhacker. “I thought the so-so economy had driven down landscaping prices. But look at this. Bucky charged five hundred bucks a month during season to cut the grass.”

  Joe Earl shrugged. “He’s one of the few guys on the island who’d do that work, and . . . it seems that the female clients liked him. Their testimonials on the site were majorly good.”

  “Apparently, his employees felt the same. When I stopped at his house last night, I ran into one of his workers, Coop Naylor. He was trimming some bushes around Bucky’s house and seemed pretty torn up about his death.” I scanned the website pages, noting phrases like “Bucky McGuire is a wonderful landscaper,” “There truly is no job too dirty,” and “Hire him today” from clients.

  “Is this Coop?” Joe Earl swung the computer screen in my direction and pointed at the lizard man image in the logo. “It looks like the lizard scales spell out ‘Cooper’ along the tail.”

  I squinted, then nodded. Sure enough, it was the same guy I met last night, except, of course, that he wore a lizard costume and had painted his face green. “And I thought I had it hard when Bernice forced me to wear stupid t-shirts. At least I never had to dress up like a reptile for a logo.”

  “I kind of like it.” Joe Earl tilted his head left and then right, looking at Coop the Lizard Man from different angles. “He looks cool.”

  “Did you find any negative comments about Bucky on the website? They might give us a lead on someone who had a bone to pick with him.” Flipping through my hard-copy pages, I found another gem of a Bucky photo, this time with no shirt at all and holding up a pair of long-bladed hedge clippers in one hand and a clump of weeds in the other.

  “Just a few tirades by some woman named Liz Ellis. She wasn’t happy with Bucky’s landscaping services around her house, and she says so in pretty negative terms.”

  “Ohmigod, I know her. She came by the Observer office yesterday claiming that someone was killing the plants at her nursery. I just brushed her off, thinking she was a garden-variety nutso—no pun intended—and she’s been e-mailing me obsessively ever since.” Flipping back to the home page printout, I found several entries posted by Liz in the “testimonials” sidebar. No glowing comments here, to say the least. I spied the terms “rip-off,” “cretin,” and “want my money returned—or else.” The last entry even included some creative obscenities. “She does a lot of name calling here about Bucky not taking care of her yard, but she d
oesn’t mention if he was tending to her nursery as well.”

  “Is she credible?”

  I flipped open my cell phone and slid it across Sandy’s desk. “Scroll down to the e-mails that she sent me in the last twenty-four hours and you tell me.”

  He scanned through the messages with lightning speed, then handed the phone back to me without a word.

  “She might be nutty as a fruitcake, but I still might interview her. You never know. Crazy people notice things, and I might be able to smooth things over with her lawsuit threat.”

  He aimed a skeptical glance in my direction. “I’d better have an attorney lined up.”

  “Anita already has one for the Observer. Believe it or not, people come out of the woodwork to sue newspapers, even a little island weekly.” I moved Liz’s e-mails to the “save” file, just in case she did follow through with her pledge to take legal action. “Anyway, this morning is my date with Destiny . . . Ransford, that is.” My attempt at humor fell flat since Joe Earl didn’t respond at all. “She was dating Bucky and was seen quarreling with him right before the town-hall meeting.”

  “Maybe he was leaving her for one of his landscaping groupies,” Joe Earl supplied.

  I raised my brows. “You think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Now that you’re working here, see if you can put together a list of Bucky’s clients from the ones who gave their names on the website. It might be there was someone else in his life besides Destiny.”

  He turned back to Sandy’s computer screen and started clicking on the keys.

  “No, wait, do a quick search on Destiny first, just to see if there’s anything I should know before I talk with her. You’d be surprised who has a rap sheet.”

  “Not really.”

  For the umpteenth time this morning, I thanked my lucky stars (and the Abe Lincoln violin—I admit it) that Joe Earl had appeared at the office in my time of dire need. With his help, I just might be able to pull off this Editor/Senior Reporter gig and put together a kick-ass headline.

  Someone banged loudly on the front door, and I jumped. “Oh, jeez, it’s Bernice.” I motioned her in, but she thumped her fist on the door again, repeatedly.

  “All right, already!” I yelled out as I strode over to the door. Swinging it open, I clenched my teeth as a cold blast of air hit me. “Why you can’t open the door yourself—” I broke off as I saw the reason why. She cruised past me still wearing the leather pants, with the addition of a “Girls Gone Wild” sweatshirt, and pedaling an “adult tricycle,” the kind retirees rode around the island.

  Her handlebar caught on the door jamb, and she ripped out a piece of wood but kept going, her wig flying full sail.

  “Nice three-wheeler.” Joe Earl glanced over briefly. “My granddad has one of those.”

  “Sounds like he’s part of the ‘geezer cool’ set, just like me.” Bernice took a few turns around the office, scratching the side of my desk and making tire marks on the carpet. “The bicycle bandit tried to steal this little gem from the Sunset-by-the-Sea Retirement Village just down the road. But he didn’t make it past the shuffleboard courts before the oldies hopped on their scooters and started to chase him down. One of my sources who lives there texted me, and I arrived just in time to see the bandit ditch the bike and flee on foot. In all the commotion, I helped myself to the cycle and rode it here.”

  “You should’ve called Nick Billie. That bike is evidence,” I pointed out.

  She whirled around my desk, sideswiping the file cabinet. “I already did, and said I was bringing the evidence to him.”

  I groaned and scooped up the trash cans before Bernice and her Mean Geriatric Machine took them out. “If you break something in this office, you own it, and you have to fix it.”

  “I’ll take my chances. It’s too cold to give it a test drive outside.” She headed toward Anita’s cubicle and squeezed the brakes; they made a screeching sound, but they didn’t slow her down.

  “Bernice! Stop!” I shouted, clutching the remaining trash can to my chest.

  “I can’t! There’s something wrong with the hand brakes.” She pumped them for all they were worth, but she still kept rolling forward at the same speed. The tricycle’s wide front tire rammed into the glass wall and shattered it, the force of the impact causing one of the back wheels to fall off.

  Bernice was going down again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I shouted something like “Thar she blows” as one side of the three-wheeler broke down. Bernice teetered precariously for a few moments, then tipped over into the pool of broken glass. Luckily, most of the window held—except the section where the wheel hit.

  “Don’t move, Bernice.” I dropped the trash can and rushed over to her. “If you thrash around, you might get cut up from the glass.”

  Joe Earl picked up the phone. “I’ll call the repair guy—his number is taped to Sandy’s desk.”

  “Hold it . . . we may need 9-1-1 first.” I checked her pulse, not sure about the medical procedure for an adult tricycle accident. “Are you okay?”

  No response.

  “Bernice?” I found a heartbeat. “Can you open your eyes?”

  “Of course I can, you dummy.” She raised her eyelids and brushed off a few pieces of glass that littered her faux-fur jacket. “I’ve had worse wrecks than this one.”

  “She’s fine.” I helped Bernice to her feet, checking her over for any cuts. “No scratches. No blood.”

  “I think I bruised my hip.” Bernice massaged her right side and winced.

  “You’re lucky if that’s all that happened,” I spat out, then turned to Joe Earl. “Nix the 9-1-1 call.”

  He grabbed the Post-it note and punched in the repair guy’s number.

  “That was some kind of rush, slamming through Anita’s office window like that.” She eyed the spider web-like crack in the glass wall and chuckled. “Anita is going to be royally pissed off. Hey, I might slap the wheel back in place and take another run at it.”

  I held both arms out as a protective shield in front of Anita’s office. “No! You’ve done enough damage for one morning. Besides, you’re going to need to explain your story to Nick, and then start writing it for the Observer. We’ve got only two days to make deadline, and an eyewitness account of a bicycle-hijacking trumps the Abe Lincoln violin story.”

  Bernice righted her blond wig with a gleam in her eye. “You mean I might scoop that phony psychic and bump her from the front page?”

  “You bet,” I lied. “Why don’t you take my desk and start working on it? I’m heading out to interview Destiny about the Bucky McGuire story.”

  Shrugging, Bernice strolled over to my desk, giving the tricycle tire a kick en route. “Stupid bike.”

  “Bernice, did you just destroy a crucial piece of evidence?” Nick Billie stood in the doorway, arms folded across his chest as he beheld our little corner of chaos: the broken-down tricycle, smashed-up glass window, and guilty look on my face.

  “I swear I was riding the bike to the police station,” Bernice protested. “It sort of steered itself into the office.”

  Nick didn’t move. “You realize it’s against the law to tamper with the scene of a crime.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. The bicycle bandit was trying to get away with the trike; I helped to stop him, along with the retirement-home seniors. When he jumped off the cycle, the oldies followed him, and I confiscated the three-wheeler.” Bernice thumped her chest in pride.

  I held my breath, mentally calculating whether our liability policy covered Bernice’s actions.

  “I swear it’s true.” Bernice gave a Girl-Scout salute.

  “All right. You’re off the hook this time, but only because the Sunset-by-the-Sea folks corroborated your story,” Nick finally said, motioning one of his deputies into the office. “Brad, wheel it over to the station.”

  Grim-faced, Deputy Brad hoisted up the trike and pushed it out of the office.

  “Hey, Nick.” J
oe Earl waved his iPhone.

  “Did they catch the bandit?” Bernice inquired, leaning on my desk.

  “No, but the Sunset seniors gave a detailed description of him.” Nick remained in the doorway. “We’ve got a pretty good idea who did it.”

  Bernice’s face brightened. “Could I get an interview with you? I’m writing a story on the bandit—”

  “No.” He swung his glance in my direction. “I assume Anita and Benton are still out of town?”

  “Yep. They’re still honeymooning in downtown Detroit,” I admitted with an arm sweep of the office. “Joe Earl and Bernice are my . . . temps till she returns—along with Madame Geri.”

  Nick muttered something unintelligible and left.

  Whew. Another lawsuit dodged. “I’m heading over to Shoreline Bank to talk to Destiny.” Grabbing my hobo bag, I started to leave the office.

  “The repairman will be here in half an hour to fix the window.” Joe Earl slipped his iPhone into the belt holster. “I’ll tag along with you, Mallie.”

  “That’s not such a good idea—” I began.

  “No way am I hanging around the office with this crazy woman. Besides, I dug up some info on Destiny that I can tell you on the way.”

  I pushed open the door. “After you.”

  He grinned.

  “I object to being called ‘crazy’ by a kooky computer nerd who thinks a violin sends him messages from Abe Lincoln,” Bernice commented as she settled in at my desk. “You’re on shaky ground yourself, kid, especially since the violin hasn’t told us much of anything.”

  Joe Earl mumbled something that sounded like “old bag” as he preceded me out. She shouted back, “Geek freak,” before I let the door slam shut.

  As we emerged from the office, I was pleasantly surprised to note the wind had died down, and the gray clouds had dissipated. I turned my face up to the sun for a few moments, feeling a tiny ray of warmth.

  “What’s the story with Bernice?” Joe Earl asked.

  “Tainted gene pool. When she was the temporary editor of the Observer, she made us share the office with a tree stump to get new advertisers.”